- EV sales fell 27 percent year-over-year in Q1 2026 to 216,399 units.
- Tesla still dominated with more than half the market share.
- Toyota, Cadillac, Lexus, Rivian, and Lucid were rare bright spots.
It’s no secret that the electric vehicle market in the United States is cooler than in other regions. Americans are still buying EVs, just not at anything close to the pace automakers were banking on a year ago. New figures from Cox Automotive show U.S. EV sales fell 27 percent year-over-year in the first quarter of 2026, dropping to 216,399 vehicles. That sounds ugly, and it is, but there’s a catch: the collapse is slowing.
Compared to Q4 2025, EV sales were down 7.8 percent. That’s still a decline, but it’s a much smaller one than the 46 percent quarter-over-quarter plunge the market suffered at the end of last year after federal EV incentives disappeared.
Read: America’s EV Sales Fell By Nearly A Third, But Toyota Jumped 79%
EVs accounted for 5.8 percent of all new vehicles sold in Q1, exactly where they stood in Q4 2025. That’s well below the market’s 10.6 percent peak in Q3 2025, but at least the bleeding appears to have stopped. Tesla remained the elephant in the showroom. The brand sold 117,300 EVs in Q1, giving it a staggering 54.2 percent share of the entire U.S. EV market. That’s more than every other automaker combined.
As has been the case for a long while, the Model Y was the dominant force. The crossover moved 78,591 units in Q1, up 22.7 percent from a year ago, and accounted for more than one out of every three EVs sold in America. Here’s the crazier part. The Model 3 came in second despite being down almost 40 percent year over year. Tesla sold 31,672 of them. That’s how wildly popular those two cars are despite all of the aspects of ownership.
EV Brand Sales USA
Behind Tesla, the field looked dramatically smaller. Chevrolet was the second-best-selling EV brand with 13,359 sales, narrowly ahead of Hyundai at 12,662 and Rivian at 10,365. Toyota was one of the quarter’s biggest surprises. Its bZ crossover nearly doubled sales to 10,029 units, helping the brand post a 79 percent gain.
Cadillac, Lexus, Rivian, Lucid, and Toyota were among the few automakers to post year-over-year growth. Lexus was particularly impressive, with the RZ climbing 206.7 percent. Meanwhile, Ford, Volkswagen, Nissan, Audi, Acura, and Jeep all saw sales collapse by more than 85 percent. Some of the hardest hit models include the VW ID.4 (-95.6%), the Jeep Wagoneer S (-93.3%), and the Volvo XC40 (-93.1%).
For now, the U.S. EV market appears to have entered a new phase. Government incentives are gone, automakers are slashing production, and success increasingly depends on something far less exciting than hype: affordable products and realistic pricing.
Best-Selling EVs USA
Cox Automotive
