Slashdot Mirror
Tesla Model 3 Becomes Best Selling Electric Car In World (cleantechnica.com)
Jose Pontes of EV Volumes and CleanTechnica has crunched some numbers and found that the Tesla Model 3 is now the best selling plug-in vehicle in the world. "In fact, the Model 3 was approximately 55,000 sales above the #2 BAIC EC-Series, an extremely popular Chinese model," CleanTechnica reports. "The Model 3 gobbled 7% of the plug-in vehicle market, while the #2 EC-Series and #3 Nissan LEAF each had 4%." From the report: After those top three, as the chart shows, the Tesla Model S and Model X were #4 and #5, respectively. They were followed by three Chinese models and then the Toyota Prius Prime and Mitsubishi Outlander PHEV. The Model 3 (and others) helped push the world plug-in vehicle share up to 2.1% in 2018. (Double that 4 times and we're at about 30% market share.) [...] Remember, 93% of plug-in vehicle sales in 2018 were not Model 3 sales. Nearly 2 million non -- Model 3 electric cars, SUVs, and crossovers made it into consumers' parking spots. Still, there's clearly a new king of the hill, and its young Tesla's 4th model.
---
gotta watch the conditionals, folks (Score:3, Insightful)
by argStyopa ( 232550 ) Alter Relationship on Thursday April 07, 2016 @06:35PM (#51864323) Journal
"...If it sells every car that's been reserved..."
I'm going to call it here, that less than 100,000 - maybe even less than 50k - actually turn into real orders.
--
-Styopa
Among the early adopters a vast majority are also the same sensible people, knowingly and willingly paying way over their normal price range for the model 3. The most common models traded in for the model 3 were Camrys, priuses and accords. My own comfort price range is 25K, and I paid 55K way beyond my comfort zone. I had heard numerous owners say the same thing.
As the prices fall, you might be tempted to stretch your price range too, it has that kind of effect, once you test drive one.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Agreed. My typical new car is about $40k, but I went well above to $55k for my 3. After about $11k in tax savings, and free charging at work, it comes out cheaper than $40k.
Anyone care to update or respond to the list?
If they actually bet on those beliefs, they've probably lost their shoes in the stock market and can't afford to comment. But talk is always cheap and there's no end of people who'd like to convince you that they know what they're talking about. Anyone who was all talk is surely talking about something else right now.
Electric cars, and Teslas in particular, are a teensy, tiny minority of all the cars out there, and a teensy proportion of new sales.
Teslas look quite a bit better if you only consider their share of markets Tesla actually is in. The number of cars sold worldwide would include the number of cars sold in India and China where Tesla has no serious business yet.
I was surprised to read that in the state of California, about 1 in 22 of all cars sold in the third quarter of 2018 were Teslas (actual number: 4.6% of "light vehicle sales"). That's not their share of BEVs, that's their share of all cars sold.
https://cleantechnica.com/2018/12/02/tesla-4-6-of-california-vehicle-sales-in-q3/
It's true that BEVs are still a tiny slice of the worldwide car market. There was a time when car sales were tiny compared to horse-drawn buggy sales. The past doesn't guarantee the future.
Musk is a salesman. [...] But the giants can stamp on him any time they like.
I used to think there was some truth to this idea. Now I scorn it.
For "the giants" to "stamp on him" they would have to produce so many electric cars that they steal away his customers. One question for you... where will they get the batteries? Have they invested staggering sums of money into their own battery factory, as Tesla did?
Also, will their cars be just as good as a Tesla? I don't take seriously any car design that doesn't have a front trunk. The new electric cars that just have an electric motor under the hood instead of an ICE engine seem like slap-dash last-minute catch-up designs by companies that aren't ready to compete with Tesla yet.
It's not that I think the front trunk by itself is that big a deal; the front trunk is the by-product of a clean-sheet new BEV design. Why would you want a complex drive train when you can have a motor right between the two wheels? For all-wheel drive, why would you want anything other than two redundant motors? If a car company hasn't even gotten that far, how competitive can its cars really be to Tesla?
To hear Musk (and others) speak, you'd think BMW are scrambling to catch up. They're not. They just don't care.
That's an interesting idea. I doubt you can support it.
In the "large luxury car" segment of the market, Tesla ate everyone else's lunch. Not that many people will pay $80K or $100K or more for a car, so a Tesla sale is a sale some other company didn't get. Tesla got more sales than BMW or Mercedes or any other luxury maker.
https://cleantechnica.com/2018/10/01/1-tesla-model-s-dominating-large-luxury-car-sales-in-usa/
If you add up Mercedes S-class sales, and BMW 6-series and 7-series sales, that's roughly the number of cars sold as the Tesla Model S alone.
The picture looks actually worse when you compare the Tesla Model 3 to its competitors. It's crushing them.
https://cleantechnica.com/2018/12/08/tesla-model-3-completely-crushing-us-luxury-car-competition-10-cleantechnica-charts/
Are these companies blithely unconcerned about Tesla? Really?
To hear Musk (and others) speak, you'd think BMW are scrambling to catch up. They're not. They just don't care. Their EV models make them no more than Tesla, which is a drop in the ocean to them. It's chicken-feed to them, in a niche market.
As I understand Elon Musk's claims: car companies currently make a lot of money off of car repairs; BEVs need less repairs and don't cost very much to repair; car companies have been reluctant to switch to BEVs because they stand to make much less money off of BEVs.
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely