Deliveries are trending down. Why?

[ajdelange]

After religiously studying the InsideEVs scorecard for months I thought I'd do some trend analysis. Here are the results starting with the M3 which is the trickiest and because it represents the majority of Tesla's sales:

The circles represent the number of 3's sold in each month going back to January 2017. The trend between then and now is obviously strongly positive as no cars were sold in the first year (or at least none listed by InsideEVs. Since I am most concerned about where Tesla is going now it seemed reasonable to look at the trend since the point where the ramp up was essentially complete which I picked as Aug 18. So I computed the trend sine that date. As mentioned my concern is with what is happening now so I weighted the most recent sales more heavily than earlier one. The weights I used put 10 month old data at 1/e and are shown by the blue dashed line. The heavy red line is the trend over the last 14 months and is downward by 150 cars per month.

The trend for the Model X is in the following plot:

The whole data set is considered but the same weighting (emphasis on the most recent 10 months) was used. The trend is downward by 29 cars per month. Very noticeable here is the quarterly push which is not seen in the M3 data.

And the story for the M S is much the same except that the trend is downward by 331 units per month:

Thus it seems that overall, based on the last year or so, trends are all downward. My question is, of course, why. Are economic trends similarly down? What I really fear is that the first adopter part of the market is saturated and the rest of the world isn't interested in EVs. Thoughts?

 

[ewoodrick]

Numbers don't look quite right, like maybe only US sales.
Instead of sales, look at production and inventory. I believe that to be much more informative.
In other words, production is increasing (except for Q1) and inventory bounces during quarter, but generally empties at end.

Since your data looks US only, what is missing is European sales, which take a chunk out of production

 

[ajdelange]

Yes, the data is US only. That's all that InsideEVs makes available and, typical Yank that I am, I suppose, that's what I am interested in. It looks as if rather than taking the US by storm, EVs were a curiosity dabbled with by rich techno-geeks and that the US market as a whole is loosing interest in them. This does not bode well for future improvements in support, charging infrastructure etc.

 

[K2500Z71]

These numbers might be more interesting if they were contrasted with overall new vehicle sales numbers which I believe have also shown a slight downward trend.

 

[ajdelange]

Staring at the plots further it is pretty clear that the trends have been positive for all the cars if we only look from January 2019 on. Thus the cause of the downward trend when examining data that goes back further in history is that the normal sharp drop at the end of each quarter was not, in the new year, followed by the rise that historically follows in the next two months. Probable cause: loss of the full tax rebate.