I’m going to go out on a limb here (but not very far) and announce that the Chevrolet Volt became the first plug-in vehicle (PHEV or BEV) to reach 100,000 units sold, in the United States!
Unless sales took a nose dive, back to levels not seen since the introduction of the 2017 Volt, this happened at some point, during this month (July 2016). Opposed by conservative politicians and conservative media, it took the Volt 67 months to reach this milestone.
How long do you think it’ll take the Chevy Bolt to do the same?
CONGRATS CHEVROLET AND PLANET EARTH!
It took the Tesla Model 3 a few days for over 300,000
Those are pre-orders, not sales. Even with the most optimistic projections, it will take years for that many actual sales to happen, because it will take years to produce that many. In my opinion, it will happen faster than it did for the Volt, but the Volt, Leaf and Model S had to pave the way for the Model 3 and deserve their place in history.
To be clear it was 300,000 FULLY refundable pre-orders. People like being part of something, and people got to be part of something with no risk.
That said, if you look at their production issues and meaningful recalls, I am confident that it will take them longer than 4 years to build and deliver their first 100,000.
Building cars is HARD. Mass producing anything at scale is Very hard (Apple STILL haas issues! Building something hard, at a scale that is very hard when you have little experience, at a consumer price point? Pssht.