Tesla Blown Away as Renault Dominates Europe’s July EV Sales Party
forbes.com
forbes.com
There is just no way to get it approved in my company car budget.
Tesla isn’t overpriced in Europe, it’s overpriced everywhere.
Realistically the Model S should be a €45-50K car the Model 3 should be around €20-25K.
Apple does truly amazing stuff for the mundane aspects of every device, even simple stuff like coloring cases, and all people can do is complain their laptops cost too much.
Tesla makes combines a set of off the shelf set of parts in a plastic bottle, causing an engineer to go "I'm amazed anyone would bother doing this for no discernible gain on such a mundane set of parts" and people misinterpret the amazement and tout it as an engineering marvel and say that's exactly why they deserve their asking price
Additionally outside of the Autobahn, you're driving through congested city streets where the speed and acceleration is of no value.
We need a Tesla sub-brand that can sell cheaper, slower and smaller cars.
Step it up to a €10,000 slightly bigger EV with 80km/h and 200km and you satisfy even inter-city use.
Renault offer the Twizy but I think its overpriced - perhaps deliberately to avoid cannibalizing their higher-priced regular cars.
https://www.schmidtmatthias.de/post/april-2020-european-elec...
Hyundai will become number 3 as they start to release their Hyundai and Kia BEVs in greater volumes.
Volkswagen with its multiple brands (VW, Audi, Porsche, SEAT, Skoda, etc.) is now the biggest BEV maker in Europe. Even the VW e-Golf still does well:
https://ev-sales.blogspot.com/2020/08/europe-july-2020.html
VW's BEV lead will be strengthened by the ID.3 and ID.4 which will be released soon.
Having said that the ID.3 is looking disappointingly expensive, I think they were originally saying it would be comparable to a Golf diesel.
Wow, that's amazing. Two more doublings and EVs dominate the market.
"Total EV registrations in Europe jumped from 23,400 sales in July 2019 to 53,200 in 2020"
Two more years like that and we're there...
What kind of time do you expect this to take?
Not sure growth will continue at that pace, of course, but we've seen 50-100% annual growth the last couple of years (63% globally 2018).
So... in a few years, perhaps 3-5?
All the cheerleading and nay-saying on both sides is tedious in the extreme. We should all be cheering the expansion of EVs accross the car industry. No, EVs are not perfect, and there is a lot of issues that need to be worked out from charging and range to the resources used to make them, but all those things are being worked on and this competition is part of that.
Around me (in the UK) the EVs I notice seem to be pretty much split between Tesla's (mostly 3s with the odd S), Renault Zoes, and the Nissan Leaf (although they seem to be a minority). I'm also seeing a lot of Nissan ENV 200 vans being used by local businesses (including my plumber, who abasolutely loves his).
Different people have different requirements. For a very large portion of the UK population, the market leading range on a Tesla is a plus for many people, especially if it's a main car.
But many cars in the UK rarely go more than 100 miles in a day, the last figures I've seen from the RAC (UK equivalent of AAA in the US I think) puts the average daily drive at something like 25 miles (roughly my wife's commute), so for many people something like the Zoe is absolutely perfect, especially for a second car.
On a random side-note, I really love the sound the Zoe makes when it goes past, it's wonderfully futuristic.
Petrol needs to be shipped, first from drilling site to refinery, then distributed around the country, stored in underground tanks, protected against fire, kept topped up as supply/demand fluctuates, and even then you are probably never further than 10 miles from the nearest petrol station.
Whereas electricity is, well, everywhere. Every petrol station has an electric connection. It doesn't need to be stored on site, transport is easy (hard for the grid but easy for the end user), no unusual hazards, etc.
Of course charging is slower, and I guess that's the real bottleneck, but even then. We put holes filled with petrol all over the country, but can't put extra sockets.
It's not as simple as using what's there. For fast chargers you also need to install a high power grid connection.
However, battery based chargers are an interesting option for low installation costs without a high power connection while still achieving 120+ kW charging. The battery can either be integrated into the charger unit itself for the lowest installation cost or a large battery pack can be placed on site to run the chargers off:
https://www.cnet.com/roadshow/news/vw-group-components-e-on-...
https://freewiretech.com/products/dc-boost-charger/
https://www.greencarreports.com/news/1129240_battery-boosted...
https://thedriven.io/2020/05/07/new-goulburn-battery-beats-g...
As battery prices continue to fall these types of charger configurations will become more attractive.
Tesla ships their cars from the US on a schedule, when that schedule doesn’t match up with a certain month, you see a big sales drop, since there are no cars to sell.
You also get a lot of articles when that happens
https://www.forbes.com/sites/jimcollins/2020/03/02/teslas-sa...
https://seekingalpha.com/article/4318996-teslas-european-mod...
https://www.teslarati.com/tesla-sales-leap-400-percent-model...
Here are the year to date sales for Europe:
https://ev-sales.blogspot.com/2020/08/europe-july-2020.html
The Renault Zoe is the best selling BEV in Europe so far this year by quite some margin. The Zoe has outsold all of Tesla's European models combined.
The article is not bs.
It is a model designed for urban use ('citadine' in french), it costs about 24000€. And I'd say it appeals more to the eco-conscious than to the "EV have full torque from zero speed" crowd.
IMHO Tesla is doing the right thing here: begin with low volume from the high-margin high-end side of the overall market (think the iPhone beginning). I'd not be surprised to see a Zoe equivalent once the Tesla factories start having significant production in Europe.
It's not as simple as nationalism, Japanese and Korean cars are definitely around. Not sure what the reasons are, perhaps a different approach/philosophy to car design?
By that line, perhaps Tesla was popular so long as the European/Japanese competition was weak, but once that picked up, and better fitted the market expectations, it took over?
Tesla already uses the established CCS standard for their chargers and cars in Europe.
That makes it possible for Teslas to charge at other highspeed chargers, but only Teslas can charge at superchargers since they communicate with the car and reject all non-Teslas.
To their credit Tesla has a standing invitation to share their supercharger network with other manufacturers, though none have taken them up on on the offer, perhaps the terms are harsh.
Why does there need to be an invitation? Tesla can open their network to all EVs right now, just like all the other charging networks have.
Tesla says their mission is to accelerate the advent of sustainable transport. If that's true, then why isn't their network open to all EVs?
Also they've invested quite a bit in the network, some fee to use it for other manufacturers is in order.
And if we're going with the accelerating sustainable transport argument - where do we draw the line? Why not just give away EVs to everyone at no cost?
European charging networks are integrated with roaming and aggregated billing already. This is not novel. If they can do it, why not Tesla?
> Also they've invested quite a bit in the network
So has everyone else and yet Teslas charge on their networks right now. If they can do it, why not Tesla?
> Why not just give away EVs to everyone at no cost?
Because companies want to make money. Who ever said anything about offering free charging or free cars?
Why would you expect them to open up their network then? Currently it's a competitive advantage, making their cars much more likely to be bought with long trips in mind.
Closed infrastructure is not in your best interest as a car owner. All charging sites charging all brands of EVs, just like all fuel stations fuel all brands of ICE vehicles, is better for you and everyone else.
If you want to short TSLA you'd have to hold that position long enough for the market to realize that you're right... that may take a long time, and you may not make it.
Sounds like a Ponzi scheme.
So do Ponzi-scheme victims.
Shorting a ponzi scheme in general isn't simply a bet that you have correctly identified that the scheme exists. It is a bet on /when/ the scheme will collapse.
Dotcom boom 1.0 was called a bubble (different name, same smell) by plenty of people who did their shirts on it. They were right. The valuations of all those dotcoms were ridiculous. I'm not sure many of those stocks are still around. Altavista, yahoo, bajizoobmalimba.com, walkyourdog.com etc etc.
Going long you can easily play the long game. "I'm not vindicated yet, but this is good, I can wait."
Going short is not a symmetric position the other way.
By your logic, does that mean that a company can do anything crazy and insane - and it makes no sense to buy puts against TSLA...ever?
> So then, what is a signal to go short on TSLA?
> By your logic, does that mean that a company can do anything crazy and insane - and it makes no sense to buy puts against TSLA...ever?
I'm really just talking about individual investors here. If you're someone with a day job and a small pot of cash who wants to make money playing games with TSLA, you're going to have a bad day.
I think all the things you mentioned are reasons not to buy the stock at its current valuation.
Also Citroen released the Ami, a minuscule box with wheels, limited to 30mph or something and accessible to teens without a license. It's apparently being received well.
I'm not an economist and I'm sure technically they're supposed to act like a selfish capitalist entity like anyone else, but as a consumer looking on, I just want more non-ICE vehicles no matter what the brand. Tesla will always have a very special place in my heart for making things change. And to me that matters the most.
Also its brand power is right up there with Apple, even still now. All the hysteria in the media of win/fail around Tesla is unrealistic.
If the old school makers catch up on battery tech etc and maintain their currently superior fittings & finish that could end badly for T.
However the article is a bit click-baity as it was really about a decrease in sales for Tesla due to the pandemic, not because someone else outsold them.
I doubt you read the same article as me, because a) the article quite clearly states that the Renault Zoe dominates sales, b) Tesla doesn't even feature in the top 10 of EV sales in Europe, c) the analyst quoted in the newspiece stated that "Some of this can be explained by issues relating to the production continuity in California, but also by high competition from brands that play as locals in Europe.”
So yes, Renault outsold Tesla :)
This is like comparing two coders lines of code per day, but zoom in on the day one of the coders was out 4 hours for a doctors appointment. Good job, you proved a coder not at work doesn’t work as much as a coder at work.