It has also relied on the CA clean car incentives to sell the Models S and 3. One of the major factors in the current popularity of Teslas is that a lot of its competition are no longer eligible for those incentives. This is why Wall Street has been so concerned about the end of the federal incentives in 2019.
> Tesla has relied on CA ZEV credits to stay afloat at several points in its lifespan.
What are you trying to express here? I think you believe it is self explanatory, but it's not to me. Tesla took advantage of government incentives just as any other company with a similar offering could have (and did!). The original statement was that Tesla accelerated electric car deployments. CA definitely deserves a lot of credit for spurring that with incentives, but Tesla goes hand-in-hand with that. The incentives are also to encourage the market to provide good offerings in that space, which it responded and did. The reality shows that the major auto makers have been slow to respond with lackluster offerings until very recently (if even then).
(Payroll, VAT, and some other taxes do have the effect you describe. To excuse my nitpicking: that confusion over corporate taxation has a somewhat outsized effect on typical discussions of tax policy)
This is exactly backwards. Tesla was the first to use up its 200000 credits, back in July. GM is the second, in December. Everyone else has a long way to go before running out of incentives.