Tesla just reported first-quarter vehicle production and delivery numbers for 2021. In total, it delivered 184,800 vehicles and produced 180,338 cars.
That's a 109% increase from Q1 of 2020.
That competition might want to start moving a bit faster. I'm not sure adding another cup holder and a usb charging port to the old gas guzzler is going keep working for them.
Kinda reminds of what Jack Rickard(EVTV) wrote about Tesla a few years ago.
EVTV has largely ceased to convert ICE cars to electric drive, which was long our only reason for life. It started in 2009 and while the Tesla Roadster was much discussed, not a single one had ever been actually delivered. If you wanted an electric car in the spring of 2009, you had to build one. There were ZERO models offered by the sum total of all automotive manufacturers worldwide. We defined, aided, abetted, and enabled the tinkerer/innovator stage of the adoption curve and noted numerous times that on achieving “early adopter” phase we were out of it.
I lied. The outcome was SO assured that by 2017 my mind, with the laser like focus and attention span of a four-year-old, just wandered away. This no longer requires my efforts. The outcome is assured.
And Tesla was largely the reason. Basically it costs between $20-40,000 to do a good build converting an ICE car to electric drive.
Tilt and tittle at that all you want, I did a lot of them and a lot of different ways and several were over $100k. Not really unusual among custom car enthusiasts and I expect those guys will be doing electric conversion show cars 50 years from now.
The Model 3 at $40k is a better car than I can do at $40k.
Worse, it is kind of a one sided launch. We covered the news of LOTS of different electric cars, and most notably HUNDREDS of VW press releases that never were actually cars. And the conclusion was that it just doesn’t matter. Porsche and BMW were the only ones that had the right stuff to compete with Tesla and they didn’t. All else didn’t matter and couldn’t matter. And yes, Porsche’s Taycan will launch this September 4th and they are going to sell 30,000 or 40,000 of them and THEY STILL WON’T MATTER.
Tesla just owns it. And at this point, the moats of its battery technology and costing, its Supercharger network, it’s online sales model, the Over the Air Software Updates, and much much more put it SO far out ahead, that the other manufacturers are still announcing the “coming Tesla killer” aimed at the 2013 Tesla Model S. Problem: It is 2019.
And so we basically got out of converting EV’s BEFORE we got to the early adopter stage. I lied. Because the outcome is not just assured, it is unstoppable.
But if all else fails, the commonly held marker for the BEGINNING of Everett Rogets adoption curve early adopter stage is 2.5% market penetration.
So where are we at? The current global market for automobiles is a little squishy on your definition of an automobile, but as a personal transportation device is currently widely regarded as 78 million units annually with about 15 million in the U.S.
The short thesis is that Tesla CANNOT POSSIBLY meet their projections of 360,000 units this year. Duh. That’s 0.0046 or 0.46%.
ALL electric cars from EVERYBODY all told don’t reach 1% of the market for cars. We aren’t even CLOSE to the “early adopter” stage.
I’m at the point where if you don’t have Tesla logo on your car you’re not electric and don’t matter. To the point that we are working furiously on things like an OBDII port adapter for the Model 3, or reverse engineering Tesla batteries, not EV batteries, TESLA batteries for solar energy storage. I have a half finished Cadillac Escalade conversion hanging in the air on a lift where it has hung for a year.
But the blue sky for Tesla is essentially UNLIMITED. They can sell all they make and make all they sell starting at 360,000 units and topping out at 78 million. They are 0.46% of a $2.3 TRILLION dollar market. And they appear to my biased eye to already own ALL of it.
It reminds me of Sandra Bullock and Sylvester Stallone, in the movie DEMOLITION MAN. In the future, ALL restaurants had consolidated under the brand name TACO BELL. If SOMEBODY doesn’t do SOMETHING pretty quickly, in the future ALL automobiles will be Tesla’s.