Tesla posts big loss, cuts production of Models X and S to catch up on Model 3
finance.yahoo.com
finance.yahoo.com
- Tesla will be late getting up to 5,000 units a week of Model 3. It will happen at the end of Q1 instead of the end of this year. The bottleneck is batteries.
- Some lines are at only 500 cars a week. Namely the battery pack assembly, body shop welding and final vehicle assembly.
- The $2.92 a share loss was much bigger than the $2.27 analysts expected.
- The company burned $1.4 billion and has $3.5 billion in cash. Raising money shouldn't be necessary.
- Automotive gross margins fell from 28% to about 18% and will slip to 15% next quarter.
- Auto revenue grew 10% to $2.4 billion as sales of Model S and X grew. Revenue is at risk, though. Tesla will divert resources from Model S and X to the Model 3.
- Tesla didn't say much about China. The company added a supercharger station with 50 chargers in Shanghai, but no word on a new plant.
- Musk expects to spend $1 billion on capital expenditures next quarter. That's consistent with expectations for ramp up for Model 3.
- Tesla installed 109 megawatts of ``energy generation systems'' in the third quarter. It acknowledges this is an underwhelming figure: ``the lower deployments are in large part a result of deliberately de-emphasizing commercial and industrial solar energy projects with low profit and limited cash generation.''
As to the battery delay.... Tesla says it's the suppliers fault. "key elements" of the battery module assembly had to be taken over and redesigned, Musk says.
EDIT
- most importantly, Elon has moved his desk to the giga factory as that is where the largest bottleneck is.
Tesla seems to be taking the opposite approach to Apple here. In my observation, Apple drives its suppliers extremely hard to achieve the quality it requires. Tesla, on the other hand, is too eager to bring any sundry part in house (e.g. car seats). Apple's approach appears to work in that it pushes suppliers to do what's necessary. I worry that Tesla, having already bitten off a large bite to chew, is inviting too much distraction that will, in the long run, not put Tesla in a stronger position (there is a reason most automobile manufacturers outsource their seats after all).
Apple in particular understood lomg before competitors that battery life is an extremely important real world metric. Doing their own SOC helps them optimise that.
Anyway, you are comparing the battery life of touch-based smartphones with its non-touch predecessor which isn't a fair comparison. Besides, mobile phones that could last for a week from a single charge are definitely not considered smartphones, those are feature phones.
Sometimes forcing your supply chain to pinch every penny works out the best for your shareholders.. sometimes focusing on quality products pays off more in the long run.
Time will tell.
I'm thinking about the different ways to structure a business to achieve a quality product. Is there a good example of a company that produces, in-house, an entire non-trivial (i.e. there are some systems to be integrated) product?
Other point Boeing had years long delays with the 787 partly due to developing a new technology while also trying to outsource much of their production.
No, it wouldn't. The OP asserted that Apple holds their supply chain to rigorous quality standards. You're asserting that Walmart holds their supply chain to the lowest possible pricing.
Apple earned this right by helping those suppliers get off the ground. With introduction of iMacs/iBooks (~1999) Apple helped build wireless card manufacturing plant in Taiwan from nothing ('few dusty rooms' at their modem supplier manufacturing facility). They did similar thing while shopping for Camera supplier, instead of going with someone established like Sony Apple chose Taiwanese bottom of the barrel volume suppliers (Primax/Micron) and grew their camera module divisions with each iteration of iPhone.
> Some lines are at only 500 cars a week. Namely the battery pack assembly, body shop welding and final vehicle assembly.
of those, the battery pack is the big issue.
From Gabrielle Coppola, bloomberg's auto analysts:
> The biggest production constraint by far is the battery module assembly. A systems integration contractor dropped the ball, and Tesla only realized they dropped the ball until very recently. Tesla had to rewrite all the software from scratch, Musk explains. That's what he and CTO J.B. Straubel have been focused on.
I'm fine with the gross margin trending towards, say, 20% over the next few quarters since GM for example is at 12% (I'd expect Tesla's gross margin to be higher than GMs because Tesla keeps the revenue that GM has to give to its dealers).
So sure they might well be making a loss at the current rate of sales of the model 3, but will be quite profitable once the production rate increases.
The S/X and are old now and the car market requires new models to keep sales going.
That combined with the approaching launches of other high end luxury electric cars does not bode well for future S/X sales.
The negative press on autopilot and failure to deliver on autopilot 2.0 could certainly be a factor as well.
Was there more than that accident with the old version? I havent heard much about this...
It's November and they don't even have automatic windshield wipers working.
See: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1FGexNNm8rOXB24qQ1bdI...
But the failure to deliver is real. The entire Autopilot project is way behind schedule. AP2 was supposed to reach feature parity last year, but it didn't until quite recently, and it's still widely considered not to be as good as experience as the original Autopilot yet.
This is a sample of the first 100 articles from Google News on "Tesla Autopilot Crash" - in total you have about 10 unique incidents with 100s of stories in different outlets written about it.
Lots of sensational headlines and a lot of the incidents are pretty dubious about what the actual cause is but to casual readers its adds up to a cloud of doubt about Tesla repeated across many big name media sources.
Most of these same media sources also run plenty of enthusiastic coverage on Tesla so it really depends on your pre-judgements what you take away from it. Tech enthusiasts will tend to minimize the negative stories whereas people not interested in tech who are more safety concerned will give them much more weight.
Maybe the market for electric cars is larger than the market for a tesla specifcally.
1) They had done the paperwork wrong and hadn’t informed his bank about some additional charges so it required an additional hour for them to get that sorted before my cousin basically just paid that additional amount upfront. 2) There were scratches in quite a few places that were noticed by us and cleaned up once we mentioned them. My cousin has purchased a couple of BMWs in the past for a lot less and never seen that before. 3) Some parts were not fitting well and had to be adjusted. 4) The autopilot to remove the car from the garage doesnt work because the garage is at the top of a slight incline. This is pretty common in many US garages. Hopefully this is just a software fix. 5) The overall car quality simply doesn’t match up to what you’d expect from a 100k car.
That being said, it’s still a pleasure to drive and a really nice car. He can’t go back to driving an ICE anymore.
Tesla does seem to have a lot of quality control issues which may have been to,reared by the initial set of buyers that will become more of a problem with a less forgiving next wave of potential customers. And a lot of their solutions currently appear very manual and ad hoc. Hopefully they can improve on them soon.
- Non-GAAP automotive gross margin temporarily declined to 18.7%, which was in line with our expectations. The gross margin declined primarily because of a significant increase in Model 3 manufacturing costs to support the limited initial level of production.
- Model S and Model X gross margin declined from Q2 primarily due to one-time price adjustments for discontinued trims and unfavorable trim mix. Numerous actions to improve Model S and Model X gross margin are underway. Consequently, we expect Model S and Model X gross margin to improve in upcoming quarters.
http://www.skm.dk/skattetal/satser/satser-og-beloebsgraenser...
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-06-02/denmark-i...
So yes, they are probably more savvy than the average equity investor; the bonds falling doesn't mean they think a default is neccessarily on the horizon, just that a ratings upgrade is not (and potentially also that the company will come back for more money sooner rather than later, as that implies more supply vs demand which may not scale equally).
This would all seem to make a good case for the equity being overpriced, but to short the equity you need a conviction that the rest of the market will realise this sooner rather than later.
That sounds better than what Tesla claims. http://files.shareholder.com/downloads/ABEA-4CW8X0/549293785... (emphasis added):
”Other lines, such as battery pack assembly, body shop welding and final vehicle assembly, have demonstrated burst builds of about 500 units per week and are ramping up quickly.”
If you can do burst runs of 15 km/hour, that doesn’t mean you can run a three hour marathon.
”The company burned $1.4 billion and has $3.5 billion in cash. Raising money shouldn't be necessary.”
To get that $1.4 billion in revenue, they will need to sell 40k Tesla 3s at $35k each, or 3,000 a week. To get it in margin, even assuming the average model 3 will sell for $50k, they will have to sell 12,000 a week or so (at 20% margin)
=> If things go as planned, I guess they will need about half their money in half a year or so before turning a profit. That doesn’t leave very much in case things go worse than planned (for example, they plan for 25% margin on model 3, but currently don’t have that on their more expensive models, and they plan to sell more of their expensive models, but can decrease production, so, presumably, they have quite a few of them in inventory)
Tesla may have a fantastic future ahead of it, but it also may fail spectacularly fairly soon, or just have a decent future ahead of it that doesn’t warrant its current share price.
lol. "it might go up, might go down, or might stay the same!"
It seems like you're assuming that the cash burn will stay at 1.4billion. Expenditure should go down once the production line tooling is complete.
This leads me to expect it's reasonable their burn will continue at the same rate.
Furthermore, it's estimated they won't reach 3k a week till the end of 2018.
https://dailykanban.com/2017/10/source-tesla-responsible-mod...
Once you're in 3 hour marathon territory, what you can do for 1 mile is a lot more relevant to what you can do for 26.2 miles than you might think. One of the tent poles of effective marathon/half marathon training is to make your race pace into a drumbeat. You want to feel your race pace in your bones. Very effective workouts look like: take your marathon race pace, and run 5 minutes easy/5 minutes hard (~race pace) for 60, or 10 easy/10 hard for 80.
Tesla is talking about burst builds that last for a week. That sounds like very effective training that will prepare them for race day.
Was that in the call? Their statement says "Several manufacturing lines [...] have demonstrated a manufacturing ability in excess of 1,000 units per week during burst builds of short duration. Other lines, [...] have demonstrated burst builds of about 500 units per week...". AFAIK, "short duration" != "a week".
Assuming they didn’t produce a lot more than they delivered, if they had even one week in which they produced 500 Model 3s, they also must have had weeks in which they destroyed them.
Something is terribly wrong in Fremont.
If you want to compete in a market, you got to play at the speed/quality/prices of the market -- there is no slack given for being new.
Their real risk is if the Model 3's reliability is bad or they need a recall thus reducing their profits significantly.
"The truth is the Model 3 costs $40,000 if you want a standard version with autopilot (an extra $5,000) in black with no other options. If you want a different color, add $1,000. And if you want a longer range ($9,000) to get over 300 miles per charge instead of 220, well now we’re at $50,000. $50,000 for a midrange car."[1]
[1] https://www.theverge.com/2017/7/31/16069960/tesla-model-3-no...
"Enhanced Autopilot adds these new capabilities to the Tesla Autopilot driving experience. Your Tesla will match speed to traffic conditions, keep within a lane, automatically change lanes without requiring driver input, transition from one freeway to another, exit the freeway when your destination is near, self-park when near a parking spot and be summoned to and from your garage."
You can get adaptive cruse control for more reasonable costs, but lane changing takes a lot more awareness around the car.
In the end, unless they get profitable, if they burn their stash, they're toast.
If Tesla is stuck on a battery bottleneck it's just as silly as if Mercedes were stuck on a sheet metal bottleneck. Yes, you need reliable component suppliers that can scale with you as you grow and provide the quality you need. If you don't have that, you have a big problem that vertical integration isn't going to solve.
The Mercedes E-class is monocoque, like almost all cars. They build the body/frame and then add the powertrain and wheels. Here's the body/frame and the powertrain/suspension coming together.[1] The powertrain and suspension aren't self-supporting; they're a collection of parts held in a fixture. That's very clear in the video of the parts coming together.
The Tesla Model S, though, is body on frame. If it can sit on its wheels without a body, as the Tesla Model S can, it's body-on-frame. Here's the Tesla Model S platform sitting on its wheels, with the powertrain installed.[2]
So is the Tesla Model 3.[3]
[1] https://youtu.be/lPKnM9vC6V0?t=395 [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l8WUIkD7xxI [3] https://jalopnik.com/why-tesla-needs-to-sell-the-model-3-wit...
Just curious -- If they need to raise money afterall, how easy or difficult it would be for them to get the money cheaply?
1: https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/17695/any-refere...
That it's a LaTeX habit does provide an explanation, but then the information that there may be a better way when using Unicode might also be appreciated for someone that does not know. I would appreciate being informed of that if I wasn't aware.
In any case, I tried to be informative and relay that it was my own problem that compelled me to reply, but I wasn't aware I was being excitable enough to need to "chill out". I tried to word it in a way to avoid people thinking I was getting worked up, and show that I just felt compelled to contribute. Unfortunately that didn't seem to come across.
Have you considered not being that guy?
This is curious. If the S and X are profitable, why divert resources from them? Not enough? Well maybe they should not have just canned a bunch of people?
Yeah I know, the ones they let go may not be the ones they needed for the 3. But it still seems strange all these things taken together.
Elon is the bottleneck
Great, the boss is in house...now I spend more of my time telling the boss why it isn't fixed yet and less of my time actually fixing it. I'm not saying those things are inherently at odds but they are definitely in tension with each other.
production could begin in three years. Source - https://techcrunch.com/2017/11/01/elon-musk-says-teslas-chin...
apparently he sleeps there sometimes too:
https://www.gearbrain.com/elon-musk-sleep-tesla-factory-2502...
Euphemism for government funding running out.
Those 'bugs' are a big problem for a company already behind in production.
I hope for Tesla this was just a single event. But new cars with new tech always have issues. You don't want that when you are already behind.
Ah, the Kim Jong Il approach. The presence of Dear Leader will surely inspire the peasants as they work towards the Juche Ideal.
"Leading up to the end of September, we saw new-high Model 3 VIN numbers in the wild almost every other day, culminating in number 521.
But since the beginning of October, nothing. I can’t find a single one above 521 with VIN picture evidence on any forum.
It’s unlikely to end up this way, but the sole evidence we have to date is this: Tesla is on track to deliver zero Model 3 units in October.
Of course, I don’t believe it will be exactly zero. However, it’s no longer an impossibility. It’s looking like my previous estimate of 240 units may be way too high."
Tesla says today they produced only 260 vehicles in October--and it's unlikely very many of those got all the way to end users!
From SeekingAlpha October 17: "At this stage, I'll continue to roll the dice one more time in favor of betting that for a third full month, the Chevrolet Bolt EV will out-sell the Tesla Model 3 in the U.S. - and probably by a very wide margin, along the lines or 10:1 or more. Maybe even 100:1 or an infinite margin."
Even if you consider Elon Musk a sort of demigod (as much of the tech industry seems to), the leap from 260 vehicles a month--which indicates the vehicles are still being made mostly by hand--to 5,000 a week is going to be incredibly difficult to make in just a few short months.
The pre-orders mean they could get some line of credit to help, but that will also cut into margins
Now if Tesla had locked in the price on preorders, they'd be in big trouble.
>Author payment: $35 + $0.01/page view. Authors of PRO articles receive a minimum guaranteed payment of $150-500.
At this point, it’s nice to have the additional transparancy into the current production bottleneck.
https://www.theverge.com/2017/11/1/16593582/tesla-model-3-pr...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bankruptcy_in_the_United_State...
If you don’t think it’s possible, then I suggest putting all of your available assets into their equity.
The momentum Tesla's created toward electric cars may be sufficient that mass-market producers can take it from here.
but I'm sure Elon could spin it.
Advanced automation promises great benefits, including reduced headcount and more repeatable (and thus higher quality) processes.
Advanced automation has some pretty serious drawbacks as well. In addition to the HUGE cost to set it up in the first place:
* Every station has to run at the same rate.
* Every station has to have material delivered at the same rate.
* Every fastener has to go on correctly the first time.
If the advanced automation cannot run at a sufficient rate, it may not pay for itself. Additionally, the Model 3 has lower margins than the Model S and Model X, so if the run rate is not high enough, the margins may not cover overhead.
0. see videos: https://electrek.co/2017/11/01/tesla-model-3-production-dela...
Disclaimer: I work for a Tesla competitor.
Many companies think that the economics will work out for them once they've achieved a certain scale or years of efficiencies. It doesn't work out for all of them. The worst case scenario is that Tesla keeps losing money, investors lose faith in the company, they spend what money they have left, no one will give them more funding, and they close up shop selling the assets to another.
A more likely scenario is that the tech is years away, they spend a lot of money before the tech is ready, and then someone else who is better at manufacturing and distribution swoops in once the tech is ready and cleans their clock.
Right now Tesla has no competition and doesn't have to negotiate and compete on price; when they do, their margins will suffer and holes in their efficiency hurt them.
In the future, self-driving cars will decimate the market for vehicles. If we didn't have to worry about the issues around sharing cars, we might need a tenth of the vehicles we currently have. Even if Tesla becomes the Toyota of that era, it's 1/10th of what Toyota is today and it shrinks to less than half its market cap. Plus, with fewer sales, maybe they can't make themselves profitable, they fold up shop, etc.
Maybe self-driving vehicles will create really great mass-transit systems where you can hop on and off ad-hoc routes with well-appointed 10-20 passenger vehicles and get picked up and dropped off conveniently with little added time - probably a lot less time than our current situation with traffic.
This isn't to say that Tesla won't achieve its goals, just to point out that many things could happen to impact Tesla's future. It's not just about making an electric vehicle - Tesla has done that. It's about being able to effectively compete with a market that isn't going to stand still. If Tesla can't manufacture with the efficiency that other auto-makers can, they'll fail over the long run. Heck, GM had a lot of trouble keeping up with Toyota. Will Tesla become efficient enough to compete? Will the auto market dry up as autonomous vehicles come into play? Will we just get transportation from A to B via a transit network rather than owning a vehicle?
Again, this isn't to say that Tesla can't succeed. This is merely to point out that it's far from assured. If electric vehicle economics improve, competitors will come in and fight for those dollars which will drive down prices and profits. If autonomous vehicle technology becomes a reality, Uber, Lyft, and others will be ready to make the case that you shouldn't even own a vehicle and they'll be able to transport the same number of people with a fraction the number of vehicles.
I'm hoping that Tesla's current manufacturing difficulties will eventually look like the early days of SpaceX and that over time they will improve their rate of manufacture, as well as the rate that they can make changes.
I've mis-estimated a lot of things in my career, so I'm trying to be sympathetic, but it seems like someone with production line experience should have been able to test individual parts of the production line before committing to thousands of units per month.
What they should hope for is for these problems to arise sooner, rather then later - lessening the cost of recalls.
I went to undergrad for mechanical engineering at a university generally known for turning out good auto industry engineers. A few years out of school (maybe 2010-11?) I noticed a lot of my alumni friends were starting to move from places like Honda, Toyota, GM, etc. to Tesla. These were the friends I would generally have considered the most motivated and best engineers I graduated with or new in college. To a man (pardon the gendering) they are not at Tesla anymore. They have all left, most for other startups, and they all left disillusioned with the internal Tesla management. They all left completely burned out.
They basically felt that a lot of managers with experience in software were brought in and made very bad assumptions about the translation of software development to mechanical device manufacturing...and wouldn't let go of them. Its not that those assumptions NEVER transfer but they don't ALWAYS transfer. Manufacturing ramp up is really really really really hard. Intel has a 10 billion dollar site in Oregon that does nothing but figure out how to put together a manufacturing process that minimally functions and then figure out how to scale it up. Ramping manufacturing is different than designing the parts. You have layers and layers and layers of design. The big OEM's use suppliers not just to outsource cost and employee management but because they allow those companies to build expertise in a specific area that the OEM then no longer has to maintain. I heard stories from friends there about Tesla managers trying to be "Apple like" and demand tighter tolerances on every dimension of a part, driving up not just cost but lead time as suppliers tried to figure out how to retool their whole process to meet the request. I heard stories of requests to design custom bolts to use throughout the process for no discernible reason. That custom bolt (1) means longer design time, because a part that shouldn't have to be designed has to be designed, (2) means greater cost, (3) and means a supplier has to ramp up their own manufacturing of a new part - but hey blame the supplier. I think the most interesting ones were related to internal culture. Tesla is a car company...I know there are all these cool elements of an office we expect of a startup, but having a beer cart rolling around on Friday's at a car company may not send the best image.
I now work at a couple universities (grad student/lecturer) and Tesla is the hot employee all the students want, not unsurprisingly, and they are all about campus recruiting. That can work great, but it relies on having a strong base of experienced engineers to train these people. Tesla has not managed to hold on to that experience from my limited dataset and is instead replacing them with cheap inexperienced labor attracted by the 'aspirational' nature of Tesla as an employee. From the pool of friends I have seen go to SpaceX, I have not heard the same things.
> “We had to rewrite all of the software from scratch,” Musk said, adding that they’d redone “about 20 to 30 man years of software in four weeks” for the battery module.
Maybe I'm just overcautious, but I would prefer not to be anywhere in the vicinity of a high-discharge actively cooled 100kWh battery whose control system was written, presumably as a rush job, in four weeks.
EDIT guess this is just rephrasing of your point, in a way.
The solution to that is to structure the project into independent parts that can be done in parallel by smaller amount of people, thus vastly reducing communication waste. But whether or not you can divide your project in such a way is a question of its scope, and of design decisions you make.
There are countless projects where work can be efficiently parallelized. Cramming 30 man years in a month still sounds like a death march but we do know that say Linux kernel which by now is probably a million(†) man-year effort was done faster than in geological time.
† Ok exaggerating but it is huge and with fast paced change throughout whole codebase.
assuming a man year is 40h/week and those 4 weeks were a crunch of 80 hour weeks, then 125 people worked on the same piece of software, assuming no ramp up time.
Is this even possible?
I mean, charging profile based on input variables such as temperature, total capacity, current capacity, health, available power ect. And then for discharging.
The battery and it's controller ought to be a black box you can either feed power or request power from, and query for data. Either I'm missing something fundamental, or the SW stack is a mess.
The code you are thinking about Is a copy paste from the model s and x batterry management system which implemented a kalman filter in a dsp to calculate State of charge among other things. That code is not the one being discussed here.
Thanks to Tesla - seriously(!! COULD not and WOULD not have happened without them), we now have a compelling mass market electric car on the market.
The Chevrolet Bolt.
In any case I'm not sure I'd give credit to Tesla on that. The Bolt seems more like a response to the Leaf and friends than it is to anything like a Model S.
If they were aiming for the Leaf, it appears they got to market faster and better (specs) than the 2018 Leaf. A little surprising from Chevy (when compared to Nissan), particularly since they didn't really have a first edition to build on themselves.
If they were aiming for the Model 3 - they got to market faster and "at least in the ballpark" spec-wise, AND at much much higher volumes than Tesla. To me this is less surprising. A mass-market car producer could get to market with a high-volume car faster than Tesla? And in higher volumes? That isn't so surprising. It would have surprised me _even less_ if Toyota had done it, though they clearly weren't trying. It does surprise me a little that Nissan hasn't, though it is fairly clear that they aren't trying _hard_.
The Prius normalizing an electric drive train pushed full electric further into the mainstream then Tesla has. Granted Tesla's investment into batteries bumped Panasonics time line up a bit and bumped full BEV up a bit but a compelling mass market electric car on the market has been clearly inevitable since 2000.
Edit: I changed it from "Tesla ... may have". To "Granted Tesla " to more accurately reflect my evaluation of Tesla's contribution to the time line.
But I would say it is more a case of "necessary, but not sufficient."
Toyota unarguably pushed electric into the unsexy, mass production, mass consumption mainstream. This was a necessary step.
But Tesla showed that electric COULD be luxury, performance, etc - not necessary for mass market - but the related headlines generated arguably were.
But also that _pure electric_ could be delivered with _more than enough_ range to eliminate range anxiety, even with "notably better than a Prius" levels of performance. And it could at least appear to be "mass manufactured" (even if, on Toyota/Chevy/Nissan scale, or if you will, BMW/Mercedes/Lexus/etc they really weren't). This WAS necessary, and did cause a tipping point that, IMHO led to the Chevy Bolt.
The Prius led to the Bolt evolutionarily.
The Model 3 led to the Bolt "by Marketing force."
And now we have a Bolt.. and basically no Model 3.
We'll see what happens in the next couple of years.
It seems to have much better range (two battery options with 40kWh and 60kWh which give est range of 150 and 200 miles, resp).
The point of Tesla under his lead was always to make transportation electric ASAP; not necessarily for Tesla to be the biggest player forever. I.e. Tesla is means to an end, not an end itself.
As a company, Tesla can use whatever nonsensical management techniques they want. But firing people 'for cause' will unreasonably hurt otherwise productive people in their future careers. And it will make future candidates far more wary to ever want to work there.
Elon quoted GE which lays of the bottom 10% of their staff every year. It's not that bad.
"Cash being tight" and "firing some employees for performance reasons" are not mutually exclusive.
How much ramp-up will replacing them require? How will that impact their production rate?
They may not need to be replaced. If they do, we can safely presume they determined those resources (cost / time) involved in doing so were less than what it takes to replace them.
It may not negatively impact their production rate. They may be able to improve their production rate by spending that money in a more targeted way now.
I've never received any communication about timelines at all.
A place better than last would even be worth more, no?
FWIW, Tesla stock price and the related predictions follow a sinusoidal pattern. When the stock goes high, doomsday predictions pull it low, and when it hits the bottom, all rosy predictions start flooding the news cycle.
When Model3 was announced, first deliveries were announced to be end of 2017, and from that POV, Tesla has already over delivered. I think most reactions that Tesla is under performing is based on the stock price, and the respective P/E value.
The model 3 Reviews so far are pretty positive, I know they are tesla employees cars so they are going to be quite biased, but others have got their hands on them and also posted positive reviews and it looks like a nice car once the software polished.
If something better did come along before I get a delivery date then I will obviously get that instead and ask for a refund, however I have not seen anything I like yet even on the drawing board so I will stick to my Mazda3 until then.
why do people do this? it is not relevant, helpful or required in order to comment. Anyone with a NASDAQ index fund in their portfolio or 401k has at least one share of Tesla...which is basically everyone here
For what it's worth, Disclaimer: I own Tesla Shares :)
Good thing tesla has a lot of vertical investment in batteries. The market is very competitive.
* 50-100% greater range * Better acceleration and handling (and RWD/AWD) * Access to the Tesla Supercharger network enabling long-distance travel * Much better UX and constant improvements in OTA software updates. * Buying from a company that is all-in on electrifying and decarbonizing the world, and isn't just dipping in their toes for the granola crowd. * A way more attractive car compared to the Leaf's awkward hatch
So it's your contention that 95% of HackerNews can see the future of EVs, but all the major manufacturers have and/or are going to miss it?
Shaky bull thesis, my friend.
https://insideevs.com/nissan-starts-selling-green-credits-pu...
My "vision" for the future of EVs is that increasing range and decreasing prices will drive adoption. With sales of the Leaf totaling about 2 weeks of US auto sales, it is risky to expect it to represent Nissan's strategy.
Much better value, larger size, better fuel economy, more conventional, more power, more range, and superchargers.
Cost per mile of range: $200 for the 2018 leaf, 132 for the Model 3. 147 hp vs 258 hp, 10" of extra length and 6" of extra width, over twice the range at less than half the capacity.
The Tesla is way superior to any other electric car on the road. The supercharger alone makes it the obvious buy for almost all consumers.
I think people getting fed up with the wait and switching to Bolts en-masse is a possible scenario. Imagine if Chevy made an ad targeting exactly that scenario....
(You can thank me later Chevy ad execs)
Bolt: http://www.chevrolet.com/content/dam/chevrolet/na/us/english...
Model 3: https://electrek.files.wordpress.com/2016/06/tesla-model-3-s...
Tesla should be concerned if GM expands their market by taking their Bolt technology and rapidly expanding into vehicle lines that appeal to other groups, such as a Bolt crossover or sexy Bolt hot hatch.
Personally the Bolt looks a bit lame to me, but I'd consider one that was a bit sportier and that looked about as good as a Golf GTI.
Or this thing: https://www.wired.com/story/crazy-cute-concept-cars-from-the...
The model 3 is just under twenty one inches longer and 6.6 inches wider. The Bolt is nearly the size of a mini. It's not in the same purchase category for most consumers. It's also hastily and very poorly designed- the lead aero guy called it a nightmare. To me the most indicative thing about that is the weight. Despite being almost two feet shorter than the model 3, the bolt weighs more than the (short range) model 3. It's a shitty car, and non-electric reviewers have loathed it.
It's a perfectly good car, and most non-electric reviewers have said its only major fault is being "not sexy, not cool". Doug DeMuro, for example - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d2ogGZXmepY
> the bolt weighs more than the (short range) model 3.
Sure, but only barely. The short-range Model 3 weighs 3,549lbs, and the Bolt weighs 3,563lbs. Your complaining about a difference of 14 pounds (less than 1%). The Bolt also delivers 18 extra driving miles of range, which explains a small portion of the weight difference.
> the lead aero guy called it a nightmare
Of course he did, they sacrificed aerodynamics for comfort. Some of the big complaints with Chevy's last electric car (Volt) was that it was too low to the ground and too short -- all great things for aerodynamics, but all things that actual humans complained about. So they made the Bolt a proper hatchback -- taller and sit higher -- to make it nicer for the occupants. Chevy, shockingly, listened to their customers and made some changes they requested.
The Bolt is perfectly fine car. Obviously it's not as sexy or luxurious as a Model 3. But the Bolt is not in any way a "shitty car" -- by most accounts, it's fast, comfortable and reliable. In fact, the Bolt is arguably the best electric car you can actually purchase in the US today -- and likely will be for the next year or so until Tesla solves their production struggles.
> We’re not fans of the front seats—the lack of support reminded us of a vinyl lawn chair. The gear selector moves in an unusual 7-shaped pattern, which makes it tricky to put the Bolt in Reverse.[1]
> Although it’s spacious and practical, the Bolt EV’s interior quality and appearance don’t befit its $30,000-plus price point. It looks and feels more as if it belongs in an economy car. It’s clear where General Motors spent its money: on the Bolt’s big battery.[2]
> Sure, but only barely. The short-range Model 3 weighs 3,549lbs, and the Bolt weighs 3,563lbs. Your complaining about a difference of 14 pounds (less than 1%). The Bolt also delivers 18 extra driving miles of range, which explains a small portion of the weight difference.
I'm complaining about it because the model 3 is a full 10% larger. If you only compare the footprint (which correlates more closely with mass) the model 3 is 23% bigger! That's a HUGE difference! It's not the weight itself that bothers me, it's just what it implies about the design work.
> Of course he did, they sacrificed aerodynamics for comfort. Some of the big complaints with Chevy's last electric car (Volt) was that it was too low to the ground and too short -- all great things for aerodynamics, but all things that actual humans complained about. So they made the Bolt a proper hatchback -- taller and sit higher -- to make it nicer for the occupants. Chevy, shockingly, listened to their customers and made some changes they requested.
That would be one thing, but the drag coefficient is .312. That's 30% worse than other EVs and stand-out bad among regular cars when it should be much better due to the reduced engine ventilation requirements and smoother underbody. The VW golf sits at .27[4], along with the mercedes b-class. There are tons of combustion hatchbacks at .27 or lower. The Bolt's aerodynamics are closer to the Kia Soul[5][6] than a Golf. The bottom line after all the excuses is still that the Bolt is way under-engineered.
> In fact, the Bolt is arguably the best electric car you can actually purchase in the US today -- and likely will be for the next year or so until Tesla solves their production struggles.
Yeah, I can agree with that. I get too incensed seeing it compared to a model 3, I guess. I also get unnecessarily annoyed when people buy a coupe civic just to save $1000. If I needed a new car in 2018, it's the car I'd buy (very unhappily).
[1] https://www.consumerreports.org/2017-chevrolet-bolt/2017-che...
[2] https://www.caranddriver.com/reviews/2017-chevrolet-bolt-ev-...
[3] http://www.hybridcars.com/2017-chevy-bolt-ev-is-less-of-a-dr...
[4] https://drivemag.com/news/the-most-aerodynamic-cars-you-can-...
[5] https://media.ed.edmunds-media.com/kia/soul/2017/oem/2017_ki...
Except that it mostly isn't on the road at all!
Cost per mile of range is a nice way of getting lower numbers for the Tesla, but it's more out of pocket.
The model 3 has a longer range, is faster, and is overall much sexier, but it costs for model 3 users to use those superchargers, and you can get a Leaf or Bolt today.
Tesla has to get them on the road before an accurate comparison can be made to Leafs and Bolts.
The 2017 Leaf has a range of 107 miles, for $287/mile. It's also 110 hp. Both the Bolt and the Leaf are crap cars. Tesla could raise the price on the model 3 by 10 grand and it would still be a better value.
Perhaps in parts of the USA but not necessarily in Europe. For example there is ONE supercharger station on the whole island of Ireland, at Ballacolla south-west of Dublin.
I've lived on the island for 40 years and have never even been to that part of it.
The supercharger isn't like a gas station, it's only meant for long trips. Ireland could probably do with one on the west coast too, but it still serves its purpose in Dublin. You wouldn't be able to drive all the way south to north in a Leaf or Bolt.
But yeah, long trips are much less common in Europe and you'd think Tesla would do worse (especially since even in America the model S is a relatively large sedan), but without checking the numbers AFAIK they do better. I would guess the price point puts it in the range of people who want big cars anyway. Probably it just fills a niche that has been very empty in Europe- wealthy climate-aware buyers with preferences for stylish mid-high level cars.
So Tesla is good ("anything other than making money"), and Nissan with doing more good by selling more Leafs is not? If Nissan is good, which electic car producer is bad?
I would agree on SpaceX - though a cynic might say it's Musks way out of the earth catastrophe[1] - but with many more companies selling electric cars the argument falls flat for me.
Especially if one looks at all the allegations by employees - if they are employees at all or sub-contractors without rights. Either Tesla has bad press or there are much more than with other car companies.
[1] Because you can be sure you're not the one on the last ship out
Not saying that. But where were the other automakers when Tesla was single-handedly pushing against the market to make EVs viable?
I get people are cynical, but come on. Musk has been actually proving for years that he cares, and the goals for Tesla and SpaceX were idealistic for as long as he was involved, did not change, and the companies did nothing to suggest they're not what he says they are.
Normal testing and tweaking time for a new body assembly line is 6 months to a year, and before that, sections of the line are run in test at the supplier's factory. Tesla skipped all that. It didn't work out well.
[1] https://dailykanban.com/2017/10/source-tesla-responsible-mod...
The big objective thing that the Bolt is missing is a fast charging network. For now, nothing can touch Tesla's supercharger network in terms of charging speed and locations.
Which isn't to say that it won't be a valuable marketing tool, however -- range anxiety is definitely going to be a thing for a while.
For two, if someone is considering buying a new car, and their daily commute is 3 miles each way, but once a year they take a 200-mile road trip (relatives, beach, mountain vacation), the lack of fast and convenient charging options severely lowers the chance they will consider that 238-mile-range vehicle.
Both the number and reliability of public chargers needs to increase drastically - there’s a couple of free Volta chargers by the grocery store I frequent, 70% of the time they’re taken and 20% they’re inoperative. Just a slight bummer for me, as I can charge at home, but a huge bummer for someone who is on a road trip down to their last 20 miles, and was planning to do a major recharge there.
Oddly enough, two years ago, Hacker News insisted that I was an idiot for driving an ICE hybrid, because of how long it takes to stop for gas.
https://jalopnik.com/elon-musk-just-yelled-shame-at-a-bunch-...
That literally every Tesla/SpaceX story in the last 10 years.
The Bolt can not be produced in the numbers needed for a revolution. The people who produce it are not interested in a revolution in the first place.
The stock might be below peak right now, but the scaling they have achieved since they started is massive, and in the long term they are still on track.
That's an odd argument to be making in favor of a company that's having so much trouble producing cars. Why do you think the Bolt can't be produced in larger numbers? Does Tesla make in a year as many cars as GM makes in a day?
Battery Supply I guess.
Meaning that they are totally unprepared to sell 1million cars a year and they also don't seem to have plans of scaling to that.
I don't follow official statements closely but it sounds like they are using this retooling as an excuse for low demand for the S and X. This way they get to have their cake and eat it too: low S/X numbers justified and re-energized promises for increased 3 production.
ps: someone explained to me that Tesla cars are still mostly hand assembled. Explains a lot of things
I imagine the same fate would await Tesla owners. However, there enough Teslas rolling around that someone might find it profitable to pick up support. Multiple vendors still sell, and in some cases manufacture, parts for fifty year old Volkswagens, for instance.
When major leadership keeps leaving[1] it feels like it's more of an ego, expectations, and political problem than a technical one.
[0]: https://mondaynote.com/teslas-new-car-smell-315c72c955d3
[1]: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-05-04/two-tesla...
Also I agree with you that it feels that they belive that they can do everything better than anybody else and thus try to do everything themselves.
Don't listen to this fear mongering BS. Tesla is the only one in the electric car game. Who else has the charging network, the half-million pre-orders, the 3.5 billion in cash and easy ability to raise more, the Elon shine?
Can't stand these articles
... if accurate, if bug-free (for varying reasonable values of same). Otherwise the mythical man-month seems to creep in.
That's a project that's complicated enough to require 240 developers (12 months x 20 years, fitted into 1 month), yet somehow was reliably chunked up, retrofitted into their supplier screw up, tested and deployed in 4 weeks??
I'm considering myself skeptical.
Seriously though, you can probably redo a typical 20 Man Year project in 2, given how much of the development process is usually taken up by missed requirements and re-work, IF you have a bombproof specification and a well-drilled team of stars.
The part I’m not quite getting though is how a battery software issue impacted on wider productivity? Couldn’t they get them in-place and then patch the software after the fact?
wow elon musk must be something out of a movie! daniel (aka me) WHAT HAVE YOU BEEN DOING WITH YOUR LIFE
I expect the Model 3 to go some way towards helping this by being much more affordable, but with delayed production on those and an interior design that won't suit everyone, I'm yet to be convinced.
The issue is production. Tesla fired off hundreds of workers a month ago, right as they were ramping up Model 3 production. Elon seems an awesome person in terms of what he's doing at a macro level, but he sounds like a horrendous person to work for.
Of course, the profit margin on the Model 3 stands to be substantially less, too.
The price drops are usually correlated with a competitor offering a comparable deal.