Plug-in electric cars are going to be a bigger part of the vehicle mix in future than they have been to date.

That much is abundantly clear.

Electric cars are one of four significant forces that will likely change what we think of as an "automobile" forever, the others being autonomy, connectivity, and sharing.

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But where will those electric cars come from?

Today, cars with plugs are largely built only in North America, Europe, and China.

So we asked our Twitter followers which country (or region) would be producing the highest volume of plug-in electric cars nine years hence, in 2025.

The results were pretty striking: fully half of the respondents (49 percent) said the answer was clearly China.

The U.S. and Europe were essentially tied for second place, with 24 percent and 22 percent respectively of the votes.

ALSO READ: China To Top U.S. Electric-Car Sales? Why Stats Don't Compare (Apr 2015)

The fourth and final option, Japan, got a mere 5 percent of the votes from survey participants.

The half of respondents who voted for China, however, have likely just been following the news, including stories on this site.

2014 Tesla Model S in China

2014 Tesla Model S in China

China is already the world's largest market for electric cars, due to a broad and stringent array of incentives and restrictions.

Those include preferred registration, financial incentives and tax breaks, and strong national and state government backing for various companies that build electric cars within the country.

Not only is China the biggest market today for electric cars, the company that sold the highest number of cars with plugs last year wasn't Tesla, Nissan, or General Motors.

CHECK OUT: Who Sold The Most Plug-In Electric Cars In 2015? (It's Not Tesla Or Nissan)

It was BYD, the privately-held Chinese automaker and battery company, which narrowly edged all three of those companies to take the crown.

Those were all highway-capable vehicles, too, not the smaller and less powerful electric cars that would be defined as low-speed or neighborhood electric vehicles in the U.S.

So if you want to get a window into the future of electric cars, you can't do it without paying attention to what's happening in the world's most populous country.

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