Nobody else can compete with them yet, although they all talk up a storm about what they're gonna do real soon now.
Here's a great example of what happens when supposed "Tesla-killer" meets reality. Or take the Kona electric. Funny how a "$30k-ish 290-mile crossover" turns out to be in actuality a "hypothetically 150-mile $31k** vehicle the same size as a Bolt or Leaf that does 0-60 in 9,3 seconds", and if you want to get Bolt-style range and not as horrible acceleration (0-60 in 7,6s) you have to add on some as-of-yet price-undisclosed upgrade package. And of course, this totally-serious-vehicle meant for totally-serious-competition is only planned for production in volumes of 30k per year and only to be sold in the US in ZEV states.
** - They dropped the nonsensical 290 mile claim for the "extended" pack Kona and are now saying that they "estimate" it will get around 250 miles EPA rating. But since they've been playing fast and loose with the numbers so far, I wouldn't be surprised to see some fudge factor there too. It's worth noting what EPA combined ratings mean for real-world highway ranges - Bolt, for example, has a combined rating of 238 miles, but only goes about 190 miles at a steady 75mph - and it's more streamlined than the Kona. As for the $31k figure, that's presuming that the EU price that they announced already included VAT, and that there's no premium charged in the US. Otherwise, increase that base price.
I-Pace also plays the same "Crossover" game that the Kona does, although at least not as badly. They like to pretend that it's a Model X competitor, when in reality it's far smaller - not even as long as a Model 3, let alone an S, let alone an X. Beyond everything in the above link, they've cranked up the dishonesty to 11 in their advertising, such as their "drag race" against a Model X 75D (a much larger, heavier vehicle than the I-Pace), where they then start talking swapping it out for the Model X P100D, but instead switch the driver to a 100D (no P) and hope that nobody will notice.
And of course, for all of them... no supercharging. Aka, no road trips - at least unless you like hanging out at charging stations. I-Pace is especially bad; it's astounding how inefficient they managed to make it - something that combined with its comparatively low charging power (particularly given that most CCS stations are only 50kW) makes it fill up at a comparative crawl.
Par for the course. With the Model X rear seat recall, for example, not only wasn't it not on the NHTSA's radar, but there hadn't even been a user complaint. Same with the Model S seatbelt pretensioner - no customer reports, no injuries..
100% of Tesla's recalls have been voluntary and arisen from internal rather than NHTSA investigations, which is not normal for "plenty of auto makers". Also, see this.
Some important information was also left out of this summary.
1) The corrosion-prone bolts are not in a component made by Tesla. It's made by Bosch. 2) Because the fault is Bosch's, Bosch has to cover the cost of the replacement.
Ecuador can put whatever conditions they want on his stay; Assange doesn't own the place. They could demand that if he wants to stay there he has to wear a gorilla costume 24/7 and walk around quacking like a duck; there's nothing in the law that says you have to let any random person stay with you rent-free and can't impose any conditions on their stay. They could literally have security carry him out the door and that'd be fully within their rights, just like it'd be your rights to do so if you let a guest stay in your house and they didn't follow the rules you laid out.
So? The Geneva convention says it follows all of the laws of the sending country.
No, it does not. Try reading it some time. This idea that the sending state's law applies on embassy grounds is just a myth. What applies on embassy grounds is limited circumstances in which the receiving state may do various actions.
Note that in no case are the immunities unlimited. For example, specifically in the case of embassies and Ecuador, Italian police once caught them using a diplomatic "pouch" (normally immune to searches) to smuggle cocaine. Once they had found reasonable suspicion that it contained drugs, they searched it. How was this legal? Because the Vienna Conventions only apply to things being used for valid embassy purposes. There's of course sometimes a fine line dividing "valid" and "invalid", but it's mostly a political one, not a legal one; the receiving state will generally shy away from enforcement except in egregious cases (such as drugs or weapons smuggling, or in one case even sending humans!) in order to not cause a political stir.
In the Assange case, it would have been well within the UK's rights (as they pointed out to Ecuador early on) to raid the embassy, as they considered sheltering him to not be a legally valid purpose under the Vienna Conventions. However, this would have almost certainly resulted in significant political consequences - at the very least damaged diplomatic relations, and likely trade relations as well. Over the issue of Assange, Ecuador gambled (correctly) that the UK wasn't willing to accept that.
This is a common myth. An embassy is not treated in law as part of the sending state. Rather, the privileges enjoyed by an embassy and its personnel are only those provided by the receiving state's laws implementing the Vienna Convention; outside of the privileges that the Vienna Convention provides, the receiving state's laws still apply, and the land still remains part of the receiving state's territory.
In general, though, "efficiency" is not the same as "awesome,"
In general, one reads a post in the context it was written, which in this case, was efficiency. Thus causing the adjective to be describing efficiency.
Someone like Assange will go stir-crazy without net access. He'll have to resort to having memory cards smuggled in and out. I wonder how they plan to keep him away from cell phones? Confiscation of guest phones and periodic room sweeps?
That pdf is completely riddled with errors on every page, and most of its links are either dead, obsolete, or both. And when you can find the links, they're usually riddled with errors. For example, in their attempts to talk up a lithium "water crisis", they link to "DClithiumfullreportenglish.pdf", but the link is dead. However, you can find it scattered around elsewhere, such as here. Here's what it says on the subject:
One major problem that lithium development could cause is a major water crisis. The region already suffers from a serious water shortage, impacting quinoa farmers, llama herders, the region’s vital tourism industry, and drinking water sources. While Bolivian officials contend that the lithium project’s water requirements will be minimal, their estimates are based on very limited and incomplete information.
This is, of course, an absurdity (no references, of course!). The water lithium is produced from is not freshwater. It's brine. You don't dump brine on quinua or give it to llamas and people to drink. Furthermore, there are no farmers, herders, and tourism lodgings in the middle of salars. It's salt. You can't grow crops and graze animals on salt.
This pdf is from "Rebecca Hollender and Jim Shultz, May 2010". So first off, 8 years old. Secondly, who are these world-renowned mining experts? This appears to be her. Samples of her work:
"A Politics of the Commons or Commoning the Political Distinct Possibilities for Post Capitalist Transformation" "Prescription for Failure: Examining the Drug Policy and Development Nexus for Shaping the UNGASS 2016 Discussion" "Northern Fixes and Southern Realities: Three Climate Policy Debate Primers, Primer Three: Climate Finance and Bolivia"
Etc. Clearly a mining expert! Well, what about Jim? This appears to be him:
I was raised in Whittier California, President Richard Nixon’s hometown, while he was President, which has a lot to do with how I became a political activist at an early age. After college at UC Berkeley I spent two decades deeply involved in California politics, as staff to the California Legislature, and as an advocate with Common Cause and Consumers Union (and in the middle took a detour to Harvard to earn a master’s degree). In 1991 my wife Lynn and I spent our first year of marriage as volunteers in an orphanage in Cochabamba and came home with a surprise daughter (today I am a father of three and soon to be a grandfather). In 1998 we returned to Bolivia for what was supposed to be a year and have stayed for almost twenty. As executive director of the Democracy Center for 25 years, it has been my privilege to work with citizen activists on five continents, from indigenous communities in Bolivia to senior leaders in the United Nations. I’ve also written three books, many articles and all along the way have done my level best to make sure David beats Goliath as often as possible. I publish on Medium, and I Tweet
You know, the author of such articles about intricate mining details such as "Feeling ‘the Bern,’ Before Bernie Sanders and After" and "When Anti-Immigrant Politics Came Back to Haunt the Republican Party"
This was in reference to li-ion battery packs with an expected lifespan of ~15 years in typical grid duty. Longevity strongly factors into the economics equation. There's also issues of efficiency.
Battery production prices are dropping like a rock, too. Most of these studies budget something like $500/kWh, but I would not be surprised in the least to see ~$100/kWh in commercially available products in a few years time. And that's a gamechanger for solar timeshifting.
It works double when you need the pack for something else, too (for example, as a buffer to EV fast charging). Your buffer also contains at least an hour's worth of its peak consumption (multiple hours when charges are spread out) just in order to have enough power to feed the vehicles it's charging. No need to "double pay" for the battery.
Just need to destroy the Salar of Atacama in Chile for your lithium!
Lithium mines on salars usually take up a few/several percent of the surface area. And complex life actually on the salars themselves generally ranges from "minimal" to "none"; where present at all, most complex life is usually confined to the periphery.
Pump the dirty water
The salt water. The same salts that form the salars. Salars that in many cases flood annually, erasing the evaporation ponds and causing them to have to be rebuilt (for example, the largest lithium salar in the world, Salar de Uyuni is like this). Remember that we're talking about salt. Water soluble.
ship it across the ocean on big freighters
There's about 7kg of lithium in a typical Tesla battery pack, or about 35kg of carbonate. Even jumping into a future with 500k Model 3s produced per year and 700k Model Ys and the equivalent of 300k "other", that's 52,5 kT of carbonate per year. A large bulk carrier can carry over 80 kT in a single trip.
Lithium mining from salars is one of the least environmentally destructive forms of "mining" you can have, only proportionally small amounts are needed, and you make yourself look desperate to find a talking point when you act like it's the greatest scourge of mankind. Ever looked into the sort of mines that produce the alloying agents used in the steel for engines, or the platinum used in spark plugs and pollution control systems, mined at low-PPM/high-PPB quantities with significant overburden? Just ignoring what you're blasting out the tailpipe every time you drive, dumping on average the car's entire mass worth of fuel into combustion products into everyone's air to breathe.
Generally people mean "land use efficiency". But even in that regard, solar isn't bad (and of course, rooftop uses no land). It's generally less (sometimes a lot less) than hydro (when accounting for reservoir area), way less than biomass, much less than wind if you count the entire area of a wind farm (but much more if you only count the tower bases and access roads), and not that much more than coal when you compare the size of mines for several decades of power generation. Nuclear and gas, however, both handily beat solar in terms of land footprint.
The spot where solar really shines (pardon the pun) is when you compare the amount of area you'd need to take up to power an electric car with solar, vs. the amount of land you'd have to cultivate to power an equivalent ICE with biofuels. It's orders of magnitude different (not even accounting for all of the water, fertilizer, etc)
When talking footprints, you also need to compare impacts, not just area taken up. For example, the main criticism of hydro is that it wipes out rare and sensitive ecosystems (river canyons) - exceptional places in the middle of more mundane surroundings. But solar is just the opposite - it works best in endless, mundane, identical stretches of indistinct flatland that don't in any way represent unique ecosystems. Furthermore, while sometimes solar is deployed with the ground kept cleared, this isn't always the case; when allowed to cooexist with its environment, it has significant potential to help, not hurt, habitats. In the desert, sun is not in short supply; water is. Places that provide shade tend to turn into oases of life. Solar panels also encourage dew collection. There's also some really interesting work going on paring solar with desert agriculture (such as is performed in the US around the Colorado River). The panels, spaced apart, basically act in the same way as agricultural shade cloth, and for some crops can even increase yields, while at the same time saving large amounts of water that's in short supply.
When it comes to wind and solar (particularly solar), using data from just a couple years ago is already well obsolete. And even then, your link (under "Projected LCOE in the U.S. by 2022 (as of 2016) ") shows "wind onshore" as some of the cheapest electricity around, and solar around the middle of the list. Your link also includes a nice graph of how badly cost predictions missed reality. E.g. in 2010, EIA was predicting that solar in 2016 would cost $396.1/MWh - nearly an order of magnitude too expensive.
SAE Level 3 automation should be illegal. Period. The backup driver simply cannot be expected to go from "no interaction with the vehicle for 1500 miles on average" to "rescuing the vehicle from an emergency".
Automation should be locked at Level 2 (ProPilot, Autopilot, Supercruise, etc, etc) until vehicles are at least ready for Level 4, if not Level 5. Level 2 = hands on the wheel, ideally with eye tracking, ideally making the user drive for themselves for at least a couple minutes every hour to stay alert.
And it should not be up to companies when their vehicles are ready to put them on the roads, as they're in a race to be seen as first movers. Governments should have their own review and testing processes, which involve both code audits (in the case of neural nets, audits of the net core and how the nets are trained) and real-world testing of simulated hazard scenarios.
That said, it's not really out of the ballpark. Assuming Q2 Model 3 production averages 2500/wk, Q3 averages 5000/wk, and Q4 averages 7500/wk, plus maybe 11k delivered so far, that's nearly 210k. If they do 90k S+X, that would be 300k, vs. your 360k.
Targets, BTW, are 2500/wk at the end of Q1, 5000/wk at the end of Q2, and building line 2 for 10k/wk in Q3/Q4 - so those are actually somewhat pessimistic figures. Model S+X targets are ~100k, the maximum number of 18650 battery packs they can make per year; realistically they'll adjust pricing and options to ensure that all get sold, even if it means cutting into their (healthy) margins. If Tesla did very well, they could plausibly hit 360k this year. But ~300k is IMHO more realistic. And that's assuming that the Grohmann line works as it's supposed to - something we'll find out over the course of Q2.
That's quite old for a commercial vehicle. I'm sure there are companies with newer vehicles that could have been contracted to do this job, and I'm sure this company was cheap.
So your argument is that Tesla would prefer to miss quarterly delivery targets by cutting back on deliveries, and have its stock tank, than pay more for these "quality contractors" that you insist, without evidence, have ample capacity available for them to use?
Six months. That's nothing compared to the Model X delays.
Also, that six months is behind the accelerated schedule that they moved to when they saw how many people were ordering. They're at or ahead of the original, unaccelerated schedule.
I almost wonder if some clever engineering could keep them off the road. For example, having the entrances to mountain roads involve having to climb a deliberately steep ramp with a deliberately poor traction surface. If they can't get up the ramp, they can't get on the road. One would need to design the ramp such that a person attempting to get on with poor tires wouldn't get in danger or block up traffic, of course, but I'd think it doable.
Slashdot Mirror
Okay, that was mildly amusing... but I literally LOLed at this. ;) See it on a live map here.
Rocket engines don't work without expelling.
Here's a great example of what happens when supposed "Tesla-killer" meets reality. Or take the Kona electric. Funny how a "$30k-ish 290-mile crossover" turns out to be in actuality a "hypothetically 150-mile $31k** vehicle the same size as a Bolt or Leaf that does 0-60 in 9,3 seconds", and if you want to get Bolt-style range and not as horrible acceleration (0-60 in 7,6s) you have to add on some as-of-yet price-undisclosed upgrade package. And of course, this totally-serious-vehicle meant for totally-serious-competition is only planned for production in volumes of 30k per year and only to be sold in the US in ZEV states.
** - They dropped the nonsensical 290 mile claim for the "extended" pack Kona and are now saying that they "estimate" it will get around 250 miles EPA rating. But since they've been playing fast and loose with the numbers so far, I wouldn't be surprised to see some fudge factor there too. It's worth noting what EPA combined ratings mean for real-world highway ranges - Bolt, for example, has a combined rating of 238 miles, but only goes about 190 miles at a steady 75mph - and it's more streamlined than the Kona. As for the $31k figure, that's presuming that the EU price that they announced already included VAT, and that there's no premium charged in the US. Otherwise, increase that base price.
I-Pace also plays the same "Crossover" game that the Kona does, although at least not as badly. They like to pretend that it's a Model X competitor, when in reality it's far smaller - not even as long as a Model 3, let alone an S, let alone an X. Beyond everything in the above link, they've cranked up the dishonesty to 11 in their advertising, such as their "drag race" against a Model X 75D (a much larger, heavier vehicle than the I-Pace), where they then start talking swapping it out for the Model X P100D, but instead switch the driver to a 100D (no P) and hope that nobody will notice.
And of course, for all of them... no supercharging. Aka, no road trips - at least unless you like hanging out at charging stations. I-Pace is especially bad; it's astounding how inefficient they managed to make it - something that combined with its comparatively low charging power (particularly given that most CCS stations are only 50kW) makes it fill up at a comparative crawl.
Par for the course. With the Model X rear seat recall, for example, not only wasn't it not on the NHTSA's radar, but there hadn't even been a user complaint. Same with the Model S seatbelt pretensioner - no customer reports, no injuries..
100% of Tesla's recalls have been voluntary and arisen from internal rather than NHTSA investigations, which is not normal for "plenty of auto makers". Also, see this.
Some important information was also left out of this summary.
1) The corrosion-prone bolts are not in a component made by Tesla. It's made by Bosch.
2) Because the fault is Bosch's, Bosch has to cover the cost of the replacement.
Ecuador can put whatever conditions they want on his stay; Assange doesn't own the place. They could demand that if he wants to stay there he has to wear a gorilla costume 24/7 and walk around quacking like a duck; there's nothing in the law that says you have to let any random person stay with you rent-free and can't impose any conditions on their stay. They could literally have security carry him out the door and that'd be fully within their rights, just like it'd be your rights to do so if you let a guest stay in your house and they didn't follow the rules you laid out.
No, it does not. Try reading it some time. This idea that the sending state's law applies on embassy grounds is just a myth. What applies on embassy grounds is limited circumstances in which the receiving state may do various actions.
Note that in no case are the immunities unlimited. For example, specifically in the case of embassies and Ecuador, Italian police once caught them using a diplomatic "pouch" (normally immune to searches) to smuggle cocaine. Once they had found reasonable suspicion that it contained drugs, they searched it. How was this legal? Because the Vienna Conventions only apply to things being used for valid embassy purposes. There's of course sometimes a fine line dividing "valid" and "invalid", but it's mostly a political one, not a legal one; the receiving state will generally shy away from enforcement except in egregious cases (such as drugs or weapons smuggling, or in one case even sending humans!) in order to not cause a political stir.
In the Assange case, it would have been well within the UK's rights (as they pointed out to Ecuador early on) to raid the embassy, as they considered sheltering him to not be a legally valid purpose under the Vienna Conventions. However, this would have almost certainly resulted in significant political consequences - at the very least damaged diplomatic relations, and likely trade relations as well. Over the issue of Assange, Ecuador gambled (correctly) that the UK wasn't willing to accept that.
This is a common myth. An embassy is not treated in law as part of the sending state. Rather, the privileges enjoyed by an embassy and its personnel are only those provided by the receiving state's laws implementing the Vienna Convention; outside of the privileges that the Vienna Convention provides, the receiving state's laws still apply, and the land still remains part of the receiving state's territory.
In general, one reads a post in the context it was written, which in this case, was efficiency. Thus causing the adjective to be describing efficiency.
It's embarrassing that I have to spell this out.
Someone like Assange will go stir-crazy without net access. He'll have to resort to having memory cards smuggled in and out. I wonder how they plan to keep him away from cell phones? Confiscation of guest phones and periodic room sweeps?
That pdf is completely riddled with errors on every page, and most of its links are either dead, obsolete, or both. And when you can find the links, they're usually riddled with errors. For example, in their attempts to talk up a lithium "water crisis", they link to "DClithiumfullreportenglish.pdf", but the link is dead. However, you can find it scattered around elsewhere, such as here. Here's what it says on the subject:
This is, of course, an absurdity (no references, of course!). The water lithium is produced from is not freshwater. It's brine. You don't dump brine on quinua or give it to llamas and people to drink. Furthermore, there are no farmers, herders, and tourism lodgings in the middle of salars. It's salt. You can't grow crops and graze animals on salt.
This pdf is from "Rebecca Hollender and Jim Shultz, May 2010". So first off, 8 years old. Secondly, who are these world-renowned mining experts? This appears to be her. Samples of her work:
"A Politics of the Commons or Commoning the Political Distinct Possibilities for Post Capitalist Transformation"
"Prescription for Failure: Examining the Drug Policy and Development Nexus for Shaping the UNGASS 2016 Discussion"
"Northern Fixes and Southern Realities: Three Climate Policy Debate Primers, Primer Three: Climate Finance and Bolivia"
Etc. Clearly a mining expert! Well, what about Jim? This appears to be him:
You know, the author of such articles about intricate mining details such as "Feeling ‘the Bern,’ Before Bernie Sanders and After" and "When Anti-Immigrant Politics Came Back to Haunt the Republican Party"
Are you deliberately trying to be difficult? "High efficiency"
Okay, then wind and hydro power are awesome, and nuclear is lousy. Is that what you're going for?
This was in reference to li-ion battery packs with an expected lifespan of ~15 years in typical grid duty. Longevity strongly factors into the economics equation. There's also issues of efficiency.
Battery production prices are dropping like a rock, too. Most of these studies budget something like $500/kWh, but I would not be surprised in the least to see ~$100/kWh in commercially available products in a few years time. And that's a gamechanger for solar timeshifting.
It works double when you need the pack for something else, too (for example, as a buffer to EV fast charging). Your buffer also contains at least an hour's worth of its peak consumption (multiple hours when charges are spread out) just in order to have enough power to feed the vehicles it's charging. No need to "double pay" for the battery.
Ed: dumping on average the car's entire mass worth of fuel into combustion products into everyone's air to breathe every year .
Lithium mines on salars usually take up a few/several percent of the surface area. And complex life actually on the salars themselves generally ranges from "minimal" to "none"; where present at all, most complex life is usually confined to the periphery.
The salt water. The same salts that form the salars. Salars that in many cases flood annually, erasing the evaporation ponds and causing them to have to be rebuilt (for example, the largest lithium salar in the world, Salar de Uyuni is like this). Remember that we're talking about salt. Water soluble.
There's about 7kg of lithium in a typical Tesla battery pack, or about 35kg of carbonate. Even jumping into a future with 500k Model 3s produced per year and 700k Model Ys and the equivalent of 300k "other", that's 52,5 kT of carbonate per year. A large bulk carrier can carry over 80 kT in a single trip.
Lithium mining from salars is one of the least environmentally destructive forms of "mining" you can have, only proportionally small amounts are needed, and you make yourself look desperate to find a talking point when you act like it's the greatest scourge of mankind. Ever looked into the sort of mines that produce the alloying agents used in the steel for engines, or the platinum used in spark plugs and pollution control systems, mined at low-PPM/high-PPB quantities with significant overburden? Just ignoring what you're blasting out the tailpipe every time you drive, dumping on average the car's entire mass worth of fuel into combustion products into everyone's air to breathe.
Generally people mean "land use efficiency". But even in that regard, solar isn't bad (and of course, rooftop uses no land). It's generally less (sometimes a lot less) than hydro (when accounting for reservoir area), way less than biomass, much less than wind if you count the entire area of a wind farm (but much more if you only count the tower bases and access roads), and not that much more than coal when you compare the size of mines for several decades of power generation. Nuclear and gas, however, both handily beat solar in terms of land footprint.
The spot where solar really shines (pardon the pun) is when you compare the amount of area you'd need to take up to power an electric car with solar, vs. the amount of land you'd have to cultivate to power an equivalent ICE with biofuels. It's orders of magnitude different (not even accounting for all of the water, fertilizer, etc)
When talking footprints, you also need to compare impacts, not just area taken up. For example, the main criticism of hydro is that it wipes out rare and sensitive ecosystems (river canyons) - exceptional places in the middle of more mundane surroundings. But solar is just the opposite - it works best in endless, mundane, identical stretches of indistinct flatland that don't in any way represent unique ecosystems. Furthermore, while sometimes solar is deployed with the ground kept cleared, this isn't always the case; when allowed to cooexist with its environment, it has significant potential to help, not hurt, habitats. In the desert, sun is not in short supply; water is. Places that provide shade tend to turn into oases of life. Solar panels also encourage dew collection. There's also some really interesting work going on paring solar with desert agriculture (such as is performed in the US around the Colorado River). The panels, spaced apart, basically act in the same way as agricultural shade cloth, and for some crops can even increase yields, while at the same time saving large amounts of water that's in short supply.
When it comes to wind and solar (particularly solar), using data from just a couple years ago is already well obsolete. And even then, your link (under "Projected LCOE in the U.S. by 2022 (as of 2016) ") shows "wind onshore" as some of the cheapest electricity around, and solar around the middle of the list. Your link also includes a nice graph of how badly cost predictions missed reality. E.g. in 2010, EIA was predicting that solar in 2016 would cost $396.1/MWh - nearly an order of magnitude too expensive.
SAE Level 3 automation should be illegal. Period. The backup driver simply cannot be expected to go from "no interaction with the vehicle for 1500 miles on average" to "rescuing the vehicle from an emergency".
Automation should be locked at Level 2 (ProPilot, Autopilot, Supercruise, etc, etc) until vehicles are at least ready for Level 4, if not Level 5. Level 2 = hands on the wheel, ideally with eye tracking, ideally making the user drive for themselves for at least a couple minutes every hour to stay alert.
And it should not be up to companies when their vehicles are ready to put them on the roads, as they're in a race to be seen as first movers. Governments should have their own review and testing processes, which involve both code audits (in the case of neural nets, audits of the net core and how the nets are trained) and real-world testing of simulated hazard scenarios.
I'm not so sure. The much publicized recent collision with a stopped firetruck at 65mph resulted in only cuts and bruises.
And yes, US vehicle safety laws are absurdly lax.
That said, it's not really out of the ballpark. Assuming Q2 Model 3 production averages 2500/wk, Q3 averages 5000/wk, and Q4 averages 7500/wk, plus maybe 11k delivered so far, that's nearly 210k. If they do 90k S+X, that would be 300k, vs. your 360k.
Targets, BTW, are 2500/wk at the end of Q1, 5000/wk at the end of Q2, and building line 2 for 10k/wk in Q3/Q4 - so those are actually somewhat pessimistic figures. Model S+X targets are ~100k, the maximum number of 18650 battery packs they can make per year; realistically they'll adjust pricing and options to ensure that all get sold, even if it means cutting into their (healthy) margins. If Tesla did very well, they could plausibly hit 360k this year. But ~300k is IMHO more realistic. And that's assuming that the Grohmann line works as it's supposed to - something we'll find out over the course of Q2.
So your argument is that Tesla would prefer to miss quarterly delivery targets by cutting back on deliveries, and have its stock tank, than pay more for these "quality contractors" that you insist, without evidence, have ample capacity available for them to use?
A curious argument to say the least.
Six months. That's nothing compared to the Model X delays.
Also, that six months is behind the accelerated schedule that they moved to when they saw how many people were ordering. They're at or ahead of the original, unaccelerated schedule.
I almost wonder if some clever engineering could keep them off the road. For example, having the entrances to mountain roads involve having to climb a deliberately steep ramp with a deliberately poor traction surface. If they can't get up the ramp, they can't get on the road. One would need to design the ramp such that a person attempting to get on with poor tires wouldn't get in danger or block up traffic, of course, but I'd think it doable.