Cars and Drivers

20 World Cities With the Most Electric Vehicles

Paul Ausick

Published: November 9, 2017 11:25 am

Last Updated: January 12, 2020 6:28 am

At the end of last year, the International Energy Agency estimated that there were more than 2 million electric vehicles in the global automobile fleet. That’s well below 1% of the global fleet.

A tipping point for electric vehicle sales has not been reached yet, and most forecasts don’t expect one until the second half of the next decade. But sales of electric vehicles are gaining ground in several of the world’s biggest cities, and a new report from the International Council on Clean Transportation (ICCT) has the details.

The report also takes a look at the policies, incentives, and infrastructure that led these 20 cities to account for 40% of the global electric vehicle fleet.

The 20 world cities with most electric vehicles are listed below in order of most to fewest in cumulative sales through 2016, along with electric vehicle sales as a percentage of total sales last year.

1. Los Angeles: 4% of 2016 new car sales
2. Shanghai: 6%
3. Beijing: 8%
4. Oslo: 33%
5. San Francisco: 6%
6. Shenzhen: 6%
7. San Jose: 10%
8. Tokyo: 1%
9. Qingdao: 11%
10. Hangzhou: 4%
11. Tianjin: 8%
12. Amsterdam: 7%
13. New York: 1%
14. Paris: 2%
15. Bergen: 36%
16. Utrecht: 7%
17. London: 2%
18. Taiyuan: 7%
19. Stockholm: 6%
20. Rotterdam-Hague: 7%

The ICCT study noted that almost all these cities had higher electric vehicle sales shares than their national averages. This difference is most notable in San Jose and San Francisco (11 and six times the U.S. average, respectively) and Qingdao and Beijing (eight and six times the China national average, respectively). Oslo and Bergen had shares 15% to 25% above Norway’s 29% sales share, highest among countries. The Paris, London and Amsterdam areas also were narrowly ahead of their respective national averages.

See the full ICCT report for more detail.