Tesla shares tank after U.S. discounts doubled on key models | Hacker News Reader

Tesla shares tank after U.S. discounts doubled on key models

reuters.com

96 pointswowhackernew179 comments

I just fined the Tesla share price incredible hard to justify, I know they are a growing company with big ambitions but the numbers just don't work.

Tesla:

- Market cap: $392.78 billion

- Q3 units sold: 343,000

VW Group:

- Market cap: $70.98 billion

- Q3 units sold: 2,181,300

Obviously they are slightly different companies, Tesla sell solar and battery storage products. And VW Group have brands that sell to a part of the market that Tesla hasn't entered yet.

However there is no way to look at those numbers and make it work. If you go with a market cap to sales ratio, Tesla investors and projecting sales of over 12 million per quarter to match VW...

On VW, they have nearly reached 7% BEV sales, steadily growing. And those cars are well reviewed.

Teslas "moat" is shrinking.

Vw isn’t just cars. They’re are invested in things like Siemens’ energy to be the worlds biggest producer of synthetic fuel. Vw is the big boy and toyota is the big boy in asia. Tesla is valued the same as all the other car manufacturers put together.

Their market share price is speculation from fan boys that want a poorly manufactured usb mouse to drive in that you have no way of fixing yourself or even taking to a specialist.

If you want to make some money in the next year or so, open a short position on Tesla. Not financial advise, just 2 cents from a guy that worked in the motor industry for 15 years

Tesla is priced as a volatile growing tech company, for better or worse. They aren’t priced according to current performance, but predicted future performance.

VW is a known thing, they aren’t expected to get much bigger than they are today, they might even shrink a bit.

Tesla is more of a risky bet, which is why it’s stock price is so volatile.

> If you want to make some money in the next year or so, open a short position on Tesla. Not financial advise, just 2 cents from a guy that worked in the motor industry for 15 years

Short pressure is enormous. It's not cheap to open this position.

The market can stay irrational for much longer than you are solvent.

It's not really about units sold though is it? I guess yes, usually it's a good approximation, but you could sell a single unit for $5bn and have a superior net profit.

Tesla's profit margin looks to be ~15%, whilst VW is at 3% - I'd love to know what it does to those numbers. Tesla's net income for Sept 2022 actually appears to be much higher than VW, if I am interpreting the numbers correctly.

Usually profit margins shrink as volume goes up. You can't sell that many cars into the premium segment simply because the segment doesn't support the volume.

VW sells a ton of cheap and small vehicles.

So then BMW and Mercedes:

BMW - Market cap: $58.47 billion - Q3 units sold: 587,795

Daimler - Market cap: $85.59 billion - Q3 units sold: 517,800

Isn't net profit absolute though, i.e. directly comparable between the two organisations. Long tail of cheap vehicles probably does help VW stay resilient long term (perhaps in the current economic climate / recessions).

It seems targetting volume could be detrimental to net profits under current/recent market conditions. Selling fewer, supposedly more upmarket vehicles has allowed Tesla to out perform VW.

They're simply different companies. VW is fairly broad spectrum when it comes to cars, even a Mercedes 'A' class (or a Smart for that matter) is fairly expensive compared to an entry level VW (say, an 'Up').

Tesla outperforms VW because they are riding a wave and have been very successful in maintaining their lead in BEVs. That won't last and then the likes of VW and possibly Toyota if they ever get with the times are going to eat Tesla's lunch, especially if the chief twat is going to be distracted by his new toys.

VW also owns some strictly cheaper brands like Skoda.

> VW sells a ton of cheap and small vehicles

Which inflates their unit numbers, exposes them to downturn risk, and doesn't really do much for their bottom line.

> Which inflates their unit numbers

No, they are real sales.

> exposes them to downturn risk

On the contrary, those models are the most successful ones during an economic downturn.

> and doesn't really do much for their bottom line

On the contrary, those models are the mainstay of their business.

Really, three out of three, why bother?

Real sales, yes, but this is why comparing sales by units doesn't mean very much relative to stock price.

Tesla has ~25% margins, VW has 3% margins. A recall, unsold stock or component shortages can quickly put VW in the red. This is what I mean by downturn risk, economic downturn is not the only potential problem manufacturing companies run into.

> Really, three out of three, why bother?

This level of communication isn't constructive.

Tesla has 25% margins because they are in a different segment. If Tesla sold a large number of very cheap cars they would not be able to command 25% margins. If you lop off the top portion of VW's sales and look at their margins they will be much higher than the margins on the smaller stuff. But in absolute numbers those figures certainly help and they also help to protect VWs income stream during slow years.

Their premium brands tend to be hit very hard during those years (Porsche, for instance).

> because they are in a different segment.

Yes, and this is exactly why comparing stock prices and expecting them to match units sold isn't useful.

The bigger the margins, the more room there is to be undercut from competitors. This is a fundamental property of the free market. When* it works, margins reduce.

*I say 'when' here because too many counter-examples non-functioning markets to list.

Tesla's solar division is an albatross, not an asset.

Absolutely, he bailed out his brother.

Tesla fanboys claim Tesla is a vertically integrated company competing in different markets, hence having a huge TAM and higher chance for growth.

Still!

There is something to this. If you include big chunks of Bosch, Siemens and all their other component providers in the VW market cap you would definitely get a more fair comparison to Tesla.

You can't just look at mcap but forget to factor in debt. vwgroup $402.96B

Sure, and Tesla at $33.74B.

But VWs debt is mostly due to them operating as a bank that sells loans to their customers to buy their cars. So it's more nuanced than just folding the into the calculation. Most other car manufactures don't do that directly.

Point is that in broad strokes it doesn't add up.

So Tesla's enterprise value is $426.5 billion and VW's is $473.9 billion?

Regarding the "operating as a bank", are we talking about net debt? I'd guess that if VW loaned money to customers those loans would be assets, right? They wouldn't get the cash from the customer, but they'd get something that looks about as good for their balance sheet hopefully?

The Enterprise Value calculations subtract cash from debt to determine the net debt level. Most think you should also subtract customer receivables as well. In VW's case that is about $150B. So VW's true enterprise value is closer to $300B in my opinion.

right, but they get the financing for those loans from other banks or from the bond market. they can't just make cars from thin air after all :)

Yes, VW does have about $200B in current assets and about $85B in financial services receivables, but that still leaves them with a massive chunk of "real debt" larger than their market cap.

Unfortunately the standard ratios only subtract cash from debt when doing this calculation so this calculation is one you have to do manually if you want to fairly compare car companies.

Wouldn't Price to Book (P/B) sort this out?

Tesla no longer has a moat in China- a more important market for EV than America.

As for Volkswagen the translation is "car of the people" which Tesla is assuredly not.

It never made sense. Its a hype train that will collide with reality one day.

Tesla made more money than VW selling 10 times less cars in September 2022.

Tesla sells luxury vehicles (by world standards) and there are only so many people who can afford them.

Either Tesla stops growing at this rate, or they will have to "stoop" to cars costing $15k, in which case their profit margins will drop like a rock.

So why doesn't VW just sell premium cars if it would make them more money?

VW is Audi Porsche Bentley and Lamborghini. I dont know if this ownership is reflected in the stock price of the company listed as VW. Porsche EVs have a better battery performance as measured empirically than Tesla - but they make more modest claims and outperform them, in contrast to Tesla who are essentially lying about battery performance. They are much nicer cars. Porche dealers take care of you very well. Porsche makes very good margin on their cars.

Because it would make them more money per car but not overall. And they aren't competitive in that segment with the assets they have. They would have to design different models, scale down production etc, a pivot of the company.

A better comparison is Mercedes or BMW, they're in a similar market segment and not selling 10x more cars at 1/5th the price live VW is. Still their market caps are lower than Tesla and their profits are in the same region (depends on which quarter you look at which one is ahead).

BMW and Mercedes aren't showing any real YoY growth. They have some token electric offerings, but don't seem particularly committed.

This is HN, the difference in value between a growth company and an incumbent should be at the front of our minds at all time.

> They have some token electric offerings, but don't seem particularly committed.

The Mercedes EQS achieves greater range than any Tesla in real world highway range tests:

https://insideevs.com/reviews/443791/ev-range-test-results/

So your claim is that can't Tesla can't match Mercedes' token EV offering? Why isn't Tesla showing more commitment?

Tesla doesn't match the BMW iX either. Or the Lucid Air. Or the Hummer EV:

https://insideevs.com/reviews/612030/hummer-ev-range-test/

It's like Tesla's not even trying.

That growth is only interesting for two types of companies. One software companies or similar industries where marginal costs are nearly zero, so rapid growth promises huge future profits. And two, companies that could form a monopoly out of that growth to be hugely profitable.

Tesla is neither of those things. So it's not a good long term investment, only a good short term one if the hype continues long enough and you can sell to someone else before profit realities kick in. The tricky thing is that you don't know when that will happen, could be 15 years from now, could be next month.

You haven't been paying attention to Mercedes' EVs, especially. Quick, how many models do they have?

Edit: I'll skip the suspense, they have 10 models, more than Tesla. And several more are on the way.

Because there is a lot of money to be made selling lots of a cheaper product if you can produce it profitably. Besides that dealers are typically willing to sell such smaller vehicles at or near their own purchase price counting on the recurring income for service and fleet sales of such vehicles tend to be quite profitable because there is only one signature but a very large amount of money involved.

Mercedes is a nice example of a premium brand, they make more money per car and a bit more money in total on lower volume. VW (or rather, the VAG group) is simply a different kind of company. But their profits are nothing to sneeze at.

> VW (or rather, the VAG group) is simply a different kind of company.

Exactly. Which is why comparing unit sales and expecting that to correlate to stock price is not logical.

Considering VW owns Audi, Bentley, Porche, and Lamborghini they obviously do sell upmarket cars.

I don't believe market cap to sales is a good ratio to look at when the margins are so different.

A forward P/E of 25 for a company growing 50% YoY is not unheard of.

Since you picked VW as reference, i had to look them up they have forward P/E 4.84 > trailing P/E 4.66 meaning they are shrinking (?)

While a 25 PE is not unheard of at all, they have been up on much higher levels (190+ IIRC) before this price fall.

I have seen two arguments:

1. Tesla has heavily invested in robotics. They will be able to build cars much cheaper than their competitors.

2. Tesla has long-term lithium delivery contracts. They will be able to pay far less for their batteries while the prices for their competitors will massively increase

I have not verified those claims but that would make Tesla's valuation more reasonable.

There is also the self-driving car race. Whoever wins that will take almost all profits. With Twitter, Musk doesn't look too good in the software department right now. However, if you ignore Google, then Tesla still has a chance to win.

> 1. Tesla has heavily invested in robotics. They will be able to build cars much cheaper than their competitors.

Wasn't this proven wrong a bunch of times? Especially back with the Model 3 delivery issues and the "build in a tent" thing? There was an entire period where their delivery woes were blamed on them trying to automate stuff that wasn't worth it or couldn't really be made reliable.

And by the way, if you think Toyota isn't investing in robotics and hasn't been for decades, I have a bridge in Bucharest to sell you ;-)

> 2. Tesla has long-term lithium delivery contracts. They will be able to pay far less for their batteries while the prices for their competitors will massively increase

This would be interesting to read about, do you happen to have a link?

> There is also the self-driving car race. Whoever wins that will take almost all profits. With Twitter, Musk doesn't look too good in the software department right now. However, if you ignore Google, then Tesla still has a chance to win.

Let's discount self-driving cars for the next decade when evaluating any company, I'd say. The tech just isn't there yet.

Every car manufacturer invests heavily in robotics, take a look at Magna Steyer, Toyota, and a number of the new Chinese EVs coming out

You forgot the supercharger network and the battery factories. Hardware isn't software and those moats are harder to erode, especially for something the size of, well, a car.

Musk is what we call a dummy. He could have bought GM for close to what he paid for twitter.

Bit OT but generally speaking if you care about company culture and want to build something great, acquiring mature companies is not the way to go. You end up with an alien culture you can’t integrate into your own. This is why Apple only buy companies they absolutely have to, and specifically early stage where the culture has not ossified yet.

So don’t buy GM - or Twitter…

It can be done with Twitter, the problem was that Elon got too emotional about it. Icahn was already looking forward to a proxy fight and just kicking out people without changing the product too much, but Elon buying his lots of shares was an easier way to make hundreds of millions in profit.

Only if he was willing to assume GM's $80B of long term debt. So he would have had to really pay almost 3X as much for GM as he paid for Twitter

Tesla commands a premium because the cars make fart noises.

Oh wow, I read this headline as Tesla unveiling a new tank after some sort of military discount was created. First cybertruck, now.. cybertank?

With a problematic "Full Self-Fighting" option.

Looking at current state of FSD, it'll probably end up shooting itself.

Better still than shooting other friendlies. That being said, one has to start somewhere.

A looped barrel that aims straight at the threads. The tank equivalent of a footgun. Aka TurretLoop, now for $420 at your nearest Tesla dealer, pre-orders only while stocks don't last.

The "footgun" barrel would be an excellent image for a editorial cartoon about Elan.

OTOH, making light of the all-too-real issue of friendly fire can go over poorly with older folks, those who've served, and those who've lost family members.

The notion of “share price” is something I haven’t ever really understood.

As I understand it, if four people are queueing up to buy stock A for [$10, $9, $8, $7] and four other people are in line to sell for [$10, $11, $12, $13] then the people at the front match up and swap one unit of stock for $10, and the stock exchange lists A as being last valued at $10.

Stock B’s order books have four buyers at [$10, $1, $1, $1] and four sellers as [$10, $99, $99, $99]. Again the matching buyer and seller exchange $10 for one unit of stock, the exchange shows B on its ticker for $10, and we say that company A and company B have the same value.

B’s future looks a lot more bleak. Buyers say it’s a junk stock, only worth a dollar. Sellers claim the company is way under-valued: you need the best part of a hundred dollars to convince them to give up their share.

People say these things in real life — retail investor blogs, Mad Money, fund forecasts etc. — but those are just words compared to actual buy/sell orders. Do exchanges give us insight into what their order books actually look like, instead of just quoting the last price where a buyer and seller matched?

I want this problem to be symmetric in such a way that A and B truly do have the same value, as shown by the market, but something about the $1 buy price for B feels more important than the $99 sell price. I think it’s because buyers have actual dollars — the things we need to buy food and shelter — so what they say is more important than what B’s snake-oil stock-sales people claim.

> Do exchanges give us insight into what their order books actually look like, instead of just quoting the last price where a buyer and seller matched?

They do. I haven't seen depth info past the best bid/offer (maybe exists? I'm not an expert), but I see the bid and ask prices with sizes in my broker's app in realtime. "Last price" is just one useful bit of information.

The theory behind showing the last price is that an actual matched transaction feels less likely to be "wrong" (over short periods) than bid/ask in illiquid cases. Sometimes there really just aren't people on one side ready to buy/sell, and the ”$1 $1 $1” would say something less realistic, not more.

Good question though, dunno why anyone would downvote.

> haven't seen depth info past the best bid/offer (maybe exists? I'm not an expert)

Most exchanges will provide arbitrary depth in way of a pure order feed. From that you can construct your price book, which gives you the levels of depth.

Some just expose the price book, some price book and order feed, some just order feed.

Some anonymize the order feed, some don't (I think typically in equities it's anonymized although not my asset class, but other markets e.g. power need to be de-anonymized and you can see the other buyers and sellers submissions).

However, that data doesn't represent the market price - I would look to constructing the fair price using the trades made on the exchange rather than the outstanding orders. From that you can create different lenses to view the fair price - e.g. volume weighted, time weighted, other types of averages.

There’s a few things wrong with this:

1. For anything remotely liquid, the order book won’t look like this for various reasons. 2. Except at very high frequency time scales there are more robust measures of price that are typically used: e.g. VWAP over some interval (this would be ~$10 in your example), or the clearing price of the closing auction, etc

In the short term, the exchanges tell us how popular a share is, based on hype, trades, etc.

In the long term, over several years, the stock price vaguely follows the value of a company (depending on the exchange - back in Australia you could discover "sure things" a year before the rest of the market was paying attention)

Resting liquidity far away from the best bid offer is close to meaningless. The last traded price contains almost all the relevant information from the microstructure. You can get an additional 0.03 percent notional of pricing information by looking at the what you're talking about.

The scenario you gave is very unlikely for stocks with large trading volume like TSLA. The spread is nowhere near that wide, and if it was market makers would make a profit out of that.

> I want this problem to be symmetric in such a way that A and B truly do have the same value

That is why you also have to look at volume.

Its almost like a very large shareholder knew, and despite saying they were not selling, was dumping shares the last couple of weeks on the hard core believers as quick as they could

Never let a good crisis, ehm opportunity, go wasted.

So wait, does this mean Tesla are finally making cars faster than they can sell them?

No -

The discounts are happening because of the Inflation Reduction Act that take effect in 2023. The IRA would give a $3500 tax credit for purchasing an EV, like Tesla Model Y.

It takes about ~6 months for people who order a Tesla to get it delivered. For people who ordered in June, they want the IRA tax credit so many considered cancelling or delaying taking delivery until 2023.

This Tesla incentive is to make those people take delivery in 2022 Q4 so that quarterly earnings report would smooth out, instead of dead Q4 and huge spike in Q1 2023.

Edit: my parents are taking delivery this week and are now super happy. They considered cancelling a few weeks back knowing their delivery date was 1 week before 2023.

Refs: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/tesla-offers-discount-car-mod...

I just checked their delivery date in California

If you are buying Model Y, you can have readily available inventory

If you are buying model 3, the delivery date is about a month

The demand is absolutely softening

Why would you want to maintain Q4 sales at the expense of profitability unless it is to maintain stock price though? And as it's obviously having the opposite effect there's no good reason for doing that.

1. Employees, esp the ones with more authority and up the management chain, has a lot at stake in stock compensation.

2. Having and holding inventory, while not bad, creates a whole slew of internal supply chain challenges. Unsure if Tesla as a company actually knows how to deal with that well since most of their existence has been not holding any inventory of completed vehicles. It could cause company problems that would cost way more to deal with than they have people & investment to fix it with.

Doesn't mean they didn't think it would help the stock price...

They’re also doing discounts in China, though

I guess so, but just because some sweet subsidies are coming January 1 so everyone is procrastinating orders to that date.

In practice it’s just Tesla “chipping in” a bit of the profit boost it will get next year, to avoid ruining their quarterly sales metrics.

Either way the TSLAQ crowd will have a field day with all the negative attention Musk is getting: they’re toast, they can’t sell without discounts, they’re not a carmaker but only a subsidy taker.

That may be so, but the effect on the stock price is pretty real.

Sure, also Musk’s behavior on Twitter is bringing a lot of negative press, and the fact he liquidated a ton ton of host TSLA stock to finance the operation.

But indeed markets are not exclusively driven by rational thinking, just look up “head and shoulders” in the context of stock charts. WTF is that? Horoscopes? SMH

They're a lot more rational now than a few months ago. Or are you (still) on the buying side? If so then you have more guts than me.

The whole Twitter saga has me worried about Musk's mental health. Either that or he should rename himself 'CLO' (Chief Liability Officer).

Chief Liability Office Without Nuance?

Markets aren't rational, but they also aren't stupid. if this is really just a "pre-discount" on the January subsidy, wouldn't that be priced in? It could be less informed retail investors panic selling due to Musk related news, etc. But a panic sale is a panic sale, regardless of the cause.

And, why would they need to do this if the subsidy is likely to kick in on January 1st? They're offering this major discount to increase sales in the two week period between now and the new year? From what I can see it isn't even 100% certain that they'll qualify for the $7,500 subsidy. Maybe there's something about corporate accounting or whatever that I'm not understanding here.

What is TSLAQ?

From first google result:

> TSLAQ (pronounced "Tesla Q") is a loose, international collective of largely anonymous short-sellers, skeptics, and researchers who openly criticize Tesla

The etymology is that bankrupted stocks that get pulled off the Exchange used to get a Q appended to their ticker name. https://www.investopedia.com/terms/q/q.asp

Somewhat confusing considering that Tesla Model Q is one of the rumored names for the new cheaper compact model (aka Model 2).

https://topelectricsuv.com/news/tesla/tesla-model-2-design-d...

Musk has a habit, a la Boris Johnson, of "snowing" search results that are likely to be unfavorable with his own (Johnson made a big show of repeatedly talking about "painting wine boxes to look like buses" to distract from a campaign issue about Brexit and contentious claims painted on buses).

"Did you mean Tesla Model Q?", might say Google in the future, when someone looks for Tesla Q.

https://www.wired.co.uk/article/boris-johnson-model-google-n...

I've never been particularly convinced of the whole "he says he paints buses so that the brexit bus is pushed off Google" thing. It seems like the sort of thing that sounds right, so everyone starts repeating it, but really, is there any evidence at all?

Boris will not tell, and the PR consultant - as long as they are in business - will neither. So there is no proof possible for the forseeable future.

It could be entirely coincidental but he also proposed a bridge between Northern Ireland and Scotland which was a useful distraction from his Garden Bridge which wasted somewhere in the region of £200M.

The thing has his just enough believability to make it possible and is unimportant enough to make it not worth investigating.

It's believable that some advisor thought it was a good idea to try, but also what if he did? Everyone remembers the bus thing in any case.

What does this have to do with anything sorry ? If the current price was warranted why would the price be lowered regardless of the output ?

There is an assumption that Tesla has peaked as competitors are successful in gaining market share. Rivian's successful of Amazon launch [1], Lucid is starting in Europe [2], and NIO is opening up in Europe. Is Tesla, given that scenario, really a 372B company (as of Dec 23rd) or rather a 45B company like Ford and GM?

[1]https://app.finclout.io/t/9Q2MQ8d [2]https://app.finclout.io/t/mOaRRwY

I think Tesla gifting the pickup truck market to Rivian and Ford w/ their Lightning is one of the biggest own goals in a long time.

And I think Tesla should worry less about Lucid, etc than Volkswagon working out the kinks in their id.4 (what a terrible name that is), and Toyota's revamped Prius, which looks like a very appealing bridge car that can still use gas on road trips.

I love how you're listing Rivian, Lucid, NIO, but you're completely discounting the company that has invested tens of billions of euros into an EV platform, and will invest tens of billions of euros more over the next few years.

VW.

FYI, Mercedes, BMW, Hyundai/Kia are also building huge EV platforms. I don't have sales numbers for them, but I imagine all of them are already selling tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of EVs, each.

Maybe they're not sold in the US? That would explain some of the comments here.

You are fully right. And only underlines my point.

How many of those are building charger networks?

Irrelevant the EU in their benevolent wisdom has mandated that charging networks have to be interoperable. You can use Tesla superchargers for your 20k Kia economy box.

This is great for consumers with the assumption that Tesla will still find it profitable to build out the infrastructure at all. On the other hand, Europe is a lot smaller, so maybe it doesn't matter as much.

My own country has several charging networks and Tesla isn't even the biggest. I imagine Tesla owners want to use other networks as well. I wouldn't want to buy a car that only refuels at Texaco.

https://ionity.eu/en/network/network-status

And that's just 35k out of 375k.

The US is at about 150k.

Europe's charging infrastructure is more developed than North America's. Because Europe adopted CCS Type 2 Combo as the common charging standard many companies can build out chargers:

- Ionity which has investments from auto makers: https://ionity.eu/en/ionity/who-we-are

- Circle K: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4TVohXHjLro

- GridServe: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FoN4WCpuxHY

- FastNed: https://fastnedcharging.com/en/

- BP: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zaSRn6hYOwc

- Shell: https://shellrecharge.com/en-gb/public-charging

- McDonald's: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8QXo8TuvqQI https://www.mcdonalds.com/gb/en-gb/newsroom/article/ev_rollo...

- EnBW: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NpbtgfqrYdA https://www.enbw.com/company/the-group/electric-mobility/

And so on and so forth. Europe is just a bigger EV market than North America is right now.

In the USA, everyone else but Tesla is doing CCS (they might also do whatever the leaf wants also, but usually with CCS). The problem is that Tesla has as much charging infrastructure as everyone else combined (and perhaps even more), especially out west where charging infrastructure is weaker due to less population density.

As many as have build their own petrol station network.

Someone needed to bootstrap the charging infrastructure. At some point it will be a commodity and at that point Tesla is 'just' sitting on a big asset.

Hyundai and Chinese competitors are ramping up quickly as well

I would imagine major Japanese/American manufacturers to follow suite

Tesla’s reign of EV is going to be over in next 5 years. Maybe they can differentiate more on software but it is not going to sustain their margin

I also think there is a market for less software in cars?

My phone contains all the software my car needs and it does it better than any car I’ve used.

I can also upgrade my phone without upgrading my car.

Your phone does not contain anti-lock break control, differential torque control, engine tuning control, or the huge amount of other automotive control software that's in a car. You're mistaking the user-facing software (infotainment) for the totality of the software in the car, when in reality it's a minority.

That might be true but the infotainment is a major factor in how people perceive the car.

Pretty sure Telsa’s reign is already over outside the US

Model Y is best selling car in Norway. While I agree they’re overvalued I don’t think that has happened quite yet.

Norway is a tiny market with only ~220,000 cars sold each year with the Model Y being about 18,000 of those

Considering Norway is on track for EVs to be 80% of sales yes Tesla has a significant share but it’s not dominant

A generally unfounded one as Tesla has always done discounts/pushes of various sorts at the end of quarters and especially at the end of the year.

Because the "current" price is always warranted based on supply and demand. If supply > demand, economics 101 says the price is too high.

It _could_ be good news for Tesla, in that it means they can actually sell to all of their potential customers. Being supply-side constrained is usually a bad thing for a stock’s share price.

Mind you, something’s inarguably up with the share price, even if it isn’t as simple as this discount.

_Could_ be good news, yes...if Tesla's share price was not at "assume they can still grow their market share 10X, plus enjoy 10X the industry-average per-vehicle profits indefinitely" heights.

As is - the discounts bear a disquieting resemblance to cold facts contradicting those optimistic assumption.

That's some pretty interesting mental gymnastics right there. It could be good news, but most CEOs would interpret their stock price tanking as a result of having too much inventory as bad news. And those other brands can usually sell to their dealers so they can recognize the profits, Tesla can't do that hence these consumer discounts. And it isn't the people that wait for next year that are buying Tesla at this discount either, but it is the people that bought one two weeks ago that feel screwed by this extra discount that they have foregone by supporting Tesla in what arguably must have been one of its most difficult times so far.

If I was an US taxpayer, I would be so pissed off to know that I'm paying for assholes buying a somehow luxury car and Elon getting billions in margin so that he could afford to crash twitter...

  As the U.S. government plans to introduce tax credits to spur EV demand starting in January

The US is becoming increasingly protectionist and Tesla is their crown jewel. They'll give Musk a blank check at this point because they're terrified of Chinese auto industry.

Model 3 is overpriced

As a tech worker myself I don’t want to support him at this moment either. I don’t like him for what is doing with Twitter drama.

I don't think he takes his work seriously enough. He is too busy being a dilettante when it seems like he has the talent to focus on one business and od it well. It almost feels like Tesla Motors can't be trusted as a company fundamentally just because Musk will get bored of running it.

Also looking at history and how things are going at Twitter. There might be real worry of him doing some weird pivot and then rolling it back again. Causing loss of money and trust.

Like announcing he’s taking the company private and then backing out? Something like that?

Musk has shown plenty of erratic behaviour around Tesla as well. And especially with the Twitter drama, I think Tesla might be better off without him.

He gets crazy whenever there's a crash crunch, but when it was the Model 3 ramp up period it was much harder. Now he should just do nothing and it would be better for all companies involved.

I don't understand this take.

I cannot find an EV that beats it on both range and price. I cannot find a car with similar acceleration for a similar price.

In what way is it overpriced?

> I don’t like him for what is doing with Twitter drama.

i doubt boycotting the car would change his behaviour.

That's not how boycotts work. If enough people do it you can be sure that Musk will notice, it is the cumulative effect of individual actions that are at the root of a successful boycott.

Doesn’t matter

My money my choice, it discounts the branding value for me which is previously there for Tesla. Now from a utility perspective I don’t think this car worth a premium, others are making EVs as well, and EVs actually has a lower market entrance bar than gas powered vehicles

Activist purchasing is something I will never understand. If a car is a better car for the price than anything else then you are only hurting yourself by not purchasing it. It seems like pure hatred of someone to hurt yourself to make them somehow feel worse because you don’t like them.

The car industry caught up and Tesla is no longer the best electric around. It was just a matter of time on when their valuation would tank.

No not really. Tesla massively leads in EV deliveries still. None of the other EV manufacturers have really reached high volume manufacturing yet.

That’s not true…

VW Group and MG (and some of the other Chinese companies) are all producing EV’ in significant volumes

In VW’s case it’s split across multiple brands but in 2021 they produced ~600,000 cars whereas Tesla produced ~900,000 cars

Are you including PHEVs in that number? If they’re low range in pure EV ability they’re not them the number of batteries is low.

Several Chinese companies build more. And ICE and hybrid car makers like Hyundai and Kia that are now making EVs left and right make a lot of other cars. So it's a little weird to directly compare just a subset of their business. Hyundai and Kia deliver dozens of different models to dozens of different geographic markets. They absolutely have high volume manufacturing, and there is no reason why they will suddenly struggle with producing high volumes of EVs.

>They absolutely have high volume manufacturing, and there is no reason why they will suddenly struggle with producing high volumes of EVs.

The fact that they are struggling to satisfy the demand for their electric vehicles right now is a pretty good reason to believe that.

Is it? The Kia Telluride has been selling above sticker price since it was released a few years ago. The demand is high for almost all their cars.

There was a time where I would have bought an Ioniq 5 Limited (When the credit was still applicable and my used car was worth more) but couldn't find one anywhere. I was willing to pay a mild markup (which many dealers near me where charging).

BYD

Which is the best electric around then?

I'm sure they'll be beaten at some point, but as it stands, nothing beats the model 3 on range and price. What is your metric for "best electric" here?

Only for the next week.[1]

Forget "discounts". Show me the final price as delivered with all fees and taxes included.

[1] https://www.cars.com/articles/tesla-offers-7500-discount-on-...

> Only for the next week.[1]

Is this an attempt at juicing Q4 financials? Is this normal among automakers, or is it just a short-term attempt to pump up sales numbers today, at the cost of sales in Q1? Or is this aimed at pulling in market share from competitors?

It's a used but not common practice in the North American car market. Toyotathon happens in December in order to dump old stock and increase sales during the last possible part of the year. Same with the December To Remember sales event from Toyota's luxury arm Lexus. Ford and GM don't usually engage in this unless they're axing the model anyways (Pontiac Solstice and Ford Taurus for example). Happy Honda Days is the only other one I can think of that's recurring. Mercedes-Benz and BMW are irregular with this practice, and BMW only does it with certain models when they do participate.

Do their stocks respond in a similar way?

Probably not, but since TSLA is a highly traded, and somewhat overpriced and volatile stock, it makes sense that every little piece of news will make it move.

> somewhat overpriced and volatile stock

Understatement of the century.

https://wolfstreet.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/US-Tesla-m...

Keep in mind that the stack of companies on the right makes 30-50 times more cars than Tesla.

This was from 2021 but I imagine it's not hugely different in 2022.

Hehe yes i agree fully, was a bit of a tongue in cheek statement.

Anyway their market cap now has tanked to 386B.

Likely not. It seems to be more of a supply practice in order to promote lot turnover and prevent previous model years from sitting on the lot rather than help the company's finances directly. There's a perception that if an older model year car is on the dealership lot brand new, either the model is undesirable or that specific car has a defect. Unfounded or not the brands don't want that association.

considering how regular those events are, probably not. Tesla doesn't seem to have an established "normal" yet, so it is likely to be more volatile.

Q1 sales will be great, some subsidies are coming to boost EVs. But the Q4 are driven to be somber by the subsidy start date; so they’re anticipating some of that windfall to avoid negative press, smooth operations and keep customers from slipping to competitors when demand will bounce January 1.

It's normal amongst a lot of equipment and machinery manufacturers.

It's the quarter and year end, remove "Tesla shares tank" from the headline and it'd be true for all car manufacturers. Add "Tesla" and BOOM, instant viral article.

Sales maybe tank, share prices - less so

Just another carmaker, that did software really well, instead of the others..

Tesla does software really well ? What ?

The bar for car software is pretty low. Eg https://www.theverge.com/2022/12/14/23508088/volkswagen-soft...

They usually outsourced software to the supply empire, and well, imagine software development, but in a waterfall, bureaucratic, cheapest first wins empire that is trimmed to produce one iterration per car version at best or the ocassionaly at service update.

If you want to become more agile and want to sell software as modules and updates, this quite physical seperate dependcy hell comes back to bite you. Its basically waterfall for every update.

BMW munich software department was famous for having no developers. Just specs and architects. People who were doing software developer "internships" there, were failed at some universitys cause that would have been a "NoCode" internship.

Software in this world was not a living product, thats regularly updated, its a off the shelf part made to specifications.

They tried to change in recent years, in reaction to tesla, but i highly doubt they can pull it off. Maybe in eastern europe, they have a developer/software culture.

Yeah they achieved several world firsts in AI. They're pretty good at software, although they do seem to be struggling as of late.

How high are your standards exactly?

Compared to BMW, they’re light years ahead.

There’s been 12 updates to Teslas in the last month OTA, BMW did one in 2022 and any car with iDrive 7 (their first to support OTA updates) had to be taken in to the dealer to do the update.

Also looking at the apps, sending a command through Tesla’s app is instant, meanwhile BMW’s app makes you look at a spinner for 2 minutes.

I’m sure Tesla’s likely cutting corners somewhere to get that kind of performance, but as an end user it’s a great experience.

> There’s been 12 updates to Teslas in the last month OTA

That's not something I would ever want for my car. I don't want my vehicle to be at the end of someone's CI/CD pipeline. I would much prefer say a quarterly cadence of rigorously tested, solid new releases. But, that's more expensive and harder to do, so hardly anyone's doing that anymore for non-critical software.

Counterpoint - I just want android auto.

You’re thinking only about infotainment updates, where for example recently Tesla pushed out an update that increased charging rates, allowing you to charge up quicker.

I couldn't care less about a minor charging rate increase that is so minimal that they don't even give any details about how much its increased.

I'd rather a manufacturer that actually tests and releases fully engineered products rather than winging it with constant OTA upgrades.

Tesla track record of OTA for faulty ABS calibration leading to terrible braking distances and a kludge to try and avoid a recall for faults in their HVAC implementation doesn't sell it as a benefit.

They did indicate the charging rate, it’s now up to 180 on model S/X

I don’t understand why Tesla needs to rush deliveries at the end of every quarter/year. If they need to provide incentives to meet the expectations they’ve set then the market should realize that and price it in, exactly like this, so what’s the point?

Honestly you’ve hit on one of the dumb things about equity markets. In theory, markets shouldn’t care about lumpy numbers since you can always borrow to smooth out your returns. In practice, dips and spikes see unwarranted reactions every time so firms will smooth out any figure they can, including dividends.

Markets can't realize anything, they have no sentience. The stock market is a graph of rich people's feelings, always has been. It reacts to rumors, sentiments and data, not reason.

This happens in many industries. I've worked at two companies where customers looking for a deal ordered at end of quarter.

Investors want a happy smooth graph of increasing sales every quarter, for no real logical reason.

It drives the price of most important product of Tesla, which is the TSLA stock.

Just like every publicly traded company.

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