As everyone knows, the automobile industry has been slammed in 2020, including in the United States. Below is a look at third quarter auto sales across the country as well as auto sales in the first three quarters of the year.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk has repeatedly said — including very emphatically on the last Tesla conference call — that consumer demand is not a problem at all for Tesla. It seems from his comments that there is far more consumer demand than production capacity. However, we don’t know how much more, and we don’t know how that demand is spread out geographically across the world.
US auto sales, as we all know by now, took a massive hit in the second quarter of 2020. After collecting the sales data of 31 auto brands (almost all of them), I decided to dig in a little deeper — and further back in time — to try to get a better sense of trends and which companies are facing particularly challenging mid- to long-term circumstances.
Toyota [NYSE:TM] was reporting monthly sales last year (including sales of luxury brand Lexus), but then didn’t publish a sales report until April, covering the first quarter of the year. “Okay, fine, it is switching to quarterly reporting, too,” I thought.
If you had asked me 4 months ago if 1st quarter US auto sales would be down 495,732, nearly half a million units, in the quarter as a whole compared to the 1st quarter of 2019, I’d think you were crazy.
The Tesla Model 3 accounted for approximately 21% of new small & midsize luxury car sales in the USA in the first quarter of 2020*. For some perspective, the BMW 2 Series, 3 Series, 4 Series, and 5 Series together combined for approximately 15% of the segment’s share.
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.
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).
The Tesla Model 3 continued to hog the throne on top of the US premium-class car market at the end of 2019. For the full year, the Model 3 accounted for 23% of small and midsize luxury car sales. In other words, nearly 1 out of every 4 small or midsize luxury cars sold in 2019 was a Tesla Model 3.
The US auto industry took a bit of a whack in 2019. Excluding Tesla, auto sales were down by 177,839 units in 2019 compared to 2018. That said, only 13 auto brands saw their sales drop, while 18 saw their sales rise.
