The numbers are even more extreme. Individual dealerships add a lot of additional local advertisement. They sponsor football teams, run local ads and so on. Whe

The numbers are even more extreme. Individual dealerships add a lot of additional local advertisement. They sponsor football teams, run local ads and so on. When new products are launched they spend money tell this to their local costumers. I assume that adds up quite a bit and is not reflected in these numbers. The R&D part is interesting. I always thought Tesla R&D spending was quite low, for what they were actually doing. I think this is because Musk really knows what he actually wants and works on solving those problems specifically. R&D for quite a while didn't grow much at Tesla and then resonantly it went up quite a bit again. We will see how this will continue to scale as they increase production. Logically as they get more cars the R&D per car should be dropping quickly as its averaged over more cars. But Tesla is not gone give any dividend, so they eventually will have to spend that money somewhere. Working on things like robots certainty seems like something you would only do if you had enough free cashflow. Only 3 years ago people would have gone ballistic over Tesla 'wasting' money on trying to build a humanoid robot, calling it irresponsible. But other then people saying its bad idea and will fail, nobody seem to question if they had the funds to do it. Research on batteries will certainty continue to be a huge part of what they do. They have seriously put themselves into 'competition' with LG, CATL, SK, Panasonic in terms of battery research and bringing that research into products. To do that fully vertically integrated, including the manufacturing part, not just the chemistry is a herculean effort. Elon has been wanting to develop electric super sonic planes for more then a decade, and eventually they will certainty start R&D for that sort of thing, and that a great way to a couple 100M. Overall I expect Tesla R&D to continue to be higher per car even as they start to match some of the other big car makers in terms of pure volume. Not as big a difference as there is now, but vertical integration will force them to do that.