Electric Cars and Tesla Now to 2020

China is the global leader in electric vehicles sales. Over one million electric cars were sold in China in 2018 which was nearly three times more than the USA.

Global electric car sales finished May 2019 with 180,000 sales for the month. This was up 12% on May 2018, with market share at 2.3% in May and 2.1% YTD. In June, plug-in electric car sales in the U.S. significantly accelerated as InsideEVs data shows 37,818 sales which is 51% more than a year ago.

Of note 73% of all global electric car sales in May were 100% battery electric vehicles (BEVs), the balance being hybrids.

China electric car sales were ~104,000 in May 2019, up 2% on May 2018. Electric car market share in China for May was 6.6%. Year-to-date market share is at 5.6%.

In Netherlands June 2019 there were 4,543 new plug-ins were registered (up 97% year-over-year).

58% of all of Norway’s car sales are for electric cars. Norway doesn’t make electric cars cheaper but they tax gas- and diesel-powered cars at a 25% rate. Zero-emission vehicles (ZEV) have no value-added tax, which is 25 percent on gas and diesel vehicles.

In Norway in June 2019, more than 3,000 Tesla Model 3 registered sent electric car sales in Norway up by 87%. In Norway passenger plug-in electric car registrations surged to the second-best result ever of 8,867 (up 11.2% year-over-year).

In April in Europe, fully electric vehicles (BEVs) jumped 70% year over year (YoY), to 24,000 deliveries.

Tesla China production in Q4 of 2019 and Model Y in Q3 of 2020

Tesla should surge to 750,000 cars in 2020 with the Shanghai factory ramping up to full production of the Model 3 and then the Model Y.

50 thoughts on “Electric Cars and Tesla Now to 2020”

  1. Given the size of the market, I’ll be surprised if little charging units that accept a credit card wavepay or mobile phone app payment don’t drop down to a couple of hundred dollars fairly soon. They should pay for themselves in months.

  2. I misinterpreted your

    So you need 2.5 kW of installed solar per car to keep it charged.

    As being a statement about individuals.

    Yes, as a society the grid makes it all work. Once you’ve wired up all the daytime parking spaces.

  3. Apartment complexes can offer charging stations as an amenity, like they do laundry rooms. If they get a cut of the revenue, they would have an incentive to install them. There are already startups putting them into parking garages.

  4. Why do the panels need to be where the car is? We have this thing in developed countries called a “power grid”. The fact that I mentioned an offshore wind farm should have made that clear.

    I was responding to jimmy2crows silly statement about the “massive buildout” needed for electric cars. If you are no longer paying for petroleum fuels, that money can be used to build renewable energy instead. So the change-over will be affordable.

  5. China slashed highest level EV subsidy (250 miles+) by half in March to now 25,000 yuan ($3,644). Still with that cut EVs are growing like +2%, while all others are dropping like -16%.

  6. I agree, so the EV optimists have good reason to be optimistic. I think the “suburban charging” advantage will stall EV market penetrations to 50% or so, though, with a much smaller growth rate for people who do not own garages after that while alternative infrastructure is built up.

  7. Oil is too fungible to make that argument with a straight face, I think. Though I’d wager you don’t usually argue with a straight face, if I count the times you’ve made me spit out my coffee onto my laptop keyboard laughing.

    EDIT: I think I’ve told you this before, but you have changed my coffee drinking habits while reading NBF to avoid accidents. Read. Pick up mug, sip, swallow, put down mug, read.

  8. Not true. As long as we import oil we will be dependent on Middle East oil. If we would substitute natural gas for oil in home heating and industrial processes then we would be able to span that gap.

  9. The only problem there is that you need the solar panels to be located where the car is parked during the day.

    The obvious solution is to leave the car at home and ride a bike to work. Not really practicable with current London weather but a bit of global warming will fix that.

  10. It’s amazing how people like to quote Tyler Durden as a good source.

    1. He was fictional.
    2. Even in the fictional source, he wasn’t real.
    3. Even in the fictional, not real source, he was a guy who was an outrageous liar, criminal and terrorist.

    As a provider of information it’s difficult to come up with a worse example.

  11. No, he deserved to be fired for introducing wrong-wheel-drive cars and soiling the BMW badge with them.

  12. Clearly that should be a tax on imports from Asia and Europe, because those are the places that the USA was defending from oil supply shutdowns. Oil used in the USA is not affected.

    (Ironically, Russia gets a pass on this tax.)

  13. I always say would you rather be locked in your garage with your ICE or your EV running. The atmosphere of Earth isn’t that all that Big. People just need to live in the micro environment they create with their outputs, doubt we’d see too many diesel lovers in short order.

  14. The thing is, if you are no longer paying for petroleum fuels, you would have the money to build more electric capacity. The US consumes 400 million gallons of gasoline a day, at an average price of about $3/gal currently. That’s $437 billion a year. How much renewable energy will that buy you in one year?

  15. In the US, average driver mileage is 12,000/year (I don’t know what it is for the UK). On a daily basis that’s 33 miles. Tesla Model 3 consumes 0.21 kWh/mile. So you need 7 kWh/day/car. London solar resource is 1000 hours/year or 2.74 hr/day. So you need 2.5 kW of installed solar per car to keep it charged. Solar farms go for $1US/Watt these days, so $2500 in solar panels. If you can afford the cars, you can afford the solar to run them.

    The Walney wind farm in the Irish Sea produces about 2400 GWh/year or 6.575 million kWh/day. It can therefore charge up about a million cars at US driving rates. The UK is building lots of offshore wind farms.

  16. BMW was slow enough that the shareholders just rolled the BMW CEO’s head over the bungled response to EVs. Mercedes just announced terrible profit guidance.

  17. The USA could go 100% light vehicle miles travelled electric and it would require only 25% more electricity demand. And zero grid upgrades because there is a lot of spare grid capacity at night.

  18. So you’re saying the USA should immediately pass an oil tax to cover the 3 trillion spent on Middle East military adventures?

  19. The market should decide WITHOUT government subsidies for electric or hybrid electric or anything else.

  20. I live in Canada in the province of Manitoba and we generate 96% of our electricity by renewables wind/hydro and have surplus to export. We pay 8c kw/h so we need electrics now. I understand that not all areas of the world are clean power but there are new energy sources coming online as we ramp up electrics. SMR Nuclear and fusion is around the corner. http://www.cnl.ca/en/home/facilities-and-expertise/smr/default.aspx
    https://generalfusion.com/
    https://www.hydro.mb.ca/

  21. Thank you for taking the time to debunk junk science and garbage being shared. I know it takes time to do but it’s worth it.

  22. Interesting. It could, of course, be worse than his sketch – too hot for humans to survive outside in parts of Africa and Asia, and day lengths in the Arctic too far from what our food crops can handle. Much stronger storms, carrying the excess tropical heat to the polar regions, could also be a problem – current climate models have trouble reproducing the temperature spectrum through the latitudes that seems to have existed during ice-free periods in the past, with higher CO2. Anyway, the hard bit would be maintaining some kind of civilisation when sea levels were rising by maybe a metre every generation, and climate zones moving faster than farmers could adapt to them.

  23. Only 1 carriage company survived the transition from horse to gasoline: Studebaker.

    Traditional auto companies have to fully redesign their vehicles to take advantage of what electric brings to the table. Making an electric F-150 is not doing that.

    They should be looking at the design of the Aptera: https://endesavehiculoelectrico.com/en/espanol-regreso-al-futuro-el-diseno-de-los-electricos-se-normaliza/
    And the Bladeglider: https://www.nissan-global.com/EN/ZEROEMISSION/HISTORY/BLADEGLIDER/

    Aerodynamics and weight are much more important for EVs. Good designs will have more similarities with aircraft, like helicopters and lower speed modern aircraft.

    There is no advantage in having a small gas tank in an internal combustion vehicle, but there is an advantage in having a smaller battery…production costs go down. But people are going to demand range. That means you have to reduce weight, increase aerodynamics, and make suspension very smooth. It also makes sense to have very efficient breaking regeneration.

  24. But that would mean applying logic and reason, not a common attribute associated with ‘Muricans’.

  25. I wouldn’t call them completely clueless; Ford has invested half a billion into Rivian, has its own separate electric and plug-in hybrid F-150 project going, and has recently formed a partnership with VW to produce electric cars on a common platform. GM has its own electric truck program going, and already makes a decent enough electric car, the Bolt.

  26. What’s your source. I read recently that the Uk’s electrical use has gone down in the last few years. Adding local solar and wind should be able to make up any difference.

  27. My guess is the tipping point from ICE to electric will be sometime between 2025 ~ 2030. After which the worlds electric grid will need some major upgrades. That would be a nice time for room temperature super conductors to make an appearance. This could also help solve the intermittency problem of wind and solar by charging only when the energy is available.

  28. UK population has only gone up ten percent since 1990, but the number of cars has nearly doubled. It’s the cars that are the unmitigated disaster – instead of sitting in traffic jams idling toxins into the air, people should be building cities where they can walk, cycle, and use fast, efficient public transport. Electric cars, with ride share, might be a small part of the picture. And yes, nuclear will be a big part. Or you could just keep burning fossils till you go under water.https://geoawesomeness.com/ice-melted-national-geographics-interactive-map-rising-seas/

  29. total yearly production of all EVs stands solidly at over a million units. For a comparison, the BMW group, with Mini and Rolls Royce, produced just over 2 million cars for 2018. That’s a solid statistic that any auto industry watcher is going to take note off.

  30. I would think all the flag waving ‘Murican types would want to stick it to the Middle East, you know, the brown peoples. Converting over to a EV would be a show of nationalism for them, lowering the demand of globally sold petroleum, and hurting those oil country funded terrorists.

  31. Rtfa instead of ZeroHedge dude. We are currently in a period of lessening geo-magnetic field (ie increasing cosmic ray) maybe leading up to a pole reversal-not strengthening. But global temps are increasing not decreasing. Their only point is to boost cloud cover dynamics based on geomagnetism in the current best-of-class climate models and boost their own research grants. Check out Drroyspencer.com for some fringe science on cloud cover and global warming to try to confirm your biases but he does provide some (scary) lower atmosphere direct satellite measurements over 40 years.

    And wtf does this have to do with electric car sales? Seems like BEV is not growing in China as fast as I would think considering the pace of the switchover in scooters. Probably because cars are non-urban so range anxiety? But maybe things are limited by battery production volume. Battery cost reductions are coming along nicely which is driving the whole dynamic.

    My personal experience is that BEV is just a way better drive. That sentiment will grow and drive (ha) improvements in infrastructure.

  32. Thanks for clarification.. Basically the guy is just another trumptard spreading fake information and alternative facts because reality does not comply with his misguided wishes.

  33. Taking the UK as an example (since I live here and can’t speak for any other nation), thanks to decades of underinvestment in stable power generation and the current (in my opinion) misguided push for unstable renewables combined with an abject failure to invest in large-scale nuclear power, there’s barely enough generating capability to power the country as it is.
    UK has ~38.4 million cars registered. Never mind trucks, public transport, motorbikes, quadbikes etc. There’s simply no way to replace all cars these with electric cars and charge them all, the country just doesn’t have the necessary power generation capabilities.
    So without massive buildout of stable baseload generating capacity in the UK, yes, a future where all road vehicles are electric will be an unmitigated disaster.

  34. The author of the Zerohedge post, “Tyler Durden” is a fictional character from the movie “Fight Club”. Not even a real person, much less a climate expert. The so-called Finnish studies are actually associated with a Turkish university, and are self-referencing (cite their own work). Anyone can publish a preprint on ArXiv.org. This paper hasn’t been peer reviewed. One junk paper by a nobody doesn’t overturn 200 years of science and thousands of other studies.

    > They are more costly than traditional vehicles,

    In purchase cost, yes, at the moment. But the “fill-up” cost and maintenance are lower (fewer moving parts). A life-cycle cost comparison shows they are about even at present.

    > their manufacturing uses more resources.

    Need a cite for that. Electric cars weigh roughly the same as ICE vehicles.

    > the infrastructure buildout to charge these vehicles will be astronomical.

    Need a cite for that too. Is it any more than the ongoing massive fossil fuel extraction industry? Offshore drilling platforms and oil tankers are not exactly cheap to build and maintain either.

    In summary, your whole post is “junk”.

  35. And of course, the “old school dinosaur stuck in the past gear heads” running GM & Ford,
    are clueless.
    Isn’t it obvious where the automotive market is heading?

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