We first covered the EV market's "chasm" moment back in March 2025. Eighteen months on, the honest thing to do is check our own work: some of what we said held up, and some of it was overtaken by events nobody saw coming — chiefly, the US federal government pulling the EV tax credit forward by a decade. Here's where things actually stand now, with the numbers to back it up.
What Actually Changed Since March 2025
Three things moved the needle more than anything discussed in our original piece. First, BYD closed out 2025 as the world's best-selling battery-electric brand for the first time, edging past Tesla on full-year deliveries. Second, the US Congress ended the $7,500 new-EV and $4,000 used-EV federal tax credits on September 30, 2025, as part of the "One Big Beautiful Bill Act" signed by President Trump on July 4, 2025. Third, the federal NEVI charger-funding program was frozen in January 2025, then restarted under new rules in August 2025 — a year of limbo that slowed public charging buildout at the worst possible time. Each of these deserves its own section, because each one changes the calculus for anyone shopping for an EV in the US right now.
Growth Slows, Competition Reshuffles
Globally, the EV market didn't stall — it just changed leaders. The International Energy Agency and industry trackers put 2025 global electric car sales at roughly 20.7 million units, about 22.6% of all new vehicles sold worldwide. BYD delivered 3.97 million plug-in vehicles for the year (up 3.1%), including 2.26 million pure battery-electric models, a 28% jump. Tesla, by contrast, delivered 1.64 million vehicles, a decline of nearly 10% from 2024, dropping it to roughly 7.8% of global EV deliveries and second place behind BYD for the first time in a full calendar year.
The reasons aren't mysterious: BYD's low-cost LFP-based lineup travels well in price-sensitive markets across Latin America, Southeast Asia, and Europe, while Tesla's aging model lineup and CEO-driven brand controversy weighed on demand in exactly the markets — the US and parts of Europe — where it used to dominate. Legacy automakers didn't close the gap either; most are still losing money on every EV they sell, which is why Ford, GM, and Stellantis have all quietly slowed EV production targets since our original report.
The US Market Lost Its Biggest Incentive
This is the story we couldn't have told in March 2025, because it hadn't happened yet. The federal tax credit didn't fade out — it was terminated on a specific date, and buyers reacted accordingly. EIA data shows battery-electric vehicles hit a record 12% of US light-duty sales in September 2025, as buyers rushed to sign contracts before the deadline. Then the credit vanished on October 1, and BEV share fell to under 6% in each of the final three months of 2025 — roughly half the pre-deadline level.
Automakers have been trying to plug the gap with their own money: average EV discounts reached $13,161 in October 2025, according to Forbes' analysis of dealer data, up more than $2,000 from both September 2025 and October 2024. Congress did leave one consolation prize — buyers who finance an American-made vehicle can now deduct up to $10,000 a year in loan interest through 2028, but only if they itemize deductions and only if the vehicle qualifies as domestically built. For most shoppers, that's a far smaller benefit than the credit it replaced, and it does nothing for anyone who pays cash or doesn't itemize.
Batteries: Cost Still Beats Innovation, But the Gap Is Closing
Our original piece flagged LFP's rise and Tesla's 4680 struggles as the two battery stories to watch. Both have moved, in opposite directions.
LFP (Lithium Iron Phosphate) chemistry now accounts for roughly 80% of new battery-electric vehicle chemistry choices heading into 2026, per industry roadmap trackers, because it's cheaper, safer, and no longer meaningfully behind on range for mainstream vehicles. Tesla's 4680 cell, which was supposed to be the industry's energy-density leapfrog, spent most of 2023–2025 missing its own production targets. That changed late in the year: Tesla's Q4 2025 shareholder update confirmed it is now producing both anode and cathode materials using its dry-electrode process at Giga Texas, running "well over" a million cells a week, and as of January 2026 has reintroduced 4680 cells into Model Y production after a period of relying on supplier cells instead.
Comparing the Main EV Battery Chemistries
| Chemistry | Typical energy density | Relative cost | Where you'll find it | Status in 2026 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| LFP (Lithium Iron Phosphate) | Lower | Lowest | BYD, Tesla standard-range models, most Chinese brands | Dominant; ~80% of new EV chemistry decisions |
| NCM/NCA (Nickel-based) | Higher | Higher (nickel, cobalt costs) | Long-range Teslas, most Korean and European premium EVs | Still preferred for range-focused, higher-price vehicles |
| Tesla 4680 (structural cell) | High (target) | High until scale improves | Cybertruck, select Model Y units | Back in limited production after years of delay |
| Solid-state | Highest (claimed) | Very high, not yet scaled | Pilot lines only (Toyota, CATL, others) | Early pilot production; mass-market use still years off |
Recycling Becomes a Real Business, Not Just a Promise
The other shift is that battery recycling stopped being a talking point and started being a supply chain. Analysts now expect second-life EV battery capacity — batteries pulled from cars and repurposed for stationary storage — to grow from roughly 25–30 GWh in 2025 to 330–350 GWh by 2030. The clearest sign of the industry taking this seriously: in June 2026, General Motors became the first automaker to sign a full-lifecycle deal with Redwood Materials, covering manufacturing scrap, end-of-life battery recycling, and second-life storage under one contract. In China, CATL's recycling subsidiary Brunp processed more than 120,000 tons of used batteries in 2024 and wrote most of the country's national recycling standards. None of this existed at meaningful scale when we wrote the original piece.
Charging Infrastructure: A Federal Program That Stopped and Restarted
Charging is where policy whiplash hit hardest. The National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure (NEVI) program — the main federal funding source for highway fast-charging corridors — was paused by executive order in January 2025 as part of a broader freeze on infrastructure-law and Inflation Reduction Act spending. States were left holding incomplete projects for seven months until the Department of Transportation issued new guidance in August 2025 that loosened station-spacing rules and let states resubmit plans. As of late 2025, roughly $885 million in NEVI funds was apportioned for fiscal year 2026, and more than 500 NEVI-compliant stations were operational, under construction, or in final procurement — a fraction of what the original schedule called for.
Overall US charging capacity kept growing despite the freeze: the country had over 81,000 public charging stations and more than 250,000 charging ports by late 2025, a 17% increase in station count since the start of the year — mostly from private buildout by Tesla, Electrify America, and utility-backed networks, not from NEVI.
The other major shift is the plug itself. Most major automakers — Ford, GM, Hyundai (whose 2025 Ioniq 5 and 2026 Ioniq 9 ship with the port built in), Honda, BMW, and Rivian among them — have already moved to Tesla's NACS (North American Charging Standard) connector for 2025 and 2026 model-year vehicles, retiring the older CCS1 plug. Stellantis is the most recent to commit, announcing that Jeep and Dodge EVs will adopt NACS starting in 2026, giving those brands access to Tesla's network of more than 28,000 Superchargers across North America, Japan, and South Korea. If you're shopping for a used EV, checking which plug standard it uses — and whether an adapter is included — now matters as much as checking its range.
What's Next for the EV Market
The framing in our original piece — that 2025 would be the year EVs either crossed the chasm or got stuck in it — turned out to be roughly right, just not in the way we expected. The US market didn't hit a demand wall because buyers lost interest; it hit one because Washington removed the biggest reason to buy now rather than later. The global market, meanwhile, kept growing exactly as fast as China and price-competitive brands could make it grow, with BYD's rise the clearest evidence that low-cost LFP vehicles, not premium long-range ones, are what's actually pulling mainstream buyers in.
Watch three things through the rest of 2026: whether US EV sales stabilize below 6% of the market or recover as automaker discounts absorb more of the lost credit; whether Tesla's 4680 ramp at Giga Texas actually hits volume production instead of another delay; and whether the restarted NEVI program can close even half the charging gap it was supposed to fill before the January 2025 freeze. None of those questions had firm answers in March 2025. They still don't — but at least now there are real numbers attached to the guessing.
-EditorZ
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