It includes all costs which are directly proportional to the number of cars Tesla is manufacturing--that's the whole point. There are other costs that are fixed, un-related, or maybe scale sub-linearly with car production--but all of those will be amortized by higher volumes (and/or higher margins).
Early in Ford Model T production you would have had very similar ratios. You just have to sell a *lot* of cars before you pay back the initial investment and cover fixed & sub-linear costs. Tesla has like $15B worth of back-orders without yet paying a cent on advertising--so there's good reason to believe they can sell every car they build.
It turned out Ford did pretty well, but I'm sure there was some idiot at the time betting on buggy whips instead because they had a better looking balance sheet.
But please, by all means, short TSLA. Short them by a lot. I've made thousands of dollars over the last couple months extracted from geniuses like you who don't understand the difference between a mature business and a rapidly growing business.
> You do realize that TSLA loses money on every vehicle it sells - BEFORE you account for R&D and capital expenses (which pushes it further into the red), don't you?
This statement is directly contradicted by your own link:
Total Revenue: $3.4 B
Cost of revenue: $2.95 B
These are the numbers that scale linearly in the number of cars they sell. If the cost of revenue is higher than the total revenue, then you could claim that "they lose money on every car sold"--because your clear and intentional implication is that they are selling cars at a loss.
They clearly make 15% in Gross profit on every car they sell; if they hold those margins and sell more cars, then they'll amortize the fixed costs "Selling General Admin, etc." and then they'll be profitable as a business.
1. Tesla is at the forefront of a few different industries that are undergoing radical change (automotive & semi EV, automotive & semi self-driving, utility & home batteries, utility & home solar) collectively representing trillions of dollars.
2. The majority of people who are betting against Tesla are doing so for irrational reasons, specifically: (a) they don't like Elon Musk, and (b) they don't like change.
I don't normally bet on individual stocks. I knew Apple was going to be wildly successful when Jobs came back and launched the iMac, iPod, iPhone--but I still didn't bet on them. But in this case it's just too damn easy. Taking money directly from TSLA shorts is the easiest money I've ever made.
That's adorable. It's completely wrong, it's contradicted by mountains of data. It's directly contradicted by official public disclosures to shareholders by Tesla themselves--and lying to shareholders is a crime. Not a "oops" kind of crime, but a "you're going to jail" kind of crime.
But it's adorable that you want to believe it so badly. Like a kid believing in Santa Claus.
Is the world changing too quickly for your little mind to adapt?
This requires that you believe that SpaceX selling rocket launches to the government for half of what they would have otherwise paid is somehow a "government handout". Learn how to read, and then learn how to read critically. Care about the the truth, it really does matter.
Denying that he's a visionary doesn't make you look like a wise commentator, bravely resisting groupthink & hero worship; it makes you look like a delusional idiot.
There are several technology transformations under way, which collectively represent trillions of dollars of economic activity:
1. ICE cars & semi-trucks transitioning to EVs
2. Carbon-based fuels transitioning to renewable energy (solar/wind)
3. Self-driving cars & self-driving semi-trucks
Guess who is at the forefront of all 3?
And both #1 & #2 create a gigantic demand for batteries (portable & utility). Guess who has a gigantic battery factory and is aggressively building more? If you own a Tesla car, who are you going to buy your solar roof & home battery setup from?
This is the problem with Tesla skeptics. You think of Tesla as a scrappy little car company for tree-huggers, when in fact it is the best-positioned company in the world. Tesla is Apple in 2007, the Model 3 is the first iPhone.
Just like they did when Apple removed the parallel port, RS232, modems, Firewire, ethernet, headphone jack, replaceable batteries, Flash support, user-expandable DRAM, VGA ports, the original iPod connector, etc., etc.
Shitting bricks is just what/. does. It's pretty hard to find a more anti-innovation website. Apple is worth $800B specifically because they ignore/.
Nuclear is done, it's more expensive than the alternatives with greater risk for catastrophe. You can drop the whole exasperated genius routine, we're not buying it.
It's only economical if you don't budget for decommissioning and cleanup (pushing that to future generations) and it's only safe if either (a) it's regulated to death--which also makes it uneconomical, or (b) at no point in the 60 year operational lifetime no one ever gives control of safety over to an MBA (or just a bad engineer). And the penalty for making too many mistakes is a cataclysmic disaster. Oh, and it requires a gigantic capital investment that only pays off over many decades and only if alternative energy sources don't continue to drop in price.
Here's a lesson for young engineers out there: A good engineering solution is one that is intrinsically safe and simple, one that naturally fails in a safe way (that's where the word "failsafe" comes from). A solution that only works out if everyone does their job perfectly is called "stupid". It doesn't matter if the more complicated approach uses a lot of cool math & physics and allows you to feel smarter and more righteous that the non-technical masses--you're the one being stupid, not them.
The future is pretty obvious, natural gas in the near term as we transition to wind & solar & batteries (with natural gas for peaking & backup).
We've seen a whole lot of holier-than-thou criticism (from people who probably write shitty code day-in and day-out) that "cars shouldn't have bugs", a lot of implication that Tesla is the only manufacturer ever to have a bug found in the field, and lot of exaggeration about the magnitude of the bug, and then some clearly insane accusations that Tesla just paid off Consumer Reports--but you're the first person I've seen make a reasonable engineering criticism.
Bugs are inevitable, they are attracted to complexity. A self-driving system is going to have bugs. The infotainment system is going to have bugs.
But, the brakes should not have bugs. It's such a critical system that the code should be blindingly simple, trivial to formally verify, and the engineers should be *shocked* when there's a bug found. If not, then the system should be simplified until that's the case.
That's probably naive, because with ABS braking, auto-gen, etc.--there are probably good reasons for some complexity separating the user pushing their foot down and the brakes being engaged--but I agree that your question is the right one to pose.
Who is liable when somebody rewrites your pacemaker software and kills you? Or burns your house down when they rewrite the software on the microwave? I guarantee the same people on this forum who are insisting on more freedom will be the first people to line up and sue they manufacturer when they cause some real physical damage by modding the device, "but, but, there should have been hardware interlocks preventing me from doing any real damage".
...because it points out the fundamental problem that no one here is talking about. The fraction of people who care about rooting their phone is statistically insignificant. If there was a market there, then companies would try to fill that void (it's not that hard to make a smartphone nowadays).
Just like if there was a market for a brick-sized phone with 2 weeks of battery life using replaceable batteries, 3 headphone jacks, no FaceID or fingerprint sensor, 4 different kinds of memory slots, and full circa-2003 Flash support, then somebody would build that phone.
Instead the hacker crowd talks about "freedom" and "sheeple" when what they really mean is, "please force everyone to subsidize my nerdy little hobby--and please make technology hard to use again so that my existence is justified and normal people are forced to talk to me occasionally."
There's a CPU in everything--should the manufacturers for every programmable device be required to enable third-party SW on that device? It's easier than you think to cause real physical harm if we let/. Java-monkeys re-write critical pieces of firmware on embedded devices; and it would cost a lot of money and effort to put in physical hardware safeguards to protect the world from the zombie hoard of self-satisfied ass-clowns that hang out on this forum.
think about that for a moment. You are describing a set of incidents, some of which are also being experienced by thousands of other Teslas. Those will all get fed back into the AI development and added to the test suite of millions of driving situations they use for validating their autopilot SW. When there's a bizarre accident, that gets added to the test suite.
Engineers debug those problems and make sure every test passes for the next round of the SW. That updated SW then gets uploaded to every Tesla on the road. Your car has gotten smarter because somebody 2,000 miles away hit a squirrel 2 weeks ago. As it gets smarter, more people buy Teslas. The dataset gets bigger, and so on.
That's an optimization algorithm with exponential convergence.
There's no reason you can't go on a joyride with the top down on the weekend, but self-driving frees you from having to drive to get from point A to point B.
and it's trying to solve a really stupid problem. For some reason people are convinced that a lot of accidents could be avoided if car A zigged while car B zagged.
In nearly 100% of cases the right answer is for car A and car B to hit their breaks and stop. If how you react is based on how some other car is telling you it's planning to react then that's a very brittle scenario.
The potential for corner cases in a distributed V2V protocol, including the cars getting confused about which car they are talking to, older cars with buggy non-updated firmware, and outright malicious actors. It's a bad engineering solution.
Slashdot Mirror
It includes all costs which are directly proportional to the number of cars Tesla is manufacturing--that's the whole point. There are other costs that are fixed, un-related, or maybe scale sub-linearly with car production--but all of those will be amortized by higher volumes (and/or higher margins).
Early in Ford Model T production you would have had very similar ratios. You just have to sell a *lot* of cars before you pay back the initial investment and cover fixed & sub-linear costs. Tesla has like $15B worth of back-orders without yet paying a cent on advertising--so there's good reason to believe they can sell every car they build.
It turned out Ford did pretty well, but I'm sure there was some idiot at the time betting on buggy whips instead because they had a better looking balance sheet.
But please, by all means, short TSLA. Short them by a lot. I've made thousands of dollars over the last couple months extracted from geniuses like you who don't understand the difference between a mature business and a rapidly growing business.
International Symposium on Confusing Acronyms
> You do realize that TSLA loses money on every vehicle it sells - BEFORE you account for R&D and capital expenses (which pushes it further into the red), don't you?
This statement is directly contradicted by your own link:
Total Revenue: $3.4 B
Cost of revenue: $2.95 B
These are the numbers that scale linearly in the number of cars they sell. If the cost of revenue is higher than the total revenue, then you could claim that "they lose money on every car sold"--because your clear and intentional implication is that they are selling cars at a loss.
They clearly make 15% in Gross profit on every car they sell; if they hold those margins and sell more cars, then they'll amortize the fixed costs "Selling General Admin, etc." and then they'll be profitable as a business.
1. Tesla is at the forefront of a few different industries that are undergoing radical change (automotive & semi EV, automotive & semi self-driving, utility & home batteries, utility & home solar) collectively representing trillions of dollars.
2. The majority of people who are betting against Tesla are doing so for irrational reasons, specifically: (a) they don't like Elon Musk, and (b) they don't like change.
I don't normally bet on individual stocks. I knew Apple was going to be wildly successful when Jobs came back and launched the iMac, iPod, iPhone--but I still didn't bet on them. But in this case it's just too damn easy. Taking money directly from TSLA shorts is the easiest money I've ever made.
That's adorable. It's completely wrong, it's contradicted by mountains of data. It's directly contradicted by official public disclosures to shareholders by Tesla themselves--and lying to shareholders is a crime. Not a "oops" kind of crime, but a "you're going to jail" kind of crime.
But it's adorable that you want to believe it so badly. Like a kid believing in Santa Claus.
Is the world changing too quickly for your little mind to adapt?
https://opensource.apple.com/
You're welcome, Linux genius.
This requires that you believe that SpaceX selling rocket launches to the government for half of what they would have otherwise paid is somehow a "government handout". Learn how to read, and then learn how to read critically. Care about the the truth, it really does matter.
then the term has no meaning.
Denying that he's a visionary doesn't make you look like a wise commentator, bravely resisting groupthink & hero worship; it makes you look like a delusional idiot.
There are several technology transformations under way, which collectively represent trillions of dollars of economic activity:
1. ICE cars & semi-trucks transitioning to EVs
2. Carbon-based fuels transitioning to renewable energy (solar/wind)
3. Self-driving cars & self-driving semi-trucks
Guess who is at the forefront of all 3?
And both #1 & #2 create a gigantic demand for batteries (portable & utility). Guess who has a gigantic battery factory and is aggressively building more? If you own a Tesla car, who are you going to buy your solar roof & home battery setup from?
This is the problem with Tesla skeptics. You think of Tesla as a scrappy little car company for tree-huggers, when in fact it is the best-positioned company in the world. Tesla is Apple in 2007, the Model 3 is the first iPhone.
Enjoy your Zune.
Neither will you in a few years, but by then you'll be whining about whatever the next thing Apple does.
Just like they did when Apple removed the parallel port, RS232, modems, Firewire, ethernet, headphone jack, replaceable batteries, Flash support, user-expandable DRAM, VGA ports, the original iPod connector, etc., etc.
/. does. It's pretty hard to find a more anti-innovation website. Apple is worth $800B specifically because they ignore /.
Shitting bricks is just what
The most modern 3G safe reactor designs out there still have safety problems.
And the economics of the industry has been devastated: A dozen reasons for the economic failure of nuclear power
Nuclear is done, it's more expensive than the alternatives with greater risk for catastrophe. You can drop the whole exasperated genius routine, we're not buying it.
It's only economical if you don't budget for decommissioning and cleanup (pushing that to future generations) and it's only safe if either (a) it's regulated to death--which also makes it uneconomical, or (b) at no point in the 60 year operational lifetime no one ever gives control of safety over to an MBA (or just a bad engineer). And the penalty for making too many mistakes is a cataclysmic disaster. Oh, and it requires a gigantic capital investment that only pays off over many decades and only if alternative energy sources don't continue to drop in price.
Here's a lesson for young engineers out there: A good engineering solution is one that is intrinsically safe and simple, one that naturally fails in a safe way (that's where the word "failsafe" comes from). A solution that only works out if everyone does their job perfectly is called "stupid". It doesn't matter if the more complicated approach uses a lot of cool math & physics and allows you to feel smarter and more righteous that the non-technical masses--you're the one being stupid, not them.
The future is pretty obvious, natural gas in the near term as we transition to wind & solar & batteries (with natural gas for peaking & backup).
We've seen a whole lot of holier-than-thou criticism (from people who probably write shitty code day-in and day-out) that "cars shouldn't have bugs", a lot of implication that Tesla is the only manufacturer ever to have a bug found in the field, and lot of exaggeration about the magnitude of the bug, and then some clearly insane accusations that Tesla just paid off Consumer Reports--but you're the first person I've seen make a reasonable engineering criticism.
Bugs are inevitable, they are attracted to complexity. A self-driving system is going to have bugs. The infotainment system is going to have bugs.
But, the brakes should not have bugs. It's such a critical system that the code should be blindingly simple, trivial to formally verify, and the engineers should be *shocked* when there's a bug found. If not, then the system should be simplified until that's the case.
That's probably naive, because with ABS braking, auto-gen, etc.--there are probably good reasons for some complexity separating the user pushing their foot down and the brakes being engaged--but I agree that your question is the right one to pose.
Is this really the first time you've ever seen a bug in a product? Or are you shorting TSLA?
CR said: Breaking distance is > 150'
Tesla said: Our testing says 133'
CR said: Same, on our first try, subsequent tries were longer.
Tesla said: Oh crap, that's probably a bug in our regen breaking stuff--thanks for pointing that out.
Tesla rolls out a fix and CR verifies the fix. It seems like everyone was well-behaved all the way around.
nt
Because Apple only has a few engineers.
Who is liable when somebody rewrites your pacemaker software and kills you? Or burns your house down when they rewrite the software on the microwave? I guarantee the same people on this forum who are insisting on more freedom will be the first people to line up and sue they manufacturer when they cause some real physical damage by modding the device, "but, but, there should have been hardware interlocks preventing me from doing any real damage".
...because it points out the fundamental problem that no one here is talking about. The fraction of people who care about rooting their phone is statistically insignificant. If there was a market there, then companies would try to fill that void (it's not that hard to make a smartphone nowadays).
Just like if there was a market for a brick-sized phone with 2 weeks of battery life using replaceable batteries, 3 headphone jacks, no FaceID or fingerprint sensor, 4 different kinds of memory slots, and full circa-2003 Flash support, then somebody would build that phone.
Instead the hacker crowd talks about "freedom" and "sheeple" when what they really mean is, "please force everyone to subsidize my nerdy little hobby--and please make technology hard to use again so that my existence is justified and normal people are forced to talk to me occasionally."
There's a CPU in everything--should the manufacturers for every programmable device be required to enable third-party SW on that device? It's easier than you think to cause real physical harm if we let /. Java-monkeys re-write critical pieces of firmware on embedded devices; and it would cost a lot of money and effort to put in physical hardware safeguards to protect the world from the zombie hoard of self-satisfied ass-clowns that hang out on this forum.
Your refrigerator? your car? your pacemaker? Do those manufacturers have to support third-party SW modding? Who draws the line?
think about that for a moment. You are describing a set of incidents, some of which are also being experienced by thousands of other Teslas. Those will all get fed back into the AI development and added to the test suite of millions of driving situations they use for validating their autopilot SW. When there's a bizarre accident, that gets added to the test suite.
Engineers debug those problems and make sure every test passes for the next round of the SW. That updated SW then gets uploaded to every Tesla on the road. Your car has gotten smarter because somebody 2,000 miles away hit a squirrel 2 weeks ago. As it gets smarter, more people buy Teslas. The dataset gets bigger, and so on.
That's an optimization algorithm with exponential convergence.
There's no reason you can't go on a joyride with the top down on the weekend, but self-driving frees you from having to drive to get from point A to point B.
and it's trying to solve a really stupid problem. For some reason people are convinced that a lot of accidents could be avoided if car A zigged while car B zagged.
In nearly 100% of cases the right answer is for car A and car B to hit their breaks and stop. If how you react is based on how some other car is telling you it's planning to react then that's a very brittle scenario.
The potential for corner cases in a distributed V2V protocol, including the cars getting confused about which car they are talking to, older cars with buggy non-updated firmware, and outright malicious actors. It's a bad engineering solution.