Tesla slipped behind VW in European EV sales last year

Electric vehicle sales increased by 20% in 2025, even as overall sales grew 2.2%.

See full article...

 

[MagStone]

If the US removed all the various subsidies for oil and gas, we'd see similar gains in EV market share. Over there, a liter of gas is around €1.70, or around $6.80 per gallon. How many Americans would be still wanting to buy a new gas car if they knew it'd be $7 per gallon to fill up on a bad day? Even California which has notoriously bad prices is still only $4.50.

It's easy to have range anxiety when we have such cheap gas that driving across the entire continent is a reasonable thing to do, but they have inverse range anxiety. A road trip over there is as expensive as a flight. Cars are used for local trips, so EVs make perfect sense.

Edit: with a 36 gallon tank, it'd cost $245 to fill up an F-150 at $6.80 a gallon. Currently at the nationwide average of $2.75 it costs $100 to fill.

My ID4 has a 82 kWh battery. At $.16 per kWh it costs me $13.12 to fill from empty. F-150s get 22mpg, so ~800 miles per fill. I get 300 miles, so I'd need to fill up around 2.6 times, or $34 compared to their $100 for the equivalent range, or $34 compared to $245 at Europe prices.

Double edit: I wasn't taking exchange range into account. €1.70 is actually closer to $2, there are 3.785 liters in a gallon, so it's actually $7.60 a gallon, not $6.80. That means it'd be $272.50 to fill up an F-150.

Here in Maine electricity is expensive, pretty much par for (subsidized, like you said) gasoline in terms of dollar-per-gallon if you compare a gas F150 to the Lightning. But you can’t build a refinery in your yard, while you can build solar.
Memories are short in the US, the last huge gas price spike had people desperately trading their Suburbans and Silverados for Geos.

 

[Redwood1]

Canada just brought back $5,000 EV consumer subsidies and is putting $3+ billion into moving away from the US market. The big three US automakers have been downsizing Canadian auto plants , Japanese and European carmakers have stayed course. Canada is dropping the 100% tariff on EV’s to allow for import of 50,000 to start for Chinese EV’s -it put tariffs in place at US request to protect the integrated US/Canada/Mexico auto industry. after the knife in the back from Trump to the US automakersit makes no sense to deprive Canadian consumers of better cheaper Chinese EV’s. Canada will no doubt allow BYD and others to build plants in Canada. Canadas auto industry since 60’s had an ‘auto pact’ requiring us carmakers to make one car in Canada for everyone sold here before the Free trade agreement in 80’s got rid of it. Canada will also put 1.5 billion more into more chargers. The aim is for 75% EV’s by 2035. Canada will build a strong car EV manufacturing industry but not by kowtowing to the US and it’s climate change denialism. The US auto industry will die it’s only market will be the US soon. Hyundai is top EV seller in Canada.

 

[numerobis]

Yeah, it's like of linguistically interesting that the Indosphere thinks in terms of hundreds while the West thinks in terms of thousands. Although it's not set in stone: you sometimes hear exceptions, e.g. English terms like "eleven hundred" instead of "one thousand one hundred".

Meanwhile in my native language I party like it's four-twenties-and-nineteen.

 

[numerobis]

Hyundai is top EV seller in Canada

For context, Canadian sales of Teslas fell by over 90% last year. Overall EV sales also fell a lot relative to 2024 because subsidies were removed: $5k nationally, plus another $7k in Quebec in 2024, fell to zero in 2025.

 

[rkhalloran]

Well, you're not paying $.16/kWh on a road trip, more like 3-4x that for fast chargers.

Which corresponds to the Interstate-adjacent gas stations who typically charge above the going local rate because they assume a captive audience. Assume most people's usage is local and charging L1/L2 at home/work.

When I see Buc-ee's (US Houston TX based roadside superstore) adding long stretches of Superchargers along with the 25-30 gas pumps, I have to think maybe there's something to this whole EV push... Don't know their cost since I'm still in a traditional auto, but...

 

[Aurich]

If the US removed all the various subsidies for oil and gas, we'd see similar gains in EV market share. Over there, a liter of gas is around €1.70, or around $6.80 per gallon. How many Americans would be still wanting to buy a new gas car if they knew it'd be $7 per gallon to fill up on a bad day? Even California which has notoriously bad prices is still only $4.50.

Here in Los Angeles I see quite a lot of EVs, but still plenty of big gas trucks etc. And we're higher than that average. Especially since a lot of the vehicles you see on the road here take premium.

I really think the conversations are way too focused on range anxiety and the environment and not enough on the economic benefits when it comes to reaching people.

It would help if there were more affordable EVs though ...

 

[peterford]

Yeah, it's like of linguistically interesting that the Indosphere thinks in terms of hundreds while the West thinks in terms of thousands. Although it's not set in stone: you sometimes hear exceptions, e.g. English terms like "eleven hundred" instead of "one thousand one hundred".

sobs in crores and lakhs

 

[Sonix]

why? Mind elaborating?

It was intended to be read sarcastically, which... I failed at. Pls ignore

 

[Bravesirrobinson]

Yup, and you wasted zero time at a gas station for the 99.99% case which is the real perk that counterbalances slightly longer stops on trips.

And haven't had to smell gasoline on a monthly basis. Once you spend a while away from it, you realize how fucked up of a smell it actually is. When I have a rental car on trips I literally try to hold my breath while filling up because gasoline is so inherently toxic smelling.

Museums in the future will have gasoline for people to smell and say "can you believe we used to smell this on a regular basis and it was being burned and going into the air for people to breathe?"

 

[dio82]

Not surprising in the least. EVs have started to enter their commodity phase and everyone's reverting to brand loyalty/whatever's on the dealer lot. When Tesla was the only really next level EV on the market it's not surprising they dominated. Now virtually every brand has a mid-ish sized EV SUV with single and dual motor configurations that gets ~300mi of range. It's like the 90's were every brand had a ~2L four cylinder compact in two and four doors or the current 1.5L CUVs.

I see this as a good sign for adoption. Most folks (arsians are no most folks, at least in the autos comments) buy a car without so much as reading/watching a review so if they're showing up to the dealer and driving off in an EV I think that's indicative of a lowering of the mental barriers to ownership and that we're moving well past the early adopter phase. Being able to get a good EV, regardless of what brand you patronize, is ultimately a good thing.

In addition, do not forget that cars in general have massively decreased in importance in terms of personal identity in the EU. For Millienial and younger generations, cars have become mere tools. To be used and discarded as needed. Cars as a status symbol is rapidly dying out.

 

[FranzJoseph]

Electricity in my region is about 0.45$ per kW so, while overall the savings with Watts vs ICE joules still applies, most western Europeans pay substantially more to charge their cars.

Don't you have off‑peak or dynamic tariffs in your region? I live in Europe and pay around €0.10‑0.15/kWh at night. €0.6 is the ultra‑fast charging rate at public chargers in my city*, without being a customer of the electricity provider who also runs most of the public charging stations and provides electricity to around 30% of homes here. Of course most people here don't live in standalone homes, but historic apartment buildings without garages, but that's still pretty viable at around €0.45/kWh just using the public charging stations, of which there are often one or two per a city block and growing. Last year the whole neighbourhood's pavements got dug up so the infrastructure could be upgraded for them.

* ETA that public UFC cost can be around 10‑50% higher on highway petrol stations (captive audience) and for roaming abroad, obviously.

Or are you conflating any monthly grid charges with the per‑kWh costs? Because that's not entirely fair, as the grid charges depend a lot on your electricity plan and usage. Which isn't just the BEV, but also your water heater, computer, lighting, induction hob and possibly heating...

 

[numerobis]

In addition, do not forget that cars in general have massively decreased in importance in terms of personal identity in the EU. For Millienial and younger generations, cars have become mere tools. To be used and discarded as needed. Cars as a status symbol is rapidly dying out.

Depends on where in the EU. Western Europe, seems likely. Eastern Europe seems to value cars as status symbols.

 

[BananaBonanza]

To be fair, private passenger vehicles contribute less than 10% of global CO2 pollution.

So? They still have to get to 0, like everything else.

There are no low-hanging fruits left for CO2 reduction. Every single difficult step will get us only fractions of a percent. We should be doing every possible measure in parallel.

We won’t, of course. I understand the incentives are stacked against it. But there is no reasonable argument not to, and especially not "someone else should do it first".

 

[grommit!]

For anyone interested in doing their own TCO calculations for an EV versus a petrol car, I found this calculator useful. The "Lifetime TCO" tab allows you to factor in your running costs (with the exception of insurance) in addition to the fuel/energy costs.

 

[Redwood1]

I live in a province with highest electricity costs around 17 cents/kw and it would cost me around 50 cents electricity to go 50 km versus around $5 gas (approx $6.30/USgallon). So it’s a no brainer to switch to EV’s for cost (gas and maintenance) A surprisingly high percentage of L2 chargers here are free (I think around 20-30%) as well so I can go couple blocks to a community free charger and pay nothing. That’s why when we abandon the US monster gas trucks and SUV model and allow consumers to buy modern EVs while incentivizing automakers to make them it’s a win win (environment and evonomically) The money saved on purchase price doesn’t disappear but goes back into economy instead of flowing to US automakers. Two in three in Europe next year is great news for the planet.

 

[jkav13]

"Volkswagen. Last year, its EVs outsold those from Tesla for the first time as sales of VW’s electric offering grew by 56 percent, while Tesla’s shrank by 27 percent"

Smart move then, that Elon seems to be redirecting any funding that might have been used for new vehicle design or updating existing designs into personal compensation. Pick the carcass clean before the company implodes and leaves the stockholders with nothing more than the fond memories of insanely inflated PE ratios.

 

[TreeCatKnight]

Many of us have zero interest in "transitioning" to EVs.

Speak for yourself, and the every smaller minority.

As someone who enjoys driving, used to regularly auto cross, mainly drove manual transmission v8s for a couple decades...

I freaking love EVs and I'm not going back to gas. Gas cars are now antiques and no longer need to be regularly driven: they can be relegated to a once in a while cruise down memory lane. Electric drivetrains are just that good.

 

[jddaigle]

What was the total number of EVs sold? The article gives totals for mild hybrids, hybrids, and plain old internal combustion vehicles but not for EVs.

edit Adding up all the numbers in the second-to-last paragraph, looks like total non-EVs was about 10.4 million. If EVs were ~20% of total sales that means ~2.6 million EVs sold, I think? Still seems odd not to put that number in the article.

 

[ArbitCommentary]

EVs are cool and help reduce road emissions, but from the point of going from point A to point B, I’m not seeing much of an improvement between being stuck in gas-powered rush hour traffic or EV-powered rush hour traffic.

Luckily we don't have to rely on what you can see but can fall back on scientific studies on the subject.

For every 200 new zero-emissions vehicles registered in a California neighborhood between 2019 and 2023, NO₂ levels dropped by 1.1% from
Zero-emissions vehicle adoption and satellite-measured NO2 air pollution in California, USA, from 2019 to 2023: a longitudinal observational study
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanplh/article/PIIS2542-5196(25)00257-8/fulltext

 

[lukem]

Volvo, owned by China’s Geely, has had pretty terrible infotainment software. The EX30 in particular has been a disaster.

As a car, we like the EX30 - great form factor for us (small lifted hatch / CUV), quick, moss yellow colour, and not buying our 2nd EV from a brand that diverged from our values. We've had it for over a year.

The software lets it down. There haven't been as many OTA updates as I'd hoped to either enable functionality that was "coming soon" or to fix bugs. Phone as key is flaky. The ADAS whines too much, except the "you're speeding" sound is too subtle.

The base UI is Google Automotive and it's too "click through menu" happy, even maps. Feels like a tablet UI not tweaked for use in a moving car where you're only using 1 hand. It has CarPlay but it'd flaky to connect and laggy too.

I don't know if it's all Volvo's fault (feels like they've abandoned the development), or some of my complaints are inherit to Google Automative generally.

(As much as I'm loathe to admit it, the UI in our 5 yo Tesla is much better except for the Bluetooth only audio to my phone, and it's had some nice feature updates including enabling matrix headlights a couple of years ago).

 

[ggalt]

Many of us have zero interest in "transitioning" to EVs.

You are engaging in the standard fallacy of "everyone thinks like me." Not everyone does and you may be in the minority.

 

[thrillgore]

I'm just waiting for SpaceX to acquire Tesla

 

[RZetopan]

Many of us have zero interest in "transitioning" to EVs.

Bye, bye. You won't be missed.

 

[Litazia]

Many of us have zero interest in "transitioning" to EVs.

The EV that was marked for Biffstar? Give it here. Gimme gimme gimme.

 

[LDA 6502]

It'll have to be part of reducing emissions. It's that simple.

What you are in reality saying is that you have zero interest in the well-being of the next generation. Which, to be fair, is an opinion.

Take another step back. It is part of reducing international conflict. How many wars or "special operations" has the US participated in to secure access to cheap oil? How much did drought (made worse by climate change) factor into the crop failures and resulting food shortages that helped trigger Arab Spring and mass migration?

 

[Fabhun]

In Germany there are just 124 Model S and 105 Model X in whole 2025. Tesla is on place 131 of 136. I think they can close the new Location soon. Or they build Some Robots lol

 

[Retrosal]

If the US removed all the various subsidies for oil and gas, we'd see similar gains in EV market share. Over there, a liter of gas is around €1.70, or around $6.80 per gallon. How many Americans would be still wanting to buy a new gas car if they knew it'd be $7 per gallon to fill up on a bad day? Even California which has notoriously bad prices is still only $4.50.

It's easy to have range anxiety when we have such cheap gas that driving across the entire continent is a reasonable thing to do, but they have inverse range anxiety. A road trip over there is as expensive as a flight. Cars are used for local trips, so EVs make perfect sense.

Edit: with a 36 gallon tank, it'd cost $245 to fill up an F-150 at $6.80 a gallon. Currently at the nationwide average of $2.75 it costs $100 to fill.

My ID4 has a 82 kWh battery. At $.16 per kWh it costs me $13.12 to fill from empty. F-150s get 22mpg, so ~800 miles per fill. I get 300 miles, so I'd need to fill up around 2.6 times, or $34 compared to their $100 for the equivalent range, or $34 compared to $245 at Europe prices.

Double edit: I wasn't taking exchange range into account. €1.70 is actually closer to $2, there are 3.785 liters in a gallon, so it's actually $7.60 a gallon, not $6.80. That means it'd be $272.50 to fill up an F-150.

Not sure where you're checking prices but in one of the more expensive areas of Europe (though definitely not the most expensive) gas was $1.55/liter (USD, not EUR) here the other day. That's for European 95 octane (lowest you can get here) which is comparable to American 91 premium.

No comments on the rest of your math however!

 

[android_alpaca]

Yeah, it's like of linguistically interesting that the Indosphere thinks in terms of hundreds while the West thinks in terms of thousands. Although it's not set in stone: you sometimes hear exceptions, e.g. English terms like "eleven hundred" instead of "one thousand one hundred".

I believe East Asian countries (Chinese, Japan, Korea) historical grouped by 10,000 and I've definitely had Chinese speakers confuse to the two or say the equivalent "one hundred, ten thousands" to describe a million.

 

[sword_9mm]

And haven't had to smell gasoline on a monthly basis. Once you spend a while away from it, you realize how fucked up of a smell it actually is. When I have a rental car on trips I literally try to hold my breath while filling up because gasoline is so inherently toxic smelling.

Museums in the future will have gasoline for people to smell and say "can you believe we used to smell this on a regular basis and it was being burned and going into the air for people to breathe?"

I like the smell of gas.

I dig 2 cycles as well.

No I'm not going to huff it but I don't have an issue.

Different strokes and all.

 

[msawzall]

Sounds like Elon needs another shareholder bonus!

 

[LordEOD]

Many of us have zero interest in "transitioning" to EVs.

Now Biff! Don't con me!

Ahh. Biff.
What a character..
Always trying to get away with something..

 

[android_alpaca]

EVs are cool and help reduce road emissions, but from the point of going from point A to point B, I’m not seeing much of an improvement between being stuck in gas-powered rush hour traffic or EV-powered rush hour traffic.

For several years, EVs were allowed into HOV lanes, so it used to actually be an improvement. As EV have become mainstream, that benefit has largely been phased out AFAIK.

Aside from that, traffic is traffic regardless of the propulsion method, but you are reducing road emissions even more. A car burns 0.25-0.5 gal of gas per hour while idle - while an EV doesn't waste energy if the car isn't moving. Say you spend 30 minutes of idle time each way on your commute. That is 1 hour or say 0.5 gal of gas a day. Over 250 days (5 days a week, 50 weeks a year) that is 125 gals of gas wasted stuck in traffic. At $3 gal, in addition to the regular cost benefits of EV, you've also saved roughly $375 is wasted energy in rush hour traffic.

 

[msawzall]

I dig 2 cycles as well.

Different strokes and all.

I see what you did there.

 

[Klinn]

I expect he'll merge Tesla in as well, so he can have his everything app -- rockets and cars and robots and ketamine all in one.

Don't forget the CSAM!

 

[RZetopan]

A software company that makes cars was outsold by a car company.

Are you calling Tesla a “software” company, when their software division lost a lot of money, while their car division actually made money??

 

[alansh42]

I love my Kia EV6. Only fault is I paid too much, but 2022 was one of the worst times to buy a car in recent history. I can really time it.

I charge at home, take it on road trips. Y'know, all the stuff that's impossible.

 

[Darc Sentor]

Got the wife an VW Id.3 which has been brilliant to drive. We can charge at .07 pence per kWh. So super cheap to run.

Getting an electric Ev(iX3) for myself too. Was looking at a petrol to replace my suv but after driving the Id.3 my car had to be electric too.

Some negative vibes about electric EV’s in some circles over here, when I explain their monthly petrol cost is more than the cost of our Id.3 lease plus and charging, you can see the head scratching going on. Everyone likes spending less.

 

[afidel]

And haven't had to smell gasoline on a monthly basis. Once you spend a while away from it, you realize how fucked up of a smell it actually is. When I have a rental car on trips I literally try to hold my breath while filling up because gasoline is so inherently toxic smelling.

Museums in the future will have gasoline for people to smell and say "can you believe we used to smell this on a regular basis and it was being burned and going into the air for people to breathe?"

Nah, museums would never be allowed to expose the public to so many aromatic ring compounds.