EVwire brief: The Tesla Model Y was South Korea's best-selling passenger car in May, the first time an imported model has topped the country's monthly sales chart.
Model Y registrations reached 8,762 units for the month, ahead of the Kia Sorento (7,836), the Hyundai Grandeur (5,183), the Kia Sportage (4,760) and the Kia Carnival (4,543). No imported car had ever finished first in Korea's overall passenger-car race before.
Tesla also led the imported-car market outright with 10,866 registrations, up 65.4% year-over-year. That made May Tesla’s third month in a row above 10,000 units, as per figures released by the Korea Automobile Importers and Distributors Association (KAIDA).
Tesla South Korea’s YTD sales (Source: @piloly)
Two Model Y variants did the heavy lifting. The Model Y Premium topped the single-model rankings with 7,195 units, and the longer six-seat Model Y L took second with 1,513.
As one industry official put it to Newsway:
“In the past, it was a given that proven domestic cars like the Grandeur or Sorento would take the top spot in monthly sales. The Model Y's rise to the top is a symbolic event showing that consumers' criteria for choosing vehicles are changing rapidly.”
The Tesla Model Y L sold well in South Korea last month
The scale is easier to feel in context. The Model Y's 8,762 sales outran the entire combined domestic output of Renault Korea (2,893), KGM (3,318) and GM Korea (808), which added up to 7,019 between them.
Hyundai (45,364) and Kia (44,713) still own the bulk of Korea's market by volume, but their flagship models all slipped under 10,000 for the month, and that gap was enough for the Model Y to slip through.
By industry watcher Roland Pircher's tally, the run also made Tesla the third best-selling car brand in Korea overall in May, behind only Hyundai and Kia, with roughly 8.6% of the entire market against a 7.3% three-month average. Pircher logs it as Tesla's best May on record.
Details:
Top imported brands in South Korea, May 2026 (new registrations):
Tesla — 10,866
BMW — 6,555
Mercedes-Benz — 3,553
Audi — 1,509
Lexus — 1,291
Volvo — 1,058
BYD — 1,032
Porsche — 820
Toyota — 804
Mini — 604
Context:
This is the structural shift catching up with the headline. Tesla already topped the country's import charts in Q1, displacing BMW for the first time. Leading a single month of imports was the next step. Beating every domestic model is the one nobody had managed.
Model Y deliveries have been the engine of Tesla's run in Korea. (Follow image link for our Q1 import recap.)
Year to date, Tesla has now registered 45,020 units in Korea, up 250.8% on the same stretch of 2025, and holds roughly 31% of the entire imported-car segment for the year. Put another way, about one in three imported cars sold in Korea this year has been a Tesla, with BMW (32,581) and Mercedes-Benz (24,211) well back. Industry watchers have noted that Tesla's 2026 tally already sits at about 75% of its full-year total from last year, with seven months still to run.
The fuel behind it is familiar: cheaper, China-built Model Y variants that priced the car into a value-sensitive market, plus the new Model Y L widening the lineup. Korean reporting also credits younger buyers in their 20s and 30s and expectations around Full Self-Driving Supervised. That demand has spilled into the secondhand market too, where the Model Y also led the country's used EV market on both volume and resale value.
Source: Digital Chosun, Chosun Biz, and Newsway
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