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While Canadians flocked to purchase gas-powered vehicles over the summer, electric vehicle sales continued to nosedive, according to new data from Statistics Canada:
Electric vehicle sales dropped 35.2 per cent in June compared to last year. Zero-emission vehicles comprised only 7.9 per cent of total new motor vehicles sold that month, with 14,090 entering the market.
Meanwhile, 177,313 new motor vehicles were sold in Canada in June, up 6.2 per cent from June 2024.
"In dollar terms, sales increased 3.1 per cent during the same period. In June 2025, there were more new motor vehicles sold in every province compared with the same period in 2024," reads the Statistics Canada data.
"Sales of new passenger cars increased 19.5 per cent in June 2025, marking the first gain in this subsector since November 2024. In June 2025, sales of new trucks (+4.3 per cent) were also higher than one year earlier."
Despite dwindling sales, the Carney government remains committed to its electric vehicle mandate of having 60 per cent of all vehicles sold be ZEVs by 2030 and 100 per cent by 2035, banning all motor vehicle sales.
Previously:
- Automobile Sales, Including EVs and Hybrids, Surge in 2024
- Mazda: Americans Want Cheap Gas Cars
- The EV Graveyard
- South Korean EV Battery Makers Reporting Big Losses as EV Demand Slows
(Score: 3, Interesting) by bzipitidoo on Wednesday August 27, @11:00AM
> Politics aside
But that's one of the biggest problems. Politicians and the media have politicized the heck out of this choice, and have done things that significantly change the calculations. For instance, a couple years ago, Texas added an additional annual fee of $200 on EVs only, on the idea that these vehicles aren't paying their fair share of highway maintenance costs, which is funded by a gas tax. I wanted personal experience with an EV, so I got a used Nissan Leaf. Had it for about 6 years. That political change was one of the factors behind my decision to get rid of the Leaf.
I'd say I learned quite a bit about EVs from owning one. They are wonderfully quiet and low maintenance. Ideal for short trips. (More on that in the next paragraph.) But they do have downsides. Firstly, you have to plan a bit more. You can't forget to put it on the charger the night before. If you do forget, and you don't find out it's low until you're rushing off to work the next morning, you're screwed. You will be late to work. Or you have to get a ride. Or, if you also have a gas burner, you'll have to use that. Whereas a gas car, you can forget to fill it up and not be late to work because you can zip into and out of a gas station in 10 minutes.
As to the short trips, the best way to use an electric car is to take no trips longer than its ROUND TRIP range. Do ALL your charging at home. Why? The public charging network is not reliable enough. Even the idea of recharging at your destination, while that avoids the worst waste of your time, of sitting around waiting for it to charge at a point along the journey, is still too chancy. Ahh, you're going to visit someone at their home that is at the limit of your one-way trip range, and think you're going to recharge by plugging into your host's wall outlet so you can get back home? Think more carefully about that. EVs pull so much juice that you will have to inform your host not to have any other electrical appliances on the same circuit, or it is likely to trip the circuit breaker. A refrigerator starting up is enough to do that. And if this is not noticed, those hours you thought you were getting charged up, you weren't. And now you're in the embarrassing position of having to impose on your host longer.
Another gotcha is the charging cable is most idiotically designed so that the cord is not long enough for that heavy brick to rest on the ground. It will be dangling from the outlet, and this weight is all too likely to slowly pull the plug out of the outlet. That's bad. Destroys outlets. When the connection weakens, the resistance goes up, and that causes heating. This heating can easily be great enough to melt and scorch the plastic of the wall outlet.
One other thing I learned is that tires can't take being powered by electric motors. Oh yeah, the Leaf felt wonderfully grippy and powerful. Heck, one time I needed that power. Was on the street during a storm, saw wind whipping the trees ahead back and forth harder and harder, then saw a huge tree branch just seemingly floating along in the air. It was a tornado. I stopped to look more carefully at the weather and wait for some debris to blow past in front of me, and when I saw that tornado, and saw it was coming straight at me from my right, I floored the Leaf and got the hell out of the tornado's path. But that is thankfully quite rare. The problem with that grippy power, is that's also the feel of that electric motor putting more stress on the tires than they can take. Can easily wear the tires out before they've reached 25% of their lifetime range. Once I realized that, and that the Leaf has this "eco mode" that is engaged by putting the gear shifter into drive twice, I used eco mode exclusively. No more premature wearing out of the tires.
Hypermiling techniques can really help increase an EV's range. I learned that what I read online is true. The difference in range from traveling at 30 mph vs 40 mph is significant. Driving slower is perhaps the #1 thing you can do, in any kind of car, to get more range. One of the frustrating things about the fact that going slower is a big fuel saver and range extender, is that much of this is another consequence of politics and marketing. You'd think the severe constraints of having such limited range would inspire manufacturers to pick that low hanging aerodynamic fruit they ignore. You'd be wrong. If the Leaf had aerodynamics like the Edison 2, the winner of the X Prize for a car that can get 100 mpg, then the difference in range between traveling at 30 mph and 40 mph wouldn't be so surprisingly big.