Even vooruit kijken aan het eind vh jaar ;-)
2018 is when things get interesting, especially if you think Tesla can build its 500k cars in 2018, which is the goal it set for itself (moved two years up from 2020) this year. I'm going to go a bit conservative here and go with 350k vehicle deliveries in 2018. I think if you caught Musk on the street, he'd agree even this number would be quite a feat. These figures would imply 680k Teslas with self-driving functionality vs. an installed base of 2mm or 34% of the total. Yeah, that's still pretty impressive. The "Tesla Wins" camp is running away with this thing. Tesla is going to be THE autonomous car company for the next two years at least, that much is clear.
After 2018
2019 going into 2020 is when autonomous cars start to ramp. Let's look at some of the industry news bits:
•NuTonomy to expand self-driving taxi service to 10 cities around the world by 2020 (Source: Yahoo News)
•Delphi (NYSE:DLPH) and Mobileye to provide off-the-shelf self-driving system by 2019 (Source: TheVerge)
•Volkswagen (OTCPK:VLKAY) expects first self-driving cars on the market by 2019 (Source: Focus)
•Ford's head of product development: autonomous vehicle on the market by 2020 (Source: Auto News)
•Baidu's (NASDAQ:BIDU) chief scientist expects a large number of self-driving cars on the road by 2019 (Source: Quora)
•First autonomous Toyota to be available in 2020 (Source: Wired.com)
•Nissan (OTCPK:NSANY) to provide fully autonomous vehicles by 2020 (Source: Nissan Motors)
•Sergey Brin plans to have Google (NASDAQ:GOOG) (NASDAQ:GOOGL) driverless car in the market by 2018 (Source: Driverless car market watch)
There is a clear trend here. Most players in the space plan on really ramping after 2019 going into 2020. Let's assume Tesla can hit its 500k goal after 2018, in 2019, it would have 1.2mm autonomous capable cars on the road vs. a 4.4mm installed base or 27% of the global base. Then, in 2020, Tesla would have 1.7mm autonomous capable cars vs. a base of 10mm or 17% of the global base. You may think that Tesla is starting to look less impressive. That's not really the case when you factor in that automakers make about 75mm cars a year globally. Tesla will still have a larger percentage of the autonomous fleet in 2020 than Toyota's percentage of the entire global automotive fleet at around 15%. With that being said, I do think 2019-2020 is when Tesla's chokehold on the autonomous vehicle fleet will start to come under pressure. Tesla needs to figure out how to ramp to Ford, Nissan or Honda (NYSE:HMC) type production levels to maintain its dominance. Is that even possible?