It’s not about sales volume, it’s about profitability and expected future profitability. Legacy car makers traditionally have slim profit margins, lots of legacy costs like union retirees with pensions and company-provided health insurance. Tesla doesn’t have generations of retired workers to support and has much higher profit margins on their cars, more growth opportunity and economies of scale with their gigafactories to produce batteries, further cutting production costs.
I think there are two general explanations:
1) The value of a company is based on profitability, not sales numbers. At various points in time, the traditional car manufacturers have sold large numbers of cards while losing money. I think there’s a decent case to be made that Tesla is (or has the possibility to be) more profitable than typical car makers because it has lower costs (e.g. it has non-union labor) and because it sells all of its cars at a high price point and with a high markup.
2) Tesla’s price is almost certainly inflated by the fact that its cars are trendy and popular with a subset of the population that has a lot of extra income to invest.
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