Whether you admit it or not, Tesla is invincible in the field of smart cars.
Invincibility is reflected in several aspects, one is the market value is invincible, more than 1 trillion US dollars, which is the sum of more than a dozen other traditional car companies. The gross profit margin is also invincible, reaching 32.6%, surpassing BBA, Porsche, Wei Xiaoli and other companies.
In addition, the prospect is invincible, and many people think that Tesla is the leader of electric vehicles and will become the same as Apple in the mobile phone industry in the future.
So the question is, tesla to reach the current height, how much money did it spend on research and development?
In 2019, Musk publicly said that in the past 10 years, Tesla's expenditure on research and development was about $20 billion, which is an investment that other traditional car companies have not invested.
In 2020 and 2021, the total is about 5 billion US dollars, which means that Tesla has spent 12 years on research and development, in fact, only 25 billion US dollars (165 billion yuan).
This investment is more, it is really not much, equivalent to an average of only about 14 billion yuan a year.
It should be known that Huawei's R& D investment in 2021 will reach 142.7 billion yuan, and the one-year investment is not much different from Tesla's 12-year investment. This means that Tesla's past 10 years is basically equivalent to Huawei's last year, and Huawei's cumulative investment in research and development in the past decade has exceeded 845 billion yuan, which is 6 times that of Tesla.
So why did Tesla invest so little, but the results were so remarkable?
First, the R& D investment of car manufacturers is not high, but Tesla is already very high.
According to 2020 data, Tesla spent $2984 per car on research and development. But that's three times the industry average (about $1,000) and even higher than the three companies of Ford, GM and Chrysler combined.
In addition, Tesla started very early, Mazilla invested in Tesla in 2004, when electric vehicles were not optimistic, the competition was not fierce, the industry threshold was low, so the research and development costs were also low.
There is also Musk's identity as an engineer, has always paid special attention to research and development, and itself is also very technical, so Tesla has always been efficient, low-cost, and fast to transform research and development results into technical products.
And when Tesla transforms these technologies into results and continues to apply them in cars, it slowly forms a threshold, and latecomers want to reach Tesla's level, far more than $25 billion can achieve.
According to previous agency statistics, like Volkswagen plans to invest 89 billion euros (about $96 billion) in the next four years to develop electric vehicles, Toyota also plans to invest $40 billion, and Ford plans to invest $50 billion, as to whether they can finally catch up with Tesla, it will take time to prove.