BMW managed in July to outsell Tesla in electric vehicle sales in Europe for the first time

The Bavarian manufacturer’s new electric-vehicle strategy, considerably expanding its range of this type of vehicle through the launch of new models, is starting to pay off. According to a recent report published by market analysis firm JATO Dynamics, BMW outsold Tesla in electric car sales in Europe last July, with a total of 14,869 units sold, compared with the 14,561 of the North American manufacturer.

The report also shows that BMW achieved this feat even though the electric vehicle market in Europe contracted during this period.

With an increasingly broad range of models, among which the iX1, i4 and i5 stand out for their market share, BMW managed to sell 308 more vehicles than Tesla in July; the latter keeps its vehicle range unchanged, with just four electric models, with the Model 3 and Model Y accounting for the vast majority of the brand’s sales.

The Bavarian manufacturer thus managed to increase its sales by 35 percent compared with the same month of the previous year, with the compact SUV iX1 being BMW’s best-selling model with 4,305 units in total.

The Tesla Model Y remains the king in Europe

The clear proof that BMW could not have achieved this feat without offering an increasingly broad range of electric models is that Tesla led the ranking of best-selling models in Europe for one more month with the Model Y, delivering a total of 9,544 units to its European customers. This figure represents, however, a 16 percent decline compared with the previous year, just as happened with the Model 3 which, with 4,694 units, recorded a 17 percent drop in sales.

Finally, it should be noted that, as we already mentioned at the beginning of this post, interest in electric vehicles in Europe declined last July, with a 6 percent drop in sales of this type of vehicle. This represents a total of 139,300 electric vehicles registered. And all this despite the fact that overall demand for cars in Europe grew by 2 percent compared with the same month last year.

In July 2024, the market share of electric vehicles in Europe thus fell, from 14.6 percent in July 2023 to 13.5 percent.

BMW has shown growing interest in the electric vehicle market, with a steady increase in the proportion of this type of vehicle in its total sales. In the second quarter, 17.4 percent of the vehicles delivered by the BMW Group were fully electric, a significant increase from 14.1 percent in the second quarter of 2023 and 13.9 percent in the first quarter of 2024. These figures clearly reflect a positive trend for BMW in the field of sustainable mobility, and leave no doubt that the Bavarian firm’s commercial strategy is the right one.