Tesla China-Made Deliveries Plunge In April, Musk Cancels Model S Plaid+

Tesla shares started the week off down slightly after the company announced it was going to be cancelling its Model S Plaid+ vehicle and delivery data out of China corroborated our past reports on a slowdown in April. 

CEO Elon Musk said that the company was going to be calling off the longer-range Plaid+ because the company’s current Plaid model was “just so good”. 

Delivery data out of China over the weekend likely won’t help the automaker’s start to the week. The company “delivered 25,845 China-made vehicles in April, including 14,174 units shipped to overseas buyers,” according to China’s Passenger Car Association. 

Retail passenger vehicle sales were up 12.4% y/y to 1.64m units in April, Bloomberg noted Monday morning, but on a month-to-month basis, sales dropped 8.6%.

This happened against the ongoing backdrop of the semiconductor chip shortage and NEV sales in China booming. NEV passenger vehicle retail sales were up an astounding 192.8% y/y to 163,000 units, the report said. 

We noted just days ago that Tesla’s Global EV market share had slipped to just 11% in April, from 29% in March. It marked Tesla’s lowest monthly global market share since January 2019. The “greater than usual drop” came between the last month in Q1 and the end of the first month of Q2. 

The company’s market share in the world’s largest auto market – China – collapsed to 8% in April from 19% in March. That drop should be no surprise given the collapse in sales numbers we reported for Tesla in China last month. “GM remained the share leader in China in April, with a 20% share, driven by continued volume traction of the low cost Wuling HongGuang Mini,” Levy’s note, summarized by Bloomberg, pointed out.

 

Recall, in mid-May we noted that sales data coming out of China for April looked like it had dropped sharply. At that time, data from April showed that just 11,949 Tesla vehicles were registered in the country, down sharply from the 34,714 registrations in March, according to Bloomberg.

In addition to that data from China Automotive Information Net, additional data from China’s Passenger Car Association out last week showed that the company sold 25,845 Chinese-made vehicles in April, down from 35,478 in March. Separately, 14,174 EVs were exported, due to demand from Europe, the report notes.

In April, the company’s growth “slowed precipitously” after weeks of controversy that started with a protest at the Shanghai Auto Show calling into question the quality of Tesla’s brakes. What followed was weeks of negative press in China, where state media decried the company as “arrogant” and urged it to focus on the quality of its vehicles.