+++ I predicted it in February and now it’s confirmed: the Tesla Model Y was the BEST-SELLING CAR IN THE WORLD in 2023. The mid-sized American crossover has made history not only for coming in first place, but also for doing so in such a short time since its introduction to the market, and it’s the first time an all-electric car has topped the global rankings. The Tesla Model Y was officially unveiled in March 2019, meaning its first full year on the market was 2020, when the pandemic hit the markets. Excluding that terrible, abnormal year, it took the Model Y just 3 years to rise to the top. That’s a remarkable achievement, especially when you consider that this vehicle isn’t available everywhere in the world. It is one of the few cars to appeal to consumers as diverse as the Chinese, Americans and Europeans. According to my research, the Tesla sold 1.22 million units last year. That’s 64% more than in 2022, or almost 480.000 more units. That’s the other reason it made history. No other car has achieved such annual growth. Finally, the Tesla Model Y has also made history, as it is the first time that an all-electric vehicle has topped the world rankings. Until now, Toyota’s hybrid models have come closest to achieving this feat, but not all of them have succeeded. As the world continues to shift from combustion engine cars to zero-emission cars, the Tesla Model Y can proudly say that it was the first to occupy this position. Further down the world rankings, Toyota placed 5 models in the top-10 thanks to the popularity of the RAV4 in China and North America, good results from the Corolla family (the saloon dropped 2 places due to increased demand for its sister Corolla Cross), the Camry’s strong position as the world’s most popular midsize saloon and good results from the Hilux, the most popular vehicle in emerging markets. Honda also achieved good results with the CR-V, which came third. The Civic, Accord and HR-V also made it into the top-25, showing that Honda is very strong in Asia and North America. The popularity of the Ford F-150 in the United States and Canada was enough to put it in 7th place, even though it is not available in most parts of the world. Its rivals, the Chevrolet Silverado 1500 and Ram 1500, occupy 16th and 18th place respectively. These vehicles accounted for 14% of vehicle sales in the United States and Canada. The second best-selling electric vehicle in the world was once again a Tesla, the Model 3, in 10th place, with volumes up by 5% thanks to the introduction of the facelift version. Chinese manufacturers also made it into the top-25, with BYD placing 3 of its models: the Qin, a compact saloon with an electrified engine that is very popular in China; the Song Plus, a mid-size SUV; and the Yuan Plus (or Atto 3), which recorded the biggest percentage change compared with 2022, at +119%. Finally, only 2 European models feature in the top-25: the Volkswagen Polo and the Volkswagen Jetta. This reminds us that the European industry may not be fully aligned with global trends. Best-selling Nissan was the X-Trail in 12th position. The Hyundai Tucson ended 2 places lower. Best-selling Mazda was the CX-5 (16th) while Suzuki took 18th position with the Swift. Kia’s number-1 was the Seltos (22th), and between 25th and 50th position we find the Dacia / Renault Sandero, the Peugeot 208, the Renault Clio, the Isuzu D-Max, the BMW X3 and the Audi Q5. +++
+++ May saw local brands make up 4 out of the 5 top-selling brands in the CHINA market according to data from the China Passenger Car Association (CPCA). The market for a long time was dominated by joint ventures with BYD last year becoming the first Chinese producer to ever take first place for sales. Thanks to the rapid electrification of the market Chinese brands are prospering as evidenced by both the figures for May and the year to date. The figures come just days after Li Yunfei, general manager of BYD’s brand and PR department, predicted at the 2024 China Automobile Forum in Chongqing that the share of Chinese brands would reach 80% within the next 2 years, currently it‘s around 60%. BYD continued to dominate in May with retail sales of 268.226 a year-on-year increase of 21.5%, meaning that BYD alone made up 15.7% of the Chinese car market. The only joint venture in the top-5 was FAW Volkswagen which (with sales of 124.029 cars) was down -17.5%, giving it a market share of 7.3%. Geely is within striking distance of the number-2 spot selling under 300 cars less. Sales for Geely were up 31.6% year-on-year and the Zhejiang-based private company now controls 7.2% of the market. Changan secured the number-4 spot despite a decline of -12.7% and it had a 5.6% market share. Rounding out the top-5 was the top climber Chery which saw sales increase by 59.3%, with the Anhui company now controlling 5.2% of the market. The top-10 is then rounded out by Shanghai Volkswagen, GAC Toyota, Dongfeng Nissan, BMW Brilliance and Tesla China. May sales showed a total of 1.710.000 cars; down -1.9% year-on-year. However, new energy vehicle (plug-in hybrid and full electric cars) sales show no sign of abating with sales up by 38.6% for a total of 804.000. These rankings are not a May anomaly with the figures for January to May showing a very similar pattern. The only difference was that Shanghai Volkswagen managed to squeeze into fifth place ahead of Chery by around 20.000 sales and that 10th position belongs to the Shanghai GM Wuling joint venture rather than Tesla. Chery again is the star of the figures showing a 75.7% increase in sales year-on-year with Geely also showing a very respectable 40.2% rise. BYD’s dominance is even more apparent when looking at sales of new energy vehicles where BYD’s market share is larger than the next 5 producers combined. +++
+++ FISKER ’s staff was in chaos as they prepared to deliver the company’s first batch of electric cars to U.S. customers. It had been 4 years since famed automotive designer Henrik Fisker unveiled his Tesla rival, an SUV called the Ocean, and the vehicle still wasn’t ready. In the weeks leading up to the big June 2023 event, Fisker staff raced to fix faulty parts on at least 4 of the 22 cars that were set to be delivered, even stripping parts off the CEO and CFO’s personal cars to repair the vehicles, including door handles and seat sensors, according to 11 sources familiar with the incident. 2 days later, Fisker board member Wendy Gruel’s Ocean, one of the cars that had been delivered at the event, shut off on a public road while going full speed, 5 sources said. Later, the same thing happened to Geeta Gupta-Fisker, Henrik’s wife and the company’s CFO and COO, workers said. A Fisker spokesperson denied that workers used parts from pre-production vehicles for customer cars and said Gruel’s car didn’t stop on a public road. The company said Gupta-Fisker’s vehicle had malfunctioned, but the issue was resolved. One thing was clear: the electric cars had barely hit the road and already the problems were piling up. Henrik Fisker’s EV startup seemed to be an easy sell at first. The 60-year-old automotive veteran boasts a long history in the industry, known for being the designer behind the Aston Martin V8, the BMW Z8 roadster that famously appeared in a 1999 James Bond film, and helping design Tesla’s Model S. Even though it was Henrik’s second automotive startup after his first company went out of business in 2013, some workers told that it was easy to dismiss worries early on that his second company could meet the same fate. For his part, Henrik said he planned to do things differently this time. He would follow Apple’s model by outsourcing production through Magna International and he also aimed to target the middle of the market with a more affordable EV option that could compete with Tesla’s best-selling Model Y. Fisker’s new company emerged in 2016 and went public in 2020 via a SPAC backed by Apollo Global Management. At one point, the company’s market value soared as high as $8 billion. At the time, Fisker was one of several EV startups to burst onto the scene: Rivian, Lucid, and Lordstown all wanted the chance to compete with Tesla. Since then, production and market headwinds have pushed some EV startups to shutter and major players like Ford and General Motrors to scale back their electric-vehicle operations. Even Tesla has struggled, seeing revenue decline and layoffs. “I was hopeful at first”, one former vice-president, who worked at both Fisker startups, said. “Initially, at least, it seemed like he’d learned from his mistakes. It became obvious later on that they hadn’t”. Many of Fisker’s woes can be traced back to the husband-wife duo (photo) who launched the brand, multiple former and current workers told. They described a disorganized environment in which unqualified people were brought in to lead major programs and basic automotive standards were ignored. While Henrik often served as a figurehead, Gupta-Fisker was heavily involved in everyday decisions, including on the engineering side, 11 workers said. Prior to taking on the role of CFO and COO at Fisker, Gupta-Fisker had served as an investment manager for the Fisker family office and as an adviser at a nonprofit. She had no prior experience in the automotive industry. But at Fisker, the workers said she managed deals with Magna and outside parts suppliers, frequently popped into engineering meetings, and weighed in on everything from parts purchases to software decisions. 49-year-old Gupta-Fisker quickly became known in the company for her shrewd cost-cutting abilities. But, her strategy meant that at times Fisker ended up using components that didn’t match the correct specifications for the Ocean, 5 former and current workers said. Gupta-Fisker made several decisions to use cheaper parts against Fisker executive and Magana executives’ advice, 2 workers said. The mismatches led to issues with over-the-air updates. Staff blamed many of the Ocean’s faults on the cost-cutting efforts. Several workers said that in the months leading up to the vehicle’s launch, they filed internal reports recommending that the product undergo further testing and development before its release. They said they were told the company planned to proceed anyway. “The focus was on getting the car to market as soon as possible”, one former worker said. “The overarching belief was we could fix things with updates later on”. Ahead of the release, Fisker engineers were aware of multiple issues with the vehicle. They had identified issues with the effectiveness of the car’s door handles, key fobs and seat sensors. Over the past year, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) has launched 4 investigations into Fisker’s SUV, including issues with inadvertent braking and flaws in the vehicle’s door latch system. Fisker has also faced dozens of lemon law lawsuits. In its haste to bring the car to market, Fisker failed to set up an effective system for processing repair orders and warranty claims. Technicians were tasked with filling out the work orders and many of them said they hadn’t been trained on the process. In lieu of a working warranty system, some workers began processing the repairs without the proper California Bureau of Automotive Repair codes and EPA license numbers, using “123456” as a placeholder on a number of repairs, according to an internal document. In March, a vice-president at Fisker warned the issue made the company non-compliant with NHTSA protocols and unable to properly track and report safety concerns. Without a proper system to process warranties or repair orders, the majority of repairs went unaccounted for. That meant there wasn’t an adequate way for Fisker to keep track of which parts were being used for repairs for its own financial records. It also meant many customers did not get a record of their repairs, workers said. Meanwhile, Fisker also struggled to find the necessary parts for all of the fixes. The company hadn’t set up much inventory for aftersales parts, so some of the parts used for customer fixes either came directly off the factory line, meaning they were meant for production vehicles, or the parts were stripped off pre-production and production vehicles, 11 workers with knowledge of the issue said. In one instance, Fisker stripped parts off an engineering test vehicle that had been shipped from Magna’s facility in Graz, Austria under an import bond, according to 3 former workers and emails. The vehicle was supposed to be destroyed in its entirety shortly after it was delivered to comply with the terms of the import. The vehicle’s parts were not intended to be used for customers’ cars. Fisker staff also looked for clever ways to address the parts shortage. In some instances, workers who visited Graz were told by managers to bring parts back in their suitcases to avoid paying import fees. One worker recalled having to leave personal belongings behind to fit air vents and key fobs into their luggage; another said they packed a larger bag to fit trim panels. Fisker was initially successful in generating interest in the Ocean, with over 65.000 reservations initially placed. But in the year since the Ocean’s release, the company has delivered around 7.000 vehicles, a Fisker spokesperson said. Negative reviews (including a YouTuber calling it the “worst car I’ve ever reviewed”) took a toll on the brand, driving thousands of would-be customers to cancel their reservations. In November, Fisker moved to bring in hiring recruiters to help sell the vehicle, as well as orchestrate the delivery of the car after the sale had been processed. In many cases, the recruiters, who had initially been brought onto the human resources team, had zero experience in automotive sales. Selling the car wasn’t easy either. The recruiters found themselves directly competing with the company’s established sales team and there weren’t enough leads to go around. 4 former workers said Fisker’s reservation numbers included many duplicate names in its count and it was difficult to track which customers had connected with a sales worker. As a result, some people on the reservation list would find themselves getting multiple calls per day from different Fisker representatives. At one point, sales workers were instructed to target customers who had cancelled their orders and pepper them with calls in an attempt to get them to reverse their decision, 3 former workers said. Fisker also began hosting pop-up events to boost sales. The events varied from meetups at parking lots to larger-scale test drive events. In at least 1 instance, the event was shut down after Fisker failed to get permission from the owner of the location. Queues of Fisker owners that needed repairs also showed up at the events, 3 former workers said. “Sometimes it was hard to sell the cars when you’d take someone on a test drive and any number of error messages would pop up”, one former worker from sales said. “As time went on and it became clear the writing was on the wall, we became even more honest with the customers on the risk”, they added. Meanwhile, some customers who’d cancelled their orders and never paid for the car ended up mistakenly receiving delivery of the vehicle anyway, 4 former workers said. Former Fisker Ocean owner Kurt Mechling told he received delivery of the vehicle before he’d signed off on the order or had his payment successfully processed. In March, Fisker temporarily lost track of millions of dollars in customer payments for multiple months. When the carmaker conducted an internal audit in December over the issue, workers began scrambling to find the missing payments and bring some of the vehicles that had been mistakenly delivered back, the workers said. Some workers were encouraged by upper management to threaten the customers by saying they’d put them on a repossession list which could impact their credit score, the former workers said. Over the past year, Fisker has dropped prices by as much as $24.000 for some versions of the vehicle. The company warned in March that it might go out of business within the year. The stock was delisted from the New York Stock Exchange in April after it fell to 9 cents per share. Fisker warned staff in an April filing that they will be laid off if the company can’t find a buyer or additional investor. The company brought in a chief restructuring officer who was given “sole authority” over some financial matters, including a potential sale, as part of an agreement with one of its investors. Layoffs have stripped the staff to the bone. Its workforce is now less than 100 people. Many of the workers who remained were involved in last-ditch efforts to offload Fisker’s remaining inventory, the people said. Meanwhile, workers have been dissatisfied with what they view as Henrik and Gupta-Fisker’s inability to take accountability for their actions. “I think it’s a story of ego. He wanted to make a car and stamp his name on it. Henrik is a great designer, but he doesn’t have the business acumen beyond that”, a person who worked with Henrik at several companies, including his first automotive startup, said. “The lessons he should have learned from the first startup were never implemented and he rushed a car to market once again”. +++
+++ Everyone wants to make the electric car cheap, but it is one thing to say what you want to achieve and another to actually achieve it. So FORD , which has been going through a somewhat complicated period with regard to its zero-emission range, in order to come up with an affordable battery car on the market, has turned to real experts in the field. Ford has hired around 300 people in the past year, who have gone on to form a new team dedicated precisely to the design of ‘low-cost’ electric cars. Of these 300 new hires, around 50 concern former Rivian employees. These are joined by more than 20 Tesla engineers and a dozen employees of the start-up Canoo. Remaining on the subject of car manufacturers focusing on electric mobility, 10 employees with a background in Lucid Motors have also joined Ford in the past year. But that’s not all. Also making up the team are some engineers who worked at Apple, probably engineers who had been put on Project Titan, the initiative that was set up to make an electric car and was recently put on hold. Finally, the team also includes 2 aerodynamic engineers with a background in Formula 1. Jim Farley, Ford’s CEO, has not explicitly confirmed the creation of the team, but in a recent public statement he said: “All of our electric vehicle teams are ruthlessly focused on cost containment and the efficiency of our battery-powered products, because that’s the only way we can beat competitors like Chinese manufacturers or Tesla”. Ford’s new ‘secret’ team comes close on the heels of the other group that was created by the company in 2023 with the acquisition of the start-up Auto Motive Power (AMP) with its 100 people, was bought precisely to help Ford in the transition with the development of a new platform for economical electric vehicles. +++
+++ It’s been 20 years since MASERATI launched the MC12, a car that used mechanical parts from the Ferrari Enzo to great effect and kick-started the modern company’s motorsport legacy after years with no competition. To mark the MC12’s 2004 arrival, the brand has announced 2 special versions of its current supercar, the MC20. They’re called the Icona and Leggenda and they feature classic liveries inspired by Maserati’s motorsport division as well as extra upgrades from the brand’s ‘Fuoriserie’ personalisation programme. The Maserati MC20 Icona’s livery is based on the MC12 Stradale’s white-and-blue colour scheme. It also uses the colours from the Maserati Birdcage Tipo 61, an iconic 1960s race car. There are special badges and an Italian flag, plus chrome-plated wheels, blue brake callipers and a carbon-fibre engine cover to mark it out from the standard MC20s. The Maserati MC20 Leggenda uses a ‘Nero Essenza and Digital Mint Matte’ colour scheme, which was previously used on the MC12 GT1 race car. It achieves an even more striking look thanks to a yellow Maserati badge, special trident wheels and black brake callipers. Both models are fitted with lightweight racing seats, an upgraded Sonus stereo system, carbon fibre details throughout and special floor mats. They also get a standard-fit electronic limited-slip differential and a suspension lifter for speed bumps and car parks. +++
+++ VOLVO is bringing its estate cars back to the United Kingdom, having taken them off sale last year to focus on SUVs. They are back due to a resurgence in demand for estate cars. Their saloon equivalents, the S60 and S90, aren’t scheduled to make a return, however. Volvo confirmed the decision to revive estate sales in a statement: “We removed the V60 and V90 from sale in the UK last August amid falling appetite for estate cars. While this remains a long-term trend, we have seen a resurgence for our estate products in recent months and have decided to reintroduce the V60 and V90 to our UK portfolio in response to this. We will begin taking orders next month. When operating in a fast-moving industry, we continually re-evaluate our product portfolio to ensure we have the right mix to serve all our customers. As part of this process, it is not uncommon for us to remove certain models or derivatives from sale and reintroduce them later. We were thrilled by the many comments from customers and media last year, with many stories and memories of how our estate cars have been a huge part of their lives. We look forward to helping create more”. It isn’t yet clear how long the 2 estates will remain on sale, as the model lines approach the end of their natural lifecycles, the V90 having been launched in 2016 and the V60 in 2018. Recently published sales figures show that the V60 and V90 were Volvo’s slowest-selling global models in 2023, clocking a combined 44.600 sales compared with the best-selling XC60’s 228.600. Meanwhile, Volvo has confirmed that production of the S60 will come to an end at its South Carolina factory later this month, to make way for the new EX90. Production of the S90 continues in Daqing, China for now, but an electric successor dubbed ES90 is due to be launched next year. Plans for any electric Volvo estate remain under wraps, with the Swedish company moving to streamline its line-up to focus on a small number of core segments as it expands its EV offering. +++