Not sure how what is misleading .... the government takes serious steps to go in environmental friendly direction, way more than any other country on the planet, could I kindly request you to lease explain what is misleading?
These are real car sales numbers
I don´t believe people over here think so much about green.... but rather what is best for their wallet!
Sure, and sorry if I came across more "strongly worded" than intended. Was in a bit of a hurry. And just to clarify I was referring to the table, not to your statements.
I simply meant that the sales numbers do not necessarily reflect the actual adoption of EVs (or Tesla's specifically) by country, and that using it as such can be very misleading.
To elaborate on this point, your table shows some 3,000 Tesla's sold (directly) in Denmark, and the Danish registration statistics agree with that number. But the real number in terms of adoption is 4-5x that.
The total addition of EVs in Denmark in 2022 were 49,200 vehicles, and more interesting 18,400 of them were imported (an unusually large portion). This is all brands, but bare with me.
I think it's (very) safe to assume 15,000 of those imports were Tesla model 3, but for the sake of being conservative, I'll continue with an assumption based on 10,000. I'll explain why later.
So in terms of "adoption", the table with it's sales numbers puts Tesla as the #18 best selling brand in Denmark and the Model 3 specifically as the #82 most selling car model in Denmark in 2022, next to such cars as the BMW i4 and the Dacia Sandero. Not that impressive.
But if all the (for all intents and purposes "new") imports are added into the consideration, Tesla becomes the #2-#4 best selling brand of 2022 and the Model 3 becomes the most sold model of the year by a decent margin - just as was the case in 2023 with the Model Y.
That is much more consistent with reality, which was that these cars popped up left and right and that you could basically not go for any drive or go through a parking lot without seeing several. Much more presence than the official figures warrant.
Or in other words; much more "adoption" in Denmark (and conversely much less in Germany) than the table suggests.
So what happened? Well, that's were the subsidiary in Germany comes in.
Due to the subsidiary I mentioned before, Germans could buy a model 3, drive in it for six months, sell it and essentially have driven for free for half a year, "fuel" included. They could even turn a small profit. But to keep up the arrangement the buyer
had to sell the car and buy a new one to repeat the cycle, and Germans wouldn't buy these EVs on the second hand market generally, since they would cost like new, but have no subsidiary for the buyer.
This fueled enormous demand for new EVs in Germany. At the same time, this artificial demand helped fuel already very long waiting times for a new Model 3, and thus an export market was born for German subsidized electric cars to be imported into Denmark, so people could skip the months and years of wait time on a new Model 3.
(I call this demand artificial because it was obvious speculation for the most part. Most of these cars were obviously not daily drivers, they had all driven
exactly 6,000 km when sold and were advertised as having perfect paint coats, etc. I don't think they drove on a treadmill per say, but these were clearly not peoples main/only car. So when I describe Germans buying them and having a car for free for six months, I'm being very generous with the motivation behind this.)
So although accurate statistics do not exist, it's likely that
well beyond 10,000 of the Tesla vehicles in your table that are attributed to Germany were actually driving in Denmark by the time they celebrated their 7 month birthday.
So why the assumption of 10,000 imported model 3s?
Well, it's simple. There weren't really any other candidates available at such scale and that made financial sense to import. Obviously not all 18,400 cars were Model 3s or Tesla's, for example some Porsche Taycan owners chose to import from Belgium due to a lower VAT. But considering the scale of cars involved and having obviously seem much of this go on first hand (advertisements for cars, etc.) it was like 80+% Model 3s.
Also this was no small scale event, several companies propped up from nowhere to facilitate the import of these subsidized EVs. It became its own little subsection of the market and it was a booming industry until Germany finally and obviously ended the subsidiary, as it was rather pointless for them to pay for EV adoption in a bunch of other countries.
So in this case, you see quite the disparity between "sales" and "adoption". Is a car the #1 or the #82 most common choice for people in a country? A significant difference, I would argue.
And on the flip side, Germany seems a lot more into adopting EVs than they really are, because the sales are generated by something other than replacing your ICE car with an EV, as would be the logical conclusion. In reality, as soon as the subsidiary was ended, sales numbers plummeted for EVs in Germany, and in fact they are now importing premium used ICE vehicles from Denmark to meet demand, something that would be unthinkable a fee years ago.
I mention all of this because you seem to use the table to compare the adoption by sales numbers of EVs/Tesla's across countries.
All I intended to say was that it's often times misleading to draw any meaningful conclusions about the
adoption of EVs by country from such sales statistics, because international car markets are a complex affair.
BR,
Nicolai
