[NickM]

> Tesla is neither at scale nor profitable. They're selling barely 15,000 cars per quarter, compared to Toyota's 2.5 million.

Tesla's sales last quarter were 24.5k cars, hardly "barely 15,000". Q4 is expected to meet or exceed that, despite being a shorter quarter.

If you pick the biggest car manufacturer in the world to compare them to, then of course they're going to look small. There are plenty of well-established, profitable car manufacturers that build far fewer cars than Toyota.

I don't want to argue semantics, so I'll leave it open for debate as to whether or not they're "at scale", but comparing them to a startup that hasn't figured out how to turn a profit yet seems highly disingenuous.

> They've been "profitable" for a single quarter by selling Tesla's at a deep discount.

If they can sell cars at a deep discount and still be profitable, then clearly the margins must be pretty good.

[gizmo]

It's funny how you call me disingenuous when you selectively engage with my arguments and repeatedly assert that Tesla is profitable when it hasn't been profitable for a single year in the entire company's existence.

Tesla has 1/6th the market cap of Toyota but produces a tiny fraction of the cars. Tesla is exactly like other silicon valley startups in that they could have been profitable if they had chosen a different business model, but now they need to grow massively or they'll become insolvent. That's what I mean when I say they haven't hit scale yet.

Will Tesla actually deliver 100,000 Model 3 cars in 2017 as promised? I'm skeptical to say the least, but if anybody can do it it's Musk.