Toyota makes fairly boring products of the last century. Musk is currently shooting rockets into space and deploying a network of satellites. The optics of this cannot be discounted.
The overvaluation of tesla is just an extreme example of the overvaluation of the whole market. Every stock has a decade or two of growth baked into the current price instead of people paying what it is worth today. Tesla probably will be worth its stock price in less than 20 years, but why are we paying for future gains? What happened to the time value of money?
Anecdotal - my neighbour has a 2019 Model X with some shenanigans going on with a sensor in the driver's side door. It has been going on more or less since the car was new, but parts are in short supply as it is (understandably, as long as the market lets them get away with it) more profitable to put the part in a new car than it is to perform a warranty repair.
On my 20-year old Land Cruiser, I recently had to replace the multi-function switch for adjusting the power mirrors. My local Toyota garage (on a small island off the Norwegian coast) didn't have it in stock, but next morning at 0851 a SMS ticked in, stating the part was ready for pickup - at a cost of less than $100 for the complete unit.
That kind of logistics organization is what Tesla will need in the long run. Building it is going to be very, very costly.
That effect is amplified in countries that have import tariffs on automobiles, because the secondary market is large.
Not everyone in the world buys cars to pleasure themselves. For most people, automobiles are a tool and their dependability is more important than their excitement factor.
Also, anyone who buys a Tesla because they like SpaceX rockets is an absolute dunce. That's like subscribing to the Washington Post because you like the navel oranges that Amazon Fresh delivers.
You're not getting it. Musk is running Tesla as a tech company, NOT a "car" company. That's why he's been able to build the company through years and years of unprofitability, as Bezos did with Amazon.
You're also not understanding the stock market (which is timely). Once that stock is sold to the market, the stock price only affects people's bonuses. It doesn't have any impact on the company's production or revenue.
People buy (or sell) stock based on whether they think the price is going to go up or down. It's that simple. Tesla doesn't pay a dividend, and doesn't confer any meaningful voting rights (as Musk has secured a supermajority). There is LITERALLY no other reason to hold Tesla stock than to think it will go up. There's no other value to it.
Why would it go up? Because of good press. Good press comes from a lot of events. The company doing well, financially, is great news! But rockets and satellites are just as good, if not better, than reports of high-quality automobiles.
There's a very, very thin relationship between non-voting, non-dividend-paying stock, and a company's fundamentals. It's mostly a shared illusion that it's based on financials which makes the stock market work at all.
>That effect is amplified in countries that have import tariffs on automobiles, because the secondary market is large.
This is the exact same naive logic people use to justify Tesla's valuating.
On one hand you have yuppie fanboys bindly harping on about Tesla's magical engineering in the face of an Impala interior topped with a big tablet and panel gaps from the 80s.
On the other hand there is another yuppie fanboy harping about "muh hilix" despite the fact that Toyota has lied through its teeth about rust in North America for ~30yr, the Hilux/LC aren't outstandingly (in the literal sense) popular in Asia and people in Africa/ME will bolt a machine gun to anything that runs regardless of brand.
Camrys and Priuses are popular in the 3rd world because they are popular among moneyed people (i.e. the people who trade in 10yo cars instead of selling private party) in the first world and because of how the used car export market works (basically vaccuming up "nice" trade-ins that are too old for first world lenders to finance) they wind up popular in the 3rd world. People act like this is special about Toyota but it's not. The 3rd world is chock full of examples of other cars those same demographics buy. Chile practically runs on the 2nd-4th Gen Honda CRV and the GMT900 Chevy Suburban may as well be the official vehicle of Mexico (these are but two examples).
My point is both brands have the same moat of moneyed first world delusion surrounding their stock. Toyota just isn't a meme-stock popular with retail investors.
> Toyota makes fairly boring products of the last century.
Toyota sells around 10mm cars a year. Only about a fifth of those sales take place in Canada, US, and Mexico. The demand picture for EVs and vehicles in general is not uniform across geography. Some places like small cars, others big; some places like EVs, others have no chargers; some places buy new cars, others can't afford it.
BTW Mexico has a different mix of vehicles because much of the first-world production happens within the country. And Chile has the highest median income of all Latin America. Extrapolating from some perception about the Chilean or Mexican auto market is a poor way to characterize LatAm in general.
> On the other hand there is another yuppie fanboy harping about "muh hilix" despite the fact that Toyota has lied through its teeth about rust in North America for ~30yr, the Hilux/LC aren't outstandingly (in the literal sense) popular in Asia and people in Africa/ME will bolt a machine gun to anything that runs regardless of brand.
OK so this is a bit more on topic. The Hilux is a great truck (even ISIS likes it) but I'm not talking about the Hilux and yuppies. I'm telling you that there are people who make $400/mo who are proud to buy a 10yo Toyota. They don't approach vehicle purchases the same way that an American would. The concept that a car is "last century" is absolutely ridiculous to that segment of the auto market. Those people don't buy these vehicles because of status, they buy them because the local mechanic tells them that the motors don't need to be rebuilt so often.
Case study: Ecuador. Import tariffs make autos cost approximately double what they cost in the US, perhaps more. A Ford Raptor costs US$150k. Income disparity means there isn't a vibrant middle class. Fuel is subsidized; the country produces a half-million barrels of oil daily and has three refineries. Much of the transit (including in the Quito metropolitan area) occurs through mountains where roads are poor quality. Road closures due to landslides are common. A used Suzuki Grand Vitara that costs $700 in the US might go for $4,000 in Ecuador.
You have this concept that people in the third world model their choices on the preferences of rich people. I don't believe that's true. Income disparity is so broad, and the middle class so narrow, that most non-rich people in LatAm just make do and try to survive.
It's also home to Toyota forklifts (TIEM), and, of course, lots of people at that company drive one.
Me? I own 4 Hondas. ;-)
The availability of vehicles in the 3rd world is determined in large part by the used car market in the first world (with south America depending more to north America and Africa/ME depending more on Europe) Exporters buy from auctions just like the rest of the used car dealers. Everybody steers clear of vehicles that have been used hard. The used car dealers steer clear of cars too old for prospective buyers to get a car loan on. The lower down the economic ladder you go the harder people are on vehicles and the more likely they are to keep them until they are totally clapped our and the more likely they are to sell private party. This means that the cars the dealers and the exporters want to buy are the upper middle class trade ins that were never smoked in that were kept clean and maintained, etc with the importers erring toward 10yo+ ones that the dealers don't want as badly.
The net result is that the vehicles of the upper middle class are over-represented in the set of vehicles that exporters steer themselves towards.
If every dumb yuppie in the US and Europe woke up tomorrow and decided they would only commute in blue cars from now on then in 10yr we'd have morons on the internet making up reasons that blue cars are more reliable and using their prevalence in the 3rd world as evidence.
Of course there's market specific models and locally made stuff available too but I'm not talking about those and that's not the avenue from which cars that have a 20k+ MSRP appear in those markets.