Tesla Model 3 is already the best selling small/midsize luxry vehicle in the Q50/Q60/A4/A5/CLA/i3 range. If he even gets anywhere close to what he's projecting and/or keeps up roughly the 10% weekly production growth rate, he's gonna be ship 300k cars this year.

Big ifs, so he's on track to fail pretty spectacularly.

Aren't they selling most Model 3s at a loss though? Does anyone have up-to-date figures on what the average marginal profit/loss is on a new Model 3?

Munro (the guy who reverse engineers cars) claims it costs $36K to build a base Model 3. Just to build it - parts + factory labor. He says the top of the car is horribly engineered and looks like amateurs did it (a 90s Kia I believe).

Conversion rates seem to be terrible at high prices - hence when an analyst asked this question on the conference call there was 15 seconds of pregnant pause (total silence) before "going to Youtube" - which mean the high end dries up in not too long. Then if Munro is correct they lose about $10K on every car after all expenses.

I don't know what the answer is.

There's a lot of real competition for solar roof panels from the makers of wait for it... roofing material.

That stuff isn't that high tech, and there are people in the world who are a lot better at manufacturing than TSLA.

Dow stopped selling solar roofs in 2016 because of lack of demand. SO it is probably a market similar to electric cars in that there is no competition because the market is too small at the price point that would make them profitable. But the technology is fairly old and well-known, so once it is profitable there will be a ton of competition.

How can it ever be a big market? It's a dumbass, costly idea. Most building is cost sensitive just like most most car buying is cost sensitive, and manufactured panels can never be cheaper than simple uncomplicated tiles or iron or other roofing materials. Not even the same ballpark.

Musk's claim it'll cost the same as regular roofing are a big fat lie, like 25% gross margins on the $35K Model 3, which Munro says cost $36K to build. It's what Musk does. He lies.

Besides, solar is a commodity item where there is no edge - which is why SCTY was going bankrupt and had to be bought out.

Perhaps it'll get some niche traction in crazy places like California where solar is now mandated, but its not going to be a big thing.

I don't think of SolarCity as that valuable because brand just doesn't matter as much in that space since in the long term, the buyers will be mostly utility scale sophisticated consumers.

Tesla meanwhile is synonymous with fast electric. That makes it unique. Even if BMW/Porsche/Mercedes start making fast EVs, people, at least in short term, will remember their heritage as ICE car makers.

It's not uncommon at all for early production prototypes to have much higher costs of production than later mass production models.

The big difference is most companies recycle their prototypes while Musk is thick-skinned enough to ship prototypes to customers.

doubt that rooftop solar will amount to all that much but commercial scale battery energy storage could be a huge market as the cost of utility solar installations continue to drop in coming years.

Batteries aren't viable for scale storage. They're far too expensive. They're ok for niche heavily subsidized projects and quite decent for last 0.1% grid load/spike balancing which is very high cost (this is what Enron took advantage of). But a size they become a no-value-added commodity - and Panasonic owns the gigafactory and the battery factories that supply the gigafactory and the knowhow. They bent Musk over and inserted their superior business skills - he owes about 13 billion dollars to them regardless of production through 2021.

Even if it takes off, it's a case of ultra low or even negative margins and any profit flowing to the battery maker.

Solar scale projects will likely settle on thermal as it's the only way to compete with the cost profiles of normal baseload. Estimates from 3c - 10c per kWh in the next decade.

I do agree there's a revenue stream here if they continue to undercut competitor/subsidize their installation. But with what? Tesla needs to grab $100 billion in net balance sheet inflow in the next decade to compete with the majors - which means profits - and M3 likely isn't profitable.

Thick-skinned may or may not be true, but wtf is he gonna sell if he isn't selling the prototypes? Nothing? lol

Breaking below the wedge that's been forming the past few months and keep in mind the broader market has broken well above its over the past couple weeks. Today's follow through is a bit unusual given its a monthly options expiration, not seeing a corresponding headline for a pretty significant technical move lower.

Bull market, TSLA treads water. Bear market, TSLA is screwed. Recession, TSLA is bankrupt.

All this discussion about how TSLA can survive its debt is contingent on the market, sector or systemic, not tanking. Or the economy.

Bullish

In the last CC, Elon Musk said that the gross margins for the M3 were negative. And this is using their inflated definition of GM, not the industry standard definition.

$35k M3 is not going to happen.

A couple of news items early today:

- Another high level rat jumping ship:

- BMW announces compact electric upcoming

Mostly a down market + the rat jumping ship. Bias is negative on Tesla and the market has been propping it up a little the past week. Some fake news on Wednesday about 4500/week production gave it a little rip on volume, but that turned out to be...fake news.

Speaking of rats jumping ship, some education for Spurious, who claimed this was "nothing" and not important and irrelevant:

https://twitter.com/BSA19741/status/997493987631095808



Multiple high level accounting departures are a giant red flat at the best of times. Add in them leaving huge about-to-vest packages on the table just as a company is supposed to first reach scale and profitability, and you know the goose is cooked. Accountants tend to understand the truth of a business better than anyone.

He could just push his timeline back by 1 year and he would be fine. Model S is already rated "above average" in reliability by Consumer Reports.

Basically, I think ToothSayer has a point that Tesla is still figuring out how to build cars. I just think he overstates his case given Musk's track record in building things he should have no business building (SpaceX and Model S by now) and getting pretty good at it in a much shorter time than other people do though longer than he promises.

More importantly, I think the market realizes that Musk's promises were unrealistic all along and even his customers recognize that the first batches of whatever Tesla builds are probably beta products.

PS: I think Musk might even realizes all this himself but he has to give himself unrealistic goals because he gets off on it and he doesn't know how to operate in lower gears so he just makes sure he always has to be in overdrive. I know a lot of people like that.

Waiting a year means raising significant capital to fund existing operations


Not sure waiting a year is an option

That plastic zip tie on the wishbone/upper a-arm sure better hold. (yes, I know it has been speculated that the zip tie was only in use for molding the iron/steel/whatever piece to the wishbone, and doesn't actually hold it together)

https://electrek.co/2018/05/20/tesla...ance-versions/

the zip tied piece is just a damper

wat

so much about the 35.000$ M3, guess those people just need to wait a little bit longer...
if they'd actually be building and selling 35.000$ cars they'd be out of business by now.

This was posted on reddit before being deleted:



I think this says it all. Musk is basically someone who hit a runner runner on rockets (ripe for disruption) but lacks the intelligence and competence to run a mass manufacturing company. Car manufacturing is highly efficient and organized and competitive and not all ripe for disruption, especially by a disorganized grandiose narcissist too stupid to know what he doesn't know.

why'd you delete it?

Elon Musk had two successful businesses even before SpaceX.

Many people with IQ north of 140 have said Musk is brilliant. Even before that he showed a lot of academic success, including acceptance into Stanford's PhD program in applied physics and materials science before he basically said "F studying theory, I am just going to build this ****."

No he didn't. He was a software geek in the right spot at the right time. Zero evidence of intelligence and business skill. This is just luck. His first real-world business, SolarCity, was a failure and basically bankrupt.
Musk is very very obviously not brilliant. He's highly driven, daring, refuses to fail and like to break things down to first principles. Those are admirable (and sadly rare) qualities, and that was enough, combined with some luckboxing, to disrupt a disruption-ready industry like launching rockets. I see zero evidence of very high intelligence let alone genius in Musk.

The right kind of fame attracts accolades and praise.
Right, he has some academic intelligence, 120-130 IQ maybe? Have you ever read masque posts in SMP? That guy is also a PhD at Stanford. Do you think he could run an ice cream shop, let alone a car manufacturing business?

Raw intelligence, even if I accept your premise, doesn't get you much without other skills. Musk has flaws he is far too stupid to see and which make him unsuitable for anything other than PR and crazy-idea-stage startups, for which he has both the energy and the mind and the chaotic grandiose personality to turn nothing into something. He lacks the intelligence,self awareness and sophistication to run an auto manufacturing business. That's pretty obvious at this stage.