A dip in Colorado electric car sales doesn’t have dealers panicking — yet

Colorado experienced a dip in clean car sales in the first three months of 2025, with anti-Tesla sentiment and a scheduled cut in the state EV subsidy eroding the booming market share clean cars had racked up in the last part of 2024. 

But the state’s auto dealers actually thought it could have been a worse start to 2025 for clean cars, with hits from the state subsidy, expiration of an Xcel subsidy, and all the talk of expensive tariffs, said Matthew Groves, executive director of the Colorado Automobile Dealers Association, which reports quarterly new car registrations for the state. Combined, fully electric and plug-in hybrid electric vehicle sales made up 26% of the Colorado market in January through March, down from the 31.3% share they enjoyed in the last quarter of 2024.

“It’s actually less of a drop than I expected,” Groves said. “I think we may have been bolstered a bit by an outstanding weekend to close the quarter at the end of March, when we expected tariffs to set in on April 2. I think a lot of people tried to ‘buzzer beat’ the tariffs and get their new car at the end of the quarter.”

Sales of hybrids, which do not plug in but use a regenerative battery combined with gasoline to get high road mileage, actually rose to 12.4% of the market starting 2025, up from 10.5%. Car dealers and efficiency advocates lump all three categories into an “alternative drive train” market, and that group took 38.4% of Colorado new car sales so far in 2025. That compares with a 41.8% share in the last three months of 2024. 

Tesla sales were down 2% in the first quarter, though they still — along with a reinvigorated Nissan — dominate fully electric car sales in Colorado and across the country. 

It’s not just that Tesla chief and MAGA cheerleader Elon Musk is getting blasted by bad publicity from Democrats, some of whom have vowed to never consider a Tesla while he’s involved with the company. Tesla’s older models are getting stale on the sales floor compared with a host of new EV models arriving regularly from the traditional car makers, Grove noted.

Hesitance among new EV buyers seems inevitable for the rest of 2025. Tariff threats are on again, off again. Colorado’s taken-at-the-register tax credit dropped to $3,500 from $5,000 on Jan. 1. The Trump administration wants to boost oil production and make gasoline cheaper. And there are MAGA supporters who would like to end the $7,500 federal EV subsidy that was a key part of Biden administration renewable energy support. 

“Yes, they’ve been threatening cancellation since November, maybe before,” Groves said. “But, until we see it on paper, we are going to encourage people to keep taking advantage of it.”

Overall car and light truck sales in Colorado jumped 10.3% over the year-earlier quarter, the auto dealers report said. That was significantly better than the 4.2% jump in national sale registrations. But Colorado dealers are also admitting they are as confused as everyone else about what the rest of 2025 will bring. 

“Pent-up-demand, combined with improvements in affordability, were expected to propel the market in 2025,” the CADA report said. “However, the potential overhaul of U.S. trade policy has added significant unknowns into the new vehicle sales outlook.”

But some things never change. Colorado continues to be as Subaru crazy as all the stereotypes tell us. 

Subarus accounted for 16.3% of new registrations in the small sport-utility segment for Colorado, “well above its 9.5% share in the nation,” the report said.