The EV’s moment may have finally arrived in the US.
Registrations for battery-powered cars, SUVs and trucks climbed by 60 percent through the first months of 2022, reports Car and Driver. Even more impressively, this has occurred while sales are slumping across the rest of the auto industry.
Registrations of EVs reached 158,689 in the US through the first quarter of 2022, according to a new study from credit reporting company Experian. The jump in sales comes at a time when overall automobile sales are down 18 percent. Because of this, the EV share of the automobile market has now reached 4.6 percent, a new high in the US.
2022 F-150 Lightning Pro Ford
Unsurprisingly, the manufacturer leading the way in EV registrations is Tesla. Elon Musk’s brand doesn’t release sales numbers, but Experian calculates that 113,882 of its vehicles have been registered through the first three months of the year. That means that nearly 72 percent of EVs sold in the US are made by the brand, which is actually an increase compared to last year.
The boom in EV sales and registrations isn’t just helping Tesla, though. Kia saw registrations rise by over 80 percent (to 8,450), Ford by 91 percent (7,407) and Hyundai by 300 percent (6,964), according to Car and Driver. All have released new EVs over the past year with more, like Ford’s much anticipated F-150 Lightning, to come this year and beyond.
Of course, EVs the still have a long way to go to catch up to their combustion engine counterparts—especially when compared to other countries. A 4.6 percent market share (Cox Automotive puts that number even higher at 5.2 percent) may be the new high watermark for EVs in America, but that figure is dwarfed by the 86 percent of sales that EVs make up in Norway, as one example. Still, with the monstrous GMC Hummer EV now on dealership lots—and the F-150 Lightning and even a battery-powered Chevrolet Corvette on the way—that gap is bound to shrink in the years to come.
