Global electric vehicle sales crossed two million units in June 2026, according to tracking published by Electrek on July 9, extending a run-up that saw worldwide EV sales grow 20 percent in 2025 alone to surpass 20 million vehicles for the year, meaning roughly one in every four new cars sold anywhere on earth is now electric. Growth wasn’t confined to any one region: Europe’s EV sales rose more than 30 percent, Asia-Pacific markets outside China grew 80 percent, and Latin America grew 75 percent, a genuinely global acceleration rather than a China-only story.
The United States moved in the opposite direction over the same stretch. New EV sales fell approximately 27 to 28 percent year over year in the first quarter of 2026, building on a 36 percent year-over-year decline in the fourth quarter of 2025. The proximate cause is straightforward: a $7,500 federal tax credit that had been reducing the effective purchase price of new EVs for American buyers expired at the end of September 2025, and without it, the report notes, there is now virtually no government financial support for EV purchases left in the US market at all. Sales did rebound somewhat in the second quarter, reaching their highest level since the credit ended, but remained well below the trajectory the US was on before the subsidy disappeared. Used EV demand, by contrast, hit record highs over the same period, buyers priced out of new EVs by the credit’s absence apparently shifting toward the secondary market rather than back to gas vehicles entirely.
The International Energy Agency’s 2026 Global EV Outlook, covered by Rest of World, frames the divergence bluntly: the US is falling behind a global EV boom it was an early leader in, not because of any technological gap, but because of policy choices. The report attributes America’s slide to three compounding factors: the loss of purchase subsidies precisely when the rest of the world was expanding its own incentives, the near-total unavailability of the affordable Chinese EV models driving adoption across much of Asia and Latin America due to tariff barriers, and an enduring US consumer preference for large trucks and SUVs that current EV offerings struggle to match on price and range simultaneously.
The contrast is sharper once you look at what’s actually shipping outside the US right now. Xiaomi unveiled the SkyNomad N90, its first extended-range electric SUV, boasting a claimed combined range of more than 1,500 kilometers, a figure that would eliminate range anxiety as a meaningful objection for the vast majority of drivers anywhere. At the opposite end of the market, British manufacturer McMurtry Automotive revealed the production-ready Spéirling PURE, an electric track car generating 2,000 kilograms of downforce and priced at £995,000, evidence that EV engineering ambition at the extreme performance end hasn’t slowed at all even as the mainstream American market stalls.
Automakers selling into the US market are already adjusting their own playbooks around the credit’s absence rather than waiting for federal policy to reverse course. Hyundai launched its biggest sales promotion of the year in July, a Getaway Summer Sales Event built around aggressive manufacturer-funded discounts across its lineup, including its EV models, an implicit acknowledgment that automakers now have to manufacture their own price incentives if they want to keep EV sales volumes from sliding further now that Washington has stopped doing it for them.
J.D. Power’s global forecast still expects EV sales to grow 7.8 percent worldwide in 2026, with the EV share of overall vehicle sales climbing 2.1 percentage points to 25.7 percent, numbers that describe a market whose center of gravity has simply moved elsewhere. The American EV story in 2026 isn’t one of a maturing but slowing category, it’s a live natural experiment in what happens to adoption curves the moment purchase-price support disappears in a market where EVs still carry a real sticker-price premium over comparable gas vehicles.
That natural experiment sits directly across from where Philippine EV policy currently stands. The country’s own Electric Vehicle Industry Development Act and its associated import-duty exemptions and charging-infrastructure commitments are still in an early build-out phase, roughly analogous to where the US was several years before its federal credit took effect, not to where the US is now after pulling that support away. The US’s post-credit sales collapse is arguably the single clearest piece of evidence available anywhere in the world right now for why sustained, multi-year incentive design matters more than the headline size of any one subsidy, a lesson that applies with even more force in the Philippines, where EVs carry a proportionally larger price premium over gas-powered jeepneys, tricycles, and sedans than they do in wealthier markets. Filipino EV importers, assemblers, and charging-network startups building five-year plans around DTI and DOE incentive commitments should treat America’s tax-credit cliff as the strongest available cautionary data point for what happens if similar support here proves temporary rather than durable.
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