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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.
I'm not surprised that the Tesla model 3 is the best selling electric car; I'd be surprised if it wasn't.
Like many things, it does seem likely that a lower-cost mass produced competitor is likely, in the long run, to take the lead, though.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
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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.
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-Styopa
Make a 50 mile range EV for cheap, and I'd buy two.
One charges directly through solar (etc) during the day, without the grid tie nonsense.
The other is for commute etc.
...is a golf cart.
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
Interestingly enough, this story was posted right as the first delivery of Model 3s to China is arriving in Tianjin. :) Also the second shipment to Europe will also arrive at Zeebrugge shortly.
Anchor: "We take you now to our Chief Meteorologist, Paris Hilton." Paris: "It's hot." Anchor: "Thank you."
The entire Tesla enterprise is a bet on a curve. The battery price will halve and the energy density will double every seven years. Sort of a Moore's Law for the batteries. The play book of Tesla is to find which segment of the car/suv market can be attacked at what price batteries. Roadster in 2008. S in 2012. X in 2015. 3 in 2018.
The auto industry is very mature. Almost all its parts have been refined and optimized over and over for a long time. The prices of components, crankshafts, body panels, differential gears, do not change significantly between the conception, design and production. They conditioned to think like this. "Today battery price is 200 $/kWh. The gasoline power train cost X$. Replacing it with electric would give me Y kWh battery, so... " They are not used to, "battery price to day is 190 $/kWh, four years from now it will 140$/kWh, ...". This is the mistake they made in underestimating Tesla.
Also the temperament of Elon helped. He kept making impossible to believe claims. So they discounted everything he said. Had he been a staid stiff upper lip CEO, they might have taken him more seriously and started competing with him earlier. 11 years after the Roadster, still there is no electric roadster from any competition with comparable spec. 50 kWh battery, 240 mile range, peppy two seater.
While the media circus he created kept focusing on his "failures". What he delivered in his "failures" were still stunning ground breaking trail blazing machines.
The battery era is dawning. It is getting cheaper to store 1 GWh of electricity than to build an gas burning powerplant, in the usa! In deep mines, not having to suck out the diesel exhaust pays for the conversion to battery powered earth movers!
At the price of 90 $/kWh BEV and ICEV will cost the same off the dealership, for a 300 mile range car. At that price indeterminacy of solar and wind would not be an issue. We are in for a great battery powered future.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Sales are always low in January, Tesla made a huge pre-tax credit phasedown push (although they've almost completely compensated for the credit reduction via cost savings since then), and they're focusing production on European and Chinese models - not simply for the ability to sell with a much higher ASP (very high take rates on M3P, for example), but because it's quite time critical due to the trade wars (March deadline for the renewal of tariffs against China, and next week a new ruling about whether to start a 90 day countdown to impose tariffs against Europe, which would also meet with retaliatory tariffs on the auto industry). There's now 7 RORO ships out there full of Model 3s, not counting the Glovis Captain which recently unloaded at Zeebrugge.
Tesla always focuses on what's time critical. Before the US credit phasedown, that was the US. Now that it's 6 months until the next, smaller phasedown, the focus is on China and Europe.
Anchor: "We take you now to our Chief Meteorologist, Paris Hilton." Paris: "It's hot." Anchor: "Thank you."
The record.
Did I miss anything? For the past 4 years I have been reading all the above here on /. over and over and over again posted with absolute conviction any time the topic comes up. Anyone care to update or respond to the list?
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.
Double it 6 times and it will be 120% of the world market!!
Also the second shipment to Europe will also arrive at Zeebrugge shortly.
And Musk is in Europe, supervising the Model 3 roll-out in Europe:
https://electrek.co/2019/02/09...
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
Weird, eh? Only a year or so ago anyone who bought American cars was a moron, and a jingoistic one at that. Remember "GET A BRAIN MORANS"? Buying foreign cars was a sign of sophistication and taste. But ever since Trump declared his trade war, Sinophobia has made a comeback not seen since the "Yellow Peril" age of Fu Manchu.
America's adversary? The Americans were front and center getting China admitted to the WTO. You know, the thing without which, China would not be the powerhouse it is today.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
In as highly fragmented a market as this one, "best seller" seems not to convey much meaningful information.
Every morning I park what might be my last gasoline engine car near the 'plug in' area at work. However, even though I'm one of the first 10% of the people in the office, both chargers are usually occupied. Unfortunately, I suspect that I'd never really be able to take advantage of the free charging.
I'd guess that it's more like 10 years from the start of a tipping point. By then about 20% of the cars will be electric, at that point gas will start to get cheap (with the removal of 20% of the demand), but banks and investors will stop financing oil projects (which require lots of money just to keep going). In about 20 years gasoline would be very expensive and pull the rest of the car market into full electric.
I've been thinking about getting a used Tesla next year, once my Honda CRV is paid off. One of the nice things is that beside brakes and tires there is very little maintenance needed for them and the batteries look to be holding up very well. They are expecting 90% capacity at 185,000 miles on average and people with high milage are seeing better results. $35,000 for a 2012 Model S is looking like a good deal, but I'll likely pick up a midrange Model 3
The force that blew the Big Bang continues to accelerate.
Cinese EVs are not a single brand. Many cars, but split among several brands. Hence Tesla is biggest at the moment. Also, some of the cheaper Chinese things cannot be called 'cars', quality too low to be sold outside China. (Fails crash tests so badly they won't be legal, and so on.)
Companies do indeed go bankrupt. There are different modes of bankruptcy, and in what they call Chapter 11, the company stays in business, only holders of stock and perhaps some bonds lose all or part of their investment. When a company runs out of money -- they lack the cash on hand to pay their employees, their suppliers demand immediate payment and/or loans come due -- is often hard to tell from the outside looking in when that is going to happen. A company can get by on the credit terms extended to them and than bam!, one day they cannot.
The Shorts and Haters have been chanting Bankruptcy! Bankruptcy! for the dozen or so years Tesla has been a "public" company, and Mr. Musk joked about it, was it around May 2018? Since then Mr. Musk admitted that the company came close to that happening.
As to the mental health of Mr. Musk, there was the matter of the putative offer to take the company private at $420/share, at a time when it was trading in the mid to upper 300's. As far as anyone can tell, that offer was, in the software parlance, complete vaporware. This kind of stunt is something responsible people in the shareholder-owned-company world don't do, and the SEC did look upon the entire affair with askance. Though I suppose along the lines of ancient Greek philosophical thought experiments about persons who never tell the truth, can we even believe Mr. Musk's admission of how close Tesla came to shutting down when Financing Assured at $420 was all made up?
There has been indeed turnover of top Tesla executives and especially on the finance and accounting side. It is hard to tell if this rate is higher or lower than in situations where the company isn't being scrutinized as much. But again, given the lack of "transparency" of this company, to put it charitably, making inferences based on such things is all we have.
I think the jury is still out on whether Tesla can "scale." One of the supposed failed prophesies of the naysayers, shorts and haters was the claim around early 2018 that Tesla would never get past 1000 cars/week whereas they easily made it to 5000 cars/week with claims they tested their line at 7000. Well, the promises of Tesla "scaling" or "breaking out" or "disrupting" the entire auto industry were based on part on what Elon Musk described as an Alien Dreadnought -- a very highly automated factory capable of achieving high profit margins on a Model 3 selling for $35,000.
From what I hear, the Alien Dreadnought didn't break out, it broke down. Tesla switched to hiring enough shifts to operate Fremont Assembly 24/7, which is a very unusual practice in the cost-conscious auto industry in all segments from basic transportation to premium vehicles. They also gave up (at least for now) on a 35K Model 3 and found a ready market for a 50K+ optioned-up Model 3, although recently they are making price reductions on that.
For Tesla to scale up from their 2018 Q3 and Q4 production that allowed them to squeak by with a slim profit, it appears that hopes of higher production to serve a global market hang on the Shanghai factory. Mr. Musk said as much in a "conference call" to investors, when questioned by a financial analyst about where more cars will be made, he made one of his trademark remarks, "In a place called Shanghai." Well, the Shanghai factory is this expanse of mud right now, and Mr. Musk or other Tesla executives have "guided" that they will have this factory making a substantial number of cars by the end of 2019. Yes, workers in China have been known to work such miracles and the Chinese government has a way of making these happen that they choose to make happen, but where the capital to do this is coming from is really unclear at this point. It isn't coming from the slim profits from the last two quarters.
Do I need to continue? Yeah, Tesla cars catching fire may be overblown, but I have an N=1 of a computer science professor buying himself a Model 3 and passing on the Autopilot feature as something not ready for prime time.
Tesla is selling everything it can shove out the factory door without spending a dime on marketing, unless you count the costs of Elon's tweets. By the end of this year/beginning of next Tesla will have completed another giant factory in Shanghai along with several lines at the Gigafactory in Nevada and will begin pumping out hundreds of thousands, if not millions of model Ys annually. This car will occupy the most popular automotive segment currently, the small SUV/CUV category. This car will be significantly cheaper and easier to manufacture than the model 3 turned out to be. (Don't take my word for it, this is what the experts like Sandy Munro believe. Go ahead a google it.) This timeframe is when most other manufacturers are actually just going to be dipping their toes into the EV waters with some initial tepid offerings. Unfortunately this means they are about to get blown out. Tesla has cannibalized the luxury to downmarket pathway for EV development. Other manufacturers are going to have to try and compete against a company who is able to profitably make high quality long range EV's while their own EV programs are still in their infancy. Tesla learned some expensive lessons with the M3 program and they still managed to turn it into the best selling EV worldwide. This room for error is no longer available to other manufacturers.
The US market will hold on to gas burners longer, but the Chinese market (the largest in the world) will aggressively phase out ICE vehicles as soon as the supply of EV's enables them to realistically do so. This if for a number of reasons but primarily to try and get a grip on rampant air pollution in cities as well as trying to locate the center of the new auto industry in China. European cities are also farther along than North America in cleaning up their air. A few have already started banning IC engines in the cores of cities for that very reason and this trend will accelerate, again, as supply of quality EV's make it feasible to do so.
Cost of batteries is also falling, though not as fast as some would like. OTOH, really significant R&D investments in batteries has really only started a handful of years ago and won't bare much fruit in the real world for 5-10 years. There are several promising pathways to double or triple energy densities while increasing longevity and lowering recharge rates.
People should sit back and enjoy the ride. There will be bumps along the way but it's not often we get to see a major industry forced to reshape itself. The game now is to see who actually makes it...
I can afford to pay even 100K for a car. But I wont pay more than 25K for a car. I made an exception for Tesla. There is a huge numbers of camry, accord owners who voluntarily stop at that price point. Give them a compelling reason, they will pay 60K.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
The tipping point is closer than you think. At present the industry battery price is 140 $/kWh. Tesla is at 120 or 110$ /kWh. The magic number is 90$/kWh at pack level. At that price point, ICEV and BEV will cost the same.
Investment in oil exploration has already dried up. Especially in the super expensive deep sea directional drilling platforms.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
We can watch Tesla fizzle without investing in the stock market at all.
The battery era is dawning. It is getting cheaper to store 1 GWh of electricity than to build an gas burning powerplant in the usa!
Except a gas burning powerplant actually creates power, the tesla battery pack just stores it... Perhaps if you want to make this example relevant you could factor in the cost of power generation?
In deep mines, not having to suck out the diesel exhaust pays for the conversion to battery powered earth movers!
The vast majority of "earth movers" operate above ground, and do not have to "suck out the diesel exhaust".
Your fringe use case is unconvincing, I don't see an industry migration to battery-powered "earth movers" anytime soon.
Ken
The click trackers will very quickly spot the trend. I think the click-bait stories in the coming months are going to be positive on Tesla.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
I'd guess that it's more like 10 years from the start of a tipping point. By then about 20% of the cars will be electric, at that point gas will start to get cheap (with the removal of 20% of the demand), but banks and investors will stop financing oil projects (which require lots of money just to keep going). In about 20 years gasoline would be very expensive and pull the rest of the car market into full electric.
It's more complicated than this. Only about half of oil goes to gasoline. So even if gasoline demand falls significantly, oil itself still won't be a specialty product.
Give it time man. Tesla will go bankrupt any day now. This is just a brief uptick. I mean their CFO just left 11 days ago. Clearly they'll be bankrupt this month for sure!
You'll be surprised. Many of the newer Tesla owners in the Model 3 didn't buy to "save the world." Electric vehicles are fun to drive and might save money in TCO depending on your situation. Your situation really matters and why there are so many vehicles in the market to fit so many needs and wants. That said, Tesla is still more luxury brand than Chevy or Kia is even with the Model 3 being less than a Model S. I am surprised how people stretch to buy a car and hope they ran their numbers right.
Things like free charging at work and for fairly long commutes without needing oil changes every month and the ability to "fill up" your car every night before work are nice. Autopilot for the miles of commuting traffic also helps immensely.
We're fortunate as a family and own more than one car. Our cars that use gas are great too mainly because you can relatively economically operate a larger one at this point in time and they make good road trip cars but that's actually proving less so after using the Model 3 for long trips. Also, I find it nice to have an older, easy to maintain car that's essentially fully depreciated to use. Autopilot really does reduce fatigue on longer trips though adaptive cruise control helps immensely.
The tax credit/break is contentious for the pro/against EV camps. Tax policy as a method of motivating people and industries in one way or another is inherently linked to politics. Promoting EV cars though a tax credit was probably the right direction but has terrible delivery and optics. I agree that China might "win" in the end since their EV policies are quite aggressive also. The growth of EV as total percentage of new cars sold in China is astoundingly as ICE car market is actually shrinking and why the legacy car makers are paying attention and have plans to electrify their drive trains if they want to stay relevant.
My take is it's complicated. Nobody has all the answers or really knows where the market will be hence why there's so much money being invested.
Afaict plastics, are typically made from hydrocarbons that are not saturated with hydrogen. These hydrocarbons result when heavier alkanes are cracked to produce lighter alkanes.
So the availability of feedstocks for plastic production is likely to depend on the relative demand for heavy and light oil products. Gasoline is somewhere in the middle so it seems like reduced demand for gasoline could do either way in terms of availability of feedstocks for plastic products.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
I wonder what happened to the Chevy Volt or is it off the list because GM is discontinuing it this year. As a plugin hybrid like the Prius Prime, it's a popular car among owner and very reliable too compared to a Tesla.