Tesla surges by over $100B on a $4B (revenue) deal, likely at very low margins. Memes galore.
The reasons Hertz is considered to be getting a great deal here by investors is that EVs retain their value a lot better and are known to have much lower maintenance overhead. So, they'll get more miles out of them before they have to sell them on, get back more when they do, and be able to charge a premium for them at the same time. In a market where margins are razor thin, that's a big deal.
It's more a question of when than if their competitors will be lining up to buy some EVs. They'll have to. And then of course the next question is which one they'd be buying. The answer for the next few years is that Tesla is one of the few companies that has both product and manufacturing ready for volume production. Of course a few other manufacturers might make some nice money here too.
So, investors are thinking that Tesla could end up supplying many hundreds of thousands of vehicles for rental per year in the next few years. On top of their other business, which is also continuing to grow at a very nice pace. They'll likely need a few new factories for this but they've shown they can deliver those as well.
https://caredge.com/tesla/model-3/maintenance#schedule - Hertz could easily train 1 tech at every airport to do this entire maintenance with a basic lift and simple materials.
For a Toyota Camry, this work occurs 2x as often (downtime is a big deal for rental companies) and is not easily performed without a much more capable shop: https://caredge.com/toyota/camry/maintenance#schedule
Less moving parts, less fluids…now I want a Model 3.
Not too long ago Elon talked about Tesla making up to 20 million cars per year in 2030. That would make Tesla twice as large as VW, the currently largest car manufacturer. Of course this statement was treated as Elons typical optimism, but deals like this pave the way to that actually coming true.
I feel people have really short memory wrt. Elon's optimism. Not everything he promises pans out (autopilot being the prime example), but usually, it does, just slightly later than promised.
In 2012 Elon predicted 500k vehicles in 2020 and he was spot on. So lets see the 2020 prediction for 2030.
Renault Clio on spot #2 with 18k sold.
Interesting considering the price of the tesla….
If nothing goes wrong, the first two-three years are practically free for an EV. Home charging costs pennies and if you're really stingy you can use free public chargers.
Then you might need a new set of tires maybe a quick maintenance at the dealership and you're good for a few years again.
Unless you also have solar panels at home and want to have the hassles of making sure your EV only charges on sunny days, you're going to be paying rates for electricity close to rates for dinosaur-fuel, especially if you're comparing to a modern 60 mpg gas car.
[0] https://www.parkers.co.uk/best-cars/most-economical-cars/
Still a hell of a lot cheaper than gas over here (coming up to 2€/litre in some places). Even diesel is over 1.8€/litre.
At 15kWh/100km consumption it'd cost me under 4€ to drive 100km on my EV. My old Prius did around 5l/100km, which would be closer to 10€/100km.
It leads to a misleading number if not averaged over the other months.
> Normally, Tesla would deliver only a handful of cars during the first 2 months of a quarter and then deliver an incredible amount of cars during the last month a quarter.
https://electrek.co/2018/06/07/tesla-sales-norway-surge-stab...
Makes little sense for Tesla to sell at low margin when they are supply constrained.