The Australian news today:- in the marketplace, the warning...

The Australian news today:- in the marketplace, the warning signs are loud and clear. In the first six months of 2024, non-Tesla brands sold 294,921 electric vehicles in the US — a 33 per cent jump on the 221,485 EVs they sold during the same period in 2023. Tesla’s US sales decreased 9.6 per cent in the same period.

Tesla’s EV market share was just under 50 per cent in the June quarter, so its decline is dragging down numbers for the total US market.

The rest of the EV industry is growing at a fair clip, albeit helped by price-cutting. US motor giants, General Motors and Ford, were slow starters but are starting to make inroads on the market.

According to the motor analytics group Cox Automotive, General Motors Cadillac sold 13,094 Lyriq’s in the first half of this year, a 465 per cent increase over the same period last year. Ford, the distant number two EV brand to Tesla, is up 72 per cent. Kia and BMW are also increasing, while Porsche is attacking Tesla’s position at the very top end.

With this sort of competition, no company can afford to have its CEO impacting market share by playing politics and concentrating on non-car matters.

A core part of the Trump strategy to win the presidency is to foster low-cost oil, gas and coal energy sources to decrease inflation and interest rates. There will be no mandate for carmakers to produce an increasing percentage of electric cars.

The Harris stance will be the reverse of Trump, and the opinion polls have the two candidates running neck and neck.

Tesla is caught in the middle. On the one hand, if Trump wins, Tesla faces much more competition from petrol driven cars, but if Harris wins the traditional US motor makers will be forced to compete even more vigorously for the electric market.

This presents Musk with a very difficult CEO task. To add the very costly space exploration and the X social media battles makes no sense. And then comes the right wing views which find their way into X.

In contrast, Alphabet — which reported at the same time as Tesla — is also pressing into new markets, but they are all related to its base technology and the development of artificial intelligence.