While the Tesla Model 3 was the 9th best selling car in the country and had more than 150,000 sales in the USA, the next best selling non-Tesla on the market was the Chevy Bolt with 16,418 sales, followed by the Nissan LEAF with 12,365 sales.
The United Kingdom (not so united these days, but that’s another story) is becoming a hot electric vehicle market, but it gets very little attention in the EV world. I’m going to postulate that’s because people drive on the wrong side of the road there. (Just sayin’.)
Some people wonder why we cover Tesla so much. I’m going to use this opportunity to quickly explain it. First of all, we are a cleantech news & analysis site. Our focus is cleantech and the reasons for it.
We’ve published numerous analyses of our own on the total cost of ownership of the Tesla Model 3 and Volkswagen ID.3 compared to top gasoline competitors. However, if you don’t trust research from CleanTechnica, perhaps you’ll find the work of a major international financial firm more palatable. A recently published report from Bank of America Merrill Lynch (BAML) that was passed along to CleanTechnica dove into this topic for the UK.
The US electric vehicle market … is not the most interesting. Unfortunately, we have only one mass-market electric vehicle on the market, and there are very few models available across the nation. Actually, aside from Tesla’s offerings, I think only two fully electric models available at dealers practically anywhere are the Chevy Bolt and Nissan LEAF.
We no longer publish monthly US electric vehicle sales reports, because few automakers publish their monthly electric vehicle sales, and several don’t even publish quarterly sales of their EVs. Nonetheless, I continue to track the numbers that are published and estimate sales for the other fully electric models.
I prefer comparing the Tesla Model 3 to its gasoline competitors, but it’s also logical to compare the Model 3 to other electric vehicles. In the old days, these were simply called EV sales reports, but the US electric vehicle market is so unbalanced at the moment that it’s hard to ignore the elephant in the room — there’s the Model 3, and there’s everything else.
Looking at pure electric vehicle sales in the United States, there’s one clear takeaway — the Tesla Model 3 dominates.
Following up on my report on fully electric car sales, I was planning to write a report highlighting the year-over-year growth plug-in hybrids saw in the USA last year.
The big electric vehicles sales stories these days are generally about the Tesla Model 3 walloping the competition. Nonetheless, we like to go back to our roots and explore overall electric vehicle growth at least once a quarter. The problem is that almost all of the positivity comes from Tesla.
