Charging Forward evee Central

EV sales have not fallen, cooled, slowed or slumped. Stop lying in headlines.

EV sales continue to rise, but the last year of headlines falsely stating otherwise would leave you thinking they haven’t. After about full year of these lies, it would be nice for journalists to stop pushing this false narrative that they could find the truth behind by simply looking up a single number for once.

Update: Even Tesla CEO Elon Musk – who, of all people, should know better – spread this misinformation at the very beginning of Tesla’s earnings call yesterday. So we saw it fit to repost this article with some updates.

Here’s what’s actually happening: Over the course of the last year or so, sales of battery electric vehicles, while continuing to grow, have posted lower year-over-year percentage growth rates than they had in previous years.

This alone is not particularly remarkable – it is inevitable that any growing product or category will show slower percentage growth rates as sales rise, particularly one that has been growing at such a fast rate for so long.

In some recent years, we’ve even seen year-over-year doublings in EV market share (though one of those was 2020->2021, which was anomalous). To expect improvement at that level perpetually would be close to impossible – after 3 years of doubling market share from 2023’s 18% number, EVs would account for more than 100% of the global automotive market, which cannot happen.

Clearly, growth percentages will need to trend downward as a new product category grows. It would be impossible for them not to.

To take an extreme example, it would be odd to say that sales are slumping in Norway, which just set a record at 96.4% BEV market share in September with 12,495 units moved, because BEV sales only went up 10% compared to the previous September’s 87% BEV number.

And yet, this mathematical necessity has been reported time and time again in media, and by anti-EV political forces, as if EV sales are down, despite that they continue to rise.

The actual short-term status of EV sales – they’re still up

Instead of the perpetual 50% CAGR that had been optimistically expected, we have seen a global EV sales growth rate of 22% in the first 3 quarters of this year, according to Rho motion. That includes a +35% bump in China, +10% in North America, and a +25% bump in the “rest of the world.” Europe is down 4% year over year, likely influenced by the end of German EV subsidies and new tariff actions against Chinese automakers. Notably, this 22% global growth rate is higher than the above Norway example, which nobody would consider a “slump” at 94% market share.

It’s also clear that EV sales growth rates were being held back in the beginning of this year by Tesla, which has heretofore been the global leader in EV sales. Tesla actually did see a year-over-year reduction in sales in 1H 2024 – likely at least partially due to chaotic leadership at the wayward EV leader – as buyers have been drawn to other brands, while most of which have seen significant increases in EV sales.