Don’t Believe the Story About ‘Slowing’ EV Sales

The vibes are bad — but the data is great.

JESSE D. JENKINS•

NOVEMBER 13, 2023

If you’ve read about electric vehicles in the news lately, you know the vibes are bad. Over the past few weeks, the media has fixated on the idea that consumer demand for EVs is “slowing,” “chilling,” or “losing its charge.”

But are sales even slowing? Has federal policy failed to spark the EV transition? Is there any cause for panic? The data shows none of that is true.

The best (and only) quantitative evidence presented for the dominant media narrative is data from Cox Automotive, as presented in a recent Wall Street Journal article, showing that dealers are taking more time and resorting to bigger discounts to move EVs off their lots. That’s true, but does it really indicate that EV sales are “slowing”?

First, this data excludes the space’s biggest player by far — Tesla — as well as other EV-only makers like Rivian who don’t use dealer networks, so this is really a story about traditional automakers (Ford, GM, Volkswagen, etc). And with high interest rates making a new car more costly to finance or lease, dealer discounts are trending steadily upwards for all vehicles in recent months, not just electric models, according to the Cox data.

Second, if we take a look at actual sales data, there’s no sign the growth in EVs is flagging. In fact, sales of battery electric and plug-in hybrid vehicles in the third quarter of 2023 exhibited the strongest year-on-year growth since the fourth quarter of 2021.

https://heatmap.news/electric-vehicles/are-ev-sales-really-slowing-data