How Tesla Fumbled
Wendover is very hit and miss in general, but this seems just totally misleading. As the video goes on he makes some bad mistakes. But mostly its just looking for evidence you want to find. He has total misunderstand of economics of car market and the EV transition.<p>I&#x27;m not really fan of Tesla, I don&#x27;t drive (trains ftw) and I generally dislike cars and I would certainty never buy a Tesla even if I needed a car. I have invested in Tesla because I thought it was a good investment. This comment is not investing advice in any way, I am just point out some issues with the video from my analysis of the car market.<p>Before addressing some of these issues raised in the video. Lets just get some basic facts down. Tesla is the largest BEV manufacture on the plant. They are the biggest consumers of batteries on the planet. They one of the most profitable car companies. And the have less debt then all the legacy manufactures.<p>Tesla has grown fast every single quarter for many, many years now. During the Pandemic and chip shortage they grew. And not only did they grow, the retired debt, increase cash position and made major investments for future growth. Some of the worlds largest EV manufacturing facilities are still in the ramp and Tesla is very, very like to continue growing for quite a while yet. Tesla Semi in Nevada will be another major product that is also ramping.<p>So to say that a company who even in 2017 was seen a tiny upstart that would get &#x27;crushed&#x27; when the legacy manufactures finally started moving on EVs. Bob Lutz from GM basically declared them dead and called EVs a &#x27;bad&#x27; business. This was literally 5-6 years ago, that these thoughts were prevalent.<p>Here their revenue growth, and profit of course grew far better:<p>&gt; Tesla&#x27;s revenue growth for fiscal years ending December 2018 to 2022 averaged 49.5%.<p>To claim that such a company &#x27;Fumbled it&#x27; requires really strong evidence, but the video doesn&#x27;t really provide it at all.<p>Please show me a historical comparison where a manufacturing company grew faster (outside of war). There might be few, but not many.<p>The points raised:<p>----------------------------------------<p>- Quality issue<p>Beyond the &#x27;this is what I saw when I googled&#x27; nonsense. This is the most valid point raised, and even then it isn&#x27;t great.<p>The only quantitative analysis was one consumer report. In that report Tesla didn&#x27;t to great but many other of the supposedly luxury manufactures weren&#x27;t much better. In fact some of those that did the best were just old cars that were in production for a decades mostly unchained. I believe if I remember correctly Jeep was on top.<p>Further, this was a US only report, testing cars from one plant and that was also already a while ago. Generally we get less reports of such issues reported from the plant in China and Berlin.<p>If you want to tell me that this is really a systematic large scale issue, please show me some better data. If their cars were so bad and they have to fix so many things, why is their service business not a huge cashleak?<p>----------------------------------------<p>- Deliver issue<p>- Service issue<p>Service and Deliveries, these are signs of success. A company that is growing so fast its almost practically impossible to scale those things as fast. Opening Service centers, building supercharges and distribution centers is hard, they require local politics and a lot of people all over the world. Tesla has been ramping all of these things very, very fast just not quite as fast as their cars.<p>Lets look at the numbers yearly numbers up to last year:<p>Store and service locations      378    433    523    644    764
Mobile service fleet(2)          411    758    894  1,281  1,584
Supercharger stations          1,421  1,821  2,564  3,476  4,678 
Supercharger connectors       12,002 16,104 23,277 31,498 42,419<p>How much faster realistically could they have grown these things? They are clearly trying to grow all these things quickly on all of these have accelerating growth. Maybe had they really pushed and focus they could have done a little better. But then again nobody else in the world is close to having a mobile service fleet that large or a supercharger netwrok.<p>And to explain how wrong this is in more detail, having to relay on Dealers and 3rd party service is a huge benefit for Tesla. And literally ever car company in the world to kill to have it. People who don&#x27;t know the car industry don&#x27;t understand this, dealers make a lot of money that not going to car companies. Car companies already make a large share of their profits on service parts (without most of them couldn&#x27;t survive) and would make even more if they had control over it. Basically most car companies are basically copying Tesla and is fighting its dealers.<p>Telsa had to do Service under warranty as a lose, and only last year that Service finally was not below zero. As increasingly more Teslas come of warranty, this former weakness of Tesla will turn into a hugely profitable business of its own. That it is already profitable despite there being so few old Tesla on the road is actually remarkable.