California is far and away the electric vehicle leader in the US. In fact, even globally, California has a high percentage of 100% electric vehicle (ZEV) sales. However, as the original home of Tesla Motors (now just “Tesla”), California has been heavily reliant on Tesla for its high ZEV sales. That’s changing, but perhaps just a bit too fast.
Largely as a result of the extreme political activities of its CEO, the face of the brand, but perhaps also from growing competition and market saturation, Tesla sales have crashed in California this year. The good news is that non-Tesla ZEV sales have gone up … but not enough to make up for Tesla’s crash. At the end of the day, ZEV market share dropped from 22% in 2024 to 19.5% in the first half of 2025, but that was on the back of Tesla sales dropping 18.3% year over year — from 101,991 sales in the first half of 2024 to 83,375 sales in the first half 2025. It’s almost like trashing California, trashing Democratic politicians, and trashing Democratic policies (that support Tesla) was bad for the Tesla brand in California….
Total ZEV sales in the first half of 2025 were 184,234, and total plugin hybrid sales were 36,266 (3.8% of the overall market).
Looking at the numbers on a quarterly basis, ZEV registrations totaled 88,219 (18.2% of the auto market), down from 96,015 registrations in the first quarter (20.8%). This is actually the most shocking point for me, because Tesla sales were supposed to rebound strongly in the second quarter, since Tesla changed over production lines for the new Model Y in the first quarter. Tesla was not supposed to see a quarter-over-quarter drop in sales. Year over year, the quarterly sales were down from 22% in the second quarter of 2024 to the aforementioned 18.2%.
Plugin hybrids rose slightly quarter over quarter and year over year. They scored 15,001 registrations (3.3% of the market) in the second quarter of 2024, 17,269 sales (3.7% of the market) in the first quarter of 2025, and then 18,997 sales (3.9% of the market) in the second quarter of 2025.
19.5% ZEV share of the market is still far more than the US average of 7.8%. Overall, California accounts for 28.6% of the US ZEV market.
I’ll cover specific vehicle segments and top selling models soon, but the big story in California is clearly Tesla’s dropping sales in its original home state.
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