Archtronics wrote:Sorry slight misunderstanding when I wrote "German cars" I was refering to BMW and Merc referenced above.
I have pointed out before that Ody's mildly racist habit of referring to a bunch of very different companies together just because they all come from Germany is neither constructive nor clear, which is hardly surprising since it is only ever used to generalise a negative across all German car manufacturers when it explicitly doesn't apply to all German car manufacturers.
Archtronics wrote:Musk pretty much said this in his biography he doesn't care about companies that make money he just wants to create competion to force other companies to create the future he envisioned as a kid.
If Tesla goes bust he has still achived his goal so I think he will be happy regardless.
Musk's aims at the outset may well have been different, and I have no reason to believe they weren't, but does he sound like a happy man? Picking fights with rescue workers in Thailand, repeatedly baiting the SEC... I think he's become too emotionally invested and too proud to ever walk away happy, or for that matter voluntarily walk away.
Is it too early for 'the full Daenerys' to have entered the Musk endeavours lexicon?
Now if he'd kept to brief and concentrated Tesla's resources on nailing the efficient production of electric powered consumer vehicles which could be sold profitably at a mass market price point, then he'd really have succeeded, we'd be living in a world where there were several million Tesla's on the road and Tesla would be turning a profit. Instead he's got a cruise control on steroids and a semi produced semi, and he's abandoned the one market Tesla might ever have have operated in profitably, flamethrowers.
odysseus2000 wrote:Think that Musk is also on another mission which is to expose Wall Street & the media as charlatans and to build a huge corporation.
Would this be the same Elon Musk who used plucky outsider firm Goldman Sachs to take his company public, and then to attempt to take it private again? Mind you he dodged a bullet there, $420? Now available for $205.36.
odysseus2000 wrote:He has already proved all of the folk wrong who said he could not have mass market car sales,
No he hasn't.
odysseus2000 wrote:What looks to be happening is that Musk is building his business into a profit machine
What profit?
dspp wrote:I look at it this way.
BMW manufactures 2.5m cars a year and is loss-making on a quarterly basis at present. JLR manufactures 0.6m vehicles and is loss making, -£3.6bn the year just ended.
The point is that these companies both support a dozen or so legacy ICE platforms. In order to keep those platforms competitive they need to achieve premium prices for high margins, and sales in excess of (say) 1 or 2 million units per year, simply in order to pay for the design teams and the always-recurring NRE on platform development, and to manufacture at the volumes required to create the cost base. They are typical of the struggle faced by any low volume auto maker, and give very direct insight into the corresponding scale game circumstances of the higher volume makers.
In contrast Tesla are remarkably close to break even at about 0.4m units a year, and two platforms (S/X, 3/Y), with another two platforms (semi, pickup) moving through the system. And they have a new factory coming through the system that is likely in time to take them to 1m units (I am assuming the Y volumes will take Fremont to 0.5m units).
So in a normal world Tesla would win out...
Against JLR and possibly BMW? Wow...
dspp wrote: But this is not a normal world, because the legacy ICE manufacturers need to also spend to create very different BEV platforms that are not compatible with their ICE platforms. So the design overheads (and the mfg facility investment needs) of the legacy makers will double, and this situation will remain for so long as they are stranded with a foot in both saddles. The financial burden will cripple them, indeed it already is.
Again smaller Legacy, quite possibly. Bigger legacy is more flexible than Tesla, it can reconfigure it's manufacturing base as the market develops, it can move it's production from continent to continent to avoid tariffs as Trump tries to destroy the modern world, it can average the development cost of the systems in it's Frankenstein cars across millions of vehicles a year, battery and electric because the platforms are designed to provide flexibility and optimisation of design not to make the current parts bin obsolete, and they can pay for development and refitting with actual profits made on the sale of actually profitable cars around the globe.
dspp wrote:Add in the costs of either playing catch-up in the autonomy stakes
One company currently has a level 3 system available for sale subject to local regulations, and it isn't Tesla. Atleast two companies currently have Level 5 taxis operating in the wild, neither of them are Tesla. There is no lead to catch up.