The American manufacturer’s decision to reduce its prices up to – 20 % sows disorder in an industry whose economic model is based on high margins in electricity.
By Jean-Michel Normand
This is not the red alert, but everyone stands on the alert. The sharp drop in the price of certain Tesla models, with a discount up to 20 %, was only followed by a limited number of manufacturers, but now a breach has been opened which could change the situation of the market electric car.
So far, only Ford, the American-Saudi firm Lucid as well as the new Vietnamese brand Vinfast have followed suit in Tesla in the United States. Xpeng, which crosses a difficult pass, is almost the only one to have done the same on the Chinese market. In Europe, everyone camps on their positions. Oliver Blume, the new boss of the Volkswagen group, swept the hypothesis of a revision of his prices. “True”>
“We have a clear price strategy and we bet on reliability. We have confidence in the strength of our products and our brands,” he assured, on January 28, at the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung. The other brands that market electric models – including Koreans Hyundai and Kia, or the very enterprising Chinese MG – postpone such a possibility. “For the moment,” they add carefully.
the value rather than the volume
Tesla has programmed the revision of its prices knowing how to count on the restart of its Shanghai factory, now capable of producing 20,000 vehicles in weekly rhythm, and on the rise in cadence of that of Berlin, with a supply sufficient in semiconductors. For its part, Ford plans to bring the production of the Mustang Mach-E 77,000 units in 2022 to 130,000 in 2023, but the United States will be the first served.
Under these conditions, the blue oval brand does not plan to consent to the slightest discount in Europe. “Why lower the price of a model that we have so many difficulties in delivering to our customers?”, Explains the manufacturer in substance, who recalls that this car, whose prices have soared in recent months, imposes in France A waiting period for more than six months.
“I think that launching a price war on electric cars now while we are just starting to produce it is not the best thing that could happen to the automotive industry,” Luca de Luca said on Tuesday 31 Meo, boss of Renault, during his first speaking as a new president of the Association of European Automobiles.
A sudden depreciation of the prices would be destabilizing in several titles. It would jeopardize the new economic model of manufacturers which, in a compensation movement, tend to favor the value of each vehicle rather than the production volume. The slowdown in the factories of the factories has lengthened delivery times, but above all encouraged them to favor the sale of the most expensive models and versions, including electricity.
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