Ignoring cost–no. Sure, the ludicrous 0-60 would be fun for a while, but the 3 is a better car than the S. It’s lighter and more nimble, while the S is a bit of a land yacht. The S is really just too big a car for my tastes (and the X is way too big). The 3 also has a bunch of nice touches all over the place compared to the S, like more cupholders, the center storage unit, the giant air vent, and so on. The center display is much better on the 3, too (it uses a more modern and much faster chipset).
Although I wouldn’t turn down more speed, a 5.1 s 0-60 combined with instant EV response really does make for a very zippy car. Without even flooring it, I’m frequently through the intersection before other cars have even entered it. And in fact it feels even zippier at speed; the 3 seems to have a pretty flat torque curve so 30-60 feels almost as fast as 0-30. I think they must have limited the low end torque for some reason.
Presuming they have not yet hit 200k and the 2-5 month delivery dates (for non-SR) hold, you should be eligible for 100% of the incentive.
On the other hand, a cynic might wonder if they’ve already passed 200k and are pushing orders prior to that announcement. :eek: That would mean 100% for Q3 deliveries and 50% for Q4.
It’s possible, but they’ve certainly given every indication that they’d try to go over in early Q3. Big shipments to Canada, stockpiling cars, etc. And previously they’ve said that they’d try to maximize the benefit people get. Q3 is not far away so it makes sense to open the orders now and have a big delivery push just after. They can still brag about that on their earnings conference call.
Yes, tax incentive eligibility is based on delivery date, not order date. The lifetime high speed internet is based on order date, but is also only $100/year.
I ordered mine early this morning, and the charge hit my credit card immediately, but I couldn’t enter the registration information until late this afternoon. The page would just spin and the entry would never complete. I’m hoping it was a glitch at Tesla, but I’m 99% sure it was thousands of people placing orders as the floodgates opened up.
I guess my early place in line didn’t get me much. I am glad I waited for the dual motor, as at $4000 I definitely want it. At $5000 I probably would have gotten it, but wouldn’t have been so sure.
I still would take a SR, base, single motor at $35k over what I got, though. As my wife and I discussed, at ~$30k with full tax incentives, I’d skip the dual motor, but at ~$46k with full incentives, what’s another $4k?
I went to get an insurance quote from my current company and it went like this: 2018 -> Tesla -> Model 3 -> 4dr gas. So I bailed out on the quote. Has anybody looking into the Tesla branded insurance from Liberty Mutual?
I just got the letter saying I could order a Model 3. But as we know, it’s the expensive model. My current old Camry is still running fine, so I think I am going to wait a year or two until the electric Mini comes out.
I went to a Tesla showroom this morning and sat in a Model 3. A few thoughts: the front seats are fantastic, as is the front cabin. The armrests are in the perfect position, and it was just really enjoyable to sit there and play with everything for a few minutes. I see the point about too many features being reliant on touchscreen use. I do think they got a little out ahead of their skis on that point, but the display is very, very nice. I also found the storage areas in the trunk and frunk to be larger than I expected based on photos. I also liked the panoramic glass room more than I expected.
On the down side, the door handles are positively silly. I mean, come on. Sure, people will get used to them, but that doesn’t mean they are good… but they are also just the door handles and not worth getting too worked up about. The worst thing I noticed was the leg support in the back seats. I only sat back there for a minute or two, but it was immediately obvious that the early criticism of having adults with their knees sort of off the seat and kind of up toward their chest (hard to explain) was not a real good idea. But I have read that newer Model 3s are tilting the seat somewhat to address that criticism, which sounds like a good idea… though I’m not sure whether that really addresses the fundamental issue that the roof slopes in a way that the car just needs a somewhat awkward low rear seat to fit adults.
The showroom said that they expect to start offering test drives in the next several months. One key for me is that a stiff ride is just a total turn-off for me. I’m not out for a sporty car with tight handling, I just want a car that isn’t going to be jarring when I drive it in the city with potholes and such. No, scratch that, I want a car that will be NICE when I drive on city roads.
But on the plus side, I asked about how my reservation will be treated if my number comes up before the lease on my current car is done. They assured me that I can just remain in the queue, at the top of the list, for however long I wanted until I’m ready to place the order. That’s good.
I’m very much looking forward to a test drive later this year.
After I reserved mine I was given the option of registering for one person, two people, a company, or a trust. It prefilled my name into the form, but I changed it to my full legal name. I selected the option to register for two people and added my wife as the second. It was this step which initially was not working.
Well, they did it–more or less. 5000 Model 3s in a week, and 7000 total cars.
That puts them at about 6 months late on their 5k/wk target rate. Pretty minimal, considering that they more than tripled their total production rate over the past year. Not too many automakers than say that aside from the very smallest ones.
Agree. Frankly, for a process that has gone on for 3 years, being off by a factor of just 15% is completely reasonable. Didn’t Ford have a shortage of F-150s when they switched to aluminum? Doesn’t GM have a shortage of Bolts right now…?
There are a lot of things that can go wrong to cause delays in manufacturing a complex physical product, and you can’t really cheat or “hack” your way past the problems. It’s not like Tesla can substitute alkaline batteries from the supermarket if they are short on assembled lithium packs, or skip packaging them in their armored, fire resistant enclosures with wired in BMS systems.
Workers being burnt out and replaced by poorly trained new hires. Stopping other things the factory is doing to blast out more cars in an unsustainable way. Trying to run machines beyond the manufacturers limits in order to avoid more facilitization. Not to mention the money already wasted on machines they are now unhappy with.
And for what? The Model 3 has a healthy margin built into it already, along with a ton of backorders. Tesla, get the rate up by listening to experts who know how to do this, and knock off this rule by dilettante regime. You’ll start making cars and money - you’ve already got the magic sauce baked in the product.
Every surviving automaker is over a century old. It’s damn hard to create a new auto company. Tesla may still fail in the end. The reason is that if they can get more vehicles on the road, they can reinvest the profits into another improved vehicle and thus stay ahead of the competition long enough to become an established player.
Remember, all the other automakers are slowly trying to mimic everything Tesla has done.
No, because they did a staggered launch. Dearborn Truck Plant shut down for retooling while Kansas City finished building orders for 2014s. Then once DTP was up and running KC changed over.
Bolt is built on the same line as the Sonic, and sales of the Sonic have tanked. Bolt demand isn’t high enough to keep the line running at capacity for a full shift so the plant has had some “planned” 1 or 2 week shutdowns here and there.
Except the part about actually putting cars together.
Yep, this kind of smells like a “suicide shot” to make the number.
That is totally true, but that doesn’t mean that one has to make all kinds of bad mistakes in doing so. When Elon started SpaceX, he got a lot of really smart rocket people to work for him, and despite all sorts of chaos (I know one dude who was fired and rehired like like times in his first few years), those experts provided the know-how to make a successful product.
But with Tesla, it sure seems like all the smart people go together to design wonderful products… but when it comes to operations, it sure seems its like Elon said, “Fuck you and your expertise, I know more than you do and sleeping under my desk will fix everything.” Seriously, what kind of screwed up management is that? It’s an embarrassment. What really has me scratching my head is how many top Tesla people have left in the last year – it isn’t clear to me whether they were fired or quit, but quite a few of them have gone on to good jobs with other automakers.
If this were anything but Elon Musk and the product was anything other than a BEV, you know damn well that virtually all of the Tesla aficionados would be cheering that, say, Bob Lutz was failing in bringing a new gas-guzzling SUV to market because he’s missed deadlines, is continually losing money, losing talent left and right, having high rates of worker injuries, has a fantastically inefficient production line, has built a tent because of those problems, etc.
FALSE. They are adopting a good number of Telsa’s design and features. Nobody is trying to copy their production incompetence. Seriously, you think Toyota is considering laying of 9% of its workforce, building a fucking tent, and creating a manufacturing system based on untrained workers occasionally doing other jobs to meet meaningless goals? Give me a break.
it’s funny, isn’t it? Elon leaves SpaceX largely in Gwynne Shotwell’s hands, and they’re by all accounts kicking ass and taking names.
meanwhile, under his personal watch Tesla has been incredibly haphazard and undisciplined,
That’s pretty much what happened. Detroit was shedding jobs from 2005-2010, and a lot of people took buyouts and went to work elsewhere (e.g. Tesla, Fisker.) And these were people with at least a decade of experience. people with that experience aren’t going to put up with “Oh, you’re going to tell me to implement something stupid which I know won’t work, and by the way work around the clock to do it? F that S.”
so they’ve apparently been replaced by younger, inexperienced tech bro types who don’t realize that “Agile” software development methods don’t work for mass producing hard goods. Hell, I saw this coming a couple of years ago; I’m acquainted with people who do production line tooling and installation, and their unwavering opinion was that Tesla was the most unbelievably unreasonable customer they’ve ever worked with. And it was even simple stuff like not understanding that you cannot make daily changes to hard tooling.
What Tesla is doing on the 3 is basically pissing all over the very concept of mass production.
they’ll just sneer and say something like “Well when have you ever started a car company or landed rockets on the ground” as if to claim Tesla and SpaceX’s accomplishments as their own.
After I wrote the last post, I thought about how the discussion in 2016 and through most of last year was about how Tesla was “building the machine that will build the machine,” and how many people were fawning over the brilliance of building… a factory.
Though it isn’t part of my day-to-day responsibilities, I’ve seen quite a few factories in the aerospace sector move from producing one complex product to a different one, and also move from low-rate production of one aerospace thing to full-rate production of that thing. I’ve even seen that process in SpaceX’s Hawthorne facility, when they reorganized workflow and added tooling to up their production rates in roughly the 2012 timeframe (don’t recall the specific year that happened).
I do not claim that I am the guy with the individual expertise to manage production flows or introduce tooling or whathaveyou… but boy, I have never, ever seen any defense program that was this far off from where they planned to be. And yeah, I’m talking about American defense programs, which are famously over-budget and behind schedule! Yet, they all seem to look pretty good when it comes to production, as compared to Tesla right now.
That isn’t their sustainable rate, that was an “all-hands-on-deck-crank-it-out” rate. Realistically they probably have another quarter or two before they are can sustain that rate.
And let me say that my criticism of Tesla is not because I’m some anti-EV FUDster. I’ve put my $1,000 down, and though I’m not totally convinced I will choose the M3 as my next car… I really really hope it is a good option for me.
This criticism should be taken in the spirit of, “The pitcher on my favorite baseball team gets hammered every damn time he throws past the eighth inning – why won’t the idiot manager pull him after seven good innings!!!” Elon clearly knows how to put in seven fantastic innings, but why can’t we have someone come in to relieve him and close out the game for a total win?
Has it been demonstrated that the turnover rate for executive management is really out-of-line with industry or Silicon Valley norms? I could be wrong, but I think some of the perception comes from the fact that when a VP of Hyundai leaves for greener pastures, it often doesn’t receive any media coverage.
Which is a fair question, but when Elon talks so often about wanting complainers to leave the company, or “scraping off barnacles,” and so on; it’s pretty clear to me that he WANTS high turnover. And when it comes to basic problems like worker safety, when it seems to only be addressed once it hits the media, it sure seems like employees are viewed in a similar way to Trump, in that loyalty is a one-way street.
But what is clear is that the current system, as it relates to production, is not being successful.