When I saw the news yesterday that GM is closing five plants and laying off nearly 15,000 employees, I was surprised. Not because it was happening, but because this could be an extremely forward looking move by the company.
General Motors says it is closing 3 assembly plants and two powertrain factories as sales of passenger cars continue to fall. It also says it will end production of the Chevy Volt on March 1.
I’ve written a lot of articles about how great and affordable the Tesla Model 3 is, and I truly believe it has the potential to become one of the best selling cars of all time. Does that mean it is the right car for everyone? No — although it must be enjoyable for everyone to drive (or not drive, once the full-self-driving software is available), it just isn’t the right car for everyone.
You’re going to be shocked — the electric car respondents most frequently said they were most likely to buy next (or for the first time in the case of non-EV drivers) was the Tesla Model 3. Over 100,000 reservations ($1,000 each) were placed for the car in under 24 hours — even before the car was shown. The demand was through the roof and ended up being the single biggest product reveal in history by certain key metrics. So, it is not a surprise in the least that this electric car tops the list of “expected next EV model.”
Brad Cornell teaches financial economics at Caltech. He also happens to manage a hedge fund. And when it comes to Tesla, he’s by no means a bull. He still believes Tesla is overvalued. However, much like short-seller Andrew Left, he’s becoming disillusioned with EV efforts from legacy automakers.
Sales of cars with electric motors accounted for more than 7% of BMW sales in the US in October. That’s good but down from last year. The Chevy Bolt and Nissan LEAF are limping along. The big news is the Tesla Model 3, which is taking America by storm.
A Tesla Motors Forum member somewhat recently posted some interesting EV-related heat maps. He used Google’s Fusion Tables and first created a heat map of Tesla Superchargers, with weighting based on number of stalls.
At the height of the financial crisis in 2008, Thomas J. Thias, a car salesperson at the 6th largest Class A dealership in the nation by total sales volume, watched as gas prices spiked to near record levels. “By June, prices had hit $4 a gallon and stayed that way until the end of October,” Thias explained. By late November, prices had dropped to $2 a gallon, “but the damage to small businesses, the Big Three automakers, and consumers was devastating,” he said.
For the third year in a row, CleanTechnica has published an in-depth report on electric car drivers in North America and Europe. For the cross-continental report, we surveyed over 2,000 electric car drivers. This year, we also surveyed over 1,000 people who don’t yet have an electric car.
Tesla has busted open the mainstream electric vehicle market. The problem is, approximately 17 million passenger vehicles are sold per year in the USA, the number globally is around 100 million, and there’s no way in the netherworld Tesla could produce 10 million cars per year on its own by 2023. Even 2025 seems idealistic (but I would love to be proven wrong). Yes, Chinese automakers are ramping up electric vehicle production faster than automakers in the US and Europe, but they aren’t taking over the world anytime soon.
