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(TSLA), which fell 65% in 2022 for its worst annual performance ever, closed Friday up 68% so far in 2023. But even that suggests that Tesla is below the 50% annual growth target it has set for the company long term. Production and sales were up much more when compared to the first quarter of 2022, with production up 44% and deliveries up 36%. “The big question will be margins as cutting prices will have an impact on this front,” he said in a note to clients Sunday.įirst quarter production was up only 0.2% from the final three months of 2022, despite it efforts to ramp up production in Germany and Texas.
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Tesla will report full first quarter financial results on April 19. Dan Ives, tech analyst for Wedbush Securities, said the consensus that Wall Street was looking for was deliveries of 421,500, which would mean a very narrow beat for Tesla.īut even Ives, a bull on Tesla stock, said the lower prices that Tesla got for cars in the quarter will mean tighter profit margins going forward. That’s short of the forecast of 430,000 vehicles from analysts surveyed by Refinitiv. The company reported it completed sales of 422,875 vehicles in the quarter. “In short, no matter what Elon Musk says, Tesla has a serious/major demand problem,” said Johnson. “For four straight quarters, Tesla has produced more cars than they have sold, despite the fact that two of its plants are operating at 20% to 40% utilization, and it shut-down its largest plant, unexpectedly, three times in the first quarter,” said Johnson said, who said he believes Musk has a “pathological problem with the truth.” “If it wasn’t clear before, it now is, Tesla has a demand problem,” Gordon Johnson, an analyst who is one of the biggest Tesla critics, said in a note Monday. “And as Elon said, as long as you offer a product with value at affordable price, you don’t have to worry about demand.”īut some analysts said the hard numbers reported Sunday raises questions about the strength of demand for Tesla, no matter how bullish the comments from Zhu and Musk. After that, we actually generated a huge demand, more than we can produce, really,” Tom Zhu, Tesla’s executive in charge of global production and sales, said at Tesla’s “investor day.” “Early this year, we had a price adjustment. First quarter sales trailed production by 18,000 vehicles, less than the gap in third and fourth quarter of last year, but still equal to 4% of the vehicles it built. That 78,000-vehicle excess production is equal to 5% of the cars it has built. Tesla said there was an increase in the number of its more expensive models, the Model S and Model X, in transit to Europe, the Middle East and Africa, as well as to the Asia Pacific region.īut it does mean that over the last 12 months Tesla has produced 78,000 more cars than it has sold, suggesting that talk of strong demand by Tesla executives may not be backed up by the numbers. Some of that may be due to the ramp up in production at two new factories, one in Texas, the other in Germany, which opened last spring, and a lag between that increased production and sales. The first quarter also marked the fourth straight quarter that Tesla has produced more vehicles than it has delivered to customers.
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You've taken out a car loan with a long term (more than 60 months): A long-term loan takes longer than usual to hit the break-even point, which is when your loan balance and the car's value begin to equalize.Tesla reported a modest 4% rise in sales in the first quarter compared to the final three months of last year, despite a series of price cuts on its lower priced vehicles and talk by CEO Elon Musk about strong demand at those lower prices.The faster you rack up the miles, the faster you depreciate your car's value, and it's likely that you'll be dropping the value of your car more quickly than your payments can keep pace. You plan to put miles on quickly: Very few things reduce a car's value faster than lots of driving.When we say substantial, think 25% or more. You bought a car with bad resale value: If you bought a car that quickly loses value, you'd probably be upside down without a substantial down payment.This extra balance could come back to haunt you if your car is totaled or stolen. You've traded in an upside-down car: When trading in an upside-down car, the dealership will add what you still owe to the loan balance of the new car unless you pay that difference up front.
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It may be several years before the loan amount and the car's actual value amount begin to balance. You financed a car and made little or no down payment: Without making a significant down payment, you'll be upside down in your auto loan the moment you drive off the lot.
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