Turns out, Europeans love big ol’ SUVs as much as Americans do
Regulators hate them, saying all the popularity of massive, heavy SUVs runs counter to environmental targets. Paris even slapped some hefty fines on SUVs parking in the city. But European consumers are showing nothing but love for the SUV, in all shapes and sizes. In a new milestone, SUV sales took the market lead at 51%.
Top sellers last year were (no surprise) the Tesla Model Y and Volkswagen’s T-Roc, which accounted for more than half of all sales in Europe for the first time, reports Automotive News Europe.
Sales of SUVs grew 19% last year to 6.63 million, according to market research Dataforce. The Tesla Model Y officially took the crown as Europe’s best-selling car overall for 2023, making it the first electric vehicle ever to do so.
For the first time, SUVs overtook Europe’s traditional hatchback and wagon body styles. Long gone, too, are the days when the VW Golf ruled the roost for almost 15 years. For minicars, a segment that sold close to a million vehicles a decade ago, last year saw the sales of 698,858 minicars in Europe. For battery-electric mini-cars, Fiat’s 500e was the best seller – a car the brand is hoping to successfully launch this year in the US. Still, lots of brands have since abandoned minicars altogether, or have bumped up the size for a larger, bulkier “minicar.”
Small SUVs, however, are on the rise, seeing nearly 2.2 million units last year, and compact SUVs selling 1.9 million, according to Dataforce. But the biggest growth came from the premium segment.
EVs were a big driver of sales in the midsize segment, with 50% of the market, according to the data. Battery-electric SUVs accounted for 48% of all premium midsize SUV sales, with the Model Y leading the pack. For mass-market midsize SUVs, Volkswagen ID4 took the lead.
For small SUVs, however, electric vehicle sales weren’t as strong, with only 1.7% of compact SUVs sold in 2023 featuring a battery-driven powertrain, according to the data. For small cars, only 5.4% of sales were electric.
But SUVs took the lead even in the highest-priced performance segment, reports Automotive News Europe, with plug-in hybrid BMW XM taking first place with 3,142 sales, outselling the Lamborghini Urus and Bentley Bentayga.
Electrek’s Take
Where is the Citroen Ami when you need it? This is going in the wrong direction, and surely Europe doesn’t need a vehicle like this one on its city streets – or even in villages where the urban planners designed the roads a few hundred years ago. To adjust for a trend of bigger and bigger cars, a lot of infrastructure will need to change – bigger parking spaces, constructing sidewalks where there are none, widening roads to adapt to two-way traffic on one narrow road, pushing bike lanes farther over to make room for vehicle bulk. Perhaps more cities will go in the direction of Paris, which voted to triple parking fees for SUVs, to help push back the presence of bigger vehicles in cities at least. Amsterdam, London, and Copenhagen could be next.
Still, there is hope yet for small EVs to come out ahead this year, with a slew of new affordable models coming out, including Renault’s electric Twingo and Citroën’s ë-C3, not to mention new models coming from BYD and SAIC’s MG Motors. Hyundai announced its new mini-SUV Casper (which does look pretty mini) would be arriving this year priced at €20,000. Several new models are targeting a starting price of €25,000 or less, including the Renault 5, Twingo, and the BEV Fiat Panda, so maybe that could help more value-minded drivers ditch ICE or lower-priced SUVs like the ubiquitous Dacia Duster and buy a smaller car.
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Tesla (TSLA) is no longer confidently stating growth in its automotive business for 2025, and it has delayed updating its guidance until the next quarter after a disappointing performance in the first three months of the year.
2024 was Tesla’s first year in a decade where its vehicle deliveries went down year-over-year.
Just a few months ago, in January, Tesla was confident in predicting that it would return to growth in 2025:
“With the advancements in vehicle autonomy and the introduction of new products, we expect the vehicle business to return to growth in 2025.”
Today, Tesla released its Q1 2025 financial results, confirming that it had its worst quarter in years to start 2025.
The automaker is now clearly not as confident about returning to growth in its automotive business this year.
Tesla updated its “outlook” section this quarter to highlight the potential impact of trade policies and now no longer discusses automotive growth in isolation. Instead, it bundled automotive and energy businesses together and said that it will “revisit its 2025 guidance” next quarter:
It is difficult to measure the impacts of shifting global trade policy on the automotive and energy supply chains, our cost structure and demand for durable goods and related services. While we are making prudent investments that will set up both our vehicle and energy businesses for growth, the rate of growth this year will depend on a variety of factors, including the rate of acceleration of our autonomy efforts, production ramp at our factories and the broader macroeconomic environment. We will revisit our 2025 guidance in our Q2 update.
Tesla’s vehicle deliveries are already down about 50,000 units so far this year compared to last year.
It will be challenging to catch up in the current macroeconomic situation.
Tesla again guided the start of production of “new affordable models” in the first half of 2025, which could help the automaker to deliver more cars.
However, as we have previously reported, these new vehicles are expected to be stripped-down Model Y and Model 3, which will cannibalize Tesla’s current sales and limit its growth to those products.
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US DC fast charging is becoming more reliable, and charging stations are getting bigger and busier, according to a new Q1 2025 report from the EV data analysts at Paren.
DC fast charging station reliability is on the rise
Paren’s latest US Reliability Index – “Can I successfully charge at this charger?” – increased from 81.2 points in Q4 2024 to 82.6 points in Q1 2025, a notable jump of 1.7%. According to Bill Ferro, CTO at Paren, “This continues a quarterly trend across the US non-Tesla fast charging infrastructure, which suggests that the ongoing efforts to replace or sunset older hardware are having a positive impact on station uptime. In addition, newer entrants into the field are bringing time-tested hardware along with enhanced driver experiences.”
Utah, Alaska, Tennessee, North Carolina, and Nevada were the top-ranked states for DC fast charging reliability in Q1 2025.
Growth slows, but charging stations are getting larger
New DC fast charging ports grew to 55,580 at the end of Q1 2025, up 3,667 from last quarter, with total stations reaching 10,839, an increase of 794. This is fewer new additions compared to the surge seen at the end of 2024, reflecting typical seasonal slowdowns due to winter weather. However, there’s a bright spot: the average number of ports per station among non-Tesla networks rose to 3.9, compared to 2.7 year-over-year. The Tesla Supercharger network now averages 13 ports per station.
Utilization rates reflect the urban-rural divide
Average utilization – that’s the minutes of a charging session as a percentage of time a station is open each day – dropped slightly from 16.6% in Q4 2024 to 16.2% in Q1 2025, following typical holiday travel patterns. But overall, charging use is climbing, especially in dense urban areas with significant rideshare and apartment communities that rely heavily on public chargers.
Early days for NACS transition
The Combined Charging System (CCS) remains dominant, with 59% of new ports, and the shift toward Tesla’s NACS (J3400) standard is still in its very early stages. Only 104 non-Tesla NACS ports were added this quarter at non-Tesla networks, so drivers of new non-Tesla vehicles need to use their adapters if they want to use Superchargers.
Fixed pricing prevails
Charging operators primarily use fixed pricing (80%), with Time of Use (TOU) pricing making up 16%. Pay-by-time options are rare, used only 4.2% of the time.
California is the only major state where TOU pricing surpasses fixed pricing, while many states, such as Oklahoma, Vermont, and Arkansas, almost exclusively utilize fixed pricing models.
As for the most expensive places to fast charge your EV? The top four metropolitan statistical areas are all in California, with average rates at $0.60 or $0.61 per kWh.
Rural and low-income areas at risk
The Trump administration’s cancellation of the National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure (NEVI) program poses a significant threat to rural and low-income communities. Loren McDonald, chief analyst at Paren, cautioned, “Our data is a harbinger of less expansion in rural and lower-income markets as CPOs will increasingly focus on urban markets, seeing high utilization, often north of 30%, versus markets with less than 5% utilization.”
‘Charging 2.0’ – a new industry phase
McDonald summed up the report by marking 2024 as a pivotal year, stating, “2024 was a year of mixed news in the US DC fast charging industry, but it will be remembered as a pivotal turn to a new era we are calling ‘Charging 2.0’. Charge-point operators and new players in the industry are increasingly focused on creating a great customer experience, improving reliability of chargers, and reaching profitability – a shift from chasing the availability of incentives, racing to get chargers in the ground, and then crossing your fingers that utilization will grow over time.”
Read more: Trump just canceled the federal NEVI EV charger program
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Tesla (TSLA) released its financial results and shareholders’ letter for the first quarter (Q1) and full-year 2025 after market close today.
We are updating this post with all the details from the financial results, shareholders’ letter, and the conference call later tonight. Refresh for the latest information.
Tesla Q1 2025 earnings expectations
As we reported in our Tesla Q1 2025 earnings preview yesterday, the Wall Street consensus for this quarter was $21.345 billion in revenue and earnings of $0.41 per share.
The expectations had been significantly downgraded over the last month, as analysts were surprised by Tesla’s announcement of much lower deliveries than expected in the first quarter.
Did Tesla meet them?`
Tesla Q1 2025 financial results
After the market closed today, Tesla released its financial results for the first quarter and confirmed that it missed expectations with earnings of $0.27 per share (non-GAAP), and it also missed revenue expectations with $19.335 billion during the last quarter.
This is a big miss for Tesla despite the company admitting to selling a lot more regulatory credits this quarter.
At $595 million in credit sales, Tesla would have lost money without it in Q1 2025:
In short, Tesla is on the verge of being a money-losing company.
We will be posting our follow-up posts here about the earnings and conference call to expand on the most important points (refresh the page to see the most recent posts):
Here’s Tesla’s Q1 2025 shareholder presentation in full:
Here’s Tesla’s conference call for the Q1 2025 results:
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