Sign up for daily news updates from CleanTechnica on email. Or follow us on Google News!
Overall, the share of pure electric vehicles (EV, or BEV) in US auto sales was 6.9% in the first quarter of 2024. Electric vehicle sales increased slightly compared to the first quarter of 2023, but overall car sales rose more, so the market share of electric vehicles fell from 7% to 6.9% year over year. It was also lower than in the fourth quarter, when the EV market share was at a record high of 7.9%. Still, it was an increase from 4.5% in the first quarter of 2022, 2.4% in the first quarter of 2021, 1.4% in the first quarter of 2020 and 1% in the first quarter of 2019 Was this just a small blip in EV market share growth? Or was this the start of a downward trend, or at least a leveling off? Given all the benefits of electric cars, their continued cost savings and the growing variety of models, I assume this was a temporary and unusual drop in EV market share.
Of Tesla accounts for more than half of US EV salesthe big hit in the first quarter was simply Tesla's revenue decline – both quarter over quarter and year over year. Year over year, non-Tesla EV sales increased by 21,792 in the first quarter. However, they fell by almost 20,000 units quarter-on-quarter.
Digging a little deeper, let's see how different car manufacturers and different car brands performed in terms of the share of their own sales that was EV sales. (Note that several car brands don't sell electric vehicles in the US and so aren't even included here.)
Looking first at car groups, we can see that BMW Group became the number 1 car group in the country due to the share of its sales that were electric, with a 13.6% share. In second place was Geely, with a 10.6% share, and another major German luxury car manufacturer, Mercedes, came third with a 10.1% share. And then you have the third of the major German car groups, Volkswagen Group, which scores a share of 9.4%. So three of the four largest car companies were the German Big 3.
Among mass-market brands, the Hyundai-Kia partnership had a 5.1% share, slightly higher than Ford Motor Company's 4.2% share. GM fell 3%, Nissan 2.2% and Toyota an embarrassing 0.6%. Honda isn't even on the board.
If we look at the same metric, but broken down by car brand instead of car group, we see that Cadillac is the leader! Who would have thought that? With a 16.4% share of first quarter sales coming from the Cadillac LYRIQ, the old-school luxury brand from the US was in charge with an all-new electric car. Audi was quite far behind in second place with a respectable 12.9% share, and BMW was right on its heels with a 12.7% share. Directly behind BMW was its little brother, MINI, with a share of 11.7%. The next two brands – Mercedes (10.1%) and Porsche (9.3%) – were also luxury brands, clearly showing which segment of the US market is going electric.
Volkswagen was the #1 non-luxury brand, but I have to say it has something of a semi-luxury reputation and appeal in the United States. The 7.5% share was the last score above the national average (6.8%). The next three mass-market brands – Hyundai (5.7%), Kia (4.5%) and Ford (4.2%) – seem to be the last ones worth mentioning. I'll end with a comment about Volvo. The Swedish-Chinese brand, which has the most ambitious plans worldwide for a switch to fully electric vehicles, emphasized that its plug-in vehicle models “accounted for 25.7 percent [of its sales] in March an increase of 33.9 percent compared to the same period last year.” However, sales of 1,069 BEVs in the first quarter amounted to only 3.5% of total sales of 30,951. So the company clearly still has a way to go on the all-electric front in the US.
In addition to all the older car brands shown here, we also have the all-electric brands Tesla, Rivian, Lucid, Polestar, Fisker and Brightdrop – which had 100% EV sales.
Related stories:
US EV sales up 170% in the first quarter compared to the first quarter of 2021
Do you have a tip for CleanTechnica? Do you want to advertise? Would you like to suggest a guest for our CleanTech Talk podcast? Contact us here.
Latest CleanTechnica.TV Video
CleanTechnica uses affiliate links. See our policies here.