From Hawthorne to HK - Our Visit to Hong Kong and Tesla Life There

[UnpluggedP]

As some of you might know. we are neighbors with Tesla and SpaceX in Hawthorne. As a result we've been in the center of Tesla's world and we've seen the rise of the brand first hand. We love talking with Tesla owners around the world and our involvement within the Tesla community has taken us to many countries.


Recently our co-founder had the privilege of visiting Hong Kong, to meet some fellow Tesla owners and to gain some insight into the rapidly growing Tesla scene. The number of Teslas on the road is staggering. In fact, Elon Musk recently stated that he expects Hong Kong to be the "leader of the world" in EV adoption. The EV segment of the car market is rapidly growing in Hong Kong with 4,198 Electric vehicles on the road in the last quarter of 2015. This is a substantial increase over the mere 100 Ev's on the road in 2011.

We saw so many Teslas on the road and were thrilled to even see some sporting our parts in the wild!

Stay tuned for more...

 

[forumman83]

Awesome. It would be interesting to hear what the Hong Kong population thinks of the car.

 

[ifung90]

There are TOO many teslas in hong kong and not enough charging venues.

That's the general consensus for our thoughts on this brand afaik.

The reason for hong kong's popularity for teslas are two-fold. First being 0% import tax makes a MS 70D the same price as a moderately equipped MB E350 or BMW 528i.

The top of the range P85D/P90D is little over $1m mark hkd ~ $129k USD. Any true performance sports sedan is out of the question.
Reference:

BMW M3 - $1.25 M HKD
BMW M5 ~ $1.7 M HKD
MB E63s ~ $1.8 M HKD
MB C63s ~ $1.3 M HKD
Audi RS6 ~ $1.8 M HKD

Not to mention our gas price is $14.50 hkd ~ $1.8 USD/L. The incentive on a 691 hp car using only $80 hkd to "charge up" versus $1100 hkd per tank on the same range ~ 300 km per charge is insane amount of saving.

 

[forumman83]

Interesting, in your opinion, do you see Hong Kong being as big for Tesla sales as Elon Predicts?

 

[UnpluggedP]

From our experience the people of Hong Kong seem to love Tesla. We saw them everywhere. Hong Kong is not a place where you see many American cars on road and many people live in apartments without access to a charger. So it is a testament to the brand that we saw so many of them.

From what we understand, more Teslas were sold than Taxis last year in Hong Kong and as previously stated the tax incentives, fuel price and rebates make them a very popular choice there.

Awesome. It would be interesting to hear what the Hong Kong population thinks of the car.

 

[UnpluggedP]

It was great to see so many Teslas on the road. Hong Kong is a city well suited to EVs. HK is a relatively small city. with an area of only 30 sq mi the short travel distances definitely help alleviate range anxiety.

Hong Kong currently has the highest density of Superchargers in the world. With a total of 8 on the island charging up is pretty convenient. Whether or not that will stay true as the number of new owners increases remains to be seen.