Tesla Reports 4th Quarter Production

In a good year, the US auto industry can sell 18MM vehicles. To be successful EVs need to get to 50% share by 2030. That’s 8MM cars. If Tesla retains 50% market share, that’s 4MM cars per year in the US. They now have four plants able to produce 400K vehicles each, two of them in the US. I see lots of potential for growth if they stay on track and make and sell those vehicles.

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In the linked CleanTechnica article the BYD clean energy vehicles include BEV and PHEV – hybrids, so it’s less than 800 K.

The Captain

Paul,

There is plenty of potential. But 10% market share is considered plenty of potential.

Captain,

Those numbers are problematic. They are yesterdays numbers.
Tomorrows assembly lines will have zero respect for them.

Tomorrow’s consumers will buy other makes and models as well as Tesla’s. Tesla wont get a 50% market share in the US, EU or China by 2030. I get they might have that in Norway now.

Note I do not need to be accurate. The projections put out by Tesla are way off.

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I think EV will get well beyond 50% market share of new cars by 2030.

I think Tesla will have over 10% market share. If the company gets to 20% market share that would be hugely successful. I am talking total market for new cars.

68% or anything in that ball park is not at all reality based. It is like Tesla can not do simple math coming up with a growth pattern like that. And no your lawsuit when you lose still more money wont hold up in court because Safe Harbor Statements say these are very risky projections.

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8/0.6 = 13
CAGR = 38%

DB2

Yes, and every car sold by Tesla or BYD is one less sold by the traditional auto manufacturers. Most auto companies are losing market share and fighting to retain same. Tesla has much growth potential.

Yes, there will be a shootout for market share and traditional automakers have a dealer network that should be an advantage. But Ford and others are abandoning that network for EVs. They are copying the Tesla model, which is lower cost.

Tesla is clearly the leader at this time. The debate is how much share can they retain.

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That’s not correct. As noted in the article, through November, BYD sold 1,623,278 electric vehicles - of which 801,640 were pure BEV, and the remainder were PHEV. Both the BEV and PHEV sales are discussed in the article - but the 800K figure is the BEV sales, not the total.

BYD has been selling more EV’s (both PHEV and BEV) than Tesla for a while now. Given rates of growth in both companies, it’s expected that BYD will surpass Tesla in pure BEV sales sometime towards the end of this year, with a good change that their 2023 annual sales of BEV’s will be higher than Tesla.

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I fully agree with that.

Except the word ‘retain’ is tricky. Because Tesla’s market share of the entire new car market is not that big to begin with and we are talking about the entire market not the EV market.

In other words regardless of today’s ICE sales the market will become EV. The other guys are going to quickly take market share from here. It wont be easy sailing for Tesla to get to 20% of the total market share for new cars.

The projected growth rate is going to collapse. The market clearly can see this in the stock price.

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Well, your first sentence is obviously correct. And so is the last. The market has always believed that Tesla is doomed. As for what has happened, well, it’s exactly the opposite.

The rest of your assertions are based on nothing. Tesla is the only company with clear sailing into an EV future. The rest will fail without state support. There is no such thing as an easy transition.

-IGU-

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Elon Musk, the man, the myth the legend. Musk arrived years ago. This is not about any of that now.

I have never seen Tesla as doomed.

The stock price is not down because anyone believes Tesla is doomed. Regardless of old hyperbole and those who wont grow up.

The projection is too extreme.

The other companies are not going to need help from the state or a bailout to compete with Tesla. You are ignoring models that already are showing success.

Adding Tesla had a long dry run and made it. Others have that infrastructure and knowledge IP etc to build on. It will happen for the others faster than it did for Tesla.

Tesla got plenty of state support along the way. Carbon credits, rebates, etc. Let’s not fool ourselves here. And it’s not that Tesla is doomed. It’s that them becoming two-thirds of the entire car market is ludicrous. We are never going back to the old times where a single player (like GM) could command such a large stake in the US car market. Anyone buying TSLA because they believe that will happen is going to be disappointed.

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yep

And as I just added Tesla’s success means charging stations are being built left and right across the country. Tesla did not have that for a long time. The others can now build cars for that. The tech to build the cars was improved by Tesla. The others can now use that knowledge.

I stand corrected. Thank you!

The Captain

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May be worth noting though that most of BYD sales are in vehicles priced well below that of Tesla models. In other words, over the past few years they have been selling to mostly different sectors of the car buying market. In addition, Tesla makes 8X more profit than BYD per vehicle.

Given all this, I am not sure that Tesla sees BYD as a major competitor, unless Tesla has plans to enter the entry-level market of cheap cars with tiny margins. I doubt that Tesla wants to do that. I don’t think Tesla’s goal is to dominate the overall car market as much as it is to dominate the high margin car market.

There are indications that BYD may want to sell higher price cars, but I think that will be a challenge. Brand matters more as prices rise and Tesla has a big advantage there.

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No worries.

Since this got me curious, I pulled BYD’s Q4 numbers. They sold another 112K BEV’s in December, which would put their annual total at around 913K. Tesla’s annual sales were around 1,313K, which would put BYD’s 2022 sales at around 70% of Tesla’s.

However, that doesn’t give the complete picture. BYD is growing much, much faster than Tesla right now - so comparing annual rates of growth obscures where BYD is now.
Their BEV sales for Q4 were up around 150% from the year-ago quarter. In Q4, BYD sold about 328K BEV’s - about 81% of Tesla’s 405K. (Of course, BYD also produced a ton of PHEV’s as well).

That’s why the expectation is that BYD’s going to pass Tesla in BEV sales this year.

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Maybe? Per IGU, Tesla’s plan is to sell 20 million vehicles in 2030 (50% CAGR from 500K in 2020). It’s going to be hard to do that without moving down market from luxury-price vehicles. That’s especially the case in a country like China, where incomes are lower than OECD countries. Which may be why Musk is alluding to a significantly cheaper Tesla as an upcoming model. It strains credibility that in a global auto market of less than 70 million vehicles, that Tesla could grow to 20 million vehicles without “bumping into” the largest manufacturer of EV’s - which is currently selling more units and growing faster than Tesla.

Meanwhile, BYD is unabashedly moving up the value chain (again, at least in China) to compete with more premium automakers like Tesla:

BYD Co. launched the first of two new luxury electric-vehicle brands it is introducing this year, looking to broaden its rapidly expanding reach by shifting into the premium car segment.

The Shenzhen-based company unveiled its U8 sports utility vehicle, which falls under the Yangwang brand, at a press conference Thursday.

https://archive.ph/yLXcP#selection-3843.0-3853.39

As you intimated, branding is key - which is why they’re moving upmarket under a different brand, much like Toyota created its Lexus brand for their more luxury segment.

BYD is a strong counter-example to the claim that Tesla’s the only automaker that has figured out how to sell EV’s profitably. They abandoned their ICE models earlier this year - they’re now 100% EV, and (as noted repeatedly in this thread) produce a ton of BEV’s as part of that mix. Given that China is Tesla’s second-largest market and the two makers are likely moving towards each other in product ranges, it’s hard to see how Tesla can grow to 20 million without directly competing with BYD.

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China production facility is the main export hub for all sales out of North America. So just because it is produced in China doesn’t mean that is where it is sold. Unless you have numbers of sales in China that really is meaningless.

Andy

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Andy

Sales figures for China can be found here:

That’s how we know that Tesla has under an 8% EV market share in China. Their total sales of the 3 and Y through November were about 405K (S and X sales not available, but those will be much smaller). BYD has about 30% of the Chinese EV market - since their sales/production are roughly split half and half between PHEV and BEV, for a rough guess we can figure they sell about twice as many BEV’s in China as Tesla does.

But again, most of my discussion has been comparing BYD and Tesla globally. BYD’s selling about 80% of what Tesla’s global sales are in BEV’s, and will pass them globally some time next year in BEV’s alone. If we look only at China, BYD passed Tesla in BEV sales long ago.

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So roughly 50 percent of their production is sold in China. Thanks.

Andy

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