There’s a comforting story that oil bulls like to tell themselves to stave off worries about the future: While the privileged few in Europe and California might have lost their minds over electric vehicles, billions of drivers in the Global South are readying themselves to provide the next wave of petroleum demand.
Those who believe this might want to have a look at the cars and two-wheelers that people are actually buying right now. Far from trailing the rich world in their enthusiasm for battery cars, developing nations are surging ahead.
China (where plug-in vehicles have nearly half the market) gets most of the attention, but neighboring Vietnam isn’t far behind: Pure-play EV-maker VinFast Auto Ltd. accounted for more than a third of car sales in the first half of this year. Turkey’s 13% sales share for fully electric vehicles in the first quarter was about double the penetration rate in Spain and Australia, according to a survey by Strategy&. In Indonesia, the share was about the same as in the US, at 7.4%. In Malaysia, it was 8.6% in the first half.
Those countries all have legacy car industries still pumping out internal combustion engines. Things are moving even faster in nations wholly dependent on imports. More than three-quarters of the value of vehicles brought into Nepal, Sri Lanka and Djibouti last year was purely electric. Import shares in Ethiopia and Laos were 40% and 30% respectively1. Plug-in sales increased by 60% in developing countries as a whole in 2024, according to the International Energy Agency.
As with the wave of EVs taking over the Gulf’s oil producers, it’s a sign of a world switching to electric mobility with breathtaking speed. The pace of the change makes the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries, which expects developing economies’ oil consumption to increase by half by 2050, look deluded.
