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Comment by newaccount74 | Hacker News Reader

Since other car makers are trying to cover the market by diversifying their model lineup, this is hardly surprising. I mean, just take BMW, despite seemingly not taking EVs seriously at first, they already have more different EV models to choose from than Tesla. So even if BMW would overtake Tesla in total EV sales, the Model Y would probably still get to keep the "best selling car" title...

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Even if you total up all the models from other manufacturers, it still doesn't touch the model Y or model 3 for sheer volume. Add all 4 Tesla models up and it's a bloodbath. (This is in the markets people on HN probably care about, North America and Europe. China is another matter.)

Why would HN people not care about sales in China?

The Chinese car market is full of brands that don't even try to sell their cars outside China. But it's noteworthy that Tesla is a top seller there as well, second only to local juggernaut BYD in EVs.

https://carnewschina.com/2023/02/13/ranking-of-china-market-...

Because they live in an alternate dimension with a peculiar market that's kinda bubbled off. China is also like a decade ahead in electrification.

All scooters in large cities have been electric for over a decade (its a weird time warp coming to taiwan and experiencing the stench of scooter on your morning commute)

They had a fully electric taxi service about 7 years ago. Inside the city medium size trucks (for delivering merchandise to stores) are all electric. They have tons of local brands that produce electric consumer cars

However the domestic market is ginormous and they only make weak attempts at going global. The international market is fragmentary and you can be arbitrarily extrajudicially curb stomped with tariffs or outright bands due to anti China hysteria

> All scooters in large cities have been electric for over a decade

A lot longer than a decade. But it depends on the city. Beijing electrified earlier (like 2004 or so), Shanghai followed, then you have smaller cities where gas was allowed for much longer.

> They had a fully electric taxi service about 7 years ago.

What city? Surely not Beijing. Maybe Shenzhen?

> Inside the city medium size trucks (for delivering merchandise to stores) are all electric.

I'm beginning to doubt you here. The delivery trikes are electric. But the small trucks that deliver merchandise to stores? Definitely not the blue trucks that are only allowed inside the 5th ring at night and cause air quality to tank after midnight.

> The international market is fragmentary and you can be arbitrarily extrajudicially curb stomped with tariffs or outright bands due to anti China hysteria

China's market is limited by their own protectionism. It is hard to tell someone to "open up" when you aren't willing to do the same yourself.

"What city? Surely not Beijing. Maybe Shenzhen?"

As you've caught on, I'm a bit fuzzy on the dates.. But I feel I was riding Caocao taxis in Chengdu around then?

"Definitely not the blue trucks that are only allowed inside the 5th ring at night and cause air quality to tank after midnight"

Yeah you're right! I was off the mark there. There are smog monsters at night thats for sure. Forgot about those haha. During the day the smaller refrigerated trucks were electric though

As to your last point.. It's not a simple topic, but protectionism in theory only hurts your own market and your own consumers. Reciprocity is kinda irrelevant

I haven’t been to chengdu since 2005 so you might be right.

Is Hackernews just getting overrun by pro-Xi commentators that make up whatever they want now? Chinese air pollution is ridiculous, and it's primarily because of their massive amount of vehicle emissions:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6526014/

That link points out that air pollution isn’t “primarily” due to vehicle emissions except in some cities.

  On both regional and national scales, vehicle emission has been identified as one of the most important contributors to air pollution in most cities in China (Gong et al., 2017; Wang et al., 2010; Wu et al., 2016), and has even surpassed other contamination sources in some cities.

"Lots of air pollution" and "lots of electric vehicles" can be true in the same sentence.

Vehicles are not the only source of severe air pollution.

* EVs are not a solution to air pollution, most air pollution from modern cars is from brakes and tyres.

* OTOH, China is really ahead in battery-powered 2-wheelers, that replace the old scooter fleet, and that ought to do something.

* Still, China's air pollution is for the main part due to massive use of coal power, incinerators, and desertification bringing sand from Gobi desert. The linked study from grand-parent doesn't even mention any of these.

HN's community is large and therefore divided on divisive topics. That's more than enough to explain why there's diversity of opinion on, for example, geopolitical topics. Everyone needs to abide by the rules in the presence of such topics so that this place does not end up burning itself to a crisp. Therefore, please don't post to HN like you did here—instead, please make your substantive points respectfully and thoughtfully.

If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.

The BMW group sold 588,138 cars in 2023. Where is that a bloodbath?

of which how many were electric?

Does it matter to BMW?

I think the point is that electric cars the digital cameras of today.

Consumers are shifting to EVs faster than expected, and it is catching some car makers (e.g. Toyota) flat footed.

> I think the point is that electric cars the digital cameras of today.

Enjoyed a brief heyday but rapidly faded as people moved on to a more convenient device?

precisely, with waymo partnering with uber you know that personal car ownership with all the headaches that entails is drawing to a close

If everyone wants to rent the vehicle at the same time? How is renting more convenient than ownership of an autonomous vehicle?

it's not, it's more efficient and thus cheaper

Everyone carries one with them all the time now because the technology became miniaturized while quality shot way up? Man, I'd love for George Jetson's briefcase car to be a reality!

Who sold the most horses in 1908?

A very rich person...

A real automotive neighsayer

“Tesla not only beat all US luxury automakers on car sales for 2022 as a whole, but also beat them by a ridiculous margin. BMW was the former champ, and while its sales dropped by over 5% year over year, Tesla's sales grew by more than a whopping 40%.”

https://insideevs.com/news/652873/tesla-tops-bmw-us-luxury-c...

If you’re pummeling Toyota with a luxy model, the rest are just fluff.

Tesla isn’t a luxury brand.

EV batteries introduce a price premium but the Model 3 is targeting Hyundai buyers not BMW buyers. Just look at the Ionic 5 price point.

The industry disagrees with you

https://www.caranddriver.com/news/a42938734/tesla-best-selli... https://www.kbb.com/car-news/tesla-is-americas-best-selling-... https://www.motortrend.com/cars/tesla/model-y/

I don’t see Hyundais in Palo Alto. I see Teslas. Perhaps you consider valley middle class.

There’s strong disagreement around that the model S and X might qualify as luxury cars but are missing many common characteristics like the degree of sound isolation. Some people talk about pricing, but you can spend 6 figures on a ford 150 which isn’t a Luxury brand.

https://carbuzz.com/news/lucid-delays-production-says-tesla-...

it will as gas car as time goes on. BMW could be okay for a while with his customers that are looking for that vintage gas smell, sound and feel.

BMW is fine. They already have a purely EV platform and are selling something like 10 BEV models...

Figures that I have for Q1 2023 for BMW Group (which includes Mini) are: 588,138 total, including 64,647 BEV. So that's 11% BEV. IN Q1 2022, figures were: 596,907 total, including about 25,940 BEV. So it was 4.3% BEV.

Going from 4.3% BEV to 11% BEV may not sound so impressive, but little by little non Tesla BEVs are adding up, and I think many car makers are investing very seriously into it.

Historically the car market has not been one of monopoly, I don't think it's going to change with Tesla. Market shares will change, some car makers will fail to adapt, but I don't think German carmakers are the ones that will suffer the most. Japanese carmakers I have more doubt: they are moving very slowly, but on the other hand Japan knows how to manufacture batteries at scale (Panasonic), so once Toyota decides to move seriously into BEV, they might be able to move very fast.

I'm a lot more worried about my own country carmakers (Renault and Peugeot). Not only they move slowly and erratically, they are going to compete head on, on price, with Chinese carmakers...

Norway is the most mature EV market in the world, and looking at 2022 numbers Tesla sold the most cars, but VW is not far behind. 21300 for Tesla (most model Y) vs 20183 for VW (most Id.4), of which the vast majority (like 90% or more) were EVs.

So Tesla is strong, but they are not crushing the market.

It's easy to say "it's hardly surprising" now, but if you'd predicted this 4 or 5 years ago, plenty of people would have been surprised.

What sets Tesla apart right now is their manufacturing capability. They are out-competing everyone else right now on cost and scale. That's the difference between having really juicy margins on their cars produced large volume and the likes of BMW, Ford, and others actually selling EVs at a loss in comparatively tiny volumes. Every time Tesla lowers their pricing, everybody else takes a big hit.

And while Tesla takes the crown here, they aren't the only new kid on the block that is extremely successful in the EV market. The likes of BYD and other Chinese manufacturers aren't far behind and are following a similar strategy to Tesla. Cheap Chinese exports are going to do similar things to the car industry that the Japanese car industry did in the eighties. The likes of Toyota of course were part of that move and it decimated the rest of the industry. That looks like it might happen again. Except this time it's Chinese manufacturers leading here; and Tesla of course.

The game right now isn't producing more concept cars, quick and dirty ICE conversions, or yet another over priced premium SUV ev but actually tackling the less premium mass market segment. This is only possible after companies nail cost and efficiency. And most of them are nowhere close to doing that. Tesla is ramping up to start selling millions of more modestly priced cars. BYD is already shipping loads of those in China. They are ready now.

Toyota particularly is far behind. The only EVs they have in the market are actually made by BYD. These are Toyota in name only. It's a BYD with a Toyota sticker slapped on. Reason: until they replaced their CEO recently, they were stubbornly pursuing things like hybrids and hydrogen cars and miscalculating how long they had to make that work. EVs priced around 20-30K$ are going to be a big problem for Toyota. Most of their remaining ICE market is at or above that price point and EVs with lower cost of ownership and a lower price tag can do some serious damage to that market. That's why they are partnering with BYD while they are figuring that out.

Is Toyota BYD’s JV partner in China? I think the BYD taxi I rode in was based off a Camry body, but it seems their JV partner is GAC, so it isn’t clear how that came to be.

Plenty of China-only car models are more than "inspired" from existing vehicle models.

No, a lot of them are made with tooling and designs directly used to make the models they are based on. This is all over the table and part of the JV deal, though I think these days it doesn’t happen as much as 10 years ago.

But if I take BMW, I see they currently have three all electric models on offer: iX, i7, i4.

Maybe because BMW customers still prefer combustion engines.

It depends on the market. BMW doesn’t sell much ICE cars anymore in Norway, a western market considered a few years ahead the other north European markets.

Because Norway heavily subsidized EV with exemption from the 25% VAT tax as well as perks like free parking. Which is ironic given they are basically the Nordic Saudi Arabia.

You have it the wrong way. ICE cars has always been heavily taxed, especially more powerful ICE cars are 2x more expensive in Norway than in EU. EV's just have no tax and only VAT added above 45k USD

Not quite. Fuel is overtaxed there and very expensive, that's a bit different from Saudis,but combined with other factors mentioned by you and the fact most of their energy is green hydro, it makes sense to them to ditch ice when there's option to buy a new car

Norway would much rather leverage their abundant hydro for domestic personal transport needs and just export their oil instead. That really isn’t ironic, just practical.

Free parking isn’t a thing anymore in Oslo. It usually costs about 25% of the ICE cars price, but anyway most of the street parking have been removed. Which is good.

…and the i5, iX3 and iX1.

And I think about 5 more models, at least, on the way until 2025.

The models that aren’t out yet don’t count in this discussion about brands selling fewer of an individual model because the brand has more models available.

Hmm ok. But one of those isn’t out yet and the other two are not available in the US. I don’t think that fits the narrative I’m responding to.

I was wondering how HN was going to spin this. The problem with this argument is that the Model Y by itself outsold the entire BMW electric lineup combined. In fact, 4 times the entire combined amount.

This is goalpost-shifting from the title, which doesn’t limit the comparison to electric cars.

Maybe because the typical BMW customer prefers combustion engines. Look at the overall sales not just EV

Tesla sold 1,247,146 cars in 2022. This year somewhere between 1.6M - 2.0M.

Last year BMW sold about 2.4M cars, so Tesla is quickly catching up in terms of numbers.

It's better to just compare brand-to-brand EV sales, rather than per model. Only Tesla can sell same model so much. I wonder will people finally bored with too many same Tesla running on the road, and Tesla start expanding their lineup like Volkswagen, or people accept it like iPhone (have a dressing case like iPhone?).

IMV, apart from the Model S Tesla’s are ugly cars

The Y looks like an over inflated balloon (BMW, Mercedes, Mini and others have the same issue with some of their models)

And the 3 just doesn’t look like anyone designed the front end — the angle of the junction between the bonnet (hood) and the windscreen is wrong, and the front grill just looks like someone forgot it needed designing

Electric cars don't need a front grill — there's no radiator. Putting a big grill on an electric car is as stupid as putting a fake horse head on a horseless carriage.

(and I quite like the look of the Tesla 3 front end.)

Batteries do need temperature control.

Sure, but electric cars are 90% efficient, and ICE only 40%. An ICE car is emitting roughly 6 times as much waste heat. BEVs do not need a big-arse radiator and grill.

I know they don’t need a grille for cooling in the same way ice cars do but compare the ‘grille’ area of the ID3 with the Model 3 and it just looks like the Tesla designers didn’t know what to do with the space

I'm only counting the BMW i4, iX, i7, and i5, vs the Tesla S, 3, X, and Y.

Maybe I'm missing something, but the lineups seem comparable.

You are missing the combustion engine models. There many people that still prefer them over EV.

BMW group sold 588,138 units in 2023 and most weren't EV.

Tesla is about to overtake BMW by car sales, not just EV

But you are quite right. Given Tesla's mission and recent discontinuation of X and S and in RHD markets it wouldn't be surprised if they eventually killed them altogether. Let the premium makers like BMW, MB, Lucid focus on a niche luxury markets; use Tesla's time to make cheaper EVs.

Would be a mistake. The luxury brand pulls in the economy car buyers. The plaid & x is a great marketing tool.

Until it becomes part of base package :)

X? Ugliest car on the road.

If you spent 5 mins looking at the data, you’d realize you’re completely wrong lol.

So it's not a true scotsman?

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