As the Tesla Model 3 gains significant production volume, with most of the 2018 deliveries going to US customers, other players in the US small and midsize luxury car segment look set to see their sales halved in Q3 and Q4.
As I discussed yesterday in a couple of pieces, Tesla Model 3 sales are beginning to look very good compared to gas cars in its class, and they should even give the top selling passenger cars in the United States a run for their money by summertime. I’m probably going to start doing monthly reports on those sales, but that doesn’t mean I’ll stop doing the super fun US electric car sales reports.
In the middle of last month, I published an article about expected Tesla Model 3 sales versus gas car sales in its class. To be clear, the estimates were for all models (not just the Tesla Model 3), with gas car estimates based on April 2017 sales and recent trends. It turned out that estimates for a few of the models were quite off — sometimes high, sometimes low. The good news is that makes this update all the more interesting.
The Chairman and Global President for the INFINITI brand, Roland Krueger, has announced that the company is now in the process of developing a new all-electric vehicle platform based around the Q Inspiration concept car design.
At the beginning of the month, Tesla noted that it had gotten Model 3 production up to 2,000 cars a week at the end of March. More recently, Tesla CEO Elon Musk told CBS that Tesla had produced 2,070 Model 3s in the week leading up to April 10. If you assume Tesla stalls at approximately 2,000 cars a week for the whole month, that’s still over 8,000 Model 3 electric super-sedans produced in April.
As part of a push to become one of the top auto manufacturers operating in the country, Nissan will be pumping 60 billion yuan ($9.5 billion) into its operations in China over the next 5 years, company execs have revealed.
While Nissan has without a doubt been one of the top firms in the plug-in electric vehicle sector over the last decade, the reality is also that the company has seemingly spent a fair amount of that time stalling. As an example, when the Nissan Leaf first hit the market, it was in some ways revolutionary, a very solid offering. It won several notable awards. It was fresh, innovative, and interesting. But the company spent the next few years refusing to update the Leaf much at all and didn’t roll out other electric cars.
Nissan CEO Hiroto Saikawa announced at the Detroit auto show on Tuesday that all new Infiniti models will be electric or plug-in hybrids beginning in 2021.
The Infiniti Q Inspiration makes bold promises on the outside, but beneath its swoopy exterior. it fails to deliver the goods.
Nissan demonstrated a fully autonomous, next-generation version of its ProPILOT technology on the streets of Tokyo a couple of days ago, giving observers a glimpse of the tech that Nissan says will be utilized in the real world (the commercial sector) from 2020 onwards.
