September 8, 2025 - EV Sales Remain Strong Ahead of Incentive Demise

This is the Telemetry Transportation Daily for September 8, 2025, and I'm Sam Abuelsamid, Vice President of Market Research for Telemetry.  

As expected, US sales of electric vehicles have remained robust in the third quarter in anticipation of the end of federal clean vehicle credits at the end of September.  In addition to the opportunity to take advantage of the tax incentives of up to $7,500 on new vehicles and $4,000 on used EVs, consumers are also finding significant incentives from manufacturers that were having difficulty selling their EVs earlier in the year. 

However, not every automaker is benefitting equally from the EV sales surge. The overall market for electric vehicles grew 24% in July and 14% in August. However, Tesla sales only increased 3.1% in August according to Cox Automotive. This comes despite the wide availability of the updated Model Y, Tesla's best selling nameplate. As a result, Tesla's share of the US EV market dropped to its lowest level since 2017 when it was just beginning to ramp up production of the Model 3, its first mainstream model.  Cox estimates that Tesla's share of US EV sales dropped to 38% in August from 48% in the first half of the year. As recently as 2020, Tesla sold more than 80% of the EVs in the US. 

The CyberTruck which the company had pinned its growth hopes on has been a flop with only 14,200 sales through the first eight months of the year. In 2017, the last time Tesla's share was below 40%, the only real competition it had were the Nissan Leaf and Chevrolet Bolt along with small volumes of compliance EVs like the VW e-Golf and Fiat 500e. Now there are dozens of models to choose from at a variety of price points and form factors and a new third-generation Leaf is about to debut with a 300 mile range and starting price just under $30,000.  GM is now second behind Tesla in EV sales with more than 14% of the US market and it has a new generation Bolt arriving at the end of the year that will likely be priced similarly to the Leaf. 

Thanks for listening.