Depending on where you get your information EV sales are either disappointing or on an unstoppable roll. Looking at the data, what’s the real state of electric vehicle sales across the UK and Europe right now? 

🇬🇧 The UK: Nearly 1 in 4 New Cars is Electric

The UK fleet is increasingly electric:

• 23.4% of all new cars sold in the UK in 2025 were electric — up from 18.7% in 2024. 
• 473,348 electric cars were sold in the UK last year. That’s a quiet revolution. 
• Used EV sales are booming too, with nearly 275,000 trades in 2025 — a 45.7% increase. The EV dream is now accessible to more people than ever.
• There are now over 1.85 million fully electric cars on UK roads — around 5.4% of all cars. Still a minority, but the fleet is transforming.

The catch? The UK’s Zero Emission Vehicle mandate set a 28% EV sales target for manufacturers in 2025 — and car companies fell short.

🇪🇺 Europe: The Big Milestone / Mic Drop Moment

Now here’s a genuine e-Mobility headline:

• For the first time ever, EVs outsold petrol cars in the EU in December 2025!
• Battery EV registrations hit 217,898 — up 51% year-on-year — while petrol car sales fell 19% to just 216,492. 
• For the full year 2025, EVs reached a 17.4% market share across the EU — up from 13.6% the previous year.
• In December, battery electric, plug-in hybrid, and hybrid cars collectively accounted for 67% of all EU registrations — up from 57.8% in December 2024. 
• The EU’s four biggest EV markets — Germany, Netherlands, Belgium, and France — together accounted for 62% of all battery-electric registrations in 2025.

🌍 The European Leaderboard: Who’s Winning?

A full north-south divide is playing out across Europe:

The Nordics (front of the class):

• 🇳🇴 Norway: constantly getting their homework in early – 96% of new cars sold were fully electric in 2025. Just 487 petrol cars were sold last year! 
• 🇩🇰 Denmark: 68% EV market share. Repeat, sixty-eight percent.
• 🇸🇪 Sweden: ~61% EV share of new car sales in 2025.
• 🇳🇱 Netherlands: 40% EV market share.

The laggards (room to grow):

• 🇪🇸 Spain: ~9% EV market share. Though to be fair, BEV registrations rose by 86% year-on-year in Spain through 2025 — growth may be coming.
• 🇮🇹 Italy: just 6%. What the FIAT?!

The UK vs the continent? With 23.4% of new car sales being electric, the UK sits ahead of most of Western Europe and well past the EU average of 17.4%.

📈 Trends Worth Watching

• BYD is surging — registrations at the Chinese giant rose 229.7% in December alone, while Tesla fell 20.2%. The Chinese electric revolution is real, and it’s arriving quietly.
• Petrol crisis? — across 2025, petrol car registrations fell by 18.7% in the EU, with France seeing the steepest drop at 32%. With petrol prices soaring, this trend may well accelerate. 
• Charging infrastructure is racing to keep up — public charging points across the EU + UK + Norway surpassed 1.05 million by September 2025, with DC fast charging infrastructure up 41% year-on-year.
• In the UK, ultra-rapid chargers (150kW+) are up 40% year-on-year, which means less thumb-twiddling and more actual driving.

🔮 What’s Next?

• Analysts expect EVs to keep gaining ground even as the EU softens its 2035 combustion engine rules — the market is moving faster than policies.
• Change takes time. One analyst put it plainly: “It will still take around half a decade before pure electric cars genuinely overtake combustion-engine models across the region, but this is nonetheless a start.”
• Europe needs its public charger network to triple before 2030 to support an expected 50 million BEVs on the road. Infrastructure is the big challenge ahead.

tl:dr

The EV revolution continues to gather pace. The UK is punching above its weight, the north of Europe leads / south lags, Norway still lives in the future, and the December milestone of EVs outselling petrol across the EU is the kind of industry moment that should give the EV industry real confidence in the trajectory.

Sources: RAC, Reuters/ACEA, Visual Capitalist/IEA, Pulse Energy, Carbon Brief, ICCT, Electrek