Toyota Camry Hybrid Dominates 2025 Sales: Battery-Powered Cars Triumph

According to the Energy Information Administration, 22% of all vehicle sales in the US were battery-powered in the first quarter of 2025. That includes everything from EVs to hybrids and plug-ins. A year ago, that number was just 18%. Hybrids have proven the most popular of the bunch, comprising around 12% of all vehicle sales, while EVs like the Tesla Model X account for around 8%, and PHEVs like the RAV4 Prime make up the remaining 2%.

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It doesn’t take an experienced market analyst to say that battery-powered vehicles, and hybrids especially, are no longer seen as a novelty in the American auto market. Drivers are still hesitant to buy vehicles that they’ll have to plug in – and that will likely continue to be the case until charging infrastructure becomes more widespread – but it seems like we’re more than happy to get behind the wheel of hybrids, and the market leader probably won’t surprise you.

Americans Love The Camry

Maybe the surest sign of the times was when Toyota announced that the 2025 Camry would be hybrid-only. We ran a thread not so long ago asking whether the lack of an ICE option would prevent you from buying a Camry, and the response was largely in favor of America’s favorite sedan going hybrid. The general perception, when it comes to the Camry, is that it is perhaps the most functional, practical car on the market, and that a hybrid powertrain would only make the Camry even more functional and practical. We’re not talking about a hybrid Mustang or an electric Challenger, after all, we’re talking about the Camry: a safe, accessible family car that just about anyone can use as a daily driver.

The general public seems to be in agreement with our readers, as Toyota’s decision to go hybrid hasn’t harmed the Camry’s sales figures at all. For the first half of 2025, the Camry has sold 155,330 units. This time a year, ago Toyota had sold 155,242 units for 2024. If you really want to split hairs, you could argue that Toyota actually gained nearly a hundred new drivers with their decision to add a battery and an electric motor.

The Hybrid Camry Isn’t A Compromise, It’s A Step Up

It doesn’t hurt that the 2025 Toyota Camry is actually more impressive than the 2024 Toyota Camry, if we’re just talking numbers…

The hybrid Camry shaves close to a full second off last year’s 0-60 mph time, clearly outclasses the ICE model when it comes to fuel economy, and cranks out an extra 22 horses. Simply put, anyone who still makes fun of hybrids for being glorified golf carts needs to update their joke book. We don’t even need to point to the science-fiction-tier performance of premium hybrids like the new Corvette to illustrate what battery power can do, we’re seeing the effect in the low and mid-budget models, too.

This Year’s Sales Numbers Point To A Broad Acceptance Of Hybrid Vehicles

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The Toyota Camry was the big winner for hybrids this year, but it wasn’t the only major win for the hybrid segment. Some other standouts in the first-half sales numbers included…

• The Toyota RAV4 sold 239,451 units in total. Of these, 95,813 were hybrids, with another 11,357 being plug-ins. Toyota has announced that the RAV4, America’s favorite SUV, will soon be ditching the ICE model, as well.
• Honda sold 212,561 CR-Vs in the first half of 2025. Of those, 113,953 were for hybrids. Year-over-year, overall CR-V sales are up 8% while hybrids are up 22%.
• In 11th place, Honda sold 128,236 Civics in the first half of 2025, with 44,051 of these being hybrids.
• The Toyota Corolla holds 12th place overall for first-six-months sales, with 120,052 units sold. This includes 27,544 hybrids.
• The Jeep Wrangler 4xe is on track to keep its hold on first-place for the plug-in segment. In 2024, the 4xe closed out the year with 55,554 sales, making up 37% of all Wrangler sales. For 2025, the 4xe makes up about 26% of Wrangler sales, according to Q1 reports, and Jeep has sold 85,631 Wranglers, which would put the 4xe at around 22,264 units sold, which should put it in the same ballpark as last year’s total sales by the end of the year.

It’s Hard To Imagine Anything Shaking The Camry Out Of The Top 10 Sellers

The Ford F-150 has been America’s favorite vehicle overall for almost 50 years. The Camry has a way to go before it can claim half a century at the top, but it’s closing in on a quarter-century, with the 2001 Honda Accord having been the last car to challenge Toyota for the title of America’s favorite sedan. Aside from that little blip on the radar, the Camry has held the throne since 1997.

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The Camry has been available on the US market since 1979, when the Camry name was first used on the “Celica Camry,” but it wouldn’t start its reign as king of the four-doors until nearly 30 years into its residency in the American market, and it wasn’t actually the Camry we knew and loved that would take that spot. In the late 1990s, the fifth-gen narrow-body V50 Camry was rebranded as the Vista, and it was the second-gen XV20 wide-body Camry that would become America’s favorite car for the next quarter-century.

The XV20 was a mid-size sedan with a 130-hp 2.2-liter inline-four as its base engine. The V6 version of the car, packing a 3.0-liter 1MZ-FE and available with a manual transmission, made Car and Driver’s 10 Best list for 1997, and the car scored an overall IIHS rating of “Good”. Thanks in some part to all this good press, Toyota sold 394,397 of these cars in 1997, beating the Accord out by around 12,000 sales.

The Camry Maintained Strong Sales Numbers Even Through The Pandemic

The closest thing the Camry has had to a “weak” sales year in recent history might have been 2020, when Toyota sold 294,348 units. That’s a lot, but it’s unheard of for the nameplate to sell anything below 300,000 at the end of a sales year. You can blame the pandemic for that, as sales numbers were down across the board.

If we were the type to place a bet, we’d put all our chips on the Toyota Camry keeping its hold on the market for another quarter-century. If Toyota’s flagship four-door can switch to hybrid-only without missing a beat, then we can’t imagine what it would take to break its winning streak.

Sources: Energy Information Administration, Toyota.