Battery Electric Vehicles (BEV) set several sales records in March 2013. March was the best sales month ever for the Nissan LEAF which recorded 2236 sales. March was also the best month for the Tesla S electric vehicle with an estimated 1950 deliveries last month (Tesla do not report monthly sales figures). The Toyota Rav4 EV also saw record sales last month thanks to $10,000 pricing discounts by Toyota. This resulted in the highest number of Battery Electric vehicles sold in one month.

More people are driving electric than ever before – Click to enlarge

As one can see in the chart, the cumulative number of electric vehicles placed into service since December 2010 is increasing at an aggressive pace. Both Tesla and Nissan US based plants are now producing vehicles domestically for the US market allowing them to meet demand for their vehicles. The introduction of the Plug in Prius and Ford Energi plug-in hybrids has provided a boost of Plug-In Hybrid Vehicles (PHEV) vehicles brought to market. Ford have announced they will increase the number of dealers selling their plug-in vehicles which will make their vehicles more generally available to consumers. We can anticipate much higher EV sales month-to-month the rest of this year. Despite more BEV’s being sold in March than PHEV’s (4553 vs 3079) the number of new PHEV models coming to market suggests that PHEV is the EV car of choice for US consumers. There are over 20,000 more PHEV’s on the road than BEV’s and I believe the gap will continue to widen as we go through 2013.

Click to view a spreadsheet of EV sales

To examine sales of EV’s in more detail I have developed a spreadsheet to provide better analysis of which models and vehicle types are selling well. Feel free to download the spreadsheet to examine and analyze to meet your needs. I have released the spreadsheet under Creative Commons control, so please attribute the work as mine if you post elsewhere and/or modify it for sharing with others.