It is sold at loss because it is not the main business. Main business is to sell shares. R&D is unavoidable in any new product. It is not going anywhere. R&D will be here 10 years later the same as it is here today. Old R&D investment depreciates and becomes useless. You don't sell exactly the same car model for 10 years.
It doesn't change anything. Panasonic didn't invented any new "giga" technology. It will be using mostly the same technology, slightly different form factor with some extra silicone to improve specific energy a bit. And by the way, current piece of "giga" factory is even smaller than old Panasonic battery factory in Japan. If you believe in all the miracles Musk is talking about before every share sale, you may as well go buy some cold fusion device, it will make miracles too.
Why are battery cars so expensive then? They don't need that complicated engine, just slap cheap* battery and electric motor that is already well perfected technology used in hybrids.
$150/kWh * 60 kWh = $9000. Plus margin, warranty costs, cooling system, etc. It is close to automaker's manufacturing cost for a complete economy gas car.
It's worth noting that preorders -- even with a meager deposit -- are not the same thing as orders. Just how many of those preorders are speculative in the hopes of turning around and selling immediately at a profit? I'd wager the answer is "many of them", and many more will likely never be turned into actual orders.
I'd also argue that the Model 3 is far from being "low cost" or sold at "a price people do want". At US$35,000 base, there are 564 new vehicle types (that's models and trim levels together) listed on Edmunds.com which are less expensive (I ruled out 11 vehicles that were almost $35k, accepting only anything sub-$34.5k.) And as of late last year, the average new car sale price in the US market was $33,500.
The Model 3 is, by most people's standards, still an expensive car.
Average passenger car is something like $26k. $33k+ includes trucks and SUVs. And no way you will get usable Model 3 for $35k in 2017 or 2018, as second quarter report shows Capex investment for production and service stalled and highly unlikely to reach more than half of 2.25 billion target for this year. Sorry guys, urgent SolarCity bailout is priority now. Just quick charging access will cost you some thousands extra above base price, and most likely you will not be able to use standard chargers like every other competitor car on the road without paying "supercharger activation fee" like it is with older Model S even if you'll buy some clumsy adapter from Tesla for half a grand.
Some 3000 people already work in the Chernobyl exclusion zone. They work in shifts, their exposure to radiation is monitored, and it isn't as bad as 30 years ago. I assume this installation would no be next to the reactor anyway. It is the same as working in any nuclear power plant - you may get some exposure to radiation, but it is monitored and isn't likely that it will be dangerous if everything goes as expected. You don't live at your workplace next to a reactor though. There is difference between agriculture when soil is constantly disturbed and servicing some PV panels.
Power station is still there, even if last reactor was shut down in 2000. The power lines are there and operational - and they are expensive. The land is free and has no other use, you don't need to buy it from multiple owners. It allows to reduce costs significantly and make it faster.
You have no chance to verify that emails or whatever provided by Russian hacking team are 100% original and unedited, and nothing is missing. Their secret service alter such documents and create fakes all the time, it is one of their job tasks to generate fake propaganda. I already read media reports that some these revealed Clinton emails are obviously fake, with dates later than the hack itself.
Yes, asking enemy to invade your country is great way to do internal politics. You know what is the word to call it? The fact that it is computer only doesn't change anything, nowdays everything is done on computers and wars are started and fought by propaganda on computer networks too.
Another problem with such "services" from your enemy is that it only provides what suits the enemy. And alters information the way it suits enemy too. Nothing new here really.
He lives "free life" in bloody dictatorship that shoots few political opponents in the center of the capital, or poisons them with radioactive materials across the Europe, annexes territories from neighboring countries just like Nazis in 1939 and promotes hate of any freedom as freedom is foreign enemy invention. What a poser.
This is complete nonsense. US alone requires 4000 bcf natural gas storage to get over winter, and US is not entirely in North. You may be living somewhere in South California or imaginary dream world and never heard about snow and ice that covers all solar panels for few months in winter elsewhere and never read any serious papers with real world numbers how electric grid and energy distribution works.
You are just repeating the same nonsensical Musk advertising about "fool cells" for 12 year olds. Please do reading of some studies on the subject. Storing energy for many months works just fine and essential part of this civilization. Never heard of natural gas storage? Please read here: http://ir.eia.gov/ngs/ngs.html Basically the same storage can be applied to hydrogen: http://www.h2fc-fair.com/hm13/... It is the only scaleable way to store energy for long term that is necessary both for electric grid and seasonal thermal energy usage. Batteries are fine for short term storage, grid balancing, but suggesting that they are suitable for everything in the world like long term storage or kitchen sink replacement is plain silly. Neither hydro nor many alternative energy storage options are even close to being significant for that purpose at wide scale. And you can't use any solar/wind energy for electric grid without long term storage, it is useless for grid at wide scale with random 20%-30% availability that varies by seasons. Once you are at it, hydrogen is intermediate step in renewable energy path, whatever way you choose - using it in fuel cell cars directly, providing dispatchable electricity to grid from fuel cell plants, or mixing it with natural gas and burning together.
Straight from Musk ad, huh? The only problem is that you don't have any batteries that can store energy over the winter and will not have any time soon. Musk sells Powerpacks for around $500/kwh. US natural gas storage peaks at around 4000 bcf, just enough get over the winter. That is only 1,171,989,452,094 kWh. By Musk battery prices, it would be $585,994,726,047,000. How many trillions do you have to buy all these fantasy batteries? Are you sure they will hold charge over months?
Hydrogen was used in gas networks decades ago before advent of cheap natural gas and it is well known how to deal with it, what pipeline materials should be used, what leaks and what not, and how much it would cost to store it underground (very little compared to batteries). Please don't scaremonger us with old well researched technology.
Why would you need to get hydrogen from so deep? Plain electrolysis, 46 kWh per kg of H2 and $0.04/kWh surplus wind electricity results in 46 * 0.04 = $1.84/kg. Not much different from wholesale gas price per gallon, but can be used more efficiently and conveniently compared to combustion. The problem is scaling up hydrogen distribution, which is too expensive at current low scale, and not production.
Yes, people want to restrict their preschool kids to adult porn when leaving them with computer to watch some cartoon or game. This concept may sound very strange, odd and unnatural to you, but it is so in real life.
Even adult persons do not expect porn ads when viewing e.g. respectable news site and would be offended by them. You may call it self censorship when choosing ads as porn sites would pay better.
It is government job to encourage and provide incentives for some kind of rating system. It will never be 100% voluntarily or 100% mandatory, something in between. Just like with movies, unrated movies do exist and you are free to watch them, but studios often get much better audiences with rated versions.
It is isn't about censoring, it is about having a choice what you want to view and what not. Spam always finds way around, but spam filters still are able to filter most of it. People should be able to filter web the same as their mailbox. Whatever the rating system, they can be different and I don't know how to invent the best. Mixing preschool kid cartoons with adult content like Youtube does is evil.
It is very dumb to compare airlines and cars. Airliners at cruising altitude don't require split second reaction most of the time. Autopilot disengages, pilot takes over few seconds later. No cross traffic appearing unexpectedly out of nowhere. It has nothing to do with cars other than silly name Musk chose for marketing. Today's cars have traffic aware cruise control and lane keep assistance. The same terminology is used in Tesla manual, as for all other automakers. Now only Tesla went into "ludicrous irresponsibility" and allowed TACC to take over and recklessly drive without hands for long time, as it needed for marketing reasons to present itself as very innovative, almost autonomic, even if it has nothing much more but the same Mobileye system as others that according to Mobileye can't detect perpendicular traffic at all at this time. It didn't detected this time too as it was expected, so we have first victim. And don't start compare some fake "autopilot" statistics with average 11 year clunker on US roads. Get detailed AP statistics, compare with 2+ year old big sedan fatalities when driven mostly on highways. 1 case isn't statistically significant, but it is obvious that it happened way too soon to call it safe and what else you can expect really.
These are not some abstract sensors but very specific ones made by known OEM with specific set of data that they can and can't provide. In particular they can't provide 3D map with coordinates of all objects and road surfaces that are not level. Some experience from gathering primitive data like speed/latitude/longitude may be useful long term, but it is usefulness is the same as taking crash PHP programming courses at local technical college expecting to become 3D modeling and AI expert:/
The other main difference is that Tesla has logged data from 50 million miles of autopilot data from all over the world, while Google has logged data from 1.5 million miles mainly in the Bay area.
I think this gap will widen exponentially, and good enough AI for driving will come only through masses of data, so Tesla have a huge advantage.
This is dumb fanboy argument that we hear again and again. Tesla didn't recorded anything. They don't have any hardware that would provided the data, i.e. laser radar system. They don't have enough connection bandwidth to transfer the data in real time. For autonomous driving, their system is dead (sometimes literaly) end from yesterday that will be replaced soon with better systems that will provide more advanced data anyway. You can't teach a pig to fly no matter how many million miles you will run with it.
"Autopilot is by far the most advanced driver assistance system on the road, but it does not turn a Tesla into an autonomous vehicle and does not allow the driver to abdicate responsibility." I see Musk is getting a clue that slapping some proximity sensors on a car without a proper 3D radar and any chance of things like road surface detection, adding extra hype to the mix, and selling as coolest whee-zee "autopilot" in the world isn't that cool as it seemed. That is after somebody died even it was told it will happen by many people. Now the question is how many deaths it will take for this genius to realize that other automakers and OEM developers FORCE driver to stay engaged with hands on wheel with their own driver-assistance system, and do not allow any "autonomous driving" Russian roulette without proper hardware and AI for it. And this comparison to average 11 years clunker on the US with worse crumple zones and no auto-brake features is so lame. You would expect better from new $100k car.
Mr. Putin prefers Trump to be the next president, as it may fragment NATO and other US alliances. This is his ultimate and most desirable goal, it will make him strongest bully in his yard.
He certainly has plenty of influence in the circles of people like Assange and can subtly manipulate them pushing to the right direction without them having a clue that they are manipulated and used.
You can't imagine that software can have bugs?;) Really, all software has plenty of bugs and do not always work as intended. And many bugs are random and hardly reproducible.
"abruptly increased to 100%" - sounds like BS. How on Earth you can now if a pedal was pressed 100%, or one of 2 potentiometers failed and software failed to apply minimum throttle instead of maximum, or it was just one of zillion of software bugs that registered 100% press when there was none? Tesla should release raw data if it has any meaningful & detailed data, then we can see how it changed over time and if Tesla story is credible, was there gradual press on pedal like pressing on brake, or was it some sudden jump to 100 over 5 milliseconds that doesn't look like human input. Right now, it looks like Tesla is covering it up or not taking it seriously.
Such cases are not about reporting but about extortion. Note dental software. Not some free tetris game software, but "dental". It means money and easy extortion target as they would have big & expensive problem with government institutions when client records are disclosed to everybody.
Slashdot Mirror
It is sold at loss because it is not the main business. Main business is to sell shares.
R&D is unavoidable in any new product. It is not going anywhere. R&D will be here 10 years later the same as it is here today. Old R&D investment depreciates and becomes useless. You don't sell exactly the same car model for 10 years.
True believers don't care about stinky math or money.
Accounting for dummies: This year investment doesn't affect profit. Or loss in this case. It may only affect next year through depreciation.
It doesn't change anything. Panasonic didn't invented any new "giga" technology. It will be using mostly the same technology, slightly different form factor with some extra silicone to improve specific energy a bit. And by the way, current piece of "giga" factory is even smaller than old Panasonic battery factory in Japan. If you believe in all the miracles Musk is talking about before every share sale, you may as well go buy some cold fusion device, it will make miracles too.
Why are battery cars so expensive then? They don't need that complicated engine, just slap cheap* battery and electric motor that is already well perfected technology used in hybrids.
$150/kWh * 60 kWh = $9000. Plus margin, warranty costs, cooling system, etc. It is close to automaker's manufacturing cost for a complete economy gas car.
It's worth noting that preorders -- even with a meager deposit -- are not the same thing as orders. Just how many of those preorders are speculative in the hopes of turning around and selling immediately at a profit? I'd wager the answer is "many of them", and many more will likely never be turned into actual orders.
I'd also argue that the Model 3 is far from being "low cost" or sold at "a price people do want". At US$35,000 base, there are 564 new vehicle types (that's models and trim levels together) listed on Edmunds.com which are less expensive (I ruled out 11 vehicles that were almost $35k, accepting only anything sub-$34.5k.) And as of late last year, the average new car sale price in the US market was $33,500.
The Model 3 is, by most people's standards, still an expensive car.
Average passenger car is something like $26k. $33k+ includes trucks and SUVs.
And no way you will get usable Model 3 for $35k in 2017 or 2018, as second quarter report shows Capex investment for production and service stalled and highly unlikely to reach more than half of 2.25 billion target for this year. Sorry guys, urgent SolarCity bailout is priority now.
Just quick charging access will cost you some thousands extra above base price, and most likely you will not be able to use standard chargers like every other competitor car on the road without paying "supercharger activation fee" like it is with older Model S even if you'll buy some clumsy adapter from Tesla for half a grand.
Some 3000 people already work in the Chernobyl exclusion zone. They work in shifts, their exposure to radiation is monitored, and it isn't as bad as 30 years ago. I assume this installation would no be next to the reactor anyway. It is the same as working in any nuclear power plant - you may get some exposure to radiation, but it is monitored and isn't likely that it will be dangerous if everything goes as expected. You don't live at your workplace next to a reactor though. There is difference between agriculture when soil is constantly disturbed and servicing some PV panels.
Power station is still there, even if last reactor was shut down in 2000. The power lines are there and operational - and they are expensive. The land is free and has no other use, you don't need to buy it from multiple owners. It allows to reduce costs significantly and make it faster.
You have no chance to verify that emails or whatever provided by Russian hacking team are 100% original and unedited, and nothing is missing. Their secret service alter such documents and create fakes all the time, it is one of their job tasks to generate fake propaganda. I already read media reports that some these revealed Clinton emails are obviously fake, with dates later than the hack itself.
Yes, asking enemy to invade your country is great way to do internal politics. You know what is the word to call it? The fact that it is computer only doesn't change anything, nowdays everything is done on computers and wars are started and fought by propaganda on computer networks too.
Another problem with such "services" from your enemy is that it only provides what suits the enemy. And alters information the way it suits enemy too. Nothing new here really.
He lives "free life" in bloody dictatorship that shoots few political opponents in the center of the capital, or poisons them with radioactive materials across the Europe, annexes territories from neighboring countries just like Nazis in 1939 and promotes hate of any freedom as freedom is foreign enemy invention. What a poser.
This is complete nonsense. US alone requires 4000 bcf natural gas storage to get over winter, and US is not entirely in North. You may be living somewhere in South California or imaginary dream world and never heard about snow and ice that covers all solar panels for few months in winter elsewhere and never read any serious papers with real world numbers how electric grid and energy distribution works.
You are just repeating the same nonsensical Musk advertising about "fool cells" for 12 year olds.
Please do reading of some studies on the subject.
Storing energy for many months works just fine and essential part of this civilization. Never heard of natural gas storage? Please read here:
http://ir.eia.gov/ngs/ngs.html
Basically the same storage can be applied to hydrogen:
http://www.h2fc-fair.com/hm13/...
It is the only scaleable way to store energy for long term that is necessary both for electric grid and seasonal thermal energy usage. Batteries are fine for short term storage, grid balancing, but suggesting that they are suitable for everything in the world like long term storage or kitchen sink replacement is plain silly. Neither hydro nor many alternative energy storage options are even close to being significant for that purpose at wide scale. And you can't use any solar/wind energy for electric grid without long term storage, it is useless for grid at wide scale with random 20%-30% availability that varies by seasons. Once you are at it, hydrogen is intermediate step in renewable energy path, whatever way you choose - using it in fuel cell cars directly, providing dispatchable electricity to grid from fuel cell plants, or mixing it with natural gas and burning together.
Straight from Musk ad, huh? The only problem is that you don't have any batteries that can store energy over the winter and will not have any time soon. Musk sells Powerpacks for around $500/kwh. US natural gas storage peaks at around 4000 bcf, just enough get over the winter. That is only 1,171,989,452,094 kWh. By Musk battery prices, it would be $585,994,726,047,000. How many trillions do you have to buy all these fantasy batteries? Are you sure they will hold charge over months?
Hydrogen was used in gas networks decades ago before advent of cheap natural gas and it is well known how to deal with it, what pipeline materials should be used, what leaks and what not, and how much it would cost to store it underground (very little compared to batteries). Please don't scaremonger us with old well researched technology.
Why would you need to get hydrogen from so deep?
Plain electrolysis, 46 kWh per kg of H2 and $0.04/kWh surplus wind electricity results in 46 * 0.04 = $1.84/kg. Not much different from wholesale gas price per gallon, but can be used more efficiently and conveniently compared to combustion. The problem is scaling up hydrogen distribution, which is too expensive at current low scale, and not production.
Yes, people want to restrict their preschool kids to adult porn when leaving them with computer to watch some cartoon or game. This concept may sound very strange, odd and unnatural to you, but it is so in real life.
Even adult persons do not expect porn ads when viewing e.g. respectable news site and would be offended by them. You may call it self censorship when choosing ads as porn sites would pay better.
It is government job to encourage and provide incentives for some kind of rating system. It will never be 100% voluntarily or 100% mandatory, something in between. Just like with movies, unrated movies do exist and you are free to watch them, but studios often get much better audiences with rated versions.
It is isn't about censoring, it is about having a choice what you want to view and what not.
Spam always finds way around, but spam filters still are able to filter most of it.
People should be able to filter web the same as their mailbox. Whatever the rating system, they can be different and I don't know how to invent the best.
Mixing preschool kid cartoons with adult content like Youtube does is evil.
It is very dumb to compare airlines and cars. Airliners at cruising altitude don't require split second reaction most of the time. Autopilot disengages, pilot takes over few seconds later. No cross traffic appearing unexpectedly out of nowhere. It has nothing to do with cars other than silly name Musk chose for marketing. Today's cars have traffic aware cruise control and lane keep assistance. The same terminology is used in Tesla manual, as for all other automakers. Now only Tesla went into "ludicrous irresponsibility" and allowed TACC to take over and recklessly drive without hands for long time, as it needed for marketing reasons to present itself as very innovative, almost autonomic, even if it has nothing much more but the same Mobileye system as others that according to Mobileye can't detect perpendicular traffic at all at this time. It didn't detected this time too as it was expected, so we have first victim. And don't start compare some fake "autopilot" statistics with average 11 year clunker on US roads. Get detailed AP statistics, compare with 2+ year old big sedan fatalities when driven mostly on highways. 1 case isn't statistically significant, but it is obvious that it happened way too soon to call it safe and what else you can expect really.
These are not some abstract sensors but very specific ones made by known OEM with specific set of data that they can and can't provide. In particular they can't provide 3D map with coordinates of all objects and road surfaces that are not level. :/
Some experience from gathering primitive data like speed/latitude/longitude may be useful long term, but it is usefulness is the same as taking crash PHP programming courses at local technical college expecting to become 3D modeling and AI expert
The other main difference is that Tesla has logged data from 50 million miles of autopilot data from all over the world, while Google has logged data from 1.5 million miles mainly in the Bay area.
I think this gap will widen exponentially, and good enough AI for driving will come only through masses of data, so Tesla have a huge advantage.
This is dumb fanboy argument that we hear again and again. Tesla didn't recorded anything. They don't have any hardware that would provided the data, i.e. laser radar system. They don't have enough connection bandwidth to transfer the data in real time. For autonomous driving, their system is dead (sometimes literaly) end from yesterday that will be replaced soon with better systems that will provide more advanced data anyway. You can't teach a pig to fly no matter how many million miles you will run with it.
"Autopilot is by far the most advanced driver assistance system on the road, but it does not turn a Tesla into an autonomous vehicle and does not allow the driver to abdicate responsibility."
I see Musk is getting a clue that slapping some proximity sensors on a car without a proper 3D radar and any chance of things like road surface detection, adding extra hype to the mix, and selling as coolest whee-zee "autopilot" in the world isn't that cool as it seemed. That is after somebody died even it was told it will happen by many people. Now the question is how many deaths it will take for this genius to realize that other automakers and OEM developers FORCE driver to stay engaged with hands on wheel with their own driver-assistance system, and do not allow any "autonomous driving" Russian roulette without proper hardware and AI for it.
And this comparison to average 11 years clunker on the US with worse crumple zones and no auto-brake features is so lame. You would expect better from new $100k car.
Mr. Putin prefers Trump to be the next president, as it may fragment NATO and other US alliances. This is his ultimate and most desirable goal, it will make him strongest bully in his yard.
He certainly has plenty of influence in the circles of people like Assange and can subtly manipulate them pushing to the right direction without them having a clue that they are manipulated and used.
You can't imagine that software can have bugs? ;) Really, all software has plenty of bugs and do not always work as intended. And many bugs are random and hardly reproducible.
"abruptly increased to 100%" - sounds like BS. How on Earth you can now if a pedal was pressed 100%, or one of 2 potentiometers failed and software failed to apply minimum throttle instead of maximum, or it was just one of zillion of software bugs that registered 100% press when there was none? Tesla should release raw data if it has any meaningful & detailed data, then we can see how it changed over time and if Tesla story is credible, was there gradual press on pedal like pressing on brake, or was it some sudden jump to 100 over 5 milliseconds that doesn't look like human input. Right now, it looks like Tesla is covering it up or not taking it seriously.
Such cases are not about reporting but about extortion. Note dental software. Not some free tetris game software, but "dental". It means money and easy extortion target as they would have big & expensive problem with government institutions when client records are disclosed to everybody.