Green Energy Vehicles in the Global Energy Transition: Technological Evolution, Critical Materials, and Sustainable Supply Chains—A Bibliometric and Thematic Review (2015–2025)

Green energy vehicles (GEVs) are increasingly central to low-carbon energy transitions, but research remains fragmented across vehicle technologies, battery systems, critical materials, circularity, and sustainable supply chains. This bibliometric and thematic review maps the intellectual structure and evolution of GEV research using 904 English-language Scopus articles and reviews published during 2015–2025. Performance analysis, reference co-citation, author–keyword co-occurrence, longitudinal thematic analysis, and cluster-guided content synthesis were combined. The corpus accumulated 34,955 citations, and annual output rose from 13 publications in 2015 to 287 in 2025 (CAGR ≈ 36.3%). The intellectual base is strongly battery-centered, linking critical-material bottlenecks, recycling, second-life use, closed-loop systems, and circular business models. Six research streams were identified, spanning supply-chain and policy optimization, circular economy, critical-mineral security, battery life-cycle assessment, low-carbon mobility, and closed-loop recovery. Circular-economy and sustainable-supply-chain themes became markedly more prominent after 2019, while critical-mineral security regained attention in 2022–2025. The international dimension is framed primarily through material sourcing, battery value chains, resilience, and cross-border circularity. The study proposes a technology–resources–energy systems–governance–sustainability framework and priorities for integrating bibliometrics with energy-system, material-flow, trade, and geopolitical-risk data.