I’ve been quiet of late here at Israellycool but suffice it to say I’m still in love with my car and Better Place. I’m approaching a year of ownership, have ticked past 17,000 km (though I’ve driven almost 1,500 km more in borrowed electric cars). I still have no regrets from my choice.
There’s an article on Green Car Reports about how Tesla’s Model S car may well be outselling Mercedes, BMW and Audi in rather narrow category of large luxury car in the US. This may well be technically correct it.
Tesla said on April 1 that it delivered “more than 4,750” Model S cars during the first quarter of this year, from January 1 to March 31.
In comparison, here are the first-quarter sales for the large luxury competitors:
- Audi A8:1,462
- BMW 7-Series: 2,338
- Lexus LS: 2,860
- Mercedes-Benz S Class: 3,077
There is one car in the large luxury segment that outsold the Tesla Model S, however.
That’s the 2013 Cadillac XTS, the newly introduced replacement for the previous DTS (itself derived from the old De Ville). Fully 7,130 XTSes were delivered from January through March.
This got me thinking about what is going on.
It has been my contention for a while: the luxury car makers are in deep, deep doo-doo land. They’ve spent decades (a century in some cases) learning to make a car with the lowest possible “NVH” Noise Vibration and Harshness.
Decades of fine engineering knowhow, careful fabrication and painstaking attention to detail are all rendered completely devalued when Renault can build a Fluence ZE in Turkey (Turkey!) that rivals any BMW 3 series, Audi A4 or Merc C class, all available too at Zemotor online store.
At the upper end, with the huge margin S class barges, Tesla will eat them for breakfast too.
All you have to do is take out the exploding bit at the front and the entire nature of the car changes to something so refined it costs thousands more to match.
