Electric vehicles seem to be picking up quite a bit of steam lately. With more vehicles finding their way onto roads 2019 seems to have been a fantastic year for electric cars. Today we’ll look at how EVs did last year and try to predict what these things might mean for the future.
Buying Trends
It should come as a surprise to no one that 2019 was a very strong year for Tesla. The Tesla Model 3 was by far the best seller this year. The Model 3 was actually the ninth best selling car in America. Well behind the Model 3 we find the Chevrolet Volt and Tesla’s Model S in close competition.
The Nissan Leaf and Toyota Prius come in to fill the fourth and fifth spots respectively. One interesting note is that only the top 5 cars account for nearly 60 percent of all new EV sales.
With only 4 brands maintaining so much control over the EV market, things don’t currently seem too competitive for consumers. We’ve seen many announcements from several companies lately including Fisker and Rivian, so hopefully we can see more competition in the electric market in 2020.
New Releases
We only saw 4 new EV releases in 2019. Three of those were all electric, the Audi e-tron, Hyundai Kona, and Kira Niro. We’ve also gotten one new plug-in hybrid with the Subaru Crosstrek.
Market Share
Electric vehicle sales have been consistently growing in an overall automotive market thats actually 1% down on sales in 2019. EV sales reached a peak of 2.6% of all new car sales in September of 2019. As of September 2019 over 1.3 million electric cars were rolling on US roads.
During the first half of the year global electric vehicle sales totaled around 1.1 million. This is a massive 46% increase in sales compared to the same time period in 2018. Demand for electric vehicles has increased 22% in the USA, 35% in Europe, and an impressive 66% in China. Sales in the US accounted for 13% of global EV sales.
Given the astounding amount of growth in the past year, things are looking very good for EVs. We can only hope this demand continues to grow as electric vehicles slowly take over market share. While we can hope for more competition in the market, with 5 manufacturers being responsible for 80% of EVs on the road, new manufacturers entering the scene could provide much needed competition. Rivian is supposed to come to the market this coming year with its electric truck with a look that’s been getting wide praise.
With all that, the only thing we can hope for is that we see more chargers built to support all these new EVs on the road!
