While the overall Chinese auto market returned to positive numbers in May (+7% year over year), plugins are still in the red and were down 32% last month, with close to 73,000 registrations.
Plugin vehicle sales continue to recover in China. They were still down 29% year over year (YoY) in April, but that was the smallest drop so far this year. Slightly more than 61,000 units were registered in April.
With the Chinese market slowly returning to normal, now that China has endured the first wave of the COVID pandemic, sales have started to recover from February’s fall into the abyss. In March they dropped just 51%, to around 60,000 units, a significant improvement from the 65% fall of the previous month.
With the Chinese electric vehicle (EV) market suffering from the general lockdown due to the coronavirus pandemic, sales took an expected beating, with only 15,000 passenger EVs registered in February, the worst result in over 3 years, representing a 65% drop year over year.
After the December sales peak, January signaled the expected sales hangover in China, but with some 49,000 passenger plug-in electric vehicles (PEVs), the numbers were worse than expected, as sales fell 50% year over year (YoY).
The Tesla Model 3 is the Usain Bolt of the electric vehicle market. It is far and away the most popular electric vehicle in the world. In fact, it had nearly 3× as many sales last year as the 2nd best selling electric vehicle (EV), and it accounted for ~4× as many sales as the 3rd best selling EV, the Nissan LEAF.
It’s hard to put into perspective just how many sales the Tesla Model 3 inspires worldwide. It’s sometimes hard to convey convincingly why Tesla is highlighted or mentioned on so many CleanTechnica pages. But there’s one general point everyone should understand by now: the Tesla Model 3 is in a league of its own.
After some terrible months (-42% in November), the Chinese plug-in market seems to have finally bottomed out, falling just 22% year over year (YoY) in December, to 149,000 units, with both powertrain technologies dropping. Fully electric vehicles (BEVs) suffered less (only -17% YoY) than plug-in hybrids (-45%).
