Landing SUCCESSFUL!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Meh, ToothSayer and/or George Hotz could throw together a recoverable first-stage booster over a long weekend. Wake me up when SpaceX recovers the second stage...

It's not super computationally expensive to multiply a few theta vectors in your RNN. I would assume you can run it in ms if not µs. The hard part is training it, not running it.

Sub,

What do you think of the insane comparison of the cost of refueling the first stage to the cost of building a new one? Obviously the entire rocket needs to be stripped/retested. We can't even run race cars without stripping the entire thing, but people think you just put some more fuel in and send it up again?

wtf?

Again, not really first to do anything, but they have a fully functioning product compared the other guys who have more of a proof of concept. While obviously the level of stupidity being thrown about is totally insane, clearly this is a major step.

Will SpaceX start developing internal testing procedures or just pretend everything works till it breaks? Rely on more "outsourced testing" (rofl)? Regardless, big progress from them.

These might help illustrate just how much further ahead Spacex is. And Blue Origin is as old as Spacex and has a founder that has been much wealthier over most of the period, Musk has only been a billionaire for the last few years and with far less liquidity available to him.

Why the landing is a huge win for reliability

Cuban,

Assuming that they actually start testing their own parts in house. That is a pretty massive assumption, considering they just blew up a rocket due to outsourced testing.

But like... someone wrote it down, so it must be true. Elon doesn't routinely lie about all sorts of crazy ****.

Lol tooth usually I agree with you, but you are so far of the mark here it isn't funny. I've been following Musk for a while now, read his biography and you are wrong on most part. Nevermind that short trash piece you posted that listed freaking seeking alpha articles as sources.

The rocket Bezo´s launched is not even remotely comparable to what Musk has done so far. For starters, without looking at reusability, Musk has already drove the costs of a launch waaaay down. Second, Bezo´s launched his rocket like 100 km in space, while Musk launched his rocket at 400 km altitude WITH a heavy payload. A huge huge difference.

On Tesla I'm a bit more skeptic, but to say that he has accomplished nothing there is laughable. When he took over as CEO of Tesla it was a complete mess on the verge of bankruptcy. They basically were way way over budget with the roadster and he pulled it together again there and drove a lot of costs out. Granted, he did not do all of that by himself, but he certainly played an important role in all of this.

Nevermind the fact that he funded SpaceX with his own money. And Blue origin also stole a lot of employees from SpaceX. Also your claim that Musk played only a very small role is also laughable. And a lot of SpaceX employees would probably disagree with you there. Another billionaire, probably known on this forum, Andy Beal tried something similar in 1997:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Beal
His role is probably a bit overrated by people, but he certainly played no small part in all of this.

Saying his success is just a matter of throwing a bunch of smart people together and throwing money at it, is laughably arrogant and short sighted if you would study the subject a bit imo. Even his haters who were involved with him admit what he is done is nothing short of impressive.

Tesla's cash flow for 2015 is going to be approximately -$1,800,000,000. They are increasing payroll and expenses, banking on their ability to tap the equity market in perpetuity. But this isn't Amazon, they aren't building market share and there is no moat. They sold approximately 20,000 cars this year. That's a rounding error for the big boys. Who, by the way, are profitable.

Where do you find this sales data? I thought the purposefully obscured their sales to hide the fact their cars are selling poorly. (Weird reporting, extra incentives, etc)

I'd be interested to see some quantitative data to match the qualitative information.

You might want to read the current issue of Car & Driver. They compare the three best semi-autonomous driving systems on the market (Mercedes, BMW and Infiniti) and their conclusion is that the Tesla system is far ahead of the other 3. "Tesla's autopilot app lives in a class of one."

TruthSayer has some extremely strange beliefs about robotic vision and the elements necessary for SDC. There are a couple threads recently where he has changed his views to suit whatever he is arguing and clearly has no understanding of the issue. He seems to think that modern camera technology is insufficient and that 150mp cameras are needed. Or something equally silly. He's made comments that are just outright false about feature extraction (Except in the most absurd of interpretations essentially claiming combinations of pixels represents the upper bound of features, which is true, but useless.)

He also weirdly claimed to be a major investor in transportation networks.

So ya, attempting to convince him with ubiquitous reviews about how great Tesla's technology is will be a waste of time. (Only legit complaint I've read is that if you drive it really fast, the battery will run out really fast. Which seems obvious to normal people. Hi science. But the Tesla PR machine sued over that.)

More shameless Musk spin. This quarter was a disaster. Barely scraped in on the low end of thrice-revised-down guidance. Model X a big failure on several levels; production ramp far slower thanks to deeply idiotic and unecessary design decisions from Musk such as weird special back row seats that are huge net negative (you can't fold them down), and needlessly complex doors. He would have been fired if he didn't own the company. Over two years behind the originally planned schedule.

The market sees the numbers for what they are. -8.5% today.

And just for a bit of historical perspective on how Musk is a clown, here's a Forbes article (Why the Telsa Model X is a Home Run) from 2012. Here are the claims of Musk (via Tesla's PR) at the time. Keep in mind, this was February 2012:

Over two years behind their own claimed schedule on Model X, 3 years behind schedule on Model 3 reveal (which has yet to happen). This is a huge fail, and other car companies will now eat their lunch as battery tech has caught up and surpassed Tesla.

How does someone fail so badly? Musk is either:

- A ****** at predicting the future of something he 100% controls
- A liar and fraud
- Some combination of the two

Does anyone really think he's going to meet his late 2017 mass production target for the Model 3 - less than 2 years? That it's going to be $35,000? Sales rapidly drop off over this price point, and the current in-production Model X is selling for $116,000. Meanwhile, the 87 mile range Nissan Leaf is available right now - in 2016 - for $29,000 before various credits. Does anyone think that in three years time when Tesla finally gets out a Model 3 into production for $40 or $50K, they won't be crushed by similar range, similar performance, cheaper cars from the established makers who leverage $100 billion+ of capital and economies of scale across models?

Meanwhile, on another competitive front to the pure electric, more and more hybrids with small cheap gasoline engines for the highways, having electric performance for around town, and 100+ mile pure electric range will crush Tesla on price and range while being electric nearly 100% of the time, meaning the experience of an under $30K car is near identical to the Model 3, but with zero range or reliability problems (you get electric 100% of the time in the city, all the savings and benefits, yet don't need to stop at a charging station for half an hour to recharge on long trips and never feel range anxiety). Porsche Mission E and others has gone into development as well, which will crush the Tesla high end.

Tesla is ****ed. They've taken too long. Anyone who thinks Tesla is a good investment at this price is crazy, frankly.

He is really, really bad at predicting timelines. I'm not sure I'd agree that he 100% controls the execution, although he is certainly ultimately responsible for all of it. He has even acknowledged this shortcoming. There have been pretty significant misses even from quite short term predictions. Autopilot (which you deride as easy) was supposed to be released in "a few months" but actually took just over a year. I would take any time-based prediction from him with a huge grain of salt.

I've not seen much evidence of other brands coming close to similar range and performance. The Roadster had a 244 mile range at release in 2006 and its now ten years later and no one has come close. What will be different about 2016-2020 than 2011-2015 or 2006-2011. Price isn't everything -- the Model S outsold the Leaf 50,000 to 17,000 in 2015 despite a $50,000+ price difference.

I love Porsche and I've also got a 997 in my garage, but Mission E has only been shown as pure concept. The earliest we'll see a real one is 2020 and I'm not holding my breath for that date either. Its probably on about the same schedule as the Roadster redesign.

You made up those Tesla sales numbers. Also Nissan sold over 40k Leafs last year. (61k in 2014)

Please don't make up facts.

Tesla sold 50,000 Model S's in 2015 according to their earnings call, 25,700 in the US.

Nissan sold ~43,000 Leafs worldwide in 2015 and 17,000 in the US.

US Numbers: http://insideevs.com/monthly-plug-in-sales-scorecard/
Tesla Annual Numbers: http://cleantechnica.com/2016/01/05/...sales-in-2015/
Nissan numbers through Nov: http://ev-sales.blogspot.com/2015/12...mber-2015.html

mmbt,

Is that sales or deliveries? I was unaware they reported sales anywhere including on calls. Can you specify the time on the call? Maybe I can find a recording.

Well, I didn't make them up, but I did get it wrong. I compared worldwide Tesla sales to US Leaf sales. The fact remains that Tesla did outsell Leaf both US and worldwide, despite costing 3x as much.

Of course, I used deliveries because Tesla's sales numbers are bogus and not publicly reported, since a reservation could be counted as a "sale" despite only requiring $500 and having very little to do with their actual execution.

It will appear on their website eventually:

http://ir.teslamotors.com/events.cfm

While Musk certainly has a penchant for missing goals that were probably crazy/impossible to begin with. But people rarely notice that his early predictions of the model s were also much more modest. I remember that when he was first predicting the model s and x he was expecting to top out around 20k sales a year of each and then quickly focusing on the model 3 and as far as i can tell early model x predictions didn't even include later decisions like falcon wing doors or a unique panoramic windshield. It seems that as things progressed he realized that everything was taking longer than he thought AND that he could sell far more model s and x units than he thought, so it then made sense to change strategy and focus more on maximizing the S and X, as they still have no direct competitors, buying them more time for cell progression that is more important with the model 3. It isn't like he said we'd have the model x sometime in 2014 back in early 2012 and just stuck to that QE after QE, if you listened to the earnings calls the reality and his strategy evolved quarter by quarter, still overly optimistic to be sure but on more reasonable terms. So investors weren't exactly shocked by it.

It should be clear to anyone who pays attention that many of Elon's predictions are not terribly realistic or even internally consistent. For instance he has said he expects to sell a car with 621 miles (1,000km) by 2017, but that battery capacity will only increase a few percent per year. It's going to be difficult to more than double range with 10% improvement in battery density. I'm not sure many investors take his projection for TSLA to exceed AAPL's current market cap by 2025 seriously. He's not going to land people on Mars by 2026 either.

On the other hand, I rejected his 50% growth in sales year over year prediction, but he hit 50k this year and the evidence strongly suggests 75k is quite possible for next year.

Or maybe the Bolt will get there first.

Yeah pretty sick.

They say $30k after incentives, how much are they roughly in the US? I've heard $7.5k being thrown around quite often, is that it?