It was close, but no cigar for battery-electric vehicle deliveries this past month, as buyers race to find an EV to buy before the end of federal subsidies on September 20th.

Despite ample inventory, huge incentives, and the full federal income tax incentive still in effect, more than 90 percent of U.S. vehicle shoppers opted not to buy a battery electric vehicle in August. Cox Automotive reports that its best estimate is a 9.9% take rate for BEVs for the last month.

We’ve previously predicted this exact scenario in multiple stories. With the “free money” federal incentive and the “lease loophole” about to go away for at least three years, shoppers had months to prepare their shopping list, search for the best deal, and pull the trigger. Despite this perfect storm of motivation, EV market share barely budged from the 8.1% it had previously peaked at in prior years. 

The 9.9% number is not to be confused with the market share for EV sales in all of 2025, year to date. That number is meaningfully lower, likely between 7.5% and 8% as a running total. The 9.9% share was just for the sales month of August.

Tesla deliveries pulled the market share down a bit in August. They were off by about 7% compared to August of 2024, according to Cox Automotive, which did not provide the actual delivery numbers in its report. The abject failure of the Cybertruck, and the Models X and S being day-old donuts are primarily to blame. Perhaps augmented by some anti-Tesla sentiment due to Elon Musk’s political activities over the prior year. Factually, Tesla now has many more viable competitors for its Model Y and Model 3, the company’s only volume sellers. 

As of the writing of this story, only 13 business days remain for shoppers to take advantage of the outgoing subsidies. Will EV shoppers turn out in bigger volumes to push EV market share past 10% for the month, triggering a flood of EV-advocacy publication articles doing a form of victory lap? We think it’s possible. July’s EV market share was 9.1%. Have fence sitters been waiting until the last minute to buy their replacement EV, or perhaps a first? Time will tell.

The image above shows the battery-electric vehicle market share in America, with the graph being full-scale. We have input 8.1% as the preliminary yearly value for 2025.As of the end of June, the EV share was 7.6%. July was 9.1, August 9.9%.  We will republish it once we know the EV market share for Q3. Q4 is expected to be the lowest market share quarter in the past couple of years as incentives will have just expired the quarter prior.

Our prediction is that EV market share will peak in Q3 and decline back to about 5% for 2026. What say you, EV fans and owners? Will EV market share top 10% in America for the month of September, and what will Q4  and then 2026 look like? Add your predictions in our comments section. If you dare. 
 

John Goreham is the Vice President of the New England Motor Press Association and an expert vehicle tester. John completed an engineering program with a focus on electric vehicles, followed by two decades of work in high-tech, biopharma, and the automotive supply chain before becoming a news contributor. He is a member of the Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE int). In addition to his eleven years of work at Torque News, John has published thousands of articles and reviews at American news outlets. He is known for offering unfiltered opinions on vehicle topics. You can connect with John on LinkedIn and follow his work on his personal X channel or on our X channel. Please note that stories carrying John’s by-line are never AI-generated, but he does employ grammar and punctuation software when proofreading and he also uses image generation tools.