How low can you go: Tesla's US market share dips below 50% for the first time US sales of electric vehicles hit a new record in the second quarter of 2024, no thanks to Tesla, which saw its market share drop below 50 percent of total US electric vehicle sales for the first time in its history. Cox Automotive said in a preview of its Q2 2024 electric auto sales report that Tesla's sales in the second …
I bought a new Model 3 the end of last year and it now has about 26k miles on it. It was cheaper, by a fair amount, then the average price for a new car in the US, I've had ZERO problems with it, and the panel gaps are tight and even.
This car is a blast to drive and cheap to run. So far maintenance has consisted of one (free) tire rotation and three jugs of windshield washer fluid.
When the car company Tesla goes bust it'll probably be remembered in much the same way as the DMC DeLorean.
Except that looked somewhat cool, and had a boost from being the time machine in "back to the future". Tesla cars will likely be remembered for all of the wrong reasons, such as (in the UK) having a yearly insurance cost that is a significant fraction of the purchase price.
If Musk weren't involved then I think it's more likely that Tesla would go the way of marques like Rolls and Bentley - absorbed by one of the big companies but still badged and sort of independently retaining some of their original USP. I don't see Musk allowing this while he's in charge and if he did consider it I can't believe that any of the big auto companies would want the pain of trying to deal with him if he had any role in the ongoing business. More likely is that, if Tesla drops too far down the sales charts, he'll find some excuse to exit gracefully** - maybe to focus on grid batteries or the space business or launching the X-bank/payments system.
** that's "gracefully" in Elon's terms, not in the generally accepted meaning of the word.
Ironically that was the real founders goal.
Build a demonstrator, the Tesla roadster, and then get bought by one of the serious auto makers.
After all you couldn't build your own car company from scratch, with factories, a supply chain and roll out your own nationwide charger network as a startup
To give the Musk his due, it's down to him that Tesla exists in its current state
"he'll find some excuse to exit gracefully** - maybe to focus on grid batteries or the space business or launching the X-bank/payments system."
The grid batteries are packaged cells they buy in and Tesla isn't the sole provider of that sort of product. Even with the Powerwall, Panasonic has competing boxes (Evervolt) with the same cells (or at least both are Panasonic cells).
The house of cards is also very interconnected. If one falls, especially Tesla, the others will crash as well. While Elon overlooks the need to get permissions and permits for many things or might ignore paying rent for offices his company(ies) occupy, he can't be as cavalier about banking regulations.
"Except that looked somewhat cool, and had a boost from being the time machine in "back to the future". Tesla cars will likely be remembered for all of the wrong reasons,"
The movie tie in will be the Julia Roberts movie (I don't know the name) of driverless Tesla vehicles speeding down a road and crashing into others.
You don't want to be around when the "semi-sentient" computer system morphs into Marvin the paranoid robot and decides to end it all out of sheer boredom or an AI generated existential crises.
A drop in Tesla's market share is inevitable, even if everyone in the US switches to driving an EV. They simply don't make cheap enough cars for the average citizen and other manufacturers are trying to compete in the "premium" part of the market. There's a distinct possibility of Tesla selling more cars in the future than they are now whilst still dropping to a single digit percentage share of the EV market.
so it's natural the tesla would be under pressure if they can't grow with their current cars. but i think already the ct is pushing avg price up. actually it was pushing avg price up for the whole market again because only tesla has real scale.
So, Elon Musk is toxic and it is having a marked effect on the business that brought him to prominence.
Are we surprised?
When 'The Onion' is publishing articles like the below and they are being read by people who are in your potential customer base, maybe the best thing is bundle Musk off into a rocket and send him off to Mars alone without a satellite link.
[1] Tesla Announces Plan To Add Up-Skirt Cameras On All Vehicles
https://www.theonion.com/tesla-announces-plan-to-add-up-skirt-cameras-on-all-veh-1851517472
>I don't think Musk's antics are the main reason for the drop in popularity,
Yes, mostly it's that there is now a lot more choice - even here in the colonies where we are mostly prevented from buying foreign cars.
But the TrumpMusk brand doesn't help.
Here on the left coast, where if you drive a pickup truck and you aren't a landscaper you are assumed to be a MAGA hat wearing gun-totting deplorable.
The dense cloud of smug which surrounded every Prius has definitely worn off from Tesla. There are even bumper stickers " I bought the Tesla before we knew about Elon"
Chortle, chortle. It's amazing how pervasive political partisanship is in the US, even in the "educated" parts. I remember when I was visiting the Outer Banks in North Carolina with some friends that it was possible to predict political affiliation from the vehicle or driving style. It's also where I saw a great way to change roads: down the grass verge of one highway and up that of the next.
It's not as if similar stereotypes don't exist elsewhere, because they do, but they're usually more personal and less political: here, BMWs and Mercedes are notorious for cutting up and tailgating because the drivers seem to assume that right of way is a configuration option! ;-)
"the competition has adapted and introduced more and cheaper cars"
Just not in the US. In Europe, UK, Aus and Scandinavia, there are loads of choices for less money. VW, who already have a sales, support and manufacturing in the US, I wonder why they didn't introduce the ID.3 rather than the ID.4. A lower price point would have put a lot of ordinance across Tesla's bow.
The US is a desert for choices when it comes to EV's. I see the models that are sold in EU, UK and Scandinavia and I get jealous. When I check in on Bjorn Nyland's YT channel to see what's what, he's reviewing yet another make/model that I've never heard of before and certainly won't be for sale in the US this century.
Tesla has one mainstream model car in two sizes (3/Y). The S and X have been eaten. The Cybertruck is a massive joke and they've shot themselves (or as Elon would say, "They've dug their own grave) shipping it long before working out the major issues such as how to build them. The superficial design flaws go a long way to masking the fundamental design flaws is about as much as can be said.
The latest news cycle is touting how well the Tesla energy division is going. Stock has been going up since the company didn't do as bad as the pundits had expected. The funny thing is that it was still way off of being able to be called growth. Going by the financials, the energy division is microscopic compared to making cars so if that business tripled and they could get away with massive margins for a few quarters, it doesn't go anywhere in justifying the market cap. Tesla is the only player in battery storage. There's also Panasonic (Evervolt), BYD, LG, Bosch, Siemens and a bunch more with some really interesting building block products that allow elechickens to use to assemble custom installations.
They are falling off a cliff mostly due to unease around what the ongoing maintenance costs are likely to be. Tesla needs to address this urgently as when the second hand market falls the lease deals will sky rocket due to lower residual values. This is already happening. Tesla needs to open up maintenance and service to third parties so the cars can be kept on the road at a reasonable cost.
My Model 3 is currently having its rear drive unit changed after 96k miles. I've had lots of other cars and none have had this level of fault at this (mainly motorway / highway) mileage. There is absolutely no maintenance done on the drive units so there is nothing you can do to prolong their life (I drive very conservatively).
Not sure about Tesla specifically, but the whole used-EV market has been plummeting for some time: https://www.cnbc.com/2024/06/16/used-ev-price-crash-gets-deeper-with-premium-brand-idea-history.html
What would you expect from a $100k "piece of Tech"? I imagine they keep their value about as well as a pallet of 100 iPads ...
There are some features of a Tesla that don't depreciate on the used market though, e.g. their ability to make you look like a total utter bellend, which for some is apparently a selling point.
It's an interesting problem for the supercar crowd.
Your $1M 25 year old McLaren F1 is now worth $25M, a 1960s Porsche or 1970s Lamborghini might be worth 10x-100x the original price
What is a 2025 Ferrari/Lambo/Koenigsegggggg EV hypercar going to be worth in 10 years if you can't drive it because the battery is junk, or the OS is unsupported ?
Or if you have to remove the battery because you can't risk it bursting into flames one day and burning down your collection. At which point it's a sculpture not a car, and you might as well buy a Picasso.
Well I just read that Ferrari is going to offer a subscription plan where you pay some $7500 per year for battery support and every few years they will out a new more modern battery in the car to keep it up to date. I guess for a Ferrari owner that sounds like a decent deal.
How long did it take after the model t went into general production before the market caught up and ford were not the dominant player any more.
What I'm getting at is Tesla dipping below 50% of the total EV market is something, but its not surprising.
I don't have the numbers but in cars in general, who has the highest market share as a brand and what is it? I would wager its far lower than 50% of the entire car market just at a guess, so Tesla being below 50% of EVs is kind of just how sales go of products.
If you have the best and most available for a period of years people will buy it, when there is competition a few years on people look at the options. There's nothing stunning here.
That sounds far more reasonable, more what I would expect from a general car market.
The headline trying to make shock out of being below 50% is more shocking it was above 50% at any time, let alone for years. Just seems like things are getting back to "normal"
Tesla been top dog with their electric vehicles for some time simply because nobody else offered anything similar. There's now competition and even allowing for the tariff walls going up around the US and Europe there's now many attractive options which will eat into their (US) market share. Even so, its still significant and since they have a hefty IP portfolio in both electric vehicles and renewable energy in general I daresay they won't starve.
There's always the China market.
Of course in terms of patents and research into EVs (and hybrids which are EVs with extra complications), Toyota has some 4 to 5 times as much as Tesla. Right now they think hybrids still make more sense, but once the cost of battery materials improve (and they are dropping fast lately) and they get their solid state battery designs into production (which they seem to think can happen in the next couple of years), Toyota will be showing up with EVs, but not until they think they make sense. Tesla has done a lot to get the EV market going, but not a while lot new in the last number of years. FSD isn't working yet, and I doubt it ever will (certainly many experts don't[ think it will work the way Tesla is trying to do it), no matter how often Elon promises it is going to be all done next year, it is after all a lot harder than he thinks, because he doesn't actually have a clue how to make it work, he just dreams big. Panasonic has more patents and research than Tesla, and while they were working with Tesla on the battery factory, they parted ways, probably because Panasonic decided Tesla wasn't possible to work with.
So yes Tesla has done well, but I don't expect them to play a large part in the EV market in 10 or 20 years. They just don't know how to make good cars and aren't looking at what lessons others have learned in the past, and making all the mistakes themselves, including some new ones (in the case of the idiotic design of the cybertruck, which of course can never be sold in any part of the world where safety is considered). There are better motors out there than Tesla has (Koenigsegg has one that is insane, but I suspect so is the price for now). Much better batteries too, and better ones than that on the way. Just about anyone else has better build quality, better service (especially if you need parts, which Tesla isn't fans of selling to anyone, so repair costs are high and hence insurance costs are high). Definitely there are other car companies doing better self driving work, just way less hyped up, and not promising things they can't deliver. The future for EVs looks promising and bright, I just don't think Tesla is going to keep up and be part of it in the long term.
I definitely won't be buying Tesla stock, nor would I consider shorting it, I would just not be involved and just watch the show. Nor will I buy a Tesla car, although I sure do expect to buy some EV within a couple of years. For now hybrid will have to do until they are ready.
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