The price of crude oil sank to $73.48 a barrel on Wednesday but the average price for a gallon of gasoline remains high at $3.92, ten cents less than a week ago but fifty cents higher than it was on July 24, 2025, according to the Triple A.
That fact doesn’t seem to be enough to push consumers to exchange an onerous price at the pump for new battery electric vehicles as sales are down 22% year-over-year according to Cox Automotive.
Indeed, at the 20 dealership Rohrman Automotive Group, new EVs are barely budging off the midwest-based company’s lots.
“On the new car side they’re pretty slow,” said Ryan Rohrman, CEO of Rohrman Automotive Group, in an interview. “The numbers are kind of all over the place, but you know we’re down about 27% in EV sales year over year.”
The company operates 20 dealerships in Wisconsin, Illinois and Indiana.
The mega group Lithia & Driveway sells vehicles of basically every make online and in more than 295 retail locations in the U.S. and Canada.
While not revealing exact sales figures, the company’s chief customer officer had a similar assessment of how high gas prices and sales of new battery electric vehicles are related, but with a qualifier.
“It’s not translating into electric vehicle sales, but the market on electric vehicles is certainly in no way dead,” asserted Dianna du Preez, in an interview.
She maintains the market is moving away from EV sales that were bolstered by federal tax credits that were discontinued last fall and incentives, to what she termed “pragmatic electrification,” AKA hybrids.
“Hybrids definitely seem to be an important part of the strategy, both for the OEMs as well as for the consumers,” said du Preez. “It’s like a no-friction purchase. They don’t have to change their behavior in any way, because there’s no plugin required at this point, so essentially everything still happens the way they used to, so we definitely see a shift towards that rather than a very strong increase to electric.”
For Rohrman’s customers, hybrids are the overwhelming choice.
“Hybrid is what everyone wants right now,” he said. “I think it’s probably the future of the automotive industry, in terms of what power train is going to win because they just keep unlocking more and more potential.”
Industry data supports what Rohrman and du Preez are seeing in the field.
Sales of hybrid-electric vehicles represent the fastest growing powertrain with volume increasing 83% since 2023, and capturing a record 14.1% of the U.S. market during the first quarter of 2026, according to Cox Automotive.
“On electrification, the story is hybrids are having their moments,” said Stephanie Valdez Streaty, director of industry insights at Cox Automotive during a media briefing Thursday.
Those “moments” are fueled by both increasing product choice and rising gas prices.
There are currently 49 hybrid electric models available, an increase of seven since 2023, with 12 makes offering HEVs, two more since 2023, she said.
In a Cox Automotive survey taken in May of consumers in the market for a new vehicle, 56% said rising gas prices would make them “more likely” to consider purchasing a hybrid or plug-in hybrid vehicle.
It’s not just new hybrids that are attracting buyers.
Sales of used hybrid sales are up 34% year-to-date with list prices hitting an all-time high in mid-June, averaging $38,800, according to new data from car shopping and research site CarGurus.
Used hybrid models seeing the biggest sales gains include: Toyota Camry at 306%, Honda CR-V Hybrid with a 78% increase, Jeep Wrangler 4xe, up 68% and Toyota RAV4 Hybrid sales increasing 27%, according to CarGurus.
While sales of new electric vehicles are lagging, used EVs are attracting customers, increasing 29% year-over-year to a record high 129,000 units according to Cox Automotive.
Consumers who felt priced out of the new EV market are still sensitive to the cost of going all-electric, with the lion’s share of sales clustered around a fairly tight price range of $25,000-$31,000, according to CarGurus, which reported the top-selling used EVs fall in that range: Hyundai Ioniq 5, Chevy Equinox EV, Tesla Model Y.
For Rohrman, however, his group’s dealerships will take all the new hybrids they can get.
“Those are the cars that we can’t keep on the lot, and as the dealer body, those are the cars we keep asking for the manufacturer to produce more of,” he said.
At Lithia and Driveway, the du Preez agrees hybrids are the hot item right now, but the company isn’t ready to give up on EVs and their future, declaring, “I do think there’s still an electric future for us. The OEMs want an electric future, because essentially, it’s software defined. So it’s a software-defined future in a vehicle, and the electric platform is the platform that will get us there, but we need to walk alongside our customers to know best when they are ready for that big jump, and the technology will develop and evolve, and the infrastructure will evolve.”
With the boosted demand hybrids are seeing now, it would be easy to imagine their “moment” Cox Automotive’s Streaty described could snowball into a momentum strong enough to vanquish EVs in the long run.
She admits hybrids are probably here to stay, however, “I think long term the future’s electric, but for a very long time hybrids are going to fill in that space that are meeting consumers where they are. There’s going to be a lot of options to choose as these more manufacturers launch more models.”
