Mark Twain famously quoted a British Prime Minister who allegedly said: “There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.” Even if Twain himself made up the quote, it’s stuck around the popular consciousness because everyone has seen a person of authority use some random statistic to make a weak argument better. Also, it’s that time of year when automakers release their quarterly sales numbers and, oh boy, we’ve got at least one whopper.
I’ll start with Stellantis, where the news is still not good and there’s some minor tomfoolery afoot of the “and statistics” variety related to the new Dodge Charger. Chinese automaker BYD is doing much better, showing that the Chinese EV market still has more room for “new energy vehicles.” Does this mean Tesla is doing better? Nope. Of course not. The company missed estimates as its quarterly deliveries fell sharply, but is there a reason for this?
Last night, a state Supreme Court seat in Wisconsin (of all places) became a referendum on Elon Musk. Why? Because in our exhausting version of modern politics, this is a thing that happens. The results? People would like to hear a lot less from Elon Musk. Maybe a lot less about Elon Musk?
Stellantis Had A Bad Quarter, But At Least They Made Me Laugh
Stellantis hit a wall last year, and then tumbled down a hill adjacent to the wall. It was not good. The company essentially fired CEO Carlos Tavares when sales dropped 15% and has been saying this year will be a rebuilding year. So far, the organization isn’t off to a great start in the United States, where sales were down 12% year-over-year.
Jeep was down 10% as every model saw a sales decline except for the aged-but-cheap Compass. Ram sales were down for everything that isn’t the Promaster Van. Chrysler was actually up 1%. Dodge was the worst with a 49% drop due to the loss of Challengers and Chargers (more on that in a minute). Fiat, which now has cars to sell, was up 239%, but that’s only 522 total vehicles. It’s crap.
How is Stellantis trying to spin this?
“We’ve seen consecutive monthly market share growth since January, in addition to retail growth momentum, with the right mix of pricing and incentive actions put in place at the end of last year, leading both Jeep and Ram brands to post their best retail months of the year this March,” said Jeff Kommor, head of U.S. sales. “Additionally, our company year-over-year retail sales were up by 13.8% when disallowing for discontinued models, and we expect to see this gap corrected as our new model offerings continue to fill out our growing U.S. brand portfolios.”
This is somewhat true. The loss of a bunch of affordable Jeeps is hurting the bottom line, and the expensive EVs the company is putting out instead aren’t going to help much. Eventually, new products will come. Sam drove the new Charger for us and generally liked it, which is not a view shared by the faithful, considering the huge markdowns we’re already seeing on the car.
This sets me up for my favorite spin from the company’s sales press release:
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All-electric Dodge Charger Daytona accounted for 65% of total Dodge Charger sales in Q1 2025
That’s funny, right? I had to go back and just confirm that you can’t yet walk into a dealer and drive out with the inline-six-powered version of the new Charger. If you’re buying a new Charger in a store, you’re either getting the EV or you’re buying a car that was built in 2023. Sure enough, Dodge dealers sold 1,052 of the remaining stock of old, gas-powered Chargers and just 1,947 of the electric ones.
Flipping that stat on its head, 35% of people would still rather have a car that’s probably been sitting on the lot for a year than your brand new, too-costly EV.
BYD Sold 416,388 Passenger Electric Cars In Q1
The Chinese car market got off to a slow start this year, following a huge fourth quarter for EVs. This doesn’t seem to have phased BYD, which managed to sell 416,388 electric cars according to CNEVPOST, an increase of almost 39% year-over-year. That’s down 30.7% from Q4 of 2024, which saw the company’s highest ever EV sales.
As an automaker, BYD has entirely abandoned purely gas-powered cars and sells a mix of hybrids, PHEVs, and electric cars. It’s also an exporter, and the stat that’s most interesting to me is that BYD has managed to sell 72,723 in foreign markets, which is up 89% year-over-year.
It’s been guessed that BYD will be the biggest electric automaker this year, outshining even Tesla, so let’s look at Tesla’s quarterly numbers.
Tesla’s Q1 Sales Down
Unless you’re the biggest Tesla stan on the planet, the news that the company had one of its worst quarters in years isn’t going to be a big shock. In total, the company delivered 336,681 vehicles in Q1 globally, down 13% from Q1 of 2024. That’s a lot of electric cars and still makes it the second biggest EV automaker by a large margin.
The consensus of Wall Street estimates was around 390,000 vehicles sold. Is this a sign that it super biffed it? Well, some of those estimates came before everyone knew just how weird the world would get and how much blowback Musk could get from his activities with President Trump.
Some of this, of course, is due to factories switching over to the updated Model Y, as Tesla itself says:
“While the changeover of Model Y lines across all four of our factories led to the loss of several weeks of production in Q1, the ramp of the New Model Y continues to go well.”
This is almost certainly a legit excuse, but it doesn’t explain the huge drop in places like Europe. Also, wasn’t Tesla supposed to sell a huge number of Cybertrucks? That doesn’t seem to be happening, given that all non Model 3/Model Y sales added up to just 12,881 vehicles total, globally, for the quarter.
What’s going on here?
Elon Musk The Cheesehead
If you have not been following::checks notes:: off-cycle Wisconsin judicial elections, you might be surprised to find out that one State Supreme Court seat in the Upper Midwest could somehow become a referendum on the Tesla CEO. Honestly, if you didn’t know that you can just skip to the song part of TMD and you might be happier.
Here’s how NBC News put it:
Musk, the billionaire White House adviser, played a starring role in the race, using personal funds and allied outside groups to put more than $15 million behind former Wisconsin Attorney General Brad Schimel, the Trump-endorsed candidate who ran against Madison County Circuit Judge Susan Crawford. Crawford and her allies responded in kind, using Musk as a foil and scoring a decisive win.
Though the race was technically nonpartisan, there were intense partisan overtones — and it functionally transformed into a proxy vote on Trump’s first two months in office and especially on Musk, who has become one of the most powerful people in Republican politics since Trump won last year.
Musk referred to the race as a contest that would be important for the future of America and “Western Civilization.”
I guess Western Civilization is in trouble, because the Musk-endorsed candidate got spanked. Technically, these are non-partisan elections, but no one really believes that. Musk’s interests here probably have a lot to do with the fact that Wisconsin is a state with a highly partisan redistricting scheme that keeps a generally purple state tilted heavily towards putting Republicans in Congress. Musk not only spent money and campaigned, he also wrote checks to volunteers, which is something that feels like it should be extremely illegal.
We should have better stats on registration in the United States in a couple of weeks, which will just be more data for people to interpret based on preexisting feelings. And while we’re talking about Midwestern politics, I should probably mention that former Jalopnik contributor, car nut, and Hot Wheels designer Mallory McMorrow is running in the Democratic primary for the Michigan U.S. Senate seat that’s going to open up in 2026. Obviously, we know Mallory very well as a site, so take that disclosure for what it’s worth, and if she were to win, we’d never stop bugging her about Kei cars.
It’s interesting that her launch video includes a bunch of clips of Elon Musk…
What I’m Listening To While Writing TMD
San Francisco-based singer-songwriter John Vanderslice should be better known for all the great records he’s produced, or the ones he’s recorded. Likely, though, you know him for calling the frontman of Third Eye Blind the rudest person he ever met while running a recording studio. Enjoy “Trance Manual,” a good song.
The Big Question
Have you seen a Dodge Charger EV on the road?
I have a Dodge/Jeep/Ram dealer by my work. I haven’t even seen a Charger EV on their lot yet
“There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.”
– Marilyn Monroe
The “Western civilization” line is straight out of The Daily Stormer. But then, so is everything else Musk, the current administration, and their supporters are promoting.
I’ve so far seen as many Charger EVs as I have Nissan Zs. One of each.
I know that the EV Charger is a thing that exists in my area, as there are Autotrader ads with photos of them in local dealers.
I have not seen a single one on-road.
I haven’t seen a Charger EV but there are a TON of Cybertrucks in my area. I legitimately see one pretty much every time I leave the house. I think it’s probably because DC has a disproportionate amount of attention seekers compared to other places and it’s not hard to make enough money to buy a six figure codpiece in this area if laws and ethics aren’t a priority.
I make sure I point and laugh at every one. I’m not going to advocate for vandalizing someone else’s property but I do think it’s perfectly okay to exercise our right to free speech when we encounter the Incel Camino in the wild…and regardless of your political leanings I think we can all agree it’s a crime against our eyeballs, and that’s worthy of mockery as well.
Laws and Ethics?
Please tell me more about these concepts…
Here in Boise, ID, I see AT LEAST 3 different ones regularly, plus a few that I see less frequently. I suspect there are more than three I see regularly, but I don’t pay attention to the plates, so all the unwrapped ones are the same to me until/unless one ends up with a blemish more noticeable than the rest. Pretty sure all of them here were purchased to “own the libs.”
I’m a bit perplexed as to why they’re so common in the DMV. This area is dark blue and oddly enough none that I’ve seen are being driven by white people…so I strongly doubt it’s an OWN THE LIBS thing so much as it’s an ostentatious display of wealth/conspicuous consumption thing. I suppose there’s no better way to rub everyone’s noses in the fact that you can afford a $100,000 car that driving one of those monstrosities.
I’ve got to ask… are you suggesting that Caminos weren’t OK in their time (or now)? Because… Caminos are totally awesome.
But I’m with you on everything else…
El Caminos are national treasures and they rule….I just find the nickname amusing
I’m loving all the protests, but not the vandalism. I’ve been suppressing the urge to flip any owners off, especially non-CT models, as I can only assume they bought them before Elon got into politics, but CT owners can’t say that; he was already re-tweeting nazi stuff by that time. I still haven’t engaged with them, but I do low key flip them off when I see them. I just keep my hand below window level.
I don’t see the point of calling out or being hostile to individual owners.
Personally, I specifically avoid flipping off, laughing at, or otherwise engaging with Cybertrucks for another reason: people bought them to be conspicuous. I’m not going to give them the attention they’re seeking, positive or negative. Certainly not going to vandalize them.
A bunch of armed folks went to “protect” a Tesla dealership here from a protest. The anti-Tesla protesters stood their ground and the armed folks ended up going home first. The anti-Tesla folks said that the armed folks may have deterred more customers, anyway. That was funny to me. I was definitely relieved that no one got twitchy and shot somebody.
That too! It has occurred to me that completely ignoring them is probably the worst thing for them.
It’s funny that the same folks who are going to “protect” Tesla dealers are the same ones who were ICE’ing chargers and rolling coal on Tesla drivers just a year ago.
Stellantis PR executive #1 – “Ok team, how can we spin the disappointing sales of our new EV Dodge Charger to look better?”
PR exec #2 – “Hmm… use a misleading percentage where the denominator is some arbitrarily small number?”
PR exec #1 – “Yes, yes, good idea…”
PR exec #3 – “What if we call them “Electric Chargers”? Then we can count both the car and the box and cable on the wall separately, doubling the reported number!”
PR exec #1 – “Brilliant! You’re getting a raise this year!”
Alternative spins to add to their amazing “disallowing for discontinued models” statistic:
“Extreme success to our EV business, with 100% of new charger purchases being electric.”
“Q1 sales up significantly when compared to Q2 and Q3 of 2020 sales” (not sure that’s actually true)
“Our best quarter of sales since Carlos Tavares (pictured above) stepped down as CEO”
“Q1 has been our most successful sales quarter of 2025”
Stellantis needs a plan to put the Pentastar V6 into the Charger/Challenger since most of them had that engine. They need that for volume, and they do need volume. They need an entry level version of the car right now. I can’t believe there’s a car company that keep discontinuing products and replacing them with cricket sounds.
I think the Hurricane is more or less slotted to be the “base” engine. The plus is that it’s way more powerful and refined. The minus is the reliability with the Hurricanes so far has been…oof.
You could argue that there’s room for both.
Will the V6 fit?
I know there has been discussion of the car needing to be modified to fit the Hemi, Since it was only intended for electric or inline ICE, the engine bay may not be wide enough to just drop in any V engine without some reworking of the front clip.
I assume it would because the Hurricane is massive. Don’t let the displacement fool you…that engine is friggin YUGE
Something has to be in the way, or they’d already be showing something with the Hemi stuffed in it. Could be overall width or exhaust routing, but there must be something.
Their dealers aren’t happy, and even a teaser of a concept may buy Stellantis some time.
No I haven’t. Let’s run some numbers to guess why…
1947 / 50 / 250 = ~0.15 per town in America
(sold) / (# states) / (number of towns in the “average state” of Indiana)
That is not good penetration.
Google says their are 109,000 towns and cities in the US. That leaves you with a considerably worse number (.018).
LOL, I agree with that! But, I want to try to use the “average” numbers. I recently asked the group on Discord what they thought the “average” state was, and Indiana won. So, I’m now going to use Indiana. I used to use Connecticut, but we are small, and only have 169 towns. Not average.
Either way, the numbers don’t look good (yet)
That’s what she said.
A better comparison would be the last Q1 when new LX cats were actually still rolling off the production line
The 1st quarter of 2023 daw sales of 22,120 Chargers, +43.8% over Q1 2022. Also, since the new Charger replaces both the old Charger and Challenger, Q1 2023 Challenger sales added another 11,371, +2.2% over 2022.
So, they traded 33,541 sales for 1,947
A big reason why there’s still old 2023 models hanging around is because they did overproduce toward the end, to help dealers stockpile inventory to cover them until the slow rollout of the new models.
Also, since no new ones have been built since December, 2023, and special orders were cut off sometime before that, you’re stuck with whatever colors and options the dealers ordered, so the stock might be getting down to the less popular configurations, just like how there’s always year end leftovers hanging around into the new model year
I’m also not sure, but I sort of suspect, that higher trim V8 models made up a larger share of the final months of production than was otherwise typical, and it was usually the Pentastar models that accounted for the lion’s share of sales volume
As has already been stated elsewhere, we know sales are down significantly YoY, but revenue is going to be taking a massive hit even higher than sales. Tesla has been offering incentives far more competitive than every other manufacturer in order to attempt to boost sales, and 0% financing is extremely costly for an automaker to offer at todays rates, as are lowered MSRP’s to try to attract sales. The quarterly and EOY financial statements will be very interesting reads when they are published.
The Wisconsin SC vote swinging against Elon’s massive financial backing, and similar trends showing in every other off-cycle election shows that the general public has increasingly more hostile views of him as time goes on. The Daily podcast from NYT had a super interesting point, the ad’s run in favor of the more liberal candidate actually pushed her as a vote against Elon, more than a vote against her actual opponent. She won several districts that Trump won. This is not an isolated event either. Trump may be unpopular en masse, but Musk is even less liked. Tesla will only suffer more and more losses.
Tesla’s stock P/E ratio is something crazy like 120, and that’s using past earnings as the denominator. Do you know what happens to “growth stocks” when they not only don’t grow in revenue, but start shrinking? TSLA is in for a mighty mighty crash.
“…ad’s run in favor of the more liberal candidate actually pushed her as a vote against Elon, more than a vote against her actual opponent.”
With the amount of money Musk put behind the election of the judge, it’s not a stretch to say that the judge would have been owned. His personal positions on issues wouldn’t matter much in that situation.
Haven’t seen a Charger EV yet. My closest dealer has one in stock but based on the photos it has been there for a while.
If they were still built in Brampton I probably would have seen one by now I’m guessing.
If they were still built in Brampton, they’d be getting used in street takeovers by what is arguably the worst drivers in Ontario, if insurance rates are anything to go by.
Good point. Also Markham/Richmond Hill has some pretty awful drivers too.
The entire GTA is an insurance heat score.
I’m lucky in that I’m old, live in the west end of Burlington, have a long clear driving record and drive boring cars. My insurance is pretty cheap, like $85/month per car. Before my wife got a new one hers was $60 a month
I’m on the wrong side of my 30s, living around the capital. But My insurance has slowly climbed from $95/mo to $160 for no reason as my record is clean an I’m a recognized MTO signing authority, so I HAVE to keep a clean record.
That BYD Shark has a lot of Ford F series in the front end.
I haven’t seen any new Dodge Chargers, but that doesn’t surprise me. I appear to live in a car desert populated with Altima’s, Rogue’s, and a fleet of grey crossovers that blend together into ennui and despair.
In the past year or two I have seen one or two Cybertrucks (May be the same one), one Hummer EV, and one 5th gen Prius tooling around. I even saw a Rivian R1T once.
No, but I really think I need to go take one for a test drive. Not really expecting to buy, but I’m curious about them.
Stellantis sales drop 15%, the whole company goes apeshit, and the CEO is fired well before his planned exit.
Tesla sales drop 13% amid a total collapse in Europe and a Cybertruck flop, and the company just kinda shrugs.
Remember, Tesla isn’t a legacy car company, they’re a…..?meme? company I guess?
It certainly helps when one of the people on the board of directors shares your last name.
It IS illegal, but enforcing election laws against the richest people in the country is (sadly) incredibly difficult to do, for both political and practical reasons.
From Wisconsin statutes:
I find it deeply amusing that anyone thinks that the rules even vaguely apply to a billionaire Republican. The Trump admin completely disregarded the rule of law the first time and stacked the Supreme Court with unqualified sycophants who made complete presidential immunity the law.
His voters knew this. They know he’s a convicted felon. They don’t give a shit. They want daddy to have complete and total power so they don’t have to think about anything and can assume their plethora of grievances are being promptly attended to.
The law is not coming to save us from these people. That ship sailed because Garland is a feckless centrist windbag. The only way Musk is going to go away is if he’s ruined financially (which is a long shot since he can just raid the federal coffers at this point) or leaves this mortal coil…and billionaire freaks are literally funding all sorts of immortality research at this point so even that may not be true in the future.
This WI election was an opportunity to see how the voters responded to Elon’s involvement in politics, and it’s clear they hate him. He’s an annoying, grating, spastic little Silicon Valley crackhead prick with the charisma of a dead toad.
Republicans will keep him around because he provides an endless supply of money and can be counted on to tow the party line to his cult members, but I wouldn’t be surprised if they start putting him front-and-center less often after this.
Realistically, prior to November, a lot of people in conservative regions (to use the president’s terminology, lets call them Shithole Counties) didn’t know much about Musk. If they weren’t investors, they wouldn’t know he was constantly being looked at for market manipulation. If they weren’t Tesla buyers (and most weren’t, nor did they have friends or family who bought Teslas) they wouldn’t know he’s screwed many thousands of buyers out of deposits to pay for their Level 4 self driving that’s been coming out any day now since 2020.
He was just some weirdo who sold electric cars (hate) but let Trump back on Twitter (love) and did something with rockets (not really sure, cool when they don’t explode but also cool when they do explode).
Now they’ve seen a billionaire rooting around in their private data, social security, national security, etc. And anyone with half a brain actually sees him for what he is.
Making him into a Trump stand-in was a major blunder, too. They wildly overestimated his popularity.
He is starting to physically resemble pepe the frog.
Yeah, the law only functions if the government enforces it. The GOP only wants to enforce the laws against those they consider outsiders and the Dems are too afraid of being accused of using the law as a political weapon (which they’re often accused of anyway, so they shouldn’t worry about that).
Some people say the system is broken, but it’s really working as intended. The rich and powerful want the system to benefit them and control the rest of us. It’s been that way since the founding of this country (when only white men with land could vote, which is pretty close to what some of these folks want to get back to).
It seems to be working, now. The current administration still appears to be warming their tires.
And yet it’s interesting that now that Susan Crawford won, and the state has a Democratic majority, one might expect a case to be drawn up against Elon regarding this specific grift.
Dare to dream!
Thanks for posting (re-posting, I know you or someone had posted this before) this. It IS illegal.
Laws?
“We don’t need no stinkin’ laws.”
In Georgia: “You can’t hand out water bottles to people waiting in long voting lines during daytime heat!!!!”
In Wisconsin: “Nothing to see here, folks. Move along.”
“Rules for thee but not for me”.
GOP following the fascist playbook of consolidating executive power by neutralizing the agencies that are supposed to hold them accountable, either by staffing them with sycophants or straight up gutting/eliminating them.
Like Signalgate: “We’ve investigated ourselves and found no wrongdoing”. Meanwhile, a much lower-level staffer was recently fired for doing the same thing, but with much less sensitive info.
Didn’t even know it was at the dealers yet.
I’ve seen a number of Charger EVs, but in the metro Detroit area the car market is so distorted that it is hardly representative. In person the Chargers seem much bigger than than the gas Charger/Challenger
Haven’t seen one yet.
No, I have not seen any Dodge Charger EVs on the road.
Come to think of it, I haven’t seen any Chargers at all, thought that may be due to the fact that I live in India…
Import one and roll around like a boss!
Elon was trying to meddle with the election because Tesla filed a petition in Wisconsin courts for not allowing them to sell cars directly. There is no other way around that.
Now for the Charger EV’s, yes I’ve seen 1 driving down the highway and three at the local dealership with steep discounts.
Seen one in a parking lot, i don’t hate the looks. I’m sure Stellantis blessed it with the best reliability that it could. Cant wait to hear the flapsonic exhaust. Who TF is Elon Musk?
Saw my first Charger EV this weekend. It probably would have looked better in a color, rather than the black I saw, but what struck me were how strange the proportions were, in a way that absolutely does not convey in photos—long, yes, but also weirdly narrow and tall.
No, it really isn’t visible in pictures. I only realised that when I saw a picture of one parked next to a more pedestrian looking vehicle
No Charger EVs on the road, but I have seen them on dealer lots and at the auto show.
It does seem like a good overall vehicle held back by a total mismatch of its powertrain to its intended customers, and by its high price.
Bringing back the Hemi would seem to solve both problems at once, as long as it isn’t some super limited edition intended only to sell I6 models.
I think the I6 is an intriguing product that will be way more appealing to most buyers than the EV…but they really, desperately need to not fuck it up and I just wouldn’t put my money on Stellantis at this point…especially considering they’re now rushing straight 6 production because the EV has been such a flop and is a half baked product.
I was super impressed with the SO Hurricane in a week long rental Wagoneer. It was a great engine (who knows about actual reliability though). I’d 100% prefer it to the 5.7L hemi in every single car or truck if both were offered. The 485hp spec 6.4L on the otherhand…. I think I’d have to go with that over both configurations of the Hurricane, even if it would probably mean worse performance and efficiency.
Yeah it would be very hard to say no to a 392, efficiency be damned
The I6 Charger is not really competing with the EV Charger though IMO, my sense is it’s competing with the Mustang, or buying a used V8 Charger.
It may well be better than the EV for most buyers, but it remains to be seen if that’s enough.
It might be the car that I’m most excited for this year. I’m looking forward to hearing the first driving impressions that should be right around the corner.
Tesla’s sales volume dropped 13% YoY, but sales revenue is probably worse than that. They’ve been cutting prices to keep the metal moving.