Photographer: Toru Hanai/Bloomberg
During the second quarter of the year, despite production being stopped due to the lockdown, Tesla managed to produce total 82,272 units and to ship over 90,650, jus t a 4.8% decline from the previous quarter, which had been a historical record for the company.
The news, which had been anticipated a few days earlier by the leak of internal memos from Elon Musk in which he first asked its employees to make an extraordinary effort to achieve their goals and then congratulated them effusively, led to a sharp rise in the company’s share price, which led it to surpass in value the only traditional car company that remained to be surpassed, Toyota, a prediction that I made in a previous article in early June.
To all intents and purposes, Tesla is now the most valuable car company in the world, mainly thanks to the fact that it looks very little like its competitors and behaves much more like a technology company. Its shares are already five times the value they were just a year ago, something that could be seen as a bubble if it were not for the fact that the company continues to execute to the letter the predictions of results and profits made by its CEO: the headline “company without profits” no longer holds true.
The company is now the gold standard for an industry that for too long has innovated reluctantly and at a snail’s pace. People who used to say “wait for this or that company to get its act together” are now seeing that carmakers whose models adorned their children’s rooms have being left behind by Tesla: in fact, they are technologically more than six years away. These are the laws that dictate the systematic exploitation of economies of scale.
Meanwhile, the Tesla Model S is the first and only electric vehicle to with a range of more than 400 miles (643 km) according to the US Environmental Protection Agency tests, the company also dispels unfounded fears about the duration of its batteries, in addition to continuing to exploit a model that sounds like a real guarantee to users: while a traditional vehicle is what you buy and stays that way, a Tesla is a platform whose software continues to be updated and radically improve its performance over time. If we include the value of the network of superchargers and destination chargers in more and more locations, the conclusion is crystal clear: the only way to lose with Tesla is to try short selling it.
Furthermore, the growth of the company that managed to make its electric vehicles better, more fun to drive and more appealing than diesel or petrol vehicles is good news for everyone. Tesla isn’t simply riding a wave of popularity that favors electric vehicles: it’s the company which created that wave. Contrary to what the oil companies would have us believe, every electric vehicle on the road improves the environment and reduces pollution levels regardless of how the energy it’s charged with was obtained and how it was manufactured. The future of the car is electric, autonomous and shared, but while we are getting there, the more internal combustion vehicles that are replaced by electric ones, the better for everyone.
