The Nissan Leaf will keep its $7,500 tax credit long after 200,000 sales. And Bidnessetc wins a new prize

Harry Truman

I’ll be here all week

True Tesla fans won’t let anything come between them and their undying love of Musk, not even the truth. Bidnessetc is a relentless promoter of TSLA, and in doing so, it has already won the DailyKanban’s coveted “Dewey beats Truman” award. Less than two weeks later, it wins it again.

Today, Bidnessetc. writes that Nissan has “no reason to celebrate,” because the $7,500 tax credit, doled out by a generous Uncle Sam to buyers of electric cars, will expire for the Nissan Leaf as the car approaches its 200,000th cumulative sale. Being a site that dispenses investment advice, Bidnessetc deduces: “Hence, demand for the world’s best-selling EV might decline soon as there wouldn’t be any federal tax credits afterward to serve as incentives for prospective buyers.”

Been drinking again? Any Teslaite partying would be premature, those tax credits won’t leaf anytime soon.

A tiny part of the report is true: Cumulative sales of the Nissan Leaf will soon reach 200,000. The world’s best-selling electric car by a wide margin, the Leaf should pierce the 200K mark some time this summer. It won’t pop the tax credit party balloon though. The Leaf is approaching 200,000 in worldwide sales, but America is not the world. The tax rules are about sales in America.

In pertinent part, the tax code says: “For purposes of this subsection, the phaseout period is the period beginning with the second calendar quarter following the calendar quarter which includes the first date on which the number of new qualified plug-in electric drive motor vehicles manufactured by the manufacturer of the vehicle referred to in paragraph (1) sold for use in the United States after December 31, 2009, is at least 200,000.” (Emphasis mine.)

According to Nissan’s Brian Brockman, the Leaf’s stateside spokesman, cumulative U.S. sales of the Leaf were “73,392 through January 2015.” (Bidnessetc could not even get that simple factoid straight, saying that it was “77,322 units since it went on sale in 2010.”) Brockman would not venture a guess for when the Leaf would shatter the 200K barrier to government largesse. Assuming that sales of the Leaf will remain at their 2014 level of 30,200 units, an expiration of the tax credit would be four years away, a point in time for when, I hate to mention it, Tesla already aims to be way over 500,000 units cumulative, or even annual, nobody really knows.

Advice for Bidnessetc.: Don’t drink and write. Unless, of course, you want to celebrate your next “Dewey beats Truman” award. You know the rules: With the third in succession, that award will be of the lifetime achievement type.

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