Tesla May Be Falling in Sales, but Electric Cars Are Doing Good Overall

Just a few By 2025, electric vehicles they’ve been on a roller coaster ride for a year now. last week, Tesla It marked the start of a rocky ride for the first time, when the reigning champion of American electric cars reported that it delivered fewer vehicles globally than the previous year. The automaker delivered 1.789 million vehicles in 2024, down 1.1 percent from 1.808 million vehicles delivered in 2023. Tesla shares fell 8 percent on the news.

Then, on Friday, more annual sales figures came out and the EV story turned rosy around the edges. General Motors It said it sold 50 percent more electrics than last year, led by the Chevrolet Equinox EV SUV. Honda’s Prologue EV, which went on sale halfway through the year, shifted 33,000 units — a coup for the Japanese automaker’s U.S. electric debut. Even Fordsaid last year that it would happen withdraws from plan to expand all electricity sales More than 50,000 were sold, in favor of a mix of EVs, hybrids, and gas-powered vehicles Mustang Mach-Eetc.

Global EV sales numbers likely won’t be fully tallied until next month, but analysts say electric vehicles in the U.S. will account for a more than reasonable 8 percent of all vehicle sales in 2024.

So maybe “roller coaster” is a bit dramatic. By many measures, the EV sales story — and even the Tesla subplot — is playing out largely as everyone in the industry thinks it is. In the early part of the decade, “people thought there was going to be this crazy hockey stick growth for electric cars,” says Stephanie Brinley, principal auto analyst at S&P Global Mobility. “It wasn’t real. The way we see the development of the market is more realistic.”

“Everyone continues to move slowly,” says Corey Cantor, a senior fellow at BloombergNEF who covers electric vehicles and their manufacturers.

Cold Optimism

No one said the transition to electric cars would be easy. Electrification is “one of the biggest changes the auto industry has ever seen, and the auto industry doesn’t change overnight,” says Ivan Drury, director of insights at Edmunds, an automotive website.

The production of a completely new power unit – and resource battery minerals to provide energy – is only half the problem. Changing people’s buying habits, especially when one of the most expensive purchases they will make in their life, will be the other half. Given these limitations, Drury says, “it’s remarkable that we’ve seen so much change.”

Even Tesla’s bump in the road can be seen as evidence that CEO Elon Musk’s automaker is doing. something right. In 2006, Musk announced his “The master planRevealing Tesla’s “core purpose”: “to help accelerate the move from a hydrocarbon extraction and combustion economy to a solar electric economy, which I believe is the primary, but not the exclusive, sustainable solution.” Tesla’s year-over-year growth problems stem, in part, from the gambit working, and now there’s more global competition in the EV space. Tesla officially lost the title of the world’s top EV maker last year to China’s BYD, which produced about 4,500 more EVs last year. (Tesla still it was sold more EV, a serious help (from Chinese buyers, who bought 8.8 percent more of the automaker’s EVs last year than in 2023.)

Whether the global car electrification project stays on track depends in part on politics. Electric car sales in the US increased in the last quarter of the year. That’s perhaps how consumers will hear about the new Trump administration’s plans to eliminate electric vehicle incentives. they took expert advice on buying new cars while they could still get subsidies. What if these purchase incentives disappear in 2025?

While there are more sales figures to come, the 2024 figures show that the industry is progressing as it should. “It’s a crazy transition,” says Brinley, an analyst of the transition to electric vehicles. But he is confident: “We will see more adoptions,” he says.