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A comment on Tesla Posts Big Quarterly Loss as Its Electric-Car Sales Lag. Parent comment

Re:Tesla Posts Big Quarterly Loss as Its Electric-Car Sales Lag by sokoloff on Thursday April 25, 2019 @07:47AM (#19747040)
When considering whether a fleet of cars has been profitable, you can’t consider only the gross margin (which excludes certain company fixed costs to arrive at an answer to “was that last car we made profitable?”) but must also consider overall profitability (“did we make money doing all of the things we did?”)

Tesla’s answer to the second is “no” for substantially all of the company history.

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Re:Tesla Posts Big Quarterly Loss as Its Electric-Car Sales Lag by sliken on Thursday April 25, 2019 @08:09AM (#19747181)
Agreed. The are using gross margin to fuel crazy growth. Much like Amazon. Tesla went from 0 2012 to #1 in 2018 in the premium segment.

Certainly looks like if they stopped expanding at a crazy rate that they would collect profits at a very healthy rate.

I'm sure just about everyone in the premium segment would love to "fail" by selling 63,000 cars costing over $50k each with gross margin of 20%.

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