Tesla unveil Semi, new Roadster, & also teased a "pickup truck"

[aturnis]

Originally Posted by vailpass

One is a start-up struggling to stay alive who can't exist without subsidies, has massive production shortfalls, does not currently offer a single product that is price pointed for 95% of the market and whose stock value just got downgraded to 'buy'.

The other is BMW.

But other than that.

I think you're ignoring the fact that traditional OEMs spend over $50 billion per year in advertising and Tesla spends $0. Their growth has been organic to this point. I'm still shocked at how many people I come across who've never heard of them, or have, but don't know s thing about them. Tesla has a supply problem, not a demand problem. 7,000 orders last week. That's 100% of current known production capacity.

Also, Teslas products have great margins. MUCH better than industry average. They just invest >100% back into the company. The Silicon Valley model may not be for other OEMs, then again, they have fully deployed manufacturing capacity and haven't really done much innovating since electronic fuel injection.

I'll never understand the "Tesla will die" argument.

First, the tax incentives are icing, obviously not necessary given their customer bases willingness to shell out huge sums of cash for the cars. Other OEMs might have that problem as they don't offer much else beyond transportation, but Teslas will become a value proposition. 20 years ago nobody thought they'd ever spend $600-800 on a phone, or $2,000 on a TV, but here we are.

Mostly though, it's that the private investors who have already committed billions aren't going to let Tesla sink with nearly $25 billion in reservations sitting on the table. Not to mention that Tesla hasn't even begun to leverage all of its assets at this point.

Tesla also has a lower debt to equity ratio than the industry average. Ford on the other hand is nearly double average.