USA October 2015

We arrived to the destination! Yeey!!!

2nd Gen Volt Arrives Edition

Another almost 10.000 plug-ins edition in October, this time above last year result (If only by 1%...), but it will be hard to turn numbers into the black this year, as we would need that the two last months of the year combined would need to have more than 28.000 registrations to surpass last result. Impossible? No. Difficult to achieve? Hell, yeah!...

The Second Generation Chevrolet Volt has finally arrived, helping the nameplate to improve the YoY result, by registering 2.035 units, a positive result, although still far from the 2.961 units recorded in October 2012. And now an interesting stat: It had been two years and two months (August '13) since the last time that the Volt had been Best Seller in a single month...

Another model to arrive last month was the BMW X5 Plug-In, selling right away 135 units, a promising start and a headache for the current leader of luxury SUV's, the Porsche Cayenne Plug-In. In unrelated news, Porsche's plug-in SUV has just beaten its personal best, by selling 126 units.

And Tesla's Model X? Four units registered. That's what happens when you do hand-made cars...

Anyway, looking at the existing models, no real surprises in the top spots, aside from the aforementioned Volt and the personal best of the VW e-Golf (Dieselgate, anyone?), with 596 units.

In the second half of the chart, things were more shaky: Once again the future classic Cadillac ELR drops one position to #17, switching positions with the Kia Soul EV, while the BMW X5 Plug-In starts its career in the ranking at #20 and the Mercedes S550 PHEV barge manages to climb one positions to #22.

As for the manufacturers ranking, the leader Tesla (19%) distanced itself a bit further from the Second Placed Ford (18%), and the #3 Nissan (16%) now has Chevrolet (15%) running close.

Pl	USA	Sep.	YTD	%
1	Tesla Model S e)	1.750	17.206	19
2	Nissan Leaf	1.238	14.868	16
3	Chevrolet Volt (1)	2.035	11.299	12
4	BMW i3	986	8.879	10
5	Ford Fusion Energi	849	7.748	8
6	Ford C-Max Energi	695	7.057	8
7	Fiat 500e	425	5.539	6
8	Toyota Prius Plug-In	91	4.125	5
9	Volkswagen e-Golf	596	3.151	3
10	Chevrolet Spark EV	177	2.311	3
11	Mercedes B-Class ED	81	1.762	2
12 13 14 15	BMW i8 Ford Focus Electric Smart Fortwo ED Porsche Cayenne Plug-In	149 126 75 126	1.491 1.393 1.030 898	2 2 1 1
16 17 18 19 20 21 22 22 24 25 26 27 28	Kia Soul EV Cadillac ELR P. Panamera Plug-In Porsche 918 BMW X5 40e Plug-In Mitsubishi I-Miev Honda Accord Plug-In Mercedes S550 PHEV Bolloré Blue Car Toyota RAV4 EV Tesla Model X Volvo XC90 T8 PHEV Honda Fit EV	109 82 28 135 9 25 1 4 1 1	836 822 358 201 135 102 62 62 50 17 10 5 2	1 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0  0 0
	TOTAL	9.794	91.425	100

e) Estimate

(1) - First and Second generations combined.

Source: insideevs.com; greencarreports.com; Good Car Bad Car

Tesla vs The Others

As Elon Musk pointed out, the real competition of Tesla aren't other EV's, but the ICE best selling models, so let's look how the Model S stands in its own domestic market (1): 

Pl	Model	Sept.
1	Mercedes E-Class	4.661
2	BMW 5-Series	2.693
3	Tesla Model S	1.750
4	Audi A6	1.740
5	Lexus GS	1.287

  
The Model S is still far from the leader Mercedes E-Class, but the #2 BMW 5-Series is attainable and it is ahead of the Audi A6, or the Lexus GS

(1) - Unlike markets across the pond, the full-size car market in the US is much more diversified, with Chevy Impalas, Malibu's, Chrysler 300, Dodge Chargers, etc, all theoretical adversaries to the Model S, but Tesla's direct competition isn't there, so the Model S is only compared with cars with similar price and concept.