Interesting. Around here the typical lift on a full-sized “alpha male” pickup truck seems to be about 12".
“Alpha male” pickups (which is also, leaving out the electric nature) is another great description of the Cybertruck! Bulletproof, powerful, indestructible, ready to drive through any sort of dystopian hellhole on your way to important business and can’t be bothered.
Coincidentally, the air suspension on the Cybertruck has about 12" of range. Truck bros can set it to max when they’re showing off, and low when they’re just driving on the highway.
Tesla announced their Q3 results:
Not much Cybertruck detail except for one tidbit:
Cybertruck production increased sequentially and achieved a positive gross margin for the first time.
So that’s good. They’re profitable less than a year after first release. Meanwhile, Ford and Rivian continue to lose billions on their trucks.
It continues to confound me how bad all other EV makers outside of China are at controlling costs. It’s really just bizarre that they’re still so bad at it. The products are mostly good but Tesla is building equivalent/superior products for like half the cost. And mostly with a greater degree of American-made content!
Even for someone like me who never believed the “the other automakers have like a century of experience and will just clobber Tesla when they get serious about EVs” rhetoric, it’s still surprising that they haven’t caught up a little bit.
Perhaps because Tesla’s been building EVs for a while so they’ve largely amortized the capital costs while the legacy automakers have just gotten started doing so, so they’re still losing money? How long did Tesla lose money building those factories from scratch and building out its network of superchargers?
Tesla certainly lost plenty of money in the early days. However, Rivian has now lost more money than Tesla ever did. Unfortunately I can’t find the nice EV profitability chart I ran across earlier, but it looked pretty dire for them.
Tesla had to build up an entire factory from scratch, and it feels like there are some steps in there that Ford and the other legacy automakers could have avoided. I guess maybe none of that experience or capital actually carried over in practice–they were in the same position as a startup like Tesla or Rivian. Except also saddled with the downsides of being a legacy automaker, like unions, a calcified management culture, etc.
Ahh, here we go:
That is cumulative cash flow. Tesla had burned through ~$12B at their worst point. They turned that around and are now making money hand over fist. Rivian is at $21B burn with no sign of stopping.
Note that this is arranged by year since founding (for the Model e division specifically in the case of Ford). Most of them are not yet at Tesla’s turnaround point (at year ~9), but you’d think there would be some second-mover advantage, not to mention support from legacy auto.
I can’t speak to Rivian which is a start-up.
But I’m pretty sure the legacy US automakers are simply lumbering their EV division with every cost they can think of, carefully accounted for in the way that makes the P&L look as awful as possible.
The goal being to either delay, dilute, or destroy the mandate to electrify. Or if that fails, to make the case that massive subsidies to the Big 3 are needed to enable them to compete w the furriners. Oh yeah, and (sotto voce) Tesla.
IOW, pure C-suite gamesmanship. Plus a healthy dollop of ossified NIH management culture.
I think that’s likely true, and speculated as much in one of our other EV threads. Still–if they were actually good at producing EVs for a low cost, there would be no need to do that. They’d prioritize EVs since they’d be the real moneymaker. So while they may be making their EV divisions look worse than they are through shenanigans, it’s probably not going to change the sign of their profits/losses.
Not if you don’t believe it.
Dinosaurs always refuse to believe the little mammals scurrying around their feet will ever be a threat, and if the little furbags become uppity enough the dinos will try to stomp 'em.
An entrenched market position based on an established technology base is the classic hill to die on, as industrial evolution goes.
True for the most part. But Jim Farley (of Ford) at least seems to be a True Believer in EVs. They’re taking them seriously and the Mach-e and F-150 Lightning are good offerings. They just can’t seem to drive down the costs. Possibly the problem is more with middle management than at the very top. That’s where the real ossification happens in my observation. They defend their territory very aggressively but don’t have much of a big picture view. So it’s hard to make changes that might end up cutting them out of the picture completely.
Ford’s Q3 EV results:
It’s hard to believe Ford isn’t doing what you suggest. Their EBIT margin is consistently around negative 100%. Every dollar they bring in costs two. And in Q1 they had essentially zero revenue with the same operating expenses!
On the other hand… isn’t there some limit to this kind of financial chicanery? Seems like there ought to be, if not.
Sometimes I think Detroit accounting could give Hollywood accounting a run for its, er, money.
Non Musk fans need not watch it. The first 15 seconds sets the tone. It’s childish. The next 15 seconds shows he doesn’t have a clue. The truck wasn’t at full throttle. Wheel spin is limited by computer control. the next 15 seconds shows it’s a Musk hit piece where he pieces together complaints from other people for that purpose. He has no knowledge of the subject matter.
With that said I saw one in a red wrap. It was worse than the kitchen sink version. Surely there are brochures for wraps that help people eliminate the criminally ugly.
So, I’m down in South Padre Island, TX for the Starship launch and there are a hilarious number of Cybertrucks around. In my short time driving around the area I’ve seen at least four, which I can distinguish based on some details (one has a QR code on the rear, another has a super deep tint, etc.).
I think there are actually more per capita than in the Bay Area. There may be more than Model Ys, which is super weird from my perspective since about one in three cars in the Bay Area is a Model Y. Cybertrucks aren’t uncommon but it’s like 1:500 vs. the Model Y.
They’re undoubtedly being pulled in for the Starship launch as well, but it’s such an out of the way place that I think they’re mostly Texan (I wasn’t able to spot plates… and the one sitting in my hotel parking lot has no plates). I think it may be a pretty good product fit for certain locales that aren’t fans of EV sissymobiles…
I strongly suspect that these events have become mostly a public display of support for Musk (and therefore Trump). Sort of like mini public rallies. I didn’t find it too surprising that you’d see a lot of Cybertrucks at such an event.
I’m not sure what a “sissymobile” is other than not a Cybertruck though.
I think you’re reversing cause and effect. People like SpaceX rocket launches because they’re cool, not because they’re Musk supporters. And Tesla fans and SpaceX fans have a great deal of overlap since they have both transformed the status quo in their respective industries.
I was just being snarky. But one has to admit that a lot of EVs aren’t marketed towards the kind of people that like trucks. See the Fiat advertisement above for an example. I think some of that attitude gets applied to Tesla’s other vehicles even thought they’re high performance and not designed to be cutesy. Companies that want to sell more EVs need to capture that market.
I guess I’m dense, but Fiats are the sissymobiles (or maybe you’re not using it as derogatory term usually aimed homosexuals)? Or is it non-EV trucks?
Especially in Texas, burning Diesel is the American way. Using electrons for gawd’s sake, is commie green woke leftie Euro-shit for Euro-leftist sissies.
As long as they’re sending lotsa dollars to Muslim petro-states they’re happy.
Morons.
Many EVs, even today, are marketed towards hippie environmental types. These are not attractive to people that buy hulking pickup trucks.
Tesla changed the game a little by producing high-performance EVs. But they still get seen in the same light. And independent of the drivetrain, they (their pre-Cybertruck cars) are still not hulking behemoths.
The Cybertruck is a hulking behemoth, and looks even more like a mobile weapon platform than a typical pickup. So it may be more attractive to pickup truck types. And have the side effect of moving society more toward EVs.
I think a lot of old-school environmentalists hoped that the EV transition would have a side effect of getting people out of their giant trucks and into tiny commuter cars like the Fiat (or out of cars completely). That was wishful thinking on their part. But we can nevertheless decarbonize ground transportation.