Tesla Helps U.S. EV Market Maintain 7% Share in May Despite Diminishing Electric Vehicle Momentum

Cox Automotive reports that EV market share has continued to remain under 7%. That means over 93% of Americans chose not to buy an EV last month in May. This is despite almost all brands having very good EV offerings, federal and state EV incentives still in effect, and EV average transaction prices declining over recent months. You can read about why the EV market in America stalled out in our prior story, Why U.S. EV Adoption Is Stuck at 8% Despite More Models and Incentives. 

Those automakers who offer monthly delivery reports almost uniformly showed lower EV deliveries in May than in the same month last year. The good news is hard to find. We have no data to show that EV adoption in America is increasing. Rather, the data shows that U.S. EV market share now is about the same as in late 2022, and that it has peaked, declined, and remained at levels below the peak for many months. 

Cox Automotive Reported in its May monthly EV Market Report the following:
-EV Market share is 6.9% as of May
-EV sales were down 10.7% year over year. 
-May estimates suggest Tesla remained the market leader with 46,150 units sold, a 0.6% month-over-month increase.
-New EV deliveries did increase slightly month over month (meaning May had more than April)

Findings From the Cox Report
Cox uses estimates, and sometimes updates its estimates after more data is offered by other sources, such as automakers themselves. For those reading your first mid-quarter EV market share report, be aware that many brands like GM don’t offer delivery reports every month. Rather, they update the data only at the end of every quarter. Tesla obscures its data all the time, only offering global deliveries, not providing model-specific delivery data, and often doesn’t even mention some models, like Cybertruck, which has never been mentioned in any delivery reports unless we have missed it.

Tesla EV Deliveries Went Up In May
Cox showing that Tesla had a 1% uptick in deliveries reinforces our past conclusions and reporting that the radical left-wing protests, bumper stickers, violence, and destruction of property did not meaningfully reduce Tesla’s deliveries in the U.S. For more on this subject, check out our report It Appears As If All the Protests and Vandalism Have Done Little Harm To Tesla’s New Vehicle Deliveries in America - We Offer You the Data and Our Analysis.

Tesla remains the U.S. EV market leader, its deliveries are strong, and if Cox’s data is to be believed, deliveries in May of 25 are up a bit from May of 24, before the anti-Tesla nonsense started. The result of this uptick by Tesla is that EVs were able to maintain the 6.9% market share. Had Tesla declined or stayed static, the EV share would have been down.

Brands That Have Reported Declining EVs In May
Some brands do report their deliveries every month, and most also report deliveries by individual models. Our data below is May of 2024 vs. May of 2025. Here are some brands that reported EV deliveries and what they reported after the end of May:
- Hyundai Ioniq 5,6,9 Combined - Down 3% Despite Ioniq 9 being newly added
- Kia EV6 + EV9  - Down 80% - Only 838 Units delivered in May
- Subaru - EV deliveries declined 20% (Soltera)
- Volvo “The company's sales of electrified models – fully electric and plug-in hybrid models – accounted for 44 per cent of all cars sold during May and decreased by 20 per cent compared to the same period last year.” This Volvo report is global, not just U.S. No U.S.-specific report was available.

If we’ve missed a May delivery report from an automaker, let us know. We’ll add it to the story. We looked for GM, Toyota, Ford, Nissan, Honda, and Acura. No reports were available.

Q2 is about to end in seven business days, and the Q2 reports from all automakers who report quarterly deliveries will be available. Look to Torque news or your favorite source of direct data for EV market share, delivery by model, and analysis. We predict that EV share will remain well below last year’s peak numbers

Our U.S. EV Market Share Prediction for 2025
We predict that the U.S. EV market share will continue to decline in 2025. We articulate our reasoning in our prior story, Tell Us We Are Wrong - U.S. EV Deliveries Will Drop in 2025 and See the Lowest Market Share in Three Years - We Lay Out the Facts On EV Production and Factors Hurting EVs to Make Our Case. Much of the reason we feel EVs have started to lose market share in America is that the affordable EV models have been going away. This is despite many pro-EV publications constantly (falsely) reporting that low-cost EVs are "just around the corner."

Tell us if this reporting jives with your expectations from the content that you read. Did you expect to hear that EV deliveries were lower than the same period last year? Did you expect to hear that EV market share increased? Did you expect to hear Tesla deliveries decreased? Tell us in the comments below.

John Goreham is a long-standing member of the New England Motor Press Association and an expert vehicle tester. John completed an engineering program with a focus on electric vehicles, followed by two decades of work in high-tech, biopharma, and the automotive supply chain before becoming a news contributor. He is a member of the Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE int). In addition to his eleven years of work at Torque News, John has published thousands of articles and reviews at American news outlets. He is known for offering unfiltered opinions on vehicle topics. You can connect with John on LinkedIn and follow his work on his personal X channel or on our X channel. Please note that stories carrying John's by-line are never AI-generated, but he does employ grammar and punctuation software when proofreading and he also uses image generation tools.