On the other hand, Tesla's accounting only figures on spending a few hundred dollars per car to pay for free, unlimited SuperCharger access for the lifetime of the car. Which is frankly absurd. You put a free, unlimited SuperCharger in somebody's backyard and of course they're going to use the heck out of it; it's like getting paid $15/hr to read the internet or a book or whatever else you do while charging. That's free money.
At 22% profit without credits that means with credits they're making say at least $40k profit per car sold. This is like 1/4 year of sales... but they need ever more money, now? Why? Maybe Model X reservations are cannibalizing S sales? Or they need to throw money at 3 because the competition is going to have an equivalent car out sooner? Or so battery factory comes online before LG Chem's new production?
This doesn't add up for me. It seems to me either their accounting is not accurate or they are seriously far behind the competition.
Tesla charges $2,000 for lifetime supercharger access. I don't think screwing that up is going to cause them big financial problems: it's just not that much money, and they can always raise the price for future buyers.
Help me out here, 2014 Q3 says $21.9m deferred for SuperCharger electricity minus $10.3m as of previous year, so they deferred $11.6m from 2014 sales of ~22,000 cars. That's ~$500/car accounted for the lifetime SuperCharger costs. Tell me where I'm wrong.
At $10 a charge (12 cent kWh) that's 50 charges per car for its lifetime. That seems like a pretty low estimate to me on number of charges, especially as the network expands.
The difference to your $2000 works out to $33m (more for the full year). That seems like a significant amount to me.
At 22% profit without credits that means with credits they're making say at least $40k profit per car sold. This is like 1/4 year of sales... but they need ever more money, now? Why? Maybe Model X reservations are cannibalizing S sales? Or they need to throw money at 3 because the competition is going to have an equivalent car out sooner? Or so battery factory comes online before LG Chem's new production?
This doesn't add up for me. It seems to me either their accounting is not accurate or they are seriously far behind the competition.