How is the electric vehicle world shifting?

Triple parity is no longer theory, it’s arriving

In our latest teardown series, we examine five next generation battery cells to understand how fast the electric vehicle (EV) world is shifting. The results point to a pivotal moment: Electric vehicles are now closing the gap with traditional cars across cost, range, and charging time; the long awaited “triple parity.” One cell reaches an all-in cost of USD 55/kWh (kilowatt-hour), almost 50% lower than cells analyzed in 2020. With battery manufacturing costs still falling roughly 10% a year, we expect new inflection points not just for cars, but also for trucks and stationary energy storage.

Images / footage of car and battery teardowns partly provided by A2MAC1.

China’s low battery costs should help Chinese automakers win a much bigger share of the global EV market – potentially reaching about 35% by 2030

Our teardown shows China-made cells lead global costs by roughly 35%, equal to around USD 2,000 per vehicle. We see this advantage persisting thanks to China’s scale, R&D leadership, and supply chain depth. Trade barriers are likely to increase, slowing but not derailing the pace of global EV adoption. Even with rising protectionism, we expect Chinese Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs) to grow their global market share from 25% in 2025 to 35% by 2030, driven mainly by sales outside China. However, new overseas factories built to bypass trade barriers could add 20–25% and delay cost in regions like Europe by 3-4 years.

Ripple effects across autos, batteries, trucks, storage, and even humanoids

Chinese auto OEMs are likely to emerge as structural winners, whereas non-Chinese OEMs in the high-volume segments may suffer from structural market share loss and rising costs from higher trade barriers and regionally different EV trajectories. Electrification of trucks will likely accelerate first in China. In the battery space, leading Chinese cell makers should benefit from strong overseas growth across use cases. For Korean cell makers, energy storage demand in the US likely becomes the most important growth driver. Utilities can increasingly benefit from backup storage capacity growth as well as charging infrastructure growth. For emerging segments such as humanoids, battery price sensitivity is low; performance and energy density matter far more.