US Electric Car Sales Up 147% Since 2021 — CleanTechnica Report
The US electric car market continues to grow strongly. Yes, Tesla still dominates (that’s not changing anytime soon), but several other automakers are also seeing fast-growing full electric vehicle (BEV) sales, and the number of BEV options on the market has exploded in recent quarters.
Overall (lacking just a little bit of data from automakers who are stingy with their stats), the US electric vehicle market grew 147% from Q2 2021 to Q2 2023. It grew 57% from Q2 2022 to Q2 2023.
Update: According to the data I’ve collected from automakers and very informed estimates for Tesla sales (and just lacking a tiny amount of data from automakers who are stingy with their numbers), the BEV market now accounts for 7% of US auto sales.
Let’s dig into the details a bit.
As you can see in the chart just above, the Tesla total continues to be the majority of the US BEV market. However, in Q2 2023, it’s closer to 50% than it’s been since the Tesla Model 3 hit mass production and started dominating the market. Even so, if you look only at non-Tesla BEV sales (the bottom bar in each group of bars), the market has gone from just under 6,000 units in Q2 2020 to nearly 35,000 in Q2 2021 to nearly 58,000 in Q2 2022 to a milestone 103,000 (nearly) in Q2 2023. Tesla still holds more than 60% of the market, though, thanks to its staggering 171,000 sales in Q2 2023 — which put it in 8th place among automakers in the overall auto sales chart (but that’s a coming story).
Here’s how it broke down by model:
That makes it look even more dramatic in favor of Tesla. (And perhaps it’s why Ford and others have decided there’s more upside to partnering with Tesla on Supercharging than downside.) But look at that growing model diversity! We’ve never had so many BEV options on the US market, and many of these are truly great options!
One more fun way I’ve found to crunch the numbers is to look at how specific models have seen their sales change year over year (in the 2nd quarter) and since Q2 2021. Let’s have a gander….
It’s unfortunate to see any models have their sales drop, but the good news is most have seen growth, sometimes huge growth (ahem, Tesla).
The models that did see sales drops since 2022 and 2021 are all older models. In the case of the BMW i3, it’s been discontinued. In the case of a few others, I would put it down to growing competition. As Jo Borras notes in our most recent EV Obsession episode on YouTube, some of the models also lost the benefit of the federal EV tax credit this year.
Overall, there’s much to be happy about on the US electric car market. I’m excited for Q3, which is just around the corner! (I’ll be sure to get a report up on Q3 faster than I did on Q2.) What do you expect from the next report, and what highlights did I miss in this 2nd quarter EV sales report?
Interactive version of the top chart if you want to play with it a bit:
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