Slashdot article is wrong. It's only against Musk, not Tesla. As longs have been pointing out for ages that it would be, while shorts kept insisting it would be against Tesla. He's also not been charged, he's been sued, in a civil case. "Civil Action No. 1:18-cv-8865"
But come on people, get that price down! I've got dry powder and it's right before the Q3 deliveries numbers;)
The time for a plant to visibly wither depends on the plant and the ambient temperature. But it arrests development relatively quickly; you're not going to have new flowers maturing on a plant that's been sprayed with roundup. And bees don't revisit flowers that have already been visited.
They stated, "figs are never vegetarian - you can't eat a fig without eating wasp eggs". Actually, by far most figs that people eat are vegetarian, and contain no wasps or eggs.
As a general rule, wild figs contain wasp pollinators. Most F. carica (domestic / common fig) cultivars, however, are parthenocarpic. Sorry to ruin that for you;)
That said, while the fruits are parthenocarpic, they're not apomictic. They don't contain viable seeds. If you have a fig that contains viable seeds, even if it's of a parthenocarpic cultivar, it very likely contains a fig wasp.
Except it's not. It was a conclusion based on a group of 15 bees, which gave bees unusually large doses of glyphosphate, and found that the heaviest dose of glyphosphate had no statistically significant effects, unlike the mild dose. The data actually argues that we should give bees more glyphosphate in order to neutralize any effects.
treated with either 5 mg/L glyphosate (G-5), 10 mg/L glyphosate (G-10) or sterile sucrose syrup (control) for 5 d.... The total number of gut bacteria decreased for both treatment groups, relative to control, but this drop was significant only for the G-5 group, which also exhibited more severe compositional shifts
They try to explain this away by arguing that maybe they were having some bias in capturing G-10 bees, well, because "bees exposed to glyphosate may exhibit impaired spatial processing"... without giving any evidence for or even a mechanism through which this could happen. What they wrote is literally the equivalent of writing re. humans "If you take some antibiotics that kill only a fraction of your gut bacteria, you're going to wander off in confusion and die". The whole study also contradicts the authors' previous work, which blamed CCD on antibiotics given by beekeepers.
The whole premise is kind of silly to begin with. Glyphosphate kills flowering plants. Bees adjust where they forage based on where flowers can be found. Bees are not going to have any interest whatsoever hanging around a field that's been sprayed with glyphosphate. Glyphosphate also does not stay on the surface; it's highly soluble and washes into the soil, where it binds tightly with soil particles.
But of course, the study said something negative about glyphosphate, so of course everyone covered it, in as apocalyptic terms as possible.
My expectation was that this "25 year anniversary" thing was supposed to make me feel old, but it really doesn't... because I associate Myst with me being young.
What made me feel old was learning that Serial Experiments Lain turned 20 this summer. Apparently there was a 20th anniversary party at Club Cyberia hosted by Wasei "JJ" Chikada, the real-world DJ who played the voice of JJ, the DJ in Cyberia, as well as composing much of the soundtrack (and co-composing the Cyberia Mix CD). I've been listening to his cover of ScummV's cover of Duvet a lot on Youtube recently.
I thought the initial shift to graphics with Zork with Return to Zork kept to the original atmosphere pretty well, although there were some details about some of the puzzles in that game that were kind of annoying.
I have to admit I was a bit thrown for a loop when Nemesis came out, given how.. well, dark it was. A person killing themselves in the title sequence wasn't exactly your typical whimsical Zork world...
My favourite easter egg in Full Throttle was one that most people I talked to missed. It's possible to get another box of bunnies after having them set off the minefield, which you can hang onto until near the end of the game when you're hanging onto the out-of-control truck. If you open up the grille and expose the spinning radiator fan, and apply the box of bunnies to it, the Ride of the Valkyries music comes back on while you shred each bunny against the fan;)
Agreed. I've never even been convinced of the need to pay the money for a smartwatch with a screen. Just the other day I picked up a replacement for my old Sony SWR10, for $12, which I lost when the band broke a couple years ago. All it can do is vibrate, use a motion sensor, and handle button presses. But that's all I need of it. It functions as a virtual tether to my phone so I can't lose it, it vibrates when my phone gives notifications or the alarm goes off even if I'm not nearby, etc.
I don't even care about the fitness / sleep tracking uses; I mainly just don't want to lose my phone. My last phone was run over by a bus several days ago after it fell out of my pocket while I was helping some people on the side of the road (they were in the bus lane next to a bus stop). Drove off, realized the phone was gone half an hour later, figured out where it was with Where's My Droid, drove back, and there it was, smashed to unusability. Had I still had my smartband then I would have noticed the instant I tried to drive off, if not sooner.
Then since you are talking about gross margins, you also realize that is pretty much irrelevant. Net margin is what matters
Gross margin is the portion of a balance sheet that by design scales linearly and (roughly immediately) with production volumes. And production volumes are (for the most part) the one thing that we, as outsiders, can actually observe as the quarter progresses, so it's the only thing that gives us insights into the Q3 balance sheet. I say "for the most part" because we can also observe hiring/layoffs and new facility construction, but you've already decided that money gets spent regardless of whether people are actually hired and facilities actually built , as if it just vanishes into a black hole "because";)
And that's not from capital expenditures
Capex is part of "cost of revenues", which is $3,4B, versus the $750M you obsess over in SG&A.
... And numbers will start leaking out in about a week - or do you claim that there are ZERO numbers about Tesla's Q3 performance until the full GAAP and SEC-certified statements are released?
Production / delivery numbers come out in a week. Nothing to do with margins, SG&A, or anything else. Just production / delivery volumes. Your comment:
we're about a week out from finding out just how much they lost
-... is hilarious, as you're adamantly convinced in your short positions and yet don't even know when key information about the company comes out.
I was talking about gross margins . "Margin" is on its own a nonspecific term, and can be gross, operating, pretax or net; you're trying to declare it to be a synonym with net margin, which it is not.
Now we revert back to our previous "where is the mythical doubling of personnel and facilities?" argument that you've refused to address above. I guess we'll find out about Tesla's secret new volcano lair after (snicker) "a week"?;)
Do you not even read the quarterly reports? Seriously, what's wrong with you? Literally the second line in the update letter... boldface in the original... "Model 3 gross margin turned slightly positive in Q2, expecting roughly 15% in Q3"
First you mistakenly thought that quarterly statements come out on the last day of the quarter, and now you show that you don't even know what's in them. Geez... I hope for your sake that it's not your own money that you're investing.
BS, and you know it. I've called you out on this MANY times Rei. SG&A has been scaling LINEARLY for Tesla for 5 years.
And you know I've called you many times on this. The fact that you refuse to read what I wrote doesn't change any of this. You keep trying to conflate the costs of scaling up for the construction and operation of a brand new model line with per-unit costs, which is an absurdity, contradicting all tenets of manufacturing. And I'll repeat: "I'm looking forward to hearing where Tesla has been secretly recruiting for all the jobs they haven't been posting on their website and where they've been storing these tens of thousands of people and new lines, given that no new line has been built at Fremont since Q2. That's going to be really exciting to find out, no? I'm voting for an underground volcano lair!;)" Seriously, where exactly do you think this mythical spending is going? It's not hiring. It's not construction. So where, exactly? Why exactly is it that you never want to answer that question? Just to give specific examples:
Can you sell product without paying for showrooms, sales people, delivery fees, purchasing departments, supply chain administration?
Where's the linear increase in showrooms? Hint: there hasn't been one. Where's the linear increase in sales people? Hint: there hasn't been one. Just the opposite, they killed off their solar direct sales. Where's the linear increase in delivery fees? I guarantee you you'll find that the per-unit delivery costs (at least eventually when it's running smoothly) end up lower because they're being done in larger volume. Higher volume shipping is cheaper per unit. Where's the linear increase in purchasing departments and supply chain administration? Just ignoring that it's absurd to think that it's required - as if the same person can't tack another zero on the end of an order - where's the hiring? Where's the extra office buildings? Nowhere, that's where.
You're calling for the doubling of Tesla's personel. Where are they?
we're about a week out from finding out just how much they lost
Seriously, how ignorant are you that you don't know that quarterly filings don't come out until a month after the quarter ends?
lot of those expenses are things like improving the service centres to cope with the demand
That's not SG&A, that's "Services and Other". Services and Other cost Tesla a net $116M in Q2, vs. revenue of $4B, aka eating up less than 3% of their gross margin.
There were already ridiculous delays getting parts and basic repairs done, six months not being unusual for things like accident damage.
6 months is highly unusual. Of course, you can always find some body shop somewhere for any brand that has hundreds of thousands of vehicles on the road that takes an inordinate amount of time. That doesn't make that "normal". Want to make there be zero cases of abnormal crash repair times (for shorts to find out about and share widely every chance they get) when you don't control the body shops? Good luck with that.
S & X repairs from accidents are usually several weeks to a month. But these are much lower volume vehicles than the 3. In the Model 3 Owners Survey, the average repair took under a week. Speaking of Model 3 repairs...
It is hot because the batteries burn at high temperature for some.
Model 3s have been driven (calculations in a previous Slashdot article) about 300-400 million miles so far. In the US, there's a car fire once in every ~20 million miles. So far the shorts (who've been desperate to find any Model 3 fires they can find) have found evidence of one - count it, one - fire in a Model 3. And that was in a Model 3 at the factory (salvage yard: Fremont; miles on the odometer: 1), not an owner vehicle. And when you look at the damage, it's heaviest on the front bumper, least around the battery.
Meanwhile, new BMWs in South Korea have been catching fire at a rate of half a dozen vehicles per month. Not cars in accidents - most of them have been in parked cars. But of course, we don't report on things like that because, hey, they're not Tesla. Tesla is one of the few automakers which has not had to have fire-related recalls in the past several years. A number of major automakers have had to in the past several months. Gee, who would have ever thought that a combustion vehicle, propelled by combusting a highly flammable fuel, might sometimes have issues with unintended combustion?
Totally. When Tesla runs a welding robot faster, that totally makes them build and fill a new office building!
SG&A is not part of gross margin for a reason: it does not rise in correlation with production volumes as a production line spools up. Increasing production rates on a line lowersCOGS, by decreasing hardware depreciation. Without refining of proction processes, labour costs increases linearly with volumes (labour being only a fraction of COGS), but refining production processes - something that happens every month as a new line matures - decreases labour. SG&A, by contrast, scales at a far-below-linear relationship to production volumes. Stamping out panels faster doesn't mean that you need to hire a new janitor. Simplifying how to attach two components with less labour doesn't mean you have to hire a new webmaster. Reducing interruptions in the paint shop doesn't mean you have to hire a new director of accounting. Heck, should we even bother talking about the SG&A expense that is operating the supercharger network - formerly a (expensive) loss leader, but presently converting to a profit centre as Model 3 volumes expand, and for which the vast majority ofchargers (aka those in less densely populated areas) are able to vastly increase their service volumes without any capital expenses?
I also love the fact that you never mention the fact that Tesla took a SG&A hit in Q2 in order to reduce its SG&A expenses from Q3 onward, but let's not worry our little heads about that!
Model 3 had a positive margin in Q2, and is expected to have a 15% margin this quarter - higher than the industry average.
$717 million loss last quarter
Why yes, let's totally take R&D, SG&A, capex, etc on a line that last quarter was operating at a small fraction of its design volumes and pretend like they increase linearly with vehicle volume! Because that's totally a reasonable thing to do. Let's also ignore that last quarter they A) soaked restructuring expenses, which were a cost in Q2 but a benefit from Q3 onwards, B) deliberately held back over 10k cars to avoid tolling the 200k US tax credit limit, C) weren't yet selling the very-high margin AWD and P variants, which now make up the majority of their sales. Let's also totally ignore that the very short argument for why Tesla can't make money - "they have high scrap and rework rates" (typical of new lines; this decreases as lines mature) - actually argues precisely the opposite. Because if you're making positive margins, and then 15% margins with high scrap and rework rates, tell me, what does that mean for margins as production processes get refined over time? Scrap and rework are part of COGS Gross margins are (Revenue - COGS) / Revenue.
I know, you're in the group which has this notion that everything simply scales linearly with volume, on a line designed for far higher volumes, and all costs remain the same, no matter how much faster they run the lines (which has been seen dramatically over this quarter), no matter how much lower the scrap and rework rates, etc. And this linear spending is supposed to come out of thin air, too. Because Tesla spending over Q2 would mean that they've practically doubled their workforce and built half of a new factory, so I'm looking forward to hearing where Tesla has been secretly recruiting for all the jobs they haven't been posting on their website and where they've been storing these tens of thousands of people and new lines, given that no new line has been built at Fremont since Q2. That's going to be really exciting to find out, no? I'm voting for an underground volcano lair!;)
You're in for a rude awakening first with the Q3 report, and then especially the Q4 report.
The hardware is not all the same, however. They have different aperture sizes (light-gathering ability), different sensor sizes (detail), different focal lengths, etc. The XZ2 Premium also has something that AFAIK is unique among cell phones, in that they have a second camera which is a dedicated greyscale (aka low-light optimized) camera, which provides extra intensity data to the colour camera when shooting in low-light conditions. So not only do you have the combined aperture and sensor area, but a large chunk of that sensor area does not suffer from the losses and blurring effects of colour filters.
Yes. But the approach by the XZ2 Premium is brand new. And as far as I am aware is not shared by any smartphone by any brand on the market today.
To reiterate: XZ2 pairs a second, greyscale camera specifically optimized for low-light with its colour camera, so that the latter provides colour data while the former dramatically augments the intensity data. Greyscale cameras are more sensitive in low-light conditions than colour cameras.
Comparing a phone without such a correlated greyscale camera to one with such a camera is comparing apples and oranges.
Even the "car-free zone" isn't actually completely car-free. E.g.:
If someone wants to get married in the car-free zone, the bride and groom can come in a car, but everyone else walks,” he says. “Same with funerals.”
They haven't talked about stocking shops, but if they're carving out exceptions like that, then I imagine vehicles for stocking shops also get exceptions.
There's also the obvious implications of the scheme:
The main grumble is that the scheme has led to congestion on the periphery of the zone and that there aren’t enough parking spaces.
Because, of course, people drive to it, then walk around in it, then drive home.
Slashdot Mirror
Slashdot article is wrong. It's only against Musk, not Tesla. As longs have been pointing out for ages that it would be, while shorts kept insisting it would be against Tesla. He's also not been charged, he's been sued, in a civil case. "Civil Action No. 1:18-cv-8865"
But come on people, get that price down! I've got dry powder and it's right before the Q3 deliveries numbers ;)
The time for a plant to visibly wither depends on the plant and the ambient temperature. But it arrests development relatively quickly; you're not going to have new flowers maturing on a plant that's been sprayed with roundup. And bees don't revisit flowers that have already been visited.
Roundup does not make rain stop falling.
This has to be a joke.
They stated, "figs are never vegetarian - you can't eat a fig without eating wasp eggs". Actually, by far most figs that people eat are vegetarian, and contain no wasps or eggs.
As a general rule, wild figs contain wasp pollinators. Most F. carica (domestic / common fig) cultivars, however, are parthenocarpic. Sorry to ruin that for you ;)
That said, while the fruits are parthenocarpic, they're not apomictic. They don't contain viable seeds. If you have a fig that contains viable seeds, even if it's of a parthenocarpic cultivar, it very likely contains a fig wasp.
Except it's not. It was a conclusion based on a group of 15 bees, which gave bees unusually large doses of glyphosphate, and found that the heaviest dose of glyphosphate had no statistically significant effects, unlike the mild dose. The data actually argues that we should give bees more glyphosphate in order to neutralize any effects.
They try to explain this away by arguing that maybe they were having some bias in capturing G-10 bees, well, because "bees exposed to glyphosate may exhibit impaired spatial processing"... without giving any evidence for or even a mechanism through which this could happen. What they wrote is literally the equivalent of writing re. humans "If you take some antibiotics that kill only a fraction of your gut bacteria, you're going to wander off in confusion and die". The whole study also contradicts the authors' previous work, which blamed CCD on antibiotics given by beekeepers.
The whole premise is kind of silly to begin with. Glyphosphate kills flowering plants. Bees adjust where they forage based on where flowers can be found. Bees are not going to have any interest whatsoever hanging around a field that's been sprayed with glyphosphate. Glyphosphate also does not stay on the surface; it's highly soluble and washes into the soil, where it binds tightly with soil particles.
But of course, the study said something negative about glyphosphate, so of course everyone covered it, in as apocalyptic terms as possible.
My expectation was that this "25 year anniversary" thing was supposed to make me feel old, but it really doesn't... because I associate Myst with me being young.
What made me feel old was learning that Serial Experiments Lain turned 20 this summer. Apparently there was a 20th anniversary party at Club Cyberia hosted by Wasei "JJ" Chikada, the real-world DJ who played the voice of JJ, the DJ in Cyberia, as well as composing much of the soundtrack (and co-composing the Cyberia Mix CD). I've been listening to his cover of ScummV's cover of Duvet a lot on Youtube recently.
I thought the initial shift to graphics with Zork with Return to Zork kept to the original atmosphere pretty well, although there were some details about some of the puzzles in that game that were kind of annoying.
I have to admit I was a bit thrown for a loop when Nemesis came out, given how.. well, dark it was. A person killing themselves in the title sequence wasn't exactly your typical whimsical Zork world...
Ahh... good memories. :)
My favourite easter egg in Full Throttle was one that most people I talked to missed. It's possible to get another box of bunnies after having them set off the minefield, which you can hang onto until near the end of the game when you're hanging onto the out-of-control truck. If you open up the grille and expose the spinning radiator fan, and apply the box of bunnies to it, the Ride of the Valkyries music comes back on while you shred each bunny against the fan ;)
Agreed. I've never even been convinced of the need to pay the money for a smartwatch with a screen. Just the other day I picked up a replacement for my old Sony SWR10, for $12, which I lost when the band broke a couple years ago. All it can do is vibrate, use a motion sensor, and handle button presses. But that's all I need of it. It functions as a virtual tether to my phone so I can't lose it, it vibrates when my phone gives notifications or the alarm goes off even if I'm not nearby, etc.
I don't even care about the fitness / sleep tracking uses; I mainly just don't want to lose my phone. My last phone was run over by a bus several days ago after it fell out of my pocket while I was helping some people on the side of the road (they were in the bus lane next to a bus stop). Drove off, realized the phone was gone half an hour later, figured out where it was with Where's My Droid, drove back, and there it was, smashed to unusability. Had I still had my smartband then I would have noticed the instant I tried to drive off, if not sooner.
All questions of spyware aside... Huawei has some serious issues with honesty that they need to get past.
Gross margin is the portion of a balance sheet that by design scales linearly and (roughly immediately) with production volumes. And production volumes are (for the most part) the one thing that we, as outsiders, can actually observe as the quarter progresses, so it's the only thing that gives us insights into the Q3 balance sheet. I say "for the most part" because we can also observe hiring/layoffs and new facility construction, but you've already decided that money gets spent regardless of whether people are actually hired and facilities actually built , as if it just vanishes into a black hole "because" ;)
Capex is part of "cost of revenues", which is $3,4B, versus the $750M you obsess over in SG&A.
Production / delivery numbers come out in a week. Nothing to do with margins, SG&A, or anything else. Just production / delivery volumes. Your comment:
-... is hilarious, as you're adamantly convinced in your short positions and yet don't even know when key information about the company comes out.
I was talking about gross margins . "Margin" is on its own a nonspecific term, and can be gross, operating, pretax or net; you're trying to declare it to be a synonym with net margin, which it is not.
Now we revert back to our previous "where is the mythical doubling of personnel and facilities?" argument that you've refused to address above. I guess we'll find out about Tesla's secret new volcano lair after (snicker) "a week"? ;)
Link
Do you not even read the quarterly reports? Seriously, what's wrong with you? Literally the second line in the update letter... boldface in the original... "Model 3 gross margin turned slightly positive in Q2, expecting roughly 15% in Q3"
First you mistakenly thought that quarterly statements come out on the last day of the quarter, and now you show that you don't even know what's in them. Geez... I hope for your sake that it's not your own money that you're investing.
** personnel. Hate how after all this time you can't edit posts...
And you know I've called you many times on this. The fact that you refuse to read what I wrote doesn't change any of this. You keep trying to conflate the costs of scaling up for the construction and operation of a brand new model line with per-unit costs, which is an absurdity, contradicting all tenets of manufacturing. And I'll repeat: "I'm looking forward to hearing where Tesla has been secretly recruiting for all the jobs they haven't been posting on their website and where they've been storing these tens of thousands of people and new lines, given that no new line has been built at Fremont since Q2. That's going to be really exciting to find out, no? I'm voting for an underground volcano lair! ;)" Seriously, where exactly do you think this mythical spending is going? It's not hiring. It's not construction. So where, exactly? Why exactly is it that you never want to answer that question? Just to give specific examples:
Where's the linear increase in showrooms? Hint: there hasn't been one.
Where's the linear increase in sales people? Hint: there hasn't been one. Just the opposite, they killed off their solar direct sales.
Where's the linear increase in delivery fees? I guarantee you you'll find that the per-unit delivery costs (at least eventually when it's running smoothly) end up lower because they're being done in larger volume. Higher volume shipping is cheaper per unit.
Where's the linear increase in purchasing departments and supply chain administration? Just ignoring that it's absurd to think that it's required - as if the same person can't tack another zero on the end of an order - where's the hiring? Where's the extra office buildings? Nowhere, that's where.
You're calling for the doubling of Tesla's personel. Where are they?
Seriously, how ignorant are you that you don't know that quarterly filings don't come out until a month after the quarter ends?
That's not SG&A, that's "Services and Other". Services and Other cost Tesla a net $116M in Q2, vs. revenue of $4B, aka eating up less than 3% of their gross margin.
6 months is highly unusual. Of course, you can always find some body shop somewhere for any brand that has hundreds of thousands of vehicles on the road that takes an inordinate amount of time. That doesn't make that "normal". Want to make there be zero cases of abnormal crash repair times (for shorts to find out about and share widely every chance they get) when you don't control the body shops? Good luck with that.
S & X repairs from accidents are usually several weeks to a month. But these are much lower volume vehicles than the 3. In the Model 3 Owners Survey, the average repair took under a week. Speaking of Model 3 repairs...
Or to put it another way....
In all categories and all subcategories as well? No, that is not normal, even for luxury cars. Seriously, just compare the pole tests for starters.
Model 3s have been driven (calculations in a previous Slashdot article) about 300-400 million miles so far. In the US, there's a car fire once in every ~20 million miles. So far the shorts (who've been desperate to find any Model 3 fires they can find) have found evidence of one - count it, one - fire in a Model 3. And that was in a Model 3 at the factory (salvage yard: Fremont; miles on the odometer: 1), not an owner vehicle. And when you look at the damage, it's heaviest on the front bumper, least around the battery.
Meanwhile, new BMWs in South Korea have been catching fire at a rate of half a dozen vehicles per month. Not cars in accidents - most of them have been in parked cars. But of course, we don't report on things like that because, hey, they're not Tesla. Tesla is one of the few automakers which has not had to have fire-related recalls in the past several years. A number of major automakers have had to in the past several months. Gee, who would have ever thought that a combustion vehicle, propelled by combusting a highly flammable fuel, might sometimes have issues with unintended combustion?
but include the REQUIRED SG&A expenses
Totally. When Tesla runs a welding robot faster, that totally makes them build and fill a new office building!
SG&A is not part of gross margin for a reason: it does not rise in correlation with production volumes as a production line spools up. Increasing production rates on a line lowersCOGS, by decreasing hardware depreciation. Without refining of proction processes, labour costs increases linearly with volumes (labour being only a fraction of COGS), but refining production processes - something that happens every month as a new line matures - decreases labour. SG&A, by contrast, scales at a far-below-linear relationship to production volumes. Stamping out panels faster doesn't mean that you need to hire a new janitor. Simplifying how to attach two components with less labour doesn't mean you have to hire a new webmaster. Reducing interruptions in the paint shop doesn't mean you have to hire a new director of accounting. Heck, should we even bother talking about the SG&A expense that is operating the supercharger network - formerly a (expensive) loss leader, but presently converting to a profit centre as Model 3 volumes expand, and for which the vast majority ofchargers (aka those in less densely populated areas) are able to vastly increase their service volumes without any capital expenses?
I also love the fact that you never mention the fact that Tesla took a SG&A hit in Q2 in order to reduce its SG&A expenses from Q3 onward, but let's not worry our little heads about that!
Model 3 had a positive margin in Q2, and is expected to have a 15% margin this quarter - higher than the industry average.
Why yes, let's totally take R&D, SG&A, capex, etc on a line that last quarter was operating at a small fraction of its design volumes and pretend like they increase linearly with vehicle volume! Because that's totally a reasonable thing to do. Let's also ignore that last quarter they A) soaked restructuring expenses, which were a cost in Q2 but a benefit from Q3 onwards, B) deliberately held back over 10k cars to avoid tolling the 200k US tax credit limit, C) weren't yet selling the very-high margin AWD and P variants, which now make up the majority of their sales. Let's also totally ignore that the very short argument for why Tesla can't make money - "they have high scrap and rework rates" (typical of new lines; this decreases as lines mature) - actually argues precisely the opposite. Because if you're making positive margins, and then 15% margins with high scrap and rework rates, tell me, what does that mean for margins as production processes get refined over time? Scrap and rework are part of COGS Gross margins are (Revenue - COGS) / Revenue.
I know, you're in the group which has this notion that everything simply scales linearly with volume, on a line designed for far higher volumes, and all costs remain the same, no matter how much faster they run the lines (which has been seen dramatically over this quarter), no matter how much lower the scrap and rework rates, etc. And this linear spending is supposed to come out of thin air, too. Because Tesla spending over Q2 would mean that they've practically doubled their workforce and built half of a new factory, so I'm looking forward to hearing where Tesla has been secretly recruiting for all the jobs they haven't been posting on their website and where they've been storing these tens of thousands of people and new lines, given that no new line has been built at Fremont since Q2. That's going to be really exciting to find out, no? I'm voting for an underground volcano lair! ;)
You're in for a rude awakening first with the Q3 report, and then especially the Q4 report.
The hardware is not all the same, however. They have different aperture sizes (light-gathering ability), different sensor sizes (detail), different focal lengths, etc. The XZ2 Premium also has something that AFAIK is unique among cell phones, in that they have a second camera which is a dedicated greyscale (aka low-light optimized) camera, which provides extra intensity data to the colour camera when shooting in low-light conditions. So not only do you have the combined aperture and sensor area, but a large chunk of that sensor area does not suffer from the losses and blurring effects of colour filters.
Yes. But the approach by the XZ2 Premium is brand new. And as far as I am aware is not shared by any smartphone by any brand on the market today.
To reiterate: XZ2 pairs a second, greyscale camera specifically optimized for low-light with its colour camera, so that the latter provides colour data while the former dramatically augments the intensity data. Greyscale cameras are more sensitive in low-light conditions than colour cameras.
Comparing a phone without such a correlated greyscale camera to one with such a camera is comparing apples and oranges.
Even the "car-free zone" isn't actually completely car-free. E.g.:
They haven't talked about stocking shops, but if they're carving out exceptions like that, then I imagine vehicles for stocking shops also get exceptions.
There's also the obvious implications of the scheme:
Because, of course, people drive to it, then walk around in it, then drive home.