Tesla's Sales in Europe Fall to a 15-Month Low
finance.yahoo.com
finance.yahoo.com
I would also say that the Chevy Bolt is solidly smaller than the average vehicle that most Americans buy, especially those that buy new cars.
Car manufacturers don’t really care what used buyers like you want. They don’t make money from a used sale.
That's not true. Someone buying a new cars pays attention to resale value, so car manufacturers want the resale value to be as high as possible to encourage someone to buy a new one.
"I bought a gently-used 29er for $300. Why are people paying $8k for cars?"
And as always, the number one reason to buy a Tesla is "best charging infra available". That's it. You still can't drive a non-Tesla across the country reliably. The other charging networks are in a terrible state of disrepair (far worse than Teslas!) and have significantly fewer locations which makes long distance travel in an EV impractical.
Americans don't need every car they own to be able to drive across the country, but they certainly want to. It's hard to get that out of people's heads.
In some places it may even be better to buy an 800V EV, and use the faster Ionity and Fastned networks.
I don't own a Tesla, but that would be my choice if not for Musk's strange antics lately. As an apartment dweller who frequently goes on road trips, the ability to fast-charge on the road is important. I've rented EVs in the past and the third-party charger networks are TERRIBLE, even when they're available and working (which they often aren't).
My next car will probably be a plug-in hybrid for that reason. As much as I love EVs, the chargers are just... really, really bad. Unless you have a L2 at home or work (I have neither), that becomes a problem.
You own piece of history and make a statement. These days though, that statement may mot be perceived as very positive if you’re not into chemtrails or something.
They're like uber expensive phones, whatever you buy will be a piece of shit in 10 years anyways, why would you spend 50k on a piece of shit when you can buy another one for 5k
I recently rented a modern car and god damn besides being able to control the back windows from the front seat it was all gimmick tier gadgets
But it sells new from 11k euros...
> What features are you talking about?
Status.
An M2 MBP may have best in class features and performance, but an RPi 3 may be sufficient for a particular computing task, even if it's way less advanced.
In most head-to-head comparisons between like models: Goes farther. Goes much faster. Holds more stuff. Seats more people. Charges at more spots. Vastly better charging experience ("plug in and walk away"). Vastly better infotainment system. Vastly better autopilot experience vs. mere "cruise control and lane keeping". New car prices are often cheaper, even.
Your Bolt may be a very useful vehicle but you're not going to road trip around the mountain west in it (though to be fair the linked article is about Europe). It'd be hard pressed just to take you skiing.
A Tesla with summer (maybe even all season) tires, its monstrous torque, and regenerative braking, is definitely not a good winter car for the uninitiated.
Doesn't help build quality has taken a nose dive. Definitely doesn't help that the CEO is unhinged.
I _almost_ bought into the hype back in 2020-2021, but backed out of my purchase due to poor build quality reports.
Competing cars were often more expensive for worse specs, did not have access to Superchargers and made decisions that were less efficient (for example, most did not have heat pumps and had weak regenerative braking so as not to be too “weird” for gas car users).
So I bought another Tesla.
The only disadvantage I see compared to other electrics is the bad turning radius.
Also, in France, i think everybody who at the same time want, can afford and have a place to charge an EV have one.
Obviously not everybody agrees, but if enough people think Tesla is the best they'll still sell well.
I'd recommend taking a look at the Industry data used in the article - https://www.acea.auto/pc-registrations/new-car-registrations...
Much of the growth seems to be driven numerically speaking by the Spanish and German markets.
In Spain, that growth seems to be mostly caused by Tesla [0]. MG and Volvo XC30 (Geely) make a showing, but the Model Y sold more in a month than both combined.
Germany's seems to be driven by Mercedes-Benz and BMW [1]
It seems more like the Tesla is less popular in Germany than it used to be previously, but I'm reading mixed information that Germany has also phased out environmental bonuses [2] (German penny wise pound foolish thinking strikes again).
It seems the biggest hit to Tesla is France, where French companies like Puegot (Stellaris) and Renault have outcompeted the Tesla. Surprised by Renault because they are also a prominent EV seller in the Indian market.
[0] - https://alternative-fuels-observatory.ec.europa.eu/general-i...
[1] - https://insideevs.com/news/719822/plugin-car-sales-germany-a...
[2] - https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/german...
And they don't offer that in Europe.
As far as I know, there is no self-driving in Europe at all. No Tesla, no Waymo, no nothing.
Will Europe fall behind with self-driving like it did with the internet?
There are a similar number of cars on the road in Europe and the US. About 250 million. I wonder how much they are driven? Maybe one hour per day? That would be 250M*365 = 91B man hours per year. If we value an hour at $20, that is $1.8T per year which can be automated. That is about 10% of the European GDP. Plus many other benefits of self-driving cars, like more public space because fewer cars are needed, and they can park outside the center.
https://www.caranddriver.com/reviews/a39966189/2022-mercedes...
All I have seen Mercedes do could have been accomplished by manual programming. But manual programming does not scale. Look at the progress Tesla made from FSD 11 to FSD 12. Nothing indicates that Mercedes is capable of this type of progress.
LOOK AT THE PROGRESS!!!1
And with FSD 34 it will be able to take the easiest highway exit ramp there is on this planet, Mountain View on HWY101, without killing you.
And what does "manual programming" even mean? Do you REALLY believe the xbox360-grade hardware in the tesla is doing AI inferencing? It's not. It's a heuristic.
The biggest problem is really how do you get to 10^n miles per disengagement, for n>=5. Waymo is kinda getting there, Tesla isn't anywhere near that today.
Getting there is really hard, because that's when you get all of the long tail events like bears, moose, wild turkeys, horse mounted police officers, costume conventions, pickup trucks carrying traffic cones and road signs, flooded streets, construction pilot cars, vehicles driving the wrong way on the highway, downed electric poles, NYC steam plumes, and tons of other scenarios. Highway driving in nice and sunny conditions is easy compared to that.
Do you know of any reverse engineering that proves that there really is running anything in regards of inferencing on the NPUs?
Also, just as you said - there are tons of corner cases in the real world, especially once you aren't on a 10-lane US highway which has been designed for monster trucks driven by 16 year olds (no offence) but one of the roundabouts of hell in Paris.
Where would the training data been coming from?
So, I have my doubts.
During summer, there is a red flower growing near the entrance of my parking garage. It constantly is seen as a red light, and the entrance of my garage is often mistaken for a huge truck suddenly magically appearing. Again: Nobody would use a Captcha these days: "Is this a red flower or a traffic light?".
Again, smells like heuristic. "Amount of red pixels in a certain form and spot".
Typically, inference in a machine learning context means feeding a model some input and looking at its output. I'm pretty sure that they are running some model on the vehicle that takes pixels as input and says this part of the image is a car/truck/traffic sign/lane line/etc. It might be misclassifying things (eg. the flower as a red light), but would still be running some kind of model.
As you point out though, the model only seems to do some simple object detection, but doesn't have much of an understanding of what it sees (eg. does it make sense that there would be a traffic light at this location). There are plenty of videos of it getting confused by all kinds of situations (eg this one from a few years ago https://www.businessinsider.com/tesla-fsd-full-self-driving-... ).
That and the fact that Elon has spent the last decade saying they're 6-12 months from actual full self driving.
Tesla - 0 disengagements.
MB - 50 disengagements.
This is not even fair comparison. MB can take all the responsibility they want when no one is going to use their system.
https://www.tesla.com/de_DE/autopilot
But this feature simply does not exist. It's a myth spread by Tesla fan boys who do not want to admit they got screwed over.
To be clear: If I drive a very easy street through my town, which is near a school, my Tesla - just like EVERY Tesla - is able to detect about 90% of trash bins on the side of the road (impressive detection rate), but only about 60% of pupils crossing the road.
If I would use Tesla's "full self driving" feature, I would be on average killing about 20 school children EVERY SINGLE MORNING.
So, no, it's not that.
There is absolutely no actual data to verify this claim. How would you know how many "billions" of miles have been driven with "FSD"?
Tesla isn't publishing any data. They just have been caught actually hiding crash report data to the NHTSA.
"My" anecdotical data is simply watching the amount of trash bins vs kids vs other objects the Tesla I am driving is able to detect. But that is still better linking to an unrelated Forbes article talking about damage done to a car when crashing it into a wall, which does not have anything to do with "FSD" in any car.
Actual facts here instead of "Elon says":
https://static.nhtsa.gov/odi/inv/2022/INCR-EA22002-14496.pdf
I believe VW still has a group working on this.
Imagine how much more GDP the US would have had if they had done that...
edit: Of course, Europeans also use that extra time to enjoy life versus driving GDP that due to increasing wealth inequality won't benefit them in any tangible way.
Public transportation increases the potential commuter density per area of road/rail while self-driving doesn't.
Musk said in 2 years, in 2012. Two more weeks brothers, two more weeks ... lol
But if a bus, a tram or a train would have a self driving... but that smells like communism to our techbros from Silicon Valley.
There are 250M cars on the road in Europe. Clogging up public space and requiring human labor to be driven around. There are cars everywhere in Germany.
A self-driving car can take you exactly from where you are to where you want to go. Right now.
Public transport requires you to walk to an entry point, wait and then walk to your destination.
Self-driving cars will make things way more efficient. Similar how TCP/IP packets are more efficient than TV broadcasts, which required you to plan when to watch what and then wait for it.
So if you propose that Europe should try to achieve efficiency via more public transport, I think that is a losing battle. Electric self-driving cars are the future.
- A train will take you right into the city center, sometimes even where cars are not allowed. OTOH entering the city from suburbia can take an hour of being stuck in traffic.
- metro and trams can skip traffic. Bus lanes are common. There are no "stroads". Average car speed in London is 12mph. That's slower than a bike.
- Finding a parking place can easily take longer than waiting for public transport, and it will probably be an underground garage, far away from your destination. Bus stops are much denser than parking garages, so they usually involve less walking.
The US experience of driving on an 8-lane highway and arriving at a mandatory-parking-quota asphalt desert in front of your destination is rare in Europe. The closest we get is a 3-lane motorway to an IKEA on the city outskirts.
And without parking cars, streets become wider. Single lane becomes double lane.
In some dense European cities there's physically not enough road surface to put every traveller in a car, self-driving or not.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Route_capacity#/media/File%3...
Road capacity has a physical limit. Unlike data you cannot convert cars into light of various wavelengths to pack more into the same physical space. Well you can but that's called public transit. In other words, public transportation has a higher capacity per road/rail area than cars ever will. We don't live in the metaverse after all.
As a result more people using cars (self-driving or not) means you hit the road capacity much more often. That means more congestion and longer trips. Any efficiency you gain by going point-to-point is utterly lost in the increased congestion and traffic.
As the other person noted, European cities are much denser and have significantly less road area than US cities. Thus more cars means significantly less efficiency as you spend more time in traffic.
Firstly the road structure is very different to the US, streets are much narrower and less car-centric so models are harder to train; secondly regulating it is much harder because the EU is a collection of countries, which is very different to a collection of states.
Thirdly non-car alternatives like trains and ebikes are a lot more viable due to a higher population density, many big cities (such as Paris) are pushing for better cycling infrastructure rather than better layouts for cars.
I beg you pardon?
https://etsc.eu/europes-first-cars-with-level-3-automated-dr....
/thread
Mercedes' "level 3" thing has been around for a couple of years in, at least, Germany. I'm not sure that there's all that much to "fall behind on", though.
> If we value an hour at $20, that is $1.8T per year which can be automated.
Can it, tho? Like, the last 10 years of promises about self-driving cars would indicate no, at least not any time soon.
When I bought my model 3 three years ago, I was amongst the first to have a Tesla in my (small) city. I bought it because I wanted an EV, and Tesla was the only one you could actually buy instead of having to wait for your car being delivered months or years later.
Then, for a long time when I stopped at a Supercharger, every conversation went like this: "TeslateslateslateslaTesla!".
If I stop at a charger today, where both Teslas and other EVs are parking, you typically hear the Tesla people apologize in shame. "I bought it before Elon became crazy", "Yes, I have looked at the hyundai, too!" etc.
In the US I think it is very common these days to deal with very powerful people who are VERY crazy. So it has become normalized and no longer appears to be a concern.
I'm also part of a very big fan German Tesla online fan forum. Mentioning Elon is now banned there. And "In MY tesla the windscreen wipers really work now!" these days will get you a request for a video proof.
Over here, people have shame. They don't want that anyone associates them with a psychopath.
I still like my M3. Not because it does what was advertised (it does not), but because I like the nerd humor in it and the acceleration.
But: I have a M3 because I bought it before Elon turned bat shit crazy, so next car will be a Hyundai. There I don't know anything about the founder or CEO, and he probably will never push himself into my daily newsfeed, and I like that idea.
I think a lot of potential Tesla customers in the US have been put off by Musk's behavior. There are even bumper stickers for Tesla owners that say something to the effect of "I bought it before I knew he was crazy".
Don't make one of us the richest and most powerful person in the world.
You will come to regret it.
Of course if he gets fired and the drama/fanboyism stops, what's left is a car company that is losing market share, with shitty cars rapidly becoming obsolete compared to the competition. So I don't expect shareholders to act.
When it came to the actual EV technology, Tesla really had the lead. But they stopped innovating in this area, sadly. Now you are seeing the first 800V vehicles driving around, and suddenly charging at a Supercharger does no longer feel Super.
If they'd change direction and immediately focus on what they are good at, they might stand a chance. But thanks to Elon it's become a huge circus of one distraction after another.
In Europe for a complex set of reasons car manufacturers tend to put out SUV designs only, while most potential EV buyers want SMALL cars. The "model 2" (or whatever it would have been called) would have beat German car manufacturers here easily.
Cancelling this project and to instead launch the Cybertruck... lunacy.
The problem is that these improvements landed in a car that is a symbol of a very public mid-life crisis.
What a waste of potential and engineering resources...
I mean, yeah, you can get a trim without a heat pump. And if you live somewhere with mild weather, then you should probably do that, as the heat pump's contribution to range will not be significant, and it's extra cost and maintenance vs resistive heating.
> In Europe for a complex set of reasons car manufacturers tend to put out SUV designs only
My neighbour's id.3 must be imaginary.
But where I agree: Tesla's image and stock sure would be in better shape if nobody would publish what Elon says at all. But here is the problem: He bought a social media company due to his narcissism.
Again, I'm from Germany. Yes, it's relevant to the news here if the (ex) richest person on the planet is spewing conspiracy theories and bullshit that quite often in some form or another feels like praise for the Nazis, and support for the Neo-Nazis.
Those in my country who may actually like his positions typically are not able to afford a Tesla, so at least when it comes to Germany and a couple of our neighboring countries who also aren't exactly in the Hitler fan camp, all in all that's just not a very good marketing strategy when it comes to Europe.
:)
So Tesla is down 2.3% in Europe compared to 14% up industrywide. The much more interesting comparison would be battery-electric vehicle sales in Europe in the same time frame for Tesla vs all other manufacturers. I'd be surprised if they did not both trend in the same direction.
CATL and BYD are already shipping some cool battery tech right now, and it's only getting better.
And unfortunately Tesla isn't a battery company.
Only EV early adopters want to sit in Walmart parking lots for half an hour charging. The rest of us want to see mainstream truck stops have chargers that have us in and out in 15 minutes.
You only need to do that on road trips, which aren't all that frequent for most people. It's not a reason to avoid buying an EV. At home, you just charge it overnight at your wall outlet. Yes, I know, not everyone has access to a wall outlet overnight, but lots of people do. EVs are ready for them right now.
So, you buy a car if you want road trips. There are exactly two fast charging networks in Europe: Tesla Superchargers and Ionity. The latter is two times more expensive (yes, you can use Superchargers with other car brands, but it costs more). Which is why I bought a Tesla, and from what I see here in Switzerland, many people share this reasoning.
Also, many people in Europe tend to live in _apartments_, where you can’t plug a car overnight. So, access to a fast charging network is essential. Once again, Tesla wins.
If you have a family with kids and your other family members are a few hundred miles away the range matters. Nobody’s going to buy four plane tickets and a rental car just to take a 400 mile trip.
That sort of trip in an EV is going to be two or three charging stops especially in winter temperatures adding up to close to an extra hour to the travel time.
In Europe a trip of that length can be done on a train or a dirt cheap flight and you might not need a car at your destination. Or it won’t happen at all because your family is likely to be physically closer in a smaller country where language and culture borders are closer in.
Less than one hour of extra travel time, three times a year, doesn't strike me as a dealbreaker. You'll save more time than that every month by never going to a gas station.
Contrast that to what Hyundai/Kia does, they basically blast features at you and ensure that every one of their cars gives you more for your money than competitors.
I know I'm going to get kicked in the dirt here for saying it. But there is evidence.
Yes, the market for pure EV is saturated. It's saturated because appealing hybrid designs have emerged and solve all the problems the rest of the (price sensitive, non-luxury) market cares about, and they're near price parity with pure ICE as well: i.e. cheaper than available EVs (as opposed to whatever Chinese EVs you have in mind.)
Plug-in hybrids are a thing now, so if your commute is reasonable you can burn zero gas for most driving, and long drives work the same as ICE: fill up and go. The rest is academic for the mass market. A Prius Prime, for example, gets up to 70 km on a full charge, and charging requires only a common 120V/15A circuit (11h). Soccer mom hauls the neighborhood around town in an eight passenger Chrysler Pacifica, and the kids plug it in when they get home. Cold weather doesn't matter either: the ICE just kicks in earlier and solves that.
There is a EIA graph over here[1] that shows (right hand side) what I'm talking about. Sum the hybrid and plug-in hybrid lines and the drop in the EV line is explained. IBD writes on this further here[2].
[1] https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=62063 [2] https://www.investors.com/news/hybrid-cars-ev-electric-vehic...
And then Musk goes and completely trashes his own reputation. First by calling rescue divers in Thailand pedos, then by lying about FSD, wasting a bunch of money buying Twitter[1], and most crucially, surrounding himself with a bunch of far-right nutjobs. The thing is, the far-right doesn't buy EVs, they want cars that command respect by frightening everyone else. The kinds of people actually buying EVs live in or near a city, in suburban housing that can support a dedicated overnight charging circuit. Which makes them far more likely to be progressive or left-leaning.
In other words, Musk sunk his own company so he could go play Twitter culture warrior against his own customers. While not all of the culture war nonsense in the US transposes 1:1 to Europe, it's analogous enough that I suspect a lot of European Tesla buyers are feeling just as shy about their car purchase as American ones.
[0] My personal conspiracy theory was that they were too durable to sell. Everyone but Tesla sells through dealers - in some cases, they HAVE TO - and dealers only make money when you take the car in for service. And EVs simply have fewer things to break, so moving to EVs means less maintenance money.
The way Tesla gets around this is with parts pairing.
[1] It is always moral and ethical to deadname corporations.
> Manufacturers including Volkswagen AG and Mercedes-Benz Group AG have meanwhile been rethinking product plans, with VW preparing more plug-in hybrids and Mercedes keeping combustion cars in production well into the 2030s.
Seems like max demand for EVs have been hit in Western Europe much like the US.
I'd be curious what is going on in the mind of an EV PM targeting the European market.
Edit: Was wrong. It grew 14% as bryanlarsen below mentioned
I'd recommend taking a look at the Industry data used in the article - https://www.acea.auto/pc-registrations/new-car-registrations...
Much of the growth seems to be driven numerically speaking by the Spanish and German markets.
In Spain, that growth seems to be mostly caused by Tesla [0]. MG and Volvo XC30 (Geely) make a showing, but the Model Y sold more in a month than both combined.
[0] - https://alternative-fuels-observatory.ec.europa.eu/general-i...
EV sales are up 14%, according to the article.
That said, I think BYD was pretty late to get a right-hand drive model on the market, so they may be underrepresented here.
And their build quality reputation wasn’t stellar.
Nowadays there are far more other brands of electric car on the roads. Kia are perhaps the most common, and not-previously-heard-of Chinese brands are starting to appear.
I think Elons own not-a-nice-person story also hurts Tesla.
* Based on current prices / range / charging infra rollout, etc. I think range has gotten to an acceptable place for most people's anxieties (still progress to make of course), price is coming down with the cars coming out in the next year or two but infra investment feels like it's dragging things down a bit. Particularly where I live in the north of the UK anyway.
In other words, I wouldn't put a lot of hopes on more infrastructure adding more adopters.
Anyone thinking like that is using outdated information. Current EVs have sufficient range for effectively all but the very most extreme use cases. Charging infrastructure could be better, and will rapidly become better, but it is sufficient now if you have access to a plug overnight and don't go on weekly long-distance road trips, which covers a lot of people.
No, it just means people have different personal situations. I have a friend who was excited to get an F-150 Lightning, and ended up selling it because it was not practical - he needed to take it places in rural areas where he lived where there wasn't sufficient charging infrastructure.
I'm a huge EV fan, but I hate it when people say that an EV won't work for them and the response from other people is essentially "you're holding it wrong". For a lot of folks, even if they only take a trip, say, every 3 months where an EV wouldn't be a good option, it still means they would never consider getting an EV. As for charging infrastructure getting better all the time, I agree, but that's not something I would factor into a buying decision today, especially if I travel places that would be in the "long tail" of getting sufficient charging stations.
So half the country today could charge weekly or less and commute just fine with an EV that costs the same as an ICE, even if they live in apartments with no charging infrastructure, even if their town or city has little to no public charging infrastructure, and it's cheaper than ICE for most of them who have some access to cheap charging, like home charging or work charging.
That's the tipping point, half can have their needs met with today's tech at today's prices. Most others could get by but they might have some slightly higher burden in charge times or vehicle price, especially outliers with very long commutes to and from locations with no good infrastructure.
For example a truck driving construction contractor in a rural home commuting to a new subdivision under development also in a rural area but 65 miles away has a 130 mile daily commute and his truck has a 150 mile range from 80% to 20% so he has to charge daily, either at home, or at the construction site. Hopefully being rural he's in a house and not an apartment building so can charge overnight, but if he lives in a suburb that's pretty rural and has no charging at home, he's kinda screwed. Or, if he's gotta carry 20 bags of cement mix in the bed or tow a trailer, then he's gotta charge at home and maybe also at the construction site to even finish the commute. So, for some rural construction workers, EVs may not quite be the optimal solution (yet.)
But most people, yes, they're holding it wrong. They're holding their 20th century car notions in 2024, where we're now decade before ICE cars get phased out in the US and as we're on a clear trajectory toward enough range and infra for no one to care just like no one cares about ICE cars and the gas stations they visit weekly.
Given that the EU wants to straight up ban combustion engine cars in future [1] I doubt that.
[1] https://www.europarl.europa.eu/topics/en/article/20221019STO...
Even if I could buy a Tesla for $19K and it did 800 miles per charge, I wouldn't, because the control system alone is beyond terrible.
You make it sound like HN is a forum for Tesla shareholders. Or Tesla short sellers. If you think Tesla is overvalued then short it instead of adding contentless noise and rants.
The oil lobby on the other hand...
I don't like Tesla's leadership (Elon) but I disagree that the product is bad; everyone I know who owns one (including myself), is happy with it, and it's still far more popular than other EVs. Not my favorite EV, but they got a lot of things right.
https://alternative-fuels-observatory.ec.europa.eu/general-i...
Secondly, if you scroll down, Tesla is #1 and #2 from January to October 2022. Chances are they were not delivering many vehicles in October 2022 due to the nature of the import cycle at the time, hence the numbers in the month of October-only were low.
I see nothing scary in headline, it is a pretty straight fact.
Markets also aren't zero sum- if the overall volume of EVs keeps rising then competitors entering the market don't necessarily mean your volume drops, as they could be taking a slice of the increase in overall sales.
I also find the headline and tone very catchy, perhaps biased. But this company has been so over hyped, even Musk himself recognizes its market valuation is ridiculous and that he would advise holders to sell.
EV will continue to grow as a hyper competitive market, as Elon said there is Tesla and 9 other makers, all Chinese, in the top 10. I wish Tesla the best but century old car makers are also in the race and aren't just retarded business aristocrates employing sub-par engineers.
Tesla's figures may continue to show poor results, car makers opex are massive, we may not see Tesla deliver any vehicle ever again by 2025 end. Not a wish, but those figures are a disaster for a company that should rather see healthy spikes in the expanding European EV markets.
For comparison GM’s PE is 5 and Ford’s is 12.
So when the company, whose stock is so expensive compared to others in the industry, and is predicated on taking the world over with their cars, doesn’t grow as expected then yes it is indeed scary.