541–550 of 778 posts
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You have to call in to get the actual base model - they removed the option to order it from the website.
Yes, I ignored that one. The $39,500 model with autopilot is right on the website. It's not the promised $35k model, but it does include autopilot.
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If you think that's a $10 billion gap, you're delusional.
I may be delusional but I actually own a VW Group car, I know of people who make their living on mostly repairing VW's past mishaps (stuff like this [1]), I have no stake whatsoever in Tesla's future financial success, and as such I can tell you that VW (and the Germans generally speaking) are way, way behind in terms of EV technology compared to Tesla because stuff like this it's not in their engineering DNA. $10 bi…
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EV are still too expensive and Tesla ridiculously so. That’s not a problem if you can’t keep up with demand, but competition creeps up. Why would you buy a Tesla when you can buy a Hyundai Kona for a lot less? We need better leadership though. I live in Denmark where EVs aren’t very widespread because of taxes. In Norway more than half of new vehicles sold are EV. Norway has more money than us, but they didn’t really…
First of all, you basically cannot buy a Hyundai. The production is far below Model 3 levels. Here in Germany, you are looking at 12 months wait time due to demand far exceeding supply. Also, the Model 3 is a very attractive offering. It is the faster car, aims at the typical BMW audience, and most of all, has the supercharger network available.
Until you find out your range goes down significantly when you drive fast... I was seriously considering tesla model 3 as most of my trips are below 40 miles, but occasionally I do need to drive to another city 200 miles away, and when I do I want to be able to drive at the same speed I normally use at the motorway (around 90-95mph, or 150km/h). Tesla model 3 will give you less than 100 miles of range at that speed and that is what will kill Tesla for many people who currently drive VWs and BMWs.
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I read earlier that model 3s had. 20% gross margin. I’m happy to find the source again if you’re interested, but I'd also love to see your source.
When considering whether a fleet of cars has been profitable, you can’t consider only the gross margin (which excludes certain company fixed costs to arrive at an answer to “was that last car we made profitable?”) but must also consider overall profitability (“did we make money doing all of the things we did?”) Tesla’s answer to the second is “no” for substantially all of the company history.
Certainly looks like if they stopped expanding at a crazy rate that they would collect profits at a very healthy rate.
I'm sure just about everyone in the premium segment would love to "fail" by selling 63,000 cars costing over $50k each with gross margin of 20%.
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Am just curious, why does everyone believe that Waymo is way ahead. They have more miles driven, but so does Tesla. Waymo has some incredible guys going after autonomy but they have nothing to show as of yet at the L4 or L5 level. Is it because they are playing it super safe. They don't have any urgency to make money from autonomy unlike Tesla. Are they taking it easy ? Per my understanding, Tesla is tackling autonom…
Personally, I believe it for two reasons: First, it seems that everyone but Musk is claiming so, so either everyone else is wrong, or Musk is wrong. I find it far more likely that this is just another "funding secured" type of claim, than an actual win. Case in point: see this evaluation [1] from only a year ago, where Tesla was ranked 19 out of 19 (Waymo was #1). And the timing of the announcement, only two days bef…
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...shitty drivers from the other 49 states, blue-haired old ladies who haven’t seen the inside of a DMV in 20 years, and massive dust storms. That 200mm of precipitation happens over a couple of days. I’ve driven in every state in the western US, and those rain storms are scary.
And what do the Waymo vehicles do during such a dust- or rainstorm? Just carry on providing rides, or go into a safety shutdown mode? (Genuine question; I have no idea.)
Do what most reasonable drivers in Phoenix do. Pull over and enjoy the view. (Phoenix dust and heavy rainstorms tend to pass in ten to thirty minutes.)
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You have to call in to get the actual base model - they removed the option to order it from the website.
Yes, I ignored that one. The $39,500 model with autopilot is right on the website. It's not the promised $35k model, but it does include autopilot.
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The spherical cow is a simplified abstraction that doesn't accurately model anything in the real world. Phoenix, AZ, is in the real world, with real roads and real customers for a real, if limited, self-driving service. Waymo’s self-driving is far less vaporware than Tesla's.
It was meant exactly in this sense, namely that the conditions in Phoenix do not resemble the challenges in the rest of the world. Phoenix gets about 310 days of sunshine per year, only 200mm of precipitation with no snow, no fog, ...
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First of all, you basically cannot buy a Hyundai. The production is far below Model 3 levels. Here in Germany, you are looking at 12 months wait time due to demand far exceeding supply. Also, the Model 3 is a very attractive offering. It is the faster car, aims at the typical BMW audience, and most of all, has the supercharger network available.
As another German I can definitely tell you that no one here sees a Model 3 at anywhere near a BMW in production quality. If Tesla intends to market the Model 3 at the "BMW audience" - whatever differentiates them from, say, the "Audi audience" - they are horribly miscalculating at what German people expect from a car. It is not limited to EV range. Also, Volkswagen is ramping up production on their Modular Electric…
Can you be more specific? What are Teslas lacking for the German market?
Tesla's 1.5B reduction of cash on hand was largely due to the 920M convertible bond payment — but that only happened because TSLA didn't perform to the level necessary for conversion (~$360 IIRC). I wonder what changes in terms this'll warrant for future capital raises. Then they mention that they missed a lot of revenue due to missing half their shipments overseas, and onto Q2 (But also expecting a loss in Q2). Sale…
It still comes down to a race between Tesla figuring out the complete automotive supply chain and competitors figuring out EVs. Tesla had, and I would assume still has, production hell. Now it's delivery hell. Both are solved, controlled and executed constantly by other car companies (VW has an exception with the new Golf 8 that proves the rule). The competition is still struggling to solve EVs, some like Jaguar and…
Not to mention they made all of their Model 3's thousands of dollars more expensive by including the "full self-driving hardware-that-wasn't" in every unit to the point where it didn't even make sense for Tesla to sell the base model anymore.
Keep it simple stupid - focus on making great high-value EVs, and keep dropping their prices in a profitable manner. Stop throwing billions of dollars on "full self-driving tech" that will never work well enough.