Hyperdrive
Elon Musk Wants Tesla to Be Big — or Bigger — in Japan
- CEO aims for Japanese market share akin to German brands
- Japan’s overall EV imports rising but not in Tesla category
A Tesla Model S in Tokyo.
Photographer: Shoko Takayasu/BloombergThis article is for subscribers only.
Tesla Inc. is not big in Japan, as the saying goes. And Elon Musk is irritated with low sales in what is still one of the world’s largest car-buying countries.
“There are some geographies where our market share is remarkably low, like Japan,” he said on a fourth-quarter earnings conference call Wednesday. “We should at least have a market share proportionate to, say, other non-Japanese carmakers like Mercedes or BMW, which we do not currently have.”