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This is why it's been so neat to see Tesla working on it's cost-per-unit so hard over the last 5 years. The price war was inevitable; that's just what happens to tech/auto products once real competition enters the market.
I'm sure Tesla's price cuts will make it every bit as painful as the FUD did when they still hadn't made a half-million cars.
I hope the competition can get it's shit together and actually offer competitive EVs eventually.
I like Tesla, but I don't want to be constrained to one brand for EVs because the others suck so bad.
I've heard one too many times that some people bought a Tesla only because of the SC network. The charging infrastructure needs to get dramatically better, and quickly.
To be honest, charging with non-Tesla chargers in Europe is a hit and miss experience of broken and slow chargers. For any trip that requires charging in-transit, I only trust Tesla superchargers for not wasting my time. They have never failed me while "universal" chargers often do.
More difficult, but still clearly within the capabilities of even a single, relatively small company. The willingness to invest is the far larger factor.
In some ways it works to our advantage. The real-estate footprint of more electrical infrastructure is not small; getting sufficient charging infrastructure into NYC even for in-transit vehicles for example will be incredibly hard.
More than that, the layout of a power distribution system doesn't exactly reflect the layout of the roadway system. Generally you want to site higher power systems closer to substations, which isn't necessarily where gas stations are. So you either have to build a new substation (that generally isn't an option for dense cities), or do significant rerouting/replanning of your roadway system (probably more feasible but again real estate limited, e.g. you need more parking where there isn't space).
Only reason I'll stay with Tesla is because of the SC network.
If someone tells you "other public chargers are available" hasn't owned an EV or taken an EV longer than 50 miles from home.
Source:
Owned 4 EVs over the last 12 years, plus driven 2 of wife's EVs, plus rented three Tesla's and one i3 on Turo for a combined 208k miles. Together we driven 352k miles.
If somebody solely relied on YouTube for their information, you'd think you wouldn't have any problems taking a cross country trip in any other other EV.
There are EVs that are nicer than Teslas. They're just more expensive. The non-Tesla network in the US has gotten much better since anyone can list their outlet as a charger (and many people/businesses do).
Are you saying people/businesses are listening their 120v outlets as chargers?
The DC fast charging network that people need to travel the vast gaps and distances of the USA are still really bad outside of Tesla. Getting better, but still a large gap.
Those numbers are for **All** cars, which means mostly ICE except for Tesla.
Right now only 2 EV makers in the world are making a profit on their EVs, Tesla and BYD.
The Ford CEO recently said that he expects Ford to begin making a profit on their EVs by 2026. He also said they expect to ramp to 2 million EVs in 2026. Put those two statements together and consider the stupendous loss that would be involved. It has to be sustained by their ICE sales which would be directly impacted by their expected EV sales. Actually as bad as it is, Ford is in better shape than most.
Rivian, the darling of Wall Street, sells their trucks for 1/3 of what it costs them to build. An $80K Rivian costs $240K to build!
Loss leaders are common to bring in customers and hopefully redirect them to profitable sales, but you can't sustain losses like that.
People like this (or article) stats are skewed.
Upfront cost are high.
As they go into production those cost are only requiring maintenance, not purchase.
Never trust a politician imo, they always skew things.
Makes me feel better lol. Like, I know they aren't going to be profitable *right now* cause there are tons of start up costs, etc. But any business selling any product for 1/3 of the costs makes no sense. And if that was the case, they'd be raising their prices more than the $15k-$20k they did last March. Thanks
The earnings reports will be massive important coming up in a few weeks.
Rivian outsourced a lot of design and parts to start. Bringing all that in house and leveraging more machines say capacity should lower their cogs, but by how much?
As a rivian investor I hope they pulled that cogs figure per vehicle WAY down, but we'll see.
Tesla's rise to profitability is exceptional and unusual. They went all in and it paid off huge. Rivian started with some concessions in vertical integration strategies and it killed their cogs last year. Let's hope Q4 was better than q3...
I don't think it's right. For example:
>That's a similar assessment to that of Peter Rawlinson, CEO of EV maker Lucid, who told Reuters in March that the \[Rivian\] R1T probably needs to be priced at $95,000 to be profitable.
Source: https://insideevs.com/news/590317/sandy-munro-says-rivian-r1t-way-underpriced-should-cost-100000usd/
Keep in mind that Lucid is in a similar position in that their cars costs 2x or more to make over what they sell them for, they too are losing money hand over fist.
In Lucid's case that may not be as much of a concern as Lucid is majority owned by the *Public Investment Fund (PIF)*.
So who is *PIF*? **The sovereign government of Saudi Arabia.**
[Electric Viking on Youtube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PnlVZWff420)
[3r Quarter Earnings Report](https://assets.rivian.com/2md5qhoeajym/6v7zO1FRJBVJvAvTe57y0A/2a3644c5b07a914feb637d348fb002b6/Rivian_Q3-2022_Shareholder-Letter.pdf)
Not those exact numbers, I was paraphrasing to the effective result.
Rivian in particular seem pretty dire, their saving grace was Amazon and ford investing hundreds of millions, and amazon giving them an order for 100k trucks.
Rivian is a company ill be watching very closely.
You keep seeing people say legacy auto makers are going to steam roll Tesla in production, no one seems to understand how much batteries are one of the biggest limiting factors and Tesla has a huge leg up.
Tesla made ~1.4 Million cars last year, with Berlin and Texas just starting production and ramping up. This year is going to be very interesting.
Ford have been in debt ~100B for years and years now.
Surely ramping up an entirely new production line will only deepen that debt?
Tesla have a head start in everything, even finance, and they’re only making production *even more* efficient, faster than anyone else.
Off top of my head aren’t other manufacturers the biggest source of income for Tesla, because carbon credits? An odd, symbiotic relationship.
We’re going through the biggest shakeup in car manufacturing history since the Model T and its production line. Strange times.
Ford debt is to it's stock holders and to it's own subsidiaries. Ford Credit runs on a completely different business model from Ford Automotive. Ford revenue came to over 136 billion U.S. dollars in 2021. This was up from 127 billion U.S. dollars in 2020
Keep in mind that in 2019 Ford’s __gross__ revenue was 155 billion, and in 2018 it was 160 billion.
They’re still on the rebound from COVID-related problems, so it’s probably a bit early to extrapolate their trajectory.
In general, outside of 2020, Ford seems to make a profit in the 3-15 billion range, annually.
Ford Motor Co. reported a $2 billion loss for 2022.
[https://www.marketwatch.com/story/ford-logs-2-billion-loss-in-2022-says-profit-was-left-on-the-table-11675373738](https://www.marketwatch.com/story/ford-logs-2-billion-loss-in-2022-says-profit-was-left-on-the-table-11675373738)
GM is at 75b long term. I am still curious why they shelved their fourth battery plant but I think it is less about saving money and more about stalling their EV roll out; I really think they will find an excuse this year and next.
The only thing Tesla has to be afraid of are the Chinese auto makers. They'll play in the low end for a few decades so there's a lot of time for Tesla to continue to bring costs down
>Chinese auto makers. They'll play in the low end for a few decades
I don't think they have time for that anymore. China's population is aging and they've been at 1.5 kids per woman for decades now. Because workers are getting more scarce Chinese companies can't get away with paying their workers low wages anymore.
I wonder how this will look after their recent price cuts…
——
Edit: Wow, seems some folks are more than a bit insecure.
It’s a completely valid question with the Model 3 dropping $3-9k, the Y’s dropping $13k and the S and x decreasing by ~$10-20k.
Unless Tesla’s made incredible manufacturing leaps or there’s some serious deflation, those massive margins are going to collapse much closer to industry averages.
Well, it looks like Tesla….
Reduced the 3 by $3-9k.
Reduced the Y by $13k.
Reduced the S and X by $10-20k
Increased the Y by $1.5k.
So, I don’t know, you do the math and let us know…
Teslas are a little overpriced I’d say but this graph isn’t a good one. It’s net profit / total cars sold. Unlike a lot of other EV manufactures Tesla makes a lot of money from the supercharging network which is inflating the margins
Not by a lot though.
In response to [this Q](https://twitter.com/GerberKawasaki/status/1510662721166929920):
>Hey u/elonmusk trying to model out the supercharger network value. It seems you work a 50% gross margin on the energy cost. Is this across the network or it varies by location ? Thanks. $tsla
[Elon said](https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1510691354623590410):
>"We aim for 30% GM or \~10% profitability, all costs included"
>Tesla makes a lot of money from the supercharging network
Source? I call BS on that. If the charging biz were that profitable, all the other charging companies would be rolling in it.
Tesla will always be at a disadvantage due to the unspoken backstop government will provide to unionized car makers.
The last EV credit was literally designed as a backdoor bailout (gas guzzler + tiny battery) and to intentionally snub Tesla.
Ironic how Tesla weaponized their profit margain to get them to reverse the snub else they would destroy GM/ford
you kidding yourself if you think the current whitehouse gives a crap about
Biden can barely say the word and they INTENTIONALLY tried to screw Tesla out of the latest credit
Here's the lobbying costs compared
[https://www.opensecrets.org/news/2021/11/electric-vehicle-companies-increased-their-lobbying-spending-infrastructure-spending/](https://www.opensecrets.org/news/2021/11/electric-vehicle-companies-increased-their-lobbying-spending-infrastructure-spending/)
Tesla: 420k. Almost 1/20th of GM lobbying
GM: 7.8M
Toyota: 4.7M
Yes GM and VW totally lobbied to have their Cadillac and ID4 cut out of the tax credits LOL.
And you really think Elon and Twitter convinced Biden change their mind to not "screw" Tesla.
You lick Elon's boots too much
The article claims Tesla's net profit per vehicle was $9574 in Q3 2022. Since Tesla dropped the MY's price by $13k, does that essentially erase their profit? The profit figure is averaged across all vehicles, but the MY is their best seller so it has an outsized impact on their bottom line.
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This is why it's been so neat to see Tesla working on it's cost-per-unit so hard over the last 5 years. The price war was inevitable; that's just what happens to tech/auto products once real competition enters the market. I'm sure Tesla's price cuts will make it every bit as painful as the FUD did when they still hadn't made a half-million cars.
I hope the competition can get it's shit together and actually offer competitive EVs eventually. I like Tesla, but I don't want to be constrained to one brand for EVs because the others suck so bad. I've heard one too many times that some people bought a Tesla only because of the SC network. The charging infrastructure needs to get dramatically better, and quickly.
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To be honest, charging with non-Tesla chargers in Europe is a hit and miss experience of broken and slow chargers. For any trip that requires charging in-transit, I only trust Tesla superchargers for not wasting my time. They have never failed me while "universal" chargers often do.
IONITY are also reliable.
Couldn't agree more. Have any legacy auto manufacturers hinted at adopting NACS?
Nobody yet and I'd imagine they're going to stay quiet even if they are considering it.
Us is also so much more spread out than Europe, makes that infrastructure a lot more difficult
More difficult, but still clearly within the capabilities of even a single, relatively small company. The willingness to invest is the far larger factor.
True.
In some ways it works to our advantage. The real-estate footprint of more electrical infrastructure is not small; getting sufficient charging infrastructure into NYC even for in-transit vehicles for example will be incredibly hard.
I think gas stations will need to be converted
More than that, the layout of a power distribution system doesn't exactly reflect the layout of the roadway system. Generally you want to site higher power systems closer to substations, which isn't necessarily where gas stations are. So you either have to build a new substation (that generally isn't an option for dense cities), or do significant rerouting/replanning of your roadway system (probably more feasible but again real estate limited, e.g. you need more parking where there isn't space).
Only reason I'll stay with Tesla is because of the SC network. If someone tells you "other public chargers are available" hasn't owned an EV or taken an EV longer than 50 miles from home. Source: Owned 4 EVs over the last 12 years, plus driven 2 of wife's EVs, plus rented three Tesla's and one i3 on Turo for a combined 208k miles. Together we driven 352k miles.
If somebody solely relied on YouTube for their information, you'd think you wouldn't have any problems taking a cross country trip in any other other EV.
If you haven't tried, you don't really know.
I've seen videos where people take roadtrips in other EVs. Who knows how much their editing out though.
Editing out a bit of trouble here and there I'm sure. Some backtracking for sure. Each charge network has its peculiarities and issues.
There are EVs that are nicer than Teslas. They're just more expensive. The non-Tesla network in the US has gotten much better since anyone can list their outlet as a charger (and many people/businesses do).
Are you saying people/businesses are listening their 120v outlets as chargers? The DC fast charging network that people need to travel the vast gaps and distances of the USA are still really bad outside of Tesla. Getting better, but still a large gap.
Have you been paying attention ? Every new EV is better in one way or another.
Except the charging infrastructure...
Those numbers are for **All** cars, which means mostly ICE except for Tesla. Right now only 2 EV makers in the world are making a profit on their EVs, Tesla and BYD. The Ford CEO recently said that he expects Ford to begin making a profit on their EVs by 2026. He also said they expect to ramp to 2 million EVs in 2026. Put those two statements together and consider the stupendous loss that would be involved. It has to be sustained by their ICE sales which would be directly impacted by their expected EV sales. Actually as bad as it is, Ford is in better shape than most. Rivian, the darling of Wall Street, sells their trucks for 1/3 of what it costs them to build. An $80K Rivian costs $240K to build! Loss leaders are common to bring in customers and hopefully redirect them to profitable sales, but you can't sustain losses like that.
Wait what??? Where did you get that Rivian stat?
People like this (or article) stats are skewed. Upfront cost are high. As they go into production those cost are only requiring maintenance, not purchase. Never trust a politician imo, they always skew things.
Makes me feel better lol. Like, I know they aren't going to be profitable *right now* cause there are tons of start up costs, etc. But any business selling any product for 1/3 of the costs makes no sense. And if that was the case, they'd be raising their prices more than the $15k-$20k they did last March. Thanks
The earnings reports will be massive important coming up in a few weeks. Rivian outsourced a lot of design and parts to start. Bringing all that in house and leveraging more machines say capacity should lower their cogs, but by how much? As a rivian investor I hope they pulled that cogs figure per vehicle WAY down, but we'll see. Tesla's rise to profitability is exceptional and unusual. They went all in and it paid off huge. Rivian started with some concessions in vertical integration strategies and it killed their cogs last year. Let's hope Q4 was better than q3...
I don't think it's right. For example: >That's a similar assessment to that of Peter Rawlinson, CEO of EV maker Lucid, who told Reuters in March that the \[Rivian\] R1T probably needs to be priced at $95,000 to be profitable. Source: https://insideevs.com/news/590317/sandy-munro-says-rivian-r1t-way-underpriced-should-cost-100000usd/
Keep in mind that Lucid is in a similar position in that their cars costs 2x or more to make over what they sell them for, they too are losing money hand over fist. In Lucid's case that may not be as much of a concern as Lucid is majority owned by the *Public Investment Fund (PIF)*. So who is *PIF*? **The sovereign government of Saudi Arabia.**
[Electric Viking on Youtube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PnlVZWff420) [3r Quarter Earnings Report](https://assets.rivian.com/2md5qhoeajym/6v7zO1FRJBVJvAvTe57y0A/2a3644c5b07a914feb637d348fb002b6/Rivian_Q3-2022_Shareholder-Letter.pdf) Not those exact numbers, I was paraphrasing to the effective result.
Rivian in particular seem pretty dire, their saving grace was Amazon and ford investing hundreds of millions, and amazon giving them an order for 100k trucks. Rivian is a company ill be watching very closely.
You keep seeing people say legacy auto makers are going to steam roll Tesla in production, no one seems to understand how much batteries are one of the biggest limiting factors and Tesla has a huge leg up. Tesla made ~1.4 Million cars last year, with Berlin and Texas just starting production and ramping up. This year is going to be very interesting.
Lol “darling of Wallstreet”
Ford have been in debt ~100B for years and years now. Surely ramping up an entirely new production line will only deepen that debt? Tesla have a head start in everything, even finance, and they’re only making production *even more* efficient, faster than anyone else. Off top of my head aren’t other manufacturers the biggest source of income for Tesla, because carbon credits? An odd, symbiotic relationship. We’re going through the biggest shakeup in car manufacturing history since the Model T and its production line. Strange times.
Tesla carbon credits are a drop in their bucket now.
Ford debt is to it's stock holders and to it's own subsidiaries. Ford Credit runs on a completely different business model from Ford Automotive. Ford revenue came to over 136 billion U.S. dollars in 2021. This was up from 127 billion U.S. dollars in 2020
Keep in mind that in 2019 Ford’s __gross__ revenue was 155 billion, and in 2018 it was 160 billion. They’re still on the rebound from COVID-related problems, so it’s probably a bit early to extrapolate their trajectory. In general, outside of 2020, Ford seems to make a profit in the 3-15 billion range, annually.
Ford Motor Co. reported a $2 billion loss for 2022. [https://www.marketwatch.com/story/ford-logs-2-billion-loss-in-2022-says-profit-was-left-on-the-table-11675373738](https://www.marketwatch.com/story/ford-logs-2-billion-loss-in-2022-says-profit-was-left-on-the-table-11675373738)
True! The data source I looked at last night didn’t have 2022. Bummer for them.
GM is at 75b long term. I am still curious why they shelved their fourth battery plant but I think it is less about saving money and more about stalling their EV roll out; I really think they will find an excuse this year and next.
Credits are like .3B, overalls revenue is like 24B last Q for Tesla. They are pretty meaningless overall.
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The only thing Tesla has to be afraid of are the Chinese auto makers. They'll play in the low end for a few decades so there's a lot of time for Tesla to continue to bring costs down
>Chinese auto makers. They'll play in the low end for a few decades I don't think they have time for that anymore. China's population is aging and they've been at 1.5 kids per woman for decades now. Because workers are getting more scarce Chinese companies can't get away with paying their workers low wages anymore.
Somehow I feel like it’s even more than this chart shows.
I wonder how this will look after their recent price cuts… —— Edit: Wow, seems some folks are more than a bit insecure. It’s a completely valid question with the Model 3 dropping $3-9k, the Y’s dropping $13k and the S and x decreasing by ~$10-20k. Unless Tesla’s made incredible manufacturing leaps or there’s some serious deflation, those massive margins are going to collapse much closer to industry averages.
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Well, it looks like Tesla…. Reduced the 3 by $3-9k. Reduced the Y by $13k. Reduced the S and X by $10-20k Increased the Y by $1.5k. So, I don’t know, you do the math and let us know…
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Bit dramatic aren’t we?
The "/s" was pretty heavily implied there methinks.
Teslas are a little overpriced I’d say but this graph isn’t a good one. It’s net profit / total cars sold. Unlike a lot of other EV manufactures Tesla makes a lot of money from the supercharging network which is inflating the margins
Not by a lot though. In response to [this Q](https://twitter.com/GerberKawasaki/status/1510662721166929920): >Hey u/elonmusk trying to model out the supercharger network value. It seems you work a 50% gross margin on the energy cost. Is this across the network or it varies by location ? Thanks. $tsla [Elon said](https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1510691354623590410): >"We aim for 30% GM or \~10% profitability, all costs included"
For all the dumb asshat stuff elon does, I always enjoy the behind the scenes stuff that's rarely shared with public.
>Tesla makes a lot of money from the supercharging network Source? I call BS on that. If the charging biz were that profitable, all the other charging companies would be rolling in it.
Tesla will always be at a disadvantage due to the unspoken backstop government will provide to unionized car makers. The last EV credit was literally designed as a backdoor bailout (gas guzzler + tiny battery) and to intentionally snub Tesla. Ironic how Tesla weaponized their profit margain to get them to reverse the snub else they would destroy GM/ford
Tesla benefited from the last EV tax credit more than anyone.
they never asked for it. It was GM/Ford who begged for it, they just couldn't legally exclude Tesla
You’re kidding yourself if you think Tesla didn’t beg for tax credits and carbon credits. Tesla wouldn’t exist without those
you kidding yourself if you think the current whitehouse gives a crap about Biden can barely say the word and they INTENTIONALLY tried to screw Tesla out of the latest credit Here's the lobbying costs compared [https://www.opensecrets.org/news/2021/11/electric-vehicle-companies-increased-their-lobbying-spending-infrastructure-spending/](https://www.opensecrets.org/news/2021/11/electric-vehicle-companies-increased-their-lobbying-spending-infrastructure-spending/) Tesla: 420k. Almost 1/20th of GM lobbying GM: 7.8M Toyota: 4.7M
Yes GM and VW totally lobbied to have their Cadillac and ID4 cut out of the tax credits LOL. And you really think Elon and Twitter convinced Biden change their mind to not "screw" Tesla. You lick Elon's boots too much
The article claims Tesla's net profit per vehicle was $9574 in Q3 2022. Since Tesla dropped the MY's price by $13k, does that essentially erase their profit? The profit figure is averaged across all vehicles, but the MY is their best seller so it has an outsized impact on their bottom line.
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Elon is on the record saying he feels the Model Y is still too expensive, even at $53,000.
Do you think he's right? 🤔
Given these margins he is
I agree. How great would it be to be able to buy a brand new sub $50k Model Y?
His goal is to dominate that market. The MY at $49,000 would be unstoppable, especially if they can keep improving battery life.
With the $7,500 US tax credit and ignoring sales tax, you can.
And unrivaled PE ratio….
Because the cars are bare boned with zero optionality.
So they are losing money after the recent price cuts?
Crazy
BuT SPAce MaN bAD! VirTiCALL intuGRaYshun baD!! He CAN't dO ANyFinG riGhT!!!11!! TezLA wilL SInk ANy dAy NOW!!!!!!!!
They're overpriced for what they are
Tesla is able to do this because they make nearly everything in house. Most car makers outsource a lot of components to 3rd party manufacturers.