Tesla is now stuck in the difficult position with the Model 3 production, where if they can / and do increase the production rate much above the reported current 2,500 per week rate --- they will hit the 200,000 Cap Limit for the $7,500 Fed Tax refund this Quarter (ends June 30th).
That would then only give them only the 3rd Quarter of this year at the $7,500 refund and deliveries in the last Quarter of this year would qualify for only a $3,750 refund.
Gets only worse in 2019, the 1st Quarter refund would be only $1,875 (not much on a very expensive car) and zero after that.
If they do hold production down this Quarter, it will only delay hitting the Cap until the 3rd Quarter and delaying these numbers by 90 days (still not a good scenario).
2019 will also bring in new competion with 200 + mile range capabilities and they will all have the full $7,500 refund available --- makes a real price point advantage when Tesla starts selling $35,000 cars.
Tesla also has this little problem of having accumulated a reported $10B debt outstanding – give or take a few $B.
$3B is non-recourse debt (SolarCity) to Tesla, so hopefully Musk will make that good from his own pocket.
It is interesting to make a wild calculation just how many cars it would take to pay off some of this debt, say $5B with an average Tesla profit of $5,000 per car (very unlikely level). That is 1,000,000 (1 Million cars) with ALL profits being used to just retire $5B debt.
This is a very Big Debt Hole to dig out of.
. Clearly the user can adjust the input as my arrows point out to adjsut the Log Growth S-Curve. I take Ben the Data Scientist skills over his any day ...
