EVs up while everything with an engine collapses
The structural collapse of gas car sales has continued in the world’s largest auto market, with July numbers showing that the only type of vehicle doing well is pure battery-electric cars, while sales of every other type of vehicle continue to drop precipitously for months on end. Sales numbers for July in China show a modest 6% year-over-year increase in battery electric vehicle (BEV) sales, and a massive 44% drop in gas car sales, causing an overall drop in the Chinese auto market which BEVs seem to be the only vehicle weathering. While Chinese EV sales hit their inflection point and have been rising quite rapidly since 2020, this most recent trend has also included a collapse of every type of vehicle that includes a combustion engine in it. This collapse has been reported on as a “shrinking Chinese auto market,” and some have even claimed that EV sales are down in China, but that’s not really true – it’s combustion engine sales that are down, not EV sales. This quirk of the numbers is …
