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.
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.
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-vehicles
If you are in Norway you are 20 times as likely to see an EV compared to if you are in Poland.
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.