Now, 2020 has rolled around and a bunch more automakers have decided to ditch monthly sales reporting. Nissan (& Infiniti), Jaguar Land Rover, and Volkswagen (including Audi, Porsche, etc.) announced the change with press releases. Others didn’t seem to announce it but just stopped publishing the monthly numbers (Mercedes, BMW, and Toyota).
Every nation of this world will do its best to protect its industry for the good of the country’s economy and its people. Politicians are elected to make sure industries and jobs are doing well, to stabilize income, and to reduce risk. There is absolutely nothing wrong with this protection. Unfortunately, politics can, by trying its very best to support its industry, destroy it without even realizing what’s happening. This has happened before, and there is a large risk that it’s happening today in the largest automotive producing countries, like Germany, Japan, and the USA.
The French plug-in passenger electric vehicle market broke all of its previous records in January, with all-electric models jumping 258% to 10,952 units and plug-in hybrid electric vehicles surging 238% to 3,813 registrations.
With a sales rush in the last days of 2019, one would imagine January would bring a big hangover for the plug-in vehicle market. But turns out, it hasn’t. Yes, the Dutch plug-in market was down 2% year over year (YoY), to 3,184 registrations, but because the overall market fell even more (-6% YoY), the plug-in vehicle (PEV) share (7.2%, 4.3% for fully electric vehicles alone) actually grew compared to 12 months ago (6.9% in January 2019). So … why is this happening?
Funds based on third-party indices did very well and very poorly. Of the top seven performing funds, four were based solely on internal investment management decisions and didn’t start with third-party indices at all.
Tesla now has as high a market cap that is nearly as large as BMW and VW combined. An article by Spiegel noted a few days ago that Tesla [TSLA] had surpassed the two, but the stock has dropped a bit since then. Nonetheless, it’s still close.
The Tesla Model 3 is the Usain Bolt of the electric vehicle market. It is far and away the most popular electric vehicle in the world. In fact, it had nearly 3× as many sales last year as the 2nd best selling electric vehicle (EV), and it accounted for ~4× as many sales as the 3rd best selling EV, the Nissan LEAF.
Ah! To zip through Miami’s city streets in a little electric sports car, a MINI…
The new MINI SE electric car is a blast to drive and the perfect urban mobility device. Now if only MINI could do something about all that traffic!
It was a favorite term of skeptics and detractors for years: the “Tesla killer.” The theory was that, as soon as premium carmakers started producing their own fully electric models, that would be the end for the fragile Californian startup. After all, how could Musk’s company even dream of competing with the century-old, giant automakers’ well-oiled machines?
