Technology

Things at tesla are not as bad as they should be.

This is a big fact almost no one speaks of. Tesla has only ever been profitable by manipulating the carbon footprint regulations and selling Ford and GMC carbon credits. Not a single tesla vehicle has ever been profitable as an actual vehicle. You know, the product they claim to be selling. The real product is pollution hiding. N ot correcting, not fixing, not even slowing pollution. No, its a shell game. Tesla is making money by shifting the blame of pollution for profit. Oh, they build vehicles also.

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Its profits are plunging, as is its share price.

Looks at share price: Up 10% in the last month....

I'm always happy to see bad news for Tesla (and by extension, Elon), but they've survived so much despite their mismanagement it feels like we'll never be rid of them.

It was only able to post a $409 million profit in the quarter thanks to the sale of $595 million worth of regulatory credits to other automakers.

Without the regulatory credits, and capital gains Tesla would be $500 million in the red.
And sales continue to drop in all markets. Tesla is no longer competitive in China and EU, only in USA due to tariffs on cars.
A couple of years ago Tesla boasted the highest margins in the industry on their cars, now they are so low, that if prices continue to drop, Tesla will soon be at s deficit on every car sold if they try to follow, or if they don't reduce prices, their cars will simply be too expensive. Damned if you do, damned if you don't.

The interesting thing is, Tesla is perhaps the most obvious and extreme example, but they’re not the only auto manufacturer this is happening to right now. Nissan is in a bit of a tail spin as well.

There are so many problems slamming in to the auto industry right now. Even beyond the tariff instability.

In the US in particular, As cars have gotten more reliable and longer lasting, the market for new “budget” cars has dried up. Car buyers who might have once bought budget are now buying used cars that probably have a good many years left. The sales of new cars have been declining since 2016 but new car price have been skyrocketing, keeping up revenue growth for automakers.

This seemed ideal for automakers as it meant they could drop the lean margins of cheap cars and focus on higher margin markets, which looked much better to shareholders. Those companies that focused on this budget market have suffered, the best example being Nissan. The ideal for automakers is that people will buy “up” the value chain over time, buying higher end or “less used” vehicles when they trade in their old vehicle, going from a twice used, to a once used and eventually to a new car.

This kind of came to a head during the pandemic. Not only was the supply of lower end used vehicles dwindling as less and less entered the market due to less being made a few years back, there was also a shortage of new cars due to supply chain break downs and an increase in demand. Many people were taking out insane financing on massively over priced cars, both new and used. Now a lot of people are underwater on those auto loans from the pandemic because the trade-in/sales price is less way than what they have left on the loan. Many are also defaulting on those insane pandemic auto loans and their repossessed cars are ending up back on the market, increasing supply in the used market.

Many who are underwater on their auto loans but can still make payments can’t afford to make even larger payments, so rolling over the principle from the last loan into a new loan on another car is impractical. So they aren’t buying, let alone moving up the market to buy new or higher end. The demand being suppressed in the used market and the supply being bolstered by repos means used prices are massively depressed. This depressed used market carries over to the new market in turn, as most people buying new probably couldn’t afford to do so without trading in their old car, so a depressed used market hurts their purchasing power. Why would someone buy a new car when the only new one the could afford is probably worse than the existing car.

Tesla is getting a lot of focus because of the political entanglement of their high profile CEO, but the whole industry is under strain. Nissan is frantically looking for buyers to help them out of the debt hole they’re in, and groups like Stellantis (owners of Chrysler, Fiat, Jeep, Ram and Dodge) are desperately chasing new revenue streams as absurd as ads in the central console.

It also wants to end the right of California and eight other states to demand tougher emissions regulations than the federal standards that would ban the sale of gasoline-powered vehicles by 2035. Without tough emissions rules at the federal and state level, there would be no regulatory credit sales.

The sale of those federal and state credits has been quite lucrative for Tesla, bringing in $8.4 billion in revenue since the start of 2021 alone, money that basically went straight to its bottom line.

Is this the greenwashing scam companies use to pretend that they are working toward a carbon-neutral production line? They're just speculating on future production and selling today's emissions to today's buyers on tomorrow's promise?

How fucked.

An Enron-like Tesla documentary is coming.

Good.

Good riddance. Nazis dont deserve to be rewarded. They deserve the worse of the worse.

Funniest thing about Tesla was the idea they'd make evs more economical and realible after starting in the luxury space. They did exactly the opposite and now shareholders are paying dearly.

At this point of negative journalism, any company that didn't choose to bend the knee to Trump's lunacy would have been denied. The right hates electric vehicles. The right hates these pesky journalists. The right says they're clever enough to see a grifter. However, when an electric car company run by an un-qualified rich boy from South Afrika utilises the media to inflate their numbers so they can sell more electric cars to the people they betrayed (not their "new customers", they won't buy into electric because of their personal politics) it's all "why have trans people existed for so long?"

Monkeys amongst apes.

Weren’t they selling like 3000 cars a day at every single dealership in Canada? Seems like sales should be fine.

Funny how now they are making money selling regulatory credits. Lol