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Meanwhile, Toyota, which is only at 3x the market cap of Tesla, sold >2,200,000 vehicles in Q4. It ships more combined battery capacity in its hybrids, then Tesla does in its EVs.


I think you are misestimating. Toyota sells ~1.5 million hybrids (plugin and otherwise) per year. If I'm not mistaken, the average capacity is ~6kwh. That works out to 9,000,000 KWh (9 GWh).

Tesla sold about 250,000 cars last year, with an average pack size of at least 70 KWh. That works out to 17,500,000 KWh (17.5 GWh).

Obviously, these are estimates, but Tesla is also running at a pace closer to ~320k units for next year with only marginally smaller pack sizes.

Revenue is another interesting metric. Toyota is at ~280 billion/year (USD). Tesla is currently at ~27 billion/year.


I think even these estimates of Toyotas battery capacity are too high. Here's my attempt:

Prius Prime PHEV: 8.8 kWh Regular Prius: I couldn't find recent numbers, but 1st gen was 1.2 kWh

All other hybrids seem to have between 1-2 kWh https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hybrid_Synergy_Drive#High_volt...

European PHEV sales were 0.3% of all sales and 0.65% of all hybrids [1]

US Prius Prime 2017 sales (I think their only PHEV model) were 21k units. [2] Note that 21k units just in the US out of 1.5m hybrids total gives us 1.4%, so maybe the PHEV prius is not selling as well in Europe.

Let's say we have the following scenarios of 2.5 or 5% of the total 1.5m number being PHEV to be conservative. Further assume that regular hybrids have 1.5 kWh. For the 2.5% scenario, if my math is correct, that yields 550,000 kWh. For the 5% PHEV scenario, that yields 874,000 kWh.

[1] https://insideevs.com/only-0-3-of-toyota-sales-in-europe-wer... [2] 2017 table from https://insideevs.com/monthly-plug-in-sales-scorecard/


Oh, nice job finding ratios of the PHEV to the rest. I felt like I was probably overestimating, but it was hard to get a feel for how much. I agree that the real number is likely closer to your estimates.


Sure, and Samsung and Huawei sell more phones than Apple. Probably Tesla is overvalued but that doesn't mean it isn't very valuable. Pricing power is much more important than volume.


Toyota was founded in 1937, so it has a 80 year head start. I didn't say anything about market cap, but Toyota's is not valued as a growth stock.


Tesla will produce close to 400k cars from one factory in 2019. It is now (relatively) easy for them to reproduce that with all their learnings in additional factories around the world.

They also own an energy and solar branch of the company which have huge growth potential and run their own electric (gas) stations.




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