Despite Everything, Tesla Still Dominates EV Sales in California

Tesla may have moved its headquarters from California to Texas, Elon Musk may have done all kinds of things that go against what most Californians support, there may be strongly improving competition in the EV market, and Tesla sales may be declining in the Golden State, but Tesla still dominates the California EV market.

In this last article in my series of pieces on California EV sales, we’re looking at how auto brands rank in terms of EV (pure electric vehicle) sales. The most striking fact of the matter, especially when visualized, is that Tesla is still in a league of its own in California. No other pure EV brand comes close, and no legacy automakers look serious at all when you compare their EV sales with Tesla’s. I’ll get to a few key reasons why this is further down in the article, but let’s first look at the charts and numbers.

Well, that just says it all, right? The chart is not right. That is not normal. Tesla is still too far of an outlier in this market. It’s not a monopoly, but it does have monopoly vibes, doesn’t it?

Because Tesla is so far ahead of the rest, it’s hard to compare the bars/results of the other brands, so I created a second chart on the same thing but excluding Tesla.

Looking at this second chart, it is a bit striking how it’s almost like a staircase (or upside down staircase). As far as the best of the rest, Ford comes out on top, but BMW is right on its tail despite being a much smaller automaker overall. Then you’ve got three more mass-market “value” brands — Hyundai, Chevrolet, and Honda — before we get to top BMW competitor Mercedes. I guess there is a bit of a big step between Honda and Mercedes, and between Mercedes and the rest, so I’ll stop there. Though, I could note that I find the ZEV sales of most brands to be fairly disappointing still. ZEV mandate or not, I hope we see auto brands continue to sell more and more electric vehicles in the state.

How about we look at the Q1 2025 numbers compared to Q1 2024, though?

It’s great to see strong EV sales growth across the brands at the top of this chart. Honda finally arriving is a good sign too. I wonder if its EV/Prologue sales will increase considerably in the coming months or if Honda’s just going to maintain the level it’s been at with that. Aside from that large increase from zero, Chevrolet and Ford had the largest volume increases year over year, so kudos to them. Unfortunately, Mercedes and Audi had significant sales drops for some reason. Growing competition?

Okay, to end, here’s that same chart but with Tesla added back in. Aside from Tesla’s dramatic lead (which we already highlighted but I’ll discuss more below, the most striking thing here is how much Tesla sales declined. That’s a big drop, and it counters much of the growth we see from other brands.

We’ve discussed this many times here on CleanTechnica, but before getting back to Tesla’s dominance, let’s look at a bullet list of probable key reasons Tesla sales declined so much:

• Elon Musk’s extreme politicking
• Tesla Model Y refresh and production line being paused and updated for that
• Growing competition
• Tesla leaving California for rival Texas
• Tesla lineup getting old/stale.

But, hey, any other auto brand would kill for Tesla’s EV sales. Here are my thoughts on why Tesla still sells so many more EVs than other brands:

• Momentum — the company has a big reputation and momentum now as the leading EV brand, and that pulls in customers every day who finally decide they’re ready to go electric and then hear and trust Tesla has the top offerings. I would bet many consumers don’t even consider or look at EVs from other brands.
• For that matter, Tesla does still offer great products with a lot of value value for the money. There are comparable options now, but many people simply prefer what Tesla is selling.
• Production capacity — you can’t sell what you don’t produce. Tesla has built up massive production capacity in the US, so it’s trying to sell as many cars as it can produce. Other brands haven’t made the leap up to anything close to that production capacity — because they simply couldn’t generate enough demand or because they’re too afraid to try. If another auto brand could produce as many EVs as Tesla overnight, I assume they’d do a better job marketing their cars, lowering prices, and moving product.
• Tesla is still a California company in many regards, and there are probably many customers who feel good buying from it because of that. After all, the people producing Tesla vehicles in Fremont are their fellow Golden State residents and probably support the same sports teams.

Any other thoughts on these numbers, and especially the trends of the top EV sellers?