The perfect place to sell the Roadster is actually Norway

[Cobos]

This is wishfull thinking of course, but it does make lots of sense.

Norway does have a few factors that make selling the Roadster a lot easier than than in the US, and then I'm talking on price alone.

We have cheap hydrobased electricity, our gas costs as of today 7,86$ / gallon and some very expensive car tolls.

I'll do an example, take the basic price of the BMW Z4 Roadster 3.0si manual costs 126 409$ and out of that you pay 61 786$ in sales tax and "registration fees and tolls". The sales tax is 25% and is based on basic price while the registration fees are based on weight, power and CO2 emmision. And now comes the interesting bit. Electric cars are exempt from the sales tax as well as the registration fees. This means in theory if you take US sale price of Tesla Roadster they should sell close to the 100k$ mark maybe around $110k. And that is comparing to a more modest roadster like the BMW mentioned above, for fun use this calculator to check out the total price in NOK for cars. http://www.dinside.no/php/art.php?id=104524

(Bilens nettopris: = car retail price excluding taxes, Bilens alder: = car age, choose "Ny bil" for new car, Egenvekt: = weight in kilos, Motorens effekt: = engine effect in hp=hk or kw=kw, CO2-utslipp: = CO2 emmisions, "= Total kostnad inkl. kjøp av bil:" = total cost of car in NOK at car dealership. Currently 1$ = 5.922NOK)

Thought you guys might get a kick out of this...

Cobos

 

[danny]

I feel pretty positive that tesla will make its way to Europe....

 

[Cobos]

Yeah I figure they will eventually, but my point was that due to our high tax level even the Roadster can compete on price alone, not to mention all the other good arguments for getting one. AND as I forgot to mention above Tesla already has an agreement with Think so they should have ready supply of qualified or almost-qualified-but-need-a-little-bit-of-training mechanics to do any servicing on their cars. The Roadster probably wont sell much since it is a niche car in many ways, but the reason they do the Whitestar and then model 3 is because the Whitestar is "too" expensive in the US, while in Norway it is not...

Cobos

 

[tonybelding]

One can speculate that there might be opportunities for partnerships between Tesla and Think at some time in the future. They have cars which fit into different segments of the market and would appear to complement one another, rather than compete.

 

[Cobos]

One can speculate that there might be opportunities for partnerships between Tesla and Think at some time in the future. They have cars which fit into different segments of the market and would appear to complement one another, rather than compete.

Definately, and the norm in Norway is that car dealerships only do one or maybe two related brands (like I believe that Citroen and Peugot uses the same dealers) so a Think and Tesla joint dealership sounds like a terrific idea. In some ways like a Toyota and Lexus dealer like the one a few blocks away from where I live. So how about it Tesla?

Cobos