Every one of the top sixteen cars sold in China was an EV in May according to China Passenger Car Association data, as gasoline-powered cars continue their structural decline in the world’s largest auto market.
China set a new milestone in May, reaching a new high of 62.9% NEV market share, up from 61.4% just last month. China counts both BEVs and PHEVs under the same “NEV” category.
This was enough to kick every single gas-powered vehicle out of the monthly top ten list. Last month, there was one ICE-powered straggler left, the Geely Coolray, but this month, they’re all NEVs.
The top ten now reads:
- Geely EX2: 38,751 units
- Tesla Model Y: 28,911 units
- Xiaomi SU7: 24,023 units
- Leapmotor A10: 22,306 units
- Li Auto Li i6: 20,878 units
- Tesla Model 3: 18,370 units
- Wuling Hongguang Mini: 18,308 units
- Aito M6: 18,148 units (BEV/EREV)
- BYD Yuan Up: 17,043 units
- Fang Cheng Bao Bao 7: 16,247 units (PHEV)
In fact, it’s not just the top ten list that’s missing gas cars, but the top 16 cars are NEVs.
The Geely Coolray, the best-selling ICE-only car in the country, fell from 8th place in April all the way to 17th place in May.
The prime culprit wasn’t so much a rise in EV sales as a collapse in non-EV sales. ICE-only car sales went down by a whopping 39% year over year, a slightly larger drop than last month’s 37%.
The sales drop carried over into basically anything that has an ICE engine: PHEV sales dropped 24% YoY, EREV sales dropped 28%, and hybrid sales dropped 24.4%. The ICE age is truly ending in the world’s largest auto market.
Due to the drop in PHEV and EREV sales, NEV sales overall were down 7.5%, but the rest of the market dropped so much that market share still increased. Notably though, when splitting the “NEV” category into its constituent parts, BEV-only sales were actually up.
BEVs were the only type of car that saw an increase in sales, up 3.9% from last May, at 637,000 cars. And that’s even after an incentive change at the beginning of this year which led to a slow start for BEV sales in the first 3 months of the year.
While EV share has been rising in China (and the world, even as media continues to wrongly claim otherwise), the significant drop in gas-powered car sales seems tied to the global spike in oil prices brought on by an idiotic US war against Iran.
The war and disruption to global oil supply associated with it has caused intelligent countries to rethink ways to move off of their oil addiction – and unintelligent ones to double down on it.
Those intelligent countries are buying more EVs and fewer ICE cars, and China is happy to supply them. While manufacturers from other countries are backing off on their EV commitments, China once again showed a massive increase in NEV exports, up 112.6% year over year, with 424,000 units exported in May. More than half (54%) of China’s car exports were NEVs, another record.
China remains the largest car exporting country in the world, a position it took in 2024, after five decades of dominance from Germany and Japan. (Something that automakers might have been warned of if they read a certain Electrek author’s coverage…)
And as we said last month, this rapid change in the world’s largest auto market and auto exporter should give pause to any automakers outside of China. As Western automakers commit more to the falling part of the market, ICE cars, China is committing to the growing part of the market, and seeing great success.
It’s not a secret and it doesn’t require some sort of incredible strategy or foresight. It just requires seeing the very obvious public numbers over the last decade, showing declining ICE sales and increasing EV sales. Yes, even oilprice.com now recognizes this trend that’s been happening for a whole decade now.
So – and this is directed at all non-Chinese manufacturers and the governments who are changing rules to make it easier for them to pollute – rather than telling yourselves comforting little lies, pretending EV sales are falling when they are not, maybe it would be a good idea to compete in the market that exists, instead of the ridiculous fantasy bouncing around in Akio Toyoda’s headcase.
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