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Elon Musk Promises 100,000 Electric Cars Per Year
Dave Knott sends this news from the CBC:
Tesla stock was up five per cent on Friday morning after CEO Elon Musk said the electric-car company would deliver 100,000 vehicles next year. Its earnings report released Thursday shows Tesla continues to operate at a loss as it spends on engineering and setting up an assembly line for its Model X SUV, which is scheduled to go into production early next year. But investors were cheered by the news that the company would deliver 100,000 vehicles next year, up from 22,000 in 2013 and a projected 35,000 this year. Tesla reported a loss of $61.9 million in its second quarter, compared with a loss of $30.5 million in the same quarter a year ago. Revenue nearly doubled to $769.3 million, missing Wall Street's forecast of $801.9 million, but expenses were also up as Tesla prepares some ambitious projects, spending $93 million in the quarter on research and development alone. While the Model X is in development, the longer-term plan is for a cheaper, mass-market car, the Model 3, to be launched in 2017. The biggest investment Tesla will make is in its large lithium-ion production plant, to be built at an as-yet-unnamed U.S. location in a $5-billion partnership with Panasonic.
He said that by the end of 2015 they would be producing cars at a rate > 100,000 cars/yr (2000 cars/wk). They will enter 2015 producing cars at slightly more than 50,000 cars/yr (1000 cars/wk). The actual number of cars (Model S & Model X) made in 2015 will be between 50,000 and 100,000. Elon went on to say it would be greater than 60,000. Elon speaks very precisely. It is not confusing.
Somebody mod this guy up. He's right. It's a critical distinction.
Methinks your definition of "cheap" and mine are very different creatures indeed.
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
Speculation is that the Reno groundbreaking might simply be a ploy to cause some other states to provide a greater incentive for them to relocate -- and that lacking that, Reno is their fallback.
free market may not be so free nor easy
What "free" market?
We construct a nation of endless laws and millions of government lawyers to regulate huge oligopolies that use these same ever willing lawyers and their laws to insulate themselves from competition, chalk all of this nasty, influence peddling bullshit to "the free market" and disparage it when it fails.
What, exactly, are you thinking of when you say "free?"
Oddly, for the price, it's got almost nothing on the Leaf other than the letters BMW on the side of it.
The Ford Fusion electric only gets about 90% the miles/kWh that the Leaf does (with the same size battery) with considerably greater style*.
Depending on your driving habits, the Fusion Energi and it's 7kWh battery (and 20+ mile range before cutting over to 40+ mpg gas) might make more sense.
*Style subject to opinion. YMMV.
While I agree that Tesla stock is *cough* optimistically valued, they are a growth company that cannot be fairly compared to a mature value company like Ford or GM. I wouldn't be surprised at volatility but I think bubble is way too strong a term.
If they slashed their R&D budget as documented in TFA they could be profitable. I'd argue that their aggressive R&D spend predicts steep revenue growth over the next several years.
Greed is the root of all evil.
I get that you think you're being funny, but lest somebody actually think that's going on here:
It doesn't say they lose money per sale. I strongly suspect they make a profit on each sale, though the summary doesn't say (and I haven't read TFA yet). What the summary says is that they're losing money overall, due to things like R&D costs and expanding production. In other words, investment costs are greater than profit.
In case it isn't yet obvious to you, this is the *EXACT* scenario where it's possible to "make it up in volume". Even leaving aside economies of scale, if they sell more cars (at a small profit on each) their overall income will exceed their expenses and they will be, overall, profitable.
There's no place I could be, since I've found Serenity...
but the vast majority of electricity is produced from coal.
You think that 39% is a "vast majority"? The US is rapidly moving from coal to natural gas because the price of natural gas is falling as domestic production increases. All in all, an electric car creates slightly less pollution than a Prius.
http://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.cfm?id=427&t=3
So what you're saying is that the backwards states pollute a lot. Gee, whodathunkit. Sadly, your crude assessment clearly designed to make electric cars look bad is rather... laughable. You include transmission losses for electricity, but not distribution pollution/losses for gas? Nor refining? You assume that ONE HUNDRED PERCENT of your electricity comes from coal? You assume that efficiency between electricity and gas is in any way comparable? I could go on, but I doubt you care about that.
Go ahead and enjoy your Hummer.
I fail to think of a single industry with any real pull in the American market place that isn't run through at least a few government regulatory entities.
Good, I can't think of a single industry that wouldn't fsck things all up if they weren't being watched.
You think building an automobile manufacturing plant, engineering a new line of cars, and building a distribution network should be cheap and easy? Musk seems to be pulling it off, so yea, it's a free market. Albeit a more expensive one to get into than opening a hot dog stand.
My Tesla runs on solar power.
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
Same reasoning exists in the people complaining about the F-35 and F-22 cost-- it's approximately the same price as a new F-16/18 in actual current cost of production; but people lump the cost of the development into the cost of the sale to make it look like it's $350m not $110m / per or whatever the actual number is.
That's pretty much a worst case scenario. If your electricity happens to be generated from nuclear or hydroelectric, your electric car will be a lot cleaner.
Upgrading our car fleet to electric and upgrading our power generation to renewable sources are multi-decade efforts that have to be done in parallel.
You mean the way they are doing in New England by shutting down coal plants (and nuclear plants) and replacing them with...well nothing. They do not have pipelines with the capacity to carry increased amounts of natural gas and cannot get the permits to build more. They do not have the electric lines to increase the amount of electric they import from outside the region and cannot get the permits to build more. This will be an interesting winter in New England.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
Those subsidies apply to all BEVs, not just Tesla, which is a startup. You can get the same discount on a Leaf which is 1/2 - 1/3 the price of a Model S and is made by one of the biggest automakers in the world.
And the "dirty coal" argument is a load of horseshit. Come out from behind your cloak of cowardly anonymity & we'll debate.
Pain is merely failure leaving the body
Canada is a big, varied place. Ontario has been using very little coal for about 5 yrs, if memory serves.
When has Quebec last relied on coal or any fossil fuel for electricity generation?
Together those two are far & away the VAST majority of "Canada" and if it weren't for Alberta and its tar sands, they probably could have hit their Kyoto targets long ago.
Pain is merely failure leaving the body
Wow, way to go Slashcode! OK, here's the same post hopefully without the mangling:
And the "dirty coal" argument is a load of horseshit. Come out from behind your cloak of cowardly anonymity & we'll debate.
Not the AC, but here's an argument for you. If you care whether a car is green* in the first place, you're probably a hipster, and thus should die in a fire. Despite sensational news stories, you're probably less likely to die in a fire in a Tesla than a gas powered car. Therefore, the Tesla is not really a green car.
*I miss cars that are the actual color green. It's really hard to find luxury cars these days in anything but neutral colors (when times are tough, people choose attention-diverting instead of attention-getting colors for expensive stuff). That's a shame, I love colorful cars. The Model S has a great red available though - good for Tesla!
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
This nonsense again?
1st off, the "30% eff." is pretty much the peak for gas vehicles, not the average or the median. It can get as low at 14%, if not lower for the really terrible ones.
There are some factors you're not considering, or are deliberately ignoring while shilling for nukes.
If most of your vehicles are EVs, then you have much lower emissions in heavily populated areas, you know, where people live.
If you're pushing your emissions back to the plants, you get huge efficiencies of scale for controlling them and you don't have as much smog-forming ground-level ozone where millions chose to work & play. And your vehicle fleet gets cleaner as you clean up the plants without having to wait for a turnover in automobile ownership.
Coal's share of electricity generation is under 40% and falling so you have a good chance of living somewhere where's it's lower.
You'll be shocked, SHOCKED to learn that nuclear & coal are NOT the only 2 options for electricity generation in America, despite their current relative dominance.
And many EV owners also have solar panels so there's another non-coal charging option.
Pain is merely failure leaving the body
So... not to stir up a hornets nest... but everyones aware that electric cars produce more pollution than gas right?
Let's look at some facts here. First off, the efficiency of a thermal power plant is somewhere around 33% to 48%, at least according to wikipedia. Let's split the difference and say 41% for a thermal plant. The typical thermal efficiency of a a gasoline engine is about 18% to 20%. Let's split the difference and say 19%. Thus, a thermal power plant is more than twice as efficient as a gasoline engine in terms of changing chemical potential energy to useful output.
But there are some caveats. Firstly, the electricity needs to be transmitted. High voltage power lines are extremely efficient, about 94% according to this article. That means that the chemical energy (lets assume from coal) reaching the charging station is 41% x 94% = 38.5%. And then there is the charging process. According to this article, the charge efficiency of a Li-Ion battery is about 97%, which makes sense to me, as batteries usually don't run too hot. The charging devices however probably are responsible for some loss. Let's assume they are 80% efficient. That gives us 38.5% x 80.0% x 97% = 30%. Thus, according to this, 30% of the coal chemical potential energy makes it to the engine.
But what about engine efficiency? Well electric motors run very cool, and have very high efficiencies, typically around 90%. I wouldn't be surprised if Tesla's motor is better. This means that if a coal power plant powered a Tesla, 30% x 90% = 27% of the energy would reach the wheels of the car, compared with a gasoline powered car, where 19% of the gasoline's potential energy comes out of the engine, never mind the losses in the transmission lines. Thus, a coal powered Tesla is 40% more energy efficient than a gasoline powered car.
However, there is one problem. Generating energy by coal produces more CO2 than generating it by gasoline. According to this article, coal generates about 215 pounds CO2 per btu of energy, while gasoline generates 157 pounds CO2 per btu. However, even with this, by my calculations, an equivalent gas powered car still emits 3.8% more CO2 than our coal powered Tesla.
Elon Musk made this claim in an interview, that even if a coal power plant generates the electricity, a Tesla still emits less CO2. My referenced back of a napkin calculations above support this assertion.
This and no other is the root from which a tyrant springs; when first he appears as a protector - Plato (423 to 327 BC)
That is basically breaking even especially given the backers and what they're investing in. I'm surprised the losses weren't larger.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
That depends on what you mean by a "free" market, which is even more complicated than the "free as in speech or free as in beer" of software. One meaning is as the opposite to a controlled market - one where participants and/or prices are regulated and you don't have a natural supply and demand. Obviously the car industry doesn't have that (but it did in the past, like the development of the Volkswagen in Germany), so in that sense it's free.
A second idea of a free market is a functional, competitive market where there are realistic choices and practically possibilities for new entrants to enter the market. The first definition doesn't exclude monopolies, oligarchies, collusion and cartels, dumping, price discrimination, exclusivity deals, IPR (imaginary property rights) lockout or any other number of anti-competitive behaviors.
A third idea of a free market is being as close as possible to perfect competition, a mostly unreachable ideal where you have cutthroat competition that'll constantly underbid each other until they sell at marginal cost and no profit is made. Lowering barriers to entry might be one way of trying to "lube" the market into functioning smoother, or you could for example require stores to show prices per kilo/liter to improve price transparency.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
The other auto makers already have this technology and are doing practically nothing with it. Elon thought the biggest risk to his company was other companies joining the race and pushing Tesla out of business. The opposite has happened, none of the big auto companies is really interested.
The problem is that, right now, electric cars are incredibly expensive to develop and produce. Lots of new technology is needed to make them efficient enough to have a practical range, and batteries are very expensive. The old auto companies have sure tried to make a few practical, sort of not too expensive small electric cars but few people were buying them because they were too expensive for what they offered. Elon's approach actually made a lot more sense:
1. Develop the basic technology by marketing a toy roadster car for very rich people with undoubtedly an enormous profit margin to pay back the development costs as quickly as possible and pave the way for the next car. Forget about the middle class, they are not going to pay 50% extra just to have an electric car. Rich people will gladly pay this and more for a "toy" to show off to their friends.
2. Using the money and gained credibility from that roadster, make a more practical model which is still very expensive but also desirable for the rich. Again, rich people is where the money is. They also don't care much about teething problems in the early cars because they are much too proud about showing off the technology and the incredible performance of their car.
3. Once you reach enough volume with these cars, start working on an actual, affordable car. With the volume of the earlier models, battery prices have come down and you can even afford building an enormous new battery plant. NOW building affordable electric cars becomes feasible.
In my humble opinion, this was a brilliant way of doing it. As long as electric cars are much more expensive than internal combustion engine cars, the masses simply won't go for them.
Oh, for fuck's sake. Go read the "Tesla Master Plan, just between you & me" that Elon posted on the Tesla forums EIGHT FUCKING YEARS ago TODAY.
http://www.teslamotors.com/blo...
He's only a few years & 1 model behind schedule; not bad for the 1st real auto startup in America in decades.
Pain is merely failure leaving the body