Numbers for August passenger vehicle sales in the Netherlands were just published. The detailed numbers are not yet available, only the totals. Officially, sales are down by 16% year over year (YoY).
Porsche is a well known automobile brand globally. If you ask 100 people what Porsche sells and ask the same 100 people what Tesla sales, no doubt about it there will be a higher number of correct responses regarding Porsche. It’s also a niche vehicle brand, of course, since it sells expensive, powerful vehicles. Its brand is all about, “You have to be rich to afford this toy.” (That’s not a direct quote of Porsche marketing materials, of course.) The sales marker highlighted in the headline is interesting when thinking about both of those matters — Porsche awareness and Porsche exclusivity. Before discussing both of them, though, let’s jump into the numbers.
The European passenger plug-in electric vehicle (PEV) market had some 36,000 registrations in July, +32% year over year (YoY). That means the PEV market has grown 34% in 2019, a great performance considering this is an off-peak month for Tesla.
There is nothing vertical in vertical integration, and nothing horizontal in horizontal integration, and the integration is not really what vertical integration is about. In short, it’s a bad name for a complex matter. The last time I intended to write an article about it, something else flew out of the 6 fingers I usually write with and I don’t know really why but people liked it, so therefore I declare it was a good story despite my own opinion, which does not really count. If I learned one thing about writing, it is, trust your readers, follow your fingers, and don’t look back — and most important of all, don’t listen to your own judgement.
For people working in software development, like I used to do, the 80–20 rule is infamous. It states that about 80% of the job is done in the first 20% of the time. The last 20% of the development will take about 80% of the time.
In this article, I want to discuss Tesla’s potential to grow in the Asian market. Everybody knows China is a huge opportunity since it is both the largest auto market in the world and it seems to get pretty good support from the government, which seems to be trying to address the air pollution issue in the country, but I wanted to look at the size of all the rest of Asia.
Years ago I switched from a small (7 person) software development team to a larger (70 persion) software development team. The products both teams maintained were nearly identical, in function, size, number, and type of users.
The planning of the small team was: “It is ready when it is ready.” The large team was ISO certified and their software development was always within budget and time.
Recently, a commenter told me that I was far too optimistic, the transition to electric driving would not start before 2025. And we were both thinking in percentage market share.
After an end-of-incentives derived surge in June, July saw the expected hangover, with the Chinese plug-in vehicle market dropping 7% year over year (YoY), and the 70,000 units of last month representing less than half of the deliveries of the previous month. Plug-in hybrids (PHEVs) sank 22% YoY in July, their worst drop in over two years, while, amazingly, fully electric vehicles (BEVs) still managed to grow, if only by 1%, despite the gloom all around them (the overall market also dropped 4%).
Sometimes it is frustrating that nearly all of the EV news sites are situated in the USA. With the result that news from the rest of the world (RotW) is not always getting the attention it deserves.
