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Tesla Proves To Be Too Pricey For Germany, Loses Tax Subsidies (reuters.com)
Tesla has been removed from Germany's list of electric cars eligible for subsidies because its Model S sedan is too expensive for the scheme. Tesla customers cannot order the Model S base version without extra features that pushed the car above the 60,000 euro ($71,500) price limit, a spokesman for the German Federal Office for Economic Affairs and Export Controls (BAFA) said on Friday. From the report: Germany last year launched the incentive scheme worth about 1 billion euros, partly financed by the German car industry, to boost electric car usage. A price cap was included to exempt premium models. "This is a completely false accusation. Anyone in Germany can order a Tesla Model S base version without the comfort package, and we have delivered such cars to customers," Tesla said in a statement. The carmaker said the upper price limit was initially set by the German government to exclude Tesla, but later a compromise was reached "that allows Tesla to sell a low option vehicle that qualifies for the incentive and customers can subsequently upgrade if they wish." It said, however, it would investigate whether any car buyers were denied the no-frills version. Under the subsidy scheme, buyers get 4,000 euros off their all-electric vehicle purchase and 3,000 euros off plug-in hybrids.
"This is a completely false accusation. Anyone in Germany can order a Tesla Model S base version without the comfort package, and we have delivered such cars to customers," Tesla said in a statement.
From the summary. Try reading next time.
"The carmaker said the upper price limit was initially set by the German government to exclude Tesla, but later a compromise was reached "that allows Tesla to sell a low option vehicle that qualifies for the incentive and customers can subsequently upgrade if they wish." It said"
Seems pretty silly if a substantial part of the reason for the price cap was to prevent Tesla cars specifically being included, but then they did an end-run around that by letting you buy the base model + the upgrade. I bet you can buy the "base model" and receive the "upgrade" before you even drive it away, and still get the credits.
Chevy Bolt.
Several companies make more electric cars than Tesla does. Nissan is one you've heard of, probably. The Nissan Leaf is the most popular. They also make some all-electric vehicles for business use.
Several companies in China make electric cars. In fact China makes more electric cars than the rest of the world combined. BYD is one Chinese company.
> I have only ever heard of Telsa manufacturing them.
Nissan and BYD executives don't announce they're building a tunnel, without permits, for a scientifically questionable vacuum subway from their parking lot to some other city. They just make good cars. Elon Musk is the PT Barnum of our age.
No Ray, Elon Musk is trying something that hasn't been done whereas you're just a jealous faggot with a coal-fired intellect firing off PT Barnum aphorisms. FTFY.
General Motors builds an amazing electric as well.
Tesla cars area joke. They typically won't break even for their high price vs. fuel savings. Buying a car with a small engine is more cost effective.
They're nothing but a rich person's "fashion statement".
If the U.S. took away Tesla's subsidy, they'd go bankrupt very quickly.
Re "who else makes viable electric vehicles?"
Bolt EV. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
Sucks when you run out of other people's money...happens sooner or later.
Ferret
Sic gorgiamus allos subjectatos nunc
Nissan makes the Leaf, and GM makes the Volt. I've heard of folks buying the Leaf and seemed pretty happy with it; I don't know much about the Volt though.
Ferret
Sic gorgiamus allos subjectatos nunc
GM Volt/Bolt, Nissan Leaf, Mitsubishi MiEV or whatever it's called - all more affordable electric vehicles. In general I support not subsidising conspicuous consumption.
Note I am in no way against the wealthy. I wish them every success.
But they don't need government assistance to buy a luxury vehicle.
Just remove the extras and make them aftermarket add ons. Tesla could probably put a kit together.
No matter where you go, there you are.
Tesla's subsidy runs out next year.
They pre-sell all their cars. They won't go bankrupt at all. LOL
If demand goes down 15%, they're still selling exactly the same number of cars. And making the exact same amount of money per car.
It is a premium car with nameplate value, but they haven't tried to explore the upper end of the tolerable price. Instead they're building up their manufacturing so they can output more, and keeping surplus demand. Everybody already knows they have surplus demand. It is a brilliant and well-funded growth strategy.
Because the Germans are using a Volkswagen calculator.
It's doubtful that the law would be valid if it outright said "except Tesla" in its language. So they tried to infer it by putting a price cap just under what a Tesla S costs. Then Tesla started offering a trim package that meets the law's price criteria.
What exactly is the problem again? Oh, what it said in the summary: this program is partially paid for by the German auto makers, and the German auto industry doesn't want to have that money going to Tesla. So let's fuck around with sock puppets in the government rather than build a competitive offering. Because clearly someone that was going to buy a Tesla is going to change their mind over this subsidy and get an electric VW Golf instead?
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
Volkswagen, Mercedes, BMW... there's a reason Tesla lost its subsidies and even other car manufacturers have a hard time in the EU. Germany runs the EU and they are very protectionist.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
The result of german newspaper investigation was:
Tesla does not produce the base version - although it was offered.
Some buyers got the premium version for the price of the base version.
In a testbuy scenario, Tesla sell staff told its not possible to buy base version, base version does not exist - IT is just to Trick german law. So the customer had to buy the premium version.
Sounds like trouble for tesla.
German newspaper:
http://www.autobild.de/artikel/kaufpraemie-fuer-elektroautos-infos-und-antragsformular-8535657.html
Just out of curiosity, who else makes viable electric vehicles?
Audi, BMW, BYD Chevy, Citroen, Fiat, Ford, GM, Honda, Hyundai, Kia, Mercedes-Benz, Mitsubishi, Peugeot, Renault, Smart, and Volkswagen. And I was being kind only listing the companies producing cars that I have actually seen driving around in the streets, and skipping over the producers I haven't seen in the wild. In the USA Nissan probably makes that list but I've yet to see a Leaf, strange given that it's the 3rd best selling electric car in Germany.
The vast majority of them are budget cars too. Several of my colleagues own Renault Zoes, VW e-Golfs, Opel (GM) Amperas, and we often joke about the one who owns the Fiat 500e. Fiat 500s have a long reputation of breaking down, but there's so little to go wrong in an electric drive train but we always say I'm sure the 500e will be the car to make that happen :-)
Where does Tesla sit in Germany? Year to date in 14th place. The Audi A3 has sold 5 times as many as the Tesla S this year, followed very closely by a Renault Zoe (which I nearly bought myself, but there was a 6 month waiting list on getting charging infrastructure installed in my street and I needed a car right now so I bought a Clio). BMW and VW's electric vehicles are far more popular in Germany than Tesla, and curiously so is the Kia Soul.
Several companies make more electric cars than Tesla does. Nissan is one you've heard of, probably. The Nissan Leaf is the most popular. They also make some all-electric vehicles for business use.
I was looking for a new car this year, and I very much wanted an electric car. So I checked all of the ones available in this country, including the Leaf, the Ionic, a bunch of hybrids and a couple others I forgot. Also a Tesla.
The Leaf or Ionic are the ones I remember clearly, so I'll write about them and ignore the forgettable ones. They are cute cars. The Ionic especially surprised me in a positive way. Very nice car. But they are not in the same class as the Tesla. Their range is laughable and the way they market them even more so (for example, on the Leaf you have to rent the battery - it isn't included in the car price and you can not buy it for any money). They have some way to go before they are serious cars. I might have considered an Ionic as a secondary car for everyday short drives, but I needed a primary car that is suitable for longer trips as well.
While Tesla is certainly strong on the hype front, their cars are considerably closer to being real cars than the competing electronic cars on the market today.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
People who buy a Model S are not looking to save money. The car is about a 100K if you take a reasonable package. When you can dump 100K on a car, you're not counting how many cents you save per kilometer.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
Please go to a huge city without vehicle emissions controls and tell me that EVs would not be cleaner. And when I say huge city, I mean Beijing, Guangzhou, Bangkok, Mumbai, Singapore - somewhere with 10+ million people trying to go about their lives with air thick enough to cut with a knife.
Petrol vehicles increase their pollution contribution with every mile driven. EVs at least have the hope of having a much reduced amount of pollution when charged with renewable energy, and even in the case of being charged with fossil fuel based generation, the electrical generation will be much more efficient than any engine produced for a vehicle.
In Europe it's called the Opel Ampera-e. Same car.
Why not just give tax breaks up to 40.000$? you can now get a usable EV for those money.
I wanted a Bolt(Opel Ampera-e) but they won't sell them here.
I live in Denmark, A place where we don't give a crap about EVs or green energy any more. In fact, we are probably the only country were the number of EVs on the street went down this year.
The government decided to drop tax breaks for EVs because people were buying Teslas like crazy. With a 180% tax om cars, they didn't stand a chance here.
So they have started to phase in taxes on all EVs and the sales plummeted. I believe it was a combination of higher prices and uncertainty as to what they will think of next in terms of finding ways to tax people. And we can see they already have reinstated a "green" tax on electricity that everyone pays, but EV charging companies didn't had to pay for the electricity they sold for charging EV's. So now charging away from home will be even more expensive ( iirc the kWh price are already 0.8$)
L'Idiot
Yeah, losing hundreds of millions all based on hype, no good can come of that, just look at companies like Amazon. Was a big hype during the dot com bubble, but now hardly anyone even remembers it.
Price also matters. In my country you get between 2.5 - 3 Ioniq:s (not Ionic) for the price of one Tesla.
I guess this sort of thing will happen whatever the price is set to. But I think it's really more that they don't want to give a tax break to things like the Tesla Roadster, which is essentially just a very expensive toy.
There will be edge cases whatever they set the price to.
You have never met a German, have you?
Real life is overrated.
So does Tesla, once they start selling half a million cars a year. Which is probably around 2019.
In Europe it's called the Opel Ampera-e. Same car.
Yet, this is a country that sells Mercedes Maybachs for how much?
The mind conceives, the body achieves, the spirit manifests.
But you can't actually buy it and have it delivered in reasonable time. It's a disaster for Opel here in Norway. Several thousand customers lined up to get one, but very few have actually been delivered.
To those who claim that the 60000 Euro price limit for the cars was created specifically against Tesla - nope, it was against luxury cars in general, since everybody who can afford a 60000+ Euro car does not really need a 4000 Euro tax break. Also, the subsidies were not only for pure EV, they were also for hybrid models. So the price limit also excludes models from Porsche (Panamera hybrid), Mercedes (S class hybrid), BMW (7 series eDrive) and other big manufacturers.
Tesla cheated, pure and simple. The rules for the subsidies state "the base model of the car must cost below 60000 Euro", so Tesla created an imaginary Model S without any options which would be normal for any car in that price range (parking sensors etc.) which made it squeak in at just below 60000 Euro. That way, they could point at the price list and say "look, base model is below 60000, so all Model S deserve the tax credit!", safe in the knowledge that no customer would actually order that barebone model. Well, the test buyers for the tax credit actually did, and Tesla told them that you cannot actually order it, because Tesla does not produce any vehicles without parking sensors etc. Tesla salesmen even told the test buyers that this model was only on the price list to allow Tesla customers to get the tax credit (by existing on paper). Tesla clearly committed fraud here, and now the customers might have to pay back the tax credit they received.
Percentages do not tell the whole tale of lobbying to set the price cap that excludes their competitor.
for example, on the Leaf you have to rent the battery - it isn't included in the car price and you can not buy it for any money
As a (used) Leaf owner, I can confirm that I own the whole damn car - including the battery. It has traveled over 30,000 miles while dropping 1 bar out of 12 for range. The range is still over 80 miles per charge.
It has snow tires on it for Winter driving. The Leaf warms itself up on a timer before I leave for work. I never have to stop at a gas station, and get about 40 miles per day for $1 (roughly $38 in electricity per month).
By the time that I need to purchase a new battery ($5000 at the moment) I will have saved significantly more money in gasoline alone. Outside of tires and windshield washer, maintenance is not an issue.
This is not an advertisement. My other (gasoline) cars are a Mitsubishi, Toyota, and Porsche. The bottom line is that the Leaf is the cheapest car to operate and maintain.
If you diss the Germans than at least spell the words right.
A quick online search (apparently very difficult to do for some who cast a verdict quickly) revealed these German EV manufacturers: Twike, IMA, eWolf, Trabant, Karabag, Treffpunkt Zukunft, Ruf, Jetcar, Brabus, VW/Audi/Porsche, Opel, Smart, Mini/BMW, Loremo, Ford Germany, Mercedes, Efa-S, Lorinser, StreetScooter, PG....plus the dozens of other European manufacturers who offer their cars on the German market. The idea that Tesla is the only EV manufacturer in the world is ignorant or naive at best. In fact, many others can fill order while Tesla is inept to glue their cars together even with a factory that was designed to crank out 500,000 cars a year and did show that it easily sustained production of 480,000 annually. Tesla cannot even get a 10th of that out. Tesla is like Apple, they excel in design and PR, but when it comes to nuts and bolts they are a hodgepodge of ineptitude and dead promises. All while asking a sickening high price for their product that really isn't that spectacular in the end.
Non sequitur. That helps the cash flow but does nothing for profitability. You should ask DeVry for a refund on that MBA.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Unlikely, even if they don't go bankrupt before that. They still haven't figured out how to make more than a few hundred Model 3s a month. Moreover, they are unable to sell the extremely expensive Model S and Model X at a profit, so even if they manage to get their act together and produce large numbers of the much cheaper (but not much cheaper to make) Model 3s, that will only accelerate the cash outflow.
Even if Musk is able to convince shareholders to keep on pumping in billons, they finally learn how to mass produce their cars and nothing goes wrong anymore with anything, they will start to deliver the Model 3 in numbers just about when all companies that actually know how to build cars will start delivering better electric cars in much larger numbers.
Face it, Tesla will never turn a profit. That's not a problem for Musk and a few of his friends and relatives, since they will make sure to cash out in time (they already have to some extent), but ultimately, it is doomed. If you are naïve enough to believe that Musk's mission was really to promote the electric car and to help make it mainstream, however, you may argue that the goal is being accomplished. Just not by Tesla.
In Europe it's called the Opel Ampera-e. Same car.
Yet, this is a country that sells Mercedes Maybachs for how much?
So you are jealous that Americans can only make overpriced E-cars, not luxury cars? An E-Maybach also wouldn't qualify for the E-vehicle subsidy - and, yes, Mercedes-Benz have presented a study of an E-Maybach.
Of course news about a fake are Fake News.
You are going to make a fortune by selling TSLA short. Oh wait, you won't because you don't really believe what you are saying.
If you try to be a Grammatiknationalsozialist on the Internet then at least spell the words right.
Love from Germany!
CLI paste? paste.pr0.tips!
i8 is a hybrid.
I would love to own one though....
If a specific goal of the policy was to prevent a certain make of car from being included, then there are two things they can do:
1. Explicitly exclude that make (or make + model) from the policy
2. Set the price cap at a level that means even the base version of that car does not qualify
The regulators chose to do neither, instead they negotiated with Tesla to allow their cars to slip through a loophole.
Porsche Panamera Hybrid
Mercedes S Class Hybrid
BMW 7 (eDrive)
Just off top of my head. All of these would be eligible if they were cheaper.
If you got 60k+ for a car, you don't need 4k tax reduction.
It isn't a non-sequitur at all, I simply didn't explain all the details. I incorrectly presumed you understand and be able to fill in the implicit details.
Non-sequitur means you didn't understand. When facing things you don't understand, the correct response would be to ask questions to increase your knowledge, instead of just deciding that everything you don't yet understand is absurd.
Also, profitability is not the antonym for bankruptcy. If you have positive cash flow you're probably not bankrupt yet, and you seem to recognize that cash flow was implied in my statement.
Instead of presuming parts that weren't explained in excruciating detail are false, consider instead what else would need to be true to make the statement true; that's how you can give yourself a chance to comprehend technical discussions.
The vast majority of them are budget cars too.
Now we see the problem.
Yeah, the problem is that the Tesla is too fucking expensive to be subsidized for mass-rollout of EVs. Even compared to cars from BMW and Mercedes.
Of course news about a fake are Fake News.
Tesla is not Amazon. For every Amazon, there are ten start ups that went bankrupt. Do you remember the dot com crash? There were a lot of companies "like Amazon" that went bust.
All I want is a secure system where it's easy to do anything I want. Is that too much to ask ~~ Randall Munroe
If they haven't run out of money before 2019, the EV market will be very crowded by then and most of Tesla's competitors absolutely do know how to engineer a production line.
All I want is a secure system where it's easy to do anything I want. Is that too much to ask ~~ Randall Munroe
I'd buy a Leaf if it looked better. Manufacturers need to get past the EV-egg car design syndrome and make them look like regular cars. Tesla seems to be the only company doing this right now.
Buying a car with a small engine is more cost effective.
This explains perfectly why there's no such thing as Ferrari, Louis Vuitton, Bollinger, Louboutin etc...
As a (used) Leaf owner, I can confirm that I own the whole damn car - including the battery
Interesting. So that is a country thing (I'm currently living in Austria). The Nissan dealer made it sound like that is general policy. I asked about this point specifically, because it surprised me.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
You have never met a German, have you?
I actually am a German. Not sure on whom the joke is with that.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org