June's lagging green-car sales actually lagged a little more

That leap that we thought US plug-in vehicle sales took in June? Turns out, it was more of a short hop now that Tesla Motor released its second-quarter deliveries and we learned they came in lower than expected. Blame "the extreme production ramp in Q2 and the high mix of customer-ordered vehicles still on trucks and ships at the end of the quarter," Tesla talked about earlier this week.

While the company discloses neither monthly sales nor US-only figures, Tesla said July 3 that it delivered 14,370 vehicles for the quarter, including 9,745 Model S sedans and 4,625 Model X SUVs. That delivery rate was the California-based automaker's lowest since the third quarter of 2014. Factoring in a 55 percent-to-45 percent US to foreign delivery ratio, we calculate that Tesla's second-quarter monthly deliveries were about 2,635 units.

As a result, overall US sales of hybrids, diesels, and plug-ins fell 22 percent to about 34,700 units last month, a steeper drop than the 21 percent we previously calculated. More notably, plug-in vehicle sales may have only increased 5.1 percent from a year earlier, down from the 11 percent jump previously estimated. That Chevrolet Bolt electric vehicle debut can't come soon enough, apparently.

The better news is that, while deliveries were less than expected, Tesla produced more than 18,000 vehicles during the second quarter, and almost half of those came during the last four weeks of the quarter. That reflects a pretty steep ramp-up in production and could bode well for third-quarter Tesla sales. In fact, that production rate puts Tesla over the 100,000-vehicle-a-year mark, which would certainly be a milestone. In the meantime, we've put the updated the June spreadsheet for US green-car sales below.