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They're planning to up the factory production to 500,000 but that's for all models, so don't count on more than 100,000 model 3s being built this year, tops. Allow for 200,000 next year, and you still haven't cleared the pre-order backlog.

I don't think that Tesla shares the same estimate as you. From their website:

Production begins mid 2017. Delivery estimate for new reservations is mid 2018 or later.

Since there are 400,000+ reservations at the moment, that means that Tesla expects to be able to get through 400,000 cars from the start of production to mid 2018. Otherwise, they wouldn't be stating that a new reservation could possibly receive delivery by mid 2018.

If you're right and they can only produce 100,000 this year, that means that by their own estimates they'll be able to produce 300,000 by mid 2018. But since the factory is supposed to only be able to produce 500,000 a year, they wouldn't be able to output 300,000 in 6 months, that would put them more than 100,000 cars over capacity (if you factor in S and X production).

More likely, by their own estimates, they'll produce 200,000 this year and another 200,000 in the first 6 months of next year.

https://www.tesla.com/en_GB/gi... "The Gigafactory will also be powered by renewable energy sources, with the goal of achieving net zero energy." its happening

Automatic braking, lane control and (eventually) SDCs, should be able to increase road capacity by a factor of 2 to 5. As the CEO of Tesla, he should focus on that.

Has anyone on earth led to more practical results in those areas than Elon Musk?

Paywalled...... Sucks, I would have loved to read that. Oh well. I guess if I wanna afford to read the Wall Street Journal I better Check. These. Out.. Instead.

I was curious as to why Tesla needs special gearboxes, but apparently the Model S uses a 9.73:1 single-gear reduction. I guess this lets the engineering team tweak the voltage to torque ratios (as opposed to rewinding the motors and modifying the drive circuitry). https://forums.tesla.com/forum...

The second is, the neodymium in the magnets for the motors is only a rare earth. That tends to mean there's a fair bit of strip mining to get it.

Tesla doesn't use rare earth metals in their motors or batteries. I realise they are not the whole EV market, but they are a large fraction of it. There's a general downward trend in the rare earth consumption by the other EV manufactures. One example

Not sure what he'll be doing there.

VP of Autopilot Software.

Read: Deep Learning Expert. I expect LLVM to come into play here.

What the fuck is your problem? The mailing list message linked to from the summary clearly contains the following (emphasis added):

... a decision I’ve made to leave Apple later this month to pursue an opportunity in another space.

The "I" in this case refers to Chris Lattner, since he's the one who wrote the goddamn mailing list message!

Besides, he's apparently going to Tesla.

HOLY FUCK!

I just saw this: https://www.tesla.com/blog/welcome-chris-lattner

We would like to welcome Chris Lattner, who will join Tesla as our Vice President of Autopilot Software.

Chris, can you confirm?! Is this true?! Are you going to be working with Tesla?!

Wikipedia lists it as the largest building in the world by area. And from this:

The original plans for the Tesla Gigafactory call for a facility with a footprint of 5.8 million square feet, on two stories for 10 million square feet of floor space. That would already give it the largest footprint of any building in the world. But that could just end up proving the starting point.

The Gigafactory is being built in a modular fashion, and Tesla is reportedly buying up adjacent plots of land in order to expand the facility. Another 1,200 acres have reportedly already been acquired, with an additional 350 or more on top of that also being looked into. Three modular blocks in addition to the original four could take it up to 24 million square feet of floor space.

In normal-people-units that's 539k m^2, 929k m^2, og 2,2m m^2, respectively.

Considering that's what Tesla calls them on Tesla's web page https://www.tesla.com/blog/bat... I think you owe someone an apology.

The name Gigafactory comes from the factory’s planned annual battery production capacity of 35 gigawatt-hours (GWh). “Giga” is a unit of measurement that represents “billions”. One GWh is the equivalent of generating (or consuming) one billion watts for one hour—one million times that of one kWh. https://www.tesla.com/gigafact...

Nope just not an idiot. Tesla specifically lists what their system provides as a feature set and it has never once listed "ability to exceed speed limit" as a feature.

https://www.tesla.com/autopilo...

this is what i rebutted with 75 minutes "A charge to 100% is over 2 hours." https://www.tesla.com/supercha...

They take a while to charge. Almost all of my use of Superchargers has been during road trips -- not around town -- and it's never taken as little as 20 min. to charge. According to https://www.tesla.com/supercha... a Model S with a 90kWh battery takes 40 min. to charge from 10% to 80%, and, as the rate slows as the battery "fills", another 35 min. to go from 80% to 100%

Powerwall != Powerpack.

https://www.tesla.com/powerpac...

Two different products. One could run your refrigerator in a power outage. The other runs an 18 story office building.

The Powerwall and Powerpack are completely different products. Powerwall = residential and small commercial, Powerpack = industrial and grid-scale battery storage.

https://www.tesla.com/powerpac...

https://www.tesla.com/powerpac...

It tops if you do certain things but at 2000 KW for 3 hours (should be 6 MW hours of total storage?):

Roughly $2,751,100.

A 300 Watt solar panel (whose dimensions would allow you to strap one directly to a Model S roof and still keep the sun roof) would take about 300 hours to charge a 90kW battery from 0 to 100%.
90kW comes out to ~403 miles, at 50 miles per hour, with no air conditioning, according to Tesla.
Or about 4.47 miles per kW.
So... charging with a single 300 W panel strapped to the roof, for 12 hours of sunlight, it comes out to about 3.6 kW or about 53.64 miles.
Meaning that if your daily commute is around one hour - you'll never need to connect the charger. Just leave the car parked outside.
If you don't mind the heat of a car sitting in the sun the whole day.

Though, if they were going to put solar panels on the car, useful surface could easily be tripled, compared to just attaching a panel to the roof.
Thus making it closer to 160 miles per 12 hours of sunlight - which is about the daily average, taken across the entire year, almost everywhere on the planet.

But I doubt that Tesla will implement something like that any time soon.
The fact they changed the supercharger "free with purchase" scheme to "free 4 1st 1000 miles" indicates that they don't want to give up the profits from the electricity distribution network - not just yet.
Musk wants to sell people on fully solar powered homes. He wants to get everyone to quit all forms of fossil fuels for all their energy needs - from heating/cooling homes to cooking/storing food.
Not just for driving around in expensive toys.

Tesla is now building in Autopilot 2 into their vehicles and they provided a new demo video of the code that will eventually be enabled on the vehicles shipping today:
https://www.tesla.com/videos/a...

The acquisition of Solarcity has to do with turning Tesla into an integrated transportation company including the energy and the vehicles. Tesla is uniquely positioned for the coming changes in transport, both at the individual vehicle level and in commercial trucking.

The acquisition also has to do with the transformation of the energy... one example is the Kauai Solarcity project that uses Tesla PowerPacks:
http://fortune.com/tesla-solar...

The amount of solar + stationary storage (batteries) that the combined company is looking to deploy in 2017 will represent a staggering growth level.

You're not paying attention then.

"The car computer will then silently compare when it would have braked to the driver action and upload that to the Tesla database."

https://www.tesla.com/blog/upg...

Except that there was no malfunction here. Like most of these Autopilot stories, Autopilot wasn't actually in use.

But wait, I hear you saying, the article says:

In September, Tesla revealed the death of a man in one of its cars in a crash in the Netherlands and said that the "autopilot" software's role in the accident was being investigated.

"In the moments leading up to the collision, there is no evidence to suggest that Autopilot was not operating as designed and as described to users: specifically, as a driver assistance system that maintains a vehicle's position in lane and adjusts the vehicle's speed to match surrounding traffic," Tesla said in a blog post at the time.

The article is talking bollocks. That quote isn't from Tesla describing the Netherlands crash, it's describing the same old May 16th tractor-trailer-across-both-lanes, driver-watching-Harry-Potter crash. Autopilot was not in use in the Netherlands crash (and more to the point, the driver was driving 155 kph). So far, there's only been one confirmed death from Autopilot (and one person in China who insists that his son was killed by Autopilot but refuses to let Tesla check the logs to see if it was actually on)

You can't currently charge a Nissan Leaf at a Tesla supercharger. The Nissan leaf uses the japanese CHAdeMO charging standard for DC fast charging. Teslas can also use CHAdeMO chargers with an adaptor. Teslas don't charge as fast on a CHAdeMO charger.

Elon Musk has spoken about opening up the Tesla charging stations to other models of EV in the future once a billing mechanism was in place. This was the motivation behind his release of Tesla patents so that other manufacturers can use them at no cost. He wants to other car makers to build Tesla charger compatibility into their cars. As yet there are no signs of any other manufacturer doing this. Japanese manufacturers have put a lot of investment in CHAdeMO over many years.

Musk could also convert his charging stations to support multiple charging standards. At the moment there seems to be an impasse when it comes to charging compatibiltiy.

according to Tesla, https://www.tesla.com/videos/e...

"While truly driverless cars are still a few years away, Tesla Autopilot functions like the systems that airplane pilots use when conditions are clear. The driver is still responsible for, and ultimately in control of, the car."

Right. And where are you going to put them?

Most people put them in their garage. Endpoint storage is generally better than centralized storage, because transmission losses are lower. The batteries can be arranged vertically, like the Tesla Powerwall, so they take up little space.

From https://www.tesla.com/en_GB/bl... :

"Before activating the features enabled by the new hardware, we will further calibrate the system using millions of miles of real-world driving to ensure significant improvements to safety and convenience. While this is occurring, Teslas with new hardware will temporarily lack certain features currently available on Teslas with first-generation Autopilot hardware, including some standard safety features such as automatic emergency braking, collision warning, lane holding and active cruise control. "

So if I buy a Tesla tomorrow, it will come with less features than another one bought last month when it arrives? In fact, it will come with less features than a well-specified competitor (BMW, Mercedes, etc) and no idea when it will catch up.

I don't want to go backwards. I want to go forwards. I want the features now and more, not less features now.

I want a car that does the same things as earlier cars and more. I don't want to be funding Tesla's product development and then beta test their code when it's rolled out.

Why do customers tolerate this from Tesla?

"To make sense of all of this data, a new onboard computer with more than 40 times the computing power of the previous generation runs the new Tesla-developed neural net for vision, sonar and radar processing software."
https://www.tesla.com/blog/all...

So what you're saying is... the cpu is a neural net processor, a learning computer.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

It's catchy to slide in Tesla in unrelated articles but just because it uses batteries doesn't mean they are prone to fires.

Except batteries are prone to fires when damaged which is why Tesla added titanium shields to the underbodies of their cars.

https://www.tesla.com/blog/tes...

Because Tesla X is totally the best choice for pulling a trailer, right?

No one was talking about the model X:
https://www.tesla.com/blog/mas...

Maybe if you said emissions efficiency... from what I understand the higher production efficiency gets eaten up by converting combustion (momentum) to electricity, transport, charging losses, parasitic losses when it's not running and so on. The nice thing is that you could have other energy sources like solar, wind and other renewables but if you're just centralizing the fossil fuel consumption it's not much of a win at all.

You understand wrongly. The transport, charging and parasitic losses are extremely small, and in fact, arguably smaller than with petrol vehicles anyway. Remember - oil needs to be distilled into petrol (a very inefficient process), then transported by road to filling stations (once again by petrol/diesel burning vehicles), also very inefficiently, and then pumped out of the ground by yet another petrol burning motor. Paying attention to electricity's distribution inefficiencies, but not paying any attention to petrol's transmission costs is disingenuous at best.

patent for "electric cars"??? What are you on? https://www.tesla.com/blog/all...

Not like Tesla has any guide for First Responders to help in said training efforts. Oh wait, they do. https://www.tesla.com/firstres...

Did you read the guide at all?

Warning: Regardless of the disabling procedure you use, ALWAYS ASSUME THAT ALL HIGH VOLTAGE COMPONENTS ARE
ENERGIZED! Cutting, crushing, or touching high voltage components can result in serious injury or death.

I'm guessing reading is hard for you.

Fucking idiot.

Not like Tesla has any guide for First Responders to help in said training efforts. Oh wait, they do. https://www.tesla.com/firstres...

Did you read the guide at all?

Warning: Regardless of the disabling procedure you use, ALWAYS ASSUME THAT ALL HIGH VOLTAGE COMPONENTS ARE
ENERGIZED! Cutting, crushing, or touching high voltage components can result in serious injury or death.

I'm guessing reading is hard for you.

Fucking idiot.

Not like Tesla has any guide for First Responders to help in said training efforts. Oh wait, they do. https://www.tesla.com/firstres...

The Model S has no third row, it is a sedan.

https://www.tesla.com/models

Did you maybe mean the Model X?

https://www.tesla.com/modelx

The Model S has no third row, it is a sedan.

https://www.tesla.com/models

Did you maybe mean the Model X?

https://www.tesla.com/modelx

The hand built labor that justifies the price does invalidate the fact that they're not production.

Oh, and you can buy a P100D now.

https://www.tesla.com/models/d...

You seriously think that an Altima is a performance and luxury equivalent to a Model 3? Seriously? If you want a nicer car, you pay more. Electric or not.

Secondly, your whole "average commute...." line is so mixed up it's not even wrong. Electric car ranges are generally rated in distances. The longer it takes you to drive it (the slower you go), the range goes up. Unlike gasoline cars, the optimal steady-state speed for an EV is generally around 15-20mph. The highway-speed range can be drastically multiplied at steady low speeds - and they deal with stop and go better than gasoline cars. So if you half the speed, you don't just double the "time" it can drive for - you more than double it.

Model 3 has a range of 215 highway miles. In town, it's probably around 300 miles. Which at an average speed of, say, 30 mph, is about 10 hours of driving. Now I don't know what your daily schedule is like, but if you're spending 10 hours between commuting, picking up kids, groceries, and the dog (WTF? does your dog have a desk job or something?), then I think you need to rethink your life.

Lastly, the superchargers form a complete network along major interstates and urban areas all across the US, Europe, and other parts of the world.

I get it that you have negative feelings about electric vehicles, and that's okay. But please do learn about a topic before you start ranting about it. It doesn't help your cause any to base your argument on things that even a person with a most basic understanding of the topic knows are inaccurate. It's like posting a sign on the bus, "Because you are riding in a space ship, smoking is prohibited". The sheer ridiculousness of the first statement invites ridicule on the whole argument.

See my other post in this thread. In more densely populated regions of the US it's difficult to specifically try to find an area more than 100 miles from a supercharger. And Model S's go a lot further than 100 miles. They're particularly common along major interstates, designed to make it easy to go cross country. And note that even as close as superchargers are, there's "slower" chargers much more frequent than even them.

At least for now, superchargers are completely free. And even when they do eventually start charging, electricity is a much cheaper energy source than gasoline per unit range.

Note that a Model S goes a *lot* further than 100 miles; I just used that number because the GP did.

I live in Iceland. But since you live in New York, here's the map. The biggest gap on the road from Boston to Philadelphia is 92 miles (aka, the midpoint is 46 miles from a supercharger). I can't find a single location within 100 miles of New York City that's more than about 60 miles from a supercharger (and I'm trying to find the most out-in-the boonies, no-direct-route place I can). If we go much further away, the middle of the triangle between Albany, Binghamton and Newburg is about 90 miles. North-central PA can be upwards of 150 miles. Just west of Charleston, WV is about 160. Little Rock, AR is about 210. But to beat that you have to go all the way out to far southwest Texas. Remember that the ranges on the Model S are 240, 265, and 310 miles, depending on the version. And also remember that: 1) these locations being picked to be in the "middle of nowhere", there's charges in all directions from them; 2) unlike European range estimates, US range estimates generally match real-world driving; and 3) I'm only listing superchargers; there's far more slower "top it up" chargers in-between the superchargers. Superchargers tend to be primarily located along interstates, which is generally the only place that you actually need them.

As for "having seen them": unlike gas stations which are big hulking affairs, superchargers are rather small and not very standoutish (although some stations have multiple, awnings, etc... depends on the site).

Good question. His goal is to get to high-volume, affordable cars

Tesla have a range calculator to show expected range based on speed, temperature, whether air con is on etc. Various factors will reduce your range from the optimum so you'll almost never get the full range quoted.

Study a little finance before lecturing.

Cap costs aren't in profit and loss. They are reporting the carrying costs of the loan to build the gigafactory, not the cost of the gigafactory.

A little bit of a naive view and a bit harsh considering their accounts justify his point a little - The accounts for R&D and sales network are OpEx, therefore entirely conceivable that ramping up for a new model with big forecasts gives a loss now.

Further, they are at profit before OpEx - so the cost of manufacturing isn't what it dragging them down. Your point about interest doesn't hold either, interest is only 40m of a 280m loss last qtr.

Citations:
https://uk.finance.yahoo.com/q...
http://ir.tesla.com/secfiling....

Because an "autopilot" system that allows a car to ram an obstacle at a significant speed is a crappy autopilot system? That's my guess.

To cut to the crux of the matter, Tesla really needs to stop calling this an autopilot* system. The name alone brings certain expectations to the table that simply aren't realities. On top of that, even if it is "assisted driving" the point still stands that auto breaking has been implemented in a ton of other vehicles. This shouldn't have happened on any of them. Tesla will continue to get the magnifying glass treatment as long as they claim to be the cutting edge of the "smart car" world.

And yes, before anyone tried to go off on a tangent, Tesla does indeed advertise this as an autopilot.

They can't keep up with demand for the model X, how the hell are they going to do it for the model 3? What's going to happen when people who pre-ordered the model 3 thinking a $35,000 price tag realizes that Tesla has used up their government rebates and it'll be $42,500

Oh for fuck sake stop bull-shitting! The base price of the Model 3 was $35,000 BEFORE the incentives.

Yes they are. See for example this quote taken directly from Tesla's 2014 Annual Report, on page 5:

Model S positions it as a compelling alternative to other vehicles in the luxury and performance segments .

By saying other vehicles Tesla is very explicitly pushing the Model S in the "luxury segment", even though in reality the car doesn't measure up.

If only there was a company that had no sunk investment in those hassles that was highly motivated to create a desirable car...