Once again, it’s the first day of the month following a weekday sales close, when the auto industry turns its eyes to the sales charts emerging from all automakers (except Tesla).
For plug-in electric cars, the question this month remains the same as last month: how many Chevrolet Bolt EVs did GM deliver?
As distribution of the first affordable battery-electric car with more than 200 miles of range continues to roll out into more states, Bolt EV volumes take on outsized importance.
In February, Chevy delivered 952 Bolt EVs, for a two-month total this year of 2,114. (Another 579 were sold in December.)
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Meanwhile, the brand’s Volt plug-in hybrid saw deliveries of 1,820, bringing the year-to-date number to 3,431.
That’s a much greater disparity than in January, when the Volt total of 1,511 was only 350 units higher than the Bolt EV’s 1,162.
That said, it’s probably not reasonable to draw any conclusions about the sales pace of GM’s 238-mile electric hatchback until at least the second half of the year.
2017 Toyota Prius Prime and 2017 Chevrolet Volt with Green Car Reports editor John Voelcker
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The Toyota Prius Prime plug-in hybrid logged sales of 1,362 units last month, for a year-to-date total of 2,728.
That too lags the Volt, the strongest competitor among plug-in vehicles this year so far.
As always, Tesla Motors refuses to break down its vehicle sales by country (or even by month) so there are no comparable figures to use in comparing its Model S and Model X deliveries to those of other plug-in electric vehicles.
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The Nissan Leaf, the aging 107-mile battery electric car now in its seventh model year, actually outsold the Bolt EV with 1,036 sales in February—returning to the 1,000-car-a-month pace it maintained throughout most of last year.
The Audi A3 e-tron plug-in hybrid logged a strong 400 deliveries last month, its second-best monthly number since it went on sale in December 2015. Its year-to-date figure is 787.
It also represented more than 20 percent of all A3 models sold in February, an encouraging sign as Audi starts to prepare for next year’s launch of its e-tron all-electric SUV model with more than 200 miles of range.
2016 Audi A3 e-Tron Sportback, San Francisco Bay Area, Oct 2015
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This article will be updated further throughout today and tomorrow as more sales figures are reported.
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