# Draw the next five years.

Revision r6 / research edition 2026-09-18

Does crossing a five-percent BEV sales share tell you what comes next?

Start at the first supplied annual observation at or above 5%. Shape the next five points, then open the historical record. The starting share is the actual observation, not an invented exact crossing.

## The drawing

The editable starter adds four percentage points per year, rounded to half-point steps. It is a drawing aid, not an estimate or a forecast.

Drag a blue handle, focus it and use arrow keys, or use the five native year controls. Each input changes half a percentage point; Shift plus an arrow changes five points. The initial observed point cannot be changed. Opening the record locks the drawing until you explicitly close it again.

## What the comparison means

Each of these six selected histories reverses at least once over the following five years. A milestone is not a promise of uninterrupted growth.

Mean absolute error is the average absolute gap across the five follow-up years, in percentage points. The flat benchmark holds the initial observed share. The anchor year is excluded from both scores.

Six selected European teaching cases with five complete annual follow-up observations. They are not representative of all countries or of every threshold crosser. Calendar windows differ by market.

This is a retrospective intuition exercise using revised, rounded IEA/OWID observations, not a blind forecast experiment or a test of forecasting skill. The reader sketch is not an empirical estimate. Crossing 5% does not identify a causal tipping point.

## Source windows

- Germany: 2020–2025, starting at 6.820513% BEV new-sales share.
- Norway: 2013–2018, starting at 5.56068% BEV new-sales share.
- Netherlands: 2018–2023, starting at 5.391304% BEV new-sales share.
- Sweden: 2020–2025, starting at 9.531915% BEV new-sales share.
- United Kingdom: 2020–2025, starting at 6.797753% BEV new-sales share.
- France: 2020–2025, starting at 6.540541% BEV new-sales share.

BEV share of new sales (%), IEA Cars. This scope differs from KBA passenger-car registrations.

[IEA Global EV Outlook 2026 / OWID compilation](https://ourworldindata.org/electric-car-sales)

[Full country history](https://www.schym.de/data/ev-diffusion/tables/global_country_year.csv)

## A portable result

The shared URL preserves the selected country, five sketch values and reveal state. The page’s existing evidence receipt includes the sketch and, when the record is opened, all five paired gaps and both mean absolute errors. This is not a validated forecast or a forecasting-skill score.

Interactive exercise: https://www.schym.de/blog/to-charge-or-not-to-charge#threshold-lab