Tesla boom lifts Norway's electric car sales to record market share
reuters.com
reuters.com
The article seems to be making out that Tesla have been the cause of the record EV sales in Norway. In actuality, Tesla have recently become the most popular EV there, but EV sales were record-breaking before that.
> In 2018, Norway’s fully electric car sales rose to a record 31.2 percent market share from 20.8 percent in 2017, far ahead of any other nation, and buyers had to wait as producers struggled to keep up with demand.
> The surge of electric cars to a 58.4 percent market share in March came as Tesla ramped up delivery of its mid-sized Model 3...
30% -> 60% is no small feat, and is due to the Model 3 availability, and the more widely accessible price point of TM3.
IMO the Leaf is a compromise car you choose in order to get an EV, whereas the TM3 is a better car in almost every way than anything else on the market, which also happens to be EV.
Although many of its advantages are made possible by being EV, they are not inherent advantages of being EV. That is to say, being EV is necessary but not sufficient to built a car with the myriad advances of the TM3.
Versus 705 TM3 registrations in May, 424 so far in June.
YTD is ~8,000 TM3 vs 3,700 Leaf.
Of course there’s nothing stopping Nissan from introducing a new upgraded Leaf in 2019. Maybe they did?
Yes they did. And it starts shipping to european customers this summer as per <1>. So you’re comparing preorder shipment numbers for tesla model 3 with previous gen leafs when a model refresh is coming and the new model can actually already be preordered. And the leaf still is not far behind in May.
<1> https://europe.nissannews.com/en-GB/releases/release-90b1ce8...
For May, the Volkswagen e-Golf outsold the TM3 by 25%.
Arguably a reasonable approach might be to throw away the month that Tesla had its highest deliveries but still use the sum of all other months.
Obviously the first quarter will be a rush of deliveries in each market as the backlog clears. Then there will be a trough where everyone who was an early adopter has got theirs and the late majority starts to consider all these TM3s they see scooting around.
How quickly Tesla recovers from the trough and how high the long term market share will go is absolutely the Billion dollar question.
Reportedly strong demand this quarter in North America points to the TM3 potentially having broad appeal beyond the EV zealots, but it’s very much too early to tell.
If you know the answer to this question, it’s the difference between TSLA at $10 and TSLA at $500. I have my own opinion, and I put some money on it. But I’m a TM3 owner, I absolutely adore the machine, and I think it’s 5 years ahead of any competition and is going to absolutely clean up as people realize it’s sensational to drive, it doesn’t actually cost $80k (can’t tell you how many people I’ve talk to that think that) and in particular the long term TCO is actually downright economical.
Look at the trends in the absolute numbers over time:
Is there a YTD Total EV vs Total ICE?
This is definitely your opinion.
Experts agree that Tesla is a low quality luxury vehicle.
Fans love it, but this is a known phenomenon with Jeep owners too. Jeep owners will forgive problems where other users would not.
The WSJ review I read last year on the TM3 does not consider it “low quality”. I believe their words were “rainbow farting unicorn”.
For a more recent example, the TM3 beat out the M3 in, of all places, Top Gear.
Polarizing, to be sure. “Low quality” is, erm, highly opinionated. I would say it’s strictly better than my previous car (an Infinit) in every conceivable way. And yet, there are some people who say the panel gaps are a millimeter too wide.
My wife’s GL450 does ride smoother, and it certainly is cozy (heated, ventilated, and massager seats?!) but then again, at 40k miles and a few months out of warranty I’m bringing her car to the shop tomorrow because the air suspension is indicating a “Malfunction”. Any guess on how much that’s going to run? Probably the GL450 is simply not a car you can reasonably own outside of warranty.
I do have a bit of a similar concern about if the TM3 could fail in some unexpected and highly expensive fashion, as it’s a brand new platform, but only time will tell and so far it’s been flawless. The expensive parts also have excellent warranty coverage.
Teslas are fun to drive but awful to sit in.
I’ve spent a plenty of time in all of them, the Tesla interior feels more like a Toyota than the German manufacturers.
Indeed.
Look also to:
- the near-universality of charger stations on streets, both in residential and commercial districts;
- the huge tax subsidies for buying and owning electric vehicles;
- the low cost of (clean, incidentally) electricity (I believe most of the charger posts in the city are free, though I should note I don't drive myself);
- the substantial tarrifs and fees for poluting vehicles in the city center areas (we're talking more than a cup of coffee's cost to enter ring 1, as well as lighter but still extant fees for the larger outer rings);
- as well as some air control days where vehicles with exhaust may be outright forbidden from operating in the city center entirely...
- and all of these pressures are being tuned up over time. It's widely-discussed and part of campaigns to make things greener. So people are not only responding to the current numbers, but considering the future.
This has everything to do with the society, its incentives, and how those incentives were rationally designed; and very, very little to do with a particular manufacturer and their marketing.
They understand how bad it is (also their oil reserves are not as great as before), and at least trying to take action before it's too late.
I don't know why these rich countries never do anything to improve quality of life on whole planet.
Pollution or climate change won't respect borders, so why should they?
What I see as important is anything that moves the price of EVs down and utility up. Norway is helping EV battery research a lot (although China still leads).
If anything, increased EV sales will help in tipping the trend against fossil-fuel-burning vehicles and have a positive impact everywhere.
Even if you consider oil money to be morally questionable, it can be employed as a soft power in a positive way.
Just had a streetview browse of your city, first view with the yellow man gave me an oncoming Tesla. I had a look for the chargers but didn't find any, I guess you need an app and to know what to look for.
More noticeable are the trams. Forget electric cars, trams are the future and I liked seeing so many of them. I tried to stay off the tramways as you aren't going to have charging points there, but now I want to know, if you didn't have an app, where would you look in Oslo for a street level charging facility?
Kind of inspired to go there after seeing the sunny day street view pics, lovely place!
You can find chargers in Norway by using one of the many maps or apps: https://www.ladestasjoner.no/kart/
Many of the Oslo chargers look like this: https://www.salto.no/media/images/referanser/_big4by3/søyle-...
Here's another one: https://www.google.com/maps/@59.9287152,10.7231221,3a,59.2y,...
See the instructional video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vgb4Rr6cG38
With the current gen electric cars it's easy to keep a car charged in Norway. I haven't installed a charging station in the garage yet, so I just park mine at one of the city (Bergen) car parks once per week (while I go to work). A work day of charging gives me about 400 km (250 miles) range.
IMO, they should require either a noise maker, or a sufficiently advanced pedestrian collision avoidance safety system.
I would think that at the speed and in the scenarios a noise maker would help, a pedestrian safety system should be highly effective.
At 3mph your car can very easily knock me down and crush me if I don't hear it coming, but designing software to recognise that it's going to collide with me, and not pass harmlessly a few metres away (a routine event you don't want the AI to freak out over) is really hard.
These low speeds are correlated with environments where it's much harder for a machine to intuit what's going on. Consider a typical open air car park next to a Walmart. A pedestrian is in view, then vanishes, the driver selects reverse - are we going to hit the pedestrian? Where did they go? The driver knows, because they have relevant experience, that the pedestrian is between two other parked cars, and won't be struck by reversing, but how can our AI figure that's where they went?
I don’t see the need for intuition. What’s the stopping distance at 3mph? Less than 1 foot with full pre-charged braking I’m sure. An effective system should be able to see a pedestrian 6-12” from the car in the direction of travel, and stop on a dime. At these speeds a false positive isn’t itself a safety risk, although of course you would seek to minimize them.
It goes without saying the system will not be perfect. Neither are noise makers. I see no reason why such a system couldn’t be made that is more effective than fake engine noise.
Low speed pedestrian avoidance in parking lots is an entirely different subsystem than highway autopilot. Arguably it would be significantly less controversial to forego LIDAR in the pedestrian case and rely purely on ultrasonic, radar, and cameras.
I can also disable it until next trip, but I guess future laws might change that.