Tesla Still Stands Alone in California EV Market

As I wrote the other day, California’s EV sales dipped slightly in Q2 year over year, and the big cause of that was Tesla sales crashing by 18.3%. That also means non-Tesla California EV sales rose in Q2, quite a lot actually. Nonetheless, even with these dueling trends, Tesla still stands levels above other EV sellers in the Golden State.

As you can see in the chart above, far and away, the Tesla Model Y and Tesla Model 3 are the best selling electric vehicles in California. They each sell multiples more units than the #3 Hyundai IONIQ 5, let alone every other EV model. In fact, you have to add up sales of the #3 Hyundai IONIQ 5, #4 Honda Prologue, #5 Ford Mustang Mach-E, #6 Chevrolet Equinox EV, #7 BMW i4, and #8 Rivian R1S just to pass up the sales of the #2 Tesla Model 3! And who knows how much farther you’d have to go to reach the Model Y, which had nearly 50% more sales than the Model 3?

Looking at the overall top 10 best selling automobiles in California in the first half of the year, the only electric vehicles on the list are the Tesla Model Y (in first place) and Tesla Model 3 (in third place). The #3 Hyundai IONIQ 5 isn’t close to the top 10. So, clearly, Tesla is still doing most of the heavy lifting for vehicle electrification in California, despite its massive sales drop and despite other EVs rising in sales. That’s both a testament to Tesla and a knock on other automakers, which have taken far too long to bring mass-market models to market and have not generated nearly enough hype for them.

Looking at the 15 top selling SUVs and trucks, the Tesla Model Y is again the only EV on the list. No other EV could even get into the top 15….

And looking at the top selling car models, only the Tesla Model 3 (#1 again) made the top 8. (I do a top 8 here because of limited data — I can’t be sure what model comes after the #8 Nissan Sentra.)

Overall, the points are clear. California relies on Tesla in order to hit high EV penetration and various CO2 and fuel efficiency targets around that. Other automakers are slowly improving, but they need to do much better in order to compete with the fossil-fueled competition in the state. Hopefully we’ll see more of that in the coming months.