GM has been beta testing them for quite some time.
consider that GM has been building cars for a hundred years, and has been building EVs, hybrids, and PHEVs for almost 20 years. Tesla has been building cars for three years (I don’t count the roadster since the “car” part was designed and built by Lotus.)
The automotive industry has been around for a long time. They’ve long since figured out how to build cars. they’ve long since figured out how to build electric cars. they’ve long since figured out how to build hybrid/plug in hybrid cars (which are far more complex than a pure EV.) The ONLY thing Tesla has changed is the business case.
How long have the established automakers been making EVs that aren’t little shitmobiles? Right–negative 6 months (or more).
It’s not just the business case that Tesla solved. They also figured out how to build an EV that was actually attractive (not just in looks, but everything).
I just ran across this article, which I laughed at. BMW brags at having 65k people willing to put exactly zero dollars down (“hand raiser”) to express their interest in the i3 and i8. Tesla may not be able to convert all of their 270k reservations into sales, but each one of them is a hell of a lot more meaningful than BMW’s handraisers and they have >4x as many.
And some day, they will release something that qualifies as v0.8.7 or better.
GM Made the EV-1 long before Musk came along and they were working on them while Tesla was building niche cars. There wasn’t anything to “figure out” in making them. the only thing Tesla invented was the down payment followed by his other invention, the late delivery. That’s not really hard to do. Neither is losing money.
How is it more meaningful that Tesla has to raise money in order to survive? They literally need this money to go forward.
It’s one thing to build a small run of expensive sports cars and lose money. It’s another to get down into the trenches and compete in the high volume low-markup product line. That’s a much greater financial risk. The Model 3 is a make-or-break product for Tesla.
There’s always Space-X. Musk could up his $61M launch price to half of ULA’s and have enough to build an entire new factory.
Just kidding!
But:
Even if Tesla Motors goes bankrupt, it has already served the big issue:
Turning EV’s from “yeah, we’ll probably get there sometime” to “On the road NOW” and 100’s of thousands of people clamoring for more.
Let’s see if Faraday Future can take up the slack.
How many people would have jumped at the chance to buy an electric car even fifteen years ago?
Up until Tesla, EV’s were basically golf carts.
In 1897, a fellow named Ransom E. Olds started a production line to manufacture “Horseless carriages” by 1902, he was producing the Oldsmobile “Curved Dash Runabout”.
Children have been taught that Henry Ford either invented the automobile or was the first to introduce a production line.
Ransom still gets a note.
And Musk has donated $2M to the effort to purchase Nikola Tesla’s lab and build a museum to honor him.
The EV-1 wasn’t interesting to anyone that didn’t have a hard-on for EVs already. In every other respect, it was notably worse than gasoline cars. Tesla was, and remains the only manufacturer of EVs that are decent for their own sake, and not just because they’re EVs.
I don’t know or care if Tesla actually has some magic uncopyable technology or not. The point is that the other manufacturers simply haven’t done it yet. So the market remains Tesla’s and even the Bolt shows no evidence of changing that fact.
In a way, the Model 3 has already succeeded in its efforts, because it’s proven that there is a massive demand for EVs at the right price point. I don’t know if this came as a surprise to auto execs or not, but either way it demonstrates massive incompetence on their behalf.
The actual money raised by Tesla from reservations is meaningless–it’s not enough to build out even part of a production line. They need billions and they’ll be raising capital via other methods for that. Their stock price is close to its all-time high and so there’s no shortage of people willing to throw them money.
What makes the reservations meaningful is that $1000 indicates a degree of commitment well beyond entering your email address on a “send me more info on your car” page. It’s not just “handraising”. And even at that, the reservations exceeded anyone’s expectations.
Well, that much I mostly agree with, though if the 3 is a failure, I’d expect they could fall back to just selling S and X vehicles. They would be profitable if it weren’t for the expansion and additional R&D costs.
Musk is a fascinating person.
He has several good ideas worth in their own right.
Space - Human colony on Mars is probably a bit fantastic (literal sense), but Space is good.
Electric Cars - 'nuf said.
Powerwall - nice, but why distract from the two above.
The self-connecting charger line - um, getting a bit carried away, are we? Do we really need this technology?
The over-the-top door handles. Out of the Pool!
Hyperloop - cool idea, but I suspect he was right to let others spend their money.
However the game plays out, I would really, really like to see Tesla name be the “Ford”, not the “Olds” of the coming EV revolution.
Neither car is on the market yet, but he’s already determined which one will take over the world and which one is a piece of junk.
[quote=“Dr.Strangelove, post:207, topic:749862”]
The EV-1 wasn’t interesting to anyone that didn’t have a hard-on for EVs already. That’s complete nonsense. The EV-1 was the only thing going at the time. There was no recent interest in EV’s prior to it.
What are you talking about? There’s a whole list of electric cars on the market. The only thing the other manufacturers haven’t done is lose money on a grand scale doing it. There’s a number of reasons for that and they’re called stockholders.
again, there’s a whole list of EV’s on the market.
This is complete fiction. Tesla is bleeding money. The company has a little over a billion in cash reserves compared to a company like GM which has over 30 billion in reserves. Tesla absolutely needs the free loan down payments to keep going.
You keep confusing your love of their products with financial success. There’s nothing wrong with loving the product but that’s not how a business works. I hope they succeed but I’m not letting that cloud reality. Elon has made some bad decisions and it is going to come to a head next year.
Speaking of the deposits as a free loan; what happens when the loans get recalled early? What happens if a significant portion of the lenders want their $1,000 back before the product is delivered? Are there any terms in the agreement of the deposit that limit cancelling?
I’m guessing it will be spent, and a significant portion of the $250 million dollar loan getting recalled would be met with blank stares from Tesla.
These are very puzzling points. First, it implies that the recipient of a loan does not typically spend the loan amount, and that all the cash would normally sit in a big pile for a long time. Of course not, that’s not the point of a loan.
Second, it’s perfectly clear that the loan (or really, it’s more like a deposit) is refundable up until the point that the purchaser makes a firm order for a car, which isn’t even a possibility for probably the next year or two. Cite.
Actually, it’s overwhelmingly likely that other car manufacturers are not making profits on their EV offerings. Bob Lutz thinks that the Chevy Bolt will be a money loser for GM, and he believes that other, non-Tesla auto makers are raising prices on SUVs in order to cover losses on products like the Leaf, C-Max Energi, e-Golf, Spark, etc.
And you keep talking about how many electric cars there are on the market. There’s 24. And half of those are actually plug-in hybrids. And of the pure EVs, the Leaf and the two Teslas account for about 45% percent of all EV and plug-in hybrid sales. Or to say it another way, 3 models account for just under half of all EV sales, 21 models split the remaining half of sales. Cite.
PLUS – a substantial number of pure EVs are simply not sold in the vast majority of states. If you live in, say, New York City, you’re going to have to travel 3,000 miles to buy an Fiat 500e, for example, which is the fourth best-selling pure EV sold in the US.
You keep thinking that Tesla has the same motives as GM. GM exists pretty much only to make profits and return money to shareholders. Tesla is probably one-half a profit seeking company and one-half a vanity business intended to change what cars the world buys, and how we buy them.
Look at each of Elon’s current business ventures: Tesla, SpaceX, Solar City. None of them are raking in cash. I don’t think Elon cares all that much. He surely doesn’t want them hemorrhaging money, but he isn’t trying to become rich off of them either. That’s the major difference with GM and other big auto makers: the big carmakers are trying to make their shareholders rich, and Elon’s businesses really don’t seem to care that much about their shareholders (if they have have any).
I addressed the point about the loan being spent in the very post you quoted, but you snipped that part out so you could fight a strawman.
My question was “what happens if a significant number of lenders withdraw their support before the product is ready to deliver?”
In hindsight, I suppose this question is rhetorical as no one here would be privy to the advance planning done by Tesla, or the forecasts for cancelled deposits.
My apologies, the part wasn’t snipped, just ignored.
Just got an email from Tesla. They sure know how to hype their product. My favorite part:
So they’re liars.
Interesting! Good to know. I suppose marketing people are generally philosophically opposed to fact checking.
I would buy a powerwall right now if I could. They are great for areas with difficult infrastructure deployment and high sun. I believe Hawaii is a target market in the US.
As someone who had a deposit for the Model X and cancelled (spouse wasn’t a fan of the falcon doors), I can say there are zero restrictions on cancelling. I called, spent about 1.5 minutes on the phone to verify identity, and was done. Received the check in 2 days via FedEx.
Tesla is publicly traded. I am a shareholder.
I think the quote missed some context - it assumed an average purchase price if all of those reservations closed. Here is the tweet:
Using the Apple example, if they sold 4M units, to reach the $7.5B that is being compared to the iPhone price would have to be north of $1,800/unit. Not a fair comparison by Musk at all really, since it’s projected sales at some super future date, but that’s how the claim was stretched.
The quote was verbatim, from Tesla, to me (and probably millions of others who signed up for alerts), in an email. I don’t know anything about a tweet. Here is all the text:
I don’t see any issues of context. It’s flat out wrong, though through ignorance or mendacity is an open question.
I meant that of his three companies, two are publicly traded, one is not, and none of them seem single-mindedly focused on profitability. Just the opposite, really.