"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.
The other car companies were never vertically integrated. Huge parts of their profit went to dealerships and suppliers. The suppliers and dealers often have better market valuations comparatively.
Current manufactures make almost no margin on cars and make decent margin on supply of parts.
Tesla own that whole chain end to end. As they scale up and build up a huge fleet of cars that need service that is not covered this will become a hugely profitable business.
Other car companies are buying batteries and that is almost 1/3 of the cars price. Tesla will make their own batteries. Most other car companies will buy their driving assistant tech, Tesla has it in-house.
Solar and utility storage are small markets now, but they will continue to grow and no other car manufactures has anything in that range.
Maybe Tesla will not be worth what they are now, but they deserve to be way higher then GM/Ford and so on.
"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.
You should maybe look a little bit deeper. Tesla already makes more money then Ford and GM combined, and that is simple profit. Beyond that Tesla has basically no debt and a great cash position, while the others have huge amounts of debt.
Tesla is still growing fast, has extensive self owned infrastructure in charging and service that will be very profitable and is a huge, huge asset. Tesla is competitive with European car makers in Europe, a market GM has dropped, and Ford mostly so relaying on VW MEB to stay in it at all. Tesla is competitive with car makers in China as well. GM and Ford have very little chance of even establishing their EVs seriously there. In fact the opposite, cars from China will compete with them in the US.
In the meantime the car industry has historically high level of access production capacity. Lots of old ICE and engine plants running below capacity, closing them is hard and costly. At the same time they have to do 10s of billions of new investments in new facilities.
At the same time the ICE sales are going down, lower economics of scale, access manufacturing means seriously negative margin. And that right around the time when anybody with half a brain will realize that buying and ICE car will be a bad investment and resell value will be low. This will collapse resale value of ICE cars and that impacts their financials.
Battery materials are a limiting factor already, and there is no physical way all the announced car makers plans can actually happen. Yes, mining is expanding, but not as fast as battery manufacturing and EV demand. Those companies that did not planned for this for the last 5 years will run into massive issues.
> It’s taken them a decade to get a dealer network built.
Meanwhile Ford and GM and co are literally in a war with dealerships over service. VW is literally suing its dealers and the auto lobby are launching a large scale lobbying effort to prevent the dealers lobbying effort. This could potentially cut 100s of millions away from the already thin profits of the car makers.
Literally every other car maker would kill to be in Tesla position.
> Their repairs timeline sound just as horrifying as their competitors.
Maybe be true or not, but on service, current car makers only maybe 20% of the money, the rest goes to dealers. Tesla will earn 100% of the money.
Its not well understood, but parts are a huge reason why traditional OEMs are profitable at all. Tesla meanwhile has very few old cars on the road, and many new cars under warranty. Despite that, Tesla service business is already profitable, and that is before millions of cars will go off warranty in a few years.
Again, literally every single car maker would love to be in Teslas situation.
One last point, if you insist on comparing how many cars they make. Look at the trendlines, not just a single year.
"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.
But I'm not including PHEV as those are a very different supply chain.
> the margin is not insurmountably large
Mhh sorry what?
Look at how tiny Ford is. And you have to understand that Ford was very, very late at doing battery partnership. Their battery factories are very late. So they will not scale very fast the next 3-5 years because of battery constraints.
At the same time, GM on this diagram looks way larger then it is in reality. The reason GM looks big is because of one tiny China only micro-car that yields almost no profit and will never be exported (and sales have gone down this year already). Their actual Ultium sales are barley existing.
You keep thinking these companies are so much bigger then Tesla, they are not. Ford and GM have less then 2x the revenue of Tesla. Tesla has faster growth and less debt and less aging infrastructure (they have brand new factories) and now legacy business. In terms of available capital Tesla can actually deploy far more, and raise money far more then Ford or GM.
Let me give you an example, Volkswagen. The ID.3 is comparable to the Model 3 and it came out in 2019. It was part of their MEB platform, something they had majority invested years before that. In 2018 they said they would invest 50 billion $ and have since increased that. Clearly they matched Tesla in spending for the last 8 years or so. And yet look at the chart, they have half the BEV sales of Tesla. And Volkswagen is consider very successful in the EV world.
You vastly underestimate how hard it is to transition to EV. Just because Ford, GM, Honda and so on are bigger then Tesla, does not magically mean they can just start mass producing EV. Go at actually look at how hard it is to scale, even for large companies with huge ability to invest.
> (Ford, GM) truly change
Have you looked at Ford and GM own predictions. Because you seem to have a higher opinion on these companies then they themselves have.
Ford just talked about how they would be losing money for many more years and then only just match what Tesla is doing just now.
Large companies often over promise what they can do. But you actually go beyond that and claim that they under promised and will do significantly better then they themselves believe.
Of course GM just learn a hard lessen with their initial battery factory, scaling is hard and that why Ultium had almost no sales in Q1.
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