USA May 2017

Toyota Prius Prime center screen: Which looks better, this or the Tesla Model 3?

Toyota Prius Prime  Shines in Hot Market

The US market is pressing the accelerator, last month it registered over 16.000 units, with YoY sales up 44%, leaving the YTD EV Share north of 1%, the US market is headed for a record year, with December surely surpassing the 250.000 units landmark, and 300.000 units still a possibility.

The Toyota Prius Prime is becoming the surprise of the year, having won the Monthly Best Seller trophy for the second time in the row in May, with a record 1.908 units, and that while the model is still in short supply, so once the model is in cruise speed, expect registrations to go north of 3.000/month.

Another measure of the success of the PHEV Prius is these brilliant performances happen while the regular Prius sales are nosediving, having dropped 35% last month to 6.064 units. 

Other models hitting record levels are the Chevrolet Bolt, with 1.566 deliveries, as production slowly ramps up and the car lands in new states, numbers slowly go up, the question is how much higher will they go? 2.000/month? 2.500? More?

The BMW 330e had sufficient stock to deliver a record month, with 475 units (Or 11% of all 3-Series sales), should the German automaker provide enough units, the PHEV version of its bread and butter model could reach some 20% of all 3-Series sales, or some 800 units/month.

Despite some production hiccups (QC...), the Chrysler Pacifica PHEV delivered some 485 units, which is just a sample of the great sales potential this model has, as there is nothing quite like it in a market hungry for big 7-seaters that do not cost small fortunes...I think 1.000 units/month is perfectly within reach, FCA just has to get its QC right and ramp up production accordingly.

In the manufacturers ranking, Tesla (21%) is running neck to neck with Chevrolet (21%) for the leadership, but with June being a last-quarter-of-the-month, expect Tesla to have another deliveries peak, so it will distance itself a little from the GM brand, while it waits for the arrival of the 2017 Event of the Year (Model 3).

 The race for Third place is also close, with Ford (12%) resisting (For how long?) Toyota (11%).

Pl	USA	May	YTD	%
1	Chevrolet Volt	1.817	9.187	13
2	Tesla Model S e)	1.620	8.845	12
3	Toyota Prius Prime	1.908	8.073	11
4	Tesla Model X e)	1.730	6.745	9
5	Chevrolet Bolt	1.566	5.950	8
6	Nissan Leaf	1.392	5.742	8
7	Ford Fusion Energi	1.000	4.350	6
8	Ford C-Max Energi	950	3.473	5
9 10	Fiat 500e BMW i3	665 506	3.333 2.425	5 3
11	Audi A3 e-Tron	294	1.796	3
12	BMW X5 PHEV	433	1.658	2
13 14 15	Volkswagen e-Golf BMW 330e Hyu. Sonata PHEV	381 475 220	1.655 1.373 1.160	2 2 2
16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 32 34 35	Ford Focus Electric Por. Cayenne PHEV Kia Soul EVChr. Pacifica PHEV Volvo XC90 PHEV Mercedes S500e Kia Optima PHEV Mercedes C350e Mercedes B250e BMW 740e Mercedes GLE550e BMW i8 BMW 530e Hyundai Ioniq Elec. Smart Fortwo ED Cadillac CT6 PHEV Chevrolet Spark EV Cadillac ELR P. Panamera PHEV Mitsubishi I-Miev	132 174 129 485 146 83 85 7 46 33 33 18 147 751 16 1	948 783 736 702 573 330 312 288 271 251 227 198 160 9454 2212 12 9 6	1 1 1 1 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 00 00 0 0 0
	TOTAL	16.568	71.753	100

 e) Estimate

Source: insideevs.com; goodcarbadcar.com


Tesla Model S & Others

Pl	Model	March Sales
1	Mercedes E-Class	4.068
2	BMW 5-Series	3.677
3	Tesla Model S e)	1.620
4	Audi A6	1.358
5	Mercedes S-Class	1.275

Looking at the E-Segment/full-size vehicles, both the Mercedes E-Class and BMW 5-Series benefit from the volume delivery of the new generation to escape the other models chase, with the Tesla Model S staying in its usual Third Place.

As for the Tesla Model X, its 1.750 units are not enough to reach the Top 5 in its class, not only it has more competition to deal with, but also higher numbers to reach (Usually high end SUVs sell two to three times more than their sedan siblings), proving once again that the Tesla SUV should have been doing much better than its five year old brother...