Donate to Remove ads

Got a credit card? use our Credit Card & Finance Calculators

Thanks to johnstevens77,Bhoddhisatva,scotia,Anonymous,Cornytiv34, for Donating to support the site

Musk endeavours

The Big Picture Place
odysseus2000
Lemon Half
Posts: 6366
Joined: November 8th, 2016, 11:33 pm
Has thanked: 1535 times
Been thanked: 959 times

Re: Musk endeavours

#258528

Postby odysseus2000 » October 17th, 2019, 4:47 pm

Looking at the images it looks to be a relatively simple surface mount re-work, something I could do with the tools I have.

$3000 seems a massive over price for this simple job.

Regards,

BobbyD
Lemon Half
Posts: 7814
Joined: January 22nd, 2017, 2:29 pm
Has thanked: 665 times
Been thanked: 1289 times

Re: Musk endeavours

#258531

Postby BobbyD » October 17th, 2019, 4:58 pm

odysseus2000 wrote:Looking at the images it looks to be a relatively simple surface mount re-work, something I could do with the tools I have.

$3000 seems a massive over price for this simple job.

Regards,



Charge £2000, and you'll soon have your own Tesla...

odysseus2000
Lemon Half
Posts: 6366
Joined: November 8th, 2016, 11:33 pm
Has thanked: 1535 times
Been thanked: 959 times

Re: Musk endeavours

#258543

Postby odysseus2000 » October 17th, 2019, 5:33 pm

BobbyD wrote:
odysseus2000 wrote:Looking at the images it looks to be a relatively simple surface mount re-work, something I could do with the tools I have.

$3000 seems a massive over price for this simple job.

Regards,



Charge £2000, and you'll soon have your own Tesla...


You sound like my bee business partner.

She is endless wanting to raise prices.

So we raised some prices and at the last show had the same turnover as the same show last year and she thought this was great.

I thought it was a poor result as I want to be growing turnover and keeping similar margins.

Sure if you are doing a one off trade you might get away with extortionate pricing, but if you want repeat custom imho you have to charge something reasonable or see punters refuse to buy and go to competitors, or you have spend a fortune on marketing and advertising as does Dyson and some legacy auto like Mercedes.

Regards,

ReformedCharacter
Lemon Quarter
Posts: 3120
Joined: November 4th, 2016, 11:12 am
Has thanked: 3591 times
Been thanked: 1509 times

Re: Musk endeavours

#258624

Postby ReformedCharacter » October 18th, 2019, 12:06 am

Useful overview of the current plans for Starship and Starlink which is now planned to be an array of 30,000 (!) satellites. Pretty incredible. First 8 minutes of this video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5g9d5GwxI-U

RC

BobbyD
Lemon Half
Posts: 7814
Joined: January 22nd, 2017, 2:29 pm
Has thanked: 665 times
Been thanked: 1289 times

Re: Musk endeavours

#258681

Postby BobbyD » October 18th, 2019, 9:37 am

odysseus2000 wrote:Sure if you are doing a one off trade you might get away with extortionate pricing, but if you want repeat custom imho you have to charge something reasonable or see punters refuse to buy and go to competitors, or you have spend a fortune on marketing and advertising as does Dyson and some legacy auto like Mercedes.


Why would there be repeat custom, or are you expecting another part of Tesla's electronics to start packing up en masse? £1000 cheaper than the official Tesla fix is hardly profiteering, something which might not be said of St. Elon.

odysseus2000
Lemon Half
Posts: 6366
Joined: November 8th, 2016, 11:33 pm
Has thanked: 1535 times
Been thanked: 959 times

Re: Musk endeavours

#258702

Postby odysseus2000 » October 18th, 2019, 10:27 am

BobbyD wrote:
odysseus2000 wrote:Sure if you are doing a one off trade you might get away with extortionate pricing, but if you want repeat custom imho you have to charge something reasonable or see punters refuse to buy and go to competitors, or you have spend a fortune on marketing and advertising as does Dyson and some legacy auto like Mercedes.


Why would there be repeat custom, or are you expecting another part of Tesla's electronics to start packing up en masse? £1000 cheaper than the official Tesla fix is hardly profiteering, something which might not be said of St. Elon.


It of course depends on the conditions.

To change the part is a relatively low cost operation, but if you have to insure against some unexpected failure the cost will be almost all insurance.

So if I had one & this problem occurred I might try & do it myself. If it goes wrong I would tolerate the cost of having to find another second hand unit to work on. I.e. I would not pay insurance.

If I was doing this as a service I would have to have insurance, because if the process fails I would have to replace the unit or else tell folk upfront their is no guarantee & thence get no customers.

As I read this the cost is disproportionate to what a technician would charge. He/she might be on minimum wage or not many times more, but he/she would not have the insurance overhead, that would be carried by someone else & with a proprietary part, unless the part is cloned possibly violating patent/copyright, will cost many times the production cost. Anyone who has had to buy dealer parts knows how this works. On my Mercedes a £10 ish pipe with a proprietary Mercedes fitting cost me well over £100.

So the reasonable cost is hard to determine without knowing what the price of replacement boards are & what the insurance premiums would be.

I can easily see this being several hundreds, but $3000 seems excessive to me & looks more like pricing to what the market can take with no relation to what the cost is.

If the reports of the car being a brick due to the inability to charge are correct with this fault then one can see how the price might easily be jacked to what the market can stand, even if I think this is bad business.

I am however speculating wildly here just giving an opinion on what the job would cost if it was a simple replacement & realising that insurance would dominate. But I have no idea about this unit or what has to be done to make the repair etc etc.

It is also worth noting that according to the Munroe tear downs, Tesla have taken to making their own dedicated hardware, designing & fabricating their own chips whereas most consumer electronics uses off the shelf. As Tesla develops more & more of the electronics will become integrated into individual chips making cloning & reverse engineering much more trouble & leading to reduced assembly & Bill of Material costs as there will be far less chips to pick & place.

Regards,

BobbyD
Lemon Half
Posts: 7814
Joined: January 22nd, 2017, 2:29 pm
Has thanked: 665 times
Been thanked: 1289 times

Re: Musk endeavours

#258704

Postby BobbyD » October 18th, 2019, 10:35 am

(Reuters) - Ford Motor Co (F.N) said on Thursday it was teaming up with Volkswagen AG (VOWG_p.DE) and Amazon.com (AMZN.O) to give its future electric car customers a range of charging options from highways to homes.

The network of charging stations will be the largest in North America with 12,000 locations and more than 35,000 charge plugs, Ford said.


- https://www.reuters.com/article/us-ford ... SKBN1WW24K

dspp
Lemon Half
Posts: 5884
Joined: November 4th, 2016, 10:53 am
Has thanked: 5825 times
Been thanked: 2127 times

Re: Musk endeavours

#258707

Postby dspp » October 18th, 2019, 10:51 am

odysseus2000 wrote:
BobbyD wrote:
odysseus2000 wrote:Sure if you are doing a one off trade you might get away with extortionate pricing, but if you want repeat custom imho you have to charge something reasonable or see punters refuse to buy and go to competitors, or you have spend a fortune on marketing and advertising as does Dyson and some legacy auto like Mercedes.


Why would there be repeat custom, or are you expecting another part of Tesla's electronics to start packing up en masse? £1000 cheaper than the official Tesla fix is hardly profiteering, something which might not be said of St. Elon.


It of course depends on the conditions.

To change the part is a relatively low cost operation, but if you have to insure against some unexpected failure the cost will be almost all insurance...
Regards,


Seconded. Hand repair of unsocketed large surface mount ICs is pretty risky. I wouldn't do it. I wonder if these flash items will get shunted to socketed in later design iterations.

regards, dspp

odysseus2000
Lemon Half
Posts: 6366
Joined: November 8th, 2016, 11:33 pm
Has thanked: 1535 times
Been thanked: 959 times

Re: Musk endeavours

#258783

Postby odysseus2000 » October 18th, 2019, 2:01 pm

dspp
Seconded. Hand repair of unsocketed large surface mount ICs is pretty risky. I wouldn't do it. I wonder if these flash items will get shunted to socketed in later design iterations.


Think unlikely, sockets generally not being that reliable over time due to eventually oxidisation of connectors. I use them even in prototypes less & less as with Chinese board turn around times of just a few days I have found that prototyping & then laying out the surface mount board is a great recipe for eating time & a lot more expense. Better in my case to go to the surface mount board after the design. If it works fabulous, it is ready for production, if not another board & iterate. I usually hand populate as I don't have my own pick & place which limits me to 603, (approx 1.5 mm x 0.75 mm) sizes & bigger. One issue now is that more & more stuff is going smaller making hand work hard but if you need something that is only available in small sizes you have to use what can be got. Last night I did a sc70-5 regulator chip which is close to my limit for hot air assembly which must be a strong driver for pick & place machines although there you often have the overheads of having to buy reels rather than cut tape.

Another issue that is coming up is that Chinese semi fab is greatly improving & they are offering very low cost components. My regulators were 69p (Texas instruments) but according to eeblog some Chinese equivalents are a few pence. Chinese pcb makers are now offering pick & place @ very competive prices, but there is always the fear that they will clone the board with out even having to suffer the reverse engineering. Firmware is a big more awkward to copy & I thought relative safe from piracy, but recent informations suggests firmware is relatively easy to pick. The Trump focus on China respecting Intellectual property probably reflects a lot of this.

Anyhow I suspect Tesla will use another tech, or put in more flash & do more wear levelling.

For my own application in a device that needs to store data for years & continually update some data, the life expectancy of flash isn't that attractive even with wear levelling algorithms which also have a programming & time over head which probably is very unwelcome in a Tesla application which is time critical.

Regards,

BobbyD
Lemon Half
Posts: 7814
Joined: January 22nd, 2017, 2:29 pm
Has thanked: 665 times
Been thanked: 1289 times

Re: Musk endeavours

#258910

Postby BobbyD » October 19th, 2019, 8:35 am

The full programme containing the Model S vs Taycan (in German).

There are 3 chapters selectable in the bottom left hand corner of the screen, the relevant section starts about halfway through chapter 2.

https://www.tvnow.de/shows/auto-mobil-1 ... ex-1934098

Howard
Lemon Quarter
Posts: 2178
Joined: November 4th, 2016, 8:26 pm
Has thanked: 885 times
Been thanked: 1017 times

Re: Musk endeavours

#258928

Postby Howard » October 19th, 2019, 11:10 am

Cathie Wood, the CEO and chief investing officer at Arkinvest who was one of the analysts accused earlier this year of ramping Tesla and enthusiastically supporting the fanciful claims about Tesla autonomous cars, self-driving taxi fleets etc, has been selling substantial amounts of shares this week. By my calculation, she has sold shares worth around $38 million in the last few days. A major part of Arkinvest's holding has gone.

This is the lady who is reported to have said in April that Tesla shares would reach $4,000.

And she said that Arkinvest "we lie in wait for opportunities" to buy Tesla stock.

Does she know something about the earnings report due next week?

regards

Howard

The most relevant part of the video is around 10 minutes in. (Health warning: As a seasoned investor one wonders who watches some of these media/analyst discussions. It would be more relevant to read fairy stories :) ).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AWFjfYa28A0

dspp
Lemon Half
Posts: 5884
Joined: November 4th, 2016, 10:53 am
Has thanked: 5825 times
Been thanked: 2127 times

Re: Musk endeavours

#258934

Postby dspp » October 19th, 2019, 11:33 am

Howard wrote:Cathie Wood, the CEO and chief investing officer at Arkinvest who was one of the analysts accused earlier this year of ramping Tesla and enthusiastically supporting the fanciful claims about Tesla autonomous cars, self-driving taxi fleets etc, has been selling substantial amounts of shares this week. By my calculation, she has sold shares worth around $38 million in the last few days. A major part of Arkinvest's holding has gone.

This is the lady who is reported to have said in April that Tesla shares would reach $4,000.

And she said that Arkinvest "we lie in wait for opportunities" to buy Tesla stock.

Does she know something about the earnings report due next week?

regards

Howard

The most relevant part of the video is around 10 minutes in. (Health warning: As a seasoned investor one wonders who watches some of these media/analyst discussions. It would be more relevant to read fairy stories :) ).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AWFjfYa28A0


To be fair, anybody who invests on the basis of anything that lady has to say, probably does believe in fairies.

regards, dspp

BobbyD
Lemon Half
Posts: 7814
Joined: January 22nd, 2017, 2:29 pm
Has thanked: 665 times
Been thanked: 1289 times

Re: Musk endeavours

#259046

Postby BobbyD » October 20th, 2019, 8:23 am

Tie-Fighter vs Tie-Can* on the strip: https://twitter.com/i/status/1184489039149326337

* Taycan is pronounced Tie-can, it's from the Turkish you know, means spirit of a young horse.

BobbyD
Lemon Half
Posts: 7814
Joined: January 22nd, 2017, 2:29 pm
Has thanked: 665 times
Been thanked: 1289 times

Re: Musk endeavours

#259174

Postby BobbyD » October 20th, 2019, 8:07 pm

...a slightly wider view of BEV take up, and potential...

For Rwanda, getting fuel comes at a price. The fuel is imported from the Middle East and passes through Dar es Salaan, Tanzania. It is a stretch of nearly 3,000 km. This has given Volkswagen the impetus and drive to launch their electric cars in Rwanda. The electric car, known as the e-Golf, will be introduced as a new initiative on 29 October 2019 at the Kigali Convention Centre.

According to Andrew Kirby, President, and CEO of Toyota South Africa Motors, only 66 electric vehicles were sold last year and close to zero in the rest of the continent. This made Volkswagen look towards Rwanda as their next destination for this ambitious investment, bolstered by what they termed the mental readiness of Rwandans to embrace electric cars.

Thomas Schaefer, the chairperson and managing director of VWSA, said this in February: "We did a grid check-in Rwanda together with GRZ (Technologies) and Siemens last year and they are ready. They already get their electricity from 70 percent renewable energy and that will change to 100 percent in the next 10 years.

"They are tracking their fuel from the Middle East to Dar es Salaam, then 3000 km by road into Kigali. What for? They could immediately go electric."


- https://www.africanexponent.com/post/43 ... r-the-golf

odysseus2000
Lemon Half
Posts: 6366
Joined: November 8th, 2016, 11:33 pm
Has thanked: 1535 times
Been thanked: 959 times

Re: Musk endeavours

#259561

Postby odysseus2000 » October 23rd, 2019, 12:31 am

Homes in US with solar roofs sell for more:

https://www.zillow.com/research/solar-p ... ore-23798/

Regards,

BobbyD
Lemon Half
Posts: 7814
Joined: January 22nd, 2017, 2:29 pm
Has thanked: 665 times
Been thanked: 1289 times

Re: Musk endeavours

#259580

Postby BobbyD » October 23rd, 2019, 8:15 am

odysseus2000 wrote:Homes in US with solar roofs sell for more:

https://www.zillow.com/research/solar-p ... ore-23798/

Regards,


Correlation not causation.

People who went to the trouble of fitting solar are likely to have spent more effort on the maintenance of the property and more likely to have installed other features which weren't captured by the fairly crude comparison metrics.

Given that the cost of installing solar is dropping the idea that the solar installation itself is going to provide a positive return in terms of house price increase doesn't make much sense. If it is a brand new fully waranteed installation then you might get some laziness dividend.

Howard
Lemon Quarter
Posts: 2178
Joined: November 4th, 2016, 8:26 pm
Has thanked: 885 times
Been thanked: 1017 times

Re: Musk endeavours

#259599

Postby Howard » October 23rd, 2019, 10:05 am

odysseus2000 wrote:Homes in US with solar roofs sell for more:

https://www.zillow.com/research/solar-p ... ore-23798/

Regards,


It would be more impressive if you could quote this statistic for homes in Manchester! :D

regards

Howard

Howard
Lemon Quarter
Posts: 2178
Joined: November 4th, 2016, 8:26 pm
Has thanked: 885 times
Been thanked: 1017 times

Re: Musk endeavours

#259759

Postby Howard » October 24th, 2019, 12:18 am

Tesla shares up in after-market trading. + 20%.

So the market is expecting a good Q3 report.

regards

Howard

dspp
Lemon Half
Posts: 5884
Joined: November 4th, 2016, 10:53 am
Has thanked: 5825 times
Been thanked: 2127 times

Re: Musk endeavours

#259760

Postby dspp » October 24th, 2019, 12:29 am

Howard wrote:Tesla shares up in after-market trading. + 20%.

So the market is expecting a good Q3 report.

regards

Howard


QR results presentation
https://seekingalpha.com/article/429835 ... esentation

quarterly net profit.

more Teslas in Shanghai than London to my eyes, mind you I am in Shanghai more often than London these days !

:)

dspp

PeterGray
Lemon Slice
Posts: 847
Joined: November 4th, 2016, 11:18 am
Has thanked: 782 times
Been thanked: 343 times

Re: Musk endeavours

#259787

Postby PeterGray » October 24th, 2019, 8:51 am

I have to say I'd find slide 4 of the presentation pretty worrying, if I were a TSLA investor.

Auto revenues down 12% YoY, and flat QoQ, total revenue down 8% YoY and 1% on QoQ. Op margins down. Opex down too, which is good news, but if they are trimming Opex at the expense of growth it's not.

No major disaster here. TSLA is still in business, but it's not looking a lot like a major growth company at the moment.


Return to “Macro and Global Topics”

Who is online

Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 4 guests