US EV Sales — Strong Increases Year Over Year Every Month of the Year

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A new chart on US EV sales has me revisiting a topic Steve Hanley and I have both covered recently, but it’s warranted, because there are a lot of headlines and there’s a lot of hype falsely declaring that the EV market is struggling. Sometimes such stories are focused on the US market and sometimes they are focused more broadly, but no matter what their focus, they are wrong. In this story, the focus is US EV sales, but also note that global BEV sales grew from 14% share of the world auto market in 2022 to 16% share of the world auto market in 2023. Sales increased in a massive, broad, diverse global industry.

The chart comes from Argonne National Laboratory, via the US Department of Energy. It shows that that BEV sales in the US have increased every month year over year for the past two years.

“A comparison of monthly EV sales data for the last three calendar years shows that for each individual month, EV sales increased significantly from the year before. The highest sales for a single month in 2021 was about 50,000 vehicles, for 2022 was about 80,000 vehicles, and in 2023 was over 100,000,” the US DOE writes. “Sales are often lowest in January following a rise that usually takes place in December.”

Indeed, if you look at the growth for each month year over year, you can see that electric vehicles are booming forward. Sales in each month of 2023 were well above sales of the same month in 2022, which were well above sales of the same month in 2021. There is no slow or sluggish growth anywhere. You can possibly say November was not as big as other months in 2023 in terms of overall sales or growth, but in the grand scheme of things, EV sales growth is looking good.

Let’s see what 2024 brings, but with Tesla Cybertruck production and sales ramping up, and with more electric models being added to the market, and with consumers getting more comfortable buying full electric vehicles produced by everyone from Rivian to Ford, there’s no reason to think EV sales should drop. The benefits of electric cars are still huge, and word of mouth is still growing.

Is this the last time I’m going to feel that I need to write about growing EV sales and misleading/incorrect hype that EV sales are not growing? Probably not.

Are there any other big EV sales stories we’re missing?