Tesla posted its first profitable quarter as a public company last week. Announced Thursday the 8th, after the bell: $11.2 million in net income, revenue of $562 million, somewhere around 4,900 Model S sedans delivered in the quarter. The stock jumped double digits the next morning. By now every tech and business outlet with a pulse has run some version of the "Tesla makes money, haters were wrong" post, so I'm not going to write that one again. What I actually want to talk about is why, having read the earnings release twice and stared at a Model S parked outside a coffee shop in my neighborhood for an embarrassingly long time, I still wouldn't put my name on a waitlist.
Cost is the boring answer and also the correct one. The base 60kWh car starts around $69,900 before any tax credit, and the Performance trim with the 85kWh pack pushes toward $95,000. Thats not a criticism, exactly: building a good electric car that doesnt feel like a punishment is expensive, and Tesla isnt hiding the price behind a "starting at" asterisk the way some of the domestic guys do with their compliance cars. But it puts the thing pretty firmly out of range for anyone who isnt already doing fine.
The part that actually stops me isnt the sticker, though. Its the drive to see my parents. Its about 240 miles one direction, mostly interstate, and I do it four or five times a year without thinking about it because my ten-year-old Civic doesnt care. Tesla's Supercharger network exists now, which is a real thing and a genuinely clever piece of engineering, but as of this month it's something like a dozen stations total, clustered on the coasts. None of them are anywhere near my route. So the honest version of owning a Model S right now, for someone like me, is doing math before a routine family visit — charge time, mileage buffer, whether the hotel at the halfway point has an outlet I can beg for. Ive done range anxiety with a phone battery. I dont need it in a car.
And I say all this as someone who thinks the company is doing something real, not a novelty act. The build quality reviews Ive read arent the usual "impressive for an EV" backhanded compliment, theyre just "impressive." The touchscreen dash, whatever you think of putting climate controls behind software, is a genuine rethink of what a car interior is for. And I like that Musk keeps picking fights with the parts of this that are annoying on principle — Tesla's already tangled with a few states over direct sales, because in a bunch of places it's technically illegal to sell a car to a customer without a franchised dealer standing in the middle taking a cut. That's a fight worth having even if it slows them down.
I just think "profitable quarter" and "the car makes sense for a normal person's life" are two completely different milestones, and this week only proved the first one. The infrastructure problem is the one that actually determines whether this becomes a category or stays a rich person's second car for city driving with occasional weekend trips. Charging networks are slow and expensive to build and Tesla is doing it more or less alone right now, station by station, which is either admirably stubborn or a sign of how big a lift this still is depending on your mood that day.
Small aside because I havent complained about it anywhere else yet: my own car radio has been stuck on a Spanish-language AM station since March because the tuner knob is failing, and Ive just accepted this as a fact of my life rather than dealing with it. Which is maybe the real gap between me and a Model S owner right there. One of us is out here solving problems with software updates, and one of us is out here just living with a broken knob.
Anyway. Good for Tesla. Genuinely. Ill be interested again once there's a Supercharger within a hundred miles of my exit on I-80. Ask me in a couple years.