BMW I3 outselling Tesla

[CliffG]

It is true. In the USA the Leaf, Volt, plug in Prius and Ford C max have all outsold Tesla YTD. And if you look at last month another Ford and the I3 outsold Tesla. Year to date Tesla has only a 12% share of the plug in market. Monthly Plug-In Sales Scorecard

Yup. Then read further down, in the Tesla section:

As foretold by the company, Summer of 2014 can loosely be translated as “no soup for you” United States when it comes to Model S deliveries. And true to their word, for August very, very few deliveries took place in the United States as Tesla focused on AsiaNot helping August sales was Tesla shutting down its Fremont assembly facility for two weeks in late July/early August in preparation for the upcoming Model X, and to expand Model S production by 25%.

and:

Just about every American who was looking for a new Model S from earlier this Spring/Summer has a report in their hand that it is now ‘in production’ in some form or another and they are going to get it before THIS month’s end. September is practically guaranteed to be a blow-out month for the automaker.

[my emphasis]

I guess those notions don't fit the message he wanted to push.

I don't know anything about the auto business, and hope someone here can shed some light - Tesla sells directly to the end buyer while other manufacturers, like BMW, sell in bulk (if they can) to dealerships. Are the numbers in this report comparing the number of i3s sold to dealers (and so some number is still sitting on lots) or are they sales to end-users? Are these numbers worth even looking at?

 

[richkae]

I don't understand why people think that comparing cars in the "plug in market" is meaningful. It is not.

Perhaps this visual aid ( borrowed from this thread The importance of price to sales ) will help:

That is the U.S. vehicle market. MSRP in dollars on the x axis. Total units sold in 2013 on the y axis. I have applied the 7500 federal tax credit.

 

[jcaspar]

Is that really a factory color scheme and not a repaired/salvaged vehicle?? That is the ugliest car I have ever seen, even out doing the R class Mercedes!

Picture from 09/26/2014.
View attachment 60151

 

[30seconds]

Longer wait times would suggest the demand hasn't waned and it is mainly US supply limited due to international markets. But if the demand level is same as 2013 with current delivery rate, one would imagine rapidly increasing wait times. At some point, people would probably decide not to wait so long which then reduces demand.

Anyway, here are some simple math to view the quantitative data (from EV sales estimate and Tesla's Q1/Q2 2014 financials)

- 3500 (Q114 US delivery estimate) / 6157 (Q114 WW deliveries) = 57% (Q114 US/WW deliveries)
- 3900 (Q214 US delivery estimate) / 7579 (Q214 WW deliveries) = 51% (Q214 US/WW deliveries)
- (35000 - 6157-7579) / 2 = 10,632 car delivery necessary in each of Q3/Q4 quarter to meet 35000 2014 delivery projection. This is 1.4X Q2 delivery rate. Q2 financials quote 9000 production (10% less for delivery?) so Q4 deliveries are going to have to hit probably close to 14k to make 35k delivery numbers.
- 8500 (2/3 of 2014) x 1.5 / 17650 (2013 sales) = 72% is a projection 2014/2013 US deliveries based on linear extrapolation of first 2/3 of the year. But we can see Tesla's planned production+delivery likely will grow rapidly towards the end of the year so should be higher than 72% of last year for US delivery.

So yes, US sales/delivery are probably down a little but WW volume is going to hit 2X 2013. And the recent factory production revamp makes sense to hit the necessary ~1.5-2X delivery rate increase necessary on the last 4+ months of the year to meet 35k target.

Regarding sales against other plug-ins... I was curious about lease ratios against total sales as leases are a good way to move cars.

Leafs are hitting that $300/month 36 month lease price point which drives sales. Curious what the percentage of sales are. BMW sales historically have been 50% leases and maybe even higher on the lower price points? Leases are pretty much a innovative solution to get people into more car for cheaper for those that prefers to drive newer cars and shorter ownership.

Tesla started business lease program in Q214. 158 cars are sold through this program in Q2. If this is majority of the leases, then lease is a small percentage of overall sales.

Q2 financial report also note the delivery wait times are increasing globally indicating demand hasn't waned. And they are targeting 100k/year production rate by end of 2015! (not total for 2015 but rather the higher production rate achieved by end of 2015 x 12 months) And for less quantitative data, I see a lot of newer MS's near me in the Seattle suburb

Back to the original topic of the post regarding i3 sales, while i3 might have won the most recent month in US. i3 is experiencing initial pent up demand in the US and Tesla is shifting to scaling sales worldwide at a higher price segment. A lot of background story is bypassed for sensational journalism

i3 leases are now being advertised for $369/month out here in silicon valley (Stevens Creek BMW). must be that runaway demand prompting the price cuts.

 

[wraithnot]

i3 leases are now being advertised for $369/month out here in silicon valley (Stevens Creek BMW). must be that runaway demand prompting the price cuts.

My wife and I leased an i3 BEV from Stevens Creek BMW this weekend (pics in the main i3 thread). We were in need of a smaller EV to complement our Model S and the Model 3 is a long way off. We almost got a RAV4 EV since they are offering some pretty amazing deals (up to $21,000 off MSRP for a three year lease) to get rid of the last several hundred of them, but the i3 felt like a more advanced car (despite the shorter range) and I expect BMW to do a better job of updating the car's software and smartphone ap than Toyota will for the discontinues RAV4 EV. The salesman we dealt with at Stevens Creek had a really good knowledge of the product and he never once tried to convince us to buy a conventional BMW. I can't say the same for the Toyota dealers we dealt with.

 

[Reykjavik]

I'd like to see the numbers relative to other cars in the class. The Model S does not compete with the i3, one is a big luxury sedan, the other is a small city car. They just aren't in the same class so direct comparison makes no sense.

 

[Chop110]

http://www.thestreet.com/story/1286...-the-sales-charts.html?puc=yahoo&cm_ven=YAHOO

Like others have mentioned, the article has no validity. You cannot even cross shop them. I think they just threw that article together to get web traffic to their site.

 

[AnxietyRanger]

That article is so full of selective quoting - Tesla's U.S. factory constrained summer months and even listing European countries where Tesla isn't even sold in any official capacity, except through some independent importers! WTF? The author makes no attempt to look at actual trends, but is instead selecting data to support an argument. The fact that Tesla's is expanding abroad is used as evidence of faltering sales, instead of as (it should be) an explanation of constrained U.S. production capacity.
That's rich. I guess he was hoping the article might make him rich.
Out in the real world the BMW i3 isn't outselling anybody:

Don't get me wrong. I love the fact that BMW is at least trying to do the BEV thing with the i3. That's more than the likes of Audi are doing at the moment.
So, kudos to BMW for trying. That's more than what the author of this article is doing.
But hey... Tesla is on a level of its own. And this article, unfortunately, was too.

 

[JohnQ]

5 months gives us virtually no information about i3 sales. Why the slow ramp up? What happens when the order backlog dries up? There are 5 sitting on the lot of my local dealer and another 13 on the lot 20 miles away. It's the same question Tesla encountered last year and they proved there was a continuous stream of buyers and they've kept a 3 month backlog on the orders.

 

[Vitaman]

For those who think the i3 is an ugly mofo, beauty truly is in the eye of the beholder.
I get more compliments and attention when driving it, than I did when driving a supercharged Jaguar F Type, Mercedes AMG, BMW M5 and X5M (Both of these were fairly new to the market).
I'm sure you could argue that attention isn't always a positive, but people seem genuinely interested in owning one after seeing it up close.