So there is no more Better Place in the Electric Vehicle (EV) space. Sadly to say that I actually just visited Better Place’s office in Israel last week and had good experience of test-driving the car. We do highly respect this company’s dream and mission, but obviously trying to destroy a well-established industry together with its value chain then to rebuild a new one is not easy. However, the death of Better Place definitely does not mean the end of EV industry. At least one company is doing a good job nowadays. We saw its stock soaring, and it seemed having a nice sale number in Q1 too. This company is Tesla Motors.
No surprise, Tesla Motors has smell a Better Place for its potentially fast growth: China. You may already read that Tesla is to open its first shop in BJ, and recently we also heard from Tom Zhang, HR of Tesla Motors that the company has appointed Kingston Zhang, ex-Bentley China GM, to lead Tesla in China.
Assuming Tesla can build its infrastructure right and sort out some regulation issues in China quickly, I think Tesla does have the chance to please the Chinese market. One simple reason is that, as you know Chinese love luxury stuff so at least some of them will love to buy Tesla car too. No need to remind me that the price for Tesla in China might be double due to various tax (Tesla’s original price in U.S. is not cheap, either.), you know how Chinese consumption power could be when buying luxury goods.
I heard that Lei Jun of Xiaomi, William Ding of Netease who have already visited Tesla Motors Silicon Valley office and both show great interest to be the first person who owns Tesla in China. Even one of my friends just flew to US several days ago to get his car ordered months ago. Note that he is based in China and knows he can’t ship the car back in near future.
Tesla, once it’s ready, I bet it can even do a Group Sell, the sales number could be good too!
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