Atlas/SACE Report Says Southeast Passenger EV Sales Rose 25% — While Announced Investment and Anticipated Jobs Fell

New passenger EV sales across six Southeastern states rose 25% from July 2025 through June 2026, even as the region's tracked announced EV and battery manufacturing investment and anticipated jobs declined for the first time in the seven-report series, according to a new Atlas Public Policy and Southern Alliance for Clean Energy report.¹²

The report covers Alabama, Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina and Tennessee. Atlas says roughly 225,000 new passenger EVs were sold during the 12-month period, while SACE puts cumulative new passenger EV sales at 1,137,170 as of June 30, 2026.¹²

That consumer-side growth sits next to a weaker manufacturing picture. Atlas currently counts nearly $74 billion of announced EV and battery manufacturing investment in the six states and more than 61,300 anticipated jobs, representing 40% and 32%, respectively, of the U.S. totals tracked in its dataset.¹

Those labels matter. The investment figure is not a measure of capital already spent, and the job figure is not a count of people currently employed.¹³ Atlas's prior report methodology explicitly warned that companies may not ultimately deliver every announced job and tracked projects through statuses including operational, under construction, delayed and canceled.³

Sales and factory commitments are moving differently

SACE, Atlas's partner on the report, says announced manufacturing investment and anticipated jobs both posted negative growth over the latest 12 months for the first time since the organizations began publishing the regional series.² The current Atlas page says manufacturers in the region canceled, delayed, downsized or relocated some EV production plans during the period, while some automakers and battery companies shifted operations toward energy-storage battery production.¹

The report does not show a uniformly shrinking EV market. Its passenger-vehicle data point the other way: about 225,000 new passenger EV sales in the latest year, up 25% from the preceding year.¹ That is why the manufacturing decline and sales growth are best read as separate indicators rather than evidence that one caused the other.

The used market also expanded in Atlas's data. The report lists about 140,800 used EV sales over the latest 12 months, up 34% from the prior year.¹ Atlas's July 2026 methodology note says its used-market analysis relies on Experian used-vehicle registrations as a proxy for used sales and may not capture every private-party transaction, so the figure should not be read as a complete census of retail deals.⁴

Charging kept expanding, too

The same regional report shows infrastructure growth alongside the sales increase. Atlas says DC fast-charging ports accounted for more than half of newly added public charging ports during the latest 12 months and grew more than twice as fast as Level 2 ports.¹ SACE separately reports 28% growth in highway-corridor fast charging and an average of about 133 new public charging stations per month across the region.²

That distinction between stations and ports is important: the two measures are not interchangeable, and the report uses them for different pieces of the charging picture.

The result is a split regional snapshot rather than a single up-or-down verdict. In Atlas/SACE's latest data, new and used passenger EV activity grew and charging deployment continued to expand, while the pipeline of announced manufacturing investment and anticipated jobs weakened.¹² The report's policy explanations go further, but the measured divergence itself does not require assuming that tax policy, fuel prices or any other single factor caused the change.²

Sources

Footnotes

1. Transportation Electrification in the Southeast: 2026 — Atlas Public Policy, September 2026. https://atlaspolicy.com/transportation-electrification-in-the-southeast-2026/ Original report landing page for the six-state July 2025-June 2026 analysis; establishes the current passenger-EV sales, manufacturing-investment/job and charging figures used above. Atlas's page gives analytical report results rather than official state retail records. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷ ↩⁸ ↩⁹

2. 2026 “Transportation Electrification in the Southeast” Report: The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly — Southern Alliance for Clean Energy, Sept. 8, 2026. https://cleanenergy.org/news/2026-transportation-electrification-in-the-southeast-report-the-good-the-bad-and-the-ugly/ Report-partner companion analysis; establishes the 1,137,170 cumulative-sales figure, the first report-series decline in announced manufacturing investment/anticipated jobs, and the cited charging-station figures. SACE is an advocacy organization, so its causal and political interpretations are not adopted as newsroom fact here. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶

3. Transportation Electrification in the Southeast: 2025 — Atlas Public Policy / Southern Alliance for Clean Energy, September 2025. https://atlaspolicy.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/Transportation-Electrification-in-the-Southeast-2025-1.pdf Prior report methodology used only for the generic limitation that announced/anticipated manufacturing jobs are not guaranteed realized employment and that project status can change. ↩ ↩²

4. Access to Electric Vehicles Grows with the Used EV Market — Atlas EV Hub, July 31, 2026. https://www.atlasevhub.com/data-stories/access-to-electric-vehicle2-grows-with-the-used-ev-market/ Atlas methodology disclosure explaining that Experian used-vehicle registrations are used as a proxy for used EV sales and may not capture all private-party sales. ↩