https://companiesmarketcap.com/automakers/largest-automakers...
Tesla PE is 50x, and Toyota PE is 10x.
Purely on the basis of earnings: If Tesla can 5x their sales (in a rapidly expanding market) while maintaining some of their pricing power, they'll be comparable to Toyota purely on the basis of multiples. The sales needn't come exclusively from automobiles either... And then there's equity-to-debt: Tesla has $3B USD in net debt; Toyota has $153B USD in net debt -- i.e. Toyota's enterprise value would be significantly higher if they had Tesla's debt load.
Margins are not going to hold for Tesla. They had the privilege of being the only strong EV vehicle on the market. Those days are gone. They had a certain cache as a luxury-ideal brand; that's been deeply eroded by a reputation for iffy finish quality and a certain high-profile personality's choices. And if their falling prices are any indication, Tesla knows that its high margin days are numbered if not outright over, and they're headed towards being just another manufacturer.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Tesla,_Inc.#Timelin... (growth)
Not saying that's gonna happen with Tesla, I'm not making that bet, but who's to say how it will turn out they could drive outsized margin from their peers with some mix of brand (not that Elon's been helping lately), differentiators and software add-on. In an industry where revenues are very high and margins very competitive (low), each percent of margin gained is really meaningful.
They aren't vertically integrated to the same extend as a producer, explorer, refiner and distributor of oil such as Exxon.
Super chargers are dispensers. They get the electricity from somewhere else. And they most of the time don't own the land the dispensers are built on either.
https://insideevs.com/news/318545/tech-crunch-what-it-takes-...
Toyota's US market share for all autos is around 15%.
So I don't think this data point says much about whether Tesla will end up with a larger slice of the pie than Toyota currently has, at least in the US.
That's what people are betting on. Not just that Tesla will beat Toyota in electric cars.
While valued at 3x. The valuation still doesn't add up, though the debt issue is a decent point.
> It matters how much profit you make and TSLA has the highest margins on EVs of any company.
They've certainly enjoyed high margins while they were the primary game in EV town. But they're not anymore, and it remains to be seen what distinguishing features will let them command high margins in a newly competitive market. The slashed prices seem to indicate they're not sure they can do this either.
> Toyota is way behind EVs
Toyota had EVs on the road before TSLA was founded. They didn't focus on the hybrid game because they couldn't do it. They did it because they understood hybrids would (and did) dominate practical concerns during a transition period, and they were rewarded pretty strongly for that bet up through 2020 given that market's greater size than straight EVs through that time and their majority ownership of that market. They'll handle the shift to EV emphasis just fine. By somewhere around 2030 they'll probably be selling more EVs than TSLA and likely with similar margins but more effective manufacturing because they're very, very good at that.
My statement that Toyota had EVs on the road before Tesla was born is not based on any degree of confusion between hybrids and EVs.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toyota_RAV4_EV
You can argue about specific capabilities, you could even argue about what it means that Toyota worked with Tesla on models in the 2010s. But whatever you think of Toyota's strategy since 1997, it was a choice, not a lack of capability, not ignoring the capacities of pure EV tech.
As for whether they "screwed up," well, hybrids proved to be pretty popular, probably around twice as many of them sold as EVs through 2020ish, and Toyota dominated if not outright made that market. Even if hybrids eventually decline, that kind of win over two decades is something most businesses would take gladly, and my bet would be that hybrids will remain a non-trivial portion of the market even as EVs grow. There's going to be markets/applications where charging is inconvenient or unreliable for a while yet.
Meanwhile, since (a) pure EVs are easier from an engineering standpoint and (b) Toyota has been making investments in the fundamental tech and engineering capacity for 25 years and (c) they're over a decade into plug-in hybrid territory (where the difference between hybrids and EVs gets especially narrow) and (d) their public roadmap has them ramping up ... I don't think the game they're playing is best described as "catch up" so much as "good timing."
But hey, you want to bet on Tesla, be my guest. I thought it was a good bet myself 12 years ago, not sorry. Less so since 2020.
And if you wanted to support some not-complicated just-wrong point, you should have picked something else, because Hollis is correct about many of their points in that article. Definitely regarding practical concerns surrounding refueling for many use cases / markets on a 2019-2024 horizon. And the author's closing paragraph where he basically insists the charge-at-night what-else-is-there-to-think-about use profile fixes all concerns makes him look as narrow as someone insisting fuel cells really should be taking off now any day now.
Hollis's statements about EV demand are also essentially correct circa 2019. "No demand" overstates the point, but he's entirely accurate for his market when he says "demand for electric is less than it is on hybrid." 2018 and 2019 were the first years EVs really started to look competitive domestically and they were still lagging hybrid sales substantially (we're only now getting to the point where EVs sold are basically at parity with hybrids).
And even there he's openly saying EVs are part of their roadmap but that they intend to follow demand, not try to lead it.
If there's something Toyota was wrong about demonstrated by the article, it was their bet they could lead the market to pick up on the advantages of fuel cells like they led the market to gas-electric hybrids. I'm not even sure they were wrong about the advantages, but clearly they weren't able get the market to follow them.
If that's what "they just got this one wrong, it's not complicated" really looks like to you, tell me some more areas in which I can bet against you.