The most worrying is the slowing production of models S and X, coupled with what I'd call a collapse in the gross margins of those products. Why is the margin declining so drastically?
- 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.
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.
http://www.skm.dk/skattetal/satser/satser-og-beloebsgraenser...
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-06-02/denmark-i...
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.