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Over 1 million plug-in vehicles have been sold worldwide

We’re all for nice round numbers. So it’s great that Hybrid Cars has confirmed that there have officially been more than 1 million plug-in vehicles sold worldwide. Put another way, if you were to park those 1 million vehicles end to end (well, at least if you’re willing to assume they were all the size of Nissan Leaf vehicles), they’d stretch from Los Angeles to New York City. How tidy.

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.

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