Tesla found itself in hot water in Australia again after the world's leading electric car maker admitted to releasing incorrect data about its Model 3 sedan sales. Tesla made a bold claim earlier in the week, saying that the company sold 15,054 examples of the Model 3 sedan in Australia, a number that the Electric Vehicle Council of Australia also released.
That figure would have ended Toyota Camry's long 28-year unbeaten reign as the top-selling car in the mid-size sedan class Down Under. Only 13,081 units of the Camry were sold in Australia last year, leaving Toyota in second place in that prized category.
Tesla's victory was immediately put into question, however, as registration data sourced from the National Transport Commission last week showed just 12,000 Model 3 vehicles being registered in Australia in 2021.
Auto website Drive, which exclusively reported those figures last Friday, January 28, immediately contacted the Electric Vehicle Council to get some clarification about the huge disparity in numbers. The electric-car lobby group insisted that the registration data was wrong and that the Tesla sales that they released were the correct figure.
Electric Vehicle Council CEO Beyhad Jafari was quoted as saying, "We now are officially getting Tesla sales figures and we can start reporting what they have (sold in Australia). We're confident our numbers are right."
Drive then asked Jafari why the numbers supplied by Tesla were a massive 25 percent higher than what the registration showed. Jafari replied that he couldn't explain it and did not know what had gone wrong there. The electric-vehicle lobbyist later added that he would work with registration authorities to address the issue and see why there is a significant gap.
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Jafari and the rest of the Electric Vehicle Council made an embarrassing U-turn just one day after releasing those numbers, with the lobby group issuing a statement to correct Tesla's erroneous sales figures.
The Electric Vehicle Council, on behalf of Tesla Australia, said that due to a human error, the delivery figures for 2020 by Tesla were erroneously added to the delivery figures for 2021 before the figure was provided to them. The Electric Vehicle Council added that instead of 15,054 Tesla Model 3 deliveries in 2021, the figure reported should have been just 12,094 units.
The mistake affected the total number of Tesla deliveries (all models), with the company only delivering 20,665 vehicles in 2021 instead of 24,078 units. Industry insiders are livid with the Electric Vehicle Council and Tesla for reporting false figures, especially with the Federal Chamber of Automotive Industries' mandate of having a "truth in reporting" in relation to the release of new-car sales data.
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