Summary
- Volkswagen beat Tesla in European EV sales across the first three months of 2025, data shows.
- Registrations for VW EVs are up more than 150%, while Tesla lost huge ground.
- However, the Model Y and Model 3 remain Europe’s top two most-registered EVs.
Somewhat amazed they’ve rebounded this much given the VW emission scandal some years back. Guess it wasn’t that brand-damaging after all.
In fact it’s even more crazy if you consider VW group:
Tesla Total 53,237
VW Group:
VW 65,679
Audi 34,739
Skoda 26,578
Cupra (SEAT) 18,878
Porsche 9,929VW Group total 155,803
ratio 155803/53237 = 2.93
VW group has almost 3 times higher sales than Tesal!!https://www.carscoops.com/2025/04/vw-finally-beats-tesla-outselling-it-in-q1-ev-sales-in-europe/
PS:
Stellantis:
Peugeot 24,397
Citroen 16,367
Opel 13,612
FIAT 6,825
Stellantis Total 61,201Stellantis manages to clearly beat Tesla too!!
Edit: I forgot FIAT in the Stellantis numbers.
Watch out for BYD from China.
Freaking hell Lemmy has a huge hard on for BYD.
I’ve seen some videos on them. They look pretty nice but I worry about how they hold up and the build quality, as I would any relatively unestablished brand.
Because they present amazing value (at Chinese prices) and really advanced battery technology.
Well, they do make pretty nice cars… I have a dolphin, and it is great value for the money :)
Chinese electric cars are great value.
If you don’t consider the impact that sending yet more manufacturing jobs to China will have in the long run and the fact that they have great value because what China is doing is called dumping and the goal is for them to have a monopoly so they can eventually increase prices without having any competitors.
Right now they’re more expensive in Europe due to tariffs (not the Trump ones), however there were some talks about the EU reducing or removing the tariff on them in which case I can see demand exploding because of their price.
AFAIK the Tariff in EU on BYD BEV is 13% (The tariffs vary based on how much state funding the brand has received), but if they have hybrids, they can sell them without tariff. The tariffs are only on BEV.
I dont think their sales would explode if the tariffs were removed. Many people are still cautious about Chinese cars, and some simply don’t want a car made in China.
It’s more expensive. Like the byd Tang is like 150% the price of a vw id4
We have them, but people don’t seem to be too eager to buy.
I live in Germany and I would love to buy a chinese EV but I just can’t find any place that sells them. You just can’t really order cars online from China like you can with other products.
I’ve seen some BYD here in Germany. No clue where they were bought though.
And that ugly Ora whatever cat. I’ve seen that as well 😵💫
Weird here in Denmark they have a map of dealers on their homepage?
They have dealers pretty well distributred throughout the country.https://www.bydauto.dk/find-forhandler
Same in Germany:
https://www.byd.com/de/find-storeThanks, didn’t know this existed
Send them an email.
Tesla was the top EV seller in Europe? I’m surprised.
I’m guessing the top electric-only vehicle excluding hybrids and plug-in hybrids? In the two or three European countries I visit often you definitely see more of those, at least anecdotally. But maybe London City techbros and finance bros outweight everybody else? That seems plausible.
I have to say, I find all of these reports and investor analyses on Tesla’s PR woes way too optimistic about how well they’ll recover if and when Musk “steps away from the government”. I really don’t think that genie is going back in the bottle, guys.
Tesla was the top EV seller in Europe? I’m surprised.
Not only that, A few years ago, Tesla was as big as all the rest combined!
I’m guessing the top electric-only vehicle excluding hybrids and plug-in hybrids?
That’s how it should be, but in most cases it’s not. 100% battery is called BEV now. But BEV sales have far surpassed plugin Hybrid (PHEV).
IMO a Hybrid plugin or not is NOT electric just as it is NOT an ICE, it’s a hybrid of the 2! But Hybrids are generally counted as EV.
Huh. And even with that Tesla was dominating the space? That’s a shocker.
Besides telling me that every other manufacturer was massively screwing up the big thing that would seem to indicate is that penetration was extremely uneven. I came into the thread wanting to see a chart, I’m coming out of it wanting to see a map.
Tesla had a HUGE lead when they started to sell the model S in 2012, and many places there were significant tax incentives to buy one. Back then every competitor to Tesla had really poor range, and they were generally very small city cars. The Tesla model S was a giant leap forward for electric cars (BEV).
The hybrids were never very popular, it was basically a misstep by traditional makers, probably an attempt to leverage their know how on making ICE cars, and use that to make a “semi electric”. The popularity they achieved was probably mostly because many places they enjoyed similar tax incentives to “real” electric cars (BEV).
Now many brands have caught up with Tesla and a popular in Europe, like Hyundai/KIA, VW group, BMW, Mercedes, Stelantis, Renault, Volvo, Polestar, and even Chinese cars like BYD, Xpeng and MG.So there is lots of competition today, but IMO the first good alternative for a reasonable price here was the Hyundai Kona. I think it’s only about 5 years ago the other makers began to catch up to Tesla.
And now they are beginning to surpass Tesla in different ways. This was made easier by Tesla because they have failed to develop to improve their cars. Tesla model Y is 5 years old now, and they only came out with a facelift version this year!
For comparison European makers have a development cycle of 3 years, and China is extremely fast with 1-2 years!See, again what I’m missing from that statement is location.
Tesla had a lead where? You couldn’t buy a Tesla at all where I lived at the time. Visiting North America everybody wanted one and I knew multiple people who did have one, but there were even more European EVs there than in Europe. First BMW i series I saw was in Canada. Last one, too.
So when did all of this reach Europe? Where in Europe? How fast did it grow in some parts versus others? Was it inconsistently fast but Tesla was ahead everywhere consistently or was the Tesla growth desynched from EV growth in general?
People are feeding me very reductive one-size-fits-all views of the EV market as a global thing in this thread while also giving me very good reason to suspect the EV market isn’t globally uniform (or even uniform across Europe, for that matter) at the same time, and no resources to tell which is which beyond anecdotal observation.
This thread is about EU!
Mostly my perspective on the technology side is global, but this is general for Europe, but where developments start from the north and the south and east are a bit behind, I’m located in Denmark.
There are American brands I don’t mention, because they are specific to USA only like Rivian and Lucid. There are also Japanese brands I don’t mention because although Nissan started early, they have failed a lot, and is only now catching up, Toyota and Honda has been very slow too, but have new models out this year that are good.The Tesla (technological) lead in 2012 with the model S was global. Obviously the lead in sales was only for the countries where it was sold. Like USA, Canada, Scandinavia as the earliest markets. I think it was first in 2018 Tesla started in China.
You couldn’t buy a Tesla at all where I lived at the time.
There are still places like India where you can’t buy a Tesla.
But as I stated above, the center of all of this is the OP post that is about EV sales in EU.
Here’s a chart with the EV sales by country in EU:
https://www.eea.europa.eu/en/analysis/indicators/new-registrations-of-electric-vehiclesIf you are in Norway you are 20 times as likely to see an EV compared to if you are in Poland.
the EV market isn’t globally uniform
Obviously it isn’t, an EV is expensive, and it requires electric grid infrastructure to use. Also tax incentives are very different.
We can’t tell you how things are compared to where you are, when you don’t tell us.
Finally data! Fig 2 in your link tells the entire story, I believe.
For the record, my point is about the EU. The idea I’m trying to impress is that respondents to this thread seem to look at EV positioning and penetration globally, but if you’re just looking at the EU that will be very different than North America, and the perspective people keep repeating seems very, very, VERY North American to me.
No wonder that’s the case, because yeah, the differences are huge, as you say. Not just for overall penetration, raging from 90% to 5% of all cars registered in your chart. Also in the types of EVs. Plug-in hybrid goes from 10-ish percent of new EVs in Norway to 75%-ish of all EVs in Romania. That’s a big swing (and some egg on grumpy "plug-in-hybrids-are-no-longer-a-concern guy up the thread).
The spread is also… consistently inconsistent? Northern countries seem to definitely take the lead, but the rest is strange. Why is Portugal so much higher than Spain? Why is Romania plug-in hybrid heaven? Why is there such a sudden break of almost 10 % between the top and the bottom half of the table?
And that’s even before we try to break it down by brand. I bet the Tesla dominance thing is also weirdly spread. Would love to know if there is a correlation with how those two numbers shake out one way or the other.
In any case, thanks for looking that up and being, astonishingly, the first person to actually check their assumptions in this whole thread.
In any case, thanks
You are welcome I was a bit worried my reply was a bit long.
For the record, my point is about the EU.
Great then we are on the same level.
Why is Romania plug-in hybrid heaven?
I don’t know the situation in Romania, but I bet it’s because they have tax benefits similar to BEV, but a hybrid is cheaper to make, because the most expensive part in a BEV is the battery, and a plugin can use a (very) small battery, and Romania is not a rich country by EU standards. Also the plugin hybrid is very flexible, and can be used just like a normal ICE car, when there are no chargers around. But there may also be other reasons, like AFAIK Romania is among the countries that have the highest degree of house owners in EU, and charging a Hybrid at home is cheap and may for many be enough for daily use, and if the price of a hybrid and ICE is similar, there are some savings there for the hybrid.
Overall I have to say there are more Hybrids sold in EU than I expected?Why is Portugal so much higher than Spain?
IDK for sure, but most likely because they have better EV tax credits in Portugal than in Spain.
I bet the Tesla dominance thing is also weirdly spread.
Absolutely, the drop in Tesla sales in Europe varies widely, Germany is the most dramatic 62% for Q1, but Italy it was only down 6,8% and UK it was UP! 6%.
Just like these percentage changes vary wildly, I bet the marketshare does too.
https://electrek.co/2025/04/09/tesla-sales-are-down-in-every-single-european-country-except-the-uk-heres-why/So in EU there are huge regional differences, just like there is in USA, where California is by far the biggest market.
And China is way more differentiated, and so it is globally.
Don’t know about “London City techbros and finance bros” but in Sweden and Norway we prefer pure EV over hybrids.
I never really understood the deal about hybrids anyway. To me, it just seems like the worst of both worlds. One of the coolest things about EVs is that you can just charge it at home but wirth a hybrid you need to charge it in addition to also driving to the gas station to fill up the tank. The battery is also way smaller, so the electric engine doesn’t take you very far anyway. And whatever engine you’re using, you always have to carry the weight of the other system. And since you have both, doesn’t that mean that there’s way more that can break too?
And that’s just talking about plug-in hybrids, the ones that generate electricity using a combustion engine just seem like ICE vehicles with extra steps.
A plug-in hybrid is cool, to me, in that I can charge it and use it as pure EV for my daily commutes, but if I forget/am unable to charge it it don’t have to worry for a second. And I don’t need to worry about the range on my 500km roundtrip to my cabin (full charge + full tank equals ~1100km range on my Prius).
Also, fuel consumption is relatively low, so whenever I do have to burn fuel I’m not breaking the bank.
Plug-in hybrids alleviate range anxiety.
So the hybrid in the name refers to the combined function as a vehicle and a psychological crutch? Would that make those aggressive looking pickup trucks hybrids as well?
Fair. That’s the problem of reporting about Europe or even just the EU as a unit. Big place, lots of cultural differences, lots of size differences in economies and populations across those cultures.
I’d prefer a Swedish salary over my hungarian, while we are at it
/s, obviously
I understand, and really hope you will be able to get rid of Orban so that the economic conditions in Hungary can get (much) closer to the EU mean.
Gosh, i have been rooting for that since i can vote, and that is more than 20 years now
Tesla understood that Batteries are expensive so let’s make a fancy car so customer are OK to pay for the batteries main brand either didn’t have an EV or tried to make a cheap electric car, cutting down the autonomy (e.g. the Renault Zoe). Add the whole We’re a progressive company, so we give Tesla rather than diesel mercedes to our executive and Tesla was the main player on the niche market for a decade.
However, as electric car stop being a Niche, every brand has now several electrical models, from a affordable urban one_ to a comfortable and fancy one, If you can afford a Mercedes, Tesla is still an option (but then there is Musk personality not helping) but if you ain’t rich, you can go to Volkswagen or Renault depending on how broke you are
You’re telling me a cool story about how the Tesla business model is supposed to work. My question is why I’ve seen a grand total of one Tesla on the road across three countries and yet somehow it was seemingly the top EV brand.
Troed’s answer above going “Teslas and full electric EVs in general are popular in very specific regional pockets” goes much further towards answering that question, I think.
My question is why I’ve seen a grand total of one Tesla on the road across three countries and yet somehow it was seemingly the top EV brand
Could be that those three countries and/or the specific parts of them you traverse aren’t typical for all 44 countries of Europe.
Can confirm, my experience says there’s been a massive increase in Teslas on the road in my region these last ~3 years, and lately VWs (ID3, 4, Buzz) are increasing too. There’s other brands too that are also going up a little, but they’re less easily identified at a glance if you don’t know the models.
Or viceversa. Hence the point of even asking in the first place.
I flagged that my impression was anecdotal up front, but the most interesting takeaway of the way this thread ended up playing out is that people are super happy assuming everybody else’s fragmentary data or observations are anecdotal but theirs are a typical, statistically significant sample.
Bit of an unexpected way to lose faith in humanity this fine morning, but here we all are, I suppose.
Your point is purely anecdotal. I see lots of Teslas where I live, so there’s that. I also see more BEVs than PHEVs, which is also in line with sales figures.
So, to be blunt, I think your perception is skewed or wrong.
Yes, indeed it is anecdotal.
Did the sentence “In the two or three European countries I visit often you definitely see more of those, at least anecdotally” tip you off? I find that very observant.
Hybrids are not electric vehicles. They are a thing of the past to appease the „range anxiety“ crazed people.
They maybe had a justification to exist until 6 or 7 years ago.
It was always wrong to count those as true electric vehicles.
Cool.
So, anyway.
I mean, plug-in hybrids are what they are, and in Europe in particular there’s way less charging infrastructure, way more people living in apartments without the ability to set up a home charge station and way more anxiety about charging full electric EVs as a consequence, depending on the region. Hybrids are whatever, plug-in hybrids seem like a reasonable way to bridge that gap.
But I’m already entertaining this conversation way more than I want, because it’s going to lead off on a tangent and I don’t want to go on that tangent and we’re going to end up in how public transport is the real answer and there are millions of threads here to go rehash that conversation.
So anyway.
in Europe in particular there’s way less charging infrastructure
That’s the opposite of reality in many cases.
For example, Scandinavia, Germany, and the Benelux countries have better charging networks AND much shorter distances between major population centers than the US in general.
way more people living in apartments without the ability to set up a home charge station
Would have been relevant a decade ago, but now there’s public chargers at more and more parking lots and highway rest stops plus at least one major gas station chain has chargers at every station here in Denmark.
I have no doubt that conditions are even better in places like Norway and Sweden where they started adapting much earlier than we did.
way more anxiety about charging full electric EVs as a consequence, depending on the region
Bolded the only part you’ve been right about so far.
plug-in hybrids seem like a reasonable way to bridge that gap.
They were back when the battery technology and charging infrastructure wasn’t in place to support fully transitioning to EVs, but most of Europe is way ahead of you, so as a rule rather than an exception, hybrids are an unnecessary concession, Democratic Party style.
But I’m already entertaining this conversation way more than I want, because it’s going to lead off on a tangent and I don’t want to go on that tangent and we’re going to end up in how public transport is the real answer and there are millions of threads here to go rehash that conversation
TL;DR: you’re wrong and tired of trying to justify your false assumptions, so you try to preempt the logic conclusion that many have reached by implying that it’s wrong and/or or tedious.
I live in Germany and wanted to buy a new car 2 years ago. I live in the city in a rented apartment. I can’t charge at Work, and neither at home. So I would have to use only public charging stations , the nearest is almost 2km away. Plus, public charging stations are so expensive that you pay more per km than gas for a ICE car (excluding maintenance costs obviously)
I actually wanted to buy an EV, but since I can’t charge it, even though I live in a city, I couldn’t
Hey, I’ll say this, if you want to have this pointless argument with someone who isn’t me by just typing “TLDR” and making up some shit you have my wholehearted blessing. Beats having to comb through obnoxious quote blocks to nitpick the smaller fallacies, so go nuts.
Call me when it gets to the full-on name calling, that’s always the most exciting part.
“What a tweest!”
