Tesla – Electric Vehicle Car Blog

No other carmaker comes close to matching its performance, which includes posting record revenue

Anyone who Googles the phrase “Tesla failed” is immediately inundated with the purported shortcomings of the car and clean-energy company’s zeroemission electric vehicles (EVs), workplace culture, business practices, occupational safety and, especially, its controversial CEO, Elon Musk. In times like these, it is appropriate to recall what Gertrude tells her son Hamlet in Shakespeare’s most famous play: “The lady doth protest too much, methinks.”

When it comes to Tesla, such criticism is little more than a sideshow. No other carmaker comes close to matching its performance, which includes posting record revenue each year since it began reporting financial results in 2007. With a stock market value of $659bn on Friday, Tesla is worth more than Toyota, Mercedes-Benz Group, Volkswagen, BMW, General Motors, Stellantis and Ford combined.

And while everyone thought Musk’s entanglement with Twitter would be damaging to Tesla, the results prove otherwise. Tesla is now turning every $100 of revenue into an industry-leading $26 of profit after production costs the widest gross margin since it started selling more than 50,000 cars annually in 2015.

Tesla also scores the highest profit margin among the 10 largest carmakers, providing a huge competitive advantage by allowing it to invest more money into improving its cars and developing new products than its peers.

Musk teased as much in recent weeks, saying Tesla will reveal more details about its’ s smaller, cheaper nextgeneration electric-vehicle platform at its investor day on March 1. Given the company already dominant market share in the EV industry, it’s probably a day that its competitors are dreading.

It’s little wonder that 30 analysts have a buy recommendation on Tesla, a record for the company going back to its initial public offering in 2010. The number of upgrades rose 32% last year even though Tesla’s shares plummeted 65% amid a nasty bear market for tech stocks.

TESLA ALSO SCORES THE HIGHEST PROFIT MARGIN AMONG THE 10 LARGEST CARMAKERS

The Bloomberg Recommendation Consensus Rating, which quantifies analyst forecasts, reveals that no other carmaker was so emphatically upgraded.

Perhaps the reason analysts are enamoured with Tesla is that it continually proves the doubters wrong in a business once considered impregnable. Annual sales of its flagship Model 3 sedan increased 278 times to 493,310 units in 2022 from less than 2,000 in 2017.

Deliveries of Toyota’s Prius, the industry’s benchmark hybrid vehicle, fell 66% during the same period. Sales at Chinese-based BYD, the biggest rival manufacturer of EVs, rose just 17-fold.

With every car company now selling EVs — an outcome predicted to be the demise of the California start-up that prompted global car buyers to begin rejecting the universal internal combustion engine — Tesla just two months ago was reported to be teetering from the assault of its detractors, led by short sellers Jim Chanos, David Einhorn and Andrew Left.

Scion Asset Management founder Michael Burry, who made his fortune and reputation by correctly anticipating the

sub-prime mortgage financial crisis, was among those who saw no end to the pitfalls enveloping Musk.

Too many of Tesla’s critics are focused on Musk’s antics. For them, Tesla’s success in the stock market and premium valuation despite last year’s setback is solely due to unrelenting demand from Musk’s legion of “fanboys” and the same folks who think bitcoin will still go to $1m and supplant the global financial system.

Few bothered to mention that Tesla, which lost $670bn market value last year, was still twice the value of Toyota when the short-selling bonanza and stock market carnage climaxed.

ROBUST

That’s because Tesla’s market share remains robust. With more than 3.6-million vehicles on the road, Tesla accounts for 20% of all battery-electric vehicles. In 2017, it was 13%. Who would have guessed in 2017 that a Tesla Model S would reach the coveted 1-million miles (1.6-million kilometres) driven milestone? But it happened in 2022 and may prompt an entry in Guinness World Records.

“Tesla has the most exciting product of any company on earth by a long shot,” Musk said on January 25 after the company released its quarterly earnings results.

Hyperbole? Sure, but it’s hard to argue with the results, which certainly don’t scream “Tesla failed”.

Paine published his views about EVs in the Washington Post; and who would be better to inform you about one of his –and my- favorite subjects than Chris in his own words, dispelling 5 myths about the electric version of alternative transportation.

1. The electric car is dead.

This myth is partly my fault, perpetuated by the title of my 2006 documentary, Who Killed the Electric Car? The signs back then weren’t promising. Under pressure from car companies and other lobbyists, California rolled back its Zero-Emission Vehicle mandate, which had helped get nearly 5,000 electric cars on the road. The change in the regulation freed carmakers to round up the cars they had leased — and then surreptitiously crush them.

Thankfully, it takes more than a crusher to kill a technology. Today, almost all the major automakers, along with a cast of new players, are investing in, and building, plug-in cars. California’s mandate [for zero emission vehicles] has also made a comeback, and other states are considering similar rules.

Fisker’s struggles can be attributed, in part, to the fact that start-ups in any industry have a high rate of failure, and launching a start-up in the automotive sector is especially expensive. That makes it all the more impressive that Fisker’s rival Tesla turned a quarterly profit this year.

A new report from IEE, part of the Edison Foundation, projects that between 5 million and 30 million electric cars will be on U.S. roads by 2035. “The electrification of the vehicle fleet is a foregone conclusion,” says former GM vice chairman (and former electric-car-basher) Bob Lutz.

Economics, politics and technology all played a role in the turnaround. Soaring gas prices in 2008 got everyone complaining. U.S. manufacturers, stuck with large inventories of low-mileage SUVs and facing bankruptcy, watched with envy as Toyota rode the buzz from its Prius hybrid to become the world’s No.1 carmaker. The chief executives of Detroit’s Big Three further reassessed after being chastised for flying corporate jets to congressional bailout hearings in November 2008. When they returned to Washington two weeks later, they arrived in electric hybrids. Since then, partly with the help of government loans (some already repaid), electric-car technology has made big strides.

2. Electric cars can’t get people where they need to go.

I’ve been driving electric cars for 15 years and have yet to run out of power. But ask people what their biggest hesi¬ta¬tion is about electric vehicles, and they’re most likely to say something about the cars leaving them stranded. This myth is so pervasive that General Motors applied to trademark the name for it: “range anxiety.”

A controversial New York Times test drive in February of Tesla’s Model S, which ended up needing a tow to a charging station, seemed to confirm the fear.

But that test drive — covering more than 500 miles in temperatures as low as 10 degrees [Fahrenheit] — was not your everyday trip. The average American drives fewer than 40 miles a day. That’s well within the 75-mile-plus range of most electric cars. And while batteries do run down faster in extreme cold, on a normal day Tesla’s Model S can go as far as 265 miles on a single charge.

The answer to range anxiety for many carmakers is the plug-in hybrid, an electric car with a backup gasoline engine. The Chevrolet Volt, the Toyota Prius Plug-In and the Ford C-Max Energi all use electric power for the first 20 to 50 miles (or most daily trips) and then switch to gasoline for longer drives.

To be continued tomorrow….