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Tesla posts big loss, cuts production of Models X and S to catch up on Model 3

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151–160 of 318 posts

Re: Tesla posts big loss, cuts production of Models X and S to catch up on Model 3

#151

Since this came out as part of the Tesla earnings, here's my recap from their earnings release and call.... - Tesla will be late getting up to 5,000 units a week of Model 3. It will happen at the end of Q1 instead of the end of this year. The bottleneck is batteries. - Some lines are at only 500 cars a week. Namely the battery pack assembly, body shop welding and final vehicle assembly. - The $2.92 a share loss was m…

>Elon has moved his desk to the giga factory as that is where the largest bottleneck is.

Elon is the bottleneck

Re: Tesla posts big loss, cuts production of Models X and S to catch up on Model 3

#152
The great thing about corporate missions & goals is that they are written so broadly: "Our goal when we created Tesla a decade ago was the same as it is today: to accelerate the advent of sustainable transport by bringing compelling mass market electric cars to market as soon as possible. " (https://www.tesla.com/blog/mission-tesla).

Thanks to Tesla - seriously(!! COULD not and WOULD not have happened without them), we now have a compelling mass market electric car on the market.

The Chevrolet Bolt.

Re: Tesla posts big loss, cuts production of Models X and S to catch up on Model 3

#153

Since this came out as part of the Tesla earnings, here's my recap from their earnings release and call.... - Tesla will be late getting up to 5,000 units a week of Model 3. It will happen at the end of Q1 instead of the end of this year. The bottleneck is batteries. - Some lines are at only 500 cars a week. Namely the battery pack assembly, body shop welding and final vehicle assembly. - The $2.92 a share loss was m…

> but no word on a new plant

production could begin in three years. Source - https://techcrunch.com/2017/11/01/elon-musk-says-teslas-chin...

Re: Tesla posts big loss, cuts production of Models X and S to catch up on Model 3

#154

The great thing about corporate missions & goals is that they are written so broadly: "Our goal when we created Tesla a decade ago was the same as it is today: to accelerate the advent of sustainable transport by bringing compelling mass market electric cars to market as soon as possible. " ( https://www.tesla.com/blog/mission-tesla ). Thanks to Tesla - seriously(!! COULD not and WOULD not have happened without them)…

Ha!

In any case I'm not sure I'd give credit to Tesla on that. The Bolt seems more like a response to the Leaf and friends than it is to anything like a Model S.

Re: Tesla posts big loss, cuts production of Models X and S to catch up on Model 3

#155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Leaf is even mostly aimed at fleet mileage scoring.

> The Leaf is even mostly aimed at fleet mileage scoring. So it's your contention that 95% of HackerNews can see the future of EVs, but all the major manufacturers have and/or are going to miss it? Shaky bull thesis, my friend.

The range on the Leaf so far has not been especially good, limiting the market for it. The fleet bonus is not imaginary:

https://insideevs.com/nissan-starts-selling-green-credits-pu...

My "vision" for the future of EVs is that increasing range and decreasing prices will drive adoption. With sales of the Leaf totaling about 2 weeks of US auto sales, it is risky to expect it to represent Nissan's strategy.

Re: Tesla posts big loss, cuts production of Models X and S to catch up on Model 3

#156

The great thing about corporate missions & goals is that they are written so broadly: "Our goal when we created Tesla a decade ago was the same as it is today: to accelerate the advent of sustainable transport by bringing compelling mass market electric cars to market as soon as possible. " ( https://www.tesla.com/blog/mission-tesla ). Thanks to Tesla - seriously(!! COULD not and WOULD not have happened without them)…

Well no, companies have been trying on EV every decade since the invention of the car.

The Prius normalizing an electric drive train pushed full electric further into the mainstream then Tesla has. Granted Tesla's investment into batteries bumped Panasonics time line up a bit and bumped full BEV up a bit but a compelling mass market electric car on the market has been clearly inevitable since 2000.

Edit: I changed it from "Tesla ... may have". To "Granted Tesla " to more accurately reflect my evaluation of Tesla's contribution to the time line.

Re: Tesla posts big loss, cuts production of Models X and S to catch up on Model 3

#157

It sounds like they are struggling. Hopefully they can pull it together and turn things around.

They are not struggling. This Yahoo article is fear mongering. I just listened to the whole earnings call and everything sounded terrific: They pulled their best engineers to Gigafactory to mitigate a supplier misleading them about one of their battery production lines, and so they dropped production of S and X. Apparently as a result of the supplier f * up, they rewrote "20 man years of software in 4 weeks". Which i…

> they rewrote "20 man years of software in 4 weeks". Which is absolutely incredible

... if accurate, if bug-free (for varying reasonable values of same). Otherwise the mythical man-month seems to creep in.

That's a project that's complicated enough to require 240 developers (12 months x 20 years, fitted into 1 month), yet somehow was reliably chunked up, retrofitted into their supplier screw up, tested and deployed in 4 weeks??

I'm considering myself skeptical.

Re: Tesla posts big loss, cuts production of Models X and S to catch up on Model 3

#158
post #120

SeekingAlpha predicted this a few weeks ago: https://seekingalpha.com/article/4114125-will-tesla-zero-mon... "Leading up to the end of September, we saw new-high Model 3 VIN numbers in the wild almost every other day, culminating in number 521. But since the beginning of October, nothing. I can’t find a single one above 521 with VIN picture evidence on any forum. It’s unlikely to end up this way, but the sole evidenc…

Huh. A friend told me a week or two ago that he saw 3 truckloads full of Model 3s going up 101. Who knows, maybe he actually saw model S or X.

That's about 10-20 cars, which is not enough to say anything about anything really.

Re: Tesla posts big loss, cuts production of Models X and S to catch up on Model 3

#159

SeekingAlpha predicted this a few weeks ago: https://seekingalpha.com/article/4114125-will-tesla-zero-mon... "Leading up to the end of September, we saw new-high Model 3 VIN numbers in the wild almost every other day, culminating in number 521. But since the beginning of October, nothing. I can’t find a single one above 521 with VIN picture evidence on any forum. It’s unlikely to end up this way, but the sole evidenc…

One or another amateur writer on that site predicts the bankruptcy of Tesla every other week. Even a stopped clock is right once a day.

that site publishes the same 'tesla is doomed/overvalued' article every week as far back as 2012

Re: Tesla posts big loss, cuts production of Models X and S to catch up on Model 3

#160
post #4

As an engineer who has zero investment in Tesla, I truly hope they overcome this setback. Simultaneously, I know from experience that failure is a real possibility. At this point, it’s nice to have the additional transparancy into the current production bottleneck.

What would failure look like? Worst case outcome to me seems that they would just take longer to get to their goals rather than not achieve them at all. They have enough money in the bank and no unsolved technical issues - it's not black hole physics. I mean they've delivered cars already. They just are slower than expected at scaling up.

I think the worst case scenario is that they can't muster the money to continue on in the face of seemingly endless losses and setbacks.

Many companies think that the economics will work out for them once they've achieved a certain scale or years of efficiencies. It doesn't work out for all of them. The worst case scenario is that Tesla keeps losing money, investors lose faith in the company, they spend what money they have left, no one will give them more funding, and they close up shop selling the assets to another.

A more likely scenario is that the tech is years away, they spend a lot of money before the tech is ready, and then someone else who is better at manufacturing and distribution swoops in once the tech is ready and cleans their clock.

Right now Tesla has no competition and doesn't have to negotiate and compete on price; when they do, their margins will suffer and holes in their efficiency hurt them.

In the future, self-driving cars will decimate the market for vehicles. If we didn't have to worry about the issues around sharing cars, we might need a tenth of the vehicles we currently have. Even if Tesla becomes the Toyota of that era, it's 1/10th of what Toyota is today and it shrinks to less than half its market cap. Plus, with fewer sales, maybe they can't make themselves profitable, they fold up shop, etc.

Maybe self-driving vehicles will create really great mass-transit systems where you can hop on and off ad-hoc routes with well-appointed 10-20 passenger vehicles and get picked up and dropped off conveniently with little added time - probably a lot less time than our current situation with traffic.

This isn't to say that Tesla won't achieve its goals, just to point out that many things could happen to impact Tesla's future. It's not just about making an electric vehicle - Tesla has done that. It's about being able to effectively compete with a market that isn't going to stand still. If Tesla can't manufacture with the efficiency that other auto-makers can, they'll fail over the long run. Heck, GM had a lot of trouble keeping up with Toyota. Will Tesla become efficient enough to compete? Will the auto market dry up as autonomous vehicles come into play? Will we just get transportation from A to B via a transit network rather than owning a vehicle?

Again, this isn't to say that Tesla can't succeed. This is merely to point out that it's far from assured. If electric vehicle economics improve, competitors will come in and fight for those dollars which will drive down prices and profits. If autonomous vehicle technology becomes a reality, Uber, Lyft, and others will be ready to make the case that you shouldn't even own a vehicle and they'll be able to transport the same number of people with a fraction the number of vehicles.

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