EV sales are still climbing fast in the EU and the UK. In December, fully electric cars outsold gas cars for the first time.
Sales of fully electric cars surpassed those of petrol vehicles in the European Union for the first time in December, even as policymakers proposed to loosen emissions regulations, data from the auto industry group ACEA showed on Tuesday.
Battery-electric registrations, a proxy for sales, also overtook those of petrol cars in the broader European market, which includes Britain and Norway, as car sales in the continent logged a sixth month of year-on-year growth.
Here are the actual numbers which show hybrids are still the most popular with EVs coming in second and gas cars just behind that.
Last month, customers in the European Union, the United Kingdom and the European Free Trade Association countries (Iceland, Liechtenstein, Norway and Switzerland) registered 308,955 new EVs. In the EU alone, 217,898 EVs were registered. In both cases, figures increased by a little over 50% compared to 2024.
By comparison, 380,921 hybrid cars were registered in the EU, EFTA and UK in December 2025, while 324,799 found new homes in the European Union alone…
Meanwhile, gas cars saw 216,492 registrations in the EU alone, a 19.2 decrease from 2024. In the EU, EFTA and UK, 254,449 gas-powered vehicles were registered, a 17.7% decrease year-over-year.
That’s a clear win in December in terms of the actual numbers of cars registered but over the full year gas cars still had an edge. In 2025, 3.5 million gas cars were registered compared to 2.6 million EVs. But the real story is the trend line. EVs ended the year up nearly 30% compared to 2024 while gas cars were down about 19%.
Here in the US growth has slowed but not as much as you might think. EV sales peaked in the 3rd quarter as buyers tried to get in before incentives went away and then slumped in the 4th quarter. Still the overall numbers were nearly even with last year.
Thanks in part to record volume in Q3, total EV sales last year came in just shy of 2024’s 1.30 million. In fact, 2025 was the second-best year on record for EV sales in the U.S., and the EV share of total market sales was a strong 7.8%, down from 8.1% a year earlier, according to Kelley Blue Book estimates…
Tesla remains the EV market leader, by far, even with sales declining for the second year after peaking in 2023. Nearly half of all EVs sold in the U.S. come from Tesla, mostly the popular Model 3 and Model Y. Tesla sales fell to 589,000 in 2025, down 7% from 2024, or 44,000 units.
Tesla sales may have been hurt by the end of incentives but the real problem for Tesla was politics. I’ve written about this before but the Washington Post has a story up today titled “Tesla bet big on Elon Musk. His politics continue to haunt it.”
Tesla’s continued struggles in the automotive space demonstrate the breadth of the backlash Musk’s political involvement ignited last year and its potential to trigger lasting brand damage. A Yale University study last year estimated Musk’s political activity cost Tesla sales of more than 1 million vehicles…
For years, customers bought into Tesla not only for its sleek and sporty electric vehicles, but also for what they represented with its mission “to accelerate the world’s transition to sustainable energy.”
But after Musk joined the Trump administration last year, Tesla storefronts became the site of political protest, vandalism and violence.
The fierce blowback showed up in earnings reports: Tesla reported a decrease in revenue, profits and vehicle deliveries in the first half of 2025, the period aligning with Musk’s term in the Trump administration. In particular, it recorded an abysmal first quarter of 2025 — a 71 percent decline in its profits when compared with the same period a year prior.
In short, Tesla’s struggles are about progressives who refuse to buy his cars because they hate Musk almost as much as they hate Trump. Progressives are never shy about expressing their anger and we saw that play out with people vandalizing and even burning Tesla cars and properties.
Most of that died down once Musk left government service. He just as quickly stopped being the main character in the papers everyday and progressives moved on to being outraged over Trump and then over ICE. But even though he’s not the focus of the daily 2-minute hate anymore, those people will never buy a Tesla unless and until they find a new CEO who sides with them on every issue. And since that’s not going to happen, Tesla is stuck.
The other thing slowing down adoption in the US is that Trump has put big tariffs on Chinese EVs which, as a result, do not exist in the US market. Those cheaper options give European buyers a chance to try out an EV at a lower price level.
Finally, one of the things Americans are most likely to complain about with EVs is that lack of chargers (or working chargers). But that problem is still getting solved despite the lack of growth in sales.
For years, EV drivers in America had plenty of complaints about fast-charging their electric cars. Many chargers were broken or glitchy; at the same time, drivers had to juggle several different smartphone apps and find chargers that matched the particular charging port on their car.
But now, even as EV sales are slumping, deployment of fast chargers is booming. According to a report released Wednesday by the charging data company Paren, the fast-charging network increased more than 30 percent in 2025, with over 18,000 new ports installed. (Like a gas station with multiple pumps, each charging station can have multiple ports for cars to plug in.) The country now has over 13,200 public fast-charging stations dotting the country — with more than 3,300 of those stations installed just last year.
The infrastructure keeps getting built and with most manufacturers adopting the Tesla charging port, the whole system will get a lot easier. Over time that should bring in some new US buyers.
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