All-Electric Vehicle Sales Are Up 66 Percent Despite Overall Drop in Car Sales: Report

Likely insufferable person driving a white Polestar 2 with bikes on top of it down a gravel road.

People are still buying the hell out of EVs, despite overall car sales being down.Photo: Polestar

Electric cars are getting more and more common every day, especially if you live in or around a major metropolitan area. Of course, they still represent just a small fraction of the total cars on the road, but that could be changing sooner than we thought if the sales data reported by Cox Automotive on Wednesday is any indicator.

See, while overall car sales for the first quarter of 2022 were down by over 20 percent, fully battery electric vehicles were up by 12.9 percent. That’s wild, considering the silicon shortage and concerns about the economy that might make the process of finding and actually buying an EV no mean feat. But wait, as they say, there’s more.

Electric vehicle sales are up by 66.4 percent over Q1 of 2021. That’s an insane difference, even accounting for the pandemic and its effect on people’s car-buying habits. That kind of difference bodes well for the EV industry as a whole and for consumers.

Why for consumers? Because the more EVs that get sold, the more EVs will get made, which, if conventional economic thought applies, means they’ll get cheaper. Cheaper EVs mean more people will likely buy them, and then it’s a short hop, skip and jump to a world where electric vehicles hit price parity with their internal combustion-powered counterparts.

Does this mean that you, fearless car shopper, should buy an EV right now? I don’t know; I’m not your dad. I don’t know your life. But, I can say that evidence continues to point to electric vehicles being the future of transportation, so they won’t be going away anytime soon.