13 Auto Brands Saw Increasing EV Sales in California in 1st Half of 2025

Last Updated on: 9th August 2025, 04:33 am

The California EV market is the biggest in the US by far. In fact, standing alone, it’s one of the biggest EV markets in the world. I’ve covered the top selling EV models in the state this year, the EV models doing well in their vehicle classes, and the top selling auto brands for EV sales in the 2nd quarter of 2025. To wrap up this series, let’s look at the top selling auto brands for EV sales in the first half of the year overall.

There is a bit of overlap with that last article, but there are also differences. If it was all basically the same story, I would have just combined the stories.

Overall, across the first half of the year, Tesla is down one place, from second place in 2024 to third place in 2025. The all-electric brand is quite far off of #2 Honda, but it also still has a decent lead over #4 Ford. Can Tesla hold onto 3rd place through the end of the year, or even climb back into 2nd? Or will it slip further as sales continue to drop in the Golden State? We’ll never know. Oh, wait, yes — we’ll know in 6 months. Drop your prediction down in the comments!

Looking just at ZEV sales, well, no matter how much Tesla drops, it’s got such a massive lead over the rest of the pack that it’s hard to even notice a drop. There’s no chance any other automaker is getting close to the (originally) California brand this year or next. Let’s just see if any other brand can get to 10,000+ ZEV sales a quarter in the coming quarters/years.

Excluding Tesla from the chart so that it’s easier to compare the others, we see a tight race for silver and bronze at the top, with BMW currently taking the silver and Hyundai currently taking the bronze, but Chevrolet right behind them. That’s different from the last quarterly report, where Hyundai is in 2nd, BMW is in 3rd, and Chevrolet is in 4th — but it’s even tighter. Ford is trying to climb up to the level of those three, but no other brand has a chance of competing for the podium.

Looking at how things have changed from H1 2024 to H1 2025, we see the massive drop-off from Tesla, with the company losing almost 20,000 sales (or 20% of sales) year over year. The brand may be years worth of sales ahead of the competition, but that stings.

Excluding Tesla so that we can see the rest of the chart better, we have a ton of variation. 13 brands scored sales rises, some big ones. However, another 12 had sales losses, some big ones. (Note: I excluded those bottom three brands from these tallies since their numbers are in the single digits.)

Chevrolet, Honda, and Acura had huge rises thanks to new, popular models. Nissan, Porsche, GMC, BMW, and Volvo also had big sales increases.

On the other hand, Kia lost a ton of sales, and Mercedes, Rivian, Audi, Volkswagen, Lexus, and Hyundai had notable and disappointing sales losses.

Clearly, there are changing preferences for EVs in the Golden State. It would be nice if all EV model sales were rising, some just more than others. But the reality is that some models and brands are struggling while others are growing their customer bases significantly. Survival of the fittest. Who do you think will have a strong second half of the year?

For extra fun, view interactive versions of three of the above charts here: