Day to day discussions on S/P, page-7969

As I mentioned, Telsa started early and blazed the trail through a period when battery cell production was very expensive, helped bring that costs down but piled on a lot of debt in the process. The point is that Tesla is showing that a quality EV is doable at the average US buying price for consumers today and its only going to improve with time. Whether Tesla makes it or is ruined by cheaper EV models by the likes of cashed up VW or any of the other big automakers who have far more experience at mass production, is not really my concern and in fact would be probably be a good thing for EV adoption. I'll add that the Hyundai Kona is another example of a new breed of cars being sold near the average US car sale price similar to Tesla with a respectable 400km+ range. Do you really think this is going to slow down now as the rest of the car markers enter the market with $90 billion allocated for the move?

In regards to your comment on the exponential growth, I'm simply going of the monthly global sales figures. 2014-320k, 2015-550k, 2016-780k, 2017-1200k, 2018-2000k sold. Too few data points yet but 210e^0.4464x (x=1,2,3,4,5...) gives an exponential fit with an Pearson coefficient of 0.9964...so on the exponential track. That simple fit predicts that sales this year will be near 3 million EVs which is a 50% growth rate and which I believe will be exceeded (2018 was 63%). We'll see how the next year goes but already January is looking vastly higher than Jan last year. January is traditionally a slow month for EV sales but Chinese sales are up 175% over Jan 2018 at nearly 100k units or near 5% market share. 5% market share wasn't supposed to happen for a few years yet.

Anyhow, I'll respectfully disagree with your EV outlook. Your points on Tesla financials are very true and its going to be a hard slog for them especially with far more experienced big automakers stepping into the EV race with fat wallets. However, I don't think any of this depends on Tesla anymore.