I want to put my thoughts out there because there’s a lot of wealth and influence in the readership of this forum and also because these silly surveys end up getting spread by journalists and even well-intentioned investors who have real concerns, and I believe that’s probably how
@aubreymcfato felt when contributing the link to the article.
Right. I’m a strong believer in the power of science and empiricism and I want to help people avoid thinking traps and understand the hierarchy of usefulness of different data sources. This includes realizing that sometimes data is actively misleading if not examined rigorously. Survey question responses frequently differ from actual human behavior for many reasons, and there’s always problems with obtaining a representative sample of people to respond in the first place. Talk (such as clicking a multiple choice button on an online survey) is cheap and $50,000 car purchases are not, and it’s the latter we’re concerned about anyway.
So, here is for the forum’s consideration some actual useful data on those $50k purchases and well done analysis published by the
San Francisco Standard on Feb 20th, using official data from the California Energy Commission, which can be accessed directly via their
wonderful interactive dashboard.
View attachment 920754
This is very relevant because California is the largest and most important state car market in America, it’s one of the most Democratic-leaning states, and it’s arguably the single-most culturally influential state in the country. Here’s some hard facts and numbers to demonstrate California’s status as a political stronghold for the Democratic Party, courtesy of
Wikipedia.
View attachment 920759
Furthermore, it’s important to note:
1) CA leads the USA and most of the entire planet in EV adoption
2) The two biggest urban areas in CA around San Francisco and Los Angeles are extremely D-dominated relative to the rest of the USA and even relative to the rest of the state
If there were anywhere in the entire country and world where I would be concerned about seeing negative Tesla demand impacts of some of Elon’s more right-wing political views and his vocal criticisms of the current state of the Democratic Party that he has been expressing recently, it would be the LA and SF metro areas. Actually, I would especially look at the SF area because it leads California in EV adoption rates, because it is possibly the #1 most liberal area of the nation depending on where you want to draw the metro area boundaries, and because it's the one small region of the entire world that is most likely to contain people who care about what's been happening with Elon and his Twitter acquisition, his public criticism of local officials in Fremont and Alameda County, and his other recent extracurricular activities.
Fortunately, the data shows absolutely zero cause for concern (in the aggregate, anyway). As a matter of fact, it indicates wildly raging demand for Tesla vehicles that is at an all-time high with a robust trend for continued growth in the future, and this is especially true for the Bay Area as noted by The Standard:
View attachment 920716
(Red dots indicate Bay Area counties)
View attachment 920721
(Red circle indicates Bay Area)
At our Silicon Valley TMC investor meetup in February, I learned from
@EinSV that San Mateo County now has
25% of all new vehicle purchases being Teslas. 1 out of 4, almost unbelievable. Indeed, per the CA Energy Commision
dashboard, in San Mateo County in 2022 Tesla sold 11,320 cars out of 13,711 total BEVs (83% share) and 46,696 total vehicles (24.2% share). At a global scale, this market share would already put Tesla close to the 20M/year goal (this is not a reasonable extrapolation but it serves to give a sense of scale.) San Mateo contains much of Silicon Valley and tends to vote about 75% in favor of Democrats in most elections. Per Wikipedia, “Every city, town, and unincorporated area of San Mateo County has more registered Democrats than Republicans.”
The SF Standard continues:
View attachment 920724
This chart is critical because California's regulatory environment has made it the #1 hotbed in America for other car companies to sell compliance EVs at a loss in order to be eligible to participate in the state's absurdly lucrative automotive market. Despite facing this extreme handicap of competing against companies willing to price EVs at levels that generate negative gross profit margin, Tesla
is still outselling everyone else combined and is steadily gaining EV market share. Let that sink in. This is just embarrassing. Also consider what this implies for the oft-repeated arguments that more competition and BEV options will reduce Tesla's competitiveness. California already has a lot of EV options, including many models that are not available for sale in significant numbers anywhere else in the nation, and California also has a decent charging non-Tesla infrastructure relative to almost all markets in the world, and yet...Tesla dominates.
For anyone who still wants to express concern about "Elon's antics", please describe your reasoning for why California and SF/SoCal are somehow not representative of EV adoption and leftist political trends in the rest of the country, or alternatively describe why you think this trend is going to reverse in the future despite having already continued unabated through the entire pandemic and Twitter saga.
Also, anyone who was surprised by Tesla's decision to double down on developing an engineering presence in Silicon Valley instead of Texas may want to take some time to sit down and have a deep meditation session to ponder why you're placing so much weight on politics instead of other factors related to the business. Palo Alto was a clear winning choice and Austin will not be on the same level for a very long time, if ever. Other locales have intensely competed with SV for decades to wrest away some of its magic and tech dominance and every attempt has, thus far, failed. Tesla was born in Silicon Valley and though it's going global now, it's still a Silicon Valley software and computer engineering company at its core and will remain so for the foreseeable future.
