EVwire newsletter #165: EV sales are up significantly in first half of 2026, industry roundup

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I’ve now gathered some EV sales from the larger regions (as noted above, looking for sponsor to produce the whole big report that takes me week(s)).

Let’s look at the US first, based on Cox Automotive data (our article here).

In the US, Tesla again owns half the market, actually rebounding from around 40% share it had some time ago. Cox Automotive puts US BEV sales at 247,226 in Q2 2026, down 20.5% year on year but up 14.7% from Q1.

The first half of 2026 recorded a -23.8% drop from 607,653 EVs sold in H1 2025 to 462,892 BEVs sold in the US.

As you can see from the FCEV rows in the bottom, Hyundai Nexo and Toyota Mirai are out of the game, no future in those two just as we called it here five years ago.

The Model Y was the best-selling EV in the country at 84,863 for the second quarter, a third of the market on its own and up 8.8% year-to-date, with the Model 3 second. Behind Tesla the chasers are tightly bunched, Chevrolet leading at 14,908 and Hyundai, Cadillac, Toyota and Rivian all landing between 11,000 and 15,000.
Two of them jumped hard on the year, with Toyota up 225% to 11,826 EVs and Subaru more than doubling to 10,064.

Here’s how the top 10 looked like in Q2:

For Europe, I’ve put together a comprehensive EV sales report together with one of our b2b partners, an European CPO called Eleport. See the whole report here: (link)

In Europe, electric just passed a milestone nobody had hit before:

For the first time in any half-year, battery-electric cars outsold petrol cars across the continent (1,608,200 to 1,590,767). BEVs now take 22.2% of every new car sold in Europe, up from 17.5%. Sure, hybrids still command the largest share at 36.9%, but surpassing pure ICE is a strong feat.

More than every fifth car sold in all of Europe this year is fully electric.

From January to the end of June, the first half of 2026, has shown 1 608 200 new battery electric vehicles (BEVs)

Germany, the UK and France drove 55.6% of the volume as we’ve seen most of the quarters, with France the standout jump at +62.9% YoY after last year's slump.

At the very top, Norway is all but done at 97.6% BEV market share of all sales, while Denmark is now officially on a steeper adoption curve, reaching 79.9% BEV share of sales. Finland (47.8%), Iceland (42.45) and Sweden (41.5%) are all comfortably over 40% now.

From the largest markets, 🇩🇪 Germany’s BEV share is at 24.8% (jumping from 17.7% a year ago) now which means every fourth car sold in Europe’s largest care market is fully electric as of H1 2026. In June, it even hit 28,4%!

🇬🇧 UK has reached an even more exact number for that, with 25% of all sales fully electric (jumping from 21.6%) and France went for the biggest leap ahead of both, from 17.6% a year ago to 28.2% now.

From the growth side, 🇭🇷 Croatia, although a small market, had enough of sitting at the bottom of European EV adoption all these years and jumped 349.7%, to 1781 EVs sold in the first half of 2026. BEV market share jumped from 0,9% to 4,0%. It was mostly due to a €45M national environment fund line opening for companies with up to €9,000 per BEV, as regular households still have no subsidy to create a similar jump.

And 🇩🇪 Germany, the home of the combustion engine, hit its own milestone in June. New KBA figures show battery-electric cars took 28.4% of the market (84,057 registrations, up a huge 78.2% year on year), outselling petrol at 20.5% and, for the first time ever, finishing ahead of hybrids too.

See the full European EV sales report that we created together with Eleport in the link above.

Our friend José Pontes reports that there’s a big ICE meltdown in China, as in june the petrol model sales crashed 42%, and plugins (PHEV + BEV) reached a record 63% market share. (link)

This time, BEVs are on the rise as PHEVs also fell 27%, along with EREVs (the extended range models) that were down 32%. While the whole car market went crashing down 23% YoY, battery electric vehicles grew 4% year over year, to 685k sales.

That means BEVs went for a record, 43% market share in China! For the whole 2026 so far, BEVs are at 36% market share, up from 33% in 2025. These are the 10 best-selling fully electric vehicles in China in first half of 2026 (redacting the PHEV side):

Tesla built its 10 millionth vehicle, a black Model Y off the Fremont line, just six years after its first million. The remarkable part is the footprint: it got there with only four car factories, Fremont, Shanghai, Berlin and Texas, and mostly just two models to get there. (link) Note to myself: map out how much of the 10M is made up of just Model Y and 3.

Interestingly, even though Tesla’s growth has slowed over the past few years (getting going again btw, with largest order backlog since 2023), it still reached the 10M first. For reference, the second-largest maker, BYD, is currently closing in on the 8M BEV mark. 10M is likely to hit next year.

🇺🇾 Uruguay is now Tesla's third direct-sales market in South America after Chile and Colombia. Official site live, Model 3 and Y open for order. (link)

By the way, based on some job posts, Tesla Argentina is also in the works.

🇱🇻 Latvia is next: a Riga pop-up store opens August 21, with online orders live ahead of it, giving Tesla all three Baltic states after Lithuania (2024) and Estonia (earlier this year). (link)

Tesla also reported an all-time record $28.2 billion in revenue for Q2 2026, up 26% YoY, and crossed $100 billion in trailing-twelve-month revenue for the first time in company history. Operating income still fell 57% to $398 million. If you want to learn exactly where all Tesla’s bets currently are, down to its lithium refinery, see our recap: (link).

Then the spending. Tesla poured a record $5.79 billion into capex, up 142% YoY and a $3.3B jump in a single quarter, dragging free cash flow to negative $1.09 billion, its first red quarter since early 2024. Operating cash flow still rose 85% to $4.7B, and the war chest sits at $43.5 billion.

They are spending like a company building for something big: AI compute, new fabs, solar.

Samsung Foundry confirmed Tesla's AI5 chip has reached tape-out, the milestone that freezes a design and clears it for fabrication. Next stop is volume production on Samsung's 2nm line in Taylor, Texas. The word came from James Kim, an 18-year Samsung principal engineer, on LinkedIn... and after I broke the news for the world’s arena, and a surprising amount of Korean news outlets picked it up, James deleted his LinkedIn post. Oops. (link)

In Plug In America's 2026 survey (4,205 people, 3,809 of them EV drivers), just 0.5% would swap their EV for a gas or diesel car. (link)

Same survey, same direction of travel: 94.3% expect their next car to be another EV, and more than nine in ten say EVs are cheaper to own, easier to maintain and more fun to drive. And that is what people felt after federal tax credits were killed, and before gas prices peaked this year.

And then there’s something that surprised me a bit:
Florida wants to spend $197 million of federal EV-charging money on electric air-taxi pads instead. The state says its highway charging is "sufficiently developed" and plans 32 eVTOL landing-and-charging sites at airports, golf courses and luxury developments. (link)

This reminds me of a slide I saw on the XPeng event, as they too play in the eVTOL space, saying China has a new national focus on something called a “low altitude economy”. That really stuck with me

The US public DC fast-charging network hit 77,776 ports across 14,514 stations by the end of Q2, per Paren's latest report, adding 4,382 ports and 806 stations in the quarter. (link)

Tesla is still the biggest builder, though the gap is narrowing as rivals adopt NACS (and the quarter still ran about 10% behind last year's pace). You wouldn’t guess who was the second-largest in fast chargers deployed in Q2 in the US.

…

it’s Walmart.

They’ve now deployed 612 fast charging ports, with 368 of them in Q2, 8.4% of all ports deployed in the US in that quarter.

I’d say Walmart is becoming the Lidl charging network in the US (Lidl pushed to become, if I recall correct, 7th-largest CPO in all of Europe). And it makes absolute sense. There are about 4,614 Walmart stores in the US.

Walmart seems to be building out its network currently with Alpitronic HYC 400 and ABB A400. I’d argue that an average Walmart run is perhaps long enough to even deploy slower, like 100kW chargers, but their data is what must’ve decided 400kW units make more sense (delivering 200kW if two plugged in), maxing out the capabilities of most EVs on US roads today.

Huge news in the US’ fast charging space came in just yesterday:

EVgo will deploy "EVgo Superchargers" as third-party Tesla Superchargers across its charging network in the US. Huge win for Tesla's Supercharger for Business program. (link, to EVwire article ofc)

These chargers will be branded "EVgo Superchargers" and start opening in cities nationwide in the second half of 2026.

How the arrangement works:

EVgo buys, owns and operates the Tesla V4 Supercharger hardware on its own sites. Tesla keeps the software, the network and the support.
The stalls then appear directly in Tesla's in-car navigation and Trip Planner, so Tesla drivers get routed to EVgo hardware automatically.
And no, most likely the free Supercharging won’t apply to these stations, just as it doesn’t for other third-party Superchargers.

In other words, the 4th-largest charging network in the US will now run on the hardware and software of the (1st) largest charging network in the US for its expansion.

It’s currently unclear if EVgo adopted this strategy for all of its expansion, but it’s likely it now drops its Delta Electronics deployment on its own network. The GM x Pilot company deployments and the 500+ stall plan they just announced with Brixmor Property Group might still rely on other hardware.

What EVgo is quoting for the sites:

Up to 500 kW at 1,000 volts, which hints that these will run on the new high voltage cabinet (most third-party Superchargers don’t).
Magic Dock on every site, so CCS cars charge alongside NACS cars.
Longer cables for vehicles with awkward port locations.

"With this deployment, we look forward to welcoming more Tesla and NACS drivers to the EVgo network." — Badar Khan, CEO of EVgo

Scale of this deal is important here.

We already reported on how Francis Energy adopted Supercharger for Business first, and has deployed over 100 Supercharger stalls by now.

EVgo currently has 1,200+ stations across 47 states and nearly 4k chargers on its own network, which in my books makes it the fourth-largest fast charging CPO in all of US, although no direct scope of this particular deal was mentioned.

Supercharging for Business program from Tesla has been a sleeper for most which we have very diligently followed from the start.

So diligently, that I believe that EVwire is now officially the news outlet with the widest coverage of every new deal & location around Supercharging for Business.

One article is inbound today which I couldn’t yet share here that also explains how there are whole new EV charging businesses created around this program specifically, but here are some of our latest coverage on some sites:

IONITY asked 1,000 EV drivers across France, Germany, Sweden and the UK what is actually on their mind at a charging stop. The answer was not kilowatts. It was coffee. (link)

Tesla leaned on its Supercharging network to help in different countries recently:

In Hungary, it cut off-peak Supercharging to 80 forint (about $0.25) per kWh to pull demand off a heat-strained grid. (link)

And Tesla also switched on free Supercharging for people hit by disasters in three countries: the Kyushu earthquake zone in Japan, wildfire areas near Bordeaux in France, and eastern and central Spain.

And Electra did the same in France and Spain, making its fast chargers free in the fire-hit Gironde and over in Madrid.

Good to see the networks showing up when it counts.