A quarter of US shoppers strongly consider an EV. Sales share is 5.6%

Two numbers from the American electric car market this summer refuse to sit in the same sentence comfortably. About a quarter of US car shoppers now tell J.D. Power they are strongly considering an electric vehicle. Electric vehicles are about 5.6 per cent of what actually gets sold.

Tyson Jominy, who runs data and analytics at J.D. Power, put the first number to Recurrent chief executive Scott Case on the company's EV Insider series, published on 27 August. Consideration has climbed roughly four percentage points in a year, from the low twenties. “So things are moving quickly once again back toward EV,” Jominy said. “We're boomeranging here.”

He was equally direct about what that gap implies. “It shows significant upside if we're only capturing about a quarter of the quarter who are, you know, raise their hand and say, yeah, I would strongly consider an EV,” he said. “That means that there still is something that we're not doing right, whether it's the product, whether it's at the sales point, whether it's in the marketing.”

Cox Automotive's EV Market Monitor for July, published on 17 August by industry insights director Stephanie Valdez Streaty, counted an estimated 77,266 new electric vehicles sold. That is up 3.2 per cent on June and down 41.5 per cent on July 2025 — a year-ago figure inflated by everyone rushing to buy before the federal $7,500 credit expired on 30 September. Days' supply fell to 80, and the gap between electric and combustion inventory narrowed from nine days to four.

The concentration is severe. Tesla sold 42,435 of those cars, roughly 55 per cent of the segment, and the Model Y alone accounted for about 37 per cent of every new EV sold in the United States in July — more volume than any other manufacturer's entire electric range. Hyundai posted the strongest month-on-month gain among high-volume brands at 36 per cent. Used electric sales rose 7.9 per cent on June and 10.1 per cent year on year, to 36,810.

So: month-on-month improvement, a brutal year-on-year comparison, and one model carrying more than a third of the market. Whether that adds up to a recovery depends heavily on which line of the spreadsheet you start from.

Researchers at the UC Davis Electric Vehicle Research Center have argued the more interesting question is not whether the market fell but who moved. Their analysis of the first-quarter collapse — California's EV share down to 13.7 per cent of new registrations from 21 per cent in 2025, national sales down 27 per cent year on year — puts the demand hit from losing the tax credit at around 15 per cent, well short of the drop that actually happened.

“Markets do not crash,” the UC Davis write-up says. “Supply and demand shift.” The rest of the shortfall, on that reading, is manufacturers walking away: roughly $53 billion in combined EV write-downs across the Detroit three, the F-150 Lightning killed, the Ram EV cancelled, GM's next-generation full-size electric trucks and SUVs delayed indefinitely, ID.4 production ending in Chattanooga. The distinction is not academic. If buyers left, the market stays flat until something brings them back. If sellers left, it recovers whenever the rules that justified the investment return.

Jominy's dealer-transaction data points the same way from a different angle. Loyalty among people who already own an electric car runs, he said, “upwards of almost 80 per cent”. Very few of them go back.

The finding Jominy said he could not stop talking about came out of J.D. Power's Power Information Network, which pulls deal-level records straight from dealer management systems rather than asking anyone what they intend to do. Electric sales are falling almost everywhere in the country. They are not falling in Texas.

“EV sales are growing like crazy in Texas right now,” he said, driven particularly by premium brands, with Dallas and Houston joining Austin as serious electric markets. The wider South was roughly flat year on year while the rest of the country slid. He offered no single explanation — in-migration from California and New York does not cover it — beyond noting that Southern buyers do not carry the cold-weather range worries that shape the conversation further north.

Utah State University's ASPIRE research centre, summarising the second quarter in its August market pulse, put North American electric sales down about 20 per cent year to date while global sales reached 9.6 million vehicles in the first half, up 7 per cent. European registrations rose 31 per cent year on year in June, with France, Denmark, Spain and Portugal all setting monthly records. BloombergNEF expects more than 27 per cent of cars sold worldwide this year to be electric. China is running near 64 per cent domestically.

The American market is the outlier, and what is holding its recovery back is more mundane than ideology. Price. Jominy's survey work found Gen Z and younger millennial shoppers naming affordability as the barrier far more insistently than boomers, who tend to talk about ease of ownership instead. Post-credit transaction prices went up, and the shoppers most likely to say yes to an EV are the ones least able to absorb that.

Which is why he kept circling back to one product. The 2026 Nissan Leaf — the last nameplate still standing from the class of 2016, now that Tesla has retired the Model S and Model X — offers around 300 miles of range starting under $30,000.

“It's the MSRP that starts with a 2 and a range that starts with a 3,” Jominy said. “If you can control the price and get the range, you've got a winner.”

A quarter of American shoppers say they strongly consider an EV. In July, EVs accounted for 5.6 per cent of total new-vehicle sales. Jominy's evidence points to price and the sales process as barriers, while the UC Davis analysis adds shrinking supply to the explanation.