BEV fans gush about the wonderful convenience of plugging in each night and waking up to a "full tank" of dirt-cheap electricity each morning, along with the pure joy of never having to visit another dirty, smelly gas station again in their life. Then they turn 180 degrees and accuse PHEV owners of never plugging them in! Why do dirty, smelly gas stations suddenly become so appealing when driving a PHEV? Ha.
GM's Volt fleet stats showed >60% EV miles even for the less capable Gen 1 car. I've seen guesstimates of 75-80% for Gen2.
It's true, though -- company gas cards give European "employee car" drivers a dis-incentive to plug in. That's easily fixed. Forcing consumer change with government policy ALWAYS has unintended consequences and loopholes, and it always takes a few rounds of policy tweaks to reach the desired outcome. This side issue has nothing to do with the long term BEV/PHEV calculation.
The bigger flaw in Europe's 95g CO2 regulation is that it only considers tailpipe CO2. You can design a BEV SUV with double the life-cycle CO2 impact of a HEV minivan, yet the BEV counted as two 0g cars (1.67 this year) while the HEV exceeded your 95g quota. By 2023 they are supposed to consider life-cycle CO2. This will tilt the field in favor of domestic production vs. China due to Europe's more favorable grid mix, so there's strong incentive behind it besides just fixing the broken CO2 calculation. But LCA helps HEVs and PHEVs relative to BEVs, so it's a risk factor for BEV-only Tesla.
This isn't a "BEVs Rule, PHEVs Suck" religious war. Investing is about identifying risks, then watching them carefully. 95g already creates headwinds for Tesla in Europe, LCA is simply another risk factor TSLA-heavy investors should watch. The risk factor to watch in China would be a policy shift to favor mini-EVs over long range BEVs and/or a move toward a 95g approach vs. the current credit-based system.
1. Regarding your first point five-seconds in the company of the average gas-guzzling European* PHEV SUV owner will convince you they never intend to plug in. There are a myriad of reasons why they buy PHEV, but the intention of actually using them as EVs and suffering the inconvenience of putting a plug in a socket isn't one of them. (I cannot speak for Asia in this respect). As you will have seen from the 2019 & 2020 BEV + PHEV data the increased PHEV sales effect is a headwind. Personally I expect it to pass in a few years time.
2. Regarding your second point, is it just me or is there a disconnect in some of the intelligence we are seeing ? We are told the Tesla R&D facility is fully operational and working, located at the Shanghai Supercharger manufacturing plant. Yet they say they are working on the first "designed-in-China" Tesla and which is also designed for global use. But we also hear that the model 2 design is completed. We also have a EIA submission to CN-Gov for a new model to be built at Shanghai GF. We also see foundations going in that appear to be heavy enough for stamping machinery, and probably overkill for the pressure-die-casting machinery, and which are adjacent to the model 3 GA area. My personal tentative conclusions are as follows:
a) the model 2 design is finished, probably a US-CN design team effort, and the EIA is for the expansion for that;
b) the model 1 design is underway now, and that is what China-design team is now working on, and it will be a Ford Fiesta-equivalent category vehicle;
c) the Shanghai foundations are for a combination of stamp and die machinery, and will feed (maybe) the existing 3 line to increase it to ?? 500k cars/year, and also to the new 2 line with a startup rate of 250k cars/yr;
d) that 1 design will be introduced into China first where it will be derisked, but will also be the first model to go into production one day in an India-plant**;
e) don't get hung up on a RoboTaxi being any one specific model - in reality it will be all of them.
That is the only way I can solve the contradictions in the data in a manner that is consistent with Tesla's direction-of-travel.
* inc UK.
** on a 100% Tesla-owned basis, and there will be no investment announcement from Tesla until the Indians give in on that, and if the Indians drag their feet the next plant will go to Brazil.
