This is a hell of a read. Basically, the car is hosed in terms of quality, which is pretty much what you'd expect from a grandiose narcissist hiring phone designers as engineering heads and thinking he could outrobot the majors and skip beta testing.

The two most respected car testing names in the business have bagged the Model 3. Wonderful sports car handling and ride and the rest is pure **** including reliability. And they lack even 1/4 of the service centers needed to handle these issues, and are already backlogged weeks.

damn, sounds like Tesla is screwed!

So you short right now TS?

Read the article first and tell me if you'd go long here? Or hold?

https://www.edmunds.com/tesla/model-...pril-2018.html

This may have something to do with why the implied volatility is so high lol. Short TSLA is basically the most crowded trade ever.

I don't have any TSLA position have no plan to have one (last sort of company I'd buy, I like buying small cap value and this is large cap growth).

So again, you're making it sound like TSLA is totally ****ed right now. So are you short?

I have a lot of favorite parts, including the writers overall frustration that he has to keep driving this thing, but this i laughed at a bunch


."Who is that joker playing his stereo so loud I can hear it from here?" Oh, it's Elon. I turned it down, but it kept wavering up and down as I started driving, working against my repeated attempts to dial it down. Then it blasted all the way to maximum. My ears are still ringing two hours later. Fixed after reboot. Not sure about hearing damage."

I think they had a bad touch screen, but yeah, that's hilarious. At this stage, we have:

- Multiple reports of touchscreen issues
- Multiple reports of serious software issues in all components from the drive system to maps to controls
- A teardown from a very respected car guy showing a cost to build alone of $36K and horrible design/weight. These will not have been fixed; these are in the basic design of the car.
- Multiple reports of braking and other mechanical issues
- Multiple reports of fit and quality issues - stuff just falling out like mirrors, held on with double sided tape
- Two of the most respected car review companies - who gave top marks to Model S - bagging the Model 3
- Back seats which are universally bagged and not a good experience
- A radical central control iPad which does away with most controls and is unsafe and no one likes
- Cheapest version is $50K for 3-6 months, which means 6-9 months in Elon Speak.
- High level people leaving in droves
- Very poor conversion rates for deposits
- S & X declining sales and no possibility of growth
- Future expansion majorly scaled back/put on hold due to a serious liquidity crisis. Included in the major scaleback future expansion of M3 line to 10K/week.
- Everything Tesla owns or has a claim on, has been mortgaged for cash already spent, from leases to their factory to their equipment
- Billions owed to credit and another half a billion in deposits.
- Bonds one rating downgrade from junk
- $19 billion owed in binding contracts through 2021 regardless of sales.

Against this, we have:

- Model 3 ride and handling is lovely and like a sports car
- High quality battery and electronics, best in class
- Production increasing exponentially and getting up to a few thousand a week now?

At this stage it's far more likely this all goes belly up than the bull case where Tesla turns into a major competent car maker at -30% of the current valuation. Maybe 50:1 more likely. And there doesn't seem to be a middle ground given the level of their debt and contractual obligations.

So much can and is likely to go wrong here. If a mouse sneezes it'll be night at the trailer park for Elon, who's $650 million in debt that we know of, pledged against Tesla shares.

I'm really curious what the bulls think the sane bull case is here? What the probabilities are of various outcomes?

Took years to fix F-22 and F-35 HUDs and a lot of the fixes were to have failsafe control systems for critical systems that just can't fail.

But that doesn't matter. The owners of the flawed vehicles are the super diehards that actually may wear the flaws of the cars as badges of honor where they sacrificed themselves for the Great One.

True for S & X. Not true for a mass market. The alpha/beta testing crowd is only so large, and there isn't the profit or revenue to go the extra mile to make it all work.

Trying to get a good handle on how flawed these cars are as that answers whether Tesla will survive. Two highly respected car journals who liked the S both unluckily got duds? Maybe. Odds are against it though.

They need about $30 billion between now and 2021 to survive to the start of a Model Y ramp, and they won't get there from credit lines and equity raises like they could when the revenue needs were smaller. They need large highly impressive revenue streams and some temporary profit to bring in more funds. If Model 3 demand fizzles, they are dead. If there are major flaws requiring a recall, they are dead. If production caps at around 6K, and it's going to be a hard slog to get it higher given that they've scaled back all operations to save money, they are dead. If the car truly costs $36K base to make, they are dead since they won't sell enough at the $50K price point, and can no longer afford to lose $10K/car, having nothing left to mortgage. If a recession hits, they are dead.

Tesla is still probably going through the diehard portions of the order book. Musk may or may not be doing it intentionally but by assigning priority on a combination of value (expensive models first) and first come first serve (more hardcore fans first), he's taking care of the most forgiving customers first.

S had quality issues that took 2 to 3 years to sort out (depending on if you stop when it was out of the cellar or when it got to about average). Consumer Reports by 2015 and 2016 (3 years after release of Model S?) were saying Tesla Model Ss were about average reliability overall, which is pretty good for the price segment (more expensive cars are less reliable due to having more parts).

This is actually pretty typical time line for brand new and totally redesigned vehicle models. Tesla's improvement cycle is maybe half a year or a year slower than typical but that's probably because that half a year to a year is when traditional auto makers are making betas in their factory and recycling parts to work out the kinks of the assembly line. Tesla just goes live and works it out as it goes, shipping ****ty unreliable cars to the volunteer beta testers that paid ridiculous amount for the privilege.

Man, imagine that happening when you're trying to shift lanes.

That's what autopilot is for.

There's a joke in here somewhere with highway dividers and crossing semis but I'm not gonna touch it.

What is this I don't even.jpg

Yeah, mind blown. Why on Earth would they do this?

a) They couldn't hire anyone more qualified?
b) they legit think a VP of monetization for a low end phone messaging app is a viable engineering VP?
c) both?

I really don't know which option is worse of (a) or (b).

Also, why on Earth aren't they promoting engineering talent from within the company rather than hiring a phone app monetization VP? Aren't there people immediately below the recent departure who actually know the ins and outs of the business who could move up?

None of this makes sense just like hiring an Apple product designer as head of M3 engineering made no sense.

Pretty sure elon thinks he needed the press of someone with a big title fron a known ticker. Moving someone up probably looks reactive and weak to him. It kind of reminds me of Trumps razor. The dumbest explaination is probably the correct one.

I don't think there is anything wrong with hiring a coder to do a coder's job.

I find it however odd to hire a VP of Monetization that has struggled to increase Snapchat's ARPU (average revenue per user). To be clear, he did grow Snapchat's ARPU pretty rapidly at 30-40% per year (off memory) but that's kind of slow relative to expectations and what the company was promising.

Oh, wait, I get it. Overpromiser that still performs at a high level. He's a Musk clone.

Qi Lu is moving back to the US. But I doubt he would want to join the sinking ship.
VP of Monetization is just a strange pick.

Are there any shareholders itt who can share their thoughts on why they are still holding?

Tesla SH are the exact demographic that will tell u they got out at 370 because they "made enough" and are thinking if getting back in soon


If cuban b posts again you will see what i mean

Apple is partnering with the largest auto maker in the world.
So in the bizarre world of Tesla, this will probably help the stock.

Apple's history in the car business has not been a success story, has it?

Elons meltdown on twitter at the media is kind of sad

FYP