The Tesla Model S Plaid will debut at an event Thursday night, Volkswagen thinks the global chip shortage might soon ease, and Jim Farley. All that and more in The Morning Shift for June 10, 2021.
I went to a Volvo event in Manhattan Tuesday night, and at some point the conversation drifted to the theory that Tesla buyers are cannibalizing Tesla sales, i.e. the Model Y is selling well because early adopters of the Model 3 are selling their cars and trading up, much like one might do when the new iPhone drops.
I have heard this theory before, but instead of Model 3 owners buying Model Ys it is potential Model S owners buying Model 3s. I’m not sure how much there is to it — the point of Tesla is to sell as many cars as possible, no matter who is buying — but I do know that competition for Tesla in the electric vehicle space is rising fast.
There is the Ford Mustang Mach-E, the Volkswagen ID.4, the Audi E-Tron, among others, and coming are cars like the Volvo C40 Recharge and the Cadillac Lyriq. In the higher reaches of the luxury space, there is the Mercedes EQS and the Porsche Taycan, to which Tesla will reply at an event tonight with the Model S Plaid, which starts at $129,990.
The Model S Plaid is basically the second-generation of the Model S, though Tesla would never call it that, given that it doesn’t believe in the concept of model years. A longer-range version called the Model S Plaid+ has been canceled, meanwhile, as Tesla starts to navigate a new EV landscape.
Analysts say Tesla needs the Model S Plaid to be another hit, per Reuters:
The Tesla shorts still may not be wrong about Tesla in the long-term, though in the near-term probably not enough has been said about how little resistance Tesla has faced from the legacy automakers. That is all changing, and it’ll be fascinating to see how it goes.
Norway is one of the most EV-saturated car markets in the world, but Norway also harvests lots of oil, a contradiction at the heart of a debate over its climate policies. That debate, Bloomberg reports, has also turned pretty ugly.
It’s sort of comforting to know that even in progressive countries everyone sometimes gets a little too heated.
Peugeot is way late to the Dieselgate party, but it apparently has finally shown up, according to The Wall Street Journal.
Ford CEO Jim Farley has really been taking a victory lap as of late, and some of it is deserved. Ford has been on a bit of a hot streak with the F-150 Lightning, Mustang Mach-E, Bronco, and Maverick. That said, most (all?) of those decisions were made before he took over last October. Farley is the first to point this out as he sat down for interviews lately in what seems like an effort to boost Ford’s stock price.
His latest interview is with The New York Times, though Farley doesn’t reveal much beyond that he thinks the Maverick will do well, and that there might be other Mavericks in the future.
Make an electric regular-cab Maverick, Ford, the people need it.
VW will be happy when the chip shortage is over, though it also says that chip shortage may never really end, and that the real gift may be the friends we made along the way.
From Reuters:
The Volvo event was ostensibly to show off the new all-electric C40 Recharge, and Volvo had the only C40 Recharge in the States on show. It looked as slick as it needs to be to compete with the likes of Ford, Tesla, Volkswagen, and the rest. Of course, Volvo insists there isn’t anything quite like the C40 Recharge currently in the American market. I was just happy to go to a car event and for it to feel sort of normal.
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