Am I the only one who thinks $35,000 is not at all a bargain?

Here's my problem: In 2012, I bought a 2009 Subaru Impreza with 9000 miles on it. It currently has 57,000 miles on it. In another five years MAYBE it will have 100,000 miles on it. It was paid for in cash on day one, like $10,000 or something. I don't see how I am going to pay hundreds of dollars a month to finance a vehicle that might save me 50-$100 on gas?

Look I want to transition to electricity, it's way easier and makes auto design a lot simpler. no oil changes, etc. But so little of my budget is spent on autos it just doesn't make sense. We are a one car, no commute family.

Also I agree with the other sentiments here. I think Tesla is in big trouble if the lending markets are less friendly than they are now.

Yes, although when I was in my 20s I had a 2003 Subaru Impreza WRX that I got brand new. It was my first and last brand new car. It was fast as hell. But my priorities are different; I can't afford all the toys, I'd rather have a basement full of pinball than a fast car.

How did he NOT gain? Isn’t he like 20% owner of Tesla? Doesn’t his job performance hinge on stock price? If he said something to raise the stock price that wasn’t true, isn’t that a fraudulent attempt to raise the stock price?

@rubberducks has this one on the nose. Tesla needs a high stock price when the loans come due so they can pay the loans back in Tesla stock and not cash. That’s why they haven’t sold more stock to raise money even though they continue to burn cash.

When you load a company up with debt, bad things happen. (Radio shack, toys R us, etc). And this whole “you gotta lose money to make money” thing is not an unwritten business rule. It’s a new thing, applies only to a tiny amount of companies, and almost all those companies are losing that money to gain monopoly market share. (Uber and Amazon). Tesla is still a tiny company and it doesn’t matter how many cars they sell if they aren’t profitable.

Doesn’t matter what amount of dollars he’s selling cars if it costs him more to make the cars than the cars sell for.

I work for a company started with cash, and who bootstrapped their sales and grew through zero debt.

Can we stop with this comparison? It’s plain wrong. Sears was in trouble back in the 90s. They managed a so-so turnaround up until 2003 when they bought K-mart; but no one believed sears was going to eat everyone’s lunch. Sears had its lunch first and foremost eaten by big box stores who had way better real estate deals and who used volume to crush prices. However, Sears did have a pretty successful web business relative to the big box stores; they even had the amazon affiliate style sellers too. They just failed to execute, mostly because their CEO Eddie lampert was more interested in strip mining Sears assets to benefit his hedge fund, not actually running a successful retail operation. Having formerly worked at Sears, and also knowing a ton about e-commerce post the dotcom bubble, this whole “everyone thought sears was gonna win” argument is BS. No one predicted Amazons success because no one ever tried the whole “sell things at a loss and don’t worry about the bottom line” strategy. Turns out, Sears being such an established brand worked WAY against them. Basically since 1999 investors have preferred to give their money to new companies, not old ones, exactly because they’re new (and because interest rates are so low which means investors chased yield on risky startups rather than invest in stodgy old sears.)

Kodak is another example. Kodak was actually very early to the digital camera game. Actually slightly too early. Their digital cameras were good and came with a decent set of software for new users. Problem is, digital cameras are not like film because you only sell digital cameras once, versus selling a camera then selling film and accessories and developing and everything else. Kodak was a SERVICES company. Digital cameras killed the need for the service. Once that happened it’s a race to the bottom for margins against knockoffs and cheap imitators (which is why GoPro is also doomed, despite making a great product).

What got those companies in trouble was a global economic slowdown and massive financialization. GM was a derivatives/finance/loan company with a car division at that point.

Ford got caught with its pants down worse in the earlier dot com era crash, which was preceded by ultra low gas prices which lead to everyone and their mom buying ford expeditions and excursions and other ridiculous vehicles. It was better positioned in 2008, but still suffered.

Shutting down small car development is simply Ford and others doing a calculation: they believe they cannot make profitable cars with the new EPA regulations and they don’t believe they can squeeze margins enough. They don’t really buy the electric story. I don’t know if that’s a gaffe or not. But unlike Tesla they can’t go on a multi year money-losing binge to do the R&D to convert 100% to electric. The market doesn’t reward the existing, stable businesses. Everyone is all in on “disrupters”, regardless of whtether their business models will ever be profitable. It’s IMHO a side effect of ultra low interest rates since 2008 (yes even today’s rates are obscenely low by historical standards). No one wants to invest slowly in proven businesses, everyone wants huge multiple growth.

Looks like unfortunately Telsa is doing workforce cuts. As much as I dislike Elon Musk, I always sympathize with anyone losing a job.
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/01/18/elon-musk-tesla-email-to-employees-about-job-cuts.html

We're picking up our 2019 Subaru Forester this week. I'm not a Tesla booster but did want to stop by and mention the things that came up in our buying decision:

Fuel efficiency continues to get better. I'm replacing a 2009 Subaru Impreza sedan, which gets 21/27, with a larger 2019 SUV which gets 26/33. Obviously, burning fossil fuels is a shitty thing, so the less we can burn, the better. Considering an EV, obviously EV's win as far as environmental concerns but to get a better, safer car and to have it use significantly less fuel softens the ICE guilt.

We are a one-car family so the car has to do everything; we went with an SUV for pinball moving and maybe light towing, but also good fuel efficiency for daily driving. We are a low-low-low miles family (wife works 1 mile away, I work from home). If I were a single dude, I might not have opted for the SUV, and just rented a truck when I needed to move games. I just didn't see an EV SUV reasonably priced that has this kind of versatility.

We live in New England and get an average amount of snow, so full-time AWD is a big blessing, and it's standard on all Subarus.

This will be my third Subaru. they're super safe and reliable, and i'm very confident in repair parts sourcing and the company honoring its warantee since they'll be around in the future IMHO.

Cost is obviously a huge factor. Our SUV will be $28,000 minus the trade in. None of the EVs on the road can really touch that price, and many EVs have these small but real costs outside of MSRP (home-charger install, for instance). Maintenance and fuel are more expensive in an ICE but balance that out with the low miles and the EVs just require a lot more up-front money (which would be financed, and I hate borrowing money so the less I borrow the better). If Subaru had an EV trim level in the Forester, and say that was top of the line at $35K or $40K, then maybe we would have to really think about it.

This isn't a troll, its literally my brain's justification for continuing to go ICE. I am hoping that in 5 years time I am trading my Forester in for an electric Forester.

Does that count against the P&L statements quarterly? I mean, its not like when they took the bond money out, they recorded $900 million in 'profits', so paying back debt should not count towards their quarterly loss. Debt service is certainly an expense but I don't think debt repayment is. I'm not 100% sure on this though.

https://www.accountingcoach.com/blog/principal-payment-financial-statement

Even if it did, wouldn't they amortize the amount over time?

How many other drivers will he take with him?

Because they took it in trade? Or because Tesla is hiring out a contractor to move the vehicles, and that contractor is hauling cargo from two different customers?

Is it sci-fi's fault? Or a deliberately bad marketing effort on Tesla's part. It's called autopilot for crying out loud, its name practically implies you can treat it like airplane autopilot when that is clearly not the case. Doesn't help that Musk keeps saying the cars are going to drive themselves 100% any day now, and adding features like 'summon' where the car is driving itself without a driver behind the wheel. Completely irresponsible.

That's one argument. Another might be that the USA has provided crazy tax credits to Tesla, that it hasn't offered to other manufacturers.

Right now Telsa buyers get a tax credit essentially lowering the final cost of the car.

Tesla also gets transferrable tax credits that it sells to other businesses from states because they built factories in Nevada.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/taxanalysts/2016/07/08/tesla-and-cash-for-credits-the-world-of-transferable-tax-credits/#1318f88465b9

Telsa also sells Zero Emission Vehicle credits. States like CA require manufacturers to buy these credits to offset their sales of non-ZEV cars.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/greatspeculations/2017/09/01/teslas-lucrative-zev-credits-may-not-be-sustainable/#404d78696ed5

Tesla also has received a $750 million factory from New York State.
https://buffalonews.com/2018/08/01/for-tesla-the-clock-is-ticking-to-bring-jobs-to-buffalo/

Tesla may be the most subsidized private company in the history of modern US capitalism. I think given that Tesla does not operate any Canadian factories and contributes only sales of Tesla vehicles, why would Canada offer Tesla tax credits? They'd be sponsoring competition to brands that operate factories and provide jobs in Canada
https://www.ic.gc.ca/eic/site/auto-auto.nsf/eng/am00767.html

Who is making it hard for Tesla? Tesla received state and federal tax credits larger than I think any other company has. 1.5 billion dollars in EV tax credits from the federal government's tax program alone.

I get that its hard to manufacture in the USA (which is why I have lots of respect for Stern for keeping the jobs here, and Spooky, for starting up in a very difficult business). But I don't think you can say Tesla hasn't had every advantage here in the USA. They've been around since 2003, been public since 2010, and posted two quarters of profit in that time. That profit during those quarters was lower than the subsidies the company received through purchase tax rebates and ZEV tax credits sold to other businesses during those quarters. I don't think its 'making it hard' for Tesla to point out that despite record subsidies they still aren't profitable. And it's fair IMHO to question whether a luxury car brand is the right place to spend those subsidized dollars. I want to see US businesses succeed but not if they're never going to be profitable on their own.

I mean, its probably way off topic but I'm not against subsidies in general. I am a fan of local initiatives which attempt to foster small business creation through grants (think: people who want to open restaurants or auto repair places in their local neighborhood but lack the capital to outfit a commercial kitchen in a rented space or the money to install a car lift). But IMHO Tesla has taken enough public subsidy. I think its fair to say if you haven't made money in 15 years of being in business you probably aren't ever going to make money.

I mean that’s bad news for Tesla if they are still losing money on every car delivered. Tesla needs to turn around it’s margins and get profitable. It’s been 16 years since they were founded; they should be profitable. It’s not clear to me why they are still losing so much money despite their factories already having been built... unless they are just fundamentally too expensive parts or labor wise to make.

They’ve supplemented their losses by selling pollution credits. If GM and others sell enough EVs such that they don’t need to buy those credits from Tesla, Tesla’s losses would skyrocket.

I’m so glad all these other drivers of regular cars get to unwillingly participate in a “beta” test of car software that might get them killed. This is the most fucked up thing I’ve ever seen. The NHTSA has really dropped the ball by allowing these unreviewed over the air updates and beta tests on live roads.