Car maker lowers prices significantly
Musk puts Tesla’s growth ahead of profit
4/7/2023 10:53 p.m
By some distance, Tesla is the world’s leading manufacturer of electric cars. But sales aren’t growing as fast as planned. The competition is catching up. In order to boost sales, Tesla boss Musk is willing to sacrifice profitability.
The US electric vehicle manufacturer Tesla is cutting prices for all vehicles for the second time this year. So it falls for the more expensive models S and X by 5000 US dollars each, as the company announced. There’s also a new base version of the Model Y, which can be had for just under $50,000 upwards.
Company boss Elon Musk recently declared his willingness to forego profitability in favor of increasing sales figures. Tesla had already reduced the prices for its entire product range in January, in some cases by almost 20 percent. However, the effect of the action was not as strong as hoped. In the first quarter, deliveries increased by only four percent compared to the previous quarter to 422,875 vehicles. Almost 18,000 vehicles produced did not initially find a buyer. A further price reduction initiated in March only for the S and X models was hardly successful. Of these, Tesla only sold 10,695 units in the first quarter, which was the lowest level since the third quarter of 2021.
Tesla is still by some distance the world’s leading manufacturer of pure electric cars. But some of the competitors are growing much faster. In March, the Chinese electric car manufacturer BYD achieved a significantly stronger increase in sales than Tesla: Sales of electrified cars climbed to 206,089 vehicles, an increase of 98 percent. According to the announcement, 102,670 of these are purely electric. For the first quarter, BYD reported an increase in all-electric cars of around 85 percent to 264,647 units.