Jaguar I-PACE outsells Tesla on debut

Tesla has had a straight head-to-head fight with the first full exclusively electric offering from a legacy carmaker and lost. Badly.

Long the lead (and mostly the only) player in the dedicated premium EV market, Tesla was unseated from its throne in The Netherlands, Norway and even Sweden by Jaguar’s I-PACE in December.

Even more telling, Jaguar’s first electric car dominated in The Netherlands, selling more than any other car the country in December as buyers raced to get out in front of January 2019’s higher taxes on EVs.

With Audi’s e-tron and e-tron GT, Porsche’s Taycan, Mercedes-Benz’s EQ C and a horde of Volkswagen-branded EVs launching this year, the heavily subsidized EV markets of Norway and Sweden will be the countries to watch this year.

But, at the very least, Tesla’s comfortable dominance of the premium EV world is starting to look shaky, with the I-PACE’s sales exploding in Europe’s most critical electric-car markets.

While the volumes weren’t enormous, at 2621 cars in December, it showed Jaguar diverting its I-PACE production to The Netherlands before the country bumped its tax on EVs up from four percent to 22 percent on New Year’s Eve.

It set itself a target of shifting 3500 I-PACEs in The Netherlands before the end of the year and came within five cars of achieving that, in the process lifting its sales in the country by 234 percent.

I-PACE sales swallowed 13.2 percent of the entire Netherlands car market in December, making up an astonishing 98.3 percent of Jaguar sales there for the month.

The second best selling car in The Netherlands in December was also an EV, but a more well-known one. Tesla’s Model S found 1558 buyers there, but only 652 people bought the Model X and just four Model 3s were sold (despite the car not yet being homologated in Europe).

On the upside for Tesla, it sold 5633 Model Ss for the year and almost 3000 Model Xs to beat Jaguar over the full year (though the British company’s I-PACE didn’t end production ramp up until the third quarter of the year).

The I-PACE also surged in Norway, which has the world’s richest pure EV model mix at 40 percent, and it ended 2018 by becoming the biggest selling vehicle – with any kind of powertrain – in The Netherlands in November.

It was the first time in automotive history that an EV scored the top sales spot in any car market outside Norway, where the Nissan Leaf dominates.

The Leaf’s 12,303 Norwegian sales claimed an 8.3 percent of its total car market, followed a long way back by the Volkswagen Golf’s combination of EV, plug-in and combustion powertrains (though the BEV e-Golf claimed most of the badge’s 9859 sales).

Third overall (and completing the strangest full-year podium in the world) was the BMW i3 (5687 cars) followed by the Tesla Model X with 4981.

Jaguar’s success there also mean that that its fleet CO2 figure for the year in Norway fell to just 31 grams/km, which indicates that the EU 7 target of 95 grams/km by 2021 is achievable with the right market incentives.

Jaguar also topped the November and December sales charts in Sweden, though delivery constraints stopped Jaguar’s first electric car from making significant inroads in China, the US and even in its home market.

Its Netherlands and Norway sales helped the I-PACE alone to outsell every Tesla model combined in Europe in the last quarter of 2018, though the Californian EV maker doesn’t have the Model 3 homologated for Europe yet.

Jaguar sold just 300 cars in Norway for the whole of the 2017 year, but now its I-PACE has become the leading premium player in the country (for December, at least).

While the I-PACE had a storming end to the year, a pointer to the future might be that Audi’s e-tron registrations outscored Tesla by a factor of five to one in Germany in December (528 cars to 105), even though the e-tron doesn’t officially go on sale until February.

More than 1.7 million electrified cars were sold globally last year for a total 40 percent higher than in 2017.

A JPMorgan analytical report suggests BEVs and hybrids will account for 40 percent of global new car sales within six years, growing the electrified market share to 7.7 percent and lifting sales volumes to 8.4 million cars a year.

China is still expected to be the biggest absorber of EVs, with 59 percent of global volumes by 2020, but only 55 percent by 2025.