US Plugin Vehicle Sales Dropped 27% Year Over Year In October
14 hours ago
Zachary Shahan
11 Comments
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When it comes to the US electric vehicle market, I thoroughly cover and analyze the sales of fully electric vehicles (aka BEVs). However, I don’t typically touch plugin hybrids. Frankly, automakers don’t break out plugin hybrid data from conventional gas-powered vehicle data when plugin hybrids share a model name — and they almost always share a model name. Nonetheless, it’s interesting to get a peek into the plugin hybrid (PHEV) market when we can, and Argonne National Laboratory does make that possible.
I was initially going to write about the September data the lab released. “A total of 169,357 plug-in vehicles (147,801 BEVs and 21,556 PHEVs) were sold during September 2025 in the United States, up 34.7% from the sales in September 2024. PEVs captured 13.55% of total LDV sales this month,” Argonne National Laboratory wrote. So, 11.8% of vehicle sales were BEVs while another 1.7% were PHEVs, according to this data. That’s good progress even though you have to take into account the fact that Q3, especially September, provided a big temporary boost in sales due to the US EV tax credit being ended by Republicans.
However, when I returned to the ANL webpage on this matter today to finish this article, I discovered that the data had already been updated with October numbers. Here are some of the highlights (and lowlights):
“A total of 91,067 plug-in vehicles (74,897 BEVs and 16,170 PHEVs) were sold during October 2025 in the United States, down 26.9% from the sales in October 2024. PEVs captured 7.16% of total LDV sales this month.
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- Over 1.5M plug-in electric vehicles (PEVs) were sold in 2024, an increase of over 7% from 2023 sales. BEVs account for 80% of the PEV sales.
- PEVs reached 13.6% of monthly sales in September 2025. PEVs were 9.9% of annual passenger vehicle sales in 2024, up from 9.4% in the annual sales of 2023.
- Cumulatively, over 7.6 million plug-in electric vehicles have been sold in the United States (as of the end of October 2025).”
So, there it is. Been wanting an update that includes plugin hybrids? Now we’ve got one, or two. We also have this graph:
And this one:
There’s also a gigantic chart of the model breakdown over time here.
Regarding the drop in EV sales in October, I have to say, it’s not as bad as many would have expected. Probably being the worst sales month for EVs that we’ll see, around 6% of US vehicle sales were still full electrics, and 7.2% were plugin vehicles overall. Onward and upward from there!
*I believe a reader provided us with the ANL link in a recent comment, but if so, I lost track of who that was. Apologies.
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