Volvo Cars sold 50,820 cars in January, with almost half of them coming with a plug. Plugin model sales were also up significantly from a year prior, growing 17% compared to January 2024.

In total, 44% of the company’s January 2025 vehicle sales — 22,398 out of 50,820 — were plugin vehicle sales. Of those, 9,705 (19% of total vehicle sales) were full electrics (+5% over January 2024), and 12,693 (25% of total vehicle sales) were plugin hybrids (+28% over January 2024).

Volvo Cars’ overall sales were down 5% — from 53,402 to 50,820. With plugin vehicle sales up significantly and Volvo Cars’ overall sales down, what does that mean about non-plugin vehicle sales? Naturally, that means they were down — a lot. Fossil-fueled vehicle sales (including mild hybrids) were down 17% in January 2025. Incidentally, that percentage decrease is the exact opposite of the percentage increase in plugin vehicle sales.

On one hand, it’s great to see a legacy automaker like Volvo Cars moving fast into an electric future. On the other hand, I forgot how small Volvo Cars was. About 50,000 sales a month is not that many. That’s approximately 600,000 a year, or about a third of Tesla’s sales. Nonetheless, as a well respected, high-quality, moderately large automaker, it’s good to see that 19% of its sales are now full electrics and 44% have a plug. Progress.