just a few With just a few days left until 2025, electric vehicles will already be experiencing a year-long roller coaster ride. Last week, Tesla began the bumpy ride when it reported that, for the first time, the reigning American electric vehicle champion had delivered fewer cars globally than the previous year. The automaker delivered 1.789 million vehicles in 2024, a 1.1 percent drop compared to the 1.808 million delivered in 2023. Tesla stock prices sank 8 percent on the news.
Then, on Friday, more annual sales figures came out and the EV story turned rosy. General Motors said it sold 50 percent more electric vehicles than last year, with its Chevrolet Equinox EV SUV leading the way. Honda’s Prologue EV, which went on sale mid-year, sold 33,000 units, something of a coup for the Japanese automaker’s electric debut in the United States. Even Ford, which said last year it would backtrack on its plan to increase sales of all-electric vehicles in favor of a mix of electric vehicles, hybrids and gasoline cars, sold more than 50,000 Mustang Mach-Es.
Global EV sales figures likely won’t be fully compiled until next month, but analysts say that in the U.S., EVs appear on track to make up a fairly reasonable 8 percent of all vehicles. car sales in 2024.
So maybe “roller coaster” is a little dramatic. In many ways, the story of electric vehicle sales (and even the Tesla subplot) is playing out largely as everyone in the industry thought. In the early part of the decade, “people thought there was going to be crazy, hockey-stick growth for electric vehicles,” says Stephanie Brinley, senior automotive analyst at S&P Global Mobility. “That was not realistic. The way we see the market evolving is more realistic.”
“Everyone is still moving slowly,” Corey Cantor, senior associate covering electric vehicles at BloombergNEF, says of electric cars and their manufacturers.
lukewarm optimism
No one said the transition to electric vehicles would be easy. Electrification “has been one of the biggest changes the auto industry has ever seen, and the auto industry doesn’t change overnight,” says Ivan Drury, chief insights officer at Edmunds, the automotive website.
Making an entirely new powertrain and sourcing the battery minerals to power it is only half the challenge. Changing people’s purchasing habits, especially for one of the most expensive purchases of their lives, will be the other half. Given those limitations, “it’s surprising that we’ve seen so much change,” Drury says.
Even Tesla’s bump in the road could be seen as proof that CEO Elon Musk’s automaker is doing what it’s doing. something good. In 2006, Musk published his “Master plan” which stated Tesla’s “overarching purpose”: “to help accelerate the shift from a hydrocarbon drilling and burning economy to a solar electric economy, which I believe is the primary, but not exclusive, sustainable solution.” The growth challenges Tesla’s annual report stems, in part, from the fact that the tactic worked and there is now much more global competition in the electric vehicle space. Tesla officially lost its title as the world’s top electric vehicle maker last year to China’s BYD. , which produced around 4,500 more electric vehicles last year (Tesla still. sold more electric vehicles, with a serious help of Chinese buyers, who bought 8.8 percent more of the automaker’s electric vehicles last year than in 2023).
Whether the global vehicle electrification project stays on track depends, in part, on politics. In the United States, sales of electric vehicles increased in the last quarter of the year. Perhaps this is because consumers learned of the new Trump administration’s plans to eliminate incentives for electric vehicles and followed experts’ advice to buy new cars while they could still get subsidies. What will happen in 2025 if these purchase incentives disappear?
Even with more sales figures to come, the 2024 figures appear to show an industry moving forward as it should. “It’s a crazy transition,” Brinley, the analyst, says of the shift to electric vehicles. But he’s confident: “We’re going to see more adoption,” he says.