Electric vehicles displaced about 1.7mn barrels a day (b/d) of oil consumption worldwide in 2025, up from 0.4mn b/d in 2020, according to the International Energy Agency's Global EV Outlook 2026, published in June.

The 2025 total is roughly equivalent to Indonesia's entire oil demand for the year, the IEA said. China alone accounted for about 1mn b/d of the global displacement - around 15% less oil than road transport would otherwise have consumed had the country's roads stayed full of petrol and diesel cars.

Energy analyst John Kemp flagged the trend on X, noting that the displacement is “expected to become much more significant by the middle of the next decade” as the global EV fleet keeps growing.

The IEA's own projections says oil displacement is set to almost triple to about 5mn b/d by 2030 under both of its exploratory scenarios, before rising more than five-fold from 2025 levels to between 9mn b/d - under its current-policies scenario - and 10mn b/d, under its stated-policies scenario, by 2035.

Global oil displaced by electric vehicles, 2025-2035 (CPS = current policies scenario; STEPS = stated policies scenario). Source: IEA Electric Vehicle Data Explorer (2026), via John Kemp (@JKempEnergy).

An energy-security story as much as a climate one

The IEA frames the trend as one of energy security rather than climate policy alone. China - the world's largest oil importer - is also home to the largest stock of EVs, and its oil displacement from EVs is projected to reach 2.7mn b/d annually by 2030 and more than 4mn b/d by 2035, or roughly half the global total. Ethiopia offers a smaller-scale version of the same logic: Addis Ababa banned the import of combustion-engine cars in 2024 to curb spending on oil imports, which had topped $4bn in 2022.

By mode, electric light-duty vehicles - ordinary cars - accounted for around 80% of the oil displaced in 2025, with electric trucks in China responsible for more than 10% of the total. That balance is expected to persist through 2035 in both of the IEA's exploratory scenarios, even as electric trucks and buses together add a further 1.3mn-1.5mn b/d of displacement on top of the light-duty total.

China's dominance of the EV supply chain underpins much of this shift. The country produced nearly three-quarters of the world's electric cars in 2025, exported more than 2.5mn of them - more than double the year before - and supplied over 80% of global battery-cell production, the IEA said. That manufacturing weight sits alongside Beijing's domestic push to electrify its own energy system, part of its drive to become the world's first Electrostate.

Electric car sales grew 20% globally in 2025 to exceed 20mn, or a quarter of all new cars sold, the IEA said, with Chinese automakers supplying 60% of that total. Sales growth has continued into 2026: preliminary data show China's electric car sales hit a record above 60% of the domestic market in April, even as the current Middle East-driven oil price spike adds a fresh economic incentive - EU drivers' annual fuel-cost savings from owning an EV rose 35% in the year to April, based on average oil prices, the agency found.