I'm so tired of the bullshit numbers. It's like when Musk claims that Tesla and Ford are the only motor companies that didn't go bankrupt. Tesla was privately funded and shipping laughable quantities of cars when the global financial crisis happened in 2007. Same with this number, Tesla grew year on year in Germany! Wow! They must be a goliath! They sold looks at numbers 11,000 cars compared to the 2 million other car companies sold during the same period. I mean come on, even for Tesla 11,000 isn't a lot.
There are plenty of car companies on that list that sold fewer cars than Tesla, and are still shrinking rather than growing.
Nobody is saying, "Tesla is more valuable/successful than Ford because they are growing in Germany while Ford isn't". They are saying, "Tesla is literally the only automaker growing in Germany this year". Which is true, according to the source provided.
This also ignores that Tesla is only selling EVs. If you just looked at EV numbers a lot of other car makers would be growing as well. It's a new market. In fact Tesla grew less than the overall EV market as I'll show below.
About 90k new EVs got registered in Germany in 2020 so far, meaning Tesla is only about 1/9th of the market.
Furthermore, in the same period in 2019 about 45k new EVs got registered. Which means the EV market overall grew by +100% in that period, while Tesla only grew +24.5%. They actually lost market share if you just look at EV numbers.
Now looking at it this way isn't completely fair either, because while the EV market is new and growth thus is no surprise, it's also true that EVs are still competing with regular cars.
So if you asked me which of these statistics is a lie, the answer would unequivocally be "yes." :)
Which to me speaks to Electrek wanting to write a clickbait piece about Tesla rather than analyze the market.
EV sales are up 4x YoY in September, due to new incentives. What is the structure? Do all Model 3s qualify or are they too expensive? How are other existing models impacted - are new entrants responsible for the growth? How would the Model 3 have sold if Q2 were not impacted by Fremont shut down?
There's a genuinely interesting article that could be written about it. I didn't expect much when I scrolled down to their Electrek's take section but what's there is poor even by their standards. It's because of Gigafactory Berlin? Really?
The sad truth is that there are three stories that are easy to write and generate the vast majority of clicks in the EV space. "Tesla's record sales", "Tesla fucks up xyz" and "Future Tesla plans". Why write about anything in depth when you can knock out one of those in an hour or two.
Even on HN, the entire ID.3 launch got about as much attention as this story has here. When personally I believe it'll go down in history as having comparable significance to the Model 3.
Finding decent in depth BEV news stories is so hard I almost want to bite the bullet and start doing it myself. It's one of the most interesting technical transitions in our lifetime, like living through the Mainframe -> Desktop era. I've been glued to the news since the Roadster.
Yet almost everything written about it is braindead spam written by unashamed Tesla supporters with their thumbs on the scale and bizarre Tesla haters who seem to genuinely believe they've found the next Theranos.
I agree that elan is full of shit a lot of the time. But you’re not doing yourself any favors , to compare 11k cars sold in Germany versus the rest of the German / international auto makers.
The fact that they are growing during economic headwinds shows that people are still interested in their product.
this is a very hyperbolic headline. A 24% growth on 11k cars is not as much as that number suggests.
Also a lot of people in the comment section seem to extrapolate from Germany to Europe, which is actually wrong as Tesla is facing heavy competition and actually losing ground (https://imgur.com/VEIB4mZ). I guess that's the kind of misleading narrative that these articles provoke
