It seems the EV transition is going just fine — except for Elon Musk's company
Recently, it seems there’s been a lot of doom and gloom around EV sales. Despite ever-dropping prices the market just hasn’t grown the way automakers would like, leading many to shift their priorities to hybrids instead. New data, however, shows that the EV market as a whole isn’t actually suffering. All the problems really come from Tesla $TSLA.
Sales data from April, collected by Automotive News, shows growth in the EV market outpacing that of vehicles as a whole. Electric sales were up 14% as a whole, which is a promising number. Yet, when you take Tesla out of the equation, those numbers skyrocket: Non-Tesla EV sales grew a full 69% over the same period. Nice. From Automotive News:
U.S. electric-vehicle registrations rose 14 percent in April after a lackluster first quarter, thanks to automaker incentives in excess of $10,000 on some models. But Tesla’s numbers continued to fall sharply and its share of the EV segment dropped below 50 percent, according to new-vehicle data from S&P Global $SPGI Mobility.
New Tesla registrations fell 17 percent in April, marking three consecutive months in the red. Tesla’s share of the U.S. EV segment dropped to 46.3 percent in April from 63.8 percent a year earlier, S&P Global Mobility said.
Excluding Tesla from the April data, U.S. EV registrations rose 69 percent, S&P Global Mobility said. Ford $F’s EV registrations rose 169 percent, Kia’s were up 172 percent and Toyota $TM’s jumped 647 percent for its lone EV model, the bZ4X crossover.
Tesla has focused its recent marketing efforts on building support for Elon Musk’s outrageous payday rather than on actually marketing its cars, but it’s unlikely that’s the issue plaguing the company — Tesla has never really advertised its vehicles the way legacy automakers do. Instead, Tesla’s history of poor quality control and unpredictable feature removal may finally be catching up with it. As automakers with more established supply chains, dealer networks and repair centers start building electric vehicles, we may see that Tesla market share continue to plummet.
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