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Comment by nickik | Hacker News Reader

If the whole market declines but your share of the overall market raises and you overtake everybody else in that market that is clearly an achievement.

Given that this is literally the first mass market car by Tesla, achieving leading sales globally over comparable products by BMW and Mercedes is clearly pretty important.

And as they said, they hope Model Y will hopefully be the best selling vehicle globally next year.

This is important to point out after 5 years of FUD about how Tesla has no demand.

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> And as they said, they hope Model Y will hopefully be the best selling vehicle globally next year.

It's very important to wonder "how much of this is EV demand" vs "how much of this is car specific demand". Tesla's Model 3 sales basically declined in lockstep with Model Y's rise: https://cleantechnica.com/2021/02/15/tesla-model-3-model-y-o...

It will be interesting to see if Tesla can grow them simultaneously going forward, but it hasn't really seemed to be the case. This doesn't make me bullish on any prediction that the Model Y is going to be the best selling vehicle globally.

Even Ford stopped making the Mustang sedan. There is a move to SUVs across the auto industry. I'm not sure if winning a rapidly shrinking segment is as much of an accomplishment as Tesla wants investors to believe.

That's not accurate in any form. The Mustang was not a sedan, but a coupe, and Ford has not stopped making the Mustang in the current form. You can still order a GT500 with 12mpg city. They added an electric version, the Mach-E, which is more of a crossover format.

I wouldn't call that a version, the Mustang Mach-E is a different product line. Just shares the branding and takes some design cues. It's like an adopted son who gets dressed up like the father, but has different genes

Selling more of the less selling cars is not an achievement by any means.

All the other companies are changing production towards different other categories, but the “achievement” Tesla wants their shareholders to be happy about is that they sell more of the cars less and less people are buying.

If you sell more horses worldwide out of the “four legged category” it has no relevance as long as less and less people are buying horses for transportation.

I'm not sure one years data point makes for a trend. Especially not 2020.

I have no data to back it up, but it seems likely that the people who can afford a luxury car are also the people that could afford to stay home during the pandemic. Personally, I'm finding it hard to justify a new car when I'm 6 months overdue for an oil change and not even at half the miles. :-)

He's speaking of the movement from luxury sedans to luxury SUVs and crossovers.

Just because sedans are not the biggest market anymore doesn't mean competition is over or that there is not still a gigantic amount of money in it.

Tesla is of course also expecting to sell more CUV and Pickups in the future and we have seen the sales growth of the Model Y.

Seriously making the argument that being the globally highest selling car in a well known very well specified category with their first ever turley mass produced car after just a few years of production is not an achievement is just insane argument.

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