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Referring to your 350 hp example:

1. That motor is a low speed motor, as such it is massive. It weighs 3044 pounds. The Tesla motor runs at nearly 10 times the speed, and ought to be roughly a factor of 10 lighter. 2. See how the price drops by almost 10% when you buy more than 5 of these motors? Now imagine you are buying 20,000+... 3. You can bet the manufacturer of the motor (Baldor) did not get $25k for it. I imagine the markup for the reseller is of the order of 30-50%, on top of other costs such as transport. These do not apply to Tesla.

I am pretty sure even $6000/unit is an over-estimate.

I have some information from an occasionally reliable source that the entire car costs around $20,000 to make. This is the "incremental cost", after tooling, R&D etc has been paid for. This is apparently about the same as a top level mass produced luxury Benz - for the Benz, the much higher inherent production cost is offset by the scale and efficiency of their production line.



The comparison is retail to retail... Not wholesale cost. I'm sure if you need a motor, because yours failed after 6 years, they aren't going to sell it to you for wholesale. And if they are marking up the cost of the car by 400% than if their motor is $5000... you'll be paying $20k


Analysis estimates of the cost of the car are about $56K

http://green.autoblog.com/2014/02/26/why-teslas-35000-model-...

That $20k motor is much less advanced than what's in a Tesla... So @ $24k I think its a bargin... what is the rest of the car? Aluminum and Plastic and a couple of computers...




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