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Tesla Model 3 Outselling Small, Midsize Luxury Cars In US (forbes.com)
WindBourne shares a report from Forbes: In the second quarter of 2018, Tesla produced just over 53,000 vehicles, doubling its output compared to the same quarter last year. For the first time, Model 3 production (28,578) exceeded combined Model S and X production (24,761) with deliveries to customers totaling 40,740 for the quarter. The ramp up in Model 3 production is enabling it to outsell small and midsize luxury car sales in the U.S., according to some number crunching by CleanTechnica's Zachary Shahan.
His analysis claims that the Model 3 is crushing its "competitors" in that segment with total estimated sales for July amounting to 16,000 vehicles. The closest individual model to Tesla's mass-market endeavor is the Mercedes C-Class and even then, its July sales are estimated at just 6,029 units. The Model 3 is still untouchable when sales figures from multiple vehicles produced by the same company are added together. For example, the analysis expects sales of the BMW 2, 3, 4 and 5 Series to hit 12,811 at the end of July in total while customers will get their hands on 11,835 Mercedes C, CLA, CLS and E-Class models. That all means that Tesla would have a 23% share of the small and midsize luxury car market in July, ahead of BMW's 17% and Mercedes' 17%.
His analysis claims that the Model 3 is crushing its "competitors" in that segment with total estimated sales for July amounting to 16,000 vehicles. The closest individual model to Tesla's mass-market endeavor is the Mercedes C-Class and even then, its July sales are estimated at just 6,029 units. The Model 3 is still untouchable when sales figures from multiple vehicles produced by the same company are added together. For example, the analysis expects sales of the BMW 2, 3, 4 and 5 Series to hit 12,811 at the end of July in total while customers will get their hands on 11,835 Mercedes C, CLA, CLS and E-Class models. That all means that Tesla would have a 23% share of the small and midsize luxury car market in July, ahead of BMW's 17% and Mercedes' 17%.
I suppose we can expect more muskisdelusionalandoutofcash postings.
In the last Tesla thread I pointed out that, as an stockholder, what I am looking for is NOT Elon Musk's cute personality or science fantasy. Nor do I care to whig out at every little story of production problems. What I am looking for is:
Technological leadership.
Market presence.
Production leadership.
Most of all: backorders and strong forecast. None of the rest matters unless you have someone willing to buy it. Tesla has that in spades.
So Tesla is delivering. Skepticism is healthy but not to the extent that the Tesla naysayers on /. take it.
All this depends on Tesla being able to get the damn things produced and delivered to customers. The Model 3 production ramp up has been much slower than Elon predicted, but it is steadily improving, even as TSLA stock takes a beating (mostly due to Elon's regrettable antics on social media). Ironically, Elon's bold claims are probably more to blame than Tesla's actual performance. In any other context, a 100% increase in production in one year would be seen as quite strong, but because they keep failing to meet Elon's projections, they keep getting criticized by analysts.
Ultimately, I think they will get over this hump, but "production hell" is going to continue for a good while yet. Ramping up to high-volume production of automobiles is a unique challenge for Elon, and building a production line in tents has an unpleasant aroma of desperation.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve your problem, you're not using enough of it. --AC
The size of the backlog is still increasing, so demand shows no sign of slowing down anytime soon.
I suppose we can expect more muskisdelusionalandoutofcash postings.
In the last Tesla thread I pointed out that, as an stockholder, what I am looking for is NOT Elon Musk's cute personality or science fantasy. Nor do I care to whig out at every little story of production problems. What I am looking for is:
Technological leadership.
Market presence.
Production leadership.
Most of all: backorders and strong forecast. None of the rest matters unless you have someone willing to buy it. Tesla has that in spades.
So Tesla is delivering. Skepticism is healthy but not to the extent that the Tesla naysayers on /. take it.
There are a lot of people sending out fake news about Tesla nowadays, but there's an interesting bit of information.
Normally, in the two weeks ahead of a financial report the stock will mirror the report outcome. If the report is good, the stock will rise a little just before the announcement. If the report is bad, the stock will drop a little.
Tesla will be making their Q2 announcement on Wednesday (after the market closes), and it's dropped by 10% in that time.
In any other stock that would indicate bad news, but for Tesla? It could indicate a last-ditch effort for the bears to drive the stock down before a "good news" report. People are changing Tesla from "hold" to "sell", and saying that they're certain Tesla will need another round of financing.
(Musk claims that they will not need another round, and that Tesla will be profitable in Q3 and Q4 of this year.)
Tesla short interest is 34m shares right now, and with 170m shares outstanding, that's about 20% of Tesla is being shorted right now. 25% is held by Musk, so that's about 1/4 of public shares are held short.
There are three key periods coming up for Tesla: the Q2 report (Wednesday), and Q3 and Q4 of this year.
Over 50% of Tesla shares are held by 5 entities: Musk, Fidelity, Baillie Gifford, and so on. If the institutions dig their heels into the sand and refuse to sell, and if the other public shareholders also refuse to sell, there will be a short run and the stock price will skyrocket. There's nowhere that the short sellers can go to settle.
If no one is selling the stock, or there are many buyers, including panic buyers, caused by other short sellers attempting to close out their positions as they lose more and more money, you may be in a position to incur serious losses.
The institutions know this. Many of the public shareholders know this.
If the stock jumps up and Tesla seems reasonably solvent, it's estimated the short sellers will be out several tens of billions of dollars.
Expect a lot of wailing and gnashing of teeth...
(I own shares in Tesla and want to see them succeed.)
Lets see.
Here is a map of just Tesla Super Chargers. I see load in Texas.
Here is a map of all commercial electric chargers Keep in mind with EVs, most of your electricity comes from your own home since few trips are more than 100 miles.
Here is a graph of Tesla registrations by state, about a year ago. Since over 5% are in Texas, that would mean at least 20K cars are Tesla just in Texas.
The real issue is that you are noticing what you want to see.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Maybe you should try visiting Austin sometime. And as far as charging stations in Texas, please let me introduce you to plugshare.com!
Just as an exercise, I zoomed the plugshare map in on the Houston / Galveston area, and it popped up 208 charging locations. And then just for fun I filtered out everything except Tesla-specific locations (i.e. filtering out ones a Tesla would require a simple adapter to use), and came up with 66. However If you actually live in the Houston / Galveston area, you'd probably never use any of them. If you are like most Tesla owners you'd charge your car at home and only use other charging points when you actually travel out of town anyhow.
And in 1907 more people bought horse carriages than all automobiles combined, and the city streets were full of manure rather than the air being full of pollution. Change happens.
Bruce Perens.
I've seen this theory going around, that other car makers--the big boys, established companies that have been in business for decades--are just waiting until Tesla has done all the expensive R&D for them and primed the market, then they're all going to pile in with their own electric cars and crush poor, naive Tesla.
Good luck with that. So far I haven't seen any indication that any established car makers have the ability to mass-produce a desirable (in particular, long-range) electric car and sell it at a profit, and I haven't seen any indication that any of them are ramping up for an attempt to do so. A recent poll of auto executives found a solid majority of them still expect battery-electric cars to fail in the marketplace, and quite a few of them still think hydrogen fuel cells are the future. Are these the guys who are going to green-light EV production on a massive scale?
The latest "Tesla killer" to get a lot of buzz was the Jaguar I-Pace. They flew a bunch of reporters out to Portugal to show it off, and the machine seems to have impressed many of them. But how many do Jaguar plan to make? How many are they even able to make? The latest numbers I've seen suggest that Tesla are now out-producing Jaguar. I don't mean they're making more electric cars than Jaguar; I mean they're making more cars that Jaguar's total automotive output.
I share your enthusiasm and hope for Tesla to be a successful American auto maker.
Please don't conflate Tesla with Amazon, however. Jeff Bezo could have flipped the switch on profitability 10 years ago. He dragged the shareholders through this long process while building out infrastructure with all revenue brought in. Kind of like in the movie, "There will be blood" where the guy is buying up all the land around the town and nobody knows why, then he starts pumping oil out of all that property and nobody can negotiate a sale of property on the newly-realized value. In the case of Amazon, Bezos wanted to absolutely pave an immense footprint before being held to profitability on a quarterly basis by the shareholders. Now he's got an fairly diversified company that dominates in many sectors (public cloud, online retail, digital media readers, echo).
$5 / month hosted VPS on linux = awesome!
Unfortunately it's as bad from both sides. You have the people who want Tesla to fail for whatever reason, and the fanboys who can't accept that any other EV might not be a steaming pile of shit.
Tesla makes some good cars. They have also had a lot of quality issues, and their prices are pretty high. Good luck to them, we need more EVs. At the same time, companies like Hyundai and Nissan/Renault have made some good cars too, starting from the affordable end of the market instead, and are now releasing cars with 300 mile range and features like autopilot. Hooray for them too.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Found the Greenlander.
Ezekiel 23:20
Oh come on. He did 510km in a Kona on eco tires and aero wheels with no passenger at an average speed of under 90kph / 56mph. And you know that.
1) His long-range run was at 120kph, not 125. With an average slightly under that.
2) Going 68% as far at 120kph as at 90kph is a big dropoff, and a testament to the lack of good aerodynamics on the Kona.
120kph (75mph) - while far faster than my speed limit - is not by any stretch an unusual highway speed in much of the world. Many places drive faster. 90kph / 56mph, by contrast, is on the very low end of highway speeds, by global standards. I live in AFAIK the only developed country that doesn't have any roads with speed limits faster than that.
No. Please, at least get your pricing right. Model 3 LR starts at $44k USD. You're adding PUP and who knows what else in. The "long range" Kona starts at £34,500 in the UK (no US pricing yet). So subtracting 20% VAT and converting to USD, that's $37830. Pricewise, that's slotting in 31% of the way between SR and LR. Range-wise, that's 33% of the way between SR and the nominal LR range of 310 miles, or 26% of the way between SR and the measured LR range of 334 miles.
I know you want to try to load up the Model 3 with packages to try to make it more expensive, under the excuse of "anything that Kona has, we'll tack on a Model 3 package for that", but sorry, that's not even remotely a fair comparison, since you're not doing the reverse. Kona doesn't even have a freaking app for crying out loud, let alone literally dozens of standard Model 3 features. I know your favourite package to do this with is Autopilot, but the portions of that which really matter (safety-related) come free.
You don't get to load up one with options to try to artificially boost the price; that's just ridiculous.
Who should I listen to, some not-that-enthusiastic commentary, or my lying eyes? Here, let's quote from the comments section of that video:
"That's... actually rather terrifying." - My comment. One of the most liked comments in the thread :)" :O They need to fix this in case people have a medical situation."
"So the car will turn off the assist and rely on lesser technologies when you need it the most? Incredibly bad design." - THE most liked comment in the thread
"we called it DDM = drunk driver mode not LFA
"This is dangerous
"Thats not good. it need to drop the speed"
"Scary drunk system"
"That’s disappointing "
"WTF I was expecting lexus lfa =("
You seem to be the only person who thinks this is acceptable. This is going to kill people. And I don't mean "one every several hundred million miles, at a rate less than a human driver". I mean frequently. You leave your hands off the wheel for too long and the car decides to drive like you're on heroin? Who the heck thought this up?
1) This is not true. Autopilot has always braked to a stop and put the flashers on if you cease responding to driver input
2) The only thing people were "moaning" about was the frequency of the alerts. In the latest update, they decreased them (but not to as far apart as they were previously) and made the
"Lock and load, Brides of Christ!"
He drive 510km at normal highway speed in Norway in the tyres/wheels that the car comes with. What do you want Rei, what specific set-up do you require for the Rei Certified Efficient Driving Range Test?
His long-range run was at 120kph, not 125
Look at the speedometer. Anyway, who cares? He was doing the speed limit or slightly above. Most of Europe has the same limit. He got 220 miles, which is the same as the similarly priced Model 3 SR gets with efficient driving. The point is undeniable, even if you do want to quibble over 5 kph.
And your beloved Model 3 also tanks efficiency at higher speeds. That's how drag works. And the Kona is still showing better efficiency at 120 kph in Bjorn's test.
Many places drive faster.
Here's a comprehensive list: https://www.theaa.ie/aa/motori...
Most are 120, and handful 130.
Model 3 LR starts at $44k USD. You're adding PUP and who knows what else in.
I'm adding autopilot, because the Kona has something similar. You get fewer luxuries in the M3 at that price, but it's broadly similar.
Here, let's quote from the comments section of that video:
Really, you are quoting the YouTube comments section now? And you take that over what Bjorn, an exert on EVs who has driven them all and extensively tested multiple steering assist systems, says?
Anyway, I'm not convinced that coming to a stop in the middle of a 120km/h highway is such a good idea either. Especially since Autopilot tends to just ram straight into stationary vehicles without bothering to slow down. That sounds even more suicidal.
If lane keeping alone was that dangerous then we would already see all these frequent fatalities as people with cruise control and lane keeping take their hands off the wheel and get little more than a beep or a nudge in the many millions of vehicles that already have it.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC