631–640 of 729 posts
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$250mil sounds a lot - until you remember they currently burn through $400mil of cash in a month
oh please. they're putting money into R&D and into the ramp up. Your statement makes it sound like they're using the money to wipe their @$$es. No, they're putting the money to work. And if the analysts and shareholders didn't believe that, the stock would tank.
It's interesting that people are so quick to dismiss this as merely a rendering, with the videos being CGI. Is that because the videos are 'too good' perhaps, or it just looks too much like a racing game car on the X-box? You'd have to deliberately ignore the fact that there were real cars presented at the announcement, for instance. Also interesting is that because the acceleration is so fast, there were accusations…
Oh please. I should hope that people aren't so intoxicated on the Kool-Aid that when Tesla claims the Roadster outperforms the fastest production cars in the world, people want to dig deeper. You're seriously implying that blindly accepting what they say is better?
I'm thinking what this means to gas car makers. Wave 1: "It's all about legacy and prestige, not speed/acceleration". Wave 2: "The track handling isn't all that good, how can drivers take that corner at full power without losing traction". Wave 3: "Alright, we will go electric too".
If this thing has torque vectoring and does a 9 second 1/4 mile, it's going to drop at wave 2. But wave 3 is already here - a lot of smaller companies are talking about making their own electric vehicles. If batteries become commodities, it's going to reduce the R&D cost of making a road legal car by an order of magnitude. We're just waiting on the batteries.
We'll probably get there at some point, once diminishing returns starts setting in. And lots of industries that aren't interested in developing battery packs (e.g. general aviation, construction, etc.), would have a sea change if high-performance battery packs were easily available. So I think the incentive to start a company in the space is good.
But for the next few years, I think battery pack design will still advance very rapidly and hence be left to the industries that are massively capital intensive and where the best battery packs are an obvious competitive advantage.
It's a super exciting development, and I can't wait to see what the future brings in this regard.
I don't see autopilot or any sort of autonomy mentioned for the new Roadster. That sort of makes sense, but I'm also a bit disappointed about it.
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Wow, the buckling of the tire wall in the last two pictures is crazy. I guess that happens because there is enough friction to stop the wheel moving, and the axle is trying to turn it faster, causing a shear force. With normal tires, I assume they would just slip at that point and spin because they don't have enough friction in the contact patch touching the road.
Yep! The tires are actually designed to do that. It really helps to prevent things from snapping by absorbing some of the shock when the cars drop the clutch or let go of the trans brake.
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10,000 NM of torque. That's INSANE. I drive a car with 400NM torque and that thing scares the sh*t out of me when I accelerate. 10,000 NM? Isn't that something along the lines of a tram or a train (I'm not sure, I'm asking you guys). This is CRAZY. I'm getting one for sure.
My car has 1092nm of torque from about 1500rpm and it's mind-boggling... 10,000nm is hard to comprehend and surely more than enough to give the occupants some serious whiplash if not sat properly.
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> struggling to produce their most important car ever Isn't this part of not executing the roadmap as planned? Put another way, how do you know if they are on the right trajectory to profitability? How much are they ahead/behind?
Tesla projected that it would produce 5K Model 3s per week by the end of 2017. In all of Q3 they produced 260! That kind of shortfall is clearly not part of any plan, unless it's one drawn up by GM and Ford. Source: http://autoweek.com/article/green-cars/tesla-model-3-product...
Kidding aside they've been in much worse situations before, it just wasn't nearly as public because it was well before their IPO.