With just days to go to 2025, electric vehicles have had a roller coaster of a year. Last week, Tesla began a bumpy ride when it reported that, for the first time, America’s EV champion had shipped fewer cars worldwide than the previous year. The automaker is expected to deliver 1.789 million vehicles in 2024, down 1.1 percent compared to the 1.808 million it delivered in 2023. Tesla’s stock price fell 8 percent on the news. rim. General Motors said it sold 50 percent more electric vehicles than last year, with the Chevrolet Equinox EV SUV leading the charge. Honda’s Prologue EV, which went on sale halfway through the year, shifted 33,000 units — a coup for the Japanese car’s electric debut in the US. Even Ford, which last year said it would back away from plans to expand all-electric sales to a mix of EVs, hybrids, and gasoline cars, sold more than 50,000 Mustang Mach-Es. Global EV sales numbers likely won’t be fully collected until next month, but analysts say that in the US, electric vehicles seem to be on track to account for 8 percent of all car sales by 2024. So the “roller coaster” may be a bit dramatic. By many measures, the story of EV sales—and even Tesla’s subplot—mostly plays out the way everyone in the industry thinks it does. In the first part of the decade, “people thought there was going to be this crazy hockey-stick growth for EVs,” said Stephanie Brinley, principal automotive analyst at S&P Global Mobility. “This is unrealistic. The way we see emerging markets is more realistic.” “Everyone is moving forward slowly,” said Corey Cantor, senior associate covering electric vehicles at BloombergNEF, electric cars and manufacturing. the transition to electric vehicles will be easy. Electrifying “has been one of the biggest changes that the car industry has ever seen—and the auto industry doesn’t change overnight,” said Ivan Drury, director of insight at Edmunds, an automotive site. Mineral batteries to energize-only one half of the challenge. Changing people’s buying habits, especially for one of the most expensive purchases they will make in their lifetime, will be the other half. Given the obstacles, “it’s great that we’ve seen so many changes,” says Drury. Even Tesla’s bump in the road can be seen as evidence that the automaker’s CEO Elon Musk has done something right. In 2006, Musk published a “Master Plan” that explained Tesla’s “general goal”: “to accelerate the transition from a mine-and-burn hydrocarbon economy to a solar electricity economy, which I believe is the main, but not exclusive and sustainable solution. ” Tesla’s annual growth challenges stem, in part, from the fact that the gambit is working, and there is now more global competition in the EV space. Tesla officially lost its title as the world’s top EV maker last year to China’s BYD, which produced about 4,500 more electric vehicles last year. (Tesla is still selling more EVs, with serious help from Chinese buyers, who bought 8.8 percent more EV cars last year than in 2023.) Whether the global vehicle electrification project will stay on track is, in part, a matter of policy. In the US, EV sales increased in the last quarter of the year. This may be because consumers heard about the new Trump administration’s plan to eliminate electric vehicle incentives and are taking experts’ advice to buy new cars while they can still get subsidies. What will happen in 2025 if that buying incentive disappears? Even with the higher sales numbers, the 2024 numbers seem to indicate an industry that continues to grow. “It’s a crazy transition,” Brinley, the analyst, said of the shift to electric vehicles. But he is confident: “We will see more adoption,” he said.
