There are now a few 100% electric vehicle brands — such as Tesla, Rivian, Lucid, and Polestar — but looking past them at legacy automakers, let’s see who’s leading the way in terms of their movement toward a 100% electric future.
Note that we don’t have data on EV sales from all automakers. Data is also incomplete for some of the automakers covered here. So, don’t take this as a comprehensive, conclusive report on EV market share by brand within the US auto market. Still, with the data we have, it’s interesting to explore how different automakers compare. First, though, there are a few more quirks to note….
There are 11 automakers in the USA that have dedicated EVs (aka BEVs) whose reported sales are not mixed in with the reported sales of gas-powered siblings. Those are the automakers we’re looking at here. In the case of Hyundai and Kia, there’s a mixture of both. Hyundai has the new Ioniq 5, and we have sales data for it since it’s its own model, but Hyundai also has the Kona EV, whose sales are included as part of overall Kona sales — and we have no idea what portion is the Kona EV versus the gas-powered Kona. Kia has the new 100% electric EV6, but it also has the Kia Niro EV, whose sales are lumped in with overall Niro sales. If the Ioniq 5 and EV6 accounted for basically all of Hyundai’s and Kia’s EV sales, 3.9% of Hyundai’s sales in the 1st quarter of 2022 would be EVs and 3.5% of Kia’s sales would be EVs — neither of which is close to leaders Porsche and Audi. But, without comprehensive EV sales data, we can’t say what the true percentage is.
The EV share of GM sales have been minimal, especially due to the shutdown of Chevy Bolt EV/EUV production for months while GM worked out battery safety and supply issues. Meanwhile, the Hummer EV just arrived on the market. So, I’m excluding GM brands from this comparison, but come back next quarter for a closer look at these other automakers.
What we end with are 6 brands that report US sales of their full electric vehicles. Of those 6 brands, Porsche has by far the greatest portion of its sales coming from full electric vehicles, Audi’s solidly second, and Volkswagen is third. That means all three are Volkswagen Group companies. They held the top 3 spots in that order in Q4 2021, FY 2021, and Q1 2022.
The three automakers in this analysis on the bottom of the chart, on the other hand, have quite unexciting shares of their auto sales coming from pure electric vehicles.
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