A six-seat pickup with 300,000 pounds of towing capacity. Three. Hundred. Thousand. Pounds. And it will be able to float. Because why not?
The largest legal towing capacity for an 18 wheeler is 80 thousand pounds in the US. Road trains can get up to 300 thousand pounds, but not here. He’s basically selling a pickup truck with the towing capacity of a very large semi truck. The largest pickup towing capacity on the market is 31 thousand pounds, so he wants to do 10 times that amount. The traction issues alone make it very unlikely. Semi-trucks weigh about 20 thousand pounds and have 8 powered tires to get the traction they need. What exactly is Musk proposing for his Bronco-looking machine?
Heard this a few days ago and it is utterly unbelievable. Putting up an assembly line in such short order, in a clearly temporary setting, does not give me the warm and fuzzies about buying a Tesla vehicle. The robots on our real assembly line aren’t working quite right, so we’ll have humans manually build cars out here in a circus tent or pole barn or whatever that structure is.
Wow, Tesla is screwed. That’s bad, really, really bad. If you’re a Tesla fan-bro, now may be the time to reconsider your position.
Damn right they’ll reconsider their positions! Have you seen the specs and sketches of that truck?! 
“Funding secured”…NOT!
And now the SEC is gonna have something to say about it.
Bloomberg has some nice graphs that seem to suggest that Model 3 production peaked about a month ago and has dropped thence to about half the peak rate today. Hard to guess whether that this a sign of impending chapter-something relief.
Granted those are only estimates of weekly production, but I am completely baffled as to why production has been cut in half over the last month when the announced plan was to double it.
Is there some supply shortage? Workers burned out? Robots down for maintenance?
Tesla’s increasingly becoming the stock market equivalent of a cult. They can generate production here and there, but they can’t turn a profit, which is ultimately what it’s about. Their stock is increasingly attracting the junk artists of the investment world.
Given the demand for “retroactive discounts” (i.e. refunds) from vendors by Telsa, it would not be surprising if one or more vendors choked parts flow in order to make a point about how unacceptible that practice is, particularly by a niche manufacturer which does not have the experience and supply base to rapidly switch from one vendor to another. However, it could equally be that Tesla was pulling out all atops to achieve peak production levels to make a good “Potemkin Village” story for investors and has now slipped back to more sustainable production rates.
Doubling production is a lot more difficult than just adding an additional assembly line; there are impacts all the way from logistics to quality inspection, and the notion that there is an unlimited workforce with suitable experience ready for hire is just not realistic. Even if there were, establishing the infrastructure to support it is a complicated undertaking, particularly with modern production methods and controls.
Stranger
Here is my WAG: the peak was due to pushing production to get to the hundredth-K Model 3 by the end of the quarter, to have a thing to brag on; if production drops from here by ~15% and levels off, they will still be putting out around 100K/year 3s, which seems like a sustainable output. Also, ISTR some cut-off around that 100K for the electric vehicle tax credit thingy, so people will soon be paying thousands more for the low-end car.
The cutoff for the $7,500 tax credit occurred with the delivery of Tesla’s 200,000th vehicle earlier this summer. The tax credit has begun the phaseout. It isn’t related to annual production.
If Tesla builds 100,000 Model 3s per year, there will be substantial numbers of customers who put a deposit down in 2016 for a car that they may not get until 2021 or 2022. Plus, Tesla forecast prodtion rates of 500,000 per year.
Even though selling 100k electric cars is a good thing, it would also be a catastrophic disappointment.
I’ve been wondering whether Tesla is simply a little bit too early in the game to make a long-term success–remember Robert Fulton’s submarine. But even if they fold up completely, they’ve advanced the state of the art considerably. A bigger company and/or a more stable businessman 20-30 years from now might have considerably more success picking up where Tesla leaves off.
Did you miss the early 2000s? Turning a profit hasn’t been necessary for stock growth for decades.
There’s no need for a “stable businessman 20-30 years from now.” Tesla has already forced the existing industry players to play catch-up by showing the world that we can half halfway decent electric cars today. I’m not a fan of the product, the cult, or Musk (given his erratic recent behavior), but the company has changed the world. It remains to be seen whether it has done so for the better; I worry that hydrogen fuel cells may be the future and that battery-electric growth may have killed or stifled development along that branch.
Hmm, need to update.
- SEC is suing Musk to never be allowed to run a public company again
- Tesla has a lot of debt that is coming due
- Sustainable production is still a big question mark.
Basically, bond holders are close to shutting down the company.
I didn’t fully realize that Tesla’s debt is slightly greater than Mazda’s market cap. They are now selling about the same number of cars, but of course Tesla’s cars cost a couple times more.
Tesla does not need Elon Musk. They could probably become more stable with a different CEO in charge. He is less useful than Steve Jobs was: a good hypist, but not much more than that.
Depends on whether Tesla still needs to be extremely innovative or at this point can be transitioned into being managed like any other automaker or high-tech manufacturing company. I don’t like Elon Musk personally (by all accounts, he’s an arrogant asshole) but there’s one thing he’s good at: doing the impossible. An all-electric car with fantastic performance and incredible range? Can’t be done, but he did it. A private space program featuring self-landing rockets? Can’t be done, but he did it.
If Tesla needs more impossible things done (I think it does) then they still need Musk. If I had a major stake in the place, I’d appoint an experienced CEO but put Musk in some position where he could direct strategy, somewhat like Bill Gates did for a while at Microsoft while Ballmer ran the administrative end of it.
I think I agree with this. I don’t like Musk all that much, and he’s a distraction as CEO. Poach some senior VP from GM or Ford to run the company and make Musk the head of R&D or something. I want Tesla to succeed because I think they’re driving rapid innovation in electric vehicles, which I think is an important end. But they’d do that better without Musk making headlines for calling people pedophiles. I do have to hand it to Musk for getting the company this far. Starting an auto manufacturer from scratch is no small feat.
Crackpot theory: Musk wanted this. He wanted the SEC - or someone - to push him out so that he could be removed for being a crazy sonofabitch rather than being removed for being a business failure.