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Last Updated on: 30th August 2025, 12:56 am
US electric car sales were going up, up, up, and up. Even as Tesla sales started to drop, non-Tesla EV sales were rising enough that overall EV sales were up. See the Q1 US EV sales report for an example of this. However … it just got to be too much and the negative trends broke through the overall EV market in Q2.
Note: These charts are much easier to view and enjoy on a real computer, not a phone.
As you can see above, US electric car sales were down 6% year over year in the second quarter, or down by 20,511 vehicles.
Compared to Q2 2023, they were still up by 5%, or 13,646 units. Compared to Q2 2022, that’s where we see how much the EV market has grown in the United States. Sales were still 60% higher in Q2 2025 than in Q2 2022, and they were 163% higher in Q2 2025 than Q2 2021. So, yes, while it’s a bit of a downer that sales dropped year over year, we are still far above where the market was just a few years ago. So, let’s celebrate that.
Looking in a little more detail here by splitting out the Tesla sales, we can see that non-Tesla EV sales barely changed (rising by 218 units) in Q2 2025 versus Q2 2024. It was entirely Tesla’s drop in sales that led to the market dropping.
Compared to Q2 2023, overall EV sales were up in Q2 2025 because non-Tesla EV sales were up a great deal. Tesla sales were down even more compared to Q2 2023 than they were compared to Q2 2024.
Even going back to Q2 2022, we can see that non-Tesla EV sales are up a ton whereas Tesla sales are only up a little bit. It’s only going back to Q2 2021 that you really see a significant rise in Tesla’s sales, but you see see almost double the rise from non-Tesla EVs.
In summary, Tesla’s sales growth has really been struggling, stalled, or going backward for several years now. Long before Elon Musk got super political and extreme (though, he really started going down that route during the COVID-19 lockdowns in 2020), Tesla has been unable to crank up sales growth like it had done for years before.
Just looking at total overall sales in Q2 2021, Q2 2022, Q2 2023, Q2 2024, and Q2 2025, we can get another look at how Tesla sales grew and then shrunk; non-Tesla EV sales grew, grew, grew, and then didn’t grow this year; and the resulting overall growth trend up through 2024, followed by the slight retraction in Q2 2025. Let’s hope this is just a bump in the road and US EV sales don’t stagnate or shrink for long.
Stay tuned. Next I’ll delve into sales and trends of individual models, and then the same for auto brands and auto groups.
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