With the recent delivery of Tesla Motors Inc. (NASDAQ:TSLA) ’s brand new “Model 3”, we thought it would be a good opportunity to consider their impact on the car market and delve into the electronic motoring giant’s journey so far, to see how far they’ve come and how they’ve fared against the competition. It turns out… Pretty well!
Indeed, UBS analysts said in a recent report on the topic of Nickel mining sees Tesla demand enough to possibly drive metal pricing higher:
Are electric vehicles likely to offer a step change in demand & if so when?
We think that EV’s could offer a renaissance for the nickel market. Nickel is used in the cathode 2 of the 3 dominant battery chemistries for electric vehicles, including the Nickel-Manganese-Cobalt (i.e. Chevy Bolt) or the Nickel-Cobalt-Aluminium (Tesla).
Obviously that would be good sign for Tesla.
However, Bank of America analysts disagree stating:
Model S and X deliveries ... may have some (but likely limited, in our view) room left to grow, the significant burden is on the Model 3 for future growth. In fact, TSLA’s 2018 delivery target of 500k vehicles (not updated since 1Q:16) essentially implies that the company will grow its 2017 total volume level 5x, which we view as highly unlikely.
Barclays also agrees with BAML stating:
We see the issues on the pack assembly line as less excusable than those at Fremont - after all, Tesla is supposed to be more experienced in module/pack assembly, so it is surprising to see it outsourcing this critical automation assignment. That said,
there's little assurance that even if the pack assembly issue is resolved, other bottlenecks won't emerge.
Regardless, Tesla has made a lot of progress from its start a few years ago to even talk of 500,000 vehicles and is taking a decent amount of market share even now - want to come along for the journey?
See the infographic from Select Leasing below
