
Tesla boom lifts Norway's electric car sales to record market share - lelf
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-norway-autos-idUSKCN1RD2BB
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lucideer
This is a very oddly positioned story. The Nissan Leaf "lift[ed] Norway's
electric car sales to record market share" before Tesla's Model 3 surpassed
the Leaf in sales.

The article seems to be making out that Tesla have been the cause of the
record EV sales in Norway. In actuality, Tesla have recently become the most
popular EV there, but EV sales were record-breaking before that.

~~~
zaroth
Tesla is the cause of the current record sales of EVs in Norway, per TFA;

> _In 2018, Norway’s fully electric car sales rose to a record 31.2 percent
> market share from 20.8 percent in 2017, far ahead of any other nation, and
> buyers had to wait as producers struggled to keep up with demand._

> _The surge of electric cars to a 58.4 percent market share in March came as
> Tesla ramped up delivery of its mid-sized Model 3..._

30% -> 60% is no small feat, and is due to the Model 3 availability, and the
more widely accessible price point of TM3.

IMO the Leaf is a compromise car you choose in order to get an EV, whereas the
TM3 is a better car in almost every way than anything else on the market,
which also happens to be EV.

Although many of its advantages are made possible by being EV, they are not
_inherent_ advantages of being EV. That is to say, being EV is necessary but
not sufficient to built a car with the myriad advances of the TM3.

~~~
shereadsthenews
Tesla performs this stunt constantly. What they do is they don't deliver any
cars for months at a time, whether because they can't or choose not to I don't
know. Then they dump all the backorders on some small nation all at once and
put out a press release about how they are the best-selling car in that place
because they recognized a year of sales in a single month.

~~~
zaroth
March was crazy - over 5,000 TM3s registered.

Versus 705 TM3 registrations in May, 424 so far in June.

YTD is ~8,000 TM3 vs 3,700 Leaf.

~~~
Xylakant
But total is ~8k model 3 VS 54k leaf. People wanting a leaf could already buy
one, while model 3 customers could only preorder. So these stats over a short
timeframe only tell us that newer models sell better and that delivery of
preorders skews the stats massively.

~~~
zaroth
Now you’re comparing total lifetime sales numbers for a model car that just
started shipping in a market this February with a model that’s been shipping
since, what, 2010?

Of course there’s nothing stopping Nissan from introducing a new upgraded Leaf
in 2019. Maybe they did?

~~~
Xylakant
> Of course there’s nothing stopping Nissan from introducing a new upgraded
> Leaf in 2019. Maybe they did?

Yes they did. And it starts shipping to european customers this summer as per
<1>. So you’re comparing preorder shipment numbers for tesla model 3 with
previous gen leafs when a model refresh is coming and the new model can
actually already be preordered. And the leaf still is not far behind in May.

<1> [https://europe.nissannews.com/en-
GB/releases/release-90b1ce8...](https://europe.nissannews.com/en-
GB/releases/release-90b1ce83155c6b12ec5c018c9a0239df-nissan-announces-
leaf-3zero-and-leaf-3zero-e-limited-edition-with-higher-output-and-longer-
range-2)

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sim_card_map
Well done, Norway! If only the rest of the world would follow with the same
pace. At least rich countries like Denmark, Switzerland etc

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pdq
April story.

~~~
ceejayoz
Musk tweeted about it 20 minutes ago, which is probably why it's here now.

[https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1138136540096319488](https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1138136540096319488)

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ecares
Meanwhile, France just decided that electric cars must be producing an
artificial soud out of security.

~~~
RankingMember
Noise makers are being added by law lots of places for good reason, but that's
a bit off-topic isn't it?

~~~
zaroth
It’s somewhat on topic as it reduces the desirability of an EV doesn’t it?

IMO, they should require _either_ a noise maker, or a sufficiently advanced
pedestrian collision avoidance safety system.

I would think that at the speed and in the scenarios a noise maker would help,
a pedestrian safety system should be highly effective.

~~~
tialaramex
Systems designed to prevent cars hitting pedestrians are not designed for
extremely low speed environments where these noise makers are most effective.
Noise makers make no difference at highway speed, and in examples I've seen
they aren't required at those speeds anyway. But they fix electric cars to not
"sneak up" on pedestrians in these low speed environments.

At 3mph your car can very easily knock me down and crush me if I don't hear it
coming, but designing software to recognise that it's going to collide with
me, and not pass harmlessly a few metres away (a routine event you don't want
the AI to freak out over) is really hard.

These low speeds are correlated with environments where it's much harder for a
machine to intuit what's going on. Consider a typical open air car park next
to a Walmart. A pedestrian is in view, then vanishes, the driver selects
reverse - are we going to hit the pedestrian? Where did they go? The driver
knows, because they have relevant experience, that the pedestrian is between
two other parked cars, and won't be struck by reversing, but how can our AI
figure that's where they went?

~~~
zaroth
Definitely this has nothing at all to do with highway speeds. We’re talking
parking lots mainly.

I don’t see the need for intuition. What’s the stopping distance at 3mph? Less
than 1 foot with full pre-charged braking I’m sure. An effective system should
be able to see a pedestrian 6-12” from the car in the direction of travel, and
stop on a dime. At these speeds a false positive isn’t itself a safety risk,
although of course you would seek to minimize them.

It goes without saying the system will not be _perfect_. Neither are noise
makers. I see no reason why such a system couldn’t be made that is more
effective than fake engine noise.

