BY Brad Anderson | Posted on January 25, 2020
As more and more electric vehicles hit the market, it would be reasonable to assume that sales of EVs would be rising consistently. However, according to new figures, that’s not the case.
The Los Angeles Times reports that while 45 new all-electric and plug-in hybrids debuted in the U.S. last year, just 325,000 EVs and plug-in hybrids were sold across the nation in 2019, a fall of 6.8 per cent from the 349,000 of the year prior. Numbers regarding how many EVs were sold in California last year aren’t available quite yet.
“The number of battery-electric models available more than doubled last year, but EV sales didn’t budge much. That’s troubling,” the head of the automotive practice at consulting firm AlixPartners, Mark Wakefield said.
A number of factors could explain this. For starters, it seems as though range anxiety remains a serious cause for concern among consumers. In addition, electric vehicles remain more expensive than their ICE-powered rivals and with some of the government’s generous subsidies ending for many of the market’s best-selling EVs, buyers are feeling the pinch. What’s more, gas prices remain low and stable.
Read: There’s A Recession In Global Car Sales And It Shows Little Signs Of Abating
Then there’s Tesla. The car manufacturer has created a lifestyle brand and its models are often considered as the quintessential electric car. Sales of the Model 3 jumped by 14 per cent in 2019 in the U.S. and more than doubled globally to 300,600.
Many so-called ‘Tesla killers’ have hit the market recently but failed to sell. The Jaguar I-Pace, for example, shifted just 2,594 units in the U.S. last year while the Audi e-tron registered just 5,369 sales. Cheaper alternatives like the Hyundai Kona and Kia Niro also aren’t selling particularly well either, shifting 3,600 and less than 1,000 units respectively.
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What with all the positive claims being made amongst the electric promoters, it’s past time to ween electrics off of credits, subsidies and supporting mandates. Obviously, they don’t need them.
“A number of factors could explain this. For starters, it seems as though range anxiety remains a serious cause for concern among consumers.”
….and a lack of a recharging infrastructure away from home. Plus (as I understand anyway) batteries do not like cold weather in winter —it lowers their range even further. EVs are likely rare here in Wisconsin if there are any at all. Dealers here probably don’t even bother trying to sell them much.
Hot weather is also not good for batteries.
They don’t do well under water either.
The issue here is more about the use of autopilot. As I understand it, there are thoughts about banning autopilot. Autopilot is not limited to EVs by the way.
The problem is lack of range and long recharge times. PERIOD.
Calling it “range anxiety” is a dishonest way of blaming the customer for rejecting a product that does not meet their needs.
Even worse for a large SUV or pickup truck intended to haul a trailer around – no way are those going to be electrified without a order of magnitude improvement in energy density and recharge time.
OT but for Antony I think this is quite important https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oZCCXZz5Esw
Thanks for the link. Very interesting.
@Eliza, enjoyed the video and sent an email with the link to one of the party members of SD (Sweden Democrats).
Nice to see young women with brains and the drive to express themselves in a mature way.
The first time you have to wait in line for hours to charge your vehicle, you’re turned off.
No pun intended? 😀
I’m turned off just THINKING about how long it will take to charge an EV that I am driving, and then multiplying that time by the number of OTHER EVs being charged ahead of the one I’m driving.
Which is why I won’t be buying a useless EV.
Especially if it’s 90 degrees outside and you have to turn off the A/C to preserve enough battery charge to be able to move ahead one car length every 20 minutes until you reach the station.
But, hey, I’m sure there’s a app out there to minimize the discomfort.
Electric cars will not be popular until I can recharge it in under 8 minutes and then drive 400+ miles including the time it takes to pay.
As far as regular vehicles go, I have an Excel spreadsheet that computes how much it costs to drive per mile. If gas prices cost $3.509/US gallon and if it cost $250 extra to add 1 MPG to your vehicle, then it would take 89,770 miles before you save $250 on gasoline. If fuel prices were $2.509, then that falls to 125,550 miles instead. The regular Camry is 35 MPH combined highway/city for the cheapest model and the hybrid version is 52 combined for the cheapest. It is about $4000 extra for the hybrid version. If gas costs $2.509/US gallon, it would take you 171,000 miles to break even, 122,500 miles if you live in California and see $3.509 for fuel. Do you think it is worth paying extra to save a little money?
What I don’t get is Tesla’s market capitalization. The article says they sold 301K units last year, are running at a -3.9% (per Yahoo finance, and yes the minus sign is correct) profit margin through 3 quarters of FY19, yet have a market cap of over $100B.
GM on the other hand sold 2.85M vehicles in 2019, are running a 6.19% profit margin (again per Yahoo), but are only valued at $47B.
Go figure.
To the range anxiety/deficiency topic I’m pretty sure that south Florida isn’t super interested in cars that can’t outrun an on-coming hurricane. And where the range is ok (like here in Tesla’s virtue signaling bosom of California, we are now told to be prepared for PG&E to cut power for WEEKS at a time, so that now many of our EV enthusiast eco purists are out buying gasoline backup generators.
My mom often referenced an old P.T. Barnum quote when she was promised something too good to be true, and it applies to EVs today perfectly: “There is a sucker born every minute, and two to take em.”
There are a lot of people who invest on hype, not on market research. I’m willing to be that when Tesla finally closes it’s doors, there are going to be a lot of liberals demanding federal bailouts for their portfolios.
MDN, it’s worse than you thought. The Tesla numbers (actually 367,000 for 2019) are worldwide sales while the GM numbers are US only. GM’s worldwide sales number for 2018 was 8.4 million. In one year Tesla sells about as many vehicles as GM sells in a little over 2 weeks.
I saw a YouTube video of a competitive teardown of a Tesla that showed the $35,000 model costs about $37,000 to build. The lose a little on every sale but make it up on volume.
The article mostly answered it own question:
– Continued relatively cheap gas.
– Tesla’s loss of subsidy.
Not mentioned is California’s electricity problems stemming from the PG&E fiasco. Without a reliable grid connection to plug in your EV every night, it’s just an expensive paperweight. Who wants to buy a Tesla in those areas where electricity prices are climbing and availability will be uncertain.
EV’s are a niche and always will be. The same niche role also applies to renewable wind and solar energy schemes. These climate alarmist unjustified renewable schemes will never be able to reliably and cost effectively meet energy needs that are met with unassailable superiority by lower cost, higher efficiency and hugely more reliable fossil fuels.
Tesla reports financials this Wednesday. Should be a good indication of BEVs chance for profitability. Most sales were of model 3 that are the least expensive in their fleet and also offer the least profit margin. No other automaker is going for the small car luxury EV.
Variability in supply is an issue with many of the new models. In the UK where I live, attractive and reasonably priced modeks from Kia and Hyundai arrived in pitiful numbers – the year’s allocation sold out in weeks if not days. The first years production of the new Ford Mustang-ish EV will I think not be available in the US – the entire production will go to Europe. Merc. have announced a halving of first year production of the EQC beceause of battery supply issues. The new VW ID3 has had software problems. The established automakers who were going to trash Tesla are finding out the hard way that this stuff ain’t easy
The problem is not that the supply is variable, it’s that the demand is weak and falling.
That’s a bold conclusion Mark W. I can’t answer for the US but here in the UK, the Kia e-niro was reported to have a waiting list of 3000 at the start of December 2019; IIRC three times the 2019 allocation
A survey of EV drivers by a well-known You-tube channel in the UK (“Fully Charged”) found that most would never go back to petrol or diesel
I agree – once you have driven one, piston engines are so last century. The price needs to come down at the cheaper end of the market though
Surveys produced by manufacturers is one thing.
Here in the US, very few people who buy electrics, trade them in for electrics.
In the US, sales spiked in 2018 (mainly due to one vehicle – Tesla’s Model 3 – You know you are dealing with a Niche market when all it takes is one product from one company to have such a huge affect on the total market) and have dropped in 2019.
2019 sales of electric vehicles in the US decreased 7% to 9% versus very strong sales growth in 2018, according to separate estimates from Edmunds and InsideEVs.
There was Significant Decline Among Top Selling Vehicles: Only one of the top ten selling EVs in 2018 saw an increase in sales in 2019 (Tesla’s Model 3) the other 9 all saw lower sales in 2019. The Model 3 had an 19k increase in unit sales, the other 9 had a combined decrease of 51k units. This is particularly significant because these top 10 EVs from 2018 accounted for 83% of sales in 2019.
According to InsideEVs, Of the 43 EVs available in 2018 and 2019, 27 saw a sales decrease for a total of -70k, while only 16 saw an increase in sales, for a total of +29k (19k of which came from one car: the Tesla Model 3).
“John Hardy January 29, 2020 at 6:16 am
A survey of EV drivers by a well-known You-tube channel in the UK (“Fully Charged”).
A very good show it is too well worth watching even if you don’t go for EV’s. It covers pretty much all EV’s even retro-fitted vehicles like classic Range Rovers, Morris Minors and Minis (One Mini was quoted at GBP75,000, just a little bit out of the price range for the average road user).
Hi, Latitude Dude! 🙂
It won’t help sales any when word gets out the EV carbon footprint is larger than gasoline or diesel cars, especially when including the CO2 making the battery.
https://www.instituteforenergyresearch.org/international-issues/electric-vehicles-in-germany-emit-more-carbon-dioxide-than-diesel-vehicles/
Here in New Zealand our electricity generation is mainly hydro except that in the North Island where 77% of the country live, it is a mix of coal, gas, geothermal, hydro, and a little bit of wind. The government quotes the CO2 emissions from each source as: Coal – 630 kg CO2-e/MWh, Natural gas – 455 kg CO2-e/MWh and Geothermal – 115 kg CO2-e/MWh (much of our geothermal is open cycle so releases CO2 from the thermal water).
On Tuesday last week at 9.00am the grid operator showed coal as generating 17% of total North Island demand, Gas 22% and geothermal 31% (hydro was 29%; wind wasn’t blowing so was less than 1%).
The cheapest electric car in NZ is the Nissan Leaf with a 40kWhr battery at NZ$59,990 while a Toyota Corolla 1.8 hybrid is $32,990. From the manufacturer’s data, and assuming 86% for charging efficiency and 5% for transmission line losses, it’s easy to work out that the EV Leaf is producing 49gm/km of CO2 (at the power stations) while the Toyota is emitting 97gm/km from its tailpipe. The EV is good but even with our large renewable power base (geothermal counts as “renewable” in NZ) it is far from zero emissions.
However, the real EV killer is that over 150,000km and taking into account petrol, electricity and servicing costs, the Corolla is NZ$14,000 cheaper to own and run. It’s no surprise that EV uptake has been miniscule even though the government has run out a nationwide recharging network and is about to introduce a rebate scheme.
“Scott R January 27, 2020 at 4:11 pm
The cheapest electric car in NZ is the Nissan Leaf with a 40kWhr battery at NZ$59,990”
NZ$60K? That is where the “rich tax”started. Thanks Helen. 39% and then down to 33% IIRC. But 60K in NZ for a car is A LOT OF MONEY locally!
After 10 years of earning 60K in NZ I didn’t feel wealthy in 2000 when the Govn’t raised tax on income above NZ$60K to 39%.
Electric cars are a solution looking for a problem. A good one isn’t cheap, and a cheap one has limited range. I have an engineer friend that bought a Chevy Bolt. I rode in it a couple times. It’s a nice car and has decent range. His job sends him out of town a lot so mostly he uses it for a short commute with maybe one charge a week, or a short(~100mi) trip here and there. But it’s expensive, >35,000 without the government discount. A comparable gas car goes for $22-26,000. Toyota has a hybrid Corolla now. One of the hype sites says: “Its 53/52 mpg rating is far thriftier than the nonhybrid’s best of 31/40 mpg.” The same mistake Consumer reports makes. The hybrid takes 2 gal to go 100 miles. The gas version takes 2.5 gallons. Far thriftier is compared to a pickup truck. But either version of the Corolla is better that the Bolt or an equivalent car, even with the Gov. Discount. The Corolla is just a bigger, better equipped car with no range issues and an excellent reliability record and no worn out battery hanging over it as a trade-in or used car sale.
I have a 2011 Hyundai hybrid Sonata with 115K miles and although it runs well I have ‘battery anxiety’ regarding replacing the hybrid battery in near future. I looked into buying a used Tesla 3 (~$47-49K) vs a new hybrid Sonata (~$35K). Even after allowing for minimal Tesla maintenance & fuel costs per year, I’d have to drive it 12 years at todays gas cost to break even. That assumes no Tesla battery replacement in years 9-12.
Then I found this Nov 2019 MIT report comparing battery electric, plug-in hybrid, fuel cell, and internal combustion vehicles. [Spoiler alert: BEV won’t have cost parity to an ICE for maybe another10 years.]
That sealed my decision to just keep driving my 2011.
https://energy.mit.edu/insightsintofuturemobility
https://energy.mit.edu/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/Insights-into-Future-Mobility.pdf
And 2 insurance companies quoted me ~$450 more per year to insure the Tesla3 which I didn’t include in the cost analysis. However my ride in a T3 was a hoot! Neck endangering acceleration. I’d love to have someone give one.
” I have ‘battery anxiety’ regarding replacing the hybrid battery in near future.”
But replacement hybrid batteries can be had from independent suppliers for under $1500 or so, no?
Yes, from a purely economic standpoint buying an electric car might not make sense. But then there are thousands of dealerships out there that thrive on the notion people buy what they want despite
economic sense.
As Mr. Rickard pointed out, there would be a lot more electric cars if the tailpipe came up through the steering column. It is sort of selfish to blithely poodle around in an ICE, but then it is genuinely a great thing having autos.
If you drive a Model 3 for a month and have a garage with 240V whatever economic sense it didn’t make would seem silly. You will not want to buy an ICE car again. It is just such a better driving experience!
Tesla has a great number of charging stations for longer trips, so even that problem isn’t a deal killer.
I see your tail pipe steering column and raise you the waste from your average lithium mine.
Beyond that, tail pipes are a lot cleaner than they used to be.
In many larger cities, the air coming out the tail pipe is cleaner than the air that goes into the engine.
You are assuming the car is in a good state of repair. That every car on the road is newer than 1990. In my town that is not the case. In fact, in L A hat is not the case. That every diesel on the road has not been chipped and is running at its best. Again, not so. When you drive do you pull up to within inches of the car ahead of you at a light? Ask a mechanic how many cars they see with a piece of electrical tape over the red light on the dash.
I Live outside the city in a cold area and there is no way an electric can fill my needs and as a second car would get very little use.
However if you rarely leave the city and you can charge at home for a reasonable cost an electric would seem to make sense. The occasional out of town drive could be covered by a rental which could be cheaper than owning a second ICE vehicle.
Towing is another matter.
The original article opens with;
“As more and more electric vehicles hit the market, it would be reasonable to assume that sales of EVs would be rising consistently. ”
Sorry, why would this be a reasonable assumption?
The market is what it is. Adding more choice to a market – and by choice we mean variations of basically the same thing – simply means there is now more variation within that share of the market. People with a need for one item are not going to buy a second one JUST because it is available and a different colour. They are going to buy as many units as they need and can justify.
EV’s filled their sustainable (pun not intended) section of the market. Pretty much everyone who wants one has one. People who don’t want one, still don’t want one, even if it has a nice Jaguar badge on the front.
What would be more reasonable to assume is that EV development will, via brutal evolutionary selection, decrease over the next decade as the companies who can’t successfully break into the EV market cut losses. Car manufacture is economy of scale. You can support say two manufacturers making 5000 units (10000 total for a semi random example number) but you can’t support twenty each only making 500. A lot of people are going to have to drop out.
“Craig from Oz January 27, 2020 at 6:53 pm
Car manufacture is economy of scale.”
Car making is extremely expensive that is why many makers share components. Honda shared engines/transmissions with Rover. Rover supplied bodies to Honda (Swindon, UK). A Mzda 6 is the same as a Ford Telsta. PSA make engines that go in to Citroen, Peugoet, VW, Audi, Seat and Skoda etc. Many parts are shared across many models, transmissions, clutches, gear selectors, EGU, GCU, BCU’s etc. They may have different part numbers but they are the same unit.
Here’s a Dec. 30 WaPo article, “Why electric vehicles still don’t live up to the hype”:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/why-electric-cars-still-dont-live-up-to-the-hype/2019/12/30/242ce200-2b29-11ea-bcd4-24597950008f_story.html
What I know about the current crop of EV’s is that they are all compromises (Well what car isn’t?). It’s almost as if the E bit of the EV was an after thought unlike a Tesla, which was designed form the ground up as an EV. If we take the Nissan LEAF as an example to me the whole power plant looks like it was retrofitted, as if it were an after market kit, but with a premium price in an fairly basic average car. Then there is the battery. A recent example here in Australia a LEAF owner was quoted over AU$32,000 for a replacement on a 10 year old car that was worth AU$10,000 if that (Obviously a lot less with a known dud battery).
EV’s, especially Teslas, are for wealthy socialists who go online to gloat about their cars.
RE: “EV’s, especially Teslas, are for wealthy socialists who go online to gloat about their cars”
Simple Simon: “I resemble that remark!”
He gets paid that much for trolling?
The spectre haunting the electric car market is that gasoline cars are so good and so cheap. Seventy percent of cars on the road in Canada were bought used. When people say that electric cars will be competitive with gasoline cars, they mean new gasoline cars, and usually high-end new gasoline cars. The Europeans, much more comfortable with antidemocratic measures than North Americans, just plan to ban gasoline cars. Why use a carrot when you can use a stick, and why use a stick when you can use a gun?
So I just read yet another internet article about the inevitable market acceptance of electric cars, and of course its basic premise is sophistry. It said, electric cars are cheaper than gas cars to operate and maintain. Well sure, but they’re a lot more expensive to buy.
What annoys me about the story that you save money on gas by buying an electric car is that anyone who considers buying one immediately runs into the barrier of the price. The argument for economy can’t last the thirty seconds it takes to compare the purchase prices of gas and electric cars.
“Ian Coleman January 27, 2020 at 10:34 pm”
With various Govn’t mandates the market is being forced (Gamed?).
The only reason why they are cheaper to operate is because gas is taxed and electricity isn’t.
Electricity bill do include taxes, lots of them in some jurisdictions, even if they aren’t always labeled as such. State and local governments often see utility bills as a way to collect revenue because they’re not optional. Of taxes that get labeled as such, many states charge sales taxes and gross receipts taxes. So it might be more accurate to say that, as a percentage of the total, electricity isn’t as highly taxes as gas.
Patrick MJD: There is only so much forcing of markets the government can do in democracies. Governments that incentivize electric cars (Norway is running amok with this right now) overtly penalize the owners of gas-powered cars. This is clearly class-discriminatory, and there is vigorous pushback against it. The tax credit for Teslas is now in danger in some jurisdictions in the United States, because almost all of the beneficiaries of it are rich.
I don’t believe the electric car market would exist without the climate change catastrophe story to make the transition to electric cars such a popular fantasy. If Tesla fails, your grandchildren will inherit an uninhabitable Earth. That is actually a sales strategy, and people are buying it.
They are niche cars at the moment, but what would the grid requirement be if they replaced all ICE cars (as mandated in some European countries such as the UK). Well, an increase in power generation is one, but often overlooked is what goes on beneath the streets. I don’t know what capacity the cables under your feet have but I would guess, completely inadequate to carry the massive power loads to charge hundreds of EV’s up and down every street. How fast is “fast” charging? Some proponents are saying 10 minutes. But the consequence of that is you need 12 times the power draw compared to a 2 hour charge time. If you need 50 Kw hours in 10 minutes, that means a power draw of 300 Kw. Imagine a charging station offering 10 such charge points! No worries, just rip up all the roads up and replace all the copper cables. Ah, but what about all the extra mining and refining and cost?
As Scotty would have said, “ye canna change the laws of physics captain”. Or, there’s no such thing as a free lunch.
Who the hell uses copper for electricity?
It’s not just the power lines. You have to dramatically increase the number and size of substations.
The transformers outside your homes will have to be upgraded as well.
In Sweden, some twenty years back, really many cars had diesel or gasoline driving stand-heaters, where as others had electric heaters. My bad ass 4WD diesel still has it’s stand-heater, but I am almost the only one on the filled parking-lot in front of the supermarket, who has such a nice thing running. I see the other scraping snow and ice off their windows and get into their below freezing cars, while I take off my overcoat and drive off.
The thing is that the infrastructure needed for electric everything is very expensive and causes a lot of inconvenience. Diesel and gasoline, and even LPG, has the advantage of being so energy dense, that you can bring all your energy with you with ease. Batteries need to be about ten times more energy dense in order to be as convenient as diesel and gasoline, and even then you have the issue of electricity buffers on the “gas stations” or alternatively the grid expansion locally and nationwide. Thirdly cars are heavy energy consumers, which means that power generation has to expand, which appears to be a problem for Green movement, considering we needed to change to LED lamps to save on electricity generation.
Copenhagen in Denmark is beginning to have electricity poverty due electrification everything. The cables from Sweden, Germany and western Denmark to Copenhagen are too weak and needs expansion. But, will the Swedes and the Germans be able to deliver? The Swedes and Germans have their own electricity issues, cased by the same Green angle dust thinking.
The Green future is either black or expensive.