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The electric vehicle market continues to grow around the world, despite what many would have you think. In fact, even in the United States, the large auto market with the weakest EV policies (well, compared to China and Europe), electric vehicles see their sales increasing year after year. In the second quarter of 2024, compared to the second quarter of 2023, sales of 100% electric vehicles increased by 16% in the US.
Yes, if you compare to Q2 2022, you can see that sales increased much more from 2022 to 2023, but BEV sales still grew by a notable 16% in 2024. The 86% growth from Q2 2022 to Q2 2024 should be looked at as a whole, too. That’s nearly a doubling of sales in two years.
In volume terms, you can see from the next chart that 46,000 more electric vehicles were sold in Q2 2024 than in Q2 2023. And going back to Q2 2022, you can see that the quarterly sales had increased by 156,000.
That’s growth. The issue raised by various automakers is the growth isn’t strong enough, but even that is a little deceiving. The biggest growth hit is at Tesla, which accounts for about half of the US EV market. As you can see in this third chart, below, Tesla sales dropped year over year in Q2, whereas non-Tesla BEV sales continued growing strongly. The narrative that EV sales are not growing fast basically breaks down if you take Tesla out of the equation.
I’ll come back to Tesla in a full brand and model sales analysis later today, but let’s wrap up this overview report with one more chart and a few more stats. In this last chart, we can see that BEVs have gone from 3.3% of US auto sales in Q2 2021 to 4.8% in Q2 2022 to 7% in Q2 2023 and then to 8.1% in Q2 2024.
We may have to settle for somewhat slower growth now if Tesla can’t return to its previous growth rate, or perhaps Cybertruck mass production or robotaxis will help Tesla with that. I’d like to think legacy automakers could really get rolling and see 50% BEV growth a year, but all of their communications around this topic imply otherwise now, so that seems unrealistic at the moment. Of course, there’s also the possibility for Rivian to see a surge in sales with its smaller crossover and SUV options coming, but, again, we’ll have to wait and see.
The final stat circles back to the US auto industry report I published last night. Gas car sales were down 1% from Q2 2023 to Q2 2024. It’s progress, but it’s not enough. Gas car sales were down 14% in Q2 2024 compared to Q2 2019, but that still isn’t as inspiring as one would hope. We still have a problem of millions of new gasoline-powered vehicles getting onto US roads each quarter. Progress is too slow. At least we are getting close to 10%, a nice symbolic — or perhaps not only symbolic — “tipping point” in tech transitions. Hopefully BEVs can reach that level in one of the next few quarters.
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