China's gas-car sales crash 49% as EVs hit 67%

Gas-powered cars are losing China, fast. New figures reported this week show why. Electric and plug-in hybrid vehicles took 67% of China's car sales in September — a record. Pure gas-engine sales fell 49% over the same month last year. Battery-electric cars alone made up about 45% of the sales. Roughly 1.6 million vehicles sold total; plug-in hybrids filled most of the rest.

This isn't a one-month blip. China's new-energy vehicle share climbed steadily all summer, from 65% in July to 67% in September. An independent data tracker in Korea confirms the same numbers. It splits the total almost exactly the same way, between pure-battery and plug-in hybrid cars. China is already the world's largest car market. So what happens there doesn't stay there. It's where most of the world's EV battery supply chains and manufacturing already live.

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Does the rest of the world follow, or stay stuck closer to 20-30% EV share? China got here partly through cheap domestic EVs. Those EVs undercut gas cars on price, something other big markets haven't matched yet. If China's share keeps climbing toward three-quarters of sales, gas-engine cars stop being the default there entirely. Automakers everywhere else will feel pressure to catch up, or lose the world's biggest market.