No faster way to kill your company than to do business with China.
Just look at the dead husks left by Apple, BMW, and Cisco!
With the exception of Apple, you do not have a great point.
Tesla plans China factory that can make 500,000 vehicles a year
111–119 of 119 posts
Re: Tesla plans China factory that can make 500,000 vehicles a year
#112Earlier quoted context omitted.
They’ve increased their numbers by about 250% over this time last year. Another 40% isn’t that much by comparison. At the end of Q2 they hit 5,000 Model 3s per week, plus 2,000 S/X. That’s an annualized rate of 350,000. And yes, they haven’t even built 350,000 cars yet. The acceleration of their manufacturing over the last few months has been amazingly fast.
Production stats: Q2 2018: 53,339 Q2 2017: 25,708 Still impressive, but not an increase of 250%. http://ir.tesla.com/news-releases/news-release-details/updat... http://ir.tesla.com/news-releases/news-release-details/tesla...
Production stats: 7,000/week at the end of Q2.
Am I just not making myself clear on where the 350,000/year figure came from, or are you ignoring it to make some sort of point?
Re: Tesla plans China factory that can make 500,000 vehicles a year
#113Earlier quoted context omitted.
Production stats: Q2 2018: 53,339 Q2 2017: 25,708 Still impressive, but not an increase of 250%. http://ir.tesla.com/news-releases/news-release-details/updat... http://ir.tesla.com/news-releases/news-release-details/tesla...
Production stats: 7,000/week at the end of Q2. Am I just not making myself clear on where the 350,000/year figure came from, or are you ignoring it to make some sort of point?
Extrapolating from the crunch week is just wrong. It featured:
1) A temporary production line 2) Reworked cars included in the total 3) 24x7 production, all hands on deck 4) No downtime for maintenance 5) Went on for 175 hours, not 168 6) Whatever else that went on that's not public (almost certainly some stockpiling of parts)
Maybe you can draw some inferences from the outcome but N x 50 is not the way to do it. Output will certainly drop in the short term, it's just a question of how much. In the long term, maybe they'll do better than 5k a week, maybe they'll eventually reach there as a steady state, but even the latter isn't guaranteed.
Re: Tesla plans China factory that can make 500,000 vehicles a year
#114Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's not saying what you think it's saying. "Chinese corporations are building or planning to build more than 700 new coal plants at home and around the world ." Coal is very much on the way out, but it's not quite useless yet. Far more coal power plants are going to be destroyed in the next 10 years than built. But, if you are going to build a coal powerplant then paying a Chinese company can be a good choice.
Fact is, they're building more coal plants in the country because they can more quickly meet energy demands with coal and as of last September the world was building coal plants faster than they were being closed (and I suspect China is).
"Shanghai Electric Group, one of the country's largest electrical equipment makers, has announced plans to build coal power plants in Egypt, Pakistan and Iran with a total capacity of 6,285 megawatts — almost 10 times the 660 megawatts of coal power it has planned in China." So yea china is still building some coal but not that much looking at actual production presents a different story.
Electricity production in China (TWh) From coal
2014 4,354
2015 4,115
2016 3,906Re: Tesla plans China factory that can make 500,000 vehicles a year
#115Earlier quoted context omitted.
Panasonic makes Tesla's batteries, and as far as I know Tesla doesn't have any proven battery technology that's better than anyone else's. I know people who work on battery technology. Pretty much every chemistry department at a major university has people working on batteries. You often see publications about breakthrough's in battery tech from these universities. Very few of these alleged breakthrough's make it to…
A battery pack in a Tesla car has much more to it than the cells themselves. There are cooling systems, monitoring systems etc. Tesla's battery packs are way ahead of anyone elses and produced at a lower cost per kWh E.g. https://www.forbes.com/sites/greatspeculations/2017/08/18/ho...
I'm pretty sure that GM have been doing their own battery pack testing, R&D and integration for quite some time now, even partnering with a local university to train people on this. The main component they outsource which Tesla develop in-house is the motor and its controller, and that's obviously pretty vehicle-specific.
Re: Tesla plans China factory that can make 500,000 vehicles a year
#116Earlier quoted context omitted.
Production stats: 7,000/week at the end of Q2. Am I just not making myself clear on where the 350,000/year figure came from, or are you ignoring it to make some sort of point?
Extrapolating from the crunch week is just wrong. It featured: 1) A temporary production line 2) Reworked cars included in the total 3) 24x7 production, all hands on deck 4) No downtime for maintenance 5) Went on for 175 hours, not 168 6) Whatever else that went on that's not public (almost certainly some stockpiling of parts) Maybe you can draw some inferences from the outcome but N x 50 is not the way to do it. Out…
This is an actually useful response, instead of just ignoring what I’m saying and quoting numbers I already know.
I think they’ll sustain this rate. We’ll see.
Re: Tesla plans China factory that can make 500,000 vehicles a year
#117Earlier quoted context omitted.
> side thought: Maybe TESLA turns into a research company TESLA's secret is that they're a battery company. I don't think people understand how big of an issue energy storage is, and what the resulting opportunity is. Energy storage to Tesla is what AWS is to Amazon.
Panasonic makes Tesla's batteries, and as far as I know Tesla doesn't have any proven battery technology that's better than anyone else's. I know people who work on battery technology. Pretty much every chemistry department at a major university has people working on batteries. You often see publications about breakthrough's in battery tech from these universities. Very few of these alleged breakthrough's make it to…
I'm skeptical too, but that's besides the point. My point is that (1) energy storage, if a breakthrough is achieved, will have a serious economic benefit to Tesla (e.g. profit) and (2) I believe Tesla's strategy isn't just to sell cars, but to compete (and frankly dominate) the energy storage market. And just like Apple needs Samsung and Foxconn to manufacture it's market dominating iPhone, it looks like Tesla needs Panasonic to do the same in the energy storage market.
Re: Tesla plans China factory that can make 500,000 vehicles a year
#118Earlier quoted context omitted.
If we'll be getting a cheap electric car thanks to that I'm fine with a bit of espionage
You won't. If a company can't reap the rewards of it's own research, that will stop. Then we race to the bottom with price leadership instead of feature leadership.
I think you might be surprised just how many people care more about price leadership than feature leadership.
Re: Tesla plans China factory that can make 500,000 vehicles a year
#119Earlier quoted context omitted.
That NUMMI plant used to do ~430,000 vehicles per year so Tesla in theory could produce that many without expanding to a new facility but the shortfalls of a plant on the West Coast away from so many suppliers in a very high cost-of-living area are going to make that a much less attractive proposition. I wouldn't be surprised if they're in talks for a South Carolina or Alabama facility to produce their Model 3s and i…
These other factories would have to be completely retooled. It would take a long time and a lot of money. It's not like changing the die in an injection mold or something.
Yeah -- I meant, they'd have to build a new factory from the ground up, spending billions of dollars to do so.. not that they could just lease a Corolla plant or something.