Tesla cars made up vast majority of EV registrations in US last year

If it wasn’t already clear Tesla has the US electric vehicle market locked down, the latest data from an Automotive News/Experian partnership released Sunday should underscore the notion. Of all the EVs registered in the US in 2020, Tesla vehicles made up 79% of them. That’s not a typo: seventy-nine percent. That leaves just 21% to carve up for the numerous other automakers and highlights an immense challenge for legacy automakers to unseat Tesla’s cache with EVs.

In total, Americans registered 200,691 Tesla cars in 2020 — a 16% increase from 2019, according to the data. The automaker’s four models currently on sale also each found a slot to fill out the top five EVs last year. The only non-Tesla is the Chevrolet Bolt EV, which was the third-placed EV on the list with 19,664 registered. The Model 3 was No. 1 with 95,135 registered, followed by the Model Y with 71,344. That makes the Bolt EV a very, very distant third place.

In fourth sits the Model X (19,652) and the Model S comes in fifth (14,430). Behind the corral of Teslas and the lone Chevy are an assortment of EVs, including the Nissan Leaf, Audi E-Tron, Porsche Taycan, Hyundai Kona Electric and Kia Niro, all with fewer than 10,000 registered.

For automakers increasingly shifting their priorities to go all-in on battery-powered cars, there’s good news, too. Even though auto sales fell dramatically in 2020 amid the coronavirus pandemic, EVs still managed to broaden their share of sales, even if it was by just 0.4%. Registrations for EVs increased by 11% in 2020 from 2019, though in the big auto sales picture, they made up 1.8% of all cars registered, up from 1.4% in 2019.