Just-in-time auto industry news and analysis
From one day to the other, Europe appears to throw the switch from being EV-skeptics to becoming all-out EV-fanatics. Diesel, the highly popular propulsion in the Old Country, is being turned into a villain and chased off the streets, and there is sudden agreement that the streets belong to battery-electrics. [ There is more … ]
Half a year ago, we brought you the story that in China, a market crucial to $$$TSLA’s success, buyers of Tesla’s $100,000 cars have to make do without built-in satellite navigation, because, duh, that huge display in the Model S talks to Google, and Google is blocked in China. Finally, Tesla will have a solution. Some time next year. [ There is more … ]
September high
(Preface: I know, the Daily Kanban looks like a Tesla fanzine lately. Gomen nasai, but there’s just too much out there to be passed over.)
On October 27, 2014, the Wall Street Journal wrote that sales of Tesla’s Model S are “declining in its home market.” The Journal said that “through September, Tesla sold 10,335 Model S sedans in its home market, down 26% compared with the same period in 2013.” At Tesla, Musk disagreed.
In the rest of the auto business, an errant writer would have been ignored, for fear a reaction could create more waves. Or the reporter would get a phone call to set matters straight (I get those all the time.) Tesla is not like the rest of the auto business, therefore, the Wall Street Journal got an angry tweet from Elon Musk himself: [ There is more … ]
In 2011, the tightly closed market South Korea opened its doors. A free trade deal eliminated duties on vehicles imported from (and exported to) Europe, never mind that EU automakers painted a depressing picture of Europe being overrun by Hyundais and Kias. Just the opposite happened. Three years later, South Korea is “on track to spend more on vehicle imports from Europe this year than it earns from exports the other way,” as Reuters reports. In a formerly fiercely nationalistic country when it came to cars, imports now hold a record market share of 14 percent. Most of them are from Germany. [ There is more … ]
“Å faen!”
What is the best-selling car in Norway? In the past, nobody would have cared who’s topping the list of a country that is good for 150,000 units total in a good year. Things are changing, and everybody knows: Of course, the best-selling car in Norway is Tesla’s Model S. Type “Best-selling car Norway” into Google, and see what that’ll get you. Click a little more, and you’ll be convinced that Norway is Europe’s EV-wonderland. Says Freakonomics:
“By most measures, Norway is among the greenest countries on Earth. It gets virtually all of its electricity from hydropower; it plans to cut its greenhouse emissions by 30% by 2020; and it has more electric vehicles per capita than any country in the world.”
Of course, the roads of that electric nirvana are filled with nothing else than beautiful blondes and even more gorgeous Model S.
Except that it’s not true. The Model S part, at least. The car is at the bottom of the list.
Even the tiniest trendlet won’t escape the world’s vehicular tealeave-readers (latest: EVs disrupt cigarette industry). But then, a huge trend remains relatively unmolested: The world’s third-largest car market, Japan, is slowly taken over by pint-sized cars. In November, mini vehicles, or kei cars, as they are called in Japan, reached a market share of 42.5 percent.
To wrap your head around the momentousness of miniature car sales in Japan, picture an America without passenger vehicles, and you can roughly envisage Japan without kei cars. (Also very much underreported, 54 percent of U.S. light vehicle sales were of the “light truck” variety in November. Down to a 46 percent share, passenger cars have become a minority.) Only once, in the dark days of carmageddon, were kei car sales higher, when in February 2009 42.66 percent of all cars in Japan were keis. [ There is more … ]
