You can see the shift in showroom traffic before it ever shows up in a sales report. Shoppers who spent the last two years cross-shopping EVs are quietly circling back to hybrids instead, and the data backing that up just landed. Cox Automotive, the company behind Kelley Blue Book, tracks roughly 12,000 new-car shoppers a year to see which vehicles and powertrains actually make a buyer’s short list before they ever set foot in a dealership. Its first-half 2026 Brand Watch numbers show hybrid consideration climbing to a new high while EV interest slipped again, and the brands riding that wave aren’t the ones the industry expected two years ago.
The Numbers Behind the Shift
Hybrid consideration among new-vehicle shoppers hit 22 percent in the first half of 2026, up from 20 percent over the same period a year earlier. EV consideration moved the other direction, dropping to 10 percent from 11 percent. Cox Automotive’s survey defines “consideration” as a vehicle a shopper says they’d actively look at while shopping, so the numbers reflect genuine purchase intent rather than idle curiosity about electric cars.
SUVs told an even starker story than the hybrid-versus-EV split. Non-luxury SUV consideration hit 71 percent, an all-time high in the survey’s history, while non-luxury sedan interest sank to a record low of 25 percent. Luxury SUVs climbed to 79 percent consideration, up four points year over year, against just 39 percent for luxury sedans. Put those two data sets together and you get the current state of American car shopping in one sentence: buyers want a hybrid powertrain in an SUV body, full stop.
Which Brands Are Winning
Only a handful of brands actually gained shopper consideration in the first half of the year, which Cox Automotive’s own analysts flagged as unusual. Vanessa Ton, senior manager of market and customer research at Cox Automotive, put it plainly: “The limited number of brands that gained consideration in the first half highlights how selective vehicle shoppers have become.”
Among non-luxury brands, Subaru and Kia were the standouts. Subaru’s gain traces directly to Crosstrek and Forester Hybrid interest, while Kia climbed on the strength of its value-oriented SUV lineup and the Carnival minivan. In the luxury segment, Audi was the lone brand posting real gains, driven by shopper interest in the A3 and A5 sedans, an interesting wrinkle in a data set otherwise dominated by SUVs and hybrids.
Toyota’s dominance in the hybrid space keeps compounding. The brand placed five separate models in Cox Automotive’s top 10 most-considered electrified vehicles for the first half of 2026. Two newcomers broke into that top 10 for the first time this cycle: the Honda Accord Hybrid and the Mazda CX-50 Hybrid, both proof that hybrid demand has spread well past Toyota’s own lineup and into direct competitors racing to catch up.
Honda’s strength wasn’t limited to the Accord. The brand led all non-luxury competitors in nine of twelve separate purchase-consideration factors Cox Automotive tracks, including durability, affordability, comfort, and performance, an unusually dominant showing for a single brand in one survey cycle. On the luxury side, no single nameplate ran the table the way Honda did; Lexus and Lincoln each topped three of twelve factors, splitting the leadership more evenly than in the mainstream segment.
Why Sedans Keep Losing Ground
None of this happened because sedans got worse. It happened because the vehicles that used to sell on price and efficiency, small and midsize sedans, are getting squeezed from both directions. SUVs no longer carry the fuel-economy penalty they once did, since hybrid powertrains close most of the gap, and financing terms have pushed shoppers toward vehicles they can justify keeping for a decade or more. A hybrid SUV increasingly satisfies both the practical case a sedan used to make and the space and ride height buyers say they want.
What It Means for the Industry’s Bet
The auto industry spent the better part of five years pouring engineering budgets into EV platforms on the assumption that shopper interest would keep climbing in a straight line. Cox Automotive’s first-half 2026 data suggests that line bent, and the demand that would have gone to EVs is landing on hybrids instead, particularly hybrid SUVs from brands that already had strong reputations for reliability. Subaru, Kia, and Toyota’s hybrid gains aren’t a rejection of electrification; they’re a redirection of it toward the powertrain that lets a buyer skip the public charging conversation entirely while still cutting a fuel bill. For automakers still calibrating how many EVs to build next year, that’s the more important number in the whole report.