Toledo’s already slow electric vehicle sales are decelerating.
Just 320 EVs were sold in the Toledo region in the first quarter of 2024, representing 2.6 percent of all new vehicle sales, according to data compiled by DriveOhio from the Ohio Department of Motor Vehicles. The Toledo market in the data was defined as the counties of Lucas, Fulton, Ottawa and Wood.
That was down from the 3 percent pace for all of 2023 but up from the 2.1 percent of total sales from the first quarter a year ago.
Toledo has traditionally lagged the nation in EV adoption, with residents buying the vehicles at less than half the pace of the national average.
But in the case of first quarter numbers, Toledo is seeing the same slowdown in uptake as the nation generally, said Ivan Drury, director of Insights at the car-shopping site Edmunds.com.
“It has been rough,” he said.
Nationally, EV sales growth slowed in the first quarter after rising precipitously in each of the past two years, according to data from Cox Automotive, a dealer software company that also operates among its properties the car-shopping sites Autotrader.com and Kelley Blue Book.