Yeah, about that. Why was storage again a business with negative gross margin this quarter? Read the 10-Q. It's right there. Subtract SolarCity revenue/cost of goods from TE and let me know what you get. It's not pretty.
Buyers now are the premium buyers. Either because they have no choice or because money is not the issue. Islands whose only alternative are expensive undersea cables, states with crumbling electric infrastructure and crippling summer heat on a 100 day deadline, isolated places spending rent money from their larger protective hosts, wineries that want to virtue signal, brand fanatics that crave a large white box with a T on it despite living in a country where it makes no financial sense and the average time between net outage is longer than the warranty on the product, consumers who are paying with tax credits, the list goes on and on. Tesla should be able to extract a huge premium from these customers. Has not happened. Maybe next quarter. Maybe not.
Here is another observation : the cost savings for Tesla Energy from concentrating in the gigafactory are likely 0 at this point. There is no cost saving from cell manufacturing otherwise they wouldn't truck in cells from elsewhere and there is no cost saving from assembly because we know through the Model 3 pack assembly fiasco that it's a completely different line that could just as easily be at a more convenient location. I would not be surprised if it turns out that today it's actually more expensive to make Tesla Energy products at the gigafactory than elsewhere.
