BEV adoption in North America will take ‘longer than thought’

Patrick Manzi, chief economist at NADA told delegates at the recent Finished Vehicle Logistics North America 2024 conference that while BEVs have been gaining more market share in sales in recent years, full-scale adoption won’t happen anytime soon in the region.

“Powertrain-wise, pretty much every month ICE’s dominance gets chipped away,” Manzi said. “Hybrids, BEVs and plug-in hybrids are gaining more share each month now. Over the past few years it has been BEV, we’ve seen BEV come in with big gains year-over-year, and that has really slowed down in recent months.”

From April 2023 to April 2024 year-to-date (YTD), BEVs’ market share rose from 6.9% to 7%, just a tenth of a percentage point. Hybrids and plug-in hybrids have seen big gains though.

“Part of what we’re seeing in NADA and what we’re hearing from our dealers is that these hybrids and plug-in hybrids are a bridge to cross the chasm to fullscale BEV adoption,” said Manzi. “We’re going to get there, it’s going to happen, it’s just going to take a lot longer than anybody thought. In fact, you can see that BEVs’ market share has fallen a little bit compared to its 2023 share, but in terms of raw sales we’re up about 3-5% any given month so far this year for BEVs. Consumers really do see the value proposition in a hybrid.”

In terms of OEM market share, GM is still on top (16%), with Toyota coming in second (15.3%). “GM has been on top probably my whole life,” Manzi said. “Toyota did take the crown in 2021 and the reason that happened was that the chip shortage affected different OEMs at different times, so there were opportunities for many of the smaller, mid-pack competitors to come in and gain some market share. This is probably what the distribution is going to look like for the rest of the year.”

Tesla doesn’t use dealers, but has grown its market share to be about 4% of the market, just below Subaru (4.1%) and a little bit above Volkswagen (3.8%).