Fossil-Fueled Vehicle Sales Actually Grew in USA in 3rd Quarter – CleanTechnica

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Covering cleantech here at CleanTechnica, the core underlying point is to replace fossil-fueled technology with zero-emissions technology that won’t cook our planet. When it comes to electric vehicles, the aim is not just to sell more EVs, but to also sell fewer fossil-fueled vehicles.

With record high EV sales in the USA in the 3rd quarter, and EVs representing more than 10% of sales for the first time (10.6%), one would think that fossil-fueled vehicle sales would be down while EV sales were strongly up. Unfortunately, that’s not how things played out.

In fact, fossil-fueled vehicle sales were the highest they had been in the 3rd quarter for years. I only went back to Q3 2021 in creating the charts for this article, so then I wondered, how far back do you have to go to find a bigger 3rd quarter for gasmobiles? I figured that 2020 must have been much lower due to COVID-19, but I guess recovery was underway enough at that point that Q3 2020 was bigger. Fossil-fueled vehicles reached 3,854,984 sales in Q3 2020, compared to 3,712,110 in Q3 2025. Digging through the numbers in my spreadsheet more deeply, I also found that Q3 2019 logged 4,275,000 fossil-fueled vehicle sales, many more than Q3 2020 or Q3 2025. So, in that regard, I guess we can say things have improved. But we have a long way to go.

Here’s how Q3 fossil-fueled vehicle sales changed in recent years, followed by two similar charts for electric vehicle sales:

Here are the charts again in another form:

So, yes, electric vehicles were up more than fossil-fueled vehicles (unless you look at volume changes compared to 2022 and 2021), but fossil-fueled vehicles were up nonetheless. What happens in the 4th quarter?