Just-in-time auto industry news and analysis
Bertel Schmitt is in India the whole week, to research the true disruptor of the car business, the $4,800 Renault Kwid, and, if they let me, its soon to appear sibling, the Datsun redi-Go. India has super connectivity, however, pressing matter could delay, or sometimes totally prevent, the filing of the Morning Roundup during that week.
Elon Musk is a divinely gifted salesman, and his Tesla story resonates with the public, because it is about two things deep in the American psyche: “Wanna race?” And the big American road trip. Acceleration better than the fastest Ferrari, and a coast-to-coast Supercharger network, that’s what’s making Tesla cool. Both narratives are in severe danger, not because the competition suddenly wins drag races with its EVs, or charges faster than a fill-up win Unleaded. Tesla itself is committing self-sabotage with software that is too smart for the company’s own good.
Who was the world’s largest EV maker in the first quarter of the year? We already have the answer: It was the Renault-Nissan Alliance. Now let’s see who actually sold the most EVs. Why is this different? As I have covered elsewhere in Forbes, automakers sometimes adhere to a somewhat proprietary definition of “deliveries.” Now for the first time, you will receive the true picture of how many EVs were not just “delivered,” but really, and truly sold.
Regime change in the March issue of our monthly Top 10 of the global auto industry: The Renault-Nissan Alliance, a global auto conglomerate consisting of Groupe Renault, Nissan, and Mitsubishi, took the top of the March ranking.
“We continue to be surprised by how sort of frankly naïve a lot of people are about production and supply chain,” complained Tesla’s Elon Musk during the company’s quarterly conference call with analysts Wednesday. (Full transcript here.) “It’s as though there is some like easy way to increase production. It’s truly not.” Better late than never, Tesla’s wunderkind CEO is coming to the insight that the hardest part is not the car, it’s the production.
More than a year after the dieselgate scandal hit, Germany finally is losing its formerly voracious appetite for diesel. Sales of diesel-powered cars dropped 19.3% in April, said Germany’s Kraftfahrt-Bundesamt KBA, which keeps track of these things.
In the months after the scandal, the diesel take rate barely budged. It started falling when politicians debated the ban of diesel cars from inner cities, and after environmental pressure groups such as Germany’s DUH successfully sought the help of the courts to force politicians into compliance with the rules they had written in the first place.
