Tesla Crushes Electric “Competition” In US

Originally published on EV Obsession.

I’m still waiting for all of the 2015 automotive sales numbers to roll in before publishing my monthly electric car sales report, but the numbers from most of the big players are in, so I thought it would be worth highlighting the main story.

Nissan sold 17,269 LEAFs in 2015 (including one to CleanTechnica/EV Obsession). GM sold slightly fewer Volts (15,393), but more electric cars overall (an additional 1,024 ELRs and 2,477 Spark EVs through the end of November — I’m still waiting on the Spark EV’s December numbers, since GM doesn’t bother to break it out from the gasoline Spark in the main press release and table). Ford’s numbers fall somewhere between Nissan’s and GM’s. So, basically, the top 3 electric car automakers other than Tesla each hit between 17,000 and 19,000 electric car sales in 2015.

Tesla doesn’t break out US sales versus foreign sales, but it did indicate last year that it delivered slightly more than half of its cars to the US. With something similar projected for 2015 (in which 50,580 Teslas were delivered), I ended up with an estimate of 26,566 Tesla Model S deliveries and 208 Tesla Model X deliveries (all of them so far). That puts Tesla at nearly 27,000 US electric car deliveries (and many more orders and reservations, it should be noted, especially for the Model X).

By any measure, Tesla is crushing mainstream automakers in electric car sales on its home turf, the USA. Imagine if the mainstream automakers tried as hard as Tesla and put their banks full of cash into quickening the transition to EVs…

Here’s my current spreadsheet for monthly and total 2015 US electric car sales:

Photos by Zachary Shahan | EV Obsession |CleanTechnica