About 62 percent of those plug-in vehicles are battery-powered electrics, while 38 percent are plug-in hybrids. The US makes up about a third of those sales, while China and Japan make up about 15 percent and 12 percent, respectively. No. 5 is Norway, which is seriously punching above its weight with about 66,000 plug-in vehicles sold there.
The more impressive part is that more than half of those vehicles have been purchased within the past 14 months. What’s more, plug-ins took only half the time to get to a million global units as hybrid vehicles did more than a decade ago. That’s if you consider “month zero” for plug-ins to be December 2010, when the Nissan Leaf battery-electric and Chevrolet Volt extended-range plug-in started sales.
As far as models go, the Leaf accounts for about 20 percent of that million, while the Volt accounts for another 10 percent. The Tesla Model S and the Toyota Prius Plug-in Hybrid are the next two largest plug-in sellers, followed by the Mitsubishi Outlander Plug-in Hybrid. That model isn’t sold in the US, yet.
