To amend the US national trade deficit; build a better product

I am a big fan & regular follower of Matt Gasnier’s excellent Best Selling Cars Blog (www.bestsellingcarsblog.com). It’s fascinating to see what cars sell where, to learn which companies are doing better than others for investing purposes, or simply just to dork out on the interesting variety on offer worldwide.

Norway is known for having some tremendous electric car subsidies, which they do as a country to offset the carbon emissions from their own large offshore oil operations which fill government coffers with cash. This obviously plays a part in the tremendous success of Tesla as a brand in Norway.

The November 2017 sales report in Norway from bestsellingcarsblog puts Tesla as the 5th overall brand, with the Model S as the #3 selling car in the country for the month (501 sales), and the Model X the #4 selling car (495 sales). This leaves only the Toyota Rav4 and Volkswagen Golf higher on the sales charts.

There are other successful electric cars in Norway. The Mitsubishi Outlander (offered as electric in Norway) is the #4 car, and the BMW i3 #5. The Nissan Leaf is ranked 31st in October at 148 sales, and the Opel Ampera-e (our Chevy Bolt) is even further down the list, at #47, or 84 sales. Subsidies do obviously help Tesla, but it’s also clear that the brand itself, the image that it owns, and the fact that it makes arguably the most technologically advanced vehicles on the market today put it on the top of the charts, despite these cars both costing on average over $100,000.

One thing historically uncommon in Norway (or Europe, for that matter) is American-manufactured cars, save for a precious few. Other than the Tesla’s, the BMW X5 is the only one on the current list of consequence, at 161 sales (#28). It seems the Ampera-e is exported from the US, and then there are two lonely Ford Mustangs and two Jeep Grand Cherokees sold down towards the bottom of the list.

This is something I think we’re generally aware of—outside of Canada and Mexico, and some mostly niche model exports to China, the United States hasn’t had much of an automotive export business for a long time. The Mustang has made some noise as a global export with success, but other than that, we mostly export German branded cars made in South Carolina.

Until Tesla. Love them or loathe them, 6,000 cars so far this year x $100k = $600,000,000 to Norway alone, a country with a population less than that of Colorado.

Cross reference that thought with the info from the U.S. Census regarding our overall trade balance with Norway, which looks something like this:

5 years ago we ran a $4 billion deficit with Norway. Now, for the first time in recent history, we’re looking to have a surplus (so far as of October 2017 we’re at a $262M surplus). Tesla alone is looks to be responsible for a not-insignificant amount of this surplus.

Our domestic automaker’s excuses have always been just that. Make a better car and people worldwide will buy it, no matter where you’re from. Tesla has proved it, and when they get Model 3 production appropriately ramped up, we will see a measurable improvement in our trade data from it.