Liam Denning, Columnist

Tesla Profit Benefits From Some Extra Credit

Its 10Q filing reveals an even bigger boost to margins from selling regulatory credits.

November 2, 2018 at 1:51 PM UTC

Liam Denning is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering energy. A former banker, he edited the Wall Street Journal’s Heard on the Street column and wrote the Financial Times’s Lex column.

Tesla gets extra credit.
Photographer: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images North America

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Tesla Inc.’s quarterly SEC filing has arrived. And while there is much to read through, one thing that usually emerges quickly from these documents is exactly how much revenue was made from regulatory credits.

To recap, Tesla gets these credits for selling electric vehicles and then sells them to other carmakers that manufacture traditional cars. The pattern of revenue from these credits is unpredictable; although, as I laid out here, they have proved crucial at various points to helping Tesla limit losses or beat analyst forecasts.