New sales are the leading indicator to total fleet composition turnover. As oil prices stay high into the future, and monthly sales of EVs continues to increase, it speeds fleet turnover from combustion to EVs.
And Norway is a "best case" as a wealthy country where people turn over their cars pretty quickly. The Philippines is at the opposite end of the spectrum.
Certainly, it's going to take time, but peak global combustion vehicle sales are long behind us (2017). Global fleet will turn over to EVs eventually, we're just arguing time horizon based on how quickly EV deployment ramps and combustion sales are destroyed. Combustion vehicle sales will only keep declining. Developing countries will soak up cheap EVs made by China, they will skip over combustion vehicles with higher total cost of ownership. Combustion vehicles will age out eventually as EV sales continue to increase.
> Globally, over 1-in-5 (22%) of new cars sold were electric in 2024. This share was 92% in Norway, and in China, it was almost 50%.
In 2025, it was 1-in-4 (25%). What will expensive oil do? It will pull these trajectories more vertical.
Average age of cars in Norway is higher than in many other countries due to high taxes on cars.
And then in China number of cars per capita is much less then in West. As more and more people there can afford a car and that car will be EV, transitioning to mostly EV should happen faster than in Norway.
It's not rational to expect owners to discard equipment long before the end of its service life, especially when the operational costs are not an order of magnitude lower.
Without time travel or CCCP circa 1955 property controls, a 100% EV ownership benchmark is unreasonable.
Ember Energy: ASEAN emerges as a new leader in global EV adoption - https://ember-energy.org/latest-updates/asean-emerges-as-a-n... - December 16th, 2025
You can see how this looks over a longer term using Norway's data as they transitioned to ~100% EV sales: https://robbieandrew.github.io/EV/