Welcome back to the podcast today, BYD's UK Surge, New York's biggest charging hub and the world car awards favour Vs.

Plus stay tuned.

Later in the show, I'll tell you why the US could follow China and force Tesla to redesign its door handles.

On EV News China today, our spin-off podcast, we're talking about SAIC's big numbers, the smart hashtag 6,

and China's EV market accelerating in December. And join me later for a bonus show called

Can the Tesla Cyber Truck be saved by going global? It'll be live tonight for patrons.

And all Patreon exclusives going to the free feed

after seven days. So if I were, you just wait a week and it'll be out in the free feed and then

you haven't got to pay for Patreon. If you want the content first, though, you can support the work

that I do on that platform. Now, we'll kick off with Volvo Cars bucking the trend, with more EV sold in the United States.

Volvo Cars was one of the first big names to bet its future on the proposition that the internal combustion engine would be dead sooner rather than later.

Well, last year, that wager could have been a little bit premature.

Global sales fell by 7% to 710,000 vehicles at

Volvo, dragged down by a 13% drop in their demand for EVs. The company called it market

turbulence. And the pain was acute in China. The world's largest EV market, Volvo's Bev sales

fell by 46%.

Europe 2 contracted, yet amidst the general gloom, Volvo found salvation.

In an unlikely place, the United States, a market supposedly turning cold on batteries,

Volvo's EV sales surged 91% last year.

The divergence between geographies was quite striking last year.

Chinese consumers abandoned Volvo.

For plug-in hybrids, they were up, but Americans rushed to buy them.

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