Tesla Moving Forward in Global Market

From today’s Clean Tech­ni­ca.  See the full post here.

Tes­la is busy as ever, as it con­tin­ues to gain fur­ther share of the glob­al EV mar­ket while mov­ing past the New York Times con­tro­ver­sy from this win­ter. In its most recent blog post, Tes­la not­ed that with­in the past three weeks it has pushed out an aver­age of more than 500 Mod­el S units a week, and is on pace on set­ting anoth­er pro­duc­tion record.

Mean­while, last week in Cal­i­for­nia, Tes­la reg­is­tered its 3,000th Mod­el S unit in Cal­i­for­nia. And Mod­el S con­sumers have now dri­ven 12 mil­lion miles as the elec­tric cars con­tin­ues to gain fur­ther pop­u­lar­i­ty across the globe.

Besides reach­ing 3,000 reg­is­tered Mod­el S users in Cal­i­for­nia, the com­pa­ny is also expand­ing its unique stores. It recent­ly opened one in Austin, Texas (dur­ing SXSW Week). In the near future Tes­la will open up shop in Los Ange­les, and will open a sec­ond out­let in Mia­mi, Florida.

In recent months, the com­pa­ny also opened up its first store in my home coun­try of Cana­da — this first Cana­di­an store was in Toron­to, Ontario, Cana­da and was opened last November.

At these stores, con­sumers can cus­tomize their vehi­cles through touch screen tech­nol­o­gy and on-site cus­tomer ser­vice staff (think Apple stores) help to pro­vide a unique cus­tomer experience.

With more Tes­la vehi­cles hit­ting the road, Tes­la also plans to expand its solar-pow­ered Super­charg­ers into new areas with­in the next three to four months includ­ing: Flori­da, Texas, the Pacif­ic North­west, and Illi­nois. There are also plans to expand in some of the company’s cur­rent locations.

Mean­while, Tes­la CEO Elon Musk dur­ing the Gene­va Auto show said the com­pa­ny would build a Euro­pean Super­charg­er net­work in three stages as the Mod­el S hits Euro­pean mar­kets this summer.

Ulti­mate­ly, Tes­la is hop­ing to bring EVs to the mass­es, and it clear­ly plans to fur­ther it’s glob­al brand. In a recent TED 2013 talk, Musk said that when a new­er tech­nol­o­gy is intro­duced, it takes about three cycles before it can be a “com­pelling mass mar­ket prod­uct” for con­sumers. He points to the first-gen­er­a­tion Tes­la Road­ster, which was an expen­sive, low-vol­ume car cost­ing $100,000; and the sec­ond-gen­er­a­tion Tes­la Mod­el S, which sells for a mod­er­ate price of $50,000. Musk said when the third gen­er­a­tion Tes­la comes out in three to four years, its price will hov­er around the $30,000 mark.

With Tesla’s recent suc­cess as Motor Trend 2013 Car of the Year has already heled put Tes­la on the map, there is plen­ty of room for Tes­la to grow in the glob­al mar­ket, in not only the mod­er­ate- and high-cost mar­kets, but also more afford­able EV markets.