It will be some time before we know Tesla’s August sales figures worldwide but we can begin to see some trends emerging.
I think it would be accurate to describe their sales drop in the USA as “disappointing”. This indicates that demand in their home market may be dropping. Whilst they may be able to generate a surge in sales in September to end the quarter, it is worth examining two claims by Tesla.
In their Q1 results update published in April, Tesla said “if our Gigafactory Shanghai is able to reach volume production early in Q4 this year, we may be able to produce as many as 500,000 vehicles globally in 2019”.
And, at an investor event on April 22, Tesla CEO Elon Musk made a characteristically bold promise: By 2020, the company will have a fleet of 1 million fully autonomous cars as part of a "robotaxi" network.
It’s not sensible to try and forecast the future as we don’t know if demand will increase. But it’s a fair question to ask if they will produce and sell more than 350,000 cars this year? Which is 30% less than their forecast in April.
And one doesn’t have to be a fortune-teller to predict that the robo-taxi forecast might prove to be around a million short by the end of 2020.
In the UK the SMMT are reporting sales of BEVs in August of 3,147 cars, this is a significant increase over July, so. I’d guess that Tesla may have sold 2,000 cars in the month? When we know a more accurate figure, this will give an idea of the actual demand in the UK. Given the depressed sales in the USA, one would imagine that Tesla should be able to satisfy every order in the UK, unless they are not good at balancing production and demand.
By comparison Audi, BMW and VW sold over 25,000 cars in August and total sales of all brands were 92,500. That’s a drop of 1.6% over 2018, so perhaps not as bad as feared, given the political uncertainties? Each of the German brands have sold over 100,000 cars so far this year.
As usual, it’s going to be interesting to see next month’s UK sales figures. I have a feeling that Tesla is reaching peak demand and they may struggle to attract new customers because of their deficiencies in Marketing and Customer Service.
regards
Howard