World and US EV sales

US EV/PHEV sales are picking up again after Model 3's sales collapsed in the first 3 months of the year.  Let's just examine why Model 3 sales plunged.  First, potential buyers brought forward their buys to take advantage of the Federal tax credit before it halved (for Tesla) at the end of Q4 .  Second, because Tesla knew their customers would do this, they decided to make their first shipment to Europe in Q1, after US sales had (temporarily) peaked.  But it takes time to ship goods from California across the Atlantic to Europe, so Model 3s came out of the US market before they entered the European market (which is one of the reasons global sales dipped from the high levels of late 2018).  It wasn't because demand for Model 3s had stopped.  It had just shifted, in time and location.  And you can see in the chart below how Model 3 demand is accelerating again.  The chart is for the US and doesn't include European sales.

You can the effect of this shift in the overall market data (hardly surprising given Tesla's dominance):

The year-on-year growth rate has slumped to zero, but there are signs in the unsmoothed data that it is starting to increase again.  Last year's second half growth was an aberration (bringing forward Model 3) just as this year's first half slowdown is too.

World EV sales have been affected by Tesla's US slowdown and also slowing growth in Chinese EV sales.  

 As usual, source of base data is InsideEVs, the St Louis Fed's data bank, OICA, and Best Selling Cars.