Overall, non-Tesla US passenger vehicle sales were up by 14,910 units in the 3rd quarter of 2019 compared to the 3rd quarter of 2018, and 14 brands saw their sales increase while 13 saw their sales decrease.
I may need to cancel my fun, popular, and extremely time consuming monthly reports for US auto sales. One by one, US automakers have stopped publishing monthly sales data. At this point, there are almost as many brands not reporting sales as there are reporting them.
Welcome to the next issue of China x Cleantech, the March 2019 edition. For our full China × Cleantech history, stroll over to the “Future Trends” section of our website.
In the first quarter of 2019, the Tesla Model 3 was again the #1 top selling car in the US luxury car market. It was far and away the winner. It was actually #13 in the overall US car market, and no other premium-class car even made the top 20.
Now that we’ve got a truly mass market electric car in the US (the 13th best selling car in the country in the first quarter of 2019 and the best selling luxury car), I’ve found it interesting to take a closer look at changes in all automakers’ overall car and automobile sales. I meticulously track changes from month to month and quarter to quarter using automaker sales reports for this purpose.
Tesla had the #1 top selling luxury car in the USA in the first quarter of 2019, but it didn’t win the title of top selling luxury car producer in the first quarter and also didn’t top the list of luxury automakers (cars + SUVs/CUVs/trucks). However, the Silicon Valley company did stay on the podium despite a 50% cut in the federal EV tax credit for Tesla buyers and despite the fact that most Tesla vehicles were shipped abroad (with the Model 3 making it overseas for the first time).
The electric car story of the year — nay, the car story of the year — was the Tesla Model 3 taking the industry by storm. Just as we were predicting 3 or 4 years ago, Tesla’s ability to ramp up production of a more affordable, more mass market model is sending chills down other automakers’ spines — or it should be. I’ll revise a famous old quote to explain the ongoing story in a different way:
GM says it will have 20 plug-in hybrid or battery electric models for sale to Chinese customers by 2023. Meanwhile in the US, it rails against fuel economy standards and continues to push pickups. Can you say “two faced,” boys and girls?
News from the Beijing auto show this week includes electric SUV concepts from BYD, BMW, and Buick.
GM is now aiming to sell 150,000 “new energy vehicles” a year by 2020, and 500,000 a year by 2025 — as revealed at a recent 20th anniversary of the company’s launch of its first two joint ventures in China with SAIC.
