Dodge Now Sells Way More Electric Chargers Than Gas-Powered Ones

Mark Twain famously quoted a British Prime Minister who allegedly said: “There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.” Even if Twain himself made up the quote, it’s stuck around the popular consciousness because everyone has seen a person of authority use some random statistic to make a weak argument better. Also, it’s that time of year when automakers release their quarterly sales numbers and, oh boy, we’ve got at least one whopper.

I’ll start with Stellantis, where the news is still not good and there’s some minor tomfoolery afoot of the “and statistics” variety related to the new Dodge Charger. Chinese automaker BYD is doing much better, showing that the Chinese EV market still has more room for “new energy vehicles.” Does this mean Tesla is doing better? Nope. Of course not. The company missed estimates as its quarterly deliveries fell sharply, but is there a reason for this?

Last night, a state Supreme Court seat in Wisconsin (of all places) became a referendum on Elon Musk. Why? Because in our exhausting version of modern politics, this is a thing that happens. The results? People would like to hear a lot less from Elon Musk. Maybe a lot less about Elon Musk?

Stellantis Had A Bad Quarter, But At Least They Made Me Laugh

Stellantis hit a wall last year, and then tumbled down a hill adjacent to the wall. It was not good. The company essentially fired CEO Carlos Tavares when sales dropped 15% and has been saying this year will be a rebuilding year. So far, the organization isn’t off to a great start in the United States, where sales were down 12% year-over-year.

Jeep was down 10% as every model saw a sales decline except for the aged-but-cheap Compass. Ram sales were down for everything that isn’t the Promaster Van. Chrysler was actually up 1%. Dodge was the worst with a 49% drop due to the loss of Challengers and Chargers (more on that in a minute). Fiat, which now has cars to sell, was up 239%, but that’s only 522 total vehicles. It’s crap.

How is Stellantis trying to spin this?

“We’ve seen consecutive monthly market share growth since January, in addition to retail growth momentum, with the right mix of pricing and incentive actions put in place at the end of last year, leading both Jeep and Ram brands to post their best retail months of the year this March,” said Jeff Kommor, head of U.S. sales. “Additionally, our company year-over-year retail sales were up by 13.8% when disallowing for discontinued models, and we expect to see this gap corrected as our new model offerings continue to fill out our growing U.S. brand portfolios.”

This is somewhat true. The loss of a bunch of affordable Jeeps is hurting the bottom line, and the expensive EVs the company is putting out instead aren’t going to help much. Eventually, new products will come. Sam drove the new Charger for us and generally liked it, which is not a view shared by the faithful, considering the huge markdowns we’re already seeing on the car.

This sets me up for my favorite spin from the company’s sales press release:

• All-electric Dodge Charger Daytona accounted for 65% of total Dodge Charger sales in Q1 2025

That’s funny, right? I had to go back and just confirm that you can’t yet walk into a dealer and drive out with the inline-six-powered version of the new Charger. If you’re buying a new Charger in a store, you’re either getting the EV or you’re buying a car that was built in 2023. Sure enough, Dodge dealers sold 1,052 of the remaining stock of old, gas-powered Chargers and just 1,947 of the electric ones.

Flipping that stat on its head, 35% of people would still rather have a car that’s probably been sitting on the lot for a year than your brand new, too-costly EV.

BYD Sold 416,388 Passenger Electric Cars In Q1

The Chinese car market got off to a slow start this year, following a huge fourth quarter for EVs. This doesn’t seem to have phased BYD, which managed to sell 416,388 electric cars according to CNEVPOST, an increase of almost 39% year-over-year. That’s down 30.7% from Q4 of 2024, which saw the company’s highest ever EV sales.

As an automaker, BYD has entirely abandoned purely gas-powered cars and sells a mix of hybrids, PHEVs, and electric cars. It’s also an exporter, and the stat that’s most interesting to me is that BYD has managed to sell 72,723 in foreign markets, which is up 89% year-over-year.

It’s been guessed that BYD will be the biggest electric automaker this year, outshining even Tesla, so let’s look at Tesla’s quarterly numbers.

Tesla’s Q1 Sales Down

Unless you’re the biggest Tesla stan on the planet, the news that the company had one of its worst quarters in years isn’t going to be a big shock. In total, the company delivered 336,681 vehicles in Q1 globally, down 13% from Q1 of 2024. That’s a lot of electric cars and still makes it the second biggest EV automaker by a large margin.

The consensus of Wall Street estimates was around 390,000 vehicles sold. Is this a sign that it super biffed it? Well, some of those estimates came before everyone knew just how weird the world would get and how much blowback Musk could get from his activities with President Trump.

Some of this, of course, is due to factories switching over to the updated Model Y, as Tesla itself says:

“While the changeover of Model Y lines across all four of our factories led to the loss of several weeks of production in Q1, the ramp of the New Model Y continues to go well.”

This is almost certainly a legit excuse, but it doesn’t explain the huge drop in places like Europe. Also, wasn’t Tesla supposed to sell a huge number of Cybertrucks? That doesn’t seem to be happening, given that all non Model 3/Model Y sales added up to just 12,881 vehicles total, globally, for the quarter.

What’s going on here?

Elon Musk The Cheesehead

If you have not been following::checks notes:: off-cycle Wisconsin judicial elections, you might be surprised to find out that one State Supreme Court seat in the Upper Midwest could somehow become a referendum on the Tesla CEO. Honestly, if you didn’t know that you can just skip to the song part of TMD and you might be happier.

Here’s how NBC News put it:

Musk, the billionaire White House adviser, played a starring role in the race, using personal funds and allied outside groups to put more than $15 million behind former Wisconsin Attorney General Brad Schimel, the Trump-endorsed candidate who ran against Madison County Circuit Judge Susan Crawford. Crawford and her allies responded in kind, using Musk as a foil and scoring a decisive win.

Though the race was technically nonpartisan, there were intense partisan overtones — and it functionally transformed into a proxy vote on Trump’s first two months in office and especially on Musk, who has become one of the most powerful people in Republican politics since Trump won last year.

Musk referred to the race as a contest that would be important for the future of America and “Western Civilization.”

I guess Western Civilization is in trouble, because the Musk-endorsed candidate got spanked. Technically, these are non-partisan elections, but no one really believes that. Musk’s interests here probably have a lot to do with the fact that Wisconsin is a state with a highly partisan redistricting scheme that keeps a generally purple state tilted heavily towards putting Republicans in Congress. Musk not only spent money and campaigned, he also wrote checks to volunteers, which is something that feels like it should be extremely illegal.

We should have better stats on registration in the United States in a couple of weeks, which will just be more data for people to interpret based on preexisting feelings. And while we’re talking about Midwestern politics, I should probably mention that former Jalopnik contributor, car nut, and Hot Wheels designer Mallory McMorrow is running in the Democratic primary for the Michigan U.S. Senate seat that’s going to open up in 2026. Obviously, we know Mallory very well as a site, so take that disclosure for what it’s worth, and if she were to win, we’d never stop bugging her about Kei cars.

It’s interesting that her launch video includes a bunch of clips of Elon Musk…

What I’m Listening To While Writing TMD

San Francisco-based singer-songwriter John Vanderslice should be better known for all the great records he’s produced, or the ones he’s recorded. Likely, though, you know him for calling the frontman of Third Eye Blind the rudest person he ever met while running a recording studio. Enjoy “Trance Manual,” a good song.

The Big Question

Have you seen a Dodge Charger EV on the road?