More to the point, if the "SpaceX options package" materializes, the thing should be capable of things like accelerating at high speeds straight sideways from a standing start. No other vehicle could even remotely hope to compete on maneuverability with a car that has an honest-to-god RCS on it. It's like stepping up to a fight, and on one side the person is armed with a knife, and on the other side it's an Abrams tank.
Without that, though, the Roadster will indeed suffer from being heavier than its competitors (although will have the advantage over 2WD competitors by virtue of being AWD). Its trick will be speed and especially acceleration***. That said, it's important to point out that the Model 3 is not at all a heavy car relatively to its size and performance class. Which probably contributes to why its handling has been getting such rave reviews. Even the famously Tesla-hostile Randy Munroe said that its suspension designer could be a Formula 1 prince.
*** Well.... it does have one other trick up its sleeve: torque vectoring. It has three motors; it can spin each of its rear wheels not just independently, but even in opposite directions. The car could even pirouette in place. That doesn't replace the impact of weight on maneuverability, but will offer a new set of maneuverability advantages at the same time. It'll be interesting to see which aspect wins out on a windy track.
It's the standard nonsense people post on Slashdot every time Tesla comes up. They ignore that Tesla was earning ~25% margins before the Model 3 production started, and even with the current scaleup is still getting a net margin of ~19%. They're simply comparing net profit and ignoring all of the capex's contribution to that.
It's just embarrassing how someone can think that they're doing a "financial analysis" where they compare current sales as cash inflows vs. current expenses designed to produce vastly larger volumes of sales that they're not yet getting the revenue from, and say, "AHA, it's negative!" Well no-freaking-duh, Sherlock. But that's not how you do a financial analysis; you're supposed to estimate at a minimum how much the company would be earning at a steady state, not during a rampup, and ideally where future growth and market trends will take the company, while factoring in risk. And reasonable people can strongly differ about all aspects of the latter. But anyone who doesn't even get as far as considering the companies that they invest in from a steady state perspective.... well, I'll put it this way, I hope you're not making your own investment decisions.
Those recordings are over a week old. You can tell by counting the number of windows and panels visible on the buildings that they're from earlier in the construction. The building wasn't even fully built yet.
Contrary to your article's assertion, Tesla has never had a goal to build 5000 cars per week every week in June. The goal is to get the line capacity up to 5000 cars per week by the end of June. They'll want to ideally have one week at that rate by that point, but at least 1-3 days to show that it can be sustained. Of course, the shorts will just insist on pretending that it's a burst rate, just like they did last time (and were wrong).
More to the point, Tesla has a very strong disincentive not to make too many cars this month, as they don't want to hit delivery #200k and start expiring the US tax credit until Q3. They certainly can stockpile, but cars take up a huge amount of space (5000 cars packed closely together takes up an amount of space about a third of a kilometer by a third of a kilometer), and the longer you stockpile something outdoors, the greater the risk of damage.
This explains the strange gaps you experience in Teslas, trim not fiting right, strange squeeks and rattles, etc.
Meanwhile, if you actually hung out on Tesla forums and watched people take delivery and write about their cars, you'd know that this is a myth. Yes, as with any brand, the occasional vehicle has problems, and needs to be corrected by a service centre. But it's not at all like the shorts portray, in their endless glee sharing every last case that they can get their hands on.
Tesla has always had the highest consumer satisfaction rate in the auto industry. Back in the Roadster days when they were selling hundreds of vehicles, you all said, "Well, that's only because you have hardcore early adopters - once you get more mainstream, people will stop putting up with it and will hate Tesla!". Then Tesla started selling thousands of vehicles with the early Model Ss. And you all said the same thing. Then they were selling tens of thousands of vehicles. Then a hundred thousand per year. And are now moving into the hundreds of thousands per year. At what point is your "people are going to start hating Tesla" hypothesis going to come true? Did you ever stop and think that the reason people tend to rate them well is that they actually really like the cars after having owned them?
Huh, that part never occurred to me. That's ingenious.
Since these buildings are standardized and designed for assembly and disassembly, with stockpiled components for them, you don't even have to use the same building. Just wait until your new building is ready then disassemble the old one.
Just have to make sure that the line is easy to take down and set back up. Wonder if the sizes of components on their next line will be based on what fits into a shipping container?;)
Musk said he automated too much. What does that mean? Who knows.
Um, everyone who listens to the conference calls and the investor meeting knows? Just because you don't know something doesn't mean that nobody does:)
You want an example? Flufferbot. There's a loose fluff used in the battery packs, and they made a robot to place it. Now, if you're trying to come up with something that would be difficult for computer vision systems to process, and for robotic arms to handle, you couldn't do much better than "fluff". The robot spent most of its time finding new and creative ways to fail to pick up the fluff, as well as to put it in inventive new locations. So you had these expensive robotics technicians both bailing it out of its mistakes and trying to adjust its programming to prevent them, on and on for months on end. When you could just have simply paid people to place the fluff.
Congratulations, you're the thousandth immature male to make that joke:P
Concerning the article, some of this is head-smackingly stupid. E.g.:
Dave Sullivan, an analyst with Auto Pacific, told Ars that he wondered what was wrong with Tesla's existing facilities
*facepalm*
There Is No More Space At Fremont. Something that has been discussed endlessly in the conference calls and at the investor meeting. Tesla applied for a permit long ago to build a new building, but it's still in progress, and meanwhile, they've been filling up Fremont at a rapid clip as they expand Model 3 production alongside the existing S and X lines. They could build a new line in a temporary building, get it up and debugged and running and turning out vehicles, or they could sit around waiting for months (or more) for a new building. Gee, I can't imagine what's the right choice here, hmm...
The current building (still being improved, but with the line in place inside) is permitted for six months, but given that they've been liking it, it may become permanent.
Examples? It took GM 15 months from start of fitting out the line to the first Bolt deliveries. On an existing line with an existing trained workforce.
The problem with the Bloomberg tracker is that it averages in line downtimes for upgrades, so you get "several thousand a week" averaged in with "0 a week".
, and companies like VAG routinely go from Kuka/Comau/Kawasaki/Fanuc arriving on the floor to full mass production at design rate in a matter of months
18650 is a common format. There might be a market for, for example, laptop batteries and other medium-sized consumer electronics. Still, that's a pretty large volume of 18650s.
I imagine Tesla won't invest the capital in switching until they feel they can't actually sell 100k/year S+X. The Model Y platform (aka, a stretched 3 platform with updates) should make a nice platform for both an updated S and X. The larger battery vs. the 3 should allow for some very impressive ranges and power outputs. In the meantime, they're already migrating individual tech elements from the 3 to the S and X. For example, it was recently announced that S and X are getting the 3's new climate control system.
Oh wow... just this second it hit me... a major update they could do is swapping out the rear motors on the S and X for the new PM motors. They'd get an instant ~10% improvement at range. The S 100D should be 370-ish miles of range with the new PM motor. And it'd improve sustained track performance. They'd obviously stick with induction on the front motor.
3500 M3 steady state. Went down at the end of last month for upgrades to bring them up to 5k by the end of the month, and are in the process of ramping back up. Was surprised to find out BTW that their pack production numbers from giga are *without* the Grohmann line - they're just now spooling it up. That's going to make a massive difference for them.
And yes, S+X is 100k per year. By design - they only can get enough 18650s from Panasonic for ~100k per year, and neither Tesla nor Panasonic want to sink more capital into building more of their old cell format, for obvious reasons.
How many times do I have to point out that I don't post anonymously? If I have something to say, you'll hear it from me. Instead, every post on the internet these days that supports Tesla seems to get attributed to me. News flash: I'm not the only person on the planet who supports them.
And there's a logic hole in the GP's post, in that there's a world outside of America. Tesla is a global company; only a fraction of the vehicles they make are sold in the US. That doesn't detract from their general argument, mind you.
This is a perfectly normal looking company email from Musk. One can argue that he writes them knowing that they'll leak, but there's nothing about the style in this one that's different from any of the numerous others over the years. They're generally a mix of "here's the problems/issues we currently need to address ASAP" and a pep talk.
it's just damage control explanation to why they weren't even making enough of them before the fire..
FYI, production scaleup has been going really well these past several months, hitting 2k/wk sustained early in the quarter, 3,5k sustained in the middle of the quarter, and well en route to 5k/wk by the end of the quarter.
somehow VAG isn't having these problems? also their megafactories have been more advanced than teslas for like 18 years.
I must have missed where VAG built a factory capable of producing 5k EVs per week in 15 months from the start of tooling, on a brand new line with a newly hired workforce. Literally, the first 467 Kuka robots arrived, were placed, and workers were hired, in April-June 2017.
Teslas "problems" are that they set absurdly aggressive schedules for themselves.
At risk of getting more off-topic, on my TODO list someday is to create a new apple/crabapple crossbreed and name the resultant hybrid "maleficarum", so that the proper name for it would be "Malus x maleficarum".
Pyrus pyrifolia? Most people call them Korean Pears. Yes, they have a shape and texture more like an apple, but... Pyrus, not Malus. And the taste is more pearlike.
If by "own money" you're referring to Icesave, we won in the EFTA court on all counts. The primary insurer was a private (non-government-backed fund). The secondary insurer was the British/Dutch governments. This info was readily available just one click away from the info page on the Icesave site, and neither the British nor Dutch governments had any complaint with that arrangement at the time - nor was it (as per the EFTA) against European banking regulations. The British and Dutch however thought they could bully our much smaller government into paying their legally binding banking obligations for them when the private fund went under. And nearly succeeded at doing so.
The case you linked concerning the Kaupthing bankers is entirely unrelated to Icesave, and thus any "your own money" wording. That was concerning the al-Thani case, where they worked out an arrangement with Sheikh al-Thani to make it look like he was investing in a financial product that they knew was worthless, in order to get other people to buy into the product - but it was set up so that al-Thani woudl still profit even when it inevitably went broke. They went to jail for that,and rightly so.
Slashdot Mirror
More to the point, if the "SpaceX options package" materializes, the thing should be capable of things like accelerating at high speeds straight sideways from a standing start. No other vehicle could even remotely hope to compete on maneuverability with a car that has an honest-to-god RCS on it. It's like stepping up to a fight, and on one side the person is armed with a knife, and on the other side it's an Abrams tank.
Without that, though, the Roadster will indeed suffer from being heavier than its competitors (although will have the advantage over 2WD competitors by virtue of being AWD). Its trick will be speed and especially acceleration***. That said, it's important to point out that the Model 3 is not at all a heavy car relatively to its size and performance class. Which probably contributes to why its handling has been getting such rave reviews. Even the famously Tesla-hostile Randy Munroe said that its suspension designer could be a Formula 1 prince.
*** Well.... it does have one other trick up its sleeve: torque vectoring. It has three motors; it can spin each of its rear wheels not just independently, but even in opposite directions. The car could even pirouette in place. That doesn't replace the impact of weight on maneuverability, but will offer a new set of maneuverability advantages at the same time. It'll be interesting to see which aspect wins out on a windy track.
It's the standard nonsense people post on Slashdot every time Tesla comes up. They ignore that Tesla was earning ~25% margins before the Model 3 production started, and even with the current scaleup is still getting a net margin of ~19%. They're simply comparing net profit and ignoring all of the capex's contribution to that.
It's just embarrassing how someone can think that they're doing a "financial analysis" where they compare current sales as cash inflows vs. current expenses designed to produce vastly larger volumes of sales that they're not yet getting the revenue from, and say, "AHA, it's negative!" Well no-freaking-duh, Sherlock. But that's not how you do a financial analysis; you're supposed to estimate at a minimum how much the company would be earning at a steady state, not during a rampup, and ideally where future growth and market trends will take the company, while factoring in risk. And reasonable people can strongly differ about all aspects of the latter. But anyone who doesn't even get as far as considering the companies that they invest in from a steady state perspective.... well, I'll put it this way, I hope you're not making your own investment decisions.
Those recordings are over a week old. You can tell by counting the number of windows and panels visible on the buildings that they're from earlier in the construction. The building wasn't even fully built yet.
Contrary to your article's assertion, Tesla has never had a goal to build 5000 cars per week every week in June. The goal is to get the line capacity up to 5000 cars per week by the end of June. They'll want to ideally have one week at that rate by that point, but at least 1-3 days to show that it can be sustained. Of course, the shorts will just insist on pretending that it's a burst rate, just like they did last time (and were wrong).
More to the point, Tesla has a very strong disincentive not to make too many cars this month, as they don't want to hit delivery #200k and start expiring the US tax credit until Q3. They certainly can stockpile, but cars take up a huge amount of space (5000 cars packed closely together takes up an amount of space about a third of a kilometer by a third of a kilometer), and the longer you stockpile something outdoors, the greater the risk of damage.
Meanwhile, if you actually hung out on Tesla forums and watched people take delivery and write about their cars, you'd know that this is a myth. Yes, as with any brand, the occasional vehicle has problems, and needs to be corrected by a service centre. But it's not at all like the shorts portray, in their endless glee sharing every last case that they can get their hands on.
Tesla has always had the highest consumer satisfaction rate in the auto industry. Back in the Roadster days when they were selling hundreds of vehicles, you all said, "Well, that's only because you have hardcore early adopters - once you get more mainstream, people will stop putting up with it and will hate Tesla!". Then Tesla started selling thousands of vehicles with the early Model Ss. And you all said the same thing. Then they were selling tens of thousands of vehicles. Then a hundred thousand per year. And are now moving into the hundreds of thousands per year. At what point is your "people are going to start hating Tesla" hypothesis going to come true? Did you ever stop and think that the reason people tend to rate them well is that they actually really like the cars after having owned them?
Huh, that part never occurred to me. That's ingenious.
Since these buildings are standardized and designed for assembly and disassembly, with stockpiled components for them, you don't even have to use the same building. Just wait until your new building is ready then disassemble the old one.
Just have to make sure that the line is easy to take down and set back up. Wonder if the sizes of components on their next line will be based on what fits into a shipping container? ;)
Um, everyone who listens to the conference calls and the investor meeting knows? Just because you don't know something doesn't mean that nobody does :)
You want an example? Flufferbot. There's a loose fluff used in the battery packs, and they made a robot to place it. Now, if you're trying to come up with something that would be difficult for computer vision systems to process, and for robotic arms to handle, you couldn't do much better than "fluff". The robot spent most of its time finding new and creative ways to fail to pick up the fluff, as well as to put it in inventive new locations. So you had these expensive robotics technicians both bailing it out of its mistakes and trying to adjust its programming to prevent them, on and on for months on end. When you could just have simply paid people to place the fluff.
Flufferbot is gone, by the way ;)
I just like arches ;) I'm a big fan of structures in compression, not so much of structures in tension.
Congratulations, you're the thousandth immature male to make that joke :P
Concerning the article, some of this is head-smackingly stupid. E.g.:
*facepalm*
There Is No More Space At Fremont. Something that has been discussed endlessly in the conference calls and at the investor meeting. Tesla applied for a permit long ago to build a new building, but it's still in progress, and meanwhile, they've been filling up Fremont at a rapid clip as they expand Model 3 production alongside the existing S and X lines. They could build a new line in a temporary building, get it up and debugged and running and turning out vehicles, or they could sit around waiting for months (or more) for a new building. Gee, I can't imagine what's the right choice here, hmm...
The current building (still being improved, but with the line in place inside) is permitted for six months, but given that they've been liking it, it may become permanent.
Examples? It took GM 15 months from start of fitting out the line to the first Bolt deliveries. On an existing line with an existing trained workforce.
The problem with the Bloomberg tracker is that it averages in line downtimes for upgrades, so you get "several thousand a week" averaged in with "0 a week".
"You do realize...." (inserts something that's in flat contradiction with all of Tesla's quarterly statements)
Examples?
18650 is a common format. There might be a market for, for example, laptop batteries and other medium-sized consumer electronics. Still, that's a pretty large volume of 18650s.
I imagine Tesla won't invest the capital in switching until they feel they can't actually sell 100k/year S+X. The Model Y platform (aka, a stretched 3 platform with updates) should make a nice platform for both an updated S and X. The larger battery vs. the 3 should allow for some very impressive ranges and power outputs. In the meantime, they're already migrating individual tech elements from the 3 to the S and X. For example, it was recently announced that S and X are getting the 3's new climate control system.
Oh wow... just this second it hit me... a major update they could do is swapping out the rear motors on the S and X for the new PM motors. They'd get an instant ~10% improvement at range. The S 100D should be 370-ish miles of range with the new PM motor. And it'd improve sustained track performance. They'd obviously stick with induction on the front motor.
No kidding. It was on the front page of Slashdot like once a week for many months on end.
It's in their interest to spook others who may be thinking of pulling the same stunt. And to make an example of this person by seeking a conviction.
3500 M3 steady state. Went down at the end of last month for upgrades to bring them up to 5k by the end of the month, and are in the process of ramping back up. Was surprised to find out BTW that their pack production numbers from giga are *without* the Grohmann line - they're just now spooling it up. That's going to make a massive difference for them.
And yes, S+X is 100k per year. By design - they only can get enough 18650s from Panasonic for ~100k per year, and neither Tesla nor Panasonic want to sink more capital into building more of their old cell format, for obvious reasons.
How many times do I have to point out that I don't post anonymously? If I have something to say, you'll hear it from me. Instead, every post on the internet these days that supports Tesla seems to get attributed to me. News flash: I'm not the only person on the planet who supports them.
And there's a logic hole in the GP's post, in that there's a world outside of America. Tesla is a global company; only a fraction of the vehicles they make are sold in the US. That doesn't detract from their general argument, mind you.
This is a perfectly normal looking company email from Musk. One can argue that he writes them knowing that they'll leak, but there's nothing about the style in this one that's different from any of the numerous others over the years. They're generally a mix of "here's the problems/issues we currently need to address ASAP" and a pep talk.
FYI, production scaleup has been going really well these past several months, hitting 2k/wk sustained early in the quarter, 3,5k sustained in the middle of the quarter, and well en route to 5k/wk by the end of the quarter.
I must have missed where VAG built a factory capable of producing 5k EVs per week in 15 months from the start of tooling, on a brand new line with a newly hired workforce. Literally, the first 467 Kuka robots arrived, were placed, and workers were hired, in April-June 2017.
Teslas "problems" are that they set absurdly aggressive schedules for themselves.
At risk of getting more off-topic, on my TODO list someday is to create a new apple/crabapple crossbreed and name the resultant hybrid "maleficarum", so that the proper name for it would be "Malus x maleficarum".
Pyrus pyrifolia? Most people call them Korean Pears. Yes, they have a shape and texture more like an apple, but... Pyrus, not Malus. And the taste is more pearlike.
"40 minutes" is greater than "12 minutes".
The bid had a requirement that any proposal has to be cheaper for passengers than a taxi, Uber or Lyft.
It doesn't. The Chicago Loop is designed to take 12 minutes.
If by "own money" you're referring to Icesave, we won in the EFTA court on all counts. The primary insurer was a private (non-government-backed fund). The secondary insurer was the British/Dutch governments. This info was readily available just one click away from the info page on the Icesave site, and neither the British nor Dutch governments had any complaint with that arrangement at the time - nor was it (as per the EFTA) against European banking regulations. The British and Dutch however thought they could bully our much smaller government into paying their legally binding banking obligations for them when the private fund went under. And nearly succeeded at doing so.
The case you linked concerning the Kaupthing bankers is entirely unrelated to Icesave, and thus any "your own money" wording. That was concerning the al-Thani case, where they worked out an arrangement with Sheikh al-Thani to make it look like he was investing in a financial product that they knew was worthless, in order to get other people to buy into the product - but it was set up so that al-Thani woudl still profit even when it inevitably went broke. They went to jail for that,and rightly so.