Tesla Sales in Hong Kong Dry Up After Gov't Drops Tax Break (axios.com) 103
Tesla couldn't sell a single car in Hong Kong in April after the government dropped a tax break for electric cars on April 1, the Wall St Journal reports citing government data. From the report: "as a result of the new policy, the cost of a basic Tesla Model S four-door car in Hong Konghas effectively risen to around $130,000 from less than $75,000." There were 2,939 Tesla's registered in Hong Kong as of April. Further reading: Nobody in Hong Kong wants a Tesla anymore.
Or (Score:5, Insightful)
Everyone who wanted one in the short term snapped them up right before the tax went into effect.
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most crazy-rich people are frugal to an extreme that can appear almost revolting.
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To be fair, that is part of why they are rich. If I lived as frugally now as I did when fresh out of college (and invested all the saved money), I'd have about $1 million in the bank.
Re:Or (Score:5, Insightful)
Exactly what the article says - there were five times as many registrations in March (the month before the rule went into effect) as in February. Hardly surprising that, when they did a half year worth of business in a month, they now see a decline.
For some other manufacturers, a decline to zero might be more concerning. I expect in the current Tesla market with only luxury vehicles, the vast majority of customers don't need to wait one more paycheck to afford the purchase.
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Another interesting factoid from the article. Hong Kong had 3,000 new electric car registrations in 2016. Tesla sold circa 3,500 cars in the first three months of 2017.
The headline that nobody in Hong Kong wants a Tesla anymore might be hard to justify when we look at the data.
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Re: Or (Score:1, Interesting)
But most of these super rich are foreigner and mainlander. The normal Hong Konger gets nothing. There's no shortage of ordinary Hong Kong families as well. These families are finding it harder and harder to provide for their family with high costs of housing and living. I am one of the average income residents. Now I have to look for somewhere else to live and raise my family because it is impossible to buy home in HK. Add to that an unstable political future and sadly Hong Kong really have no future, just
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Nice attempt at spin, but it still shows that signiificantly less people will buy one without subsidies.
Re: Or (Score:3)
Nice attempt at spin, but it still shows that signiificantly less people will buy one without subsidies.
No it doesn't. [It] shows that when given the choice between subsidy and no subsidy, everyone choses subsidy.
Next year's sales will show whether or not they'll buy it without subsidy.
or, put another way, "significantly fewer people choose to buy the Tesla without subsidy"...
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Is it really a subsidy? They just reduced the normal 40% tax on imported vehicles. Sounds more like "not being fined for excessive pollution".
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Everyone who wanted one in the short term snapped them up right before the tax went into effect.
There's definitely that going on, but not only was there a big fat goose egg for registrations in April, there were only 5 in May: http://www.investopedia.com/ne... [investopedia.com] Anyway you look at it, that's a huge drop off in demand because a government subsidy was taken away.
Warehoused stock. (Score:2)
What Tesla did to soften the blow, was to register around 500 cars as owned by Tesla HK.
So you can still buy a "used" Tesla with less than 20 miles on the clock, the 'one previous owner' being Tesla itself.
Obviously this took quite a bit of investment, and won't last long, but it's managed to keep down the price of used Teslas for now.
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"Big place"... sure, kid.
Hong Kong: 2755 square kilometers (1,064 square miles) [wikipedia.org]
Québec: 1542056 square kilometers (595,391 square miles) [wikipedia.org]
Keep in mind that Québec is only the second biggest province/territory of Canada, which itself is the second biggest country on the planet after Russia.
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Sarcasm [wikipedia.org] is "a sharp, bitter, or cutting expression or remark; a bitter gibe or taunt". Sarcasm may employ ambivalence, although sarcasm is not necessarily ironic. "The distinctive quality of sarcasm is present in the spoken word and manifested chiefly by vocal inflection." The sarcastic content of a statement will be dependent upon the context in which it appears.
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Triple sarcasm: my brain is mostly empty space.
Hey, wait a minute...
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Poe's Law: Idiots can't understand a joke, blame others for lack of humor.
It is range anxiety! (Score:5, Funny)
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Hong Kong seems to be roughly 25 x 40 miles. The contiguous USA is roughly 2800 x 1600 miles.
WTF are you talking about. Is this a weird way to attempt to explain that Hong Kong is now part of China instead of still separate?
Re:It is range anxiety! (Score:5, Funny)
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Found the German!
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oh man, I almost got taken in by this one and if so I'd be assigned the Whoosh Co. I'm thinking why would anyone buy a car of any sort in a congested place like HK.
Reminds me of one time when I visited my grandparents in HK as a kid (in the mid 1970's). He
had use car from his job and wanted to drive us to go to dinner. Took about 20-mins and he dropped us off in front of the restaurant. With no place to park, he drove back to the house and walked back to the restaurant and joined us about 20-minutes later.
Even the airport is squeezed, there's many videos that landing a typical airliner is action and adventure (means need plenty of barf bags).
That was the old Kai Tak airport's infamous "checkerboard" approach [unforbiddingcity.com]. The new HKG international airport's over-water approach [hkatc.gov.hk] is pretty bog standard and relatively
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So now them there fancy new technology thingums = the left?
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It costs so much because of the unreasonable import fee of 50% being placed on these items. It is forcing Tesla to build a plant in mainland China if they want to sell cars there.
If only our own government could institute a similar policy on chinese products to protect american industries...
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When I buy things on eBay, I always pick Hong Kong sellers if I can, even if it means paying a bit more. I get my items much faster, sometimes a week or two earlier than ordering from China.
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Hong Kong, being such a small city with the amount of road traffic, justifies such levy on cars, regardless of origin.
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...protect american industries...
From what? Its own greed, and avarice? Americans created the problem. Americans shipped American industry jobs overseas. Lets see what Americans do now.
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Americans shipped American industry jobs overseas in part because there was low or no tariffs on imports, and the labor overseas is super cheap.
If GM saves themselves $5,000 per car in labor and whatnot by building it in Mexico, and there's no import fees.. then why wouldn't they move to Mexico? If on the other hand the US Govt charged a $8,000 import fee for Mexican-based cars well.. now GM isn't going to be so happy to move. Even if the US Govt only charged a $4000 import fee (still saving GM $1000 per
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Ugh. I really should proofread.
International trade because
.. International trade exists because
Apologies, grammar Nazis!
Re: Buying spree (Score:2)
I'm sure sales will pick up again in a couple month
Sure, just as soon as everyone forgets it's $75K car they are paying $130K for...
Soon. (Score:2)
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Fully electric cars with tolerable range (my made up bs threshold: 200+ mi) don't seem to be cheap enough to compete on their own merits yet... will probably be a few more years, but it's coming.
Actually, China makes these already. And they're around $6000.
In actual practice, people in Hong Kong going on a long trip would tend to use the very very fast High Speed Rail systems China and nearby countries have in place.
Wake up, it's 2017, not 1997.
Ouch (Score:2)
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Explains, why Musk is upset about "Climate" (Score:2, Insightful)
To me this is related tightly to why Elon Musk has publicly broken up with Trump over "climate" [slashdot.org]. If, as Trump thinks, climate is not really a big concern and the government will stop paying scientists to say, that it is, Tesla becomes just another car — and an expensive one at that...
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Exon is funding plenty of climate science - and actually doing what you assume the government must be doing - simply because you don't like the results. Anyway, any legit climate scientist who thinks global warming is a government-funded hoax can easily find lucrative work for Exon and/or Koch Industries - or one of the Koch-funded 'think tanks'. So, no. Climate scientists are not finding 'phony' man-made warming for profit.
Where, exactly, does electricity come from? (Score:1)
Hydro power is already 100% spoken for in the western world. The extra electricity to power electric vehicles will come from any of nuclear, gas-burning, or coal-burning generators. A few percent of the demand *MIGHT* come from wind and solar.
One month of data only!! (Score:4, Insightful)
Did the WSJ really publish a story based on just a single month of data showing a fall in sales?? That is ridiculous.
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Agree it's an interesting data point, but there's an awful lot of stew being cooked from that single oyster. It's really rather early to say that Tesla sales in HK have dried up with the removal of the tax break. And the last data point reported was April. There's been May and June since then -- surely the reporter could have gone and asked around to see if the story remained consistent, even if official figures are laggy.
Cars just sold before the price went up (Score:4, Insightful)
From the article
"There were 2,939 first-time Tesla registrations in March just before the new tax rules kicked in, around five times that of the number in February."
everybody remotely considering buying one, just bought them before the price went up. Check back in six months to a year to see what the real effect is.
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The REAL Effect is obvious. Without huge government subsidies Tesla's in HK are unsellable. Why else would people rush to buy them BEFORE the end of the tax subsidy
Because it saves them a bunch of cash? Even if I'm happy to buy at $130k, why wouldn't I buy it at $75k and save myself $55,000?
To, from? (Score:2)
When the hell did people start writing things in the "To Y from X"?
It makes more sense to write "From X to Y".
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It's a pun on the gameplan for Tesla models. The model S was first, we now have model 3 and X, and the final model is supposed to be the model Y.
S3XY
Clarification of "Tax Break" (Score:5, Informative)
When most US readers read "Tax Break" they think that someone bought a car that was priced "X" and instead, paid "X-Y" where Y is some subsidy the Government offers...or alternatively they imagine that ALL cars cost "X+Y" where Y is a uniform tax. That's not the case in Hong Kong. In Hong Kong, a car that is imported from overseas is subject to a First Registration tax, that tax STARTS at 40% of the car's value and goes up from there "X+0.4X". This is a tax only on imported vehicles and previously all EV were exempt from it which put Tesla (and other imported EV) on level playing field with domestic Hong Kong vehicles. But that exemption has been removed for EV over a certain threshold, of which Tesla lands above. So now Tesla costs "X+Y" where Y is a tax that no domestic vehicles have to pay. So yes, Tesla is on an even playing field with other imports, but not with all other cars.
So the folks saying "Ha! See, Tesla can't compete with other cars without a special exemption!" are ignoring that Tesla is now working at a handicap, not a level playing field.
As others have pointed out, it's also likely that anyone who had the spare cash laying around who was planning on buying a Tesla, just did so prior to this phase out. People with lots of money aren't COMPLETELY oblivious to price fluctuations...especially when announced in advance.
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So the folks saying "Ha! See, Tesla can't compete with other cars without a special exemption!" are ignoring that Tesla is now working at a handicap, not a level playing field.
Also worth mentioning, most people in Hong Kong don't need cars anyway. The public transport is world class and being so small you can train/bus/walk or even taxi pretty much everywhere quicker and cheaper than driving.
Oh well (Score:2)
Who cares? They are just a hair metal band who are well past their prime.
A pity (Score:4, Informative)
Taxes are very high on new cars, at least 40%. The government previously wanted to boost electrical vehicles and thus gave the tax break for EVs.
In fact EVs are ideal for HK. Never a range problem, and people in general are very positive about there being no emissions.
Personally I think it is a pity that they stopped this tax break, it gave a great signal to the community. They could have reduced the tax to 20%, still a difference. Eventually Tesla and otther EV sales will pickup again of course but HK could have been at the spearhead of the move to zero emission cars countries.