How Did EV Sales Do This Year? We Take A Global View

Hello and welcome to your daily ChargeSmart blog! As the year winds down, let's take a look at how EVs performed in terms of global car sales over the past year!

Above: Tesla's range of cars, including the Model Y crossover

How did Tesla do?

Volkswagen have their sights firmly set on dethroning Tesla as the sales leader in EVs but for now, Tesla are still the leader when it comes to the electric car market. The question is, how popular are Tesla’s cars? Globally, 1 in every 6 and a quarter cars is a Tesla. That’s impressive but surely stats like that don’t come from the expensive Model S and Model X, right?! You’d be correct in assuming that because Tesla have seen a huge jump in sales ever since the launch of their much-anticipated Model 3. Just to give you an idea of the impact that this car has had on the market, 1 out of 8 EVs on the road globally is a Tesla Model 3! That means that the little Tesla accounts for 13% of the worldwide EV market! In fact, the market seemed to love the Model 3 so much that Tesla sold 3 times more Model 3s than the second-best electric vehicle. If it wasn’t obvious then let’s put some figures behind our statement. The Tesla Model 3 was the most popular EV of 2019, selling more than 220,000 units worldwide.

Above: Nio's ES8 SUV

China are still big on EVs

The next highest seller was the EU-Series of vehicles by Chinese manufacturer, BAIC who sold just over 81,000 EU-Series cars. That brings us to another interesting observation from the list of the top selling plug-ins of 2019. Chinese brands did very well when it came to hybrids and EVs, making up 9 out of the 20 names on the list of the top sellers in the year gone by. This is down to government subsidies on the purchase of EVs and mandates around the vehicles. These 9 Chinese models account for nearly a quarter of global EV sales, wow! However, the market has cooled off recently which leaves some space for other cars that have had worldwide success to gain a few places on the list.

As we outlined earlier, Tesla’s Model 3 was the only plug-in vehicle to sell more than 100,000 units worldwide. While the BAIC EU-Series, BYD S2/Yuan and the infamous Nissan Leaf were the only EVs to sell more than 50,000 units globally. That doesn’t make for entirely good reading if you’re a climate change activist but the good thing is that the numbers of EV sales have been rising year on year and with the entrance of Volkswagen next year and their line of ID cars, one can only expect EV sales to go up exponentially. As of last month, plug-in vehicles made up 2.2% of global market share. One could expect EV sales to see a large rise in the last month or so of this year especially in Europe where a new incentive for EV buyers has been introduced by the Dutch government. However, Tesla have a limited production capacity hence the reason why people are still in queues for their Model 3 so don’t expect the stats to jump by a huge margin for the last month.

Above: New EVs like the Volkswagen ID3 should increase the demand for EVs

The rise of pure EVs

The statistics show that sales of pure EVs are on the rise and that surely makes for some good reading if you’re a fan of emission free vehicles. Add on the fact that Volkswagen have put in a huge amount of investment into a whole line of new cars and a massive battery factory to compete with Tesla’s, we could be in for a lot of electric options from the VW group next year. Then there’s Ford’s newfound interest in the EV space which has led then to release the Mustang Mach E and they are currently working on their own line of EVs which will be released over the next few years. The Peugeot Citroen (PSA) Group also have some big plans for shared EVs and then when you look at the insane pre-order figures that the Tesla CyberTruck got within the first few weeks of its release. There’s a lot to look forward to when it comes to future EVs.

Let’s take this opportunity to quickly touch on the Hyundai Kona EV. The car only sold around 36,000 units across the globe in the year gone by but that wasn’t because of a lack of demand. Hyundai simply weren’t prepared for the demand, their limited battery supply and poor availability of the car really hurt sales of the very promising Kona EV. Some predict that Hyundai could have doubled the amount of Kona EVs that they sold last year if they were prepared for the demand. Anyway, some other notable names on the list of top selling plug-ins include the Renault Zoe EV which placed 8th, selling just over 38,000 units and the BMW i3 EV which sold 34,050 units to give it a respectable ranking of 10th on the list. It was followed closely by the Chery eQ EV in 11th. Tesla’s two other cars, the Model X and the Model S ranked 14th and 20th in sales respectively while Volkswagen’s e-Golf sold just over 29,000 units to land it a 15th place on the list.

Thanks for reading! Make sure to check back in for our last post of the year and of the decade!