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You can always use leading indicators (unemployment, inflation) to estimate future car sales, then extrapolate the EV market share based on current growth numbers. It's not perfect but it's not like large institutions somehow have a crystal ball. They are likely doing the same, just with better models.



Both unemployment and inflation numbers are known to be fake though. They’re specifically designed to make the government look good. One would be a fool to rely on them exclusively.


Then I guess nothing is truly measureable and we should never attempt to make predictions.


If unemployment and inflation rates are politically gamed nothing is truly measurement?

Many things can be measured. And unemployment is measuring something but not what it's titled suggests. It's measuring some group of people who qualify as looking for work within a specific timeframe. Someone looking for work for a few years is deemed to employed by this calculation some might question it.

Changing the definition of a recession is political.

That doesn't mean measurements are incorrect and prediction is impossible.


My comment was sarcasm. OP is being a defeatist to anyone trying to explain that, yes, actually, you can measure these things. You don't need the media to spoonfeed you fake information.


By the time a number is getting printed in the newspaper, Goodhart's Law has already taken effect. Anyone who has a good metric is keeping it quiet, the only way to know anything is to get deeper into the details than the average voter.


They are not totally fake, but engineered to show only the good parts. Like when fuel prices drop, and this appears in the data as huge inflation reduction, when in fact food and shelter prices are growing faster than anyone wants to admit.


There are many numbers and government numbers are not fake. They're cherry picked, there's a difference.


The only leading indicators you need in the car market are days of inventory and recent price actions.

Tesla's have deep discounts, suggesting a decline in demand. The end. Inventory is harder because they lack dealerships, but it doesn't seem difficult to find a Model3/ModelY right now at all.

-------

For other EVs like Ford Mustang MachE, days of inventory are rising and prices are declining as well as incentives.

It's not just Tesla, it's a wide group of EVs that were overproduced.

https://caredge.com/guides/fastest-and-slowest-selling-cars-...

Go browse some stats yourself.


You’re considering those metrics as though they’re independent from APR on loans, which could easily double from where they are now in case we enter a recession and rate hikes prove ineffective. Try to sell an expensive car on a loan with an eye watering APR of, say 10-12%. This did actually happen in the past, and could very well happen again.


> recession

You've got it backwards. Recessions cause rate-drops.

> Try to sell an expensive car on a loan with eye watering APR of, say 10-12%. This did actually happen in the past, and could very well happen again.

Rate-hikes cause us to lose demand. Yes. But we can see that Toyota demand remains strong with less than 30-days-of-inventory on the average.

So the rate-hikes from the current Fed plan are causing expensive cars (like EVs) to lose demand, while cheaper, more-reliable ICE / Hybrid cars from Toyota are selling like hotcakes.

Yes, I'm watching interest rates and am trying to understand how our economy shifts because of them. But at this base level, EVs are doing worse (and the stats prove it), while cheaper cars (namely ICE/Hybrids) are doing far better right now than anyone expected.


Don’t look at recent recessions which happened under almost zero rate regime. Look at the Carter era recession. Consider as well the cost of “printing money” if the rate reaches double digits, and the cost of refinancing the existing debt load.


You've got my wording reversed.

I said: recessions cause rate-drops. Which has always been true. Rate-drops don't always cure recessions, but its one of the first moves a central bank will make to try to fix a recession.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FEDFUNDS

That's 2020, 2007, 2000, 1990, 1981, 1979 where a recession immediately caused a rate-drop.

We have to go all the way back to 1974 before we had inflation so high that the central bank kept rates high even during a recession. (Dropping rates causes inflation, so its a balancing act). Even then, interest rates dropped to bring us out of the recession of 1974.

After that, we have 1969, 1959, and 1957 recessions, all three of which caused interest rates to drop.

So 9/10 times, a recession caused an immediate drop in interest rates. And the last 1 time (1974), the recession _eventually_ caused the bankers to drop rates.

> Consider as well the cost of “printing money” if the rate reaches double digits, and the cost of refinancing the existing debt load.

You've got it backwards. Increases rates destroy money. Lower-rates print money.

That's why the central bank lowers rates during recessions, its an indirect way to print money (or perhaps more accurately, expand M2).

Raising rates, like what we're doing today, destroys money (or more accurately, contracts M2). We're destroying money today with 5%+ interest rates because we've seemingly made too much in the 2020 recession / COVID19.


Discounts seem to be $2K for a $47K Model Y long range picked from inventory—-is that actually deep or can I find better deals?


https://www.kbb.com/tesla/model-y/2022/

> Price: The 2022 Tesla Model Y starts at $64,990. A Model Y Performance model starts at $67,990. Fully loaded, a Performance model can exceed $80,000.

Is there any other car, EV or otherwise, that is seeing a 33%+ decline in price over the last two years?

Other EVs are seeing deep shadow-discounts. I'm seeing 0% or 1.9% APY financing, which comes out to a few $x,000 savings over the term of the loans. Its an interesting trick to reduce prices without changing the MSRP, but I'm perfectly aware of these games.

Still, no one is doing the depth of discounts like Tesla is doing right now. Granted, all EV makers (Ford F150 Lightning, Subaru Solterra, etc. etc.) have discounts of some kind, or at least financing-1.9% or other "shadow discounts". But nothing on the level of wtf 30%+ declines like Tesla.


The comparison is a little weird because Tesla changes their pricing a lot.

The Model 3 price is down ~25% year over year:

https://www.kbb.com/tesla/model-3/2023/ (Long Range MSRP $45,990)

https://www.kbb.com/tesla/model-3/2022/ (Long Range MSRP $57,190)

But that's still higher than its release price in 2017:

https://www.kbb.com/tesla/model-3/2017/ (Long Range MSRP $45,200)

And the "target price" for this thing was supposed to be $30,000.

It's hard to do the same comparison for the Model Y because it was originally released in the middle of the COVID supply chain problems, but notice that the year you're using was the high water mark. The Model Y Performance was $69,190 in 2022 but $61,190 in 2021:

https://www.kbb.com/tesla/model-y/2021/

2022 - 2023 was -32% but 2021 - 2023 was only -16.5%, which itself presumably had some of the supply chain issues priced into it.


There is also an explanation for why Tesla's pricing is like this: They don't use dealerships. For most carmakers, if they temporarily can't supply enough cars, they don't change the MSRP but the dealers mark them up. Since Tesla doesn't have dealers, to change the price they change the MSRP.


According to Tesla.com the model Y starts at $42,990 and goes up to $52,490.

https://www.tesla.com/modely/design#overview


Tesla sell more EVs in USA than everyone else combined, partially because they can cut prices. Is any other company even making a profit selling EVs in USA?




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