Did Tesla Find Its US EV Tax Credit Loophole? Tesla Rentals? Plus New Marketing Efforts

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Two recently introduced initiatives at Tesla caught my eye in the past week, and got me wondering again. First of all, Tesla has started offering rental cars, which brings all kinds of questions. Secondly, right before launching the rental program, the company started engaging in an interesting new marketing push.

Tesla Rentals? Tax Loophole?

So, the core news on the consumer or public end is that Tesla is now offering the option to rent its cars. In certain locations, you can rent a Tesla from Tesla for $60/day for 3–7 days. And if you decide to buy a Tesla within those 7 days, you can get a credit of up to $250 on the purchase.

Naturally, this is an easy new way for Tesla to market its cars and find more buyers. And maybe that’s all it is. However, it also got me thinking….

As the $7,500 US EV tax credit came to an end, we got news that Ford & GM had found a loophole to push a few more electric cars out the door. They essentially sold a bunch of EVs to themselves, or to dealers, logged the tax credit for themselves, and then those dealers could pass on those savings to customers via leases.

At the time, I wondered if Tesla could find a way to take advantage of that loophole as well. I wrote the following: “Now, what about Tesla? Tesla doesn’t have separate dealers. So, presumably, Tesla couldn’t take advantage of this loophole. There’s no clear network of dealers who are independent partners to the EV company and can engage in a written binding contract with the company. Unless I’m missing something, it seems that Tesla will lose out here and suffer competitively from the loophole, despite initial reporting seeming to indicate that the change/clarification to the terms of the EV tax credit expiration would benefit Tesla and was perhaps made to benefit Tesla.”

Is it possible this rental program was created by selling vehicles to itself and logging the $7,500 tax credit? And now it is renting those cars as a somewhat separate business?

To be honest, I think this is unlikely, since it just seems like Tesla shouldn’t have been able to sell cars to itself, and the rental program is clearly linked to normal marketing efforts, but I have to think in modern America that there’s a 30–40% chance Tesla did find a way to get tax credits by doing this.

That brings me to the second news item.

Tesla Will Come To Your House

Tesla marketing emails used to be almost nonexistent, but they’ve grown and grown and now feel comparable to a local auto dealer’s emails once they get you on their list, but there was one email in particular that caught my attention recently.

The title of the email, send two weeks ago, was “Try Full Self-Driving (Supervised) With a Tesla Ride.” Here was the core text of the email, with emphasis (bolding) added by me:

Experience our latest Full Self-Driving (Supervised) technology on a Tesla Ride.* Run errands, get a ride to work or visit a friend and let your Tesla take the wheel. We’ll come to you and take you where you want to go.

Hop in the driver’s seat and a Tesla Advisor will join you as your co-pilot. They’ll walk you through all of the car’s latest features including comfort settings, games that kids can play on the touchscreens and Grok AI, your AI companion who can answer all your questions and tell you stories along the way.

Space is limited, request a call to schedule a Tesla Ride through your neighborhood to get started.

So, Tesla has gotten to the point of driving to your house to give you a test drive.

That sounds nice and exciting from a consumer end. Great! Convenient! But it clearly means we are very far from consumer demand exceeding Tesla’s supply! Not to mention its production capacity, which has been about 30%+ higher than its production and sales for a couple of years.

Frankly, if I was a Tesla shareholder, this would make me very nervous. Tesla seems to be getting desperate. You can argue that the company is just so proud of its tech and its cars that it wants to show people how good they are. But why do they need to leave the Tesla store and come to your house to make that happen? Because not enough customers are coming in the door.

There’s the possibility that Tesla FSD will soon be at a level where you will be allowed to text or do other things while the car drives itself, but in the meantime, it seems like Tesla is struggling to find customers and is in a race against time to crack that magic nut in order to juice sales again. If sales drop enough, of course, Tesla will go from having profitable quarters to having unprofitable quarters.

Stay tuned as we continue to closely follow the Tesla story for the 13th year in a row.