Europe EV Sales BEVs Jump 50% & Reach 26% Market Share
cleantechnica.com
cleantechnica.com
At best, it’ll be a situation where the US market is segregated from the rest of the world: US auto consumers will be buying inferior vehicles from the rest of world that are more expensive to buy and own, since they will only be viable in the US market and will only be built in the US, Canada, and Mexico.
At worst, the US is setting itself for horrendous energy policy issues moving forward. Sure, the US produces a lot of gas and oil and will for a long time, but any sort of price shock will be leaving the US and its car-dependent economy destabilized while Europe and Asia power forward with an ever-decreasing dependence on oil and gas. The US’ endless energy wars will continue to serve as incredibly expensive endeavors that other countries don’t even need to engage in.
Just look at the number of nuclear power plant projects in progress in China. Comparatively few people in China depend on oil to get to work and travel long distances, and the amount that do is plummeting.
It already charges in 20-30 min at Tesla chargers and has a practical range of around 600 kms, so super fast charging is a bit of a straw man.
Their big downfall is they lack an advertising department willing to spend $1B on pro-electric propaganda to debunk all the Trump/big oil propaganda. IMO EVs have addressed all the main product concerns, and the last ones are buyer stupidity.
If I'm going on a long trip, I just make sure I start charging from > 50% the previous day, and I'm good. It's trivial to manage the state of charge when you have a charger at home and a planned trip coming up.
The average person in America drives about 37 miles a day.
EVs gain about 3-5 miles per hour on a household 120V charger.
You sleep for about 8 hours and are probably home away from work and errands for an about 12 hours.
Do the math: 3 miles per hour for 12 hours is 36 miles.
And even if you don’t keep up with your pace, the weekend can act as additional time to charge. Or if you drive more on the weekend, you can basically decide that you’re going to go to a fast charger every 2-4 weeks just like a gas car (or maybe even less frequently than a gas car).
Let’s say you drive 50 miles a day but you’re only able to charge up 35 miles per day at home. If your vehicle’s range is 250 miles that means you need to go to a fast charger every 15 days including a little room for reserve power.
Also, all of this is even less of a concern if you live in a country with 240V power.
The fact that I can do 100km with 3 €, even with our expensive electricity, is icing on the cake.
If you don't have a charger at home, though, an EV is a chore, I agree.
I also don't have a fast electric charger at my house, and yet I still also own an EV.
And even with that, very few places seems to be willing to build competing charging stations that will undercut those prices. The only way to actually save money is to have a charging stations at home or at work where you pay the normal (through still very high) cost that the utility company take.
But I actually do most of my charging as trickle-charging from a regular home outlet, despite it being slow; it adds about 40 miles of range per 24 hours of charging. My car sits in my driveway most of the time so that's actually sufficient most of the time.
Good thing I only need to fast charge a few times a year, on long trips (or consecutive trips away from home/a plug).
I agree with you about just stopping to charge for a few minutes along the way if I need more, though.
If Telsa were still innovating, they'd have rounded out their offerings to fill in the gaps that are now getting filled with other brands in the world outside the USA.
Tesla sells more vehicles than Mazda, and both brands are in a similar semi-premium non-luxury segment. Compare lineups between these brands.
How does Mazda have 3.5 SUVs and Tesla only has 1.5? (The .5 is counting the CX-70 and CX-90, and the Y and YL as essentially the same car)
Mazda is able to offer a sedan and hatchback variant of the 3.
They also have a city car in Europe, the Mazda 2. Absolutely nothing in the segment from Tesla.
And of course, Mazda has the legendary MX-5, which chugs along selling a very respectable quantity while the Tesla Roadster remains MIA.
Where is Tesla’s lineup? For being a being China-focused brand, where is their premium/luxury van? For being a US-focused brand, where is their family 3-row Grand Highlander killer? How did they botch a truck made in Texas?
Isn’t that all that matters ?
Where the ball is vs. where the ball is heading.
Musk (and TSLA shareholders keeping the price where it is) is arguing the ball is heading to robotics and AI; I think we're at least a decade from the robotics+AI vision he's trying to sell the dream of, and in the meantime he may lose the car business by everyone else out-innovating on vehicles with regards to stuff he's either lost interest in, or lost the trust of the best designers an engineers to hire to work on for him.
It’s not like Tesla runs a Japanese-style corporation with tons of product breadth…they don’t even have product breadth in their primary business.
If they couldn’t maintain market leader status in their primary area of expertise, what makes them likely to gain market leader status in a tangentially related field?
It seems like an incredibly random product opportunity, and it’s highly suspicious of being a stock pump mechanism.
> CATL also says the battery retains more than 90% of its original capacity after 1,000 ultra-fast charging cycles
https://www.evdances.com/blogs/news/hongqi-unveils-ultra-fas...
All you need to do is an honest look at how many days a year you drive 500+ miles per day. People can't seem to do that and fixate on the ultra long distance road trip that they might make once per year. And neglecting to realize that they stop for bathroom breaks and food and so the actual time you're simply waiting for charging is, at best, maybe 20-30 minutes per year.
99% of the time you would be plugging your car into the charger at your house. And it just charges overnight.
I guess it's different if people have no way to charge their car at home or have it plugged in overnight. But in that case a lot of times they can pick up charge while at work, or whole doing grocery shopping, etc.
Even for road trips there are different ways to approach it. Some people just want to get to their destination fast and don’t mind eating at wherever the charger is. Others take road trips differently and would want to eat at the best restaurant at each local town they pass through, which may not be where chargers are. And if there are many passengers the bathroom breaks are usually not aligned with when the car needs charging. The perfect scenario of getting food or bathroom breaks exactly when the car needs charging could be a rare scenario.
Even if your use case is "only take the car on 500 mile road trips and I don't want to stop for 15 minutes", you should be able to understand how exceedingly rate that is.
Think about your phone. Do you plan how you'll charge that quickly? Do you know where you can get a quick charge at a local mall while ordering coffee? Nope, it just gets charged over night when you're asleep, no problem.
With respect to your phone analogy, if I weren’t able to charge my phone at home or at work, I would definitely be interested in being able to fast-charge it at some conveniently located business
If you have a wall plug at home, an EV is basically always full. I'm shopping for a flat and one of my non-negotiable requirements is a parking spot with a plug. The one I'm looking at now even has a three-phase plug, which is a nice extra, but not really necessary.
The products aren’t “done.” They’re stagnant.
Where is their proper 3 row SUV, not a hacked together half-effort like the YL?
Where is their passenger premium van product for China?
Remember that this is a company with a huge factory and presence in China, and they were the first mover in that market, but they’re getting eaten alive by competitors.
Meanwhile, in Europe, the Volkswagen Group is outselling Tesla in EVs. The #1 EV in Europe is a Skoda, and on top of that Tesla doesn’t make a European style city car. Small sedans like the Model 3 are really not popular in Europe, you need a hatch.
And I haven’t even brought up the Cybertruck selling a couple hundred thousand units below company expectations, that is kind of a low blow cherry on top.
Apparently not so much, the restyle and a consolidated assistance and charging network make people prefer it over the homemade products lately, which keep innovating but you essentially need to re-learn from scratch every time (my original source article is in Italian - https://www.vaielettrico.it/troppa-scelta-poca-fiducia-i-cin... ; this is the closest I could find in English: https://paultan.org/2026/01/21/tesla-model-y-again-best-sell... )
> They’re stagnant.
To some degree, I agree. Esp. on the 800V part which could make charges a bit faster. But I think they're overall stagnant: they pushed a ton of boundaries in the first 10-15y because they had to make something people could buy and use, but now that innovation push has diminished greatly: the cars work for most people, and the range is acceptable and not such a big inconvenience that pushes people to other brands. So no sense in going axial flux motors (that everyone is experimenting with) or bigger battery capacities, or even 48V + Ethernet instead of 12V + CANbus (the CyberTruck has these, but I don't think it has trickled down to the other models).
> Meanwhile, in Europe, the Volkswagen Group is outselling Tesla in EVs. The #1 EV in Europe is a Skoda, and on top of that Tesla doesn’t make a European style city car. Small sedans like the Model 3 are really not popular in Europe, you need a hatch.
Yes, but the Model Y remains the single unique best-selling car. VW needs to put together a few vehicle models to get to the same numbers. And I think the reason is the same as with China: Tesla has always been EV only, and built assistance and infrastructure for it, while VW doesn't have a very clear direction and makes products which are perhaps slightly mechanically superior, but feel inferior on the software and UX side. A car with hardware equivalent to Tesla (which now has 2 trims and 2 battery picks) costs anyway more than the base Tesla (you need to add a few optionals to the VWs). What Tesla is lacking in Europe are smaller models with ~450-500km range.
BYD is likely moving a few hundred thousand more pure BEVs than Tesla each year, although it’s hard to gauge the exact mix given that they have hybrids and ICE vehicles.
I am not saying Tesla is in doomed in China or anything like that, they’re a top brand. But they should be definitively the #1 brand and their product lineup is short 2-3 models.
However, a nice dull car company with Tesla's sales would be worth 1-10% of Tesla's market cap, and I don't know what happens if Musk is e.g. sentenced to prison time, or even just stripped of US citizenship and deported, or even just the SEC gets their teeth back and bans him from serving as CEO of publicly traded companies like they almost did for the "$420" tweet. That bubble popping may reveal financial shenanigans whose unwinding cause a fire-sale that ends the company.
This is why I'd say Tesla's stagnating. They don't have brands to fill in those gaps, other car makers don't feel the need to say "best selling model", they just go for the total sales.
Similar thing happened to Apple with the original iMac: it was the (world's? USAs?) "best selling model" of personal computer. The entire company was still struggling and had like 5% of the total personal computer market, but they had only one model of consumer-focused personal computer and everyone else had loads of models.
I think Apple are still only around 10% of the personal computer market today, their money is from branching out to phones and so on.
Huh? In June the best selling EV in China is Model Y across all price ranges. Model 3 a tie for the 8th with many ~$10k entry level higher up. If you only rank among ~$40k, then it's a tie for the 4th.
This is very very far from faltering so badly.
Toyota didn’t start outselling GM until 2021. Honda and Hyundai still sell fewer vehicles than Ford and GM in the US.
Tesla still sells a lot of product and does relatively well for itself, but proportionally to its prior status in the market, it has fallen far.
Tesla’s small model range makes their numbers look better because they can say that their two volume models sell very well. In reality, BYD is shipping hundreds of thousands more BEVs than Tesla and Volkswagen Group is outselling Tesla in Europe.
Another way to put this is to say that it’s really impressive that the Model Y sells number similar to the RAV4 and CRV in the United States. It’s far less impressive when you consider the fact that Toyota has nine SUVs in their lineup.
When you have a small model lineup like Tesla has it skews things a bit. Let's say you have a buyer who really likes the Tesla brand and wants a subcompact city car, or maybe they want a 3-row SUV. Let's say about 40% of them say "you know what, I like Telsa so much, I'll compromise and get a Model 3 even though it's bigger than what I want" or they say "I'll get the Model YS even though it's not a full large sized 3-row SUV I want."
This scenario now pads the numbers for those models and makes it look like the Model Y/YS/3 are incredibly successful, even though they didn't quite fit their buyer demographic and those buyers might not be back as repeat buyers as soon as there's another option available on the market that works better for them.
This hypothetical leaves 60% of potential buyers defecting to other brands right away. They'll say, "Tesla doesn't make what I want, I'll go buy an EV9 or a Renault 5 instead, even though I prefer Tesla."
A lot of those buyers are buyers that Tesla could have had, but they don't have because their model lineup is too thin.
This is exactly why most large volume brands have some kind of badge engineering and sub-brands going on. Toyota doesn't lose any buyers that want a Camry but want it to be more luxurious, those buyers are directed to Lexus. Hyundai doesn't lose any buyers that want more aggressive/sporty/modern styling, those buyers go with a Kia.
Tesla sells far too many cars to not have any of this yet, but they've just under-expanded, IMO.
That's worth accounting for - I'm likely not alone.
BYD were breathing down their neck after a few years.
Protectionism makes industries weak and uncompetitive, ultimately hurting the economy of the nation doing the protectionism. The proper strategy to become competitive is to provide a small amount of protectionism so that the industry does not die, but to ruthlessly cull underperforming companies so that only the strongest survive. The continual bailouts of companies, keeping old and incompetent executives at the helm, has destroyed the US car industry.
Capitalism requires killing the underperforming companies. Until we let that happen, or at a minimum cull leadership and boards, nothing will get better. The rot is at the top.
That's where we are now. Here's BYD's main model lineup.[1] Ford's CEO brought a few into the US, paying the insane tariffs, and has his executives driving them to see what the rest of the world is doing.
The oil and gas industry survives and dictates policy not because its very influential- its simply the economic backbone of the empire via the petrodollar. https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Petrodollar
And the people life in de-concentrated large scale villages instead of cities, because the empire is in no need to tax economic activities such as moving large distances via driving a car efficiently. So the government, cursed with the ressource curse of beeing able to sell security outside of the us- pacifies the population with economic presents, which are often just frozzen in time retro trinkets.
One can not derive any political and economic lessons from such a strange diorama.
There is no incentive
BYD are taking over.
And it’s very likely that If the orange idiot keeps threatening 50% tariffs on Canadian goods Ike he is now every two weeks then Canada will just drop the quota and open the floodgates.
This has happened over and over, really. See also: Hyundai and Kia.
1. Tesla Model Y: 27 621
2. Volkswagen ID.4: 8 802
3. Toyota bZ4X: 7 274
4. Volkswagen ID.7: 6 976
5. Tesla Model 3: 6 608
6. Volkswagen ID.3: 5 572
7. Volvo EX40: 5 270
8. Volvo EX30(xc): 5 206
9. Skoda Enyaq: 4 836
10. Nissan Ariya: 4 565
Norway is a smallish country (you can fit 24 Norway's in Australia - so less range anxiety), whose government pushed the transition to EV's hard. Australia has the worlds most competitive new car market and with one of the least restrictive emissions controls on ICE engines.
It's not that surprising that Norway's government engineered transition to EV's was successful. In Australia EV's became around the same price as ICE vehicles in the last 12 months, and it feels like we've hit a market driven tipping point.
If battery developments take their predicted path, with pricing dropping about 10% per years and range per unit weight doubling, it's difficult to see how it isn't all over bar the shouting - for USA car manufacturing.
Trump sealed the USA's fate, when his changes EV policies lead to $51B in direct write downs. I don't see how you can recover from that.
(P)HEV - (plugin) hybrid electric vehicle
ICEV - internal combustion engine vehicle
Effectively no modern car "looks cute" or good. They are all stupid SUVs for soccer moms brainwashed by car marketing.
The Renault 5 is kinda cute.
I'm drowning in theoretical options and I'm left with the feeling that everything seems to be possible in theory, but I won't find a solution that works in practice. There are just too many protocols and regulations at play.
Would have loved to wait another year until the dust around these topics have settled a bit, but the old car broke too early :( (sorry for the rant)
Not saying any particular number is wrong, just wishing it was a clearer way of writing.
I looked at other posts by this author and they're all sales by month charts, which are totally devoid of context as they lack historic trend data. So you have to read words to find that out, and its a slog.
I have firsthand experience starting a news company and dealing with this...
What is the solution for this, from the management POV?
Maybe having a data-viz person as part of the editorial process?
Note: I do not want this to be true. Other companies please copy what Tesla has done with both of these. You’ve had years to do this and failed.
This isn't accurate - they charge slower and Plug & Charge is common in many vehicles now, including with the Tesla network - whereas Teslas cannot Plug & Charge on other networks.
Tesla cannot Plug & Charge on any non-Tesla network. Whereas other vehicles can Plug & Charge on Tesla networks. Therefor, the advantage is to everyone else.
Teslas have poor charging curves and are not cutting edge for charging performance. They are average.
Ironically - if it was faster I’d need to go move it in the middle of the bathroom/food stop.
In the UK most EVs use the standard CCS2 plug.
That said while I appreciate their design focus their software still feels not quite as polished as Tesla’s.
Also, while FSD has limitations, I have found it provides enormous utility for older people, and Rivian doesn’t yet have a competing product for FSD.
The R2 base model is not as premium as the higher models but the Model Y base model is really deeply stripped down including some really barebones stuff like removing liner material from the frunk and removing some of the exterior LED lights.
So really, the price gap is $40k or more until R2s are actually delivered.
You are incorrect when you say that Rivian isn’t delivering R2s. Factually untrue. This claim of a $40k+ price gap is absurd.
Only about 12% of Tesla owners have the FSD subscription or purchase according to articles I’ve found on the subject.
This lines up well with Gallup polling that states that less than 20% of Americans even have a desire to own a driverless car in the future: https://news.gallup.com/poll/708683/americans-driverless-car...
Being the cheapest game in town isn’t always the path to success. The RAV4 is at least $5k more in street price than an equivalently specced out Mitsubishi Outlander and Toyota sells a whole lot more RAV4s than Mitsubishis.
In my opinion, the base trim Model Y is probably not being purchased by a lot of non-fleet-style customers. I think that model is a price anchor like a 256GB MacBook Air. Your Uber driver will buy one but someone buying a new car paying the EV price premium rather than a used car really doesn’t want a stripped down experience.
There is no honest way to manufacture a $40k price gap.
As far as charging, I think that was the case even as recently as ~2 years ago. But today, the charging game is pretty decent for CCS cars. You can even charge at Tesla stations using an adapter.
The difference between them are subtle but massive. To the point, I will say a good amount of Tesla owners complains about build quality are fully on point.
On the other hand, those same people will be pleasantly surprised if they try out ~2025 models.
I own both. To an external eye, latest Y just has lightbar and more space. But only when you use it, you notice the QoL improvements. I rarely drive the M3 even though it is the more "fun" car...
As for turn signal stalk, it is present in Y. and newer 3 as far as I know.
“Best software” is subjective as well. Many car owners really don’t care for their software and just want to bypass the infotainment system for CarPlay and Android Auto.
10% to 70%: 5 minutes
And as for software, on the infotainment side, AA/CP are great (but not available on Tesla), and people often like having _some_ physical controls, which goes against Musk's aggressive cost-cutting.
If by software you mean FSD (Supervised), I think essentially every major auto lane-keeping + adaptive cruise covers the key use case where FSD is useful: highway slogs.
For anybody who lives outside of the USA, the Chinese EVs are the obvious answer -- they've surpassed Tesla on essentially every dimension.
For people who live inside the USA the math is different, since the government is actively interfering with the free market to protect a critical donor.
They have a very reliable charging network with excellent coverage. You just plug your car in and it charges. No fiddling with the charger or apps.
> And as for software, on the infotainment side, AA/CP are great (but not available on Tesla)
The infotainment is good enough where you don't need AA/CP but that's a very subjective detail. The software also extends outside of your car because you can do a lot from the Tesla phone app. It's your car key, control/schedule/monitor charging, lets you control climate remotely, use GPS to find your car, dashcam, etc... all are standard with a Tesla but unavailable or locked behind a subscription elsewhere.
> If by software you mean FSD (Supervised), I think essentially every major auto lane-keeping + adaptive cruise covers the key use case where FSD is useful: highway slogs.
Agree but FSD (Supervised) is actually getting better over time. You 100% need the latest model/hardware car to see those improvements though. Still needs supervision but far less than you may have seen before.
On self-driving: if you want true autonomy, where you can relax and do something else entirely while you drive, the answers are Waymo, Apollo Go, and to a lesser extent: rideshare.
Every other system requires that you sit in the driver's seat, pay attention, and be ready to handle exceptions. Which means that ongoing improvements don't actually buy you much of anything, because having to handle an exception every 50 miles isn't a better experience than having to handle one very 5 miles.
why?
That's what I thought too but after trying FSD on HW4 for two months I really think they are almost there. HW3 was really bad but I didn't need to intervene once with HW4. I think their biggest hurdle will be more of a legal or insurance one when they need to shift liability to actually stop saying it needs supervision.
> the answers are Waymo, Apollo Go
Both of which are supervised too, but remotely, and not constantly. There's no reason why Tesla can't do the same - they probably do for Robotaxis now - as soon as the exception rate is low enough, why not?
FSD is unmatched. Auto lane-keeping and adaptive cruise control don't provide the reactivity that FSD does even for straight highway driving.
Most objective reviews comparing a Model Y and Chinese EVs are far less conclusive than you propose.
I'm setting aside that charging off of public EVs is relatively rare anyway... but your premise is flawed.
Afaik it’s the same in US, isn’t it? Just with the complication that there’s no government mandated standard, but NACS seems to becoming the de facto standard? So a benefit to Tesla for older models I suppose?
Did I actually buy a Tesla? No. But this has entered as part of my "which EV" conundrum.
Now considering that Yaris is one of the most popular cars (if not the most popular), the increase in sales is not surprising
https://www.best-selling-cars.com/europe/2025-full-year-euro...
here in Czechia Toyota is fairly popular, but I wouldn't say Yaris is the best selling car model, the top 10 best selling models is absolutely dominated by Skoda, only 3 spots in top 10 made other brands - 6th place Hyundai i30, 9th Toyota Corolla and 10th Hyundai Tucson
https://www.cebia.cz/novinky/trh-s-automobily/top-30-nejprod...
btw. my mother has the latest Yaris Cross as well and it's horrible car for the money, the rear seats are unusable for anyone taller with very little space, trunk is very small, usable really only for 2 people, for the money it cost I would much rather bought Hyundai i30 Combi or Dacia Jogger
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0: https://www.acea.auto/pc-registrations/new-car-registrations-5-7-in-h1-2026-battery-electric-20-7-market-share/If gas were 2 to 4 times as expensive, as it is in much of Europe, there would be a lot more demand for electric cars.
It doesn't help that we exclude all of the new BEVs from China, which are considerably less expensive.
The only way to make our auto makers change is to "make" them change by competition. Consumers want this change, why else do we buy so many Japanese cars? (Beside the fact they are superior.)
EVs are in high demand in the EU because laws have been passed in every country and ICE are getting banned in many cities.
Chinese EVs did flood the EU not because people did want to buy chinese EVs: people in the EU were totally fine buying ICE cars (german, french, italian, spanish, ...) but the EU pushed for both legislation and incentives greatly favoring EVs over ICE cars.
It's IMO a good thing to push people to buy EVs. But the EU being the EU, of course they did it incredibly stupidly and managed to inflict great harm to EU car manufacturers and basically hand the keys of the kingdom to both US and chinese EVs (because in the EU we're led by treacherous dumbasses).
People can nitpick as much as they want as to what makes a great car: I do personally have a car from 1988 (38 and a half years old now) that, unlike chinese EVs, doesn't spy on me and that I could still use as a daily (I regularly use it to go, say, pick my kid at school). It's a gas-guzzler and it's not as safe as a modern car, but we definitely could have a talk about the actual CO2 of that car over its lifetime (which is far from done yet) compared to the CO2 over the lifetime of a brand new EV (and if we talk about chinese EVs brought by boat to the EU, we can have a talk too about coal usage in China).
The article could be summed as: "Yay, the EU caused great harm to its car industry and is now buying chinese EVs by the cargo load!".
I take we should... Applaud that great success!?
Amsterdam's current plan says they'll eliminate ICE from their city centre by 2030. I have no idea why you'd drive in central Amsterdam anyway, seems like a terrible idea - but if you insist on doing it after 2030 you'll need an electric vehicle. But that's not today is it? Things change.
Yes, Reduce, Re-use, Re-cycle is in that order for a reason. It's good that you're continuing to use this old car while it meets your needs. A dense European city may well not want you there because the trade-off sucks too bad for them.
And while China does use proportionally more coal than Europe today and likely for the foreseeable future, like European leadership Xi can do the math. The problem I have with Trump is that I'm not sure he even understands the problem, obviously if he did understand he'd lie about it, but I'm just not sure he's even lying, I think he might well be too stupid to understand.
Can you give us an example of a city in the EU banning ICEs? (Not that I'm complaining, it's nice to have quiet cities with clean air, I just don't know about those)
> But the EU being the EU
The EU being the EU did the responsible thing and gave car manufacturers clear rules and a long timeline (over 15 years) to apply them; they also gave them the escape hatch of hybrids and PHEVs that will only be closed using the OBFCM in the following years. But the manufacturers chased fast money and refused to innovate and lower prices because they still made lots of money in export markets. Then China changed the rules, it became very hard to make money with ICE cars there, and then the mfgs complain about the EU and want to be saved again.
> Chinese EVs did flood the EU
There are tariffs on Chinese EVs, depending on the manufacturer, ranging from 27% (BYD) to 45% (SAIC). If the customers still buy a Chinese EV and not an european EV, then the European EV manufacturer does something wrong.