[fweespeech]

Per-unit margin goes down (but is still profitable per unit) but you make up in volume to create a profit.

Tesla's main costs aren't the cost per unit but the engineer/software costs iirc.

[Reason077]

@cortesoft - It takes a lot of time and infrastructure investment to ramp up production to those sort of levels.

This has actually been Tesla's business plan all along: start with a low volume, high-priced product (the Roadster) and gradually move towards successively higher volume, lower cost models.

[jrv]

As per the earnings call, the profit per unit actually went up, and the discounts were never sanctioned and also not relevant to this end result.

[cortesoft]

If they make more profit by selling more units at a lower price... then why don't they always just do that?

[jacquesm]

They don't make more profit per vehicle, they just made more profit in a short window of time by doing more sales but this may not be sustainable because it just shifts sales around rather in time at a lower profit per vehicle.

[fweespeech]

Production bottlenecks.

Tesla is constantly behind on producing cars for its customers. They just wanted to generate money now rather than later.

[mikeash]

Building lots of cars is hard. It takes a lot of time and money to ramp up production capacity to this level. They've been building cars as fast as they could for years now.