26150 S+X Q3 last year vs. 27660 S+X Q3 this year, you mean? Not like it matters. Tesla has the battery supply to make about ~100k S+X per year. Doesn't matter what quarter they move them, that's their cap.
Please mortgage your house and short the company, since you both hate Tesla and love short selling.
Yep, gonna do that on Monday.
Be sure not to cover before the Q3 report;)
That's complete bullshit
Simple, readily cross-referencable facts are bullshit. Got it.
why did Musk feel the need to apologize
Did you see what the stock did after the Q1 call? Did you see what the stock did after the Q2 call? Would you apologize for billions of dollars?
When you short a stock, you take a share that wasn't available for sale, and make it available for sale. You increase the supply on the market. The laws of supply and demand dictate a price drop. When you cover, you take a share that was available for sale and take it off the market. You decrease the supply on the market. This correspondingly dictates a price rise.
It really isn't. $230M it's an order of magnitude less than cash on hand. Tesla has some loans against assets (like almost all companies), but not 100%. Bringing up just accounts payable is silly, as if it's the only item on the balance sheet; Tesla's total assets are 27,9B and total liabilities are 22,6B. You have no clue what the current price on ZEV credits is. And yes, duh.
And March is actually 11 weeks away
Someone failed math.
Tesla must have $800m in unencumbered cash by the end of Dec or be in violation of the covenants.
Both preorders and new orders, but only for a small subset: US and Canada only, LR, PUP, non-lease, no air suspension, no tow package. Tesla is preparing for both their European launch and production of a broader range of options shortly. Pre-orders have priority, but only for within their config and market.
Sedans come before crossovers because they require less batteries for the same range. So long as you can sell as many as you can make, that's what you want first. Whenever you become demand limited, rather than supply limited, that's when you focus on crossovers.
People who short the stock of have absolutely no affect on a company' operations. None.
Shorting inherently reduces the stock value. Hence, your argument is that the stock value has no effect on a company's operations. But this is obviously false; many things related to a company's ability to raise capital or obligations related to existing debt are tied to the company's stock price. Hence, shorting a stock inherently - on its own - hinders a company's finances.
Beyond this, however, shorting a company creates a strong incentive toward spreading FUD against a company. Indeed, this is the entire means by which "activist short sellers" such as Jim Chanos and Andrew Left operate. Activist short sellers coordinate their short positions with a negative PR campaigns against their targets. These can range from the aboveboard, such as interviews, to the nefarious, such as paying off "independent" analysts to write negative reports (such as what Chanos got caught doing in his Fairfax campaign), to the amateur, like the regular astroturfing campaigns we get on the Tesla forums.
When faced with an activist short campaign, companies have a few options. One is privatization. We saw how that went re: Tesla. The other is to decrease the company's dependence on outside capital, and thus decrease the significance of its stock price on the company's operations and to raise its credit score. While this is an effective strategy, it strongly hinders the company's growth rate. A company fighting off a short campaign in this manner has to heavily cut back on its least profitable activities and its investments in the future and instead focus only on its most profitable activities.
As for the rest of your post:
"Tesla is losing money": "Is" is a present tense verb. Meaning past Q3. We have not seen the Q3 report yet. The goal was to become sustainably profitable in Q3. We'll know in four weeks if it was a hit or a near miss.
"is buried in debt beyond a healthy level": Tesla's debt-to-equity ratio is 60% that of Ford's. I know some people will argue that, "Well, with the traditional automakers you shouldn't count their financing divisions, as they're profit-makers!". But their financial divisions are an essential part of their operations. When comparing companies, you compare all of their components, not just the fractions you want to. And more to the point, the traditional automakers' debt is a lot more risky than Tesla's. Defaulting on auto loans is one of the first things that happens during a financial downturn.
"Of course anyone pointing out those facts are called "trolls" or "shorts". Which he then bullies along with his cult following those people"": Irony alert: Sentence 1: Stop name calling! Sentence 2: Practice name calling!
What he did to that analyst during that conference call: Which analyst? One asked a question that was literally answered right at the top of the Q1 report that everyone was supposed to have read before joining the call. Boldfaced. By re-asking Tesla about that, he was basically accusing them of lying. The other was pushing a conspiracy theory that Tesla's demand was running out. It's five months later and it still hasn't happened, so clearly it was a boneheaded question.
" and to the blogger Montana Skeptic was just pure asshole.": Meh. Musk knew his boss. His boss was an early supporter and fan of Tesla.
"And when you add in the fact that CFOs don't stay": Tesla's CFO has been with the company since 2008.
"Also remember that Model S sales have tanked": They clearly have not, as per the delivery report. They increased over last quarter, and are well on their way to Tesla's max annual 100k S+X production capacity.
"I have a sneaky suspicion that Q3 isn't going to be that good" - Please mortgage your house and short the company, since you both hate Tesla and love short selling.
The concentrations given were around a thousand of times a normal neotame dose (equivalent to dozens of milligrams for an adult human, where normal daily neotame intake is in the dozens of micrograms) (or over a hundred times a normal dose if you accept their 12,5x human:mouse exchange factor, although that seems misguided since they're testing effects on bacteria, not direct effects on the animal). One thing that's notably absent IMHO is the glaring omission of discussion of the mice's food consumption. It's not even clear whether the pelleted diet is ad libitum or whether just the water is ("standard pelleted rodent diet and tap water ad libitum"). If the pelleted diet is ad libitum then it seems utter incompetence to not discuss changes in dietary consumption when doing a gut flora study.
Waymo used to publish a monthly list of all accidents its cars were in, but they've since stopped doing this in january 2017 and scrubbed their website of past lists. And the claim that it's not been at fault in accidents when under its own control are not true - for example...
It's important to remember that for most of its miles, it's also had a human present who can take control to prevent accidents, and a large chunk of its miles have been "sandboxed" - that is, Google/Waymo tightly controlled where it was allowed to drive, in what conditions it was allowed to drive.
And here's the cold financial logic. Let's say that the cars kill over four times as many people human drivers - one every 20 million miles (Waymo has driven under half as many so far, a lot of that with heavy sandboxing). Let's say that the average wrongful death settlement is a well-above-average $2m. So $0,10/mi. The average rate for an Uber ride in the US is $2/mi, and the average car in the US costs (incl. depreciation) about $0,75/mi to operate.
They also only have 9 million miles on the road, most of that effectively in a "sandbox". In the US, there's one fatality every 86 million miles. So the fact that Waymo hasn't killed anyone yet is hardly indicative of anything.
Leaving it to corporations to regulate themselves due to fears of liability has created one disaster after the next. And come on, let's not act like we can't all figure out how autonomous vehicles could be tested. Give a small fleet of them to the NHTSA and have the NHTSA spend a few weeks subjecting them to one unanticipated event after the next in an (easily reconfigurable) mock town, without a given "script" that the manufacturer could use as a cheat sheet.
Too onerous of a testing cost? At least give them a one day serial battery of scenario tests. I mean, come on. We're talking about peoples' lives here. It's bad enough that Level 2 systems don't have to do this. But Level 5? Ugh.
We have safety alerts here built into our cell network. They're not even slightly controversial. If you're in some area and there's signs that a volcano near you is about to go off or there's a jökulhlaup or something, evacuation notices are issued to all phones in the area. And that's a great thing. I mean, why wouldn't you want that?
But in the US you've connected your safety alerts to a political office (the presidency), whose occupant at least a third of the country will always strongly dislike - and the intensity of dislike is particularly strong with the current president. And he's famous for messaging rants. So you've sullied what should be an obvious "well of course everyone supports this" thing into one that people are suing to stop.
Interesting you also jump in this thread, and were basically silent on the one where Musk was forced out as Chairman"
What are you talking about? I wrote a good chunk of a dozen posts over there. Not like it would even matter if I hadn't; I don't hang out on Slashdot 24/7.
(Rest of your post not even worth bothering with a reply).
BYD made 114k vehicles in all of last year combined. Tesla made half that in just one quarter. Furthermore, note that I wrote battery capacity. The limiting factor.
I had no idea that Honda Accord and Toyota Camry were EVs. Or in your mind is that an irrelevant niggling detail?
Tesla makes more EV battery capacity than everyone else in the world combined. And they're still struggling to keep up on batteries, their volumes are so high. Point at ICEs all you want, but said "production experts" keep falling further and further behind Tesla in the race to make what they almost universally agree is the future (EVs).
Your argument is like someone in 1904 saying, "This 'Ford Motor Company' thinks its so great, it made 1750 Model As last year, while we here at the Columbus Buggy Company produce that many buggies every three weeks!"
You mean the car that few want? A car sold in 1/14th the volume of the Model 3 this month? A car whose sales have collapsed over the past year?
Imagine that - people don't want a dorky-looking econobox that takes 2 1/2 times as long to recharge from a fragmented, poorly maintained network. Whodathunkit?
GM got some things right. Performance is decent, although not to Tesla standards. The battery is properly liquid cooled. Etc. But... sorry, Bolt was a miss.
You realize that Sandy Munroe, the guy you're citing, later changed his mind and called the vehicle a symphony of engineering, among other high praise? Literally stated "I have to eat crow" concerning his earlier analysis (aka what you linked)
I note that people only go into "but what about the mining!" rants when talking about EV batteries, and not.... literally everything else they consume which is also made out of mined products. E.g. why should we give a rat's arse whether we use nickel in the form of stainless steel or in the form of the nickel oxides that make up the lion's share of an EV cathode? Why shouldn't we care about other mined products like platinium for catalytic converters (you don't need much, but it's mined in hundreds of ppb/low ppm quantities after stripping vast quantities of overburden) and the like? Heck, if you want to look for low impact mining, it's pretty dang hard to beat salar lithium. Really... why are the steel, alumium, vanadium, manganese, molybdenum, silicon, chromium, magnesium, etc etc in the ICEs considered irrelevant?
And as for cobalt - the element that's been dwindling in EV batteries - even in Congo, 80% of it is mined in mines run by international conglomerates, to modern standards, and of the artisinal mining, most is just villagers mining their own land; the concern is over a minority of a minority of mining in a single country. And even that is irrelevant - not because western companies generally have procedures in place to prevent buying artisinal cobalt (it's generally purchased by less scrupulous buyers, such as in China), but because this article about Tesla, and Tesla has historically acquired most of its cobalt from Canada.
The mass of a Model 3 is is about the same as its performance equivalents from BMW. The mass of "stuff" that makes it up is about the same as the mass of "stuff" that makes up the BMW. Why are we supposed to freak out about one but not the other?
Wouldn't be surprised if they do it even sooner. After transportation, their next bottleneck is going to be cell production; Tesla's growth has outpaced Panasonic's ability to provide cells. They're trying to get three new lines online at Giga as soon as possible, but it'll take months. When cells are the limiting factor, it makes sense to switch to SRs so you can make more vehicles with a limited volume of cells. Well optioned out SRs surely first, of course, but SRs nonetheless.
2) The shorts have been pushing their "See, there's cars in lots, therefore there's no demand and they're just building to throw them away!" conspiracy theory every week since June. They never really caught on to the concept of a staging yard for shipping.
3) They cite under a thousand cars spotted. But Tesla has over 8000 cars in transit right now, according to the quarterly delivery figures. The "Shorty Airforce" needs to do a better job, they missed nearly 9 in every 10 cars in transit.
Guess they tricked InsideEV's independent count, too. And made everyone helping with the deliveries hallucinate a huge volume of vehicles going through the delivery centres. Sneaky, sneaky Tesla.
California is their biggest market; could well be coulter pines;) The cones can weigh 2-5kg when fresh. There's also sugar pine cones, which can be 2/3rds of a meter long (but narrow).
As for the time to get an appointment, it depends entirely on where they are. While Tesla is working on switching to Tesla-owned body shops, right now, body work is contracted out to local body shops. So if you can't get an appointment, then the local body shop is overbooked.
Slashdot Mirror
(Opens window and sticks hand outside)
Yeah, sounds about right.
26150 S+X Q3 last year vs. 27660 S+X Q3 this year, you mean? Not like it matters. Tesla has the battery supply to make about ~100k S+X per year. Doesn't matter what quarter they move them, that's their cap.
Be sure not to cover before the Q3 report ;)
Simple, readily cross-referencable facts are bullshit. Got it.
Did you see what the stock did after the Q1 call?
Did you see what the stock did after the Q2 call?
Would you apologize for billions of dollars?
When you short a stock, you take a share that wasn't available for sale, and make it available for sale. You increase the supply on the market. The laws of supply and demand dictate a price drop. When you cover, you take a share that was available for sale and take it off the market. You decrease the supply on the market. This correspondingly dictates a price rise.
It really isn't. $230M it's an order of magnitude less than cash on hand. Tesla has some loans against assets (like almost all companies), but not 100%. Bringing up just accounts payable is silly, as if it's the only item on the balance sheet; Tesla's total assets are 27,9B and total liabilities are 22,6B. You have no clue what the current price on ZEV credits is. And yes, duh.
Someone failed math.
1) Citation needed
2) Free cash (not counting restricted cash) is $2,2B.
Both preorders and new orders, but only for a small subset: US and Canada only, LR, PUP, non-lease, no air suspension, no tow package. Tesla is preparing for both their European launch and production of a broader range of options shortly. Pre-orders have priority, but only for within their config and market.
Sedans come before crossovers because they require less batteries for the same range. So long as you can sell as many as you can make, that's what you want first. Whenever you become demand limited, rather than supply limited, that's when you focus on crossovers.
"Bankers inundating Tesla" in no way means that Tesla is seeking it out. It says literally the exact opposite.
$230M is nothing. March is half a year away.
Shorting inherently reduces the stock value. Hence, your argument is that the stock value has no effect on a company's operations. But this is obviously false; many things related to a company's ability to raise capital or obligations related to existing debt are tied to the company's stock price. Hence, shorting a stock inherently - on its own - hinders a company's finances.
Beyond this, however, shorting a company creates a strong incentive toward spreading FUD against a company. Indeed, this is the entire means by which "activist short sellers" such as Jim Chanos and Andrew Left operate. Activist short sellers coordinate their short positions with a negative PR campaigns against their targets. These can range from the aboveboard, such as interviews, to the nefarious, such as paying off "independent" analysts to write negative reports (such as what Chanos got caught doing in his Fairfax campaign), to the amateur, like the regular astroturfing campaigns we get on the Tesla forums.
When faced with an activist short campaign, companies have a few options. One is privatization. We saw how that went re: Tesla. The other is to decrease the company's dependence on outside capital, and thus decrease the significance of its stock price on the company's operations and to raise its credit score. While this is an effective strategy, it strongly hinders the company's growth rate. A company fighting off a short campaign in this manner has to heavily cut back on its least profitable activities and its investments in the future and instead focus only on its most profitable activities.
As for the rest of your post:
"Tesla is losing money": "Is" is a present tense verb. Meaning past Q3. We have not seen the Q3 report yet. The goal was to become sustainably profitable in Q3. We'll know in four weeks if it was a hit or a near miss.
"is buried in debt beyond a healthy level": Tesla's debt-to-equity ratio is 60% that of Ford's. I know some people will argue that, "Well, with the traditional automakers you shouldn't count their financing divisions, as they're profit-makers!". But their financial divisions are an essential part of their operations. When comparing companies, you compare all of their components, not just the fractions you want to. And more to the point, the traditional automakers' debt is a lot more risky than Tesla's. Defaulting on auto loans is one of the first things that happens during a financial downturn.
"Of course anyone pointing out those facts are called "trolls" or "shorts". Which he then bullies along with his cult following those people"": Irony alert: Sentence 1: Stop name calling! Sentence 2: Practice name calling!
What he did to that analyst during that conference call: Which analyst? One asked a question that was literally answered right at the top of the Q1 report that everyone was supposed to have read before joining the call. Boldfaced. By re-asking Tesla about that, he was basically accusing them of lying. The other was pushing a conspiracy theory that Tesla's demand was running out. It's five months later and it still hasn't happened, so clearly it was a boneheaded question.
" and to the blogger Montana Skeptic was just pure asshole.": Meh. Musk knew his boss. His boss was an early supporter and fan of Tesla.
"And when you add in the fact that CFOs don't stay": Tesla's CFO has been with the company since 2008.
"Also remember that Model S sales have tanked": They clearly have not, as per the delivery report. They increased over last quarter, and are well on their way to Tesla's max annual 100k S+X production capacity.
"I have a sneaky suspicion that Q3 isn't going to be that good" - Please mortgage your house and short the company, since you both hate Tesla and love short selling.
Neotame is 7000-13000 times as sweet as sugar.
The study was published in a MDPI journal. MDPI has some serious reputational problems (more here).
The concentrations given were around a thousand of times a normal neotame dose (equivalent to dozens of milligrams for an adult human, where normal daily neotame intake is in the dozens of micrograms) (or over a hundred times a normal dose if you accept their 12,5x human:mouse exchange factor, although that seems misguided since they're testing effects on bacteria, not direct effects on the animal). One thing that's notably absent IMHO is the glaring omission of discussion of the mice's food consumption. It's not even clear whether the pelleted diet is ad libitum or whether just the water is ("standard pelleted rodent diet and tap water ad libitum"). If the pelleted diet is ad libitum then it seems utter incompetence to not discuss changes in dietary consumption when doing a gut flora study.
Waymo used to publish a monthly list of all accidents its cars were in, but they've since stopped doing this in january 2017 and scrubbed their website of past lists. And the claim that it's not been at fault in accidents when under its own control are not true - for example...
It's important to remember that for most of its miles, it's also had a human present who can take control to prevent accidents, and a large chunk of its miles have been "sandboxed" - that is, Google/Waymo tightly controlled where it was allowed to drive, in what conditions it was allowed to drive.
And here's the cold financial logic. Let's say that the cars kill over four times as many people human drivers - one every 20 million miles (Waymo has driven under half as many so far, a lot of that with heavy sandboxing). Let's say that the average wrongful death settlement is a well-above-average $2m. So $0,10/mi. The average rate for an Uber ride in the US is $2/mi, and the average car in the US costs (incl. depreciation) about $0,75/mi to operate.
Waymo can afford to kill people.
Well, Waymo certainly has the best PR.
They also only have 9 million miles on the road, most of that effectively in a "sandbox". In the US, there's one fatality every 86 million miles. So the fact that Waymo hasn't killed anyone yet is hardly indicative of anything.
Leaving it to corporations to regulate themselves due to fears of liability has created one disaster after the next. And come on, let's not act like we can't all figure out how autonomous vehicles could be tested. Give a small fleet of them to the NHTSA and have the NHTSA spend a few weeks subjecting them to one unanticipated event after the next in an (easily reconfigurable) mock town, without a given "script" that the manufacturer could use as a cheat sheet.
Too onerous of a testing cost? At least give them a one day serial battery of scenario tests. I mean, come on. We're talking about peoples' lives here. It's bad enough that Level 2 systems don't have to do this. But Level 5? Ugh.
... connecting safety alerts to the president.
We have safety alerts here built into our cell network. They're not even slightly controversial. If you're in some area and there's signs that a volcano near you is about to go off or there's a jökulhlaup or something, evacuation notices are issued to all phones in the area. And that's a great thing. I mean, why wouldn't you want that?
But in the US you've connected your safety alerts to a political office (the presidency), whose occupant at least a third of the country will always strongly dislike - and the intensity of dislike is particularly strong with the current president. And he's famous for messaging rants. So you've sullied what should be an obvious "well of course everyone supports this" thing into one that people are suing to stop.
What are you talking about? I wrote a good chunk of a dozen posts over there. Not like it would even matter if I hadn't; I don't hang out on Slashdot 24/7.
(Rest of your post not even worth bothering with a reply).
Believe what you want; facts state otherwise. I know it's hard to comprehend the rate at which they're churning out battery capacity, but it's reality whether you want to believe it or not.
Ed: half that in terms of Model 3s alone in just one quarter.
Did. Not does.
BYD made 114k vehicles in all of last year combined. Tesla made half that in just one quarter. Furthermore, note that I wrote battery capacity. The limiting factor.
I had no idea that Honda Accord and Toyota Camry were EVs. Or in your mind is that an irrelevant niggling detail?
Tesla makes more EV battery capacity than everyone else in the world combined. And they're still struggling to keep up on batteries, their volumes are so high. Point at ICEs all you want, but said "production experts" keep falling further and further behind Tesla in the race to make what they almost universally agree is the future (EVs).
Your argument is like someone in 1904 saying, "This 'Ford Motor Company' thinks its so great, it made 1750 Model As last year, while we here at the Columbus Buggy Company produce that many buggies every three weeks!"
You mean the car that few want? A car sold in 1/14th the volume of the Model 3 this month? A car whose sales have collapsed over the past year?
Imagine that - people don't want a dorky-looking econobox that takes 2 1/2 times as long to recharge from a fragmented, poorly maintained network. Whodathunkit?
GM got some things right. Performance is decent, although not to Tesla standards. The battery is properly liquid cooled. Etc. But... sorry, Bolt was a miss.
You realize that Sandy Munroe, the guy you're citing, later changed his mind and called the vehicle a symphony of engineering, among other high praise? Literally stated "I have to eat crow" concerning his earlier analysis (aka what you linked)
I note that people only go into "but what about the mining!" rants when talking about EV batteries, and not.... literally everything else they consume which is also made out of mined products. E.g. why should we give a rat's arse whether we use nickel in the form of stainless steel or in the form of the nickel oxides that make up the lion's share of an EV cathode? Why shouldn't we care about other mined products like platinium for catalytic converters (you don't need much, but it's mined in hundreds of ppb/low ppm quantities after stripping vast quantities of overburden) and the like? Heck, if you want to look for low impact mining, it's pretty dang hard to beat salar lithium. Really... why are the steel, alumium, vanadium, manganese, molybdenum, silicon, chromium, magnesium, etc etc in the ICEs considered irrelevant?
And as for cobalt - the element that's been dwindling in EV batteries - even in Congo, 80% of it is mined in mines run by international conglomerates, to modern standards, and of the artisinal mining, most is just villagers mining their own land; the concern is over a minority of a minority of mining in a single country. And even that is irrelevant - not because western companies generally have procedures in place to prevent buying artisinal cobalt (it's generally purchased by less scrupulous buyers, such as in China), but because this article about Tesla, and Tesla has historically acquired most of its cobalt from Canada.
The mass of a Model 3 is is about the same as its performance equivalents from BMW. The mass of "stuff" that makes it up is about the same as the mass of "stuff" that makes up the BMW. Why are we supposed to freak out about one but not the other?
Wouldn't be surprised if they do it even sooner. After transportation, their next bottleneck is going to be cell production; Tesla's growth has outpaced Panasonic's ability to provide cells. They're trying to get three new lines online at Giga as soon as possible, but it'll take months. When cells are the limiting factor, it makes sense to switch to SRs so you can make more vehicles with a limited volume of cells. Well optioned out SRs surely first, of course, but SRs nonetheless.
1) Lol, Daily Mail ;)
2) The shorts have been pushing their "See, there's cars in lots, therefore there's no demand and they're just building to throw them away!" conspiracy theory every week since June. They never really caught on to the concept of a staging yard for shipping.
3) They cite under a thousand cars spotted. But Tesla has over 8000 cars in transit right now, according to the quarterly delivery figures. The "Shorty Airforce" needs to do a better job, they missed nearly 9 in every 10 cars in transit.
Guess they tricked InsideEV's independent count, too. And made everyone helping with the deliveries hallucinate a huge volume of vehicles going through the delivery centres. Sneaky, sneaky Tesla.
California is their biggest market; could well be coulter pines ;) The cones can weigh 2-5kg when fresh. There's also sugar pine cones, which can be 2/3rds of a meter long (but narrow).
As for the time to get an appointment, it depends entirely on where they are. While Tesla is working on switching to Tesla-owned body shops, right now, body work is contracted out to local body shops. So if you can't get an appointment, then the local body shop is overbooked.