In March 2023, Tesla's Model Y becomes the best selling SUV in China
Tesla
Tesla's Model Y has emerged as China's best-selling SUV in March 2023, following substantial price cuts at the beginning of the year. The China Passenger Car Association (CPCA) reports that Tesla sold 54,937 Model Ys in the country in March, representing a 38% increase from March 2022 and a 115% increase from February.
The Model Y's impressive sales performance is attributed to Tesla's decision to reduce prices by up to 13% in January, making the electric SUV more accessible to a broader consumer base. This strategic move paid off, as the Model Y outperformed other SUVs in March, including the second-place BYD Song, a plug-in hybrid (PHEV), which sold 40,114 units during the same period.
Model Y Ranks Second in Q1 SUV Sales, Leads Among Electric Vehicles
Despite this strong performance, the Model Y fell short of becoming the best-selling SUV in China for Q1 2023. BYD Song accumulated 141,415 sales from January to March, outpacing Model Y, which saw 94,647 sales. However, the Model Y was the only electric vehicle to achieve such a high ranking, far ahead of the third-placed BYD Yuan Plus, which sold 62,528 units.
Tesla's strong start to the year in China began with 66,051 Model 3 and Model Y sales in January, followed by 74,402 sales in February. March's near-record sales of 88,869 units contributed to a quarterly total of approximately 229,322 units, accounting for more than half of Tesla's global sales for Q1 2023.
Strong Q1 Sales Solidify Tesla's Position in the Chinese Market
The Model Y's exceptional performance in China highlights Tesla's continued success in the market as Chinese consumers increasingly embrace electric vehicles. The strategic price reductions at the start of Q1 allowed more potential buyers to consider purchasing a Tesla, resulting in impressive sales figures for the first three months of the year.
As Tesla Model Y sales continue to soar in China, the automaker is well-positioned further to solidify its position in the country's SUV market. The Model Y's dominance among electric SUVs showcases the growing demand for EVs and the potential for Tesla to capitalize on this trend.
Tesla has recently changed the language in its Foundation-series Cybertruck configuration and order invites and is reaching out to customers who have ordered the Tactical Gray Interior or Core Wheels.
Non-Foundation Delays
Tesla has added the following language to its order invites: “Due to continued high demand, we expect to deliver only the Foundation Series through late 2024.”
We previously reported that the foundation-series was ending soon, based on the Q&A answers from Elon Musk at the Tesla’s Shareholder Meeting. However, this no longer appears to be the case, and it seems the Foundation series is continuing for at least another quarter, into late 2024.
Here is the Cybertruck's new Tactical Grey interior color.
Tactical Gray, the updated darker interior for the Cybertruck, as well as the Core wheels, have been delayed. Limited vehicles with Tactical Gray started going out to customers this weekend, but the Core wheels haven’t been shipped just yet.
The default wheels, as well as the Core wheels, are both 20”, but the Core wheels offer lower rolling resistance and slightly more range. The Core wheels also have a smaller aero cover, but we haven’t seen these on a customer truck just yet.
Tesla has begun to reach out to customers offering them a free upgrade to the default wheels and offering them a vehicle sooner if they switch to the white interior instead of the Tactical Gray interior. Customers have also been informed that there may be a delay in receiving their vehicles if they stay with Tactical Gray or with the Core wheels.
After a month-long delay, Tesla sent FSD v12.4.2 to employees yesterday with update 2024.15.10. After just a few hours of the update going out to employees, Tesla started sending it to OG testers as well, who were already on FSD v12.4.1.
Issues Behind Delay
On X, Elon Musk broke down some of the details behind the delays. He mentioned that part of the issues behind the V12.4.2 delays were based on training. Tesla was seeing fewer interventions with FSD v12.4, but the release suffered from driving smoothness, which ironically was supposed to be one of the key features of this release.
Musk explained that part of the issue was due to too much focus on interventions, and not enough on normal driving. He compared it to training a doctor on emergency room patients, versus training on regular preventative care.
Vision-Based Attention Monitoring Changes
With FSD update 12.4.2, Tesla changed some of the language used for its Vision-Based Attention Monitoring in the release notes. Here’s a breakdown of some of the key points in the language. The changes to the release notes are below. Phrases or words that were removed are crossed out, while those added are in bold.
“When Full Self-Driving (Supervised) is enabled, the driver monitoring system now primarily relies on the cabin camera to determine driver attentiveness. This enhancement is available on vehicles equipped with a cabin camera and only when the cabin camera has clear and continuous visibility of the driver's eyes Cabin camera must have clear visibility (e.g., the camera is not occluded, eyes, arms are visible, there is sufficient cabin illumination, and the driver is looking forward at the road ahead and not wearing sunglasses, a hat with a low brimwithout sunglasses, or other objects covering thetheir eyes). Outside of theseIn other circumstances, the driver monitoring system will continue toprimarily rely on a combination of torque-based (steering wheel) and vision-based monitoring to detect driver attentiveness. When the cabin camera is actively monitoring driver attentiveness, a green dot appears next to the steering wheel icon on the touchscreen.
If the cabin camera detects inattentiveness the driver to be inattentive, a warning will appear. The warning can be dismissed by the driver immediately reverting their attention back to the road ahead. Warnings will escalate depending on the nature and frequency of detected inattentiveness, with continuous inattention leading to a Strikeout.
Cabin camera images do not leave the vehicle itself, which means the system cannot save or transmit information unless you enable data sharing.”
Arms Need to be Visible and Other Changes
There are various interesting changes here. While some of the changes are just improved wording to make the feature clearer, there are others that are worth highlighting which could point at changes to Tesla’s vision-based monitoring.
The first is the addition of “arms are visible.” Apparently, Tesla now wants to be able to see your arms to better detect attentiveness. Tesla may want to see that your arms are on the steering wheel, or they maybe they want to make sure your arms are moving so that someone isn’t able to post a static photo in front of the cabin camera to circumvent the attention monitoring. The reason isn’t clear, but looks like having your arms visible is now a requirement.
There are other small changes like the removal of a “hat with a low brim,” which was replaced by more generic wording that says the driver’s eyes must be visible.
However, near the end, Tesla removed the portion that said the driver monitoring system will rely on a combination of torque-based (steering wheel) and vision-based monitoring. This was changed to simply say that Tesla will rely primarily on torque-based (steering wheel) monitoring when vision-based monitoring is unavailable. It’s not clear whether this is just semantics and the wording now better describes how the vision-monitoring feature works, or if Tesla made changes so that the vehicle is simply either doing vision monitoring or steering wheel torque detection, and it doesn’t try to combine the two sources to detect whether the driver is paying attention.
Even more interestingly, the last line that says “cabin camera images do not leave the vehicle itself, which means the system cannot save or transmit information unless you enable data sharing,” has been removed. This could point to Tesla saving images of the cabin camera to improve its AI training model.
Either way, we’re glad to finally see FSD v12.4.2 going out to employees and early-access owners. The release is expected to have far fewer interventions and improve vehicle smoothness during braking and acceleration. If there are no major issues found, this update could go wide to all customers with FSD and on update 2024.14 or lower in the coming weeks.
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