The importance of price to sales

I took the car sales statistics broken down by model ( from 2013 ) and entered them into a spreadsheet. Then I googled the MSRP and added it into the sheet.
I did some smoothing ( skewing the price up, not down to compensate for the flaws listed below ) and the result was this chart ( x axis is MSRP, y axis is units sold ):



I've been trying to find this data for free on the webs, but I haven't found it, so this is the best I have.
The main flaw is that I used the MSRP of the base vehicle by model name. I have no idea what the trim levels are and how the sales break down among the trim levels. I also don't know how much option value is added by each vehicle.
This chart serves the purpose to illustrate the size of the car market by starting MSRP class ( actual sale prices are undoubtedly higher, not lower as people option up and go up trim ).

The total number of vehicles in the data making the chart is 16164533
For cars that start at $70K MSRP, my best guess from this data is that the total market in the US is about 140,000 - 160,000 vehicles.
For $60K MSRP and up the total market is about 250,000 - 300,000 vehicles.
For $35K MSRP and up the total market is about 1.7 - 2 million vehicles.
A few thousand either way when you are near $35000 dramatically changes the size of the market you can reach.

The conclusions I draw are:
1) that the potential market for the Model 3 is about 10-12 times bigger than the market for the Model S.
2) Tesla has a suprisingly large share of the market already

If you find a better source for this data, please let me know.

Source: 2013 U.S. Vehicle Sales Rankings By Model - Top 270 Best-Selling Vehicles In America - Every Vehicle Ranked - GOOD CAR BAD CAR
Note that Tesla is missing from that data.

EVNow said:

Very nice. The median price is 24k.

BTW, the average price is about 31k.

Click to expand...

Yeah I know that using the MSRP of the model skews the numbers low for the reasons I listed.
I was going to apply a fudge factor that scaled up all the data by a multiplier until the average price of all the data in my model was 31K to try to compensate for those.
But I think you can still use it to compare 2 categories if you assume that both of them will up the trim level and add options at the same rate.


I think people should carefully look at how small the high-end market is ( $70K+ ) and how much of it Tesla has captured.

The big players in those markets have to be feeling it.