I read the link. Tesla promised refunds within three weeks, then promised them again within two weeks on the phone, and failed to deliver on either promise. It's about setting expectations. People would be pissed off if they told them the truth, so instead they lie to potential future customers? Okay, if that works for them. But it sets a precedent.
You don't know if the refund delay was because Tesla didn't have the money or if there was a problem with the payment processors. Tesla claims to have over 60000 net cancellations between the Model 3 reveal and Fall 2017. If even a significant number of them were problematic, the message boards would be overflowing with chatter about it.
"Maybe because Tesla and Musk constantly demand attention. Heck, Musk installs a few solar panels at one bldg. in Puerto Rico and its an international story. But that's ALL HE DID in PR. Its not like installing solar panels is some great achievement, its been done for decades. Meanwhile, individuals and organizations that did so much more were and are still ignored"
yeah, Tesla Energy only installed at least 6 projects to restore power in Puerto Rico incl at a children's hospital. Stupid of Elon to go through all that trouble when all he had to do was toss a few bundles of paper towels, say that everyone was enjoying themselves and we can't do more because of all the bigly ocean water surrounding the island.
I was about to respond, snippily, that it's not like there's a whole lot of people cancelling, and then thought I'd google.
Turns out AC's right -- people are cancelling, and in many cases Tesla's taking a really really long time to refund their money (up to 3 months, it seems). More at https://www.wired.com/story/ca...
Not technically "not refunding", but still pretty poor.
Did you read your own link? "The next day, I found a FedEx envelope on my doorstep. My refund had arrived — 61 business days after I cancelled my reservation.
Not every Tesla refund takes this long — or this much work. "It was easy," says Jeff Maggard, a former reservation holder from Ithaca, New York, who cancelled his deposit in February after a career change made it hard to justify buying a new car. His refund showed up on his credit card less than two weeks later. "I did it all online without talking to anyone. There was no number to call so I could be talked out of it by a representative. No dumb tricks to make me stay. It was great," Maggard says. "Very customer-centered."
I've waited much longer for refunds for a lot less than $1000 so I don't know what the gripe is all about. In any case, it's clear that it's not everyone who had to wait a long time. It's been suggested that a lot of the complainants may have had the credit cards used to place the reservation expire which would make a refund difficult.
There is nothing trivial when a car company which took prepaid orders is years late.
It is a swindle.
They're not "years late". No deposits for Model 3 were taken before Mar 31st, 2016 and at the time the start of production for North America was supposed to be Fall 2017. So they're running months behind, not years
The cycle wear on my storage batteries comes out to the equivalent of about ~29,000 miles of driving in a Model S.
Yikes! That battery isn't going to last long if that's the yearly cycle wear!
I don't think that's true. Some Model S85s have been driven over 100,000 miles with less than 5-10% capacity loss and he has more than double the capacity.
"The rest could be available for energy price arbitrage"
Tesla has been very resistant to using the car battery for anything other than powering the car; I suspect the battery formulation is not suited for it. That said, Tesla hacker wk057@skie.net has a pretty nice off-grid setup with his 44 kW solar array backed up by 191 kWh of Tesla battery pack modules. https://twitter.com/wk057/stat... https://skie.net/skynet/projec...
I once interviewed a programming candidate, sent to me by a recruiter, who had only programmed in JOVIAL for his whole career and only wanted to program in JOVIAL for the rest of his career. I guess my business didn't matter much to that recruiter.
Most of the really good programmers can learn a new language on the plane to their new gig.
In the case of that candidate, it's probably not a good idea for him to try switching languages; he'd end up writing JOVIAL code in Java or Python, would look like a literal translation of German into English, or worse.
Yet one more reason why I won't do business with Oracle. These updates and firmware use to be free, now they're throwing people in prison because they got free updates that fixed Oracle's shitty products. Screw HPE too... Dell still offers free unencumbered firmware updates.
Cisco pulls the same shit; no active maintenance contract on the hardware or software means no updates / fixes for you.
Google has admitted to doing it since gmail first came out
True but I can send links to Pornhub through Gmail without a problem. The one time I tried to share one with a FB friend through "private" message, it got blocked and I got run through a FB terms & conditions that warned me I was violating terms & conditions, that I had to plead guilty to sharing naughties and swear not to do it again before getting back my access (well, to *that* account - I have more than one)
The countries with the terrible North Korea policies are China & Russia who've been propping up a corrupt regime for decades. America is responsible for a lot of bad stuff but this problem should not be up to them to solve.
"So you're saying that Tesla has been lying to the SEC for years? The average margin on S and X was 25%. Their overall automotive margin is down to 18% now because of the problems with the 3 dragging down their average, but that's to be expected"
I know a few folks who know quite a bit about automaking including an old fogey who worked at Fremont decades ago both before & after it became NUMMI. He's says there's no way Tesla's overall margins are that high. But even if they are, their R&D costs relative to their revenue is much higher than the competition.
"Four. Years. The line downtime was 8-10 weeks, but it took four years to tool up"
No it didn't. The total time including planning may have been years because Ford didn't dare screw up their cash cow. After converting Dearborn, they pulled off the same feat 6 months later in Kansas City. By the way, the reported numbers of employees at Dearborn and Kansas City are ~8000 combined and produce 800000 trucks annually. Tesla Fremont has 10k employees and has yet to surpass 100k.
1) I don't know why you linked to a blog when you can get that graph (up to date) straight from the Bloomberg site. 2) That's actually a terrible graph from Bloomberg, since those are supposed to be S curves, not straight lines (aka, starting out slower, then speeding up). 3) Go further back.
That S-curve or "stepped exponential" as Elon also referred to it, got scaled back quite dramatically. In the dim & misty past known as August 2017, he said quite emphatically “What people should absolutely have zero concern about, and I mean 0, is that Tesla will achieve a 10,000 unit production week by the end of next year. [] I think people should really not have any concerns that we won’t reach that outcome from a production rate.” "https://electrek.co/2017/08/03/tesla-model-3-elon-musk-production-reservations/"
I don't hear that 10k/wk number bandied about any more by anyone at Tesla.
I wouldn't put too much faith in that. Tesla 25% margin is not plausible even for their higher-end cars except perhaps the Performance trims. As for the Bolt, a car that I wouldn't buy unless it were 1/2 the MSRP, GM is mostly selling them for the EV credits. But they do have the facilities, manpower and skillsets to turn up the production as needed. Ford, for example, converted their largest NorthAm truck factory to aluminum production of their flagship F-150 in only 8-10 weeks and by mid-November were producing 1400 per DAY at the new plant. https://www.popularmechanics.c...
That's a "machine-that-builds-the-machine" that Tesla can still only dream of building.
S and X production were only down for one day. Lines have to go down periodically regardless; tooling does not last forever, even if you're not doing upgrades.
If they're reaching the 2000/wk mark with 2 shifts, not much overtime, solid build quality with minimal reworking, and can sustain it across several weeks, then this is a real milestone. Otherwise, they've still got a ways to go and much to learn. The above may sound like a tall order but it's what established automakers do by the 10s of 1000s - or more - every week.
Neither 75% nor "broken" appears in the media release It says "Media Release: Worsening Worldwide Land Degradation Now ‘Critical’, Undermining Well-Being of 3.2 Billion People"
"Less than 25% of the Earth’s land surface has escaped substantial impacts of human activity – and by 2050, the IPBES experts estimate this will have fallen to less than 10%"
That's not remotely the same as what the Slashdot headline says
Slashdot Mirror
Of course, sending them away worked out SO well for Puerto Rico.
Letting them try to fix anything probably would have been worse.
Did you read your own link?
I read the link. Tesla promised refunds within three weeks, then promised them again within two weeks on the phone, and failed to deliver on either promise. It's about setting expectations. People would be pissed off if they told them the truth, so instead they lie to potential future customers? Okay, if that works for them. But it sets a precedent.
You don't know if the refund delay was because Tesla didn't have the money or if there was a problem with the payment processors.
Tesla claims to have over 60000 net cancellations between the Model 3 reveal and Fall 2017.
If even a significant number of them were problematic, the message boards would be overflowing with chatter about it.
"Maybe because Tesla and Musk constantly demand attention. Heck, Musk installs a few solar panels at one bldg. in Puerto Rico and its an international story. But that's ALL HE DID in PR. Its not like installing solar panels is some great achievement, its been done for decades. Meanwhile, individuals and organizations that did so much more were and are still ignored"
yeah, Tesla Energy only installed at least 6 projects to restore power in Puerto Rico incl at a children's hospital.
Stupid of Elon to go through all that trouble when all he had to do was toss a few bundles of paper towels, say that everyone was enjoying themselves and we can't do more because of all the bigly ocean water surrounding the island.
I was about to respond, snippily, that it's not like there's a whole lot of people cancelling, and then thought I'd google.
Turns out AC's right -- people are cancelling, and in many cases Tesla's taking a really really long time to refund their money (up to 3 months, it seems). More at https://www.wired.com/story/ca...
Not technically "not refunding", but still pretty poor.
Did you read your own link?
"The next day, I found a FedEx envelope on my doorstep. My refund had arrived — 61 business days after I cancelled my reservation.
Not every Tesla refund takes this long — or this much work. "It was easy," says Jeff Maggard, a former reservation holder from Ithaca, New York, who cancelled his deposit in February after a career change made it hard to justify buying a new car. His refund showed up on his credit card less than two weeks later. "I did it all online without talking to anyone. There was no number to call so I could be talked out of it by a representative. No dumb tricks to make me stay. It was great," Maggard says. "Very customer-centered."
I've waited much longer for refunds for a lot less than $1000 so I don't know what the gripe is all about.
In any case, it's clear that it's not everyone who had to wait a long time.
It's been suggested that a lot of the complainants may have had the credit cards used to place the reservation expire which would make a refund difficult.
There is nothing trivial when a car company which took prepaid orders is years late.
It is a swindle.
They're not "years late".
No deposits for Model 3 were taken before Mar 31st, 2016 and at the time the start of production for North America was supposed to be Fall 2017.
So they're running months behind, not years
Silicon Valley doesn't get a pass because they are currently the 'hot thing'. No one is exempt from rules and regulations.
Except Vladimir, of course. But he can fuck off too.
Why would I want my fridge, lightbulbs, toaster and so on to ever be hooked up to the public internet?
You probably don't, but Big Brother does. They're hoping you will give up your privacy in exchange for added convenience of these IoTs.
Say that a bit louder , Alexa didn't hear you
"Swatting is attempted murder. It's time we treated it as such"
And if someone who's unarmed is shot, the cops should be charged, too.
http://www.kansas.com/news/loc...
Only 30 percent of model 3 reservations are converting into orders.
Because they're waiting for AWD / higher-performance versions or for Tesla to start offering the base version.
"I saw a qnx demo of a bouncing cube and realtime video playing on the different sides of the cube"
I think that was BeOS unless QNX also had a similar demo
That's really cool, but:
Yikes! That battery isn't going to last long if that's the yearly cycle wear!
I don't think that's true. Some Model S85s have been driven over 100,000 miles with less than 5-10% capacity loss and he has more than double the capacity.
"The rest could be available for energy price arbitrage"
Tesla has been very resistant to using the car battery for anything other than powering the car; I suspect the battery formulation is not suited for it. That said, Tesla hacker wk057@skie.net has a pretty nice off-grid setup with his 44 kW solar array backed up by 191 kWh of Tesla battery pack modules.
https://twitter.com/wk057/stat...
https://skie.net/skynet/projec...
I once interviewed a programming candidate, sent to me by a recruiter, who had only programmed in JOVIAL for his whole career and only wanted to program in JOVIAL for the rest of his career. I guess my business didn't matter much to that recruiter.
Most of the really good programmers can learn a new language on the plane to their new gig.
In the case of that candidate, it's probably not a good idea for him to try switching languages; he'd end up writing JOVIAL code in Java or Python, would look like a literal translation of German into English, or worse.
Yeah, but it'll be a Thursday. The universe never has gotten the hang of Thursdays.
There's a French expression, "dans la semaine des quatre jeudis" or "in the week of the 4 Thursdays" that signifies something that'll never happen
Yet one more reason why I won't do business with Oracle. These updates and firmware use to be free, now they're throwing people in prison because they got free updates that fixed Oracle's shitty products. Screw HPE too... Dell still offers free unencumbered firmware updates.
Cisco pulls the same shit; no active maintenance contract on the hardware or software means no updates / fixes for you.
"What is funny, is that America works it tail off to not hit civilians"
That went out the window in many of the drone strike operations and has gotten worse under Trump
https://www.independent.co.uk/...
Asimov rolls in his grave
Reminds me of a 1st season ST:NG episode, the Arsenal of Freedom
Google has admitted to doing it since gmail first came out
True but I can send links to Pornhub through Gmail without a problem.
The one time I tried to share one with a FB friend through "private" message, it got blocked and I got run through a FB terms & conditions that warned me I was violating terms & conditions, that I had to plead guilty to sharing naughties and swear not to do it again before getting back my access (well, to *that* account - I have more than one)
The countries with the terrible North Korea policies are China & Russia who've been propping up a corrupt regime for decades. America is responsible for a lot of bad stuff but this problem should not be up to them to solve.
"So you're saying that Tesla has been lying to the SEC for years? The average margin on S and X was 25%. Their overall automotive margin is down to 18% now because of the problems with the 3 dragging down their average, but that's to be expected"
I know a few folks who know quite a bit about automaking including an old fogey who worked at Fremont decades ago both before & after it became NUMMI.
He's says there's no way Tesla's overall margins are that high. But even if they are, their R&D costs relative to their revenue is much higher than the competition.
https://seekingalpha.com/artic...
"Four. Years. The line downtime was 8-10 weeks, but it took four years to tool up"
No it didn't. The total time including planning may have been years because Ford didn't dare screw up their cash cow. After converting Dearborn, they pulled off the same feat 6 months later in Kansas City.
By the way, the reported numbers of employees at Dearborn and Kansas City are ~8000 combined and produce 800000 trucks annually. Tesla Fremont has 10k employees and has yet to surpass 100k.
1) I don't know why you linked to a blog when you can get that graph (up to date) straight from the Bloomberg site.
2) That's actually a terrible graph from Bloomberg, since those are supposed to be S curves, not straight lines (aka, starting out slower, then speeding up).
3) Go further back.
That S-curve or "stepped exponential" as Elon also referred to it, got scaled back quite dramatically.
In the dim & misty past known as August 2017, he said quite emphatically
“What people should absolutely have zero concern about, and I mean 0, is that Tesla will achieve a 10,000 unit production week by the end of next year. [] I think people should really not have any concerns that we won’t reach that outcome from a production rate.”
"https://electrek.co/2017/08/03/tesla-model-3-elon-musk-production-reservations/"
I don't hear that 10k/wk number bandied about any more by anyone at Tesla.
Meanwhile, Tesla produced its first 10k Model 3s in the time it took GM to produce its first 1000 Bolts. I guess that's that "decades to tune their processes and supply chains" they had going for them, eh? And it costs Tesla $10k less per vehicle.
I wouldn't put too much faith in that. Tesla 25% margin is not plausible even for their higher-end cars except perhaps the Performance trims. As for the Bolt, a car that I wouldn't buy unless it were 1/2 the MSRP, GM is mostly selling them for the EV credits. But they do have the facilities, manpower and skillsets to turn up the production as needed.
Ford, for example, converted their largest NorthAm truck factory to aluminum production of their flagship F-150 in only 8-10 weeks and by mid-November were producing 1400 per DAY at the new plant.
https://www.popularmechanics.c...
That's a "machine-that-builds-the-machine" that Tesla can still only dream of building.
S and X production were only down for one day. Lines have to go down periodically regardless; tooling does not last forever, even if you're not doing upgrades.
If they're reaching the 2000/wk mark with 2 shifts, not much overtime, solid build quality with minimal reworking, and can sustain it across several weeks, then this is a real milestone. Otherwise, they've still got a ways to go and much to learn.
The above may sound like a tall order but it's what established automakers do by the 10s of 1000s - or more - every week.
"but only having the budget for newbies"
or only be willing to *pay* for newbies but demanding expert skills and extensive experience.
Neither 75% nor "broken" appears in the media release
It says
"Media Release: Worsening Worldwide Land Degradation Now ‘Critical’, Undermining Well-Being of 3.2 Billion People"
"Less than 25% of the Earth’s land surface has escaped substantial impacts of human activity – and by 2050, the IPBES experts estimate this will have fallen to less than 10%"
That's not remotely the same as what the Slashdot headline says