Taxes included in Australian price (using 109k USD base):
- Impport Duty @ 5% : $5.5k
- GST @ 10% (on dutied price) : $11.5k
- Luxury car tax (any vehicle over $59,000, on pre-GST price) @ 33% : $15k
Total Tax, Dutied Price : $141k
That leaves 54k unaccounted for. This is cash straight into the back pocket of Tesla. Shipping might be around $2000 per vehicle - assuming they pay 'full freight'.
Similar figures apply to any premium brand - a $55k BMW will set you back about $110k in Australia. It gets worse as you go up the scale - a Lamborghini Avantador costs $379k in the USA, but $745k in Australia.
The reason this price gouging goes on is because there is a further regulation that prevents parallell imports - you cannot import a vehicle (personally) unless you have lived in the country of purchase for 12 months, and used the vehicle for that entire period. It is also impossible in most states to register a LHD vehicle under 30 years old.
These regulations prevent people from flying to SF (or London), ordering a new RHD Tesla from the dealer there, and shipping it home on a boat. Thus they hand Tesla (and other makers) the ability to gouge Australian buyers by 40, 50, 100k - whatever they think they can get away with.
All these regulations and taxes are created with the idea of protecting the tiny local car industry - 224k cars made last year - but, to add insult to injury, the government regularly gives the foreign-owned car makers (Toyota, GM and Ford) cash payments to stay and keep producing.
So Australians get more expensive cars, and pay higher taxes so that global car companies don't close the unprofitable operations.
The entire thing is a poster child for the damage bad regulations and policies can cause.
EDIT : I also forgot about 'ADR' - which is Austalian design rules. These force a manufacturer to re-do compliance testing for local rules, which, although very similar to EU standards (and in some cases less stringent) - require a manufacturer like Tesla to re-crash a vehicle and modify it in insignificant ways. This raises the costs of bringing low-volume vehicles even higher. There has been talk of adopting EU standards, but it has never gotten anywhere.
Meanwhile you can import into NZ for the price of the standard GST, 15% tax on all goods. Type approval not an issue if approved in US/EU/Japan etc.
As a result only 64000 of the 150000 cars imported in 2011 were dealer new. The rest were 2nd hand, 95% from Japan. The money saved to the economy is staggering.
Australia's import barriers add huge economic deadweight loss to their economy. (I.e. they waste money)
I was going to add that NZ dumped the idea of a local car industry in the 1980s and relaxed its car import laws. As a result the average car age is much lower, and the average cost of a car is much lower - leaving large amounts of disposable income for NZ residents to spend on other things (ie, not Dealer/Manufacturer profit margins + Federal taxes). As you have shown - when people can import a vehicle from anywhere they like, they do, and no doubt that puts serious pressure on dealer + manufacturer margins and there would be very little price gouging going on.
You should hear Toyota Australia go on about parallell imports - they condemn the cars as unsafe - despite those cars being built in Toyota factories in Japan. It is mind boggling.
Meanwhile, the last round of Federal Government 'assistance' (or co-investment, as they now spin it) that was given to GM was mostly used for redundancy payouts for factory staff.
Support for the regulation + taxation + duty protection for the Australian car industry has bipartisan support - so it's not likely to go anywhere any time soon.
