Hertz orders 100k Teslas

This is myth. 35yr loan is pretty basic, most loan supports up to 50yr. We can see many houses built 35yr ago. Anyway, installing EV charger is easy task for own house. It just takes about from $200 if 200V line is available. I believe mostly available unless the house is very old.

More importantly, there are many condos and parking that's hard to install charger due to it need to be approved in condo committee.

All of the cars I listed are real street legal cars (no NEVs), available for purchase today (no concepts), that are plugin electrics (no hybrids) with a range in excess of 100 miles, with a price less than $40,000. These are viable inexpensive cars. That was the criteria. Arguing that these don't count because they're not comparable to one that costs 50% more, isn't fair.

The state with longest average commute distance is New Hampshire at 46 miles.[0] Even if that’s one way, that’s only 100 miles a day. Assuming you can only charge overnight, you’ll never use that extra range. You'll never even go below 50% if you can charge at work.

The software you’re citing for Tesla is gimmicks and cruel jokes. Why does someone need a game that only works when your car is parked and the screen faces the driver? When would someone use this? And even if you find the situation where you want to play a game in parked car, why would chose this rather than any of the games on your phone?

Tesla navigation last time I checked was Google Maps, but not Google turn-by-turn. That's odd. When I test drove a Model S, the salesman pitched some unknown streaming service as “like Pandora”. I’m sorry, but what? The car doesn’t even come with Android or Apple CarPlay.

I’ve used CarPlay, it’s heads and shoulders above any OEM infotainment system I’ve ever used. It’s so good, it’s a requirement for my next car. Assuming AndroidPlay (or whatever it's called) is just as good, why would anyone want anything else?

[0] Yes this is four years ago, and commutes have lengthened, but most articles I found expressed commute is minutes, not miles. Congestion and distance increase commute times. https://www.answerfinancial.com/insurance-center/which-state...

Tesla MSRP Price is $42k...

https://www.caranddriver.com/news/a35494747/2022-chevrolet-b...

https://www.consumerreports.org/car-safety/cadillac-super-cr...

But this is lala-land thinking. As long as the United States remains on the UN Security Council (which is equivalent to saying as long as the UN continues to exist in any practical form), both Taiwan and Israel will remain our client states.

Generally I'd expect service and repairs to be of the same order of magnitude as sales, because if you have to spend $5000 a year to service and repair a $20000 car, you'll probably junk it and buy a new car that breaks down less, while if it costs you $500 a year to keep it going you'll probably either keep it running or sell it as a used car. One revenue stream might be two or three times bigger than the other, of course, and the profit margins might differ, and the dealerships don't capture all the service and repair.

I'm not sure what the number of dealerships tells us about the relative earnings potential. B. Dalton had more dealerships than Amazon ten years ago. (Or do we count B. Dalton and Waldenbooks as "dealerships of Hachette and Penguin Random House"?)

We can probably do a reasonable Fermi estimate of total dealership profits, though; 1.3 million car salespeople in the US probably means about US$60 billion in car sales commissions per year, which is about US$250 billion in car sales per year and something like US$25 billion in dealership profits; at a reasonable P/E of 30 years, the capital stock of US auto dealers would be worth about US$750 billion in total. https://policyadvice.net/insurance/insights/us-auto-sales-st... says the number of new cars sold in the US is 17 million a year, which suggests that these figures are in the ballpark, since it would mean that the average car cost US$14700, which seems maybe a little low for the US but not absurd. However, used cars are an additional 40 million a year, so maybe US$1.5 trillion for the capital stock of US auto dealers. Adding in whatever they make on sales and service, say US$3 trillion.

The worldwide number is 74 million new cars per year, 4.4 times the US number, so if we just multiply the US number by 3 (probably the average car in the US costs more), we get US$6 trillion for the value of hypothetical worldwide car dealership capital stock.

So, yeah, it does seem plausible that all the Toyota dealerships in the world would be worth US$750 billion, with similar numbers for GM, Fiat, etc.

Another thing, though, is that Tesla's vertical integration goes both directions, and you're not counting companies like American Axle & Manufacturing, Mold Masters Co., Grand Traverse Plastics, and Bosch as part of GM's market cap either.

So, I think buying TSLA at a P/E of 161 years is a pretty daring bet, and there's a significant chance it won't pay off. But I don't think the comparison to other car companies makes it look nearly as crazy as you make it sound, even if TSLA doesn't end up running our power grid on its batteries.