Additionally, Nissan has the #4-selling electric car, and Chevy has the #2.
I think you are overstating your case.
Tesla Model 3 is the best selling BEV in every market it participates in (not sure about numbers compared to PHEVs). It is selling in comparable quantities to ICE vehicles in the same price range.
A significant number of people buying Model 3 are upgrading from cars costing half the price.
There is little to no indication that EV adoption will slow down (before pointing to a drop in Model 3 sales in the USA consider that the one factory supplies the entire world outside China).
No, that's incorrect.
The Model 3 is the second best seller in France: https://ev-sales.blogspot.com/2019/12/france-november-2019.h...
It's the third best seller in Germany: https://ev-sales.blogspot.com/2019/12/germany-november-2019....
And it's the 9th best selling BEV in China: https://ev-sales.blogspot.com/2019/12/china-november-2019-up...
Europe-wide, Tesla Model 3 is top of the charts by a wide margin. The articles you linked mentioned this, France and Germany are behind because the vast demand for Tesla in Netherlands and Norway is sucking all the supply up before France and Germany get a seat at the table.
As Fremont production improves and the German Tesla factory opens, we’ll see that lead grow as Europeans switch to BEVs en masse to escape the cheating ICE manufacturers.
By February the factory should be working close to its capacity, let’s see what sales are like once Tesla is actually participating in that market.
Let’s see what News February brings shall we?
5300 seems quite low given China’s size compared to, say, Australia. No doubt you will claim it is demand constrained, but that number looks like one boatload. That market is supply constrained.
I don’t think it’s too optimistic. VW with the ID.3 seems like they’re the only ones who will be able to match the scale and qualities of product to the Model 3/Y in the near term.
We’ll see though. It’s interesting in any case.
https://electrek.co/2019/11/13/la-adds-hundreds-of-ev-charge...
It can be done over decades for sure but it won't happen overnight.
With high battery prices the market stays with hybrids longer.
With cheap and plentiful batteries it moves faster to full EV.
What'll be interesting is if some vendors have access to lots of cheap batteries and so are living in one future while competitors are in the other.
One time a few years ago, oil went down and TSLA followed. It'd be interesting to see what will happen with the incoming recession (although then all stocks might go down with people pulling out of the market).
From here: https://insideevs.com/news/343998/monthly-plug-in-ev-sales-s... - by # of units sold, no one is even close to the Model 3. People with money to buy electric cars with can probably afford a $50k car (Model 3) that does everything well over $less cars that do everything kinda poorly.
Sure maybe for the next 2-5 years people will do business as normal but are you really going to buy a Corolla for $30K when you can get a Tesla Model 3 for $30K? That is what will cause a quick shift.
The Tesla requires 50,000 kWh to drive 200,000 miles. At $0.08/kWh (what I’m paying), that’s just $4000 in electricity. $36k + $4k = $40k
That’s surprisingly close for a Tesla Model 3 versus a Corolla.
And most people will not be on track to drive 200k miles in their car before the loan is paid off. Which leaves them upfronting a very large percentage of the savings.
Yes, Arizona has good rates.
Fuel-cell/electric hybrids are a different value proposition and will keep going.
But they'll increasingly drop gas hybrids and jump to full electric, perhaps after the next generation of vehicles.
I thought that was in 2012? Of course "recently" is kind of subjective.
Edit: Ah, so they only introduced plug-in hybrids in the United States in 2016. Wonder what took them so long.
John Q. Public has no reason to buy an EV. Today's gas prices don't put the same dent in his pocket that $5/gallon* gas did. And there's good reason to believe that $5/gallon gas is probably never coming back.
I am for EVs, Tesla, and anything that can keep us from making large portions of Earth unarable and uninhabitable. But most people's car-buying decisions are driven by economic realities, not environmental concern.
*$5/gallon US average price - I understand it's frequently this high on the coasts and in large cities, and it's almost always higher in countries with appropriately levied fuel taxes.
John likes fast cars. And oh boy my Nissan Leaf is fun to drive! Mountain driving feels like floating silently into the air. Instant torque, no gear shifting.
John may also appreciate the extra leg room, as even a compact car gains a lot of room without a gas engine.
John also likes saving money and convenience. And while gas isn't super expensive, I wake up every morning with a full charge for about $1. Gas stations just aren't a part of my life. (charging away from home is still a PITA, FWIW)
John might also like skipping the majority of standard maintenance. No oil changes. No random belts. Less brake wear (I think?) from regeneration. Sure, after 100k you'll probably want a new battery, but it's a known cost that's dropping.
Maybe EVs need to drop the 'environmental' badge and focus on how awesome they are.
just curious, what else have you driven to compare it against? I rarely hear even hardcore EV enthusiasts describe that car as "fun".
But, this isn't a nice car- I paid $6,500. I'm just comparing it to every ICE car I've driven (aside from that one time I got 20 minutes in a Lamborghini), and definitely every ICE car you can purchase used for $6,500.
But given the acceleration and smoothness, I'm just betting it's more fun to drive than nearly every car described in commercials fun to drive.
On the Model 3, if you enable Hold mode, then it's possible to drive without EVER using the brakes outside of emergency situations. The rotors and pads will theoretically last forever outside of environmental damage.
If the $40K model had a longer range, I'd place a preorder.
GA Power offers $.01 per kilowatt hour rates in the middle of the night. A Tesla Model 3 gets 2.91 miles / kWh. Driving 1000 miles per month in the Tesla costs $3.44.
Fueling the Tesla costs $1200 less per year than the BMW if you drive an average number of miles, and we haven't even gotten to the cost of oil changes and brake pads.
This is perhaps true for a few countries making good cars. The rest of EU is more than happy to drive German and French cars (if they can afford it, of course).
Sure some manufacturers will go bust and collapse, but other will adapt, and new ones will be created.
I'm quite puzzled by Tesla's valuation, such a valuation is betting on it becoming a huge actor in the post IC automobile industry which is not a given.
I'm also skeptical about the "Iphone moment", functionally the Iphone was a huge step forward (basically having a small computer in your pocket vs having something just doing phone calls, SMSes and snake), but a Tesla, well, right now, it's still a car which does more or less the same thing as any other car (just slightly better in some aspect, slightly worst in others).
It's also not the same market, the Iphone appeared in the booming market of mobile phones which was seeing exponential growth at the time. And also, the gain in functionality and convenience was enough to transform the market from consumers willing to pay at most ~100$ for a flip phone to consumers willing to pay 1000$ for a smartphone with all that entails in term margins and profitability.
The car market by contrast, is not seeing such a growth, and it's unlikely consumers will be willing to spend that much more for their car.
There are potential market shift possible which could be caused by things like reliable autonomous vehicles, tighter regulations forbidding IC vehicles in some cities, cheaper cars (as EV are mechanically simpler, it's a possibility), but these are somewhat elusive.
Tesla valuation is at the very least a huge bet.
The iPhone wasn't the first smartphone. In fact when released it was significantly inferior to existing Symbian and Nokia offering in terms of "objectively useful" stuff like browser behavior, modem bandwidth and third party app support. Obviously it was transformatively better, in ways that the established players didn't understand enough to emulate, but it's not correct to imagine it as a first mover.
In fact the Tesla/Apple comparison seems almost perfectly apt to me.
I personally have bought my last internal combustion engine car. I had planned to purchase another vehicle by now, but will wait for the Model 3 (perhaps another?) to mature a bit then go electric. I’m curious how many others out there have changed their calculus, too. I think it’s very analogous to iPhone’s rise, which must account for the stock.
[1] https://www.autonews.com/article/20171105/INDUSTRY_REDESIGNE...
iPhones couldn't run Flash (which powered all of the interactive content on the internet at the time), couldn't send MMS (which was the way everyone shared photos at the time) or run apps (which was how feature phones added functionality at the time).
"Why on Earth would anyone want one of those!?" was a pretty common reaction, yet they still sold like hotcakes. In the case of Flash and MMS, the whole mobile internet changed to suit the iPhone. In the case of apps, Steve Jobs finally relented, leading to the single biggest software marketplace in the world.
That reaction really only came from makers of competing phones. (RIM execs famously refused to believe the battery life was possible, Balmer threw very unconvincing dismissals.)
Everyone else was standing in line to buy one.
I remember thinking (and hearing):
'Way too expensive'
'I want a tactile keyboard'
'Nice, but I don't need one'
and so on.
However, the overwhelming response to the iPhone was extremely positive. Even from non Apple sources.
RIM didn’t think the iPhone was possible when it was first released. Google instantly changed the direction of their Android project when the iPhone was released.
Maybe also complaints about bad autocompletion?
Qwerty keyboards were always a niche, and "nice, but I don't need one" is reasonably classified as an underestimate of the product but it's still approval.
The iPhone 3G changed this fundamentally; you didn't have to be a die-hard Apple fanboy to justify wanting one of those, because it was the only phone on the market that actually gave you sufficiently usable mobile access to "the real Internet".
The original iPhone sold for $600 and a 2 year AT&T contract.
The iPhone had a ton of pricing headway to make itself more attractive.
Tesla is almost the exact opposite.
Now, this isn’t an argument against Tesla or its stock price (that’s a different argument altogether). This is an argument against the idea That Tesla and the iPhone are in any way comparable.
That is most certainly not the state of the car industry.
And you can see how "old industry" will play with old wet cell batteries and newer batteries in data center spaces (newer batteries are considerably safer in reality with each cell monitored, with the battery wall automatically removing problematic cells, and requiring less than a fifth of the space of wet cells). However wet cell manufacturers have been really good at manipulating and adding regulations that make newer batteries untenable to have since regulations are purposely broad enough that each inspector you bring in will cited the same regulation as having a different meaning.
They were almost the textbook definition of a disruptive product (worse on traditional metrics by which products compete, but better on some key factors that have customer value)...
A lot of people should do the math on the model 3. The math is current car payment + 90% gas payment = new car payment on a model 3. The remaining 10% is what you pay for electricity.
The building that I live in is going to run out of physical space for electric meters long before it has issues with electrical capacity. My neighbor opted to forgo having a charger for his Model 3 and instead put one into the garage of his weekend home (he doesn't drive much during the week so he'll be ok).
Given existing equipment on the market now, our building can support maybe 10-15% electric cars. If you are designing a new building, there is no limitation. Our condo board has been searching for a solution and has found some things that are "promising", but nothing that will solve our problem before we run out of space. Again, this is a physical space limitation for the meters, not electrical capacity. And it's a problem where the solution will have to interface with the existing built environment and the existing electrical grid and the existing safety codes, etc. If all you pay attention to are single family homes with garages, you'll never know this is an issue until sales take a nosedive in big cities.
In a new building, you just design the electrical system so this is a non-issue. In an existing building, it's not so simple. Any state that has a lot of condos is going to have 100+ years of condominium laws that govern the ownership and usage of space in a condominium. You can't force someone to share their space and you can't authorize someone to enter someone else's space.
In Germany, 1 kWh costs over 30 cents. As far as I know, that's one of the highest rates in "Western" countries.
If electric cars make sense in Germany, then they can succeed pretty much anywhere.
Edit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_pricing#Global_com... lists Germany price/kWh at 0.35 USD, making it indeed the most expensive Western country at least by quick eyeballing.
We drive 10K miles per year across two drivers. My daily electric (LEAF) costs me $0.05/mi for energy (and I love it). My wife’s SUV costs $0.10/mi for gas and a few pennies for oil (and she loves it). She pays $600/year max for fuel. That covers about a month of Tesla car payment.
There are many reasons to like a Tesla. It’s almost surely not the cheapest way to motor though. A $5K Honda and investing the difference will be wildly cheaper during the ownership period (including no need to carry collision/comprehensive insurance!) and have a much higher residual value (in the investment account). To me, that should be more compelling to many people.
Depending on where you live, there are sometimes EV charging spots in apartments/condos. To me, this is pretty clearly a supply/demand issue.
Today, there aren't enough EV drivers for condos to care, but as the percentage of people who own EVs increases, more places will install chargers. It's the exact same process that resulted in gas stations being everywhere.
Of course these are all IFs:
- battery chemistry: change in electrolyte, if not solid state
- modular wiring (way less expensive cable to make and install)
These two are worked on as of now, if they pan out, that's another drop in price and increase in usability.
Taking in account that the amount of money flowing into EVs has most probably increase by an order of magnitude (German brands, etc, all are investing). This may very well cause an overall drop in prices in all parts. Commoditization..
Time will tell
Even a level 1 charger (1.4kW) can add >50 miles worth of charge overnight (12h) and people living in condos tend to have a shorter commute.
And it's going to get better - for example Ontario mandates 20% parking spaces have charger installed and remaining 80% be ready to have one installed since 2018. IIRC the requirement is 200A per parking spot.
The bet is that the advantages outweigh the negatives.
Being hundreds of dollars more expensive is objectively a disadvantage.
"not a very good email machine" sounds right, in comparison to something like a blackberry.
And that's it, he only listed those two things. He didn't try to make up fake reasons.
Something being better does not mean the disadvantages somehow don't exist.