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Tesla Will Close Most of Its Stores, Only Sell Cars Online
Tesla CEO Elon Musk said in a call with reporters Thursday that the company will only sell its vehicles online. As a result, the electric carmaker will close most of its stores over the "next few months." The Verge reports: Tesla will keep some of its retail locations open, which the company described as "a small number of stores in high-traffic locations remaining as galleries, showcases and Tesla information centers." The decision to shift away from brick-and-mortar retail is necessary if the company is to remain financially sustainable, Tesla said. The company's finances have stabilized somewhat in recent months, but Tesla still operates on very tight margins. Tesla said in a blog post: "You can now buy a Tesla in North America via your phone in about 1 minute, and that capability will soon be extended worldwide. We are also making it much easier to try out and return a Tesla, so that a test drive prior to purchase isn't needed. You can now return a car within 7 days or 1,000 miles for a full refund. Quite literally, you could buy a Tesla, drive several hundred miles for a weekend road trip with friends and then return it for free."
The company announced the move at the same time it said it will finally begin to sell its long-promised $35,000 Model 3.
The company announced the move at the same time it said it will finally begin to sell its long-promised $35,000 Model 3.
It's literally the same as the previous post, but minus most of the information... and both were published by the same editor. What gives?
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
Ummmm.
No need to consider a Tesla. If I can't feel how it drives, how the seat feels, feedback from steering, wind and road noise, and everything else which can make or break such a purchase, I'll cross this off my list.
For those that don't mind this, more power, but some of us like to know what we're getting before we put down cash.
This is a mistake. A car is not like most other purchases, and while Teslas aren't cheap, Tesla isn't so far removed from traditional mass-market sales as to be able to take a page from luxury-performance makes like Ferrari and sell cars to buyers that haven't driven the particular model in question yet.
Sure, there are some people that would be willing to buy a car untested, but I don't think that's most buyers, and I don't care how good Tesla's return policy is, it's a huge hassle to buy something incredibly expensive and to then return it, especially when financing is involved. It's not zero-risk.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
"Stuff that matters" Or is it "throw shit up and see what sticks" these days?
He really is. He started PayPal and that was a total flop! Good luck finding anyone who's ever heard of it anymore. SpaceX never did anything worthy of note, except blow up rockets before they went out of business. Now you have this failure of a company which has no mass market vehicles and doesn't have the highest market cap of any American car company. Besides, he makes all of his cars over seas, not in America, so I'm excited to see it fail. It's like everything he touches fails. What a con!
Yes, click the first link for each...
"PayPal was established in December 1998 as Confinity,[13] a company that developed security software for handheld devices[14] founded by Max Levchin, Peter Thiel, Luke Nosek, and Ken Howery.[13][15] PayPal was developed and launched as a money transfer service at Confinity in 1999, funded by John Malloy from BlueRun Ventures.[16][17]"
"Tesla was founded in July 2003, by engineers Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning, under the name Tesla Motors."
Sweet Jesus the Musk Cult is something else! Google does not say Musk founded either company. Just because Google Images shows a bunch of Musk's pictures when you type that in doesn't mean that's the answer to the question. Read the history of either company.
Paypal bought out Musk's company a couple years after they were established, that's how he became involved with PayPal and made his fortune to later take control of the already existing Tesla Motors. I bet you didn't know that Musk was later fired by Paypal either. Thrown out.
Musk started X.com. When PayPal and X.com combined forces, they kept the PayPal name.
....to further reduce costs, Telsa will sell cars only in kit, to be assemled by the user.
P.S. SpaceX, if you haven't realised, is burning through money and nearly gone bankrupt several times. So has Tesla.
Elon relies on having a huge personal stash of money to burn. And governments, etc. let him because then they get cheap space launches (at risk, but cheap) because he and his investors are basically subsidising the launches and taking the heat for any mistakes.
https://seekingalpha.com/artic...
Both companies have been around for - what? 15-20 years? Musk is rich - he got rich off Paypal but it wasn't his, and certainly wasn't *solely* his. Since then, everything he's done is with his money at his risk. He can afford to burn hundreds of millions a year. He can probably afford to continue doing similar until the day he dies.
The reason that other companies haven't emulated his "success" is that they don't want to sit and just burn their money. They want to make a decent profit. So they let him break the new ground, burn through what they themselves invest as a small percentage of their profits in R&D every year, let him take the risk, and then if anything is successful they can leap on it.
Note that car manufacturer's aren't scrambling to sell you their electric cars. They have an electric model. All of them. But they don't really care about it. They don't push it heavily. It's a niche market still. They sell a thousand times more cars that aren't electric. He can own that market for decades, they won't even notice a dint in their profits. But when the tide turns and electric cars start being required, they can out-spend, out-produce, out-perform and out-sell his companies in a matter of days (they literally make as many cars in a few days as he sells all year long).
They're using him. He's the public face of all those movements. He's digging tunnels that would cost other people billions. Of *course* they let him do that. They get a cheap tunnel dug. And once the tunnel is there, it pretty much doesn't matter what happens to his company. They use his throw-away toy projects to achieve things on the cheap.
The train thing - you don't see other train companies scrambling to emulate it. Hell, even Samsung/Apple are constantly playing catch-up with each other in the most ridiculous ways. Nobody's even trying to play catch-up with SpaceX, Tesla, the hyperloop, or the tunnelling company. They won't compete because they can't because they don't want to - it's unprofitable for them to do so.
Musk doesn't have much to do with Tesla any more either - he can't make public statements, he's not in charge any more, it's yet-another-company that he's been thrown out of, effectively.
Now watch as it starts to "return" to a normal business. Sure, the paper will show they're not doing as much now he's gone. Because now all the things he did that *weren't* compatible with being a profitable business will disappear. Because he's not a sugar-daddy over there any more yelling to have that stuff done.
All the companies he's ever been involved with are the same... Paypal is a brilliant example. They bought his company. Made him rich. Then he shouted his mouth off. They sacked him. And the company *then* became the defacto payment method online.
Musk is a loudmouth investor. The companies he runs, he runs by shouting and doing things that no other company in the world would emulate, because they are not conducive to making profit. He'll burn through his money. People will get *really* great, cheap cars, etc. Of course they will. In time. And then that will disappear, and not much will have changed.
Musk has pet-projects that he funds / gets investment to the tune of hundreds of millions. They're hobbies to him. He runs them like hobbies. He's the rich version of the guy in a garage somewhere who makes an amazing, one-off beautiful car and engine from raw metal during his spare time/retirement, at his own expense. A labour of love. I'm s
We are also making it much easier to try out and return a Tesla, so that a test drive prior to purchase isn't needed. You can now return a car within 7 days or 1,000 miles for a full refund. Quite literally, you could buy a Tesla, drive several hundred miles for a weekend road trip with friends and then return it for free."
I think the more alarming part is no show rooms, no test drives. Tesla must be hoping to hell that people are so willing to buy their cars without being able to looking at or driving them beforehand and will just drop the cash. If they do then I guess Tesla will do pretty well from it but investors could perceive this as desperation.
You don't. You buy it sight unseen and hope you like it enough to not want a refund. I guess Tesla are hoping that good word of mouth and customer satisfaction ensures that gamble pays off.
Seeking Alpha is just a collection of personal opinions.. which happen to be pretty much exclusively favoring $TSLA short sellers.
Anyway, a lot of the very successful, very big companies we have today, including Apple and Amazon came close to going out of business. It's just on par for being a disruptive company. If you have a good growth plan (both Tesla and SpaceX have this) then there will usually be investors willing to invest.
What is far from opinion is that Tesla produces a shitload of cars and that SpaceX has grabbed most market share of worldwide launch capacity, all in a under a decade. The fundamentals of both companies are such that they will not go out of business in any shape or form. Sure, stupid things can happen and some other company might buy them but right now even that seems very unlikely.
Now folks like the above can go an do personal attacks and what not, it's all pretty much besides the point. What matters is how many cars are being produced and if a solid margin is being made so they can fund growth. Net profit isn't even an issue since they're plenty demand and there are plenty of investors. Future profit is good enough. Amazon showed the way in this regard and a lot of investors have seen that light.
News about the Kettle Open Source project: on my blog
I agree with all the posts that this is a mistake. There are so many questions you have with such a major purchase and they can only be answered with a test drive. Do the seats hurt my hips? Can I see out of the rear corner? How easy is it to load and unload the trunk? Also, Tesla tightly controls the repair market and things still go wrong on electric cars and they still need service centers. I feel they actually need to add more locations with all they cars they have out on the road. Yes the cars don't need oil changes, but you can still hit a pothole and bend a wheel and damage a control arm. Your A/C fan motor can start to make noises. The window channel can become damaged and your window won't go down and up. There are 300,000 people in the metropolitan area I live in and the nearest Tesla location for service is 1 hour away. They need to add locations, not subtract and they need to hire and train more people for service work.
Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
I'm shocked people aren't catching on to what's happening here. Tesla is aggressively positioned in the market. Competitors are trying to ramp up their own EVs with mixed success, and they're doing it slowly. If they get up to full production the traditional manufacturers could muscle Tesla out of the market.
So what does Musk do? He pushes the envelope to dump cars at a desirable price to SATURATE THE MARKET. He's sucking down market share... pulling the air out of the room. EVs still have drawbacks, the larger market isn't ready for them and probably wont be till they start seeing lots of chargers in their parking deck at work. All those other companies are going to have to fight over a dwindling share of early adopters. If Tesla didnt do this theres a real risk Kia or some other cut-rate brand could saturate that market first, and Tesla would permanently be a luxury brand.
Tesla on the defensive? About to die? Desperate? Sure doesnt look like that to me. Seems like the kind of power move designed to establish long-term dominance. Autos aren't a high margin business, and Tesla is making it damned hard to churn out enough of any given competing model to make a profit.
I mentioned this in a previous post but this is likely a 7 day test drive and not a buy and return in the sense that the vehicle won't be titled to you until after the seven day period is up.
There are 300,000 people in the metropolitan area I live in and the nearest Tesla location for service is 1 hour away. They need to add locations, not subtract and they need to hire and train more people for service work.
This news is not about service centers (although you can view and test drive there). It's solely about the standalone showrooms such as the ones in major malls (in the USA).
Tesla has said it's planning to open lots more service centers, BTW. Progress there is slow; but they are definitely not closing any service center.
https://app.box.com/WitthoftResume Code: https://github.com/cellocgw
I'm thinking this is in a big part a reaction to the massive stones they've put into Teslas way, trying to force them into a traditional retailer model instead of direct sales. After a while you ask yourself if the hassle is really worth it.
For the moment anyway the order queues are full, so not a big deal. But I would be surprised if not at least one person inside Tesla is thinking about a new approach that doesn't have the issues the old one had. I quite like the "showroom" idea. Maybe if you can't buy a car there, it will get Tesla out of the conflict with the car retailers?
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
Over-complicated, failure prone vehicle.
ICEs are baroque collections of parts whirling around one another. EVs aren't. Which one is over-complicated?
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Cars are going electric, within the next 20 years. Tesla alone made that possible. Now it may have happened anyway, but it was certainly sped up by Tesla. The same way the iPhone sped up smartphones.
SpaceX pioneered reusable rockets, the same way.
The hatred towards Elon is despicable, he has mainly done good things.