Sept 27 (Reuters) - Ford Motor's (F.N) decision to hit the brakes on a planned $3.5 billion battery plant in Michigan highlights a challenge for Tesla's growing crowd of rivals in the U.S. market: Tesla is pushing most of them into unprofitable, low-volume niches.

Global automakers are launching scores of new electric vehicles in the United States, and pouring billions of dollars into new EV and battery plants. But few of them besides Tesla's Model Y and Model 3 are selling at high enough volumes to support a full-scale assembly plant, according to a Reuters analysis of U.S. EV sales data for the first six months of 2023.

On a brand-by-brand basis, Tesla outsold its next 19 competitors by 10 to one or more during the first half, according to S&P Global Mobility data.


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Tesla sold 325,291 vehicles in the United States from January to June. General Motors’ (GM.N) Chevrolet brand, with its aging Bolt EV, was a distant second at 34,943, trailed by Ford, Hyundai (005380.KS) and Rivian(RIVN.O).

On a nameplate basis, all four of Tesla’s models placed in the top 12, with the Model Y and Model 3 ranked numbers one and two, with first-half sales of 200,000 and 160,000, respectively.

In comparison, the Bolt sold 35,000 and Ford’s Mustang Mach E chalked up 13,600 — nowhere near enough volume to fill a typical assembly plant, which needs to operate at 80% of capacity or more to be profitable.


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Electrified vehicle sales, including plug-in hybrids and fuel cell vehicles, captured 8.9% of the U.S. market during the first half of 2023, up 2.6 percentage points from a year earlier, according to data compiled by the Alliance for Automotive Innovation, an industry trade group.

But that market share was divided up among 103 different models, according to the Alliance's latest quarterly report on the EV market.

Ford's decision to pause work on a $3.5 billion electric vehicle battery plant in Michigan comes as some analysts question whether the U.S. EV market will grow fast enough to support all the new battery and assembly operations launched or under construction.

In July, Ford forecast a full-year loss of $4.5 billion on its EV unit - 50% higher than projected earlier this year - and said it was slowing its EV production ramp up.

The U.S. automaker, like several rivals, has committed billions to build additonal EV and battery plants in the U.S.

In a media presentation on Tuesday, Cox Automotive noted that Tesla has surrendered some share of U.S. EV sales this year as more entrants hit the market, but still commands nearly two-thirds of all EV sales. No other brand has more than 10%.

Cox estimated that EV sales will rise to 8% of total U.S. vehicle sales in the third quarter from about 6.5% a year ago.

Some of that growth likely has been driven by falling prices, a trend driven by Tesla which is using its superior profit margins to cut prices and expand sales. Cox said average EV retail prices fell to $53,376 in July 2023, from a high of nearly $70,000 a year ago.

LOS ANGELES — Tesla's net income slumped in the third quarter versus a year earlier, as price reductions helped drive strong sales growth but also ate into the automaker’s profit margins.

The Austin, Texas, maker of electric vehicles, solar panels and batteries on Wednesday reported net income of $1.85 billion for the July-September quarter, a 44% decline from a year earlier. Earnings per share fell to 53 cents from 95 cents.

Excluding stock-based compensation, Tesla’s adjusted net income fell to $2.32 billion, or 66 cents per share. On that basis, Tesla’s earnings fell short of analysts’ consensus estimate of 73 cents per share, according to FactSet.

Total revenue rose 9% to $23.35 billion. Analysts had forecast $24.19 billion.

Earlier this month, the company reported that it sold 435,059 vehicles during the July-September period, an increase of 27% from the same stretch last year. Even so, Tesla’s deliveries came in below the 461,000 vehicles analysts had predicted the company would sell during the quarter, according to FactSet Research.

The third-quarter sales also marked a step back from Tesla’s 466,140 vehicle deliveries during the April-to-June period, something Tesla blamed on planned downtime to upgrade its factories.

Tesla has been slashing prices most of this year to keep attracting buyers who now have a wider selection of electric vehicles as more automakers shift away from gasoline-powered cars and trucks. The discounts range from $4,400 on Tesla’s top-selling vehicles to as much as $20,000 on its most expensive models.

The latest round of cost cutting trimmed Tesla’s operating margin, which represents how efficiently sales are turned into pretax profits, down to 7.6% in the third quarter. That’s down from 17.2% a year earlier. The measure also declined sharply in the first two quarters of this year.

In addition to lowered electric vehicle prices, increased expenses related to Tesla's Cybertruck and the development of an AI-trained “humanoid robot" also hurt the company's bottom line.

Tesla announced that the company would begin deliveries of the Cybertruck to some select customers on Nov. 30. Full production will begin in 2024.

As usual, Tesla’s third-quarter sales consisted primarily of its Model 3 and Model Y vehicles, which have been made even more attractive by lowered prices. Despite large price cuts, sales of the aging models S and X fell 14% year over year to 15,985.

Looking ahead, the company reiterated its plans to produce around 1.8 million vehicles this year. And said its long-awaited Cybertruck is on track to begin deliveries this year.

Tesla’s shares closed 4.8% lower Thursday. They were up 2% in after-hours trading following the release of the earnings report.

During a gloomy third-quarter earnings call, Elon Musk confirmed that Tesla is slowing down Gigafactory Mexico plans "to get a sense of what the global economy is like." The announcement came as the next-generation EV platform is making progress.

Apart from the Cybertruck deliveries, Tesla fans are the most excited about the upcoming mass-market electric vehicle, which Tesla calls next-generation EV or next-generation platform. The plans for the most affordable Tesla EV were officially confirmed in March during Investor Day, and they involved groundbreaking manufacturing techniques that required a whole new factory layout. That's where Tesla's next-generation gigafactory entered the stage, with the prototype being built in Nuevo Leon, Mexico.

Elon Musk always referred to Tesla Gigafactories as the "machines that build the machines," and you can understand why when you realize how different they are from the industry's golden standard. The best representative of the Gigafactory concept is Giga Shanghai. This car manufacturing facility is optimized for efficiency, with almost all components produced on-site or very close and no warehouses to begin with. All the parts and components used are off-loaded directly on the production lines at precise moments and locations, requiring sophisticated choreography.

Giga Mexico was supposed to become the first gigafactory to pioneer a new manufacturing process called "unboxed vehicle." This requires a new factory layout, with the benefit of much higher efficiency and productivity while minimizing footprint. A lot of ink has been spilled this spring about Giga Mexico, but soon, it would become obvious that progress was slower than expected.

If you recall, Tesla brought Tom Zhu from China to supervise the construction work and ensure that Giga Mexico would advance from groundbreaking to building cars even faster than Giga Shanghai. Everybody was confident that the Nuevo Leon gigafactory would become visible on satellite maps before this year's end and start making cars sometime next year. And yet, nothing happened besides some permits and the promise of imminent groundbreaking.

The first hint that something was awry with Giga Mexico arrived with Walter Isaacson's book about Elon Musk. According to the famous biographer, Tesla changed plans and will not start the next-gen EV production at Giga Mexico. Instead, Tesla will build a pilot production line at Giga Texas and, when everything seems right, will transplant it to Giga Mexico and, possibly, to other gigafactories.

This information has now become official, as Elon Musk expressed his concerns about the economic environment. Tesla is working on infrastructure and factory design in parallel with the engineering and development of the next-gen platform, but Giga Mexico construction is now on hold. According to Musk, Tesla is "laying the groundwork to begin construction," but wants to see where the economy is heading before going "full tilt on the Mexico factory." But that doesn't mean the factory will be scrapped.

"We're definitely making the factory in Mexico," Musk replied to a question from Wells Fargo's Colin Langan. "We feel very good about that. We put a lot of effort into looking at different locations, and we feel very good about that location, and we are going to build a factory there, and it's going to be great. The question is really just one of timing."

Musk said that Tesla will start the initial construction phases next year, about a year later than initially announced. Tesla's CEO is terrified by the high interest rates and what this might bring if the global economy enters a recession. He recalled the 2009 crisis when GM and Chrysler went bankrupt, while "Tesla was just hanging on by a thread during that entire time."

Exactly three years ago tomorrow, Tesla Inc. finally started trading on the S&P 500 Index. Since then, the company’s stockholders have been on a wild ride that’s left them wondering if they should’ve just put their money in the broad equities benchmark.

Tesla shares closed around $232 on Dec. 18, 2020, the session before the company joined the S&P 500. Today they’re about $258, a roughly 11% increase. Meanwhile, the S&P 500 has climbed roughly 28%, led by mega-cap technology stocks such as Microsoft Corp., Apple Inc. and Nvidia Corp. Tesla, which has the seventh-largest weighting in the index, is among the bottom half of S&P performers over that time.

“Tesla’s valuation was way overdone when they went into the S&P, so it is no wonder the shares are underperforming and will likely do so for the next couple years,” Craig Irwin, an analyst at Roth Capital Partners, said in an interview. “Trading the volatility is the right strategy to make money in the stock currently.”

Indeed, Tesla’s lackluster three-year return masks a highly volatile run. At one point, the stock was up nearly 80% from its price right before joining the S&P, while at another it was less than half that value.

Rally covers wounds

Looking ahead, conditions could get even more challenging for Tesla as demand for electric vehicles cools. Even the company’s dominant position in the sector, which makes it perhaps the only viable bet for investors in the industry, may not be enough to help its stock price in the coming years.

Still, the euphoric rally that preceded Tesla’s entry into the S&P 500 makes the stock’s weak showing palatable to some investors. The shares rose a staggering 731% in 2020 through Dec. 18 as expectations that the company would soon gain blue-chip status lured both institutional and retail investors.

Getting a spot in the S&P meant many fund managers who were wary of the volatility, the company’s flamboyant and unpredictable chief executive officer, Elon Musk, and the nascent EV industry had to take notice. And for funds tracking the benchmark, portfolio managers were required to buy Tesla shares to reflect the index’s new makeup.

“Passive index investors jumping in after the run-up in 2020 have not had a great return considering the volatility,” said Jerry Braakman, chief investment officer at First American Trust, which held about 16,000 Tesla shares as of Sept. 30. But “change the starting point just a little and it is obvious how much value can be created by holding Tesla.”

The question from here is how much room there is left in a market valuation that already towers above other carmakers and resembles the biggest tech companies.

Shares in Tesla plunged as much as 11% after the market opened Thursday, wiping $73 billion off the company’s market value hours after it warned of slowing growth in electric car sales and an existential threat from Chinese rivals.

In an earnings presentation Wednesday, the world’s most valuable automaker said its sales growth this year “may be notably lower” than last as it continued developing the “next-generation” vehicle, likely a lower-priced model.

While it reported a sizeable 38% increase in deliveries last year compared with 2022, Tesla had previously targeted a 50% annual growth rate averaged over several years.

Tesla’s (TSLA) financial results for the last quarter also disappointed, with adjusted earnings per share down 40% from a year earlier, and revenue, which rose 3% to top $25 billion, coming in below market forecasts.

Thousands of drivers will get to try Tesla's "Full Self-Driving" technology (which, despite its name, does not make a car fully autonomous) for free for one month. The company is rolling out the feature to compatible cars via an over-the-air software update, according to CEO Elon Musk.

Musk made the announcement on X, formerly known as Twitter. Most of the cars that Tesla has recently built are compatible with Full Self-Driving technology, though the feature isn't enabled if it's not paid for. However, many older models can't receive Full Self-Driving.

Like any free trial, whether it's from Amazon, your local brewery, or Netflix, the aim is to get consumers to spend money. Someone might try Full Self-Driving for a month, like it, and order it. As of writing, it's one of Tesla's most expensive options: It adds $12,000 to the cost of a new Model 3, though owners can also subscribe to it via the infotainment system's touchscreen for anywhere between $99 and $199 per month.

As a bonus, beaming Full Self-Driving to motorists across American roads promises to give Tesla engineers a massive amount of data to analyze as they make gradual improvements to the technology. Full Self-Driving has gone through numerous evolutions since its launch.

In what appears to be a leaked internal email, Musk instructed the brand's dealers to give buyers an overview of how Full Self-Driving works by going on "a short test ride" before they take delivery of a new car. "Almost no one actually realizes how well (supervised) FSD actually works," he wrote. He added that this is "a hard requirement." The email noted that the test ride is mandatory across North America, which includes Mexico and Canada, but Musk's original post on X specified that only drivers in the United States will get the one-month trial. The many established owners who suddenly get the feature presumably won't get a test-ride demo.