Imperfect Exchange
1 min readJan 3, 2022

--

How does Tesla compare?

Tesla announced fourth quarter 2021 sales of 308,000 vehicles. This exceeded Wall Street estimates by at least 15%. Total sales for the year were 940,000. All of this with only four models on the road.

How does this compare to other automakers? 2021 figures are not yet available (hat tip to Tesla for going first). In 2020, Ford sold 1.9 million vehicles. One million were trucks. Tesla does not yet sell a truck. So a fair comparison to Ford must exclude truck sales. Thus, Tesla and Ford both sold 900,000 cars. Tesla across four models, Ford across many more than four models. Ford’s top four selling modes accounted for 630,00 sales in 2020. Does this mean Tesla is more disciplined than Ford, focusing on a core group of excellent products instead of excelling at some things but barely competing on others? Or does Ford’s core strength enable it to experiment more broadly than can Tesla? What is to be made of the fact that Tesla also makes fuel for its vehicles? Ford would never consider entering this market.

What is the earnings per share comparison? Free cash flow? Debt-to-equity ratio? Cost of capital? How do Tesla’s numbers compare to Toyota? Volkswagen? Hyundai? BMW or Mercedes?

--

--