Tesla Leads Industry Sales Forecast With 132% QoQ Change

The chart below is interactive. You can either click the YoY% or the QoQ% header to show the data you are interested in.

Commentary

It may seem unbelievable that Tesla's sales are so much better than the rest of the industry, but you shouldn't be surprised. The following chart of sales in the first half of 2020 compared to the previous year was shared at Tesla's battery day last week.

So what caused this incredible outperformance? I attribute it to the following factors:

1. The volume production of the Tesla Model Y, a car I've written about since I first saw it at the unveiling over a year ago. A car that the Wall Street Journal seriously wonders if it the best car in the world. Its no surprise that ramping production of a car with almost univeral glowing reviews in the hottest market segment (crossovers) is going to give Tesla a bump.
2. Tesla was way ahead of the industy when COVID caused buyers to want to do as much online as possible. Tesla had attempted to go 100% online in 2019 and backed off after customers weren't quite ready to make the leap, but the whole exercise put Tesla miles ahead of the industy in having systems that can handle the transaction remotely and made it relatively easy for them to go to a 100% touchless experience for their buyers.
3. Last but not least, Tesla owners continue to tell their friends, lockdown or no lockdown that they love their cars. This army of satisfied customers drives sales without the high marketing costs needed by the rest of the industry to drive traffic to their dealers.

Paul Fosse is a Software Engineer delivering financial data marts using massively parallel databases (Exadata and GreenPlum) for a major healthcare insurer and a lifelong lover of cars. From the time I saw the 1972 Volkswagen Dasher review in Consumer Reports, I knew the industry would convert to front-wheel drive. Now I am excited to have a front-row seat to the industry's biggest transition in generations, the transition from gas and diesel cars to electric vehicles. I ordered my first EV (Nissan Leaf) in 2010 and now own a 2018 Tesla Long Range Model 3 and have a Cybertruck and a Model Y on order. Contact me on Twitter at Paul Fosse with tips for new stories. Full disclosure, I'm a Tesla Shareholder.

Reference: TrueCar and ALG Forecast New and Used Vehicle Sales for September 2020 and the Third Quarter

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