Tesla spends the most R&D and least in advertising per car sold

A new report shows that Tesla is spending more in research and development (R&D) per car than any other automaker by a wide margin, and it is spending the least in advertising per car sold.

Tesla is now the biggest automaker in the world by market capitalization, despite selling only a fraction of the number of cars that other big automakers are selling. The electric automaker is growing fast, with a capacity to deliver over a million vehicles per year.

In order to keep growing, Tesla aims to maintain its EV technology lead and is investing heavily to do so. A new report from StockApps.com compared R&D spent per car sold from all the biggest automakers and found Tesla to be in the lead:

In fact, Tesla spends more on research and development(R&D) than any other automaker.  According to data presented by StockApps.com, the firm spends $2984 on R&D per car produced. That’s thrice the industry average of roughly $1,000 per car and higher than the collective R&D budgets of Ford, GM, and Chrysler per car.

Additionally, Tesla’s entire R&D spent goes into improving technology for electric vehicles and not split with an internal combustion engine business:

On the other hand, Tesla doesn’t spend any money on advertising and rely entirely on organic growth and some marketing. Marketing costs also went down significantly last year after Tesla ended its owner referral program for vehicles.

Now, the automaker relies almost entirely on word-of-mouth and its strong brand, which doesn’t seem to be a problem in the current market situation as its delivery timelines for new orders extend into next year for some versions of its vehicles.

On top of R&D investments, Tesla CEO Elon Musk has been claiming that the automaker is also broadly investing more than double what GM and Ford are investing combined:

It looks like Musk is talking about Tesla’s current investments in manufacturing, like Gigafactory Texas in Austin.