Notes From All Over, Part 3 -- December 2, 2019

Updates

Later, 8:09 p.m. CT: from seekingalpha --

• Global electric car sales were down 28% YoY in October, reaching 2.2% market share. The fall was due to a large fall in sales in China (due to cut in state subsidies)
• EV market news - Germany to hike electric car subsidies by 50% starting 2020 until 2025. NASA's unveils its first electric plane, the X-57 Maxwell.
• EV company news - Production of Volkswagen ID.3 begins in Germany. Ford unveils Mustang Mach-E starting at roughly $44,000, due late 2020. Tesla launches its e-pickup cybertruck.
• China's electric vehicle market to see sales rebound next year as automakers roll out more new products to lure buyers, but more supportive government policies are needed, auto executives said.
• bottom line: EVs don't sell without huge government subsidies; still way too expensive; and too few charging stations; and, when you find a charging station, 30 minutes to charge, and hard to say how long one will be waiting in the queue to charge one's car

Later, 8:04 p.m. CT: from zerohedge -- 

Meanwhile, here are TSLA’s current cars/products not in production:

• Roadster (unveil was 2yrs ago)
• Semi (unveil was 2yrs ago)
• Model Y (TSLA refuses to mention how many pre-orders they’ve received here)
• Cybertruck ($100 fully-refundable deposits on a car that will likely cost $60K, or  0.167%, is the equivalent of someone putting $1.67 toward an $1,000 iPhone and Apple calling it an order)
• ATV
• FSD (to be FSD, TSLA would have had to achieve level 5 autonomy… they’re at level 2)

So… TSLA has more vaporware products (i.e., stuff that doesn’t exist) than real products for sale; and, it’s real products are seeing large negative y/y growth currently.

But there's more:

Oh… and what about E. Musk’s promise that:

• TSLA would have flying cars (he made this claim 322 days ago),
• TSLA would create break pads that never need to be replaced (he made this claim 336 days ago),
• TSLA would have a base on Mars in 2028 (he made this claim 432 days ago),
• TSLA would have a one hour body shop (this claim happened 437 days ago),
• he would fix the water in all Flint houses above FDA levels (he made this claim 504 days ago),
• there would be no more mass layoffs (533 days, and multiple layoffs, ago), etc.?

And the SEC looks the other way. Because they know no one takes Musk Melon seriously.

Original Post

EVs. After our cross-Texas trip over Thanksgiving I was again struggling to see how EVs were going to become "a thing." It's just not gonna happen. At least not in the US.

• forty percent of the US population live in apartment complexes; charging units are expensive
• homeowners need to install EV chargers; new homes will have them installed
• the grid will be hard pressed to handle any surge in new EVs
• convenience
• ICEs: average time of stop to refill -- five minutes
• to charge: 30 minutes, which also means that when one pulls in to charge, one will wait behind a queue of cars charging and waiting to charge
• EVs have maps to show where charging station is, but convenience of service stations is not to be underestimated
• at the end of the day, Americans don't like to be tethered, and an EV is a tethered vehicle, no matter what one says
• other links:
• oilprice
• automotive news, September 11, 2019: as more EVs hit the market, selling them could be a challenge;
• marketrealist, October 14, 2019: EV makers in trouble as China's market hits the brakes?
• policyoptions, May 20, 2019: the challenge for EVs to disrupt trucks and buses; commercial vehicles use weighty, wildly expensive batteries and need powerful charging stations; a broad shift to electric will take some policy to help 

EV sales are tracked here. New sale data should be out later this week. Wow, that's strange. This site must be having problems. The side doesn't even have October data yet. As recently as a few months ago, sales data lagged only a few days after the end of the month. Oh, there it is, in the small print from the website: "With that being said, we are looking at moving to quarterly reporting as a whole."

It appears that automobile manufacturers are "afraid" to post monthly sales figures. Yes, it's gotten that bad. The "cheap" price of gasoline is not helping. Nor is the fact that some manufacturers are now facing phase out of their federal incentives. At one time a lot of folks thought that Congress might extend these incentives, but with the US House on vacation for the past two years and no end in sight for that vacation, nothing is going to get done. Incentives for EVs is way, way down on the list of things of which the public is interested. Has anyone heard any of the current crop of folks running for president mention EVs?

The fact that the "EV sales" site can't even get reliable data for months at a time tells me all I need to know about EVs in the US. If EVs were flying out of sales rooms, we would be getting the data.

• GM: down a penny today at $35.99, mid-range for the year;
• F: up six cents today, at $9.12, mid-range for the year; maybe a bit on the high side for recent investors;
• TSLA: despite the Dow being down 220 points, TSLA is having a great day, up 1.22%; up over $4.00; trading at $334.

Disclaimer: this is not an investment site.  Do not make any investment, financial, job, career, travel, or relationship decisions based on what you read here or think you may have read here. 

By the way, the market is down today because "factories extend contraction as index misses forecasts." That headline will be forgotten by the end of the week.