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Comment by nostromo | Hacker News Reader

Check out how fast this market it going. (US battery electric vehicle sales per year: http://www.electricdrive.org/index.php?ht=d/sp/i/20952/pid/2...)

  2010:     19 (lol, is that right?)
  2011: 10,064
  2012: 52,835
  2013: 96,702

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> 2010: 19 (lol, is that right?)

Yes, because despite all of our pre-ordered Leafs supposed to be showing up in December of '10, they were late (granted, they had a tsunami, but that wasn't the only reason). And as far as I know, Nissan was the only one shipping battery cars.

The 2011 number doesn't include plug in hybrids, the later years do (with the plug in hybrids being the majority of 2012 sales and around half of 2013).

Considering that Telsa brought in $116M in revenue in 2010, I find the 2010 count suspect.

http://www.teslamotors.com/about/press/releases/tesla-motors...

Tesla accepted a lot of pre-orders long before they had shippable cars.

Tesla began delivering their roadster to customers in 2008.

Most of that revenue is from selling EVs to Daimler and others. But it does look like you are right about the 2010 number being off..

Tesla celebrates 1000th roadster: Jan 12, 2010

http://www.teslamotors.com/about/press/releases/tesla-celebr...

Full Year 2010 Results "Tesla delivered its 1,500th Roadster during the [4th] quarter."

http://www.teslamotors.com/about/press/releases/tesla-motors...

The fact that they are so wrong on that statistic makes me question their data collection methods. How can you trust anything else on that page?

Useful point of reference: the VW golf (Europe's most popular car) sells around 500k/yr, so the Leaf's sales are about 7% of that. Seems significant.

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