EV Sales Growth Slump Of 2024 Was Overblown, Now Let’s Do 2025
Sign up for daily news updates from CleanTechnica on email. Or follow us on Google News!
The Great EV Sales Slump of 2024 is a matter of history now that 2025 has begun, and it’s time to put things in perspective. Despite the click-baiting doom-and-gloom headlines of last year, global EV sales continued to grow, while gasmobile sales continued to fall. With that in mind, let’s take a look at some of the numbers.
Check out CleanTechnica’s latest quarterly US sales report here.
By The Numbers, Tesla Still Dominates Global EV Sales
The US startup Tesla got a huge head start on global EV sales with a hefty assist from the US government, which forked over a loan guarantee of $465 million back in 2009, enabling the firm to start production. It was one of the first corporate aid packages approved by the newly established Loan Programs Office of the Department of Energy. The loan was repaid ahead of schedule in 2013 and the rest is history. To this day, Tesla is a powerful force driving gasmobiles out of the personal mobility market.
Still, legacy automakers and other startups have launched EVs of their own into the market, chipping away at Tesla’s market domination. Brand reputation is also an issue now that CEO Elon Musk let his political ideology take center stage (see more political background here and here).
Whatever the reason, auto industry observers attribute much of the 2024 so-called EV sales slump to Tesla’s overwhelming presence in the global market. As Tesla sales go, so goes the industry average. If there were more diversity in the market, Tesla would not exercise so much weight on industry-wide sales, but the fact is that it does, and 2024 was not a pretty year for Tesla.
2024 Was A Pretty Good Year For EV Sales, With Some Exceptions
As for how not-pretty 2024 was for Tesla, earlier today Associated Press and many other news organizations reported that Tesla’s worldwide sales — meaning full battery-powered EV sales, not plug-in hybrids or fuel cell EVs — totaled 1.79 million 2024. That’s 1.1% below the previous year’s total of 1.81 million. So, not just a concerning slowdown in the pace of sales growth, but a much more concerning year-over-year decline in sales.
“Tesla’s global annual sales fell for the first time in at least 9 years, with a 2.3% increase in the final quarter not enough to overcome a sluggish start to 2024 despite offers of 0% financing, free charging and low-priced leases,” AP explained, twisting the knife just a little bit.
The AP report also indicates that Tesla didn’t read the room on luxury EV sales. In past years, Tesla and other EV makers focused on high-end EVs because they figured that status-hungry, tech-oriented early adopters would pay more for, well, status and technology. Battery costs were high, after all. Now that battery costs have dropped, automakers can begin focusing on more affordable EVs for budget-conscious households. Still, Tesla chose to launch the high profile, and expensive, Cybertruck into production in November of 2023, even as the impacts of post-COVID inflationary pressure were still emerging.
“Nearly all of Tesla’s sales came from the smaller and less-expensive Models 3 and Y, with the company selling only 23,640 of its more expensive models that include X and S, as well as the new Cybertruck,” AP noted.
AP also took note of competition for global EV sales from automakers in China, but beware of apples-to-oranges comparisons. Hybrids are beginning to make up a bigger chunk of the electric vehicle market in China. For better or worse, Tesla doesn’t make hybrid EVs, and it probably never will.
So, let’s take another look at that AP report, which concluded with the observation that “Tesla’s global electric vehicle sales edged out Chinese rival BYD, which announced Thursday that total soared 41% last year including 1.77 million EVs.”
“Edged out” is not the phrase I would have used. It’s more like a respectable whomping. The 41% increase in sales for BYD actually includes a substantial number of plug-in hybrids. “Plug-in hybrids represented 58.5% of BYD’s total sales in 2024,” Car News China reported earlier today. “BYD sold 2,485,378 passenger PHEVs (plug-in hybrid vehicles) in 2024, up 72.8% from 1.4 million in 2023.
See our detailed monthly reports on Chinese EV sales for more on that topic.
The Norway Solution
As for the rest of the global market, everyone is looking at Norway as a good example of the potential for edging gasmobiles out of the new car market entirely.
“Another record for EV sales in Norway was set in 2024: 88.9 percent of all new passenger cars sold were fully electric, up from 82.4 percent in 2023,” reports the Norwegian Electric Car Association. That’s a particularly notable development, because electric cars are supposedly not up to snuff in terms of cold-weather performance. Drivers in the cold climate of Norway are apparently not convinced that’s a problem.
If late-year developments are any indication, EV sales are on track to top 88.9% in 2024. Last fall CleanTechnica tracked sales in the 90% and up range, with 100% battery power accounting for almost the entire lot.
Tesla still dominated sales in Norway last year, with NECA reporting sales of 16,858 for the Model Y and 7,264 for the Model 3. The two next-best automakers in the 7,000 EV sales range were Volvo and Volkswagen, with everybody else running far behind.
What Comes Next For Zero Emission Mobility
For my money, the pace of full battery-powered EV sales is not the only measure of progress on transportation decarbonization. More people are sharing cars or doing without them entirely, depending on the availability of mass transit and walkable communities. E-scooter and e-bike sharing are also increasing.
It’s also worth noting that here in the US, most people buy their cars used. As more EVs cycle through their first owner and hit the used car market, sales of new EVs will feel the pinch.
Still, replacing more gasmobiles with more EVs more quickly is an important part of the decarbonization plan, and in that regard 2025 is looking somewhat shaky. Barron’s is among the financial observers warning that some kind of EV sales apocalypse has been readying itself to pounce.
That remains to be seen. Much depends on the $7,5000 federal tax credit, which could disappear after President-elect Trump takes office on January 20.
The new status of America’s #1 EV stakeholder, Elon Musk, as a top advisor to Trump is no guarantee that the tax credit will survive. All else being equal, one decisive factor could be the political willpower of public officials in Trump-voting states, like Georgia, who are basking in the warm glow of the jobs created by Biden-era policies favoring electric vehicles.
On the other hand, meh. It all depends on how much red-state officials really care about job creation and economic development. If you have any thoughts about that, drop a note in the comment thread.
Follow me via LinkTree, or @tinamcasey on LinkedIn and Bluesky.
Photo (cropped): Global EV sales continued to increase in 2024, though 2025 could be a work in progress the US after President Biden leaves office on January 20 (courtesy of US Department of Energy).
Chip in a few dollars a month to help support independent cleantech coverage that helps to accelerate the cleantech revolution!
Have a tip for CleanTechnica? Want to advertise? Want to suggest a guest for our CleanTech Talk podcast? Contact us here.
Sign up for our daily newsletter for 15 new cleantech stories a day. Or sign up for our weekly one if daily is too frequent.
CleanTechnica uses affiliate links. See our policy here.
CleanTechnica’s Comment Policy
This post has been syndicated from a third-party source. View the original article here.
