You're confused. The "pulling people off shifts" was first off due to planned S/X downtime, but more importantly, that was not this quarter. That was at the end of last quarter, and to achieve 2020 vehicles per week, not 3500. And more to the point, they not only maintained that rate for several weeks after the other lines went back up (all the way up until the Model 3 lines' next scheduled downtime), but increased it.
The exact quote is: "Despite our production difficulties, all parts of the Model 3 production system have demonstrated a 500 car per day capability, or, a 3500 car per week capability, and we just did a big set of upgrades and are spooling up the production lines again. I think it's quite likely that we will achieve a 5000 cars a week by the end of the month."
This was with 2 GA lines (the biggest bottleneck). They just built a third.
I don't think there's any malice in the Bloomberg tracker. I think it's just hindered by too long of an averaging period on their algorithm. It averages in planned line downtimes in with line production rates, which you don't want.
I think it's important to assess the social consequences of any given policy. For example, a major sporting effect (where some people drink heavily) can often cause high surge pricing. As has been shown time and time again, the higher the price of alternative modes of transportation, the more likely intoxicated people are to drive.
If surge pricing isn't really turning out "new" supply - if it's just that the existing supply goes idle in off-peak times - then is it actually a good thing to have the price fluctuate dramatically, or would it not be better to level it out?
Puerto Rico lost a lot of generating power, but they lost even more distribution capacity. Much of their power was left in excess but stranded. The power is also in poor condition in terms of voltage, frequency regulation, and general reliability.
Except that it doesn't. Most of our primary energy, and a large minority of our electricity, come from geothermal power. In one of our wells they actually drilled down straight into a magma chamber. It's one of the best wells in the country. And every bit of heat they take out is solidifying magma. It doesn't stop the plates from spreading, of course, it just shifts the pressure/heat balance that determines whether some arbitrary point is in a liquid or solid state.
Really, what we do is of such insignificant scale to a volcano it's not even funny. Our last eruption of Bárðarbunga erupted around a cubic kilometer of lava. Not a cubic kilometer of lightweight ash, but heavy basalt. At around 3g/cc, that's around 3e12kg. This came out of the ground at over 1150C (very hot eruption). At 840 J/kg-K, and say 880 degrees temperature difference that's 2,2176e18J, or 616 terawatt hours (not accounting for the enthalpy of crystalization or the higher specific heat at higher temperatures... we're really talking in the lower thousands of TWh). And we're just talking about the part of the eruption experience on the surface, not the far larger part experienced underground. Which in turn only represented a small percentage of the magma in the magma chamber. Of just this one volcano. By comparison, Iceland's total annual electricity consumption is 16,8 GWh.
Teslas have driven over 7,2 billion miles. Given how by far most of that has been accumulated since the addition of AP hardware (in October 2016 they were only at 3,5B), and from the Q1 conference call we know that over 1/3 of Tesla miles are on AP, we can extrapolate to maybe around 2 billion miles (give or take large margins of error, and yes, that's the best we can do for now until the first AP statistics report comes out). At the normal US vehicle fatality rate of 1 per 86 million miles driven, 23 people should have died on AP (were Teslas only of average-safety, which they're not).
Adjust up or down by your personal assumptions. We should have actual data to work with in a month or two.
He announced in the last conference call that they're going to be releasing quarterly Autopilot crash statistics reports. The next quarter ends at the end of June, so you can expect the first one at some point after 30 June.
That's not the gross margin. Gross margin is just (revenue - COGS) / revenue. If you're including R&D, SG&A, etc, you're thinking of the profit margin, which is around 4%.
(ED: turns out the gross margin is was a bit higher than I remembered, 14,76% last quarter. But still nothing spectacular)
Indeed, both shorts and longs are expecting this. And Tesla making a huge push on Canada supports this notion (since Canadian deliveries don't count toward the US credit).
I'm sure congress knew when they designed the credit that manufacturers would try to "time" it to maximize their benefit.
Giga is designed to produce packs for 500k TM3 vehicles per year (Fremont is capable of ~400k, with ~100k of those being S/X, Tesla hasn't disclosed where they want to complete the other ~200k TM3, whether via local expansion or elsewhere). The average TM3 sale price is expected to be $45k. Even with only a 25% margin, that's $5,6 billion gross profit per year. Now of course, that's not money you can just take to the bank - you have R&D, SG&A, etc to pay for. But it's a lot of money.
If by "rest of the costs" you mean R&D and SG&A, yes, but "no duh" to that.;) (Also worth noting: they were tearing down a Model 3 LR with PUP, not a base model)
Ford's average vehicle margin is 10%. Now, Tesla's structure means they need a higher margin (as they own all of their own stores and service centres), but "greater than 20%" is more than a healthy margin. And that's with no options (which are overwhelmingly profit).
There's nothing at all "misleading" about starting a production-limited vehicle with the more premium versions and working down from there as production ramps up. Lots of manufacturers do this. Jaguar won't be offering their base i-Pace for a year after the heavily-optioned-out version is on sale.
It's only where you're demand limited that you have to get the cheapest versions out immediately.
As for the demand for the base battery, according to polls on the Tesla forums, only about a third of reservation holders want it. And there's no confusion about the tax credit; the fact that Tesla would be running up against the start of the phaseout (which is a long process) has been widely known and discussed from the beginning.
If you define "the military objectives of my side are good, and those of their side are evil", then you can justify almost anything that helps you win.
Clearly, using algorithms to pre-sort images, while useful in its own right, is just the start. The obvious followup is having drones designed such that if they're jammed, they can still attempt to carry out their mission as best as they can on their own (thus reducing or eliminating the military effectiveness of jamming as an anti-drone weapon; Russia has gotten very good at such electronic warfare).
Who's talking about an article? You were replying to a comment. If you meant only to talk about the article, it shouldn't have been a reply to me. Don't get mad at me for interpreting your reply to me as a reply to me. The comment you replied to was:
"Should we bother mentioning also that in the past Tesla has also increased acceleration and range over the air, too?;)"
Your response argued that this was due to needless artificial limits, which was not true. I corrected the issue.
The Irma case was something entirely else, and only temporary. That was just a goodwill gesture. I'm not talking about pack unlocking (which only applied to people with a relatively rare situation; it's not normal for Tesla to make locked packs, they only did it the one time while transitioning between configurations). I'm talking about performance and efficiency improvements through improving the control software.
If you don't understand the reason for the improvements then yes you'll write things that reflect your lack of understanding.
* The biggest range improvement had nothing to do with unlocking more battery. It was the creation of "torque sleep". Tesla realized that, with the differently geared front and rear motors, which always left one motor running in a more efficient power band than the other, that you could "sleep" the less efficient motor, only instantly waking it when alerted by traction control or when the user requests more power.
* The motor power limits were there for a good reason, and a reason that would affect any manufacturer: early in a motor's history, you don't know how it will wear in the long-term in the real world. With most automakers, once you have that data, if the motors are not suffering much wear, you update the performance in your newer models by removing limits - but the owners of old models are SOL. With Tesla, the updates went out to everyone, not just people buying new models.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm sorry, you're going to have to speak up, we can't hear you over all of the laughter.
Meanwhile, Model 3's handling has been almost universally praised by reviewers, but don't bother your head about that.
Since when do I submit news anonymously?
Anyway, if anyone here is short TSLA and is trying to understand what the market is thinking, this summary explains everything.
You're confused. The "pulling people off shifts" was first off due to planned S/X downtime, but more importantly, that was not this quarter. That was at the end of last quarter, and to achieve 2020 vehicles per week, not 3500. And more to the point, they not only maintained that rate for several weeks after the other lines went back up (all the way up until the Model 3 lines' next scheduled downtime), but increased it.
The exact quote is: "Despite our production difficulties, all parts of the Model 3 production system have demonstrated a 500 car per day capability, or, a 3500 car per week capability, and we just did a big set of upgrades and are spooling up the production lines again. I think it's quite likely that we will achieve a 5000 cars a week by the end of the month."
This was with 2 GA lines (the biggest bottleneck). They just built a third.
I don't think there's any malice in the Bloomberg tracker. I think it's just hindered by too long of an averaging period on their algorithm. It averages in planned line downtimes in with line production rates, which you don't want.
The bottom end prices will inherently rise if you limit the top-end prices. You don't have to mandate it.
I think it's important to assess the social consequences of any given policy. For example, a major sporting effect (where some people drink heavily) can often cause high surge pricing. As has been shown time and time again, the higher the price of alternative modes of transportation, the more likely intoxicated people are to drive.
If surge pricing isn't really turning out "new" supply - if it's just that the existing supply goes idle in off-peak times - then is it actually a good thing to have the price fluctuate dramatically, or would it not be better to level it out?
Ed: should read "Q3". It's Q2 right now :)
Puerto Rico lost a lot of generating power, but they lost even more distribution capacity. Much of their power was left in excess but stranded. The power is also in poor condition in terms of voltage, frequency regulation, and general reliability.
That said, Tesla also does solar.
Except that it doesn't. Most of our primary energy, and a large minority of our electricity, come from geothermal power. In one of our wells they actually drilled down straight into a magma chamber. It's one of the best wells in the country. And every bit of heat they take out is solidifying magma. It doesn't stop the plates from spreading, of course, it just shifts the pressure/heat balance that determines whether some arbitrary point is in a liquid or solid state.
Really, what we do is of such insignificant scale to a volcano it's not even funny. Our last eruption of Bárðarbunga erupted around a cubic kilometer of lava. Not a cubic kilometer of lightweight ash, but heavy basalt. At around 3g/cc, that's around 3e12kg. This came out of the ground at over 1150C (very hot eruption). At 840 J/kg-K, and say 880 degrees temperature difference that's 2,2176e18J, or 616 terawatt hours (not accounting for the enthalpy of crystalization or the higher specific heat at higher temperatures... we're really talking in the lower thousands of TWh). And we're just talking about the part of the eruption experience on the surface, not the far larger part experienced underground. Which in turn only represented a small percentage of the magma in the magma chamber. Of just this one volcano. By comparison, Iceland's total annual electricity consumption is 16,8 GWh.
Kilauea is helping reduce Hawaii's carbon footprint. Human-related energy consumption has drastically declined in Leilani, Kapoho, Vacationland...
The first quarterly report on Autopilot safety is due out some time in early Q2.
Teslas have driven over 7,2 billion miles. Given how by far most of that has been accumulated since the addition of AP hardware (in October 2016 they were only at 3,5B), and from the Q1 conference call we know that over 1/3 of Tesla miles are on AP, we can extrapolate to maybe around 2 billion miles (give or take large margins of error, and yes, that's the best we can do for now until the first AP statistics report comes out). At the normal US vehicle fatality rate of 1 per 86 million miles driven, 23 people should have died on AP (were Teslas only of average-safety, which they're not).
Adjust up or down by your personal assumptions. We should have actual data to work with in a month or two.
He announced in the last conference call that they're going to be releasing quarterly Autopilot crash statistics reports. The next quarter ends at the end of June, so you can expect the first one at some point after 30 June.
That's not the gross margin. Gross margin is just (revenue - COGS) / revenue. If you're including R&D, SG&A, etc, you're thinking of the profit margin, which is around 4%.
(ED: turns out the gross margin is was a bit higher than I remembered, 14,76% last quarter. But still nothing spectacular)
No, more like $200/kWh.
Indeed, both shorts and longs are expecting this. And Tesla making a huge push on Canada supports this notion (since Canadian deliveries don't count toward the US credit).
I'm sure congress knew when they designed the credit that manufacturers would try to "time" it to maximize their benefit.
"Well under" $2k, if I recall the wording correctly.
Also, the above $10k in the German study is total production costs, not just labour. That includes depreciation.
Giga is designed to produce packs for 500k TM3 vehicles per year (Fremont is capable of ~400k, with ~100k of those being S/X, Tesla hasn't disclosed where they want to complete the other ~200k TM3, whether via local expansion or elsewhere). The average TM3 sale price is expected to be $45k. Even with only a 25% margin, that's $5,6 billion gross profit per year. Now of course, that's not money you can just take to the bank - you have R&D, SG&A, etc to pay for. But it's a lot of money.
The $10k is not "labour", it's "production costs", which includes tooling depreciation.
And FYI, but a normal automotive margin is around 10%.
If by "rest of the costs" you mean R&D and SG&A, yes, but "no duh" to that. ;) (Also worth noting: they were tearing down a Model 3 LR with PUP, not a base model)
Ford's average vehicle margin is 10%. Now, Tesla's structure means they need a higher margin (as they own all of their own stores and service centres), but "greater than 20%" is more than a healthy margin. And that's with no options (which are overwhelmingly profit).
There's nothing at all "misleading" about starting a production-limited vehicle with the more premium versions and working down from there as production ramps up. Lots of manufacturers do this. Jaguar won't be offering their base i-Pace for a year after the heavily-optioned-out version is on sale.
It's only where you're demand limited that you have to get the cheapest versions out immediately.
As for the demand for the base battery, according to polls on the Tesla forums, only about a third of reservation holders want it. And there's no confusion about the tax credit; the fact that Tesla would be running up against the start of the phaseout (which is a long process) has been widely known and discussed from the beginning.
If you define "the military objectives of my side are good, and those of their side are evil", then you can justify almost anything that helps you win.
Clearly, using algorithms to pre-sort images, while useful in its own right, is just the start. The obvious followup is having drones designed such that if they're jammed, they can still attempt to carry out their mission as best as they can on their own (thus reducing or eliminating the military effectiveness of jamming as an anti-drone weapon; Russia has gotten very good at such electronic warfare).
Who's talking about an article? You were replying to a comment. If you meant only to talk about the article, it shouldn't have been a reply to me. Don't get mad at me for interpreting your reply to me as a reply to me. The comment you replied to was:
"Should we bother mentioning also that in the past Tesla has also increased acceleration and range over the air, too? ;)"
Your response argued that this was due to needless artificial limits, which was not true. I corrected the issue.
The Irma case was something entirely else, and only temporary. That was just a goodwill gesture. I'm not talking about pack unlocking (which only applied to people with a relatively rare situation; it's not normal for Tesla to make locked packs, they only did it the one time while transitioning between configurations). I'm talking about performance and efficiency improvements through improving the control software.
If you don't understand the reason for the improvements then yes you'll write things that reflect your lack of understanding.
* The biggest range improvement had nothing to do with unlocking more battery. It was the creation of "torque sleep". Tesla realized that, with the differently geared front and rear motors, which always left one motor running in a more efficient power band than the other, that you could "sleep" the less efficient motor, only instantly waking it when alerted by traction control or when the user requests more power.
* The motor power limits were there for a good reason, and a reason that would affect any manufacturer: early in a motor's history, you don't know how it will wear in the long-term in the real world. With most automakers, once you have that data, if the motors are not suffering much wear, you update the performance in your newer models by removing limits - but the owners of old models are SOL. With Tesla, the updates went out to everyone, not just people buying new models.