This is a bit "inside baseball" but it relates to the ongoing utility of the Australian sales figures that I have posted on a regular basis for some time now:
These monthly sales figures are going to become less useful going forward as Tesla has announced that it is withdrawing from Australia's local industry group, the Federal Chamber of Automotive Industries which, amongst other things, collates and publishes sales data in its monthly VFACTS publication, which media organisations such as Drive and CarExpert then present to the public and analyse.
Tesla is
from the FCAI owing to (what it characterises as) the latter's lobbying efforts against prospective vehicle emissions legislations recently floated by the federal government. Tesla only
started reporting sales figures to the FCAI about two years ago, but in e.g. 2020 it didn't really matter that Tesla wasn't reporting sales as their numbers were quite low in the context of the overall market. Today, Tesla is clearly a Top 10 brand in Australia with further growth prospects ahead, and its Model 3 and Model Y vehicles are often amongst the top-selling models in their particular segments, so the loss of Tesla sales from the VFACTS dataset is more significant.
Tesla has said that it will continue reporting sales figures to the FCAI
(end June 2024). Beyond that there are other avenues to obtain this data, such as state-level registration databases and voluntary submissions to other publications, but this data will be sporadic, less timely and more difficult to harmonise and integrate into a cohesive picture of the Australian automotive landscape.
