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by rsynnott 2874 days ago
> I was going to say GM's Bolt/Volt since it was one of those 'best cars of the year'.

Barely available outside the US. There's the Opel Ampera, which is mostly a GM Volt, but it's weirdly expensive so no-one buys it. The Leaf is the world's best-selling electric car, for now (especially if you include its very close relatives like the Renault Zoe; I don't think that's precisely the same platform, but it's close).

3 comments

GM doesn't get California credits for selling Bolts outside of California and the other states that follow the California standard.

Isn't the Leaf about to stop being the world's best-selling electric car?

It's possibly been replaced by the BAIC EC, at least for the first part of this year. That's unlikely to last, though; the Chinese market is too fragmented for that. The BAIC EC is also of very limited relevance worldwide.
>but it's weirdly expensive so no-one buys it.

But isnt that the same problem with the Tesla?

Is the Model 3 not already massivly outselling Leaf month by month? Can you show some date on that?
Hard to come by proper figures for the 2018 Leaf currently, but Nissan has said they're selling one every 10 minutes in Europe. That'd be a little over 4000 a month. They're presumably also selling some in Japan and the US (looks like 1-2000 in the US), so all in all they pretty much have to be outselling the Model 3.
It's also worth noting for Nissan those are people buying the car at a dealership (not preordered) and driving away with it presumably that day. A lot of Tesla's numbers are filling all the preorders of people who have been waiting months to a year. What will happen when they finally complete all those orders of people waiting? That isn't to say sales will stop but certainly there has to be some consideration there.
Tesla is also able to sustain the S/X without lots of pre-orders. Tesla has also said that they can see a sustained growth in orders in addition to the backlog. At some point they will reach some steady state number.
Model 3 US sales were 14,250 last month (July). That's what I was getting at when I asked you about the Leaf getting dethroned.

https://insideevs.com/monthly-plug-in-sales-scorecard/