I did. I was coming from a Toyota Corolla and wanted an electric car. Never considered a BMW or Audi, which didn't have electric options available at the time. Tesla won on range and comfort--I'm a big guy and the Leaf and Bolt were both a bit cramped.

Tesla has actually released stats on what cars their buyers trade in [1]. Most of them are not premium brands. Toyota is the largest single brand.

The anecdote about the people you know who are buying Teslas may be more reflective of who you know than who is buying Teslas.

[1] https://insideevs.com/news/504078/what-cars-tesla-buyers-tra...

That article is misleading because it doesn't break down the Tesla purchases by model or even price range. Obviously most of them are model 3s. The model 3 is not a luxury car by any stretch and many model S and X owners will say the same about those models. Still, the people coming from the common luxury brands are not typically buying the "cheap" model 3.

I was responding to a claim about people buying Teslas in general. I responded with statistics about people buying Teslas in general. It is absurd for you to come in saying the data is misleading because it's not broken out in a way that nobody else was talking about until you just brought it up.

But that's the point. Tesla's market cap is over $700bn.

That's more than twice that of all of Porsche, VW (which owns Audi), Mercedes, BMW, Ferrari and Volvo put together.

Without selling down into the mass-market and out-competing Chevy in that segment, that price premium cannot be justified.

Tesla’s margins are much higher and they also have no debt

>Tesla’s margins are much higher

But they're not.

On a trailing four quarter basis; BMW has more revenue than Tesla ($135bn vs $67bn), better operating margin than Tesla (18.6% vs 16.2%) and therefore also higher earnings ($25bn vs $11bn).

That's basically the point. Tesla can't sell to those people, because they have no product for them currently.

Tesla sells every car they produce before they build them, and there are multi-month waiting lists. They don't need to go downmarket. If they build many more of the cars they already sell, they will make a lot more money.

But they sell everything they produce with good margins. Cheaper vehicles can be introduced when needed, it’s not necessary to announce them too early and it could even reduce the sales of existing more expensive cars.

Serious question, don’t they all cost about the same amount of money? 35-45k? I understand not comparing an individual 18k Chevy sedan to a 35k BMW sports car. But with regard to price, most EVs seem to be in the same ballpark.

The cheapest Tesla has a $47k MSRP now, but most people add on several thousand dollars in options even on that one.

The Leaf and Bolt both have starting MSRPs around $28k, and most probably sell in the mid-$30k range, so there is a significant price difference.

That really depends on where you are. I'd say that Tesla is the cheap kind of car that "everyone" have, at least in Norway. Polestar 2 has gotten quite popular too. A BMW i4 M50 with equipment is around ~1.5x the price of a Model 3 Performance.

I would definetly put BMW and Tesla in a different class, with Tesla being the budget option.