Electric car sales worldwide grew 20% in 2025, to more than 20 million, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA). Tesla's deliveries fell 8.6%, to 1.64 million, their second yearly fall. Tesla's January–September deliveries rose 8.8% in 2026, although third-quarter deliveries fell 2.1% from a year earlier. That brings Tesla only back to where it was at this point in 2023.
What is being compared
The IEA counts new electric cars sold: battery-electric cars, which run only on a battery, and plug-in hybrids, which also have a petrol or diesel engine. Where it can, it uses new registrations. The figures here are the rounded ones stated in the text of its Global EV Outlook 2026 report, with the report's own wording ("more than", "around"); 2025 is the latest full year.
Tesla reports deliveries: cars handed over to customers worldwide each quarter. It makes only battery-electric cars. The IEA says 65% of the more than 20 million electric cars sold in 2025 were battery-electric, about 13 million. That share rose in 2025, so battery-electric sales, the only kind Tesla makes, grew faster than electric car sales as a whole. Tesla's 1.64 million deliveries were less than 13% of the battery-electric cars sold that year. Deliveries and sales are close but not identical counts.
The market grew almost everywhere except the United States
Electric car sales grew by more than 30% in Europe, to 4.2 million, and by nearly 50% outside the three largest markets. In China, the largest market, growth slowed to less than 20%. In the United States they were slightly lower than in 2024, at around 1.5 million; the IEA attributes this to policy changes, including the end of federal tax credits after September 2025.
China is most of the market
More than 13 million electric cars were sold in China in 2025, which the IEA says was six in every ten sold worldwide, and China accounted for more than half of the global increase.
These are sales by market, not by carmaker, and the data here has no Tesla breakdown by country. The IEA's report does compare carmakers: it says that in 2025 Tesla lost its position as the world's top-selling maker of battery-electric cars to China's BYD, with Tesla's battery-electric sales down 9% to 1.6 million, and that counting plug-in hybrids, BYD overtook Tesla as early as 2022.
In 2026, Tesla is back to its 2023 level
Tesla delivered 1,324,681 cars from January to September 2026, 8.8% more than the 1,217,902 in the same months of 2025, and almost exactly as many as in 2023 (1,324,074).
All of the gain came in the first half: deliveries were up 6.3% in the first quarter and 25.0% in the second, then 2.1% lower in the third quarter than in the third quarter of 2025, its highest quarter since this data begins in 2020. Whether 2026 as a whole beats 2025 or 2023 depends on October to December, which Tesla usually reports in the first days of January.
The IEA figures used here end in 2025 and include no January–September 2026 total comparable with Tesla's. The IEA also reported global electric car sales of around 3.9 million in Q1 2026, down 8% year on year; Tesla's deliveries rose 6.3% over that quarter. These figures cover different vehicle categories. In May the IEA said it expected global electric car sales to grow to 23 million in 2026, 28% of all car sales.
What this data does not say
It shows volumes, not reasons. It does not say why Tesla's deliveries fell in 2024 and 2025 or rose in the first half of 2026. The IEA's comparison with BYD is the report's own, not something this data tests.
How this was made
Market figures are stated in the text of the IEA's Global EV Outlook 2026 report (published 20 May 2026; IEA (2026), Global EV Outlook 2026, Licence: CC BY 4.0), read from the report PDF because the IEA's site refused automated downloads. We did not use the IEA's separate EV data product, which carries different terms. Each figure is listed with its page and the report's exact wording in iea-gevo2026-report-figures.csv. Tesla's deliveries come from its quarterly releases filed with the SEC, via DataPressr's tesla-quarterly-deliveries dataset, plus the Q3 2026 release. fetch.mjs downloads the sources, checks their hashes and checks every IEA quote against the report text, and writes the Tesla extract; calculate.mjs computes every number in this post into statistics.json; ev-market-vs-tesla-make-charts.mjs builds the charts, and re-running it reproduces them exactly. Sources, licences and definitions: PROVENANCE.md and DATA.md. As the IEA's Notice for CC-licensed Content requires for adaptations: "This is a work derived by Datopian (DataHub) from IEA material and Datopian (DataHub) is solely liable and responsible for this derived work. The derived work is not endorsed by the IEA or its Member countries in any manner." The same disclaimer is printed on the two market charts. From the download folder, run:
npm ci
node ev-market-vs-tesla-src/calculate.mjs
node ev-market-vs-tesla-make-charts.mjs