Hollis Johnson
The Chevy Bolt.
- Chevy sold over 3,000 Bolts in December.
- Tesla will likely sell fewer Model 3's than that for the entire fourth quarter.
- If the sales trend continues, Chevy could be selling 5,000 Bolts per month by mid-to-late 2018.
Let's be honest: while it was impressive that General Motors beat Tesla to market with an affordable, long-electric vehicle, launching the Chevy Bolt in late 2015, few expected Tesla be threatened by GM.
That's because Tesla had racked up an unprecedented 400,000-plus pre-orders for the Model 3 and it was assumed that once the car launched in mid-2017, it would rapidly outpace the Bolt in deliveries.
The outpacing hasn't happened yet. Far from it: Tesla will probably only deliver a few thousand Model 3's for all of 2017 (we'll find out this week, most likely, when the company releases its fourth-quarter and full-year numbers).
Meanwhile, the Bolt has exceeded expectations, with almost 24,000 sales in total in 2017 and a fairly impressive 3,000-plus in December. If the trend continues, Chevy could see 5,000 monthly Bolt sales well before Tesla gets anywhere near that mark.
Tesla
The Tesla Model 3.
I suspect some of those Bolt sales can be attributed, ironically, to Tesla. The Model 3 hyped up the idea of an affordable, long-range EV, pressured GM to get into the game, and now that the Model 3 is falling far short of Tesla's goals, a significant number of buyers are choosing a Bolt.
This, unfortunately for Tesla, is what happens when demand can't be matched by product. It's a common occurrence in the auto industry; automakers suffer, for example, if they're trying to sell passenger cars when everybody wants to buy compact SUVs. Obviously, it's not as if people don't want to buy the Model 3 - and I think there's a good chance that the market is much bigger than the huge pre-order tally would indicate.
For much of 2016, it was easy to scoff at all the "Tesla killers" en route to market. That mountain of Model 3 pre-orders made the scoffing effortless. But with the Bolt a sudden success, a Tesla Model 3 killer, at least, is what GM has on its hands.