Following my slightly premature highlighting of Tesla crushing the electric car competition, here’s my full electric car sales report for December and 2015 as a whole.
There’s not a whole lot more to add. However, aside from Tesla having a stellar month and year, BMW also stood out as a shining example of electric car sales growth.
The BMW i3 was the third-best-selling electric car in the US in December (up 40% compared to a year prior), and 4th for the year as a whole (up 81% compared to a year prior). The BMW i8, meanwhile, outsold all but 5 electric cars in December despite it’s $136,000 and up price tag!! With 656 sales, it was up 315% over December 2014. For the year as a whole, it still landed a respectable #11.
A new arrival, the BMW X5 xDrive 40e also fared quite well. With 607 sales in December, it accounted for 5% of the electric car market. Not a bad start, and surely helped a little bit by the Tesla Model X’s long production delay. I’m curious to see how sales develop in the coming year — will they rise much higher, stay around the same, or drop down a bit?
In the end, for 2015 as a whole, the Tesla Model S accounted for a whopping 23% of the electric car market, the Nissan LEAF accounted for 15%, the Chevy Volt accounted for 13%, and the BMW i3 accounted for 9%. The Ford Fusion Energi (8%) and Ford C-Max Energi (7%) together accounted for 15% of the market. Together, Tesla (23%), GM (16%), Ford (16%), Nissan (15%), and BMW (12%) dominate the US electric car sales market (82% combined). Whether or not Volkswagen, Audi, Volvo, Hyundai, or others will get serious and challenge the top spots this year, we’ll have to wait and see, but the story has been pretty straightforward for the past ~1.5 years.
Here are the charts and table for more info:
Not really reasonable to call the BMW i8 an electric car when its range is about 15 miles. This is less than 10% of the Tesla so there is no comparison.