Tesla's 'Production Hell' Threatens Its Future | Hacker News Reader

Tesla's 'Production Hell' Threatens Its Future

jalopnik.com

18 pointsthemgt13 comments

It kinda funny that Tesla's delays in ramping up production of is first mass produced car results in predictions of total doom. Despite Tesla having large amounts of cash on hand. Despite that every other manufacturer of complex and expensive products has routinely had similar problems.

Tip: Never take business advice from a journalist.

I am loving this. Let the stock crash hard, so I can buy more of it.

The man built an org that lands reusable rockets on a portable barge. My suspicion is that he can survive assembly line issues.

About 15 years ago I was supporting an IC used in a consumer product. Our first big customer designed it in and from Feb through middle of August we fielded a constant stream of questions, spent a countless hours tracking down and solving obscure bugs in the silicon. And then in the middle of august all the calls just stopped and in the middle of Sept we got the news that they were punting to Q1. Six month delay because they didn't feel comfortable handing over the pre-production units to the buyers.

Okay so that was a scuddy consumer product that sold for $150 retail. But at 1M units a year. Tesla's trying to go full production with a product that is 100 times more complicated. But at 100k/year.

The other funny bit is no one bats an eye when a traditional automaker delays a new model for a year or two. You see a press release in 2013 about the brand new 2015 model. And 2015 rolls around and it's now delayed till 2016, then 2017. Anyone want to guess why that happens? Oh yeah.

This is clickbait at its finest. No attributable sources and except for a pretty honest admission by Tesla which then leads to nothing but rampant speculation and claims.

Tesla will be fine. They have something like a 90+% satisfaction rate amongst current owners. People stood in line for hours to give them money for a car that didn't even have a production date. These people want a Tesla no matter when or how they get it. They're fine waiting and will continue to wait. Predicting the entire failure of the company on something like this is just silly.

I wouldn't be surprised if this guy Ryan Felton was being paid to write negative pieces against Tesla and Uber. Go look through his articles and you'll see nothing but doom and gloom about electric cars, autonomous cars, uber, etc.

Most of his claims are backed up by "anonymous former employees" or "unnamed people familiar with the matter"

Tesla will be just fine.

That's what I was going to point out. Nearly every citation on this article is from "unnamed people familiar with the matter". What the heck does that even mean? I'm familiar with the matter now, does that mean that I get to make wild speculations?

I wouldn't be surprised if this guy digital_trench was being paid to shill for Tesla.

At the risk of feeding the trolls:

Are you making a satirical example about the emptiness of such flippant accusations, or do you actually entertain a serious possibility that GP is on the tesla payroll spreading propaganda on HN?

That's not why its future is threatened.

1. It's low oil/gas/energy prices and the fact that it looks like we are in for a low energy price environment for a decade or two.

2. Tesla, just their sister company solar city was built entirely on government subsidies. Those look to be going away.

3. They are hemorrhaging money.

Tesla is this decades Prius on steroids. Except that tesla doesn't have toyota's best selling sedans, tacoma trucks or their luxury lexus buttressing their foray into clean cars.

Remember when everyone thought that prius would take over the world?

No, I don't remember any such thing. The thing that haters fail to recognize is that people buy Tesla cars for more than the government subsidy and fuel economy. Ask any actual owner and they will tell you how incredible the cars are in practice. Disclaimer: owner since 2012.

> No, I don't remember any such thing.

It was called the 2000s. Did you miss that decade?

> The thing that haters fail to recognize is that people buy Tesla cars for more than the government subsidy and fuel economy.

I'm not a hater. I'm just pointing out economic/business reality.

> Ask any actual owner and they will tell you how incredible the cars are in practice. Disclaimer: owner since 2012.

My god, that's exactly what my uncle said about the prius more than a decade ago. Also, tesla isn't the only incredible car. There are lots of incredible cars out there. That's why most people don't buy teslas.

A lot of criticism over this aritcle's credibility in this thread. So here's a more reputable source with a similar take:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-11-02/model-3-h...

Jalopnik is a joke that shouldn't really be used as a source here.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com