Kia can’t stop winning. Its refreshed line-up of EVs, sedans, and SUVs just powered another record-breaking quarter, putting it on pace for its third straight annual sales record.

Kia keeps breaking records in September and Q3 2025

Kia sold more vehicles in the US over the past three months than in any quarter since launching its first vehicle in the early ’90s.

After selling nearly 220,000 vehicles in the third quarter, Kia is on track for another record-breaking sales year, marking its third straight.

Through the first nine months of 2025, Kia has sold a record 636,148 vehicles, representing a 9% increase compared to the same period last year.

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Kia’s surge is being fueled by a wave of new and updated models like the EV9, EV6, K5, Telluride, and Sportage. The EV9, Kia’s three-row electric SUV, just posted its best month and quarter yet, with 3,094 and 7,510 units sold.

Through September, Kia has sold 12,448 EV9 models. Although that’s down from the 15,970 it sold in the first nine months of 2024, the 2025 model year sold out over the summer, with the 2026MY arriving at dealerships shortly after.

Both of Kia’s electric vehicles, the EV9 and EV6, received updates for 2026, including a built-in NACS port to enable recharging at Tesla Superchargers.

Kia sold 2,116 EV6 models last month, bringing the total to 11,077 through September. “As we begin the last quarter of the year, these best-ever sales performances set the Kia brand on a perfect trajectory to achieve yet another annual sales record,” Kia America’s sales boss, Eric Watson, said.

According to Watson, Kia is on track to achieve its highest-ever market share in the US. With a “world-class model line-up,” the company “will continue to attract both repeat and new customers to Kia showrooms well into 2026,” Watson said.

Since launching a major brand overhaul in 2021, which included a new logo, branding, and designs, Kia has continued to break sales records in the US, the UK, several European markets, and other parts of the globe.

With the EV4 set to launch in early 2026, Kia’s first electric sedan, the Korean automaker aims to capture a larger share of the US electric vehicle market.

The 2025 Kia EV6 Light RWD starts at $42,900 with up to 237 miles of EPA-estimated range. You can upgrade to the Long Range RWD mode, which offers a driving range of 319 miles for $46,200

Kia’s three-row electric SUV, the 2026 EV9 Light RWD, has a starting MSRP of $54,900 with an EPA-estimated range of 230 miles. The Long Range EV9 starts at $57,900, offering a range of 305 miles.

Looking to test out Kia’s electric vehicles for yourself? You can use our links below to find Kia EV6 and EV9 models at a dealer near you today.

Tesla’s sales decline in China continues to accelerate, despite the automaker’s efforts to mitigate it, including offering discounts and introducing new variants.

The American automaker is expected to release its Q3 delivery results tomorrow, and as we previously mentioned, it is expected to be its first and last good quarter in a while due to the end of the tax credit for electric vehicles in the US pulling demand forward.

As for the most important EV market in the world, China, the results are already in, and Tesla saw an even steeper decline.

Tesla’s deliveries in China, the world’s largest EV market, were down roughly 4% in the first half of the year.

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In Q3, Tesla’s deliveries in China decreased by 8%, and they are now down 6.4% year-to-date, based on insurance data.

The decline is happening despite Tesla having maintained strong incentives and discounts in the country all year, including 0% interest rates on its best-selling models.

Tesla even started delivering the new Model YL in China in Q3, which helped mitigate the decline in sales, but it wasn’t enough to stop it.

To incentivize buyers to place orders and take delivery by the end of the quarter, Tesla often sets deadlines for its incentives, such as the subsidized 0% interest rates on financing its cars.

However, due to demand issues, Tesla is quick to reinstate those incentives.

Q4 is no exception.

Tesla has already announced that 0% APR will be available on the Model 3 and Model Y until October 31. At the current rates, it represents a $1,500 to $2,500 discount on Tesla’s EV lineup.

Furthermore, Tesla is extending the ‘Intelligent Assisted Driving’ software transfer to new cars, the Chinese equivalent of “FSD” transfer, until October 31.

Electrek’s Take

You always have to keep an eye on China. China produces and consumes the majority of electric vehicles. It is by far the biggest and most competitive EV market in the world.

Tesla uses to dominate BEVs in China, but now it is in a clear steady decline.

Model YL appear to have helped a bit in Q3, but it wasn’t enough to slow the decline. I think the upcoming new stripped-down Model Y should help a bit more, but the problem with these new Model Y variants is that they mostly cannabilize Tesla’s existing Model Y sales.

There’s so much competition in China that there are already many viable options in the segments and price points that Tesla is bringing those new products in.

Let’s see how the stripped-down Model Y plays out, but if it doesn’t help much, maybe Tesla finally wakes up and do something about its aging vehicle lineup and invest more into refreshes and new models rather than betting the house on autonomy.

The $7,500 US federal EV tax credit is no more, having expired yesterday, a deadline which was set when republicans voted to reverse climate progress and channel trillions of dollars from everyday Americans to wealthy elites.

However, that’s not the end of subsidies for the American auto industry, as most gas cars continue to benefit from over $20k in subsidy for each vehicle over the course of their lifetime.

In its mission to make Americans sicker and poorer, the republican party has made a point of attacking cheaper and cleaner transportation options in the form of EVs. It’s doing its best to ship American EV jobs overseas, and instead throw your hard-earned tax dollars at dead technologies where the money will be completely wasted.

One of its salvos in these attacks has been to remove the $7,500 EV tax credit, which had made superior new transportation options more affordable for Americans (and, strangely, it did this with the help of the CEO of America’s largest EV maker, even though it will harm his company). That tax credit was taken away from Americans yesterday, seven years earlier than planned.

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So, after inflating vehicle costs by $7,500, republicans feel quite accomplished at taking a step towards their goal of making your air dirtier and enriching their oil buddies which they sought a billion dollar bribe from. And yes, that inflation will increase the price of gas cars as well – when the price of one product goes up, then there is less downward pressure on the price of competing products, which can then raise prices.

Some have stated that removing this subsidy is only fair, and that a new technology should have to stand on its own two feet. But that rationale misses something very important – the fact that fossil-powered vehicles have benefitted from over a century of extreme subsidies, which have been far larger than any amount of subsidy ever received by electric cars.

Fossil cars get far more subsidy than EVs ever did

The International Monetary Fund estimates that fossil fuel subsidies total $760 billion per year in the US alone, with roughly half of that subsidy going towards oil, which is used primarily to fuel cars.

These subsidy calculations consider both explicit subsidies – direct payments or tax breaks from the government to oil producers – and implicit subsidies, or the ignored costs associated with burning oil which get absorbed by the whole economy, rather than by the producers or consumers of the oil.

To explain the concept of implicit subsidies, imagine you live in a place where you have a separate bill you pay for trash pickup. Now, imagine if your neighbor decided that they didn’t want to pay this cost and would just start throwing their trash in the middle of the street and let everyone else clean it up for them. In this case, you and your other neighbors are subsidizing that neighbor’s trash pickup, having to clean up a mess that they are not paying for.

It’s the same with burning oil, but instead of spewing trash into the street, polluters are spewing trash into our lungs, which we then have to pay for in the form of asthma medication, hospital visits, lost productivity, and the effects of climate change.

These costs add up to hundreds of billions of dollars per year in the US, and trillions globally – and in addition to those monetary costs, also increase misery. I’m sure most of us would rather sign a check with our pocketbook than with our lungs.

In another study, the ignored costs of gasoline measured around $3.80 a gallon (although it’s likely that number is even higher now, as the study dates from 2015).

We can multiply this number by the amount of gallons of gasoline an average car will use in its lifetime (at average 24mpg for new cars and 150k-200k miles of useful service, that’s 6-8k gallons of gasoline burned, times $3.80), and find that the embedded lifetime subsidy runs in the tens of thousands of dollars. Even for a relatively efficient 40mpg car, that’s $19,000 in subsidy over a 200,000 mile lifetime, based on that 2015 subsidy number.

Now, compare to EV subsidies. EVs received $7,500 per car federally, with some additional state and local credits in certain regions, and some cars receiving lower subsidies due to income or domestic limitations. But lets stick with the $7,500 number as an average.

With Americans buying 1.3 million EVs in 2024 (and a market share of just under 10%), that means a total of around ten billion dollars in total subsidy for EVs in 2024. Which means not only is the total amount of subsidy lower for EVs than the hundreds of billions of dollars worth of benefits that gas cars enjoyed, but the amount per EV is significantly lower than the amount per gas car.

And as long as we’re considering total subsidies, we should consider that only a few million EVs have been sold in the US total, ever. Meanwhile this country has run through more than a billion gas cars, all of which have polluted with impunity.

Solutions are available, but republicans don’t want to solve problems

This discrepancy has been pointed out by many before, including Tesla CEO Elon Musk himself, who in the past has repeatedly claimed that if subsidies were removed from both EVs and gas cars, that EVs would be more cost-competitive, not less, given the imbalance in total subsidies received by the two technologies.

What Musk said was true in the past and is true now – but he seems to have forgotten one half of that equation, and threw a substantial amount of money towards removing EV subsidies and keeping gas car subsidies alive (and then whining about the thing he paid for).

The actual solution to this issue is to make all polluters pay for the pollution they cause. This should apply to both gas and electric vehicles – each should have to pay in proportion to how much damage they cause. But since EVs are much cleaner, they would naturally pay less than gas cars.

A plan like this has been supported by a series of former republican luminaries seemingly from a different era when the party wasn’t quite as violently anti-American as it is today, and by, uh, basically every economist. And IMF says that if efficient pollution pricing were implemented globally, it would generate net benefits of 3.6% of global GDP and save 1.6 million premature deaths per year.

However, that solution is unlikely to see much discussion, given that oil shill Chris Wright, who is currently squatting as the Department of Energy’s titular leader, just censored discussion of it.

Last week, Wright’s department sent out an Orwellian memo stating that nobody at the Department of Energy is allowed to talk about the subsidies, in a rather blatant attempt to distract everyone from the man behind the curtain (a.k.a., the hundreds of billions of dollars per year the oil industry is fleecing from the public). Maybe it’s time to get a government that’s actually interested in the well-being of its populace, rather than only interested in sucking their dead bodies dry in the name of oil profits.

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