How can you still write nonsense like this: "Musk used massive government subsidies to produce a small number of luxury electric cars for wealthy people"?
Technically still correct even if the intent was to use the wider margins to enable growth. But more to the parent comment's point, Musk used tax credits intended to incentivize EV purchases by everyday users to inflate the prices for his cars in order to extract more value from buyers/governments.
Proven true by the fact that he had to cut pre-rebate prices after Tesla cleared the sales thresholds for the tax rebates.
Ergo, it is a factual statement to say that (1) Tesla sells a small number of (2) luxury electric cars to (3) wealthy people.
[edit] As for the government subsidies... [1]
[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-list-government-su...
Tesla delivered 310k vehicles in Q1: https://tesla-cdn.thron.com/static/IOSHZZ_TSLA_Q1_2022_Updat...
310 is 14.4% of 2148, and it implies an annualised rate of 1240k per year. Tesla production and deliveries are growing exponentially, Toyota deliveries are shrinking. Last year in Q1 toyota delivered much less compared to 2020 and while this year it’s recovering it’s still delivering 170k less cars in Q1 2022 compared to Q1 2020. Tesla just opened two new factories and this can feasibly double its capacity by next year.
In an average year, Toyota ships between 8 and 10 million cars, and has for a long time.
Tesla's year over year percentage increase in cars shipped has been trending down, of course, as they grow with the exception of last year.
However, last year, Tesla shipped 935K cars. Since it's just Q1 of 2022 I don't think it makes sense to make any extrapolations as to how many they will actually deliver this year, so let's use that number. I think that's generous given, you know, everything.
So, Tesla ships 9%-ish as many cars as Toyota.
To get from 900K to 10M per year, an 11X increase, would take:
- 27% year over year growth for 10 years.
- 30% year over year growth for 9 years.
- 35% year over year growth for 8 years.
- 40% year over year growth for 7 years.
- 50% year over year growth for 6 years.
As deliveries increase and the market is saturated growth rates will drop.
And that's to get to the same deliveries as just Toyota today (a company valued at 250B), when Tesla is valued at the sum total of the market cap of every other automaker on the planet, plus a utility company, plus the battery arm of Panasonic, plus a solar panel manufacturer.
The global auto market delivered 67M cars last year, of which Tesla accounted for 0.9M, or 1.3%. For comparison Porsche delivered 0.3M last year. Same ball park.
Even if Tesla doubled their deliveries this year and next year, they'd still sell a fairly small number of expensive electric cars to rich people. And that's a big if since right now is just about the single hottest auto market in history, and their deliveries remained flat quarter over quarter.
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/502208/tesla-quarterly-v...
A "small number of electric cars" isn't nonsense. Ford sold as many F-150s in 2021, than Tesla has sold in it's lifetime.