The Terrible Timing of Tesla's Expiring $7,500 Tax Credit

[Adam Varga + 123]

Just a few weeks after finally reaching its goal of building 5,000 Model 3 sedans in a week, Tesla has hit another threshold. Earlier this month, it sold its 200,000th car in the US. This milestone  is more cause for concern than celebration.  Tesla's customers will start to lose access to the $7,500 federal tax credit. While the federal tax credits are available for any Tesla model, they were considered particularly important to Model 3 buyers  as it is the company's newest model and Tesla's first attempt at a more mass market car. Now every Model 3 is about to become more expensive.

[Epic + 390]

Some more info on this topic:  

"If you buy a new Tesla that is delivered before the end of 2018, it will still be eligible for the full $7,500 credit. For the first six months of 2019, new Teslas will be eligible for a tax credit of $3,750; for the final half of 2019, that drops to just $1,875. Any new Tesla delivered in 2020 and beyond will be ineligible for the federal tax credit."

I think the key word in the above statement is: "If you buy a new Tesla that is delivered before..."  

Also keep in mind that Tesla isn't even considering making the cheaper version of the model 3 available until some time after the 5,000 car-per-week production level is reached, which only happened for the first time during the last week of June.  They also only accomplished that production level by skipping the break tests.  Although in Tesla's defense, they claimed the skipped break tests were a redundancy since the breaks are also checked at other points during production.