Looking at how the Tesla Model 3 compares on lists of the top selling cars in the USA is always a bit odd. The other top selling cars are a class or three below the Model 3. The most comparable vehicles on the list are the iconic Ford Mustang and Dodge Charger, which do not match the Model 3 in several major categories (sometimes by a gigantic margin) but are at least in the “sporty affordable cars” category.
A little while after I published articles about Tesla’s US 1st quarter sales earlier this month, I discovered that our estimates for foreign sales had been too pessimistic. Sales abroad were much higher in the 1st quarter than we initially thought — most notably, in Europe, South Korea, and China. That meant that US Tesla sales estimates were too high.
With the Chinese market slowly returning to normal, now that China has endured the first wave of the COVID pandemic, sales have started to recover from February’s fall into the abyss. In March they dropped just 51%, to around 60,000 units, a significant improvement from the 65% fall of the previous month.
Porsche worldwide sales were only down 5% in the first quarter of 2020, thanks to strong sales in Europe. Numbers in other world markets were far less satisfactory, however.
Despite the Covid-related lockdown in the second half of the month, the German plug-in vehicle market score signaled another record performance in March, its third in a row — 19,145 plug-in vehicles (EVs) were registered. With the overall market dropping 38% year over year (YoY), last month’s plug-in share reached a record 8.9% (4.8% fully electric/BEV), pulling the yearly tally to an amazing 7.3% (3.7% BEV).
The true issues of a crisis are usually not the root cause of it, but rather the consequences and the ability of your organization to respond to them.
We report on plug-in vehicle sales in many markets, but we’ve only reported on South Korea’s electric vehicle sales twice over the years. Perhaps it’s time to start giving this major economy more attention. Electric vehicle (EV) market share in South Korea rose to 3.3% in March, and 2.3% in the first quarter as a whole.
With the overall French market crumbling (-72% year over year!) due to the coronavirus lockdown, and the country returning to registrations levels (62,668 units) not seen in the past 50 years, one would think that plug-ins would suffer too, right? The answer to that is “yes” and “no.”
A matter of weeks. That’s all it took for the coronavirus pandemic to change the face of the world and wreak havoc at an unprecedented scale on all aspects of human life. The economic fallout of this health emergency has proved particularly quick and devastating on the transport sector, as entire continents try to slow the spread by adopting strict lockdowns.
Supply and demand are two sides of the same coin, and although they look different, you cannot separate the two. They are like twins always moving together.
You can’t measure true supply without having excess demand and you can’t measure true demand without excess supply. They influence each other and are actually the same looked at from two different perspectives.
