Tesla produces its millionth car
electrek.co
electrek.co
Logic says - get all these parts together, assemble them and off a car comes out. Forget about engineering - assume all R&D work is done/frozen, the supply-chain complexity alone is staggering. 2000+ suppliers, with multiple redundancies. Keeping the assembly line moving without a hiccup is a compounding a chain of all problems - all probabilities of things going wrong at each station/module/step.
Another beast of an industry(which I am intimately familiar with) is semiconductor manufacturing. But, it actually appears to be hard unlike car manufacturing. Making 4 million chips a day, containing 2 billion transistors sounds hard af and it is.
Manufacturing is a very interesting field to get into (even as software engineers). Ever heard of this game - Factorio? You get to play that in real life (with some pain and big rewards). If you can master manufacturing, you're unbeatable because the entry point is so steep, learning curve is steeper and scaling up is nothing like spinning up Kubernetes clusters and instances (no offense meant).
Hey, kudos to all the people that burned midnight oil, persevered through tough times at Tesla, congratulations. If you work at Tesla plant, please share your story!
Is this incorrect?
You Jamie for pointing that out.
"Global sales totaled over 400,000 Leafs by March 2019"
That is awesome and the Leaf is a fantastic vehicle only limited by its range. But it does not sound like one million Nissan Leafs have been produced. And the Tesla milestone still carries extra significant because all of its models are reasonable replacements for ICEs in most households. The Leaf is suited to a much smaller set of use cases.
A Nissan Leaf is not as nice of a car as a Tesla Model 3 in pretty much any way, but it also costs 3/4 of the price. Meanwhile, the Leaf is profitable per-car, and the base model Tesla Model 3 is barely break-even per-car, even with the very aggressive accounting that Tesla uses. Tesla can't keep producing base Model 3's at the price they are selling them for (even at over $40k), they are a loss leader to look competitive on price, the profitable version is well over $50k without government subsidies that will end this year (and the performance model is over $60k). A leaf is around $30k.
GM had a great electric car in the mid 90s that couldn't compete due to lead acid batteries being heavy and having poor energy density (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_EV1). Put Lithium batteries in an EV1 and people still wouldn't have wanted it because oil prices were low, but it beat the Model S to market by nearly 20 years and again given a better battery technology like lithium would probably have led to a majority of cars being electric today.
The tide seems to have turned... a bit.
Have improved emission standards done more to comeback air pollution that Telsa?
I’m no expert, but I’m willing to bet: yes.
Will has improved emission standards always out compete electric vehicles? I’m willing to bet: no.
We definitely want to improve ICE engines too.
With any new technology, the real trick is to produce a marketable product then keep iterating, with customers providing the revenue.
Big LCD TV’s, for example, used to cost over $10,000.
Now that Tesla has proven the product, we are now getting a battery arms race...
Anyway, this is all well known about how technology works... Apple I to iPhone...
Now where are consumer robots?
There's no urgency for Toyota to produce electric cars because they've been making hybrids for a long time and they're already in a good position with the new emissions standards.
[1] https://techcrunch.com/2020/03/06/tesla-gets-ok-to-produce-l...
[2] https://fortune.com/2020/01/07/elon-musk-tesla-gigafactory-s...
[3] https://www.benzinga.com/news/20/03/15507012/tesla-now-china...
https://www.tu.no/artikler/na-har-tesla-solgt-50-000-biler-i...
It is intriguing to see what these companies do to deal with disrupted supply chains!
http://www.xinhuanet.com/2020-02/10/c_1125555728.htm
However I do think the supply chain will need more time to recover.
And consumer market wise it's quite uncertain. People are locked in doors with limited travelling needs, and oil prices are historically low.
The result is you stimulate your economy because some of the tax is getting paid by foreign oil interests but all of the money is going to your citizens.
Innocent typos aside, I think these sorts of vehicles are dramatically underused / undersold in the US. So there may be still a market to be opened up, at least if you can get some value before the international competition comes in.
I think here American company has to market these things, less they be branded as foreign and wimpy. And even then, looks at segway it's a delicate act.
Seems like a good idea tbh. Kids largely get locked out of the outside world due to car centric design. This seems like a pretty good solution which is no less safe than cycling. Maybe even more safe since its more visible.
Tesla is a remarkable company, but they are terrible at building and delivering cars, which is very much the primary competence needed to succeed as a company that sells cars. Their production rates have dramatically trailed their promises, and while they are valued at around $160B, they are hoping to build about 500k cars this year. Volkswagon builds that many cars every 2 weeks or so, and actually makes a profit on each car, as does Toyota (10M cars each, per year, for VW and Toyota, 7M for GM and Hyundai, per year). Tesla is worth more than any two other car companies (other than Toyota) while producing around 5% as many cars as any one of them, if Tesla hits their goals.
Success as as a car company is more about being able to produce cars that people want -- efficiently, than it is about designing cars that people want. Otherwise Lamborghini would be selling more cars than all the other car companies combined, if posters and dreams could somehow translate into units shipped without regard to price or ability to actually build cars in the necessary volume. The two huge success stories in cars are Ford, who invented the assembly line, and Toyota, who invented Kanban, both of which dramatically increased the quality while decreasing the labor input of manufacturing cars. Tesla, with all their claims of automation, produces cars using about 1/3 the automation of Toyota today (9 vs 24 cars for full-time employee per year) while using accounting tricks to claim large per car margins, while showing a large loss using standard accounting practices.
I think if I had to make a guess, Tesla will be in the same chapter in the history of cars as DeLorian and Duesenberg.
I don't actually know what chapter that would be. Delorean was around for 3 years, and made ~9000 cars. Duesenberg (of which I had never heard) made race cars, somewhere under 1000... There really isn't a good comparison to be made with Tesla.
I wish I could respond nicely, maybe it's been too long of a day.
A Model 3 with 500km of range is over triple the price of a Corolla and a Leaf is over double the price in my market - they just don't make financial sense until they drastically drop in price.
‘Green’ also depends on how you use it. One can argue that, for many use cases, those cars are way too big and heavy to be called ‘green’.
I'll take a dual-motor version with a big battery, please!
I'm one of them. If I would be on the market for a car it would be a Tesla, but I most likely never will never own one. It's a great car, green, geeky and the performance is superb, but I much prefer to use public transportation when getting around. Most of my friends (age ~30) with disposable income just don't want a car. We live in cities in Europe where public transportation is good enough. Owning a car is just a burden if you would only use it for weekend getaways.
The people who live in the countryside where you need a car for day-to-day life just can't afford it.
- high demand for EV cars
- the world is screwed
It looks like the world is going to choose number 2.
If subsidies end they are going to have to be replaced by something else. A carbon tax is the best option, but strict fuel economy standards like Europe has is also an option.
I was one of the many folks who (probably like you?) was thinking, once summer 2018 turned into fall 2018, and Tesla worked through the backlog of Model 3 orders (and the well-publicized cancellations and demand for deposits back) that there wouldn't by much demand left. I guess that shows my blind spots as a car person, I just assumed everyone knew about most new vehicles on the market, and what they had to offer. But their prevalence in the market has only driven demand harder.
Toyota makes ~9 million cars every year.
Tesla just made its millionth car ever.
Toyota market cap 201B.
Tesla market cap 112B (was ~170B at peak).
The stock market still has very far to fall before it comes back to reality again.
Also, Toyota started making cars in 1933 (licensed GM models), Tesla, in 2012 (an all-new class of cars).
Another would be to say in the end, it's the same "mature" market, one more EV sell is most likely one less ICE sell.
And it's not like EVs have tremendously changed the equation, the price is about the same (total cost of ownership), the capabilities are about the same (slightly better on some aspects, like performance, slightly worst in term of autonomy and refueling/recharging time). Right now, EVs are not extending or creating a market but are triggering a re-composition of this market.
Maybe in the future, we will see more deeper changes which will trigger a major shift (autopilots that work? reduction in cost? (EVs are engineeringly simpler than ICE vehicles)) but we are not there yet.
I'm glad to see this. Keep rocking, Tesla!
Elon Musk is another one of those progressive tech people that the rest of society has stopped caring about because they realized that we weren't progressing to anywhere good, and that technology doesn't solve anything. None of them are leaders to anyone other than a small group of naive 20 somethings.