Who resuscitated the Electric car?
There is still an Overweight consensus among Tesla Motors Inc (NASDAQ:TSLA) analysts ratings with 8 Buys and 1 Overweight and expectations have been increased by 12.5% from 7 Buys and 1 Overweight three months ago. Most Tesla Analysts still expect an upside of 12% from current levels.
Long before Tesla, there was another electric car.
According to an earlier analysis on Insider Monkey, the Tesla Model S is one of the 10 most fuel-efficient cars on the road today. I am very impressed with that order of 100 cars from Las Vegas. There are 30 cities larger than Las Vegas in the United States of America and is only a matter of time before they decide to place a similar order with Tesla Motors Inc (NASDAQ:TSLA).
Each Five Star hotel should buy at least 10 of these and charge $70 to each guest per ride. Hotel chains would get to 1,000 rides in a matter of months. Why are we still burning gasoline when we are out of town? Let’s use a Tesla Motors Inc (NASDAQ:TSLA) Taxi.
Is Ford out of focus?
Ford’s shareholders have a very good reason to celebrate because the Focus has surpassed the Toyota Corolla as the World’s best selling car of 2012. Also the F-Series are not too far behind at number three.
Another interesting situation is the sales in Asia & Africa (41%) are now bigger than the Americas (29%) or Europe (30%)
As people get richer and richer in Europe (Europe now makes more money than the United States of America) more and more people will buy more expensive German vehicles like Mercedes Benz, Audi and BMW or American vehicles like Tesla Motors Inc (NASDAQ:TSLA) and the market share for Ford will get smaller and smaller in Europe and the Americas.
There is still an Overweight consensus among analysts ratings with 11 Buys and 1 Overweight but expectations has been reduced by 30% from 14 Buys and 3 Overweight three months ago.
Holds, Underweights and Sells on the other hand, have increased by exactly by 30% suspiciously. Most Analysts still expect an upside of 17% from current levels.
I am not as confident because for the first time in a decade the annual car sales in India fell. Only two years ago everybody was rushing to increase capacity in India because they were the hottest growth market after China.
Last year, car sales in India went up by just 2.2%
As any Economic Student will tell you: If the market is growing at 30% then many players will enter the market to compete against you and margins will be reduced too quickly, even if the market keeps growing, you still face very serious challenges. Needless to say, It all ends in tears.
Ford and Suzuki of Japan wrote checks for one cool billion each to build plants in the western state of Gujarat. Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL) is currently the second most profitable company in the world according to Forbes magazine after Exxon Mobil Corporation (NYSE:XOM) and they don’t even have factories.
How hard can it be to pick up the phone and call Mike McNamara to ask him –Can you built me a car in India?- I don’t think cars are more complicated than a Blackberry Z10. If Flextronics International Ltd. (NASDAQ:FLEX) can build an iPad then they can build a Focus. It’s not like they are building Naos.
If you don’t know what a Nao is then you really need to see this.
We’d like to present eight auto stocks that currently sport analyst target prices above their trading price. Aside from Tesla Motors Inc (NASDAQ: TSLA), highlights include Ford Motor Company (NYSE:F), General Motors Company (NYSE:GM), Toyota Motor Corporation (ADR) (NYSE:TM) and Honda Motor Co Ltd (ADR) (NYSE:HMC).
(Data via WSJ/Dow Jones & Co.)
Let’s take look at the collection.
