Top Dog: Tesla Leads in Share of Increasing U.S. Electric-Vehicle Market

July 1, 2022 Topic: Tesla Region: North America Blog Brand: The Buzz Tags: TeslaElectric VehicleFordHyundaiChina

Top Dog: Tesla Leads in Share of Increasing U.S. Electric-Vehicle Market

The company has 61 percent of the market, as of April, with Ford second with 8 percent, Hyundai third with 6 percent, and Kia fourth, also with 6 percent.

Registrations of electric vehicles more than doubled in 2021, reaching an all-time high of 5 percent of the overall market by the end of last year. That’s according to new statistics released this week by S&P Global Mobility and reported by Axios.

The report also found that Tesla is by far the leading brand when it comes to market share for electric vehicles. The company has 61 percent of the market, as of April, with Ford second with 8 percent, Hyundai third with 6 percent, and Kia fourth, also with 6 percent.

California has the largest market for electric cars, along with “some large cities in the Northeast, Florida, and Texas,” although there is much less such car ownership in the Midwest, the report said.

General Motors, which has plans for introducing models at various levels of the market, is the biggest emerging challenger to Tesla, per the report.

“It will depend a huge amount on the specifics of the product, including the price and the monthly payment,” Tom Libby, S&P Global Mobility analyst. told Axios. “If GM is able to launch a (Chevrolet) Equinox for under $30,000, that would be competitive.”

The report arrives as Tesla is preparing to announce its delivery figures for the second quarter, and there is speculation that recent lockdowns in China will put a dent in those numbers.

“The albatross around the Tesla story this quarter is clearly the zero Covid issues in China which has been a major headwind to both production as well as deliveries in this flagship market for Musk & Co,” analyst Daniel Ives of Wedbush Securities wrote in a note this week.  “With 40%+ of deliveries set to come from the China market and production an absolute disaster in the months of April and May due to the shutdown, we estimate roughly 70k units ultimately got wiped out this quarter from China.”

Another analyst, Deutsche Bank’s Emmanuel Rosner, predicted that Tesla will announce a delivery number of 245,000 units, compared to 310,000 earlier projected. This would still represent “a 22% year-over-year uptick but a 21% sequential drop,” per Yahoo Finance.

“Beyond the quarter,” Rosner said in his note, per Yahoo, “we remain impressed with Tesla’s pricing power and operational execution in the face of large industry supply-chain challenges and note that Q2 should be the trough of the year.”

Tesla’s stock was trading at $672.11 as of Thursday morning, way down from its price of $1,145 a share back in April. The company does still have a market cap of $696.396 billion, although it announced layoffs this month.

Stephen Silver, a technology writer for The National Interest, is a journalist, essayist and film critic, who is also a contributor to The Philadelphia Inquirer, Philly Voice, Philadelphia Weekly, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, Living Life Fearless, Backstage magazine, Broad Street Review and Splice Today. The co-founder of the Philadelphia Film Critics Circle, Stephen lives in suburban Philadelphia with his wife and two sons. Follow him on Twitter at @StephenSilver.

Image: Reuters.