Florida is second only to California in EV sales: How'd that happen?

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In cumulative EV sales, Florida has the lead after California—without all the incentives—and there's even been a recent surge.

Florida's politics are the polar opposite of California's. Yet the home state of President Trump is second only to California in EV sales.

That sales growth, leaving Florida solidly in the top position after California, based on cumulative EV registrations, was driven not by incentives but primarily by EV enthusiasm in the populous central region of Florida. More than 17,000 EVs were newly registered in the nine counties of Central Florida between November 2023 and November 2024, according to a recent examination of this sales trend by the Orlando Sentinel.

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For the full year of 2024, Central Florida's EV registrations grew 15.2%, surging past the national average of 9.4%. And registrations in EVs in Orange County, where Orlando is, surged 46% year-over-year. It's an acceleration of a trend that's been going on for years now. Florida is an anomaly and, like Texas, it's posted relatively strong EV growth over the years without significant state incentives.

In 2023 and 2024 EV adoption continued to become more polarized by state. That may also be happening on a local level in Florida, which isn't as homogeneous as it appears.

The rest of the country tends to see Florida as full of retirees, but even by 2030, official state projections suggest that people aged 65 and up won't be the largest demographic group in the state. That leaves more room for Gen X and Millennials, who previous studies have shown tend to buy more EVs than Boomers, while the latter group controls policy decisions related to them.

And while the state government hasn't exactly been pro-EV, that hasn't stopped efforts to expand charging infrastructure in Florida. In 2022, Invisible Urban Charging (IUC) announced plans to install 6,000 chargers—doubling the number of chargers in the state. The chargers are primarily 80-amp Level 2 AC units for public spaces and housing developments, IUC said at the time.

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