- EV giant Tesla sold an incredible 1.79 million new vehicles last year
- It’s a big number, but it’s also down approximately 1.1% year-over-year, the first drop in 12 years
- The slump in demand comes partly from the States—sales in China were up 8.8%
As time began to run out on the 2024 calendar, Tesla mounted a mighty push for extra sales. In Canada alone, referral bonuses doubled on certain Tesla products, and finance rates sank to 0% on others. Meanwhile, other markets even saw the carrot of free Supercharging being dangled in front of potential buyers.
But it was all for naught — at least in year-over-year (YoY) comparative terms. By the time the clock flipped into 2025, Tesla was behind the eight-ball in terms of deliveries compared to one year prior. In fact, numbers supplied today by the analytics firm Global Data suggests Tesla sales were off by 1.1% on a YoY basis. This, despite that year-end scramble that saw fourth-quarter global deliveries rise by 2.3% compared to the same time-frame one year ago. For the entire year, Tesla is estimated to have found new homes for 1.79 million of its vehicles.
Those two paragraphs and the clickable headline, of course, are intentionally incendiary. Why? Call it a reality check for insufferable Tesla stans who will gloss over every single fault of the brand, to say nothing of its CEO cozying up to a newly elected American government. No matter what side of the aisle from which you preach, it is dangerous for the head of a car company – especially one seeking to unleash hordes of self-driving vehicles on our roads – to have a direct influence on the levers of power.
And, if you’re wondering, Tesla’s sales in China rose by 8.8% to record highs last year, finding more than 657,000 buyers, according to Reuters. That’s a third of its global market, so you do the math on how far demand fell in North America for cars so closely associated with Elon Musk and his spending of a quarter-billion bucks to get Donald Trump back into the White House.
EVs are a hot-button topic right now, and plenty of digital ink will be spilled about why Tesla sales dropped in 2024, but it’s no secret many EV drivers tend to lean left politically, and may be turned off by Musk’s recent dive to the right. Also, save for the Cybertruck, the Tesla catalog is getting a bit long in the tooth, with the newest mainstream model dating back to 2020.
As for overall demand for EVs, it is estimated there will be about a 7.5% growth in that segment for 2024 compared to last year, when sales grew by nearly 50%. Increasing by half each year is unsustainable, and anyone (including clueless legacy automakers) who thought it would continue apace had a rude awakening. Still, don’t believe anyone who says demand for EVs is cratering, either.
For comparison purposes, Chinese EV juggernaut BYD is said to have shifted 1.77 million cars globally in 2024 without any sales in North America. At home, Ford moved almost 100,000 EVs, just a fraction of its total 2.08 million vehicles sold.
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