GM (and all other auto manufacturers) include their R&D expense in their COGS since they acknowledge they must release new models every year. Tesla, doesn't.
Tesla also doesn't include showroom costs in their COGS, but they can't sell cars without them.. (all other autos only include the revenue they receive from their dealer networks as the top-line revenue figure).
These are the kinds of thing that makes people suspicious about their ultimate financials.
I don't care at all about stock prices, I'm actively shopping for an electric car and Teslas are near the top of my list since they're so technologically advanced, but they're just not very well as a manufacturer or as a responsibly run corporation which annoys me since I'm in corporate finance.
As an example, if Tesla and GM both had $10,000 cars for sale. GM's "Cost of Goods Sold" would include the manufacturing costs, costs for R&D and their revenue would only be $8k since the dealer networks have their own books - but then GM isn't responsible for all of the showrooms and sales staff, etc.
Tesla's revenue would show $10k, but would only include the cost to manufacturer (the R&D expense is "below the line") and they wouldn't include any costs to have hundreds of showroom locations - even those those showrooms are necessary to sell cars at any volume, and Tesla has to pay for out of that $10k sales price.
It's obviously not apples-to-apples to compare those "GAAP Gross Margin" between those two things.
Your original statement "Tesla doesn't make a profit on every car" is a blatant untruth. That's an understandable mistake for a layman to make given the misinformation out there, but you claim to be in corporate finance and should have better standards.
I felt like “by the accounting standards used by literally every other company in the auto industry” was implicit. So apologies - “Tesla doesn’t make a profit on every car, If you use the accounting standards in place for every other auto manufacturer.”
There are a lot of weird short seller conspiracies out there but “In order to increase apparent profitability, Tesla uses different accounting than every other auto company” is a factual statement and so is “If you use actual industry GAAP, Tesla isn’t yet GM profitable.”
I hope they get there! I hope they sell 10M cars per year.. but to hold them up as a manufacturing leader is pretty silly.
If you understand the point about COGS, it's pretty disingenuous to try and compare GAAP between the two and make that claim. If you don't understand the point about COGS, you're not really in a position to denigrate his standards on corporate finance.
If you are so certain that you are correct and these are a fair comparison, can you please explain how his breakdown between the two is either incorrect or not relevant to your point?
He said that Tesla was unprofitable on a per car basis. The whole company including R&D, SG&A etc was profitable, so unless the solar part of the company was subsidizing the car business, that's a flat out falsehood. We can reasonably argue whether GM or Tesla are more profitable per car, but that wasn't the original claim.
Sorry for the late response, but, yes, their car business is being subsidized. They lose money on each car. It is not being subsidized by solar, however.
Multiple states in the US require companies sell a certain amount of zero-emission vehicles or buy regulatory credits from companies that do sell that amount. Tesla is one of these companies they buy credits from. They were paid 1.6 billion USD in 2020 for these credits. That is more than double their 2020 net income. [1]
