Tesla cuts prices on electric vehicles for U.S. market | Hacker News Reader

Tesla cuts prices on electric vehicles for U.S. market

reuters.com

30 pointsVagueMag17 comments

Ford dramatically raises prices on the F-150 Lightning while Tesla lowers prices and electric cars are hard to get.

If your product category is doing incredibly well and you have to lower your prices, something has gone terribly wrong.

F-150 Lightning prices have increased three times since it was launched. In May of 2021, a “stripped out” Pro trim was $39,974. As of December 2022 they are $55,974 before destination and other “out the door” charges excluding sales tax. Granted, all trim levels have increased, but the “base, more accessible model” went up 40% in 19 months. It’s nuts!

Granted, they can’t build those things fast enough. It wouldn’t surprise me if there’s was a healthy ADM up until recently, if not still. I’m around the Boston area and there’s a few near me that are owned either by people who absolutely do use them for work, or larger contracting firms that actually are using them as their fleet vehicles.

This new price cut makes the new $7500 "inflation reduction"(lol) federal tax credit effective for at least the model Y, maybe other models too. So that may play a role - Tesla cut the price $10k but it really is more like an $18k price cut.

Also, keep in mind Tesla raised prices multiple times over the past couple years - the Y started out at $48k (I think) and made it up to $62k, and is now back down to $52k. I always assumed they just raised the prices because of the hot/weird COVID car market.

Is the hot/weird Covid car market doing better by now?

>Is the hot/weird Covid car market doing better by now?

Not really, at least in Canada.

I've been shopping for a compact commuter for a couple of months. I'll use my Honda experience as an example: late model (2019-2021) are selling for the price of brand new Civics. However, you can't get a new Civic, since the local dealership is getting a trickle at unknown cadence. My dealer said they are getting FOUR this quarter, and they were already spoken for.

I had similar experience at Hyundai, and the Toyota lot has nothing. It's still wild. Meanwhile, financing rates are over 8% on used cars, with stellar credit.

In the US, I only had luck with Kia. I don't know why, but I found Kia dealerships in the area where I bought my car (Sacramento) for MSRP. Actually managed to negotiate a good price without the BS dealership markup and silly add-ons.

I don't know if its an anomaly or not, I may have just gotten extremely lucky after looking for over a year, and it was only with Kia and their Soul model, not any other line.

That’s also my impression. Delivery times of more than a year are not uncommon. Tesla seem to be doing a few things right though

I totally understand why you would "lol" at the idea of a tax credit lessening inflation. However, in this case it did actually cause a car company to reduce prices, so it's probably the biggest counterexample I've ever seen.

Teslas are very expensive in general and especially for what they are, and no longer the only EV in town. I think they might be getting to saturation in the market segment they have been targeting so far.

You think competition instead of monopoly is something going terribly wrong?

It's a matter of perspective. For the consumer and the economy as a whole competition is of course a good thing. GPs comment was something has gone terribly wrong from the perspective of Tesla. From their perspective of course they would prefer to maintain a monopoly rather than have competition.

No. What a strange reading of what I wrote.

It's something going wrong with Tesla. Obviously I love lower prices like any other consumer.

Or maybe we've finally found the approximate level of EV demand for >60k cars in the US during a recession. Tesla produces a lot more EVs than Ford does.

Having said that, other EVs are starting to show up in inventory more often too. I think the ID.4 is getting much easier to find now, and tbh this move will likely make the Mach-E really easy to find.

Interestingly this brings down model 3 prices back down to 2019 levels. This is not going to help the battered down stock (https://markets.sh/symbols/NASDAQ:TSLA)

Marginally speaking it seems it did. Not notable perhaps, but it didn't sink it.

TSLA down ~6% pre-market, maybe not "sinking it" but certainly down on the news.

Not just U.S., all over Europe too. In my country for example this means the LR variants qualify for incentives (4500€) again.

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