USA Electric Vehicle Sales Up 478% in 2024 vs. 2019, Fossil Fuel Vehicles Down 12% – CleanTechnica

Sign up for daily news updates from CleanTechnica on email. Or follow us on Google News!

---

Following our report on Q4 auto sales in the US, including pure electric vehicle (EV) sales versus fossil fuel vehicle (FFV) sales, we’ve got a new, much bigger report — well, it’s the same size and type of report, but it’s for full-year sales rather than 4th quarter sales. Like in the quarterly report, we are going deep, way back to 2019 — the last pre-COVID year.

Also, we’ll look at industry-wide trends, we’ll look at brand-specific trends, and we’ll look at EV versus FFV sales.

First of all, compared to every year since COVID-19 hit, we can see that US auto sales grew in 2024. Compared to 2023, auto sales were up a modest 3% in 2024.

However, when we strip out fossil fuel vehicle sales and electric vehicle sales, we see very different trends. Well, like in overall auto sales, fossil fuel vehicle sales were up slightly compared to 2023 sales, up slightly compared to 2020 sales, and up a lot compared to 2022 sales. Also, they were down — but much more considerably (by 12%) — compared to 2019 fossil fuel vehicle sales. (They were also down, by 5%, compared to 2021 sales.)

That leads us to electric vehicle sales….

Pure battery-electric vehicles didn’t have any down years in this 5-year time period. 2024 EV sales were up 7% compared to 2023 EV sales, up 61% compared to 2022 EV sales, up 166% compared to 2021 EV sales, up 406% compared to 2020 EV sales, and up a whopping 478% compared to 2019 EV sales — EV sales the year before COVID-19 hit.

So, we get the highlights noted in the headline — fossil fuel vehicle sales declined 12% from 2019 to 2024, while electric vehicle sales increased 478%.

Just look at 2024 sales by auto brand, we have the chart above. There’s still the real “big 3” — Toyota, Ford, and Chevrolet — and Honda sort of close behind them. Fully electric Tesla came in 9th in 2024. That’s down from 8th in 2023, but it’s up from 12th in 2022, 13th in 2021, 17th in 2020, and 19th in 2019.

As for other fully electric vehicle brands, well … they are still down at the bottom of the ranking. That would be Rivian, Lucid, Polestar, Brightdrop, and Fiat.

The downside for fully electric Tesla in 2024 is that it lost the 5th most sales volume-wise compared to 2023 among all auto brands (-20,201 sales, or 3%). Additionally, Polestar dropped the most percentage-wise (-30%).

On the upside, three fully electric brands saw the highest percentage growth in 2024 vs. 2023. Brightdrop grew 208%, Fiat grew 153%, and Lucid grew 53%. Rivian also grew, but by just 3%.

For comparisons to previous years, you can look through the following charts on your own, and I’ll return at the end for commentary on comparisons to 2019.

Comparing 2024 to 5 years prior, 2019, the biggest highlight is Tesla’s massive growth. The company’s US sales grew by 442,523 units, or 235%. It’s stunning growth. Despite the drop in sales compared to 2023, Tesla is still up enormously over this past half-decade.

To wrap up, the following mega-chart lets you examine each brand’s annual sales changes from 2019 through 2024. There’s a static version, and then there’s an interactive version that’s much better — but you probably need to view that on a real computer (not a phone). The static chart is surely much easier to view on a big device as well.

Any other thoughts from these numbers and sales trends?