With all the announcements from automakers planning for more gasoline and hybrid cars in their future lineups, you’d think that electric vehicles had stopped selling. While that might be increasingly true for Tesla, everyone else is more than picking up the slack. According to analysts at Rho Motion, global EV sales are up 30 percent this year already. Even here in the US, EV sales were still up 28 percent compared to 2024, despite particularly EV-unfriendly headwinds.
Getting ahead of those unfriendly winds may actually be driving the sales bump in the US, where EV sales only grew by less than 8 percent last year, for contrast. “American drivers bought 30 percent more electric vehicles than they had by this time last year, making use of the final months of IRA tax breaks before the incentives are expected to be pulled later this year,” said Charles Lester, Rho Motion data manager.
With the expected loss of government incentives and the prospect of new tariffs that will add tens of thousands of dollars to new car prices, now is probably a good time to buy an EV if you think you’re going to want or need one.
Perhaps surprisingly, growth in the much more EV-tolerant European Union was barely higher, at 29 percent for the year to date, helped by a new tax on plug-in hybrid weight in France, Rho Motion says. Both Germany and the UK EV markets have grown by 40 percent this year.
China is speeding past the rest of the world in terms of electrifying its transportation, and unsurprisingly it comes out on top in Rho Motion’s data, with 35 percent growth for the year to date compared to 2024. Looking month by month shows an even more impressive 73 percent increase year over year, thanks to where the lunar new year fell in 2024 and 2025.
Now Audi has gone a little further, abandoning its almost-new nomenclature in the process. As naming conventions go, Audi at least tried to keep things a little logical when it told everyone last summer that henceforth, odd-numbered Audis—A3, A5, Q5, Q7, and so on—would be internal combustion or hybrids, and even-numbered Audis—A4, A6, Q6, Q8—would be electric, or e-tron.
This was the case when we went to see some of those new Audis in the studio last summer. There was an all-new gasoline-powered A5, which comes in a handsome fastback sedan or even more handsome Avant (station wagon) version, that won’t come to the US.
There’s also an all-new, fully electric A6, available as a sedan but also as a handsome fastback sedan and even more handsome Avant. This one also isn’t coming to America.
As of this week, things are back to where they used to be. Forget the odd and even distinction; for now, it means nothing again. A gasoline-powered A6 will break cover on March 3, Audi says. And as for names? “A” means a low floor, and “Q” means a high floor (i.e., SUV or crossover).
To do this, it eliminates “state emissions waivers that function to limit sales of gasoline-powered automobiles.” That spells bad news for California and the 17 other states that follow the California Air Resources Board’s Zero Emissions Vehicles regulations. California has been granted waivers under the Clean Air Act to set emissions controls within its state borders, but the first Trump administration spent much time and energy battling CARB’s waiver.
The revised clean vehicle tax credit, which provides up to $7,500 in credit toward the purchase of a new EV, or up to $4,000 for the purchase of a used EV, also looks to be in trouble. The executive order also calls out “unfair subsidies and other ill-conceived government-imposed market distortions that favor EVs over other technologies and effectively mandate their purchase by individuals, private businesses, and government entities alike by rendering other types of vehicles unaffordable.” However, as the clean vehicle tax credit is a part of the tax code, changes to it will require Congress to pass legislation to that effect.
As you might expect, environmental groups are not impressed. “The transition to electric vehicles is opening factories and putting people back to work across the country,” said Katherine García, Sierra Club director of the Clean Transportation for All campaign. “Instead of building upon progress we’ve made, Donald Trump remains intent on fear-mongering around electric vehicles and taking the US back in time while the rest of the world moves forward on auto innovation. Rolling back vehicle emission safeguards harms our health, our wallets, and our climate.”
Only 5 percent of US consumers want their next vehicle to be a battery electric vehicle, according to a new survey by Deloitte. The consulting company gathered data from more than 31,000 people across 30 countries as part of its 2025 Global Automotive Consumer Study, and some of the results are rather interesting, as they pertain to technologies like new powertrains, connectivity, and artificial intelligence.
Among US consumers, internal combustion engines (ICE) remain number one, with 62 percent indicating that their next car will not be electrified. Another 1 in 5 would like a hybrid for their next vehicle, with a further 6 percent desiring a plug-in hybrid. (The remaining survey respondents either did not know or wanted some other powertrain option.)
By contrast, only 38 percent of Chinese consumers want to stick with ICE; meanwhile, 27 percent of them want a BEV next. That’s a far higher percentage than in other large nations—in Germany, only 14 percent want a BEV; in the UK and Canada, only 8 percent are BEV-bound; and in Japan, the number is a mere 3 percent.
Meanwhile, hybrids are far more attractive to consumers in most countries. While only 16 percent of Chinese and 12 percent of German consumers indicated this preference, 23 percent of Canadians, 24 percent of UK consumers, and 35 percent of Japanese consumers replied that they were looking for a hybrid for their next car.
Deloitte suspects that some of this reticence toward BEVs “could be due, in part, to lingering affordability concerns.” The hoped-for parity in the cost of a BEV powertrain and an ICE powertrain has still not arrived, and fully 45 percent of US consumers said they did not want to pay more than $34,999 for their next car (11 percent said less than $15,000, 9 percent said $15,000–$19,999, and the remaining 25 percent said $20,000–$34,999.)
Why the reticence?
Despite popular sentiment, there are actually quite a few electric vehicles available for much less than the average new vehicle price of $47,000. But other than the Nissan Leaf, all of them have prices starting with a “3.” (Meanwhile, 75 percent of car buyers in the US buy used cars, and the transition to electrification will not change that underlying reality.)
The incoming Trump administration has even more plans to delay electric vehicle adoption than previously thought. According to Reuters, which has seen transition team documents, the Trump team wants to abolish EV subsidies, claw back federal funding meant for EV charging infrastructure, block EV battery imports on national security grounds, and prevent the federal government and the US military from purchasing more EVs.
During the campaign, candidate Trump made repeated references to ending a supposed EV mandate. In fact, policies put in place by current US President Joe Biden only call for 50 percent of all new vehicles to be electrified by 2032 under EPA rules meant to cut emissions by 56 percent from 2026 levels.
More pollution
Instead, the new regime will be far more friendly to gas guzzling, as it intends to roll back EPA fuel efficiency standards to those in effect in 2019. This would increase the allowable level of emissions from cars by about 25 percent relative to the current rule set. US new vehicle efficiency stalled between 2008 and 2019, and it was only once the Biden administration began in 2021 that the EPA started instituting stricter rules on allowable limits of carbon dioxide and other pollutants from vehicle tailpipes.
About a third of the population looks to the California Air Resources Board, rather than the EPA, to get their emissions regulations.
The so-called ZEV states (for Zero Emissions Vehicles) do have something closer to an EV mandate, and from model-year 2026 in these states (California, Connecticut, Colorado, Delaware, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Nevada, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont, Virginia, Washington, and the District of Columbia) a third of all new cars sold by each automaker will have to be battery-electric—assuming the EPA grants California a waiver to allow this to happen.
As with the first Trump administration, we can expect a sustained attack on California’s ability to set its own vehicle emissions regulations and any attempts by other states to use those regs.
More tariffs
Trade tariffs will evidently be a major weapon of the next Trump administration, particularly when deployed to block EV manufacturing. Even the current administration has been wary enough of China dumping cheap EVs that it instituted singeing tariffs on Chinese-made EVs and batteries, with bipartisan support from Congress.
Ending the tax credit is not something the incoming administration can do via executive action—Congress controls government spending, and this would require new legislation. But the budget reconciliation process results in bills that cannot be filibustered, and Reuters says that the Trump transition team will likely use this route as part of a larger revamp of tax laws.
Tesla was a major beneficiary of the new clean vehicle tax credit; under the previous scheme, an OEM was only eligible until it sold its 200,000th plug-in vehicle, at which point the credit available to its customers began to sunset. Tesla—which exclusively sells plug-in vehicles—was unsurprisingly the first to reach this threshold, at which point its EVs became more expensive than competitor cars. But the sales cap was eliminated under the new rules.
One might expect the company would be up in arms over this proposal. But according to Reuters, that’s not the case—Tesla is in favor of ending the clean vehicle tax credit, and CEO Elon Musk has previously said such a move would be far more damaging to rival companies than to Tesla.
Need to bust anti-EV myths at the Thanksgiving dinner table? Here’s how.
Credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images
Credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images
The holiday season is fast approaching, and with it, all manner of uncomfortable conversations with relatives who think they know a lot about a lot but are in fact just walking examples of Dunning-Kruger in action. Not going home is always an option—there’s no reason you should spend your free time with people you can’t stand, after all. But if you are headed home and are not looking forward to having to converse with your uncle or parent over heaped plates of turkey and potatoes, we put together some talking points to debunk their more nonsensical claims about electric vehicles.
Charging an EV takes too long
The No. 1 complaint from people with no experience with driving or living with an electric car, cited as a reason for why they will never get an EV, is that it takes too long to recharge them. On the one hand, this attitude is understandable. For more than a century, humans have become accustomed to vehicles that can be refueled in minutes, using very energy-dense liquids that can be pumped into a fuel tank at a rate of up to 10 gallons per minute.
By contrast, batteries are not at all fast to recharge, particularly if you plug into an AC charger. Even the fastest fast-charging EVs connected to a fast DC fast charger will still need between 18–20 minutes to go from 10 to 80 percent state of charge, and that, apparently, is more time than some curmudgeons are prepared to wait as they drive from coast to coast as fast as they possibly can.
The thing is, an EV is a paradigm shift compared to a gasoline-powered car. Yes, refueling for that gas car is quick, but it’s also inconvenient, particularly if you live somewhere where all the gas stations keep closing down.
Instead of weekly trips to the gas station—or perhaps more often in some cases—EV owners plug their cars in each night and wake up each morning with a full battery.
I can’t charge it at home
The second-most common reason that people won’t buy an EV is actually a pretty good reason. If you cannot reliably charge your car at home or at work—and I mean reliably—you don’t really have any business buying a plug-in vehicle yet. Yes, you could just treat your nearest fast charger location like a gas station and drive there once or twice a week, but using fast chargers is very expensive compared to plugging in at home, and repeated fast charging is not particularly great for batteries. DC fast charging is for road trips, when you don’t have enough range in your car to get to your destination. But for most daily driving, that just isn’t the case.
But don’t worry, there are plenty of efficient parallel hybrids you can pick from that will serve your needs.
An EV is too expensive
Unfortunately, the promised reduction in the cost of lithium-ion batteries to a point where an electric powertrain is at price parity with a gasoline powertrain has still not arrived. This means that EVs are still more expensive than their fossil-fueled equivalents. But gasoline cars don’t qualify for the IRS clean vehicle tax credit, and in their eagerness to sell EVs, many car manufacturers are offering incentives to customers who don’t qualify for the credit.
Beyond incentives, while it seems like every new EV that gets released costs $80,000 or more, that simply isn’t true. There are at least 11 different EV models to choose from for less than $40,000, and 17 that cost less than the average price of a new car in 2024 ($47,000).
What’s more, 75 percent of American car buyers buy used cars. Why should that be any different for EVs? In fact, used EVs can be a real bargain. They depreciate more than internal combustion engine vehicles thanks in part to the aforementioned tax credit, and there’s now a used EV tax credit of up to $4,000 for buyers that qualify. We’re even expecting quite a glut of EVs to arrive on the used market in a year or so as leases start to expire.
What happens when it rains or snows or I have to evacuate a hurricane?
The problem of inclement weather and EVs is another commonly heard talking point from naysayers and FUD-spreaders. First off, charging an EV in the rain or snow is no less safe than refueling a gas car in the rain. And while you will lose some range in very cold weather, guess what? So does every other car and truck on the road, it’s just that those drivers don’t keep track of that stuff very closely.
The potential need to evacuate an area due to extreme weather like a hurricane also causes plenty of concern among the EV-naive. And again, this is a misplaced concern. If there’s extreme weather on the way, make sure to charge your car fully beforehand, just like you’d make sure to fill up your gas tank. Yes, if the power fails, the chargers won’t work anymore, but neither will any of the gas station gas pumps, which also run on electricity. And as long as there’s electricity the chargers will still work—those gas stations will need regular deliveries of fresh gasoline to serve new customers.
Finally, if you’re stuck in slow-moving or even stationary traffic, you are far better off doing that in an EV than a gas-powered vehicle. An EV powertrain uses no energy when it’s not moving, unlike a gas engine, which needs to burn 0.5-1 gallon an hour as it idles its engine. And driving slowly in an EV is very efficient, especially as you regenerate so much energy in stop-start driving.
I need 600 miles of uninterrupted range
There isn’t really a good rebuttal for this one, other than telling the person to go and buy a diesel if they’re truly serious about having to drive uninterrupted for such long distances. If they admit it’s really only 500 miles, suggest they look at a Lucid Air.
They’re bad for the environment
This is another area where EVs have an undeserved bad rap, based mostly on outdated facts. EVs are simply much more efficient than an equivalent ICE vehicle. For example, a Ford F-150 Lightning can travel 300 miles on the equivalent of three gallons of gasoline. An F-150 hybrid, which gets 24 mpg on the highway, would need 12.5 gallons of gasoline to go the same distance.
Even if that electricity comes from coal-fired power stations, the EV is still cleaner than all but the very most efficient hybrid cars, and most of the US grid has moved away from coal. In fact, the average EV driven in the US emits the same amount of carbon dioxide as a car that achieves 91 mpg. And as electrical generation increases the percentage of renewables, the knock-on effect is that every car that’s charged from the grid gets cleaner as well.
Now, it is true that it requires more energy to make an EV than an ICE vehicle, but the EV will use so much less energy once it’s built and being driven that it only takes a few years—as little as two, in some cases—before the EV’s lifetime carbon footprint is smaller than the gas-powered car.
We don’t have enough electricity
Another common concern is that there simply isn’t the spare capacity in the national grid to charge all the EVs that would have to be charged if EV adoption continues to grow. This worry is ill-founded. Studies have shown there is no need for extra power generation while EVs remain below 20 percent of the national fleet, and we’re quite far from reaching that benchmark. Meanwhile, renewable energy gets more plentiful and cheaper every year, and solutions like microgrids and batteries will only become more common.
Plus, as we just covered, EVs are extremely efficient compared to cars that burn fossil fuels. While we may need between 15–27 TWh of electricity by 2050 just to charge EVs, that’s about half a percent of current capacity.
Jonathan is the Automotive Editor at Ars Technica. He has a BSc and PhD in Pharmacology. In 2014 he decided to indulge his lifelong passion for the car by leaving the National Human Genome Research Institute and launching Ars Technica’s automotive coverage. He lives in Washington, DC.
As a candidate, Donald Trump had no love for EVs or foreign imports.
Expect bigger and less efficient trucks in the coming years. Credit: Emily Elconin/Bloomberg via Getty Images
Yesterday, Donald Trump won a second presidential term from American voters. His first term was marked, among other things, by attempts to water down environmental laws and regulations aimed at the auto industry. And as a candidate in 2024, Trump has promised plenty of disruption to the sector through both trade policy and an abrogation of the government’s commitment to fight climate change. Here are some of the more significant changes we think are coming.
Electric vehicle adoption
The Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 was one of President Joe Biden’s signature policy achievements, part of a $450 billion climate package. One of its many sections revised the way we incentivize consumers to buy electric vehicles, with an update to the clean vehicle tax credit that requires final assembly in North America, as well as ever-increasing amounts of US-sourced battery components and minerals to be eligible.
But such policies are not loved by the Republican Party. During his first term, Trump repeatedly criticized EVs, saying that “all-electric is not going to work,” and he vociferously attacked EVs during his campaign, telling supporters at his party’s national convention in July that “I will end the electric vehicle mandate on day one,” referring to a current White House goal to reach 50 percent EV adoption by 2030, and calling the most significant climate legislation ever “the new green scam.”
The Project 2025 policy document, developed by the Heritage Foundation in lieu of an official Republican Party manifesto, contains little affection for EVs. It says we should “respect the right of Americans to buy and drive cars of their own choosing rather than trying to force them into electric vehicles and eventually out of the driver’s seat altogether in favor of self-driving robots” and that the waiver given to the California Air Resource Board should only apply to that state and not the other 16 states and the District of Columbia, which currently abide by CARB’s emissions rules.
Indeed, the Trump campaign press secretary told journalists that California’s waiver would be “immediately revoked” if Trump returned to office.
As such, fuel efficiency rules set forth by the US Department of Energy and the US Environmental Protection Agency, which are meant to go into effect in two years, are almost certainly toast at this point. As we know, the previous Trump administration took an unorthodox approach to undermining existing fuel economy standards, sidelining the EPA in the process.
Given these facts, the future for electric vehicle adoption in the US now appears questionable, and it’s likely that OEMs—the American ones in particular—will return to their 2016–2020 playbook, which involved lots of supersized gas-guzzling SUVs and pickup trucks, with less emphasis on the safety of pedestrians. As an example, Ford has been candid that its EV division is losing billions of dollars a year, and a second Trump administration may well empower shareholders to demand a more profitable allocation of those resources from the automakers in which they are invested.
For companies like Toyota and Stellantis, which lag behind European and Korean rivals when it comes to EVs, Trump’s election will no doubt give their product planners a small measure of relief.
The EV industry says it is ready to work with the incoming government “and all groups that want to ensure our nation’s innovation and economic competitiveness remain the best in the world. The next four years are critical to ensuring that these technologies are developed and deployed by American workers in American factories for generations—a goal that unites every state regardless of their electoral college votes,” said the Zero Emission Transportation Association (ZETA).
“We encourage members of both parties to support policies that provide business and trade certainty so that EV manufacturers up and down the supply chain can unleash the next chapter of American automotive dominance. The United States’ global competitiveness depends on it,” ZETA said to Ars in a statement.
Tesla off the hook?
Tesla, however, should be placed to do better under the next Trump administration. Its CEO Elon Musk has taken a hard right turn politically over the past couple of years, funding republican political causes to the tune of tens of millions of dollars before contributing more than $150 million to Trump’s reelection—a far cry from the Musk of the early 2010s who claimed that climate change was the most pressing issue facing humanity.
As it stands, the future looks very bright for Musk and Tesla. In recent years, the Texas-based automaker has been the subject of at least 14 safety defect investigations by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, and many Tesla watchers believed that NHTSA has been getting ready to order a costly hardware recall due to the dangerous nature of Tesla’s “Full Self Driving” and “Autopilot” driver assistance systems.
But a position for Musk in Trump’s cabinet is well within the bounds of possibility—as a candidate, Trump more than once has suggested making Musk a key adviser or giving him control of one or more government departments. With the keys to the Department of Transportation (and thereby NHTSA) in his pocket, any meaningful regulation of Tesla would be very unlikely.
Perhaps a Musk cabinet position would safeguard the National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure program, however. This $7.5 billion program is building out fast chargers along highway corridors and in underserved communities, and the disbursement of funds by the state DOTs (which administer it) has been glacial, making it a potentially ripe target for cancellation. But Tesla has been a recipient of NEVI funding and stands to benefit further in the future if the program survives.
But not every Tesla watcher thinks this would be entirely positive for the company. Musk already splits his time as CEO between several companies, and some investors think a cabinet position would mean even more time away from Tesla’s helm. “Musk getting a cabinet seat in a Trump win would be a complicated decision that would take time away from Tesla and is not what shareholders want to see,” said longtime Tesla bull and analyst Dan Ives to Investors Business Daily.
Big import tariffs on imported cars and parts
Under the Biden administration, there has already been broad bipartisan support to protect US auto manufacturing from cheap Chinese imports, supported by both automakers and unions. In addition to tying clean vehicle tax credits to North American manufacturing, the Biden administration recently levied a 100 percent import tariff on Chinese-made EVs.
Many industry watchers think this will only escalate under the new administration after Trump repeatedly suggested abolishing many federal taxes—including income tax—and replacing them with import tariffs that would significantly drive up the cost of imported goods to US consumers. German automakers that depend on the US market are already seeing their stocks slide today, even though companies like Mercedes-Benz and BMW already have US manufacturing sites. “There’s some natural cover-up against possible tariffs,” BMW CEO Oliver Zipse told Automotive News.
Jonathan is the Automotive Editor at Ars Technica. He has a BSc and PhD in Pharmacology. In 2014 he decided to indulge his lifelong passion for the car by leaving the National Human Genome Research Institute and launching Ars Technica’s automotive coverage. He lives in Washington, DC.
A group of more than 5,000 car dealers have made public their worries about a lack of demand for electric vehicles. Earlier this year the group lobbied the White House to water down impending federal fuel efficiency regulations that would require automakers to sell many more EVs. Now, they’re sounding an alarm over impending EV mandates, particularly in the so-called Zero Emissions Vehicle states.
The ZEV states—California, Connecticut, Colorado, Delaware, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Nevada, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont, Virginia, Washington, and the District of Columbia—all follow the emissions standards laid out by the California Air Resources Board, which require that by 2035, 100 percent of all new cars and light trucks be zero-emissions vehicles (which includes plug-in hybrid EVs as well as battery EVs).
That goes into effect starting with model-year 2026 (i.e. midway through next calendar year) and would require a third of all new vehicles to be a BEV, claim the car dealers. But there is not enough customer demand for electrified vehicles to buy those cars, the dealers say. Worse yet, it would make gasoline-powered cars more expensive.
“This is a de facto mandate, as dealerships will be allocated fewer internal combustion engine and hybrid vehicles, and due to the lack of BEV sales, the result will create excessive demand driving up prices for customers,” the group wrote in a statement.
EV sales are growing more slowly in 2024 than the 50 percent growth we saw in 2023 (to this writer, calling a 12.5 percent growth rate “flatlining” seems hyperbolic).
A lot of the dealers’ concerns are around a lack of knowledge about EVs among their customers. The open letter complains that customers are ignorant about where to charge and how long that takes, how long batteries last and how expensive they are, and range loss in winter. In defense of those car buyers, a place that sells cars, including electric ones, would surely seem like the obvious place to ask those questions—again, at least to this writer.
Have electric vehicles been overhyped? A casual observer might have come to that conclusion after almost a year of stories in the media about EVs languishing on lots and letters to the White House asking for a national electrification mandate to be watered down or rolled back. EVs were even a pain point during last year’s auto worker industrial action. But a look at the sales data paints a different picture, one where Tesla’s outsize role in the market has had a distorting effect.
“EVs are the future. Our numbers bear that out. Current challenges will be overcome by the industry and government, and EVs will regain momentum and will ultimately dominate the automotive market,” said Martin Cardell, head of global mobility solutions at consultancy firm EY.
Public perception hasn’t been helped by recent memories of supply shortages and pandemic price gouging, but the chorus of concerns about EV sales became noticeably louder toward the end of last year and the beginning of 2024. EV sales in 2023 grew by 47 percent year on year, but the first three months of this year failed to show such massive growth. In fact, sales in Q1 2024 were up only 2.6 percent over the same period in 2023.
Tesla doesn’t break out its sales data by region anymore, but its new US registrations were down by as much as 25 percent, month on month, as its overall marketshare of EVs closes in on 50 percent this year; by contrast, Tesla was 80 percent of the US EV market in 2020. (Overall, Tesla’s global deliveries fell by 8.5 percent.)
The other sick patient in addition to Tesla is Volkswagen. Despite local production of the ID.4 crossover in Chattanooga, Tennessee, the brand saw EV sales fall by 37 percent in Q1. It has also abandoned plans to bring the ID.7 electric sedan to North America, and the long-awaited ID. Buzz microbus has yet to reach US showrooms more than eight years after it was first shown here.
But all this noise has been enough to spook executives into action. Both Ford and General Motors took the embarrassing step of rolling back their electrification goals, all but admitting they bet on the wrong horse. Instead of turning away from new internal combustion engine products, we’re set for a new flurry of hybrids—just don’t expect any of them to show up before 2026.
GM’s difficulty in ramping up its new family of EVs built around the UItium battery platform has been well-documented. The end of production of the Chevrolet Bolt, which sold for less than $30,000, didn’t help; with the little electric hatchback (and the slightly stretched Bolt EUV) no longer contributing to the sales charts, GM’s Q1 EV sales fell by 21 percent.
The problems with assembling Ultium cells into battery packs appears to be in GM’s past now. Cadillac Lyriqs are starting to become a common sight on the road, and GM CEO Mary Barra told Bloomberg that GM expects to build between 200,000 and 300,000 Ultium-based EVs this year, a huge increase over the 13,838 it managed to ship last year.
Meanwhile, Ford’s EV “slump” is nothing of the kind. In May, it sold 91 percent more F-150 Lightnings than last year. E-Transit sales were up 77 percent. And the Mustang Mach-E showed growth of 46 percent. In total, Ford’s EV sales for the first five months of this year were up 87.7 percent on 2023, helped no doubt by the company’s price cuts.
High double-digit sales growth (in Q1 2024) has also been occurring at Hyundai and Kia (up 56.1 percent), BMW (up 57.8 percent), Rivian (up 58.8 percent), Mercedes (up 66.9 percent), and Toyota (up 85.9 percent).
“As anticipated, Tesla’s sales took a hit, influencing the overall market dynamics. However, a few brands saw significant EV sales increases, achieving over 50 percent year-over-year growth,” said Stephanie Valdez Streaty, director of industry insights at Cox Automotive. “As noted in January, we are calling 2024 ‘the Year of More.’ More new products, more incentives, more inventory, more leasing and more infrastructure will drive EV sales higher this year. Even so, we’ll continue to see ups and downs as the industry moves toward electrification.”
“We view the current headwinds that EV sales are experiencing in the US and Europe as short-term in nature. The buildup of charging infrastructure, availability of affordable EV models with a fall in battery prices, combined with government regulations, will drive sustainable BEV growth in the long run,” said Cardell.
New cars have gotten pretty expensive, and it feels like electric cars are especially pricey. The average sale price of a new car has dropped a couple of thousand dollars since it peaked in early 2023, but at more than $47,400 in April, sticker shock is understandable, particularly as interest rates have doubled over the course of the past two years. Based on reader feedback, that impression is particularly pronounced when it comes to new electric vehicles. But EV prices have actually been falling, and inventory is growing. So we put together a list of all the new EVs on sale today for less than the average transaction price of a new car. You can buy 17 different EVs for less than the average price of a new car, and 11 are available for less than $40,000.
Nissan Leaf
Enlarge/ The Leaf is the cheapest new EV on sale today.
Jonathan Gitlin
First on the list is the Nissan Leaf, which starts at just $28,140 for the version with a 40 kWh battery pack. Nissan was an early EV pioneer, and the current Leaf is the second generation to wear the name. But it hasn’t always been on the cutting edge, and some of the Leaf’s specs that felt a little outdated in 2017 may feel more so in 2024. The Leaf is eligible for a $3,750 IRS clean vehicle tax credit.
Mini SE
Enlarge/ There’s an old joke where I come from. “How do you get to Wales in a Mini,” it asks, except instead of “to Wales” the country, the joke is “two whales,” and the answer is “one in the front, one in the back.” Such jokes are unlikely to be repeated about the new battery electric Mini Cooper SE, but if they are, the answer will probably be “slowly, because you have to stop and charge it a lot.”
Jonathan Gitlin
With new tariffs on Chinese-made EVs, no one is entirely sure when the next electric Mini Cooper will go on sale in the US. But right now, you can buy the current Mini Cooper SE for a starting price of $30,900. Although the suspension can feel stiffer than a supercar’s, if you live in a city and don’t need mega-miles of range, the Mini fits the bill quite effectively and is much more of a hoot to drive (and much cheaper) than the John Cooper Works GP mini.
Fiat 500e
Enlarge/ Fiat thinks the 500e makes the perfect second car.
Stephen Edelstein
The $32,500 electric Fiat 500e is one of the newest cars on our list; we only drove it for the first time in early April. It has more range than a Mini, and it charges faster, too.
Enlarge/ Electric F-150 sales are up 80 percent year over year.
Ford
Ford has caught a case of electric vehicle pessimism and is scaling back or delaying some of its plans for new EV models. A new electric pickup, scheduled to go into production next year, has been pushed back to 2026. And a three-row electric SUV has been given a two-year delay and will now not be available until 2027 at the earliest. The kicker? The automaker has published its sales for the first quarter of the year, and its EV sales are up a whopping 86 percent year over year.
Instead, the Blue Oval wants to focus on making more hybrids instead and says it will have hybrid options for all its internal combustion engine-powered vehicles by 2030. Ford’s current range of hybrids is not extensive, but it grew 42 percent in Q1 compared to the first three months of 2023.
Many of those—19,660 to be exact—were the Maverick Hybrid, despite the fact that for model year 2024, Ford removed the hybrid powertrain as the base model and effectively gave the electrified pickup a $1,500 price hike. In total, Ford sold 38,421 hybrids in Q1 2024, which it says makes this the best-ever quarter for hybrid sales. But they represent a rather small slice of its overall pie—just 7.6 percent of the 508,083 vehicles that Ford sold for the first three months of the year.
Still, that towers above the company’s total EV sales, which topped out at 20,223 for Q1. The F-150 Lightning was up 80 percent year over year for Q1, with 7,743 trucks sold. But one can see why Ford has cut production shifts for the Lightning—total F-series sales for the quarter were 152,943, suggesting that traditional truck buyers are yet to be tempted by the EV version en masse.
But with Mustang Mach-E sales up 77 percent to 9,589 sold, and a 148 percent growth for the E-Transit, Ford is the country’s second-bestselling EV brand. Despite that status, Ford expects that its EV division will continue to lose money—up to $5.5 billion in 2024, although that is more than offset by the money it expects to make selling commercial vehicles and gasoline-powered vehicles.
Meanwhile, it continues to build a series of battery factory joint ventures in Kentucky and Tennessee, as well as a battery facility in Michigan. It’s also working on a smaller, cheaper EV platform.
EV sales are still growing
Those details say a lot about the overall EV market in the US, which is not quite as bad as many of the naysayers claim, but it also leaves quite a lot to be desired if you’re anxious about US transport-related carbon emissions. In fact, EV sales still grew in Q1 overall, although only by 3.3 percent compared to a total growth in car sales of 5.1 percent. (For all of 2023, EV sales in the US grew 47 percent year over year.)
Other automakers also had a good Q1 in terms of EV sales. Rivian deliveries were up 71 percent. Kia EV sales were up by 88 percent. Hyundai Ioniq 5 sales increased by 19 percent. And Audi sold 23 percent more Q4 e-trons and 47 percent more Q8 e-trons despite overall Audi sales dropping 16 percent.
But not everyone is doing great. Volkswagen sold 37 percent fewer ID.4 crossovers last quarter, even as the brand’s sales grew by 21 percent. And then there’s Tesla. Despite being far and away the largest EV brand in the US, it had a no-good Q1, with an 8.5 percent decline in deliveries and a massive overproduction glut that has led to yet another round of price cuts for vehicles in its inventory. Tesla has also apparently canceled plans for a cheap “Model 2” EV in favor of a renewed focus on robotaxis.
