Spain's electric top ten this month has no European car in it. Not one. Registration data from the DGT, compiled by motor.es and published on 19 September, puts two Teslas at the top, six Chinese models behind them, and a Toyota and a Kia filling the rest.
The ranking so far this month
| # | Model | Units | Brand's home market |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Tesla Model 3 | 1723 | United States |
| 2 | Tesla Model Y | 715 | United States |
| 3 | Leapmotor B10 | 209 | China |
| 4 | Toyota C-HR+ | 193 | Japan |
| 5 | BYD Dolphin Surf | 190 | China |
| 6 | Kia EV3 | 132 | South Korea |
| 7 | Leapmotor B05 | 128 | China |
| 8 | BYD Atto 2 | 125 | China |
| 9 | BYD Atto 3 Evo | 123 | China |
| 10 | Changan Deepal S05 | 102 | China |
The first European model is the Mercedes-Benz CLA on 97 units, five short of tenth place. Behind it sit the Citroën ë-C3 on 96, the Volvo EX30 on 91 and the Renault Twingo E-Tech on 89. The absence is real, but it is narrow: four European models sit within 15 units of the table.
The Tesla figures are a shipping artefact as much as a demand signal
The number worth pausing on is 1723 against 5940 — this month's Model 3 registrations against the total for January to August. Close to three in ten of every Model 3 registered in Spain this year has landed in the past three weeks.
Tesla ships to Spain in batches, and September closes its third quarter. When a boat docks, registrations spike; motor.es makes the same point about the pattern. A partial-month ranking taken during a quarter-end delivery wave flatters Tesla and flattens everyone else, because rivals supplying the market steadily register cars evenly across the month.
The year-to-date table is the calmer picture. Through August, on ANFAC and IDEAUTO figures: Model 3 on 5940, Model Y on 3767, BYD Dolphin Surf on 3671, Kia EV3 on 3299, Toyota C-HR+ on 2921. Tesla still leads, but the gap between the Model Y and the Dolphin Surf is under a hundred cars.
What the Chinese share does and does not show
Six of ten is the headline and it holds: Leapmotor has two cars in the table, BYD three, Changan one. What it does not show is a sudden arrival. The models involved are small, cheap and sit in exactly the segment where European manufacturers have the thinnest electric line-ups — and the Citroën ë-C3 and Renault Twingo E-Tech immediately below the cut are the European answer to them, trailing by single-digit unit counts rather than by a category.
Caveats worth carrying
motor.es publishes no cut-off date beyond "so far in September", so this is a partial month of provisional DGT registrations, not a closed monthly result. One month is not a trend, and a quarter-end month is the least representative one anyone could pick. The full-September figures, due in early October, are the ones to set against the rest of the European picture — Tesla was ninth in the Dutch August registrations and behind two Škodas in Czechia's year to date.