US EV Market Down 27%, Worst 1st Quarter Since 2022
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When Joe Biden and Democrats got control of the White House and Congress, they revived and extended the $7,500 EV tax credit, with some new stipulations but also very inclusive loopholes. In short, Americans were incentivized to buy more new EVs. Then, Donald Trump and Republicans took over and killed those EV incentives. Looking at Q1 2026 US EV sales compared to previous years, we can now get a sense of the effect this has had on the market.
Overall, EV share of the US auto market was 5.9% in the first quarter of 2026, down from 7.6% in Q1 2025 or 7.2% in Q1 2024. The quarterly peak for EVs in this regard was 10.6% share in Q3 2025.
As we can see in the charts, the market rose up to record heights in Q1 2025. (That said, since we include a separate bar in the chart for dominant Tesla, we can see that its 1st quarter record was back in Q1 2023, not Q1 2025.) Note that there are both embedded interactive charts and static images of the charts shared below, since the former show better for people on some devices and the latter show better on other devices.
That’s quite a drop year over year. We didn’t know how good we had it back in Q1 2025, even despite being well behind markets like China and Europe.
The one positive note here that did also pop out to me is that we’re still well above Q1 2022’s numbers and even much better compared to Q1 2021.
So, which EV models are leading this new market? That’s still very heavily the Tesla Model Y and Tesla Model 3. The Toyota bZ (previously bZ4X) is the big surprise at #3, followed by the equally impressive Hyundai IONIQ 5 and Chevrolet Equinox EV. After that, there’s a significant dropoff.
As noted yesterday, only six auto brands saw year-over-year sales growth in the first quarter. Most of them saw dramatic sales declines. I’ll dig into the model data separately. Stay tuned.
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