California announced that the state’s electric car sales account for nearly 18% of new car sales compared to 6% for the entire United States, as per Electrek.
Meanwhile, some people claim that subsidies are all that keep electric vehicles going. Currently, there are two things that the US EV market can’t do without: California and Tesla.
Tesla’s EV record sales in the US
Though the American automaker had no access to federal EV subsidies for years, Tesla amounts to over 60-80% of the EV market in the US. The Texas company’s models reached 67.7% of sales in the Q2 of 2022 and 71.6% in H1 of 2022, according to CleanTechnica.
Without the Texas-based carmaker, EV sales in the country would be massively small. In addition, where those vehicles are going indicates how the US market is divided.
California’s Office of the Governor provided a report of the state’s electric vehicle market’s progression that now nearly 18% of all new vehicles sold are fully-electric.
Top 5 EV sales in the market
However, the record may seem low compared to other markets, such as Norway with a record of 86% sales, Iceland with 72%, Sweden with 43%, Denmark with 35%, and even Finland with 31% overall car sales for the previous year.
Canary Media presented that the first 12 of the top EV sales belong to European countries, which might have been slightly ahead with EV adoption due to tax policies that allow EV purchase incentives.
Notably, China, an Asian country, has also made considerable steps in EV adoption as it has become the world leader in EV manufacturing.
“China will be making over eight million electric cars a year by 2028…compared with one million” in 2020, according to a report by The New York Times.
Electric vehicles reach approximately 6% of new car sales in the United States. That number would be less without California since out of ~576,000 EVs sold in the US in 2022, about 250,000 were sold in California.
The electric vehicle market has been rising rapidly and is anticipated to continue. Over 6.6 million EVs were sold worldwide. As the IEA puts it in context, “Back in 2012, just 120,000 electric cars were sold worldwide. In 2021, more than that many [were] sold each week.”
This year, however, 2 million EVs were purchased globally in the first quarter, 75% more than in the same period in 2021.
