Your argument for the current quarter is that they were saved by price cuts and tax credits. Previous quarters in 2022 didn't have any of those. Even the carbon credits didn't make up the majority of the profits anymore.
Now you're making the argument that they're in a growth phase so are you really saying any quarter doesn't count no matter how well they do?
However, Tesla's EV market share has been declining and that decline will accelerate as the rest of the industry shifts more and more to EVs and Tesla’s "honeymoon period" comes to an end.
That marketshare argument is hilarious. Let's do some math.
If you outsold the entire competition cumulatively, you have >50% marketshare. Make sense, right? If you want to maintain 67% of marketshare, you have to outsell all of your competition cumulatively by 2:1. If you want to maintain 75% marketshare, you'd have to outsell 3:1 against all of your competitors. 80% marketshare, 4:1. 83% marketshare, 5:1. See where I'm getting at?
So if Tesla had 67% marketshare and Ford adds 100k capacity/quarter, Tesla would need to add 200k capacity/quarter for every 100k Ford adds just to maintain 67% marketshare. But then, say GM also added 100k capacity quarter at the same time. This means Tesla would need an additional 400k capacity/quarter to maintain 67% marketshare. That means if Ford and GM built 1 factory each, Tesla would need to build 4 factories in the same amount of time. The higher the marketshare you have, the higher the multiple needs to be to maintain the marketshare.
Declining marketshare is to be expected when Tesla had 70+% marketshare in USA IIRC. To say that Tesla is losing their 70% marketshare and therefore Tesla is in trouble is ridiculous.
The target marketshare Tesla wants IIRC is 10%-15% of all cars in the world. Short term goal would be 20 million / year by 2030.
It's still too early to tell how good of a business decision it was. Musk has stated in the past that Tesla may eventually need to go to some sort of hybrid manufacturer/franchised dealer hybrid system. With markups, price cuts, discounts, sales promotions, differing prices, added fees, increasing in store inventories, etc. Tesla has been becoming more and more like a traditional dealer over the years anyway.
i dont recall musk ever saying that. i recall musk saying they need to educate the customers more through traditional ads but not a dealership model.
edit: looks like he said it 2014
https://cleantechnica.com/2014/10/19/tesla-going-way-franchise-dealerships-elon-musk-hints-yes/
turns out they didn't go that route. there's no indication that they are still looking into this model when in fact they're going even more vertical with Tesla insurance, producing their own batteries, designing their own HD radar and inference chips, designing and building their own supercomputers, refining their own lithium, and continuing to fight dealership laws.
