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Comment by boplicity | Hacker News Reader

It's easy to forget that Tesla was made possible almost exclusively through government incentives. This is something that most people seem to have forgotten: Tesla exists because the government created incentive programs that paid in cold hard cash. Musk took advantage of those programs, and Tesla absolutely would not have been nearly as successful (and likely not existed) without it.

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This is incredibly overstated. There are "incentives" for all sorts of activities. These incentives were available to all manufacturers. We should have "incentives" to produce electric vehicles and manufacturing in America. Insane not to. And these incentives are often "you would normally have to pay us X million in taxes, but we'll let you pay less". When the alternative is something not being built and no tax revenue, it makes sense. And a lot of subsidies were to buyers of EVs

> In 2019, the loss was $862 million, but for 2020 there is a huge profit of $721 million.

> However: A closer look at the figures published last week shows that Tesla is still making losses with actual sales of electric cars - around $500,000 in 2020.

> In 2020, carbon certificates brought in $1.6 billion, without this revenue the numbers would still be below red.

https://www.electrichunter.com/ev-news/tesla-makes-money-co2...

With a "profit" margin that jumpy and a history of unrentability, i think it's fair to say that Tesla only exists today because of subsidies. It's not just tax benefits, as you frame it, but in this case EU-CO2 certificates, a direct "revenue" stream.

Also available to other companies

Back then tesla was a unicorn.

Billionaires can claim child benefits too.

And Unicorns are about valuation, not money in the bank.

As much incentive as the oil & gas industry receives?

Can you say point to any other industry that hasn't used subsidies/ selling to the gov? Oil and gas, semi conductors, compute... Everyone sells and gets loans from the gov... Tesla like the least.

The government should find ways to strategically invest in developing major industries. The market for them is global and China has/will have a bigger internal market than the US, so without intentional development we'll get a continued industrial consolidation that is bad for the US and the world. I have robotic lawn mowers and vacuum cleaners made by Chinese companies partly because an intentional policy from China's government to grow these capabilities locally.

The current administration is literally cutting all those strategic investments

I think they're cutting strategic investments that they don't have personal investments in, as suggested in their banana republic handbook. They seem to be fine with fossil fuel investments for example.

I wouldn't be surprised if they start investing again once they destroy the competition and create rival companies in their stead.

Right now they seem to be swatting away wind and solar and propping up nuclear companies that are in their pocket.

The titles read like they're straight out of The Onion:

"Trump Media To Merge With Nuclear Fusion Startup"

https://oilprice.com/Alternative-Energy/Nuclear-Power/Trump-...

wtf, I missed that one. I’m really sorry for anyone living in the US but the country you knew is dead, whatever the new country is, the old rules don’t apply. It’s now closer to a 3rd world country where literally everything all the time is corruption, as a core fundamental value of the administration

the way the us govt has behaved internationally i wouldnt be surprised if countries/people actively boycott made in america.. the market for us goods and services would definitely have shrunk.

The government should give incentives to do things that benefit the future of the country. All auto manufactures had the same incentives but instead of building actual good vehicles they instead shipped more production to Mexico and continue to build the absolute most dog shit vehicles in the world.

Not a single US auto manufacturer, outside of Tesla, has a good EV, nor FSD. Waymo is buying thousands of Chinese cars because of how shit US car manufacturer are.

They are the worst of the worst. They shouldn't even be in business they are that bad at building cars which they literally invented.

This is such a braindead take. Ford could have taken advantage of those same EV incentives. Any other new startup could have too. Tesla got nothing special.

The biggest miracle of Tesla is that they somehow got liberals to argue against government incentives for electric cars

... against Alon, not EVs.

What was the incentive and was that specific to Tesla?

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