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Comment by elisharobinson | Hacker News Reader

"carmaker" != "electric carmaker" , all other carmakers DO NOT make profitable EV's and require heavy subsidies to be in parity. Tesla has better margins because it is vertically integrated . Apple will NEVER make a car , cars require a totally different supply chain not as simple as moving a low mass objects like phones and PC's , ie cant move them multiple times across different continents. other car makers will have to make significant investments while having losses and being dependent on ICE to break even all the while EV's grow and the ICE mkt share reduces (less profits) . They will probably never catch tesla in building a tech platform "infotainment" , how long would it take for any other car maker to ship steam games and have 60 fps gaming on the car.

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Tesla earned 5.5 billion on 54 billion in sales in 2021. 1.5 billion of that was in air pollution credits Tesla sells to other carmakers, meaning they earned about a 8% margin on the car business. You could definitely argue that Tesla is only profitable because of government price supports.

they have grown production capacity yoy of >50% , 2021 was a heavy capex year. tesla makes > 30% margin on each car sold.

>how long would it take for any other car maker to ship steam games and have 60 fps gaming on the car.

I'm still young, but hearing about this kind of feature makes me feel like a luddite. I just don't get it. Is it so passengers can play while you're driving, or just to play while the car is charging/you're waiting somewhere?

Yeah, it's entertainment for passing the time while charging. Tesla has long had Hulu, Disney+, Netflix, etc. apps in their cars for this reason, along with a number of games.

It's pretty neat. It's really cool to go car camping and effectively have a portable mini-theater come with you.

isn't tesla heavily subsidized via carbon credits?

"carbon credit" != "tax credit"

carbon credit: EU law fines ICE car makers for making cars. they inturn purchase carbon credits to have the right to keep polluting. further more tesla made 53 B$ in rev for 2021. 1.5B is not nothing but not > 5% of revenue for the year. ie bulk of it came from actually making and selling cars.

tax credit: the US federal govt had a tax credit program which was lobbied by GM in the 2010's that gave car buyers 7.5K as a tax write off . this was only eligible for less than 100k cars sold (tesla sold 405,300 in q4 2022) and was only useful if you made enough income where a tax writeoff made sense. 2023 new laws are in place with more rules which makes them almost useless (or only useful for those who lobbied for it).

We don't talk about Bruno.

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