In the first five months of 2022, Chinese electric cars were on a roll. New brands were selling incredibly well. They couldn't get enough stock to meet demand.
2022年头五个月里,中国的电动车销售非常火爆。新兴品牌的销售量非常大,他们无法满足市场需求。
In the first five months of this year, their sales have completely tacked. No one is buying them. They've sold so few cars and they have a lot of stock sitting in dealerships. There's a lot of Chinese electric car brands in China, including BYD, Neo, Xplo, etc. And for some reason, the Norwegian people have just suddenly stopped buying all of them.
A lot of you have been saying to me, you know, if Chinese cars or Chinese electric cars are going to do so well in Europe, why are they not selling their well right now? Why are they actually having worse sales this year than they did last year? And in some cases, much worse. That's a really good question. And interestingly, Norway are asking the same question. In fact, the biggest motor in publication in Norway just basically answered this question.
Here's what they had to say. Hello, my friends. Welcome to the channel. It's great to see you. Thank you for tuning in. My name is Sam Evans and welcome to all the new subscribers. Great to have you. Welcome back everyone else.
The Norwegian car market, right? 85% of the car sold in May were fully electric. This year, so far, 80%, just over 80% have been fully electric. There's a lot of options. There's more than 100 different models of electric car you can buy there. This is basically the only mature electric car market in the world. Now, you might be thinking, isn't China?
Well, only 35% of EVs or just under that 33% of vehicles sold this year in China have been electric. So, yeah, that's a pretty big percentage, but it's nothing in comparison to Norway where, well, pretty much everyone's buying an EV. You're a very rare minority if you don't buy an EV. If you're not buying a plug-in hybrid or an EV, while you're in the 5%, so you can see how this is really relevant to the future. If you want to see what's going to happen in the future, look at a future market. And this is pretty much the only one we have in the world where we can see a market where they're just years ahead of everyone else.
In recent years, a number of new car brands have entered Norwegian car market plus the European recently, but more specifically, they targeted Norway first, the Chinese car makers, target Norway first because they didn't have a choice, because they knew that other car manufacturers weren't selling enough EVs there. I mean, for example, Toyota had no EVs there for sale until about a month ago, two months ago, I think it was, when they started selling the BZ4X. Many car makers didn't have an EV, so they just weren't selling any cars there because that's all anyone's buying. So basically, the Chinese car manufacturers last year and the year before they stepped in and went, OK, we'll go there first.
After the record year of 2022, thousands of huge premium cars from BOD, Hong Chi, Nio and Xpung and other car makers from China are now rolling around on Norwegian roads. So they sold a right in 2022. What happened in 2023? Well, challenges came on the conveyor belt. That taxes, weight taxes, higher interest rates and generally uncertain economic times, according to L-Bill 24, are the reason why there have been many players have been experiencing a slowdown in new car sales and the Chinese have noticed that.
Now, the thing is here, more EVs have been sold this year, quite a lot more, so far in the first five months of this year versus the first five months of last year simply because a much larger percentage of the cars being sold in Norway this year are EVs. Even though the car market has declined, shrunk in size by about 6% this year, there's still a lot more EVs being sold, but the Chinese ones have actually decreased significantly in their sales.
L-Bill 24 says that there are brutal figures for several Chinese car brands, according to recent figures from OEV. For examples of the Hong Chi E1 of the Hong Chi EHS9, which is actually a really impressive electric car, it's made using Porsche parts, it's got a Porsche steering wheel, I think they make Porsche as that company in China.
Anyhow, only four of those have been sold this year, so not even one per month. At the same time last year 879 were sold, so they sold 879 in the first five months of last year, this year 4. It's not because there are none available by the way, there are some in dealerships just sitting there.
X-PUN, they have several models available for sale in Norway, but so far this year only 21 have been sold, that's unbelievable because last year they sold 453. So X-PUN right sells 453 cars in the first five months of last year, with less models than they have available now, and now they sell 21. I mean X-PUN is not just dying in China, it's dying in Norway as well, I feel really sorry for them. What about Voya? Voya are doing quite well in China, they make some really impressive electric cars in fact, but their figure is even more depressing than X-PUNKS, they really sold two cars this year, period.
Now this is not because these electric car manufacturers have long delivery times, quite the contrary, the Norwegian importers and dealers have cars ready and in stock that can be delivered almost the same day, without that even tempting buyers at all. It appears as though buyers know I have bought them, and well for some reason they've now stopped. Now I don't know if this is whether or not it's because they think there's better choices available or they're just more comfortable with their brands that they're used to, but for some reason buyers instead of buying these Chinese electric cars are buying well really predominantly one model of car, which is really strange.
I mean the Tesla Model Y has 21% of the entire car market in Norway, it's hard to understand why no one are buying these cars, this range of models I have from China, and instead well it seems as though large percentage of people are just going and buying a Tesla Model Y. Now L-Build 24 says this, at the same time many new cars are registered every day. In May 2023 over 10,000 electric cars were registered in Norway, the highest number ever in a single month in the month of May. If we look behind the numbers some changes became apparent compared to the past, the biggest they say is that Tesla dominates something absolutely enormous, almost around one in every four cars sold this year was a Tesla in Norway. The second they say is that more people are buying cheaper electric cars, interestingly you will find that new Chinese cars in the budget class are few and far between, there's not many cars there.
It's strange that you know the only real affordable electric car you can buy is actually the MG4 and that's selling okay, better than all the models I just explained but it's really not actually selling as well as what you would expect which is quite surprising. What Hongchi, Voya, B-Y-D and Nioh have in common is they have targeted the premium market, even B-Y-D is suffering. You would think B-Y-D being the powerhouse brand that they are would come in and be able to dominate in Norway but actually they're having an all- They only sell the Tang electric SUV and that's not selling well at all either. All these manufacturers offer well equipped cars though at competitive prices but they're still relatively expensive.
At the moment, fewer people choose cars in higher price ranges than last year and those who do tend to choose more traditional car brands. In other words, people who want to spend more money on electric car, they don't really want to buy a Chinese one, that's what it would appear. If they want to spend more money, they want to buy something with a badge that they know that has kind of a premium that has the perception by others that it's a premium car. The decline in sales says Elbiel 24 is not particular to Chinese car brands. In unsafe times, people generally look for more well-known brands. It says managing director Nukji at Hongchi.
So basically, the reason Hongchi says that people are not buying their cars, their electric cars is because it's an unsafe time. I'm not really sure about that. Norway's economy seems to be doing all right right now.
The only Chinese car brand that has not experienced a major drop so far this year is MG. That's it. They're roughly on par with last year. Now, I would have thought they'd be doing better considering they now have the MG 4 but their sales haven't actually increased. MG bets on cars at people's prices such as the MG ZSEV and of course the MG 4.
However, my point still stands. If anything, MG is actually performing nowhere near as well as you would think. I mean, the MG 4 is an incredibly good car right. It's gotten great reviews from journalists all over the world. People in Norway, they're very well aware of this. They watch reviews in the UK. They've seen journalists say they've seen you know, Matt Watson tell millions of people that it's the best car he's driven all year period. Everything included the best car and they're still not selling that many of them. It's quite strange.
A number of new car brands have been planned for Norway in 2023. Geely have announced that they're postponing their models until next year for some reason they're putting off entering the Norwegian market. Other new establishments are also at risk of being delayed.
Now looking at BOD sales in the first five months of last year, BOD sold 658 tanks. In the first five months of this year, they sold 234, meaning they don't rank in the top 20 models in Norway at all, which is surprising. The tank is actually a really good car and it's actually not that expensive in Norway. Tell you a little bit more than a model why, but it's a much bigger car with a much bigger battery.
Now you can see here Maxis, their sales have declined significantly. Their sales are down from 315 last year to 106 this year. X-PUN from 453 down to 21, Hong Chi from 879 down to 4, but you can also see that there's more brands here competing now, even though they're all selling very, very few cars. I mean, this is a lot of Chinese electric car brands, MG, BYD, 9, Maxis, JAC, X-PUN, Aura, Ceres, Hong Chi, Voya, NIO. That's a lot of car manufacturers.
And to be honest, I mean, none of them, including MG, are having any real success in the Norwegian car market. That's a shock to me. I don't fully understand why this is happening, but it is interesting to see that in a mature car market, even though Tesla gets a lot of criticism by the media, even the media in Norway criticizes them a lot, people will still buy them on mass.
What I want to know is guys, what do you think this is? What is causing this? Let me know in the comments what you think it is. I don't know if this has anything to do with the fact that Tesla is leading in terms of brand loyalty for some reason. They are. A lot of people are saying that they're bad cars, but brand loyalty is extremely high.