I talked on the air last Saturday about the General Motors announcement that by 2023 they would have 20 different all-electric vehicles. That is slightly over five years from now, but that’s only the tip of the iceberg. Other automakers are rushing an additional 50 all-electric cars to market before 2022. Even vacuum cleaner maker Dyson says it is investing 2.6 billion dollars into a new electric car.
Automakers Want To Be Like Tesla, But Why?
Automakers love to grab headlines, and nobody does it better than Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla. One has to assume this rather sudden interest in all-electric vehicles has something to do with this. Call me crazy, but I always wanted to emulate people who were wildly successful. Are the auto CEOs not looking at the public data available on Tesla? Thirteen years in business, not a cent of profit. Worse, according to Bloomberg, Tesla will have burned through 10 billion dollars of cash (yes, billion with a b) by the end of this year.
Behind The Numbers
We have all these all-electric cars coming at us, but who is showing interest in the United States in electrics? Today, there are a total of 13 different all-electric car models you can go out this afternoon and purchase. So how many have been sold this year? Through August, approximately 105,000 all-electrics have been purchased in America. There is a slight margin of error because unprofitable Tesla doesn’t actually make public their sales numbers (inquiring minds want to know why) but even if you assume they sold every vehicle they produced, the 105,000 number should be really close.
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Although 105,000 of anything is a lot, that is out of 12,883,917 sales…