Musk endeavours

[BobbyD]

However, for those of you who can't get their head around the fact the Tesla's first business disruption model is their production method,

In that case things are far worse for Tesla than I thought.

[odysseus2000]

Nice to see all of this posting activity and it is pleasing to a Tesla bull like me that much of it is negative.

Tesla has been very good to me this year, but I sold out yesterday believing that improved production is likely in the current price, but also just to book profits and wait for a potentially lower re-entry if it comes.

Just a few other points.

For some reason many here have good things to say about big auto suggesting they are well managed and profitable business. I am not sure if we all live in the same world but autos have always been in my view rubbish investments, badly run, cost mostly trumping safety save for Scandinavian motors which alas either went bust like Saab and are in various phoenix stages or like Volvo got sold, as far as I know, to Tata (correct if wrong) by Ford.

German autos have been the great beneficiaries of the EURO which has kept this currency low allowing with brilliant marketing to sell what in my opinion, having worked on Mercedes, are cars of poor quality, now requiring such expensive service costs (locally Audi charge £160 per hour labour) so that folk are forced to buy new stuff taking over a life time, very substantial sums off their punters.

I rate auto management as some of the worst business managers on the planet. They have a relentless history of doing stupid stuff, selling lemons, caring very little about their punters and going bust with the prime example of this being GM after the even better example of the combined government run UK motor industry which was mostly shut down and re-invented at a much smaller level and then sold to better overseas managers.

Another theme here is that auto will have many years to adjust to electric. This I think is wrong because of what the politicians will do. I expect carbon taxes to go up substantially and a war on the internal combustion engine. I don't think big auto as anything like the time it thinks before it is forced to electric.

I am also bemused by the issues of quality that folk raise here. If you compare the government crash test data for Tesla motors to those of all other manufactures there is no question that Tesla cars are more likely to keep you from injury than are any of their competitors even including Volvo in any type of crash.

I am similarly amused by all the comments on solar city and cut backs in solar. This is another market of commodity products where there is a race to the bottom and so it does seem logical that Tesla should instead focus on attractive panels disguised as roof tiles and storage which imho is the missing ingredient in the current grid system. As an example a barge dwellers I know disagreed with me for years over solar always moaning about having to use diesel to charge his batteries, then he got some solar panels and can't believe how much it saves him on diesel. Now we debate lithium v the lead acid batteries he uses and which he is having to replace every two years. I have repeatedly told him that he can extend the life of lead acid with electronic cleaning, but he refuses to consider doing it and that he could likely get a decade out of lithium storage and it would be lighter and better and that if he wanted to he could quite easily build his own system. But he is stuck in his ways and enjoys nothing more than moaning about battery life while doing nothing to get rid of this relentless drain on his money. Somehow he seems symptomatic of so many others in society, but things are changing rapidly and the rate of change is accelerating.

Regards,

[dspp]

Volvo got sold, as far as I know, to Tata (correct if wrong)

Regards,

wrong. Ford sold Volvo to Geely ........ it was Land Rover who they sold to Tata when they dismembered PAG

apart from that ......

regards, dspp

[odysseus2000]

wrong. Ford sold Volvo to Geely ........ it was Land Rover who they sold to Tata when they dismembered PAG

apart from that ......

regards, dspp

Thank you for the correction.

Regards,

[BobbyD]

How long is the wait for Tesla Powerwall 2?

- https://forums.tesla.com/forum/forums/h ... owerwall-2

[odysseus2000]

BobbyD
How long is the wait for Tesla Powerwall 2?


- https://forums.tesla.com/forum/forums/h ... owerwall-2

It is great that folk are prepared to pre-order & wait.

There seems to be genuine demand for powerwall, some folk wanting two. Given the difference between the $100 per kWh that Tesla say they can make batteries for & the price of the powerwall, it looks like a good high margin business to me.

There is one school of thought that one should use the grid for storage, but often one is selling power to the grid at x, but having to buy back at nx, where n is around 2. So for folk who want to power electric cars from their own solar & be independent if grid pricing which is presumably going to rise over time, the powerwall locks in the price of electric transportation at today's cost for ten years (warranty) or more. It is like being able to fix petrol costs & have certainty of supply for 10 years & I imagine will be an attractive option for many.

Regards,

[redsturgeon]

https://www.bloomberg.com/hyperdrive

More analysts comment on "the big tent"

Seriously? What is Musk thinking, just to hit the 5000 a week figure by the end of the month he has cobbled together a spare part production line to manually assemble a high tech car that was supposed to be being built by the most sophisticated robot car production line ever made.

What gives manufacturing experts pause about Tesla’s tent is that it was pitched to shelter an assembly line cobbled together with scraps lying around the brick-and-mortar plant. It smacks of a Hail Mary move after months of stopping and starting production to make on-the-fly fixes to automated equipment, which Musk himself has said was a mistake.

“It’s preposterous,” Bernstein’s Warburton said.

“I don’t think anyone’s seen anything like this outside of the military trying to service vehicles in a war zone. I pity any customer taking delivery of one of these cars. The quality will be shocking.”

It reminds me of the 1970s when British Leyland were making Rover SD1s and most of the cars coming of the production line were defective and needed remedial work in order for them to be shipped. Would anyone in their right mind really want to by one of these "made in a tent" Model 3s?

The early Teslas were a high tech futuristic marvel...these Model 3s will be more like a modern version of the Delorean...a lipsticked pig dressed up as the future of motoring, what was Musk thinking!

As my poker friends would say, "He's gone all in with 7-2 off suit"*

John

* The worst starting hand in poker whose only real chance of winning is to be played as a total bluff! (Sometimes it wins though)

[dspp]

Interesting commentary on that thread thanks BobbyD. I have dealt for many years with that US buyer-segment and the thread reminded me they exhibit an interesting combination of target fixation and paranoia.

My monitoring of industry(s) gossip had led me to believe that the Tesla mfg constraint was seat assembly, and that they had largely solved the gigafactory problems. Those ongoing anecdotes suggest that they still have a gigafactory constraint. The more they insource, they harder the mfg balancing act is.

Many of the Powerwall buyers need two to deliver the capability they are after. These people splurge power. It is the US.

Re o2000's comment re difference in buy vs sell price, I agree that is an issue. However self-storage from daytime PV then download overnight to EV is even more expensive when you take cyclic lifetime being used up, and charge/discharge losses into account, so one should still view the grid as being the store. As battery storage becomes grid-embedded and centralised grid-storage will always have economies of scale & geography advantages over consumer storage, then I see no reason for that calculation to change, i.e. the consumer should (from an economic POV) choose grid over local storage. It is other factors that should (and do) drive localised consumer storage:
- tech interest
- security of supply (though this needs an islanding inverter)
- ability to adopt without waiting for ones local grid
- social factors
- mistaken understanding of economics (see o2 !)
- inappropriately targetted subsidies (pols do this all the time ........ darn those lobbyists)

regards, dspp

[odysseus2000]

Model 3's they have been making:

https://twitter.com/jb_snook/status/1011055605753118720

Regards,

[odysseus2000]

Difficult to get numbers from the video, but it looked like 10 per row and 37 rows, so about 370 cars, but could easily be off by 15+%

Regards,

[odysseus2000]

Interesting video by Bezos on space access, AI, autominous weapons etc. He outlines the 3 work outlines:
Job, career, passion & his motivation for blue origin, why he doesn't think much of living on Mars, but then reckons there could be a trillion humans living in the solar system... kind of interesting:

https://youtu.be/fMTkmq5lT2I

Regards,

[Meatyfool]

viewtopic.php?f=15&t=12388

The world has moved on ...

Diversify or die!

Meatyfool..

[BobbyD]

Let's cut the crap and get down to the important stuff

Elon Musk drawn into farting unicorn dispute with potter

- https://www.theguardian.com/technology/ ... om-edwards

[odysseus2000]

The war on Diesel:

https://www.petrolprices.com/news/citie ... ht-diesel/

Regards,

[ReformedCharacter]

BP to add electric car charging points to UK petrol stations this year:

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/busi ... 21056.html

RC

[BobbyD]

The war on Diesel:

https://www.petrolprices.com/news/citie ... ht-diesel/

Regards,

Diesel demand is already plummeting... the thing is at the moment it is going to be replaced primarily by petrol demand and maybe a little mild hybrid. Electric is growing but from a tiny baseline, and petrol is picking up as diesel declines.

Either way it can't be of much benefit to Tesla as both cars they produce each week are already spoken for for the foreseeable future.

[redsturgeon]

I just took delivery of my brand new car yesterday...a petrol VW Golf. Inside and out it had a very fine layer of dust which annoyed me slightly. Then I imagined how dusty one's new car would be if it had been put together in an open sided tent in the desert!

John

[odysseus2000]

BobbyD
Diesel demand is already plummeting... the thing is at the moment it is going to be replaced primarily by petrol demand and maybe a little mild hybrid. Electric is growing but from a tiny baseline, and petrol is picking up as diesel declines.

Either way it can't be of much benefit to Tesla as both cars they produce each week are already spoken for for the foreseeable future.

I can never quite decide if diesel is in decline. On the one hand there are many articles saying how diesel cars are not selling, but then one looks at the RAC foundation for petrol and diesel consumption:

https://www.racfoundation.org/data/volu ... me-by-year

This only goes to 2017, but it interesting.

The plus for Tesla over the war on diesel is that it makes getting finance to build new Tesla factories is much easier, whereas getting finance to build a new diesel engine plant might be a little more trouble.

Regards

[odysseus2000]

I just took delivery of my brand new car yesterday...a petrol VW Golf. Inside and out it had a very fine layer of dust which annoyed me slightly. Then I imagined how dusty one's new car would be if it had been put together in an open sided tent in the desert!

John

Will be interesting to see how many Tesla buyers complain about dust.

Presumably the Golf was made in a factory with dust control suggesting your layer of dust came from the importer/dealer. One can easily see how dust would get on the outside, but inside suggests a bit of carelessness.

Dunno how practical it is to control dust in tent like structures, but mobile field hospitals must be quite good at dust control and one imagines that if one has even simple furnace filter technology running that one can substantially reduce dust. The tests I have seen of the efficiency of these filters when dealing with MDF dust have been quite impressive. The dust one gets from the desert would presumably be easier to deal with, likely predominantly silicon, so heavier than the predominant carbon from MDF.

Regards,

[BobbyD]

I can never quite decide if diesel is in decline. On the one hand there are many articles saying how diesel cars are not selling, but then one looks at the RAC foundation for petrol and diesel consumption:

https://www.racfoundation.org/data/volu ... me-by-year

This only goes to 2017, but it interesting.

2 years fuel consumption after the VW diesel 'hitch' really doesn't give any useful information on new car sales.

You might find component manufacturers to be another way of investigating your suspicion. No idea if it is representative but Delphi's last set of results were basically diesel down everything else up. http://s22.q4cdn.com/144082429/files/do ... tation.pdf

The plus for Tesla over the war on diesel is that it makes getting finance to build new Tesla factories is much easier, whereas getting finance to build a new diesel engine plant might be a little more trouble.

Any problems Tesla might have securing funding have nothing to do with demand, they have no shortage demand, what they have a shortage of is cars and a production record which would encourage financiers to think that their money might change that situation.

Dunno how practical it is to control dust in tent like structures, but mobile field hospitals must be quite good at dust control and one imagines that if one has even simple furnace filter technology running that one can substantially reduce dust.

Not sure many of them are praised for their views though.

Musk later said the tent was better than the factory in Fremont, California, where most of Tesla's general vehicle assembly occurs.

"Not sure we actually need a building," he said. "This tent is pretty sweet."

He added in another tweet: "It's actually way better than the factory building. More comfortable & a great view of the mountains."

- http://uk.businessinsider.com/teslas-ne ... ent-2018-6

...or how many have car's worth of material taken in one end and cars driven out the other.

It's difficult to tell how open the ends are, since photos show differing amounts of enclosure, this si the most closed off I've seen though. https://goo.gl/images/2eWviF