Electric Car Prediction - Whatdayathing???

[Olaf Hart]

I am interested in the concept of using home solar panel energy to charge your car rather than pumping it at low cost into the grid, it’s like a Tesla wall but you use the cars batteries not your house ones.

Another disruptor is China, and the possibility of small generic cars not large individual model based ones, look at the bicycle market and development of electric bicycles.

The real enemy of electric vehicles is weight, which comes as a result of surviving on a freeway. Lots of cities are putting in discrete bicycle paths, which opens up a completely new market for commuting.

[BeauV]

I'd just like to point out that almost no one under the age of 30 wears or even owns a wrist watch. The phone killed the market. Watches are now only man-jewelry, they've always been woman-jewelry, and really they are just about useless.

The data says that the average commute in the US is 25.5 minutes each way. Obviously, there are people who commute over an hour, but it's a very small percentage. Also, that commute is is only about 14 to 15 miles because folks don't drive at 60 MPH. So the real "demand" is centered at something like 55 minutes/day with some sort of running around after work or on the lunch hour. If we extend that to 90 minutes at an average speed of 45 MPH, then that's something around 60 miles. Clearly an electric car with about 300 mile range is just fine, even for outliers who commute for 100 or 120 minutes. Keep in mind that it is _miles_ that count not _minutes_ as the electric car uses very little power going slowly and nearly zero when stopped. This is quite different form IC engine cars. (Source)

I know there are plenty of folks who drive long distances in states like WY and TX, but they are a real minority; as the data shows.

As to VW Groups capabilities. No doubt they know how to build IC cars. But Please recall the utter disaster that occurred when various German companies tried to deal with electronics in the '90s and '00s. It was almost comical how terrible their computer control systems were. Even today, Porsche (a car I love to drive) has some of the worst user interfaces and electronics on the planet.

Finally, I'd just like to point out that Tesla doesn't actually ever need to build a mass market car to be a very successful car company. There is a massive market they are doing great in clobbering BMW, MBZ, Jaguar, Lexus, Acura, Porsche, etc.... The fun thing is we don't really need to predict this, unless we're investors (I have never bought a single share of Tesla, even when it was private). This will sort itself out in the next five or six years.

Like Apple which only has about 25-30% of the smart phone market but has over 90% of the profit dollars, Tesla may find that the right strategy is to build higher end cars at a relatively low market share and utterly ignore the commoditized low-end were there is very very little profit.

[kdh]

Finally, I'd just like to point out that Tesla doesn't actually ever need to build a mass market car to be a very successful car company. There is a massive market they are doing great in clobbering BMW, MBZ, Jaguar, Lexus, Acura, Porsche, etc.... The fun thing is we don't really need to predict this, unless we're investors (I have never bought a single share of Tesla, even when it was private). This will sort itself out in the next five or six years.

Like Apple which only has about 25-30% of the smart phone market but has over 90% of the profit dollars, Tesla may find that the right strategy is to build higher end cars at a relatively low market share and utterly ignore the commoditized low-end were there is very very little profit.

Quite true, but two things to consider:

1) Elon Musk's plan all along has been to save the planet by offering electric cars to the masses. He'll be reluctant to give up on that.

2) The current stock price can't be justified if Tesla is purely to be a luxury car builder.

[BeauV]

Finally, I'd just like to point out that Tesla doesn't actually ever need to build a mass market car to be a very successful car company. There is a massive market they are doing great in clobbering BMW, MBZ, Jaguar, Lexus, Acura, Porsche, etc.... The fun thing is we don't really need to predict this, unless we're investors (I have never bought a single share of Tesla, even when it was private). This will sort itself out in the next five or six years.

Like Apple which only has about 25-30% of the smart phone market but has over 90% of the profit dollars, Tesla may find that the right strategy is to build higher end cars at a relatively low market share and utterly ignore the commoditized low-end were there is very very little profit.

Quite true, but two things to consider:

1) Elon Musk's plan all along has been to save the planet by offering electric cars to the masses. He'll be reluctant to give up on that.

2) The current stock price can't be justified if Tesla is purely to be a luxury car builder.

On #1, I think that while Elon says that, he's really after being famous and rich. The planet will be a distant last place based on his behavior as opposed to what he says.

On #2, the only one who cares about the stock price are stockholders. The crazy CEO is one of the reasons I've never ever owned stock. BTW, the earlier CEO was even crazier than Elon. Elon was a massive upgrade. I have recommended NOT buying Tesla stock at ever stage. The cars are great, as an investment the company sucks.

[Jamie]

So Tesla Model 3 sold 2.5x BMW 3 series. This guy is kind of annoying, but mostly gets it right.

Some interesting things on the technology deployed on the Tesla and the build quality.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XzspO4-T7t4

Jamie, to be fair, I think we'd have to combine BMW 3 and 4 series to get the real comparison. For some Totally Idiotic reason BMW decided to make one car (clearly the most well known performance model that they build) two "numbers" for what sure seems to be the 2-door and 4-door version of the same car. Jamie, I don't know if Tesla 3 outsold the combination of M-3 and M-4. Do you have that number? I'm guessing Tesla still won.

As to the video, the reviewer really does seem like he's reaching for something to complain about with the Tesla 3 mid-range. Yes, I know he wants to say why the mid-range is different from the M-3, but his "complaints" are pretty darn weak for 99% of the buyers.

Having driven my daughters Tesla 3 mid-range a lot, I have to say it's not going to keep up with our Tesla S with the performance package. But, that's really an apple-2-oranges sort of discussion.


Keith, around here in technoland folks have stopped buying Prius and never did buy BMW i3 because both cars are butt ugly. When Prius was the only option for a "clean car", they put up with it. But now that there is a cleaner car, they are moving on to something that looks nice. This really applies to the interior where the Tesla 3 is simply decades ahead of any other car in its class.

The Toyota Mirai (burns hydrogen) is not only about the ugliest car I've seen in decades, but also has ALL the fuel supply problems with no gain to the customer. I think it represents a total misunderstanding of what customer's want.

I think he had a point with his previous car with the paint defects and panel gaps. This one not so much. I don’t have the number but M3 and M4 are pretty low volume like most performance cars. I think of Teslas like iPhones: not the first, but a unique combo of cool and function. How long did your palm pilot and Nokia last after the iPhone arrived?

What will be interesting to see is how fast traditional mfg catch-up.

[BeauV]

I think he had a point with his previous car with the paint defects and panel gaps. This one not so much. I don’t have the number but M3 and M4 are pretty low volume like most performance cars. I think of Teslas like iPhones: not the first, but a unique combo of cool and function. How long did your palm pilot and Nokia last after the iPhone arrived?

What will be interesting to see is how fast traditional mfg catch-up.

Yup, if they can catch up. If we use laptops as an analogy, IBM never did catch up, sold the business to Lenovo who still hasn't caught up. Eventually, after more than a decade, Microsoft got into the business and a Surface is now the first real competitor for a Mac Laptop. Samsung didn't build phones when iPhone was launched. None of the original competitors ever caught up.

Heavily subsidized companies (EG: Kia and Hundai in the auto industry) have managed to enter the market, but only with someone giving them a lot of free capital and (in Asia) having access to really cheap labor and a local protected market. Samsung did the same thing with semi-conductors, it's really an extension of the Government. VW group is a great example in Europe. Tesla has received plenty of subsidies, but nothing like what the state of Saxony has done for VW.

[TheOffice]

Just got an invitation to build by electric Hyundai Kona. They are even offering lease deals. 258 mile range starting at 37k.

I expected Elon to announce that they would start building the Y on the Model 3 assembly line. Wrong again! I know BMW can build multiple models on one line, so I assumed Tesla could also. Maybe the overseas demand for the 3 will keep the line busy.

[BeauV]

My understanding is that there are two “fixed” Model 3 assembly lines and one “temp” line out in a tent in the parking lot. When Tesla built that Temp line they caught a lot of grief from the auto industry along the lines of “real men put their manufacturing indoors” - mostly from folks in the mid-west and Europe who don’t realize how benign the weather is in CA. The purpose of the Temp line was to build the backlog of Model 3s that were stacked up. I would not be surprised if the Temp line is being repurposed to build Model Y cars, but I can’t tell by looking at it from the outside.

Meanwhile the number of Teslas roaming around it getting silly. My X is in the super charger while I grab lunch and where there used to be 4 charging stations there are now 25. All but 2 were full when I arrived. The same thing happened just south of San Francisco and also in Monterey. Here in Los Gatos there is a line of chargers for other cars as well, but only about 20% of those slots are full.

It’s seriously impressive to see the sort of inverter it takes to power 25 slots at 75kw each.

[TheOffice]

I'd expect the new assembly lines to accommodate multiple models as demand shifts. BMW's South Carolina plant has done that for years.

The Model 3 is a hit, even in Germany. It is apparently scaring the crap out of MB and BMW.

[BeauV]

I'd expect the new assembly lines to accommodate multiple models as demand shifts. BMW's South Carolina plant has done that for years.

The Model 3 is a hit, even in Germany. It is apparently scaring the crap out of MB and BMW.

It is hard to describe in words what a HOOT the model3 is to drive, especially the performance model.

[avramd]

Hey Everyone, I am super-late to the game on this thread... I read/scanned the whole 1st page, and then realized there are 19 pages... So I TL/DR'd to here...

I only recently discovered how impressive the Tesla acceleration figures are, even for just a base-model 3. The bottom line all-wheel-drive Model 3 does 0-60 in 4.5 secs. OMG that's amazing.

I gave up on hybrids a while ago because I'm from Maine, and I refuse to have a daily driver that is not all-wheel drive. Subaru's hybrid is a joke. Audi has one that apparently you can't actually buy, and is absurdly expensive, and has performance almost as underwhelming as the Subaru.

As you may have see in my other post, I'm about to drive from RI to the FL keys, via Asheville NC on the way down and OBX on the way back. I am pretty much coveting a model 3 now, but I can't imagine doing this trip in one. I pan to do a 12-hr drive between each major location. The logistics of trying to coordinate that with "supercharing" stations is starting to make it sound more like a cruise than a drive!

I totally missed any conversation about self-driving cars between pages 2 and here, but I'll throw in my bit about it anyway: I'm a software engineer. Don't trust your or anybody else's lives to a software engineer. The primary qualifying characteristic of a really good software engineer is laziness.

Ok, I'm half joking. Personally I don't think self-driving cars will be commercially viable in the united states until they change the right-of-way laws such that they have the right of way. Over everything. Including pedestrians. On the sidewalk. And in restaurants. The reason is liability. People here want somebody to go to jail and cough up a lot of money when they get hurt or someone they love dies. The current rules about that are established and accepted. Nobody is going to be ok taking financial and legal responsibility for mistakes their self-driving cars make - not the owners, not the manufacturers. Whoever that blame lands on will disappear from the market, and then there will either be no supply or no demand.

The only way it can work is if we decide that when a self-driving car runs down a pedestrian, it was the pedestrian's fault. And nobody's going to tolerate that.

[LarryHoward]

I would argue that Tesla’s supercharger network is getting more expansive quickly and their newest version (hypercharger?) allows more charging faster. Had “lunch” (noon until 5) a couple of weekends ago with friends who bought a new LR, 2WD model 3 in late December. Quality is impressive and although they felt taken a bit ( they really wanted the $35K version but had to move up to get the full tax break).

They are planning a trip to CT for their Son’s wedding and he has mapped out superchargers along their route and they are planning 20-30 minute stops every 3 hours. Not quite “has and go” but, like many of us, they have crossed the 60 threshold and are OK with the stops for a stretch, a quick meal or tea (she is English). With the latest software push, it appears the Model 3 is now able to deliver 300 “real world” East coast highway miles (80 MPH, AC on, et.) so 200 miles between stops is pretty realistic. Unless I’m on a mission, I go around 250-275 with an ICE car. Challenge is still off the beaten path and finding a place to stay on the road and get a full charge overnight. Not happening on OBX-yet.

I think Porsche, Audi, BMW, VW, the Chinese start up and others are starting to put competitive pressure on Tesla (and Tesla is penetrating their home markets). That should drive an explosion in options at different market points. Enough so that a plug in electric is on our radar when we replace Lynne’s aged minivan in a couple of years. It will have to compete with ICE options but not something we would have considered 2 years ago.

In a really short period, Tesla has changed the market from electrics that required significant compromise and commitment to truly viable urban and suburban options and are pretty far down the path of making them road trip contenders. I have to give Elon credit for that.

As to Key West? My daughter lives in Palm Beach and gets down to the Keys fairly often. I’ll pulse her for suggestions.

[TheOffice]

We are seeing a revolution. The Model 3 is about to be the best selling car in Germany.

In Norway, which Beau pointed out is the home of cheap electricity, electrics are now outselling ICE powered cars. Hyundaia/Kia have electrics, and you can order your Kia charging station from Amazon which will contract with an electrician in your area. Volvo (chinese owned) is coming out with electrics as are VW, MB BMW and Porsche. The Big 3 and the Japanese seem to be lagging behind, and it is going to cost them.

I imagine gas stations turning into charging stations with Starbucks cafes. Pull in, power up, get a cup of coffee so you need to stop in 200 miles anyhow, and repeat.

[Chris Chesley]

[quote="avramd"
I gave up on hybrids a while ago because I'm from Maine, and I refuse to have a daily driver that is not all-wheel drive. .[/quote]

I am on my 2nd Toyota Highland hybrid (only because I gave the 1st one to the kids...) Pulls 3500 lbs, AWD, 28 mpg city and hwy all the time. I also have a Kia Niro hybrid that gets over 50mpg all the time (okay, sometimes 48 mpg in the winter)--- it's way better than the Prius I had.

From a price, fuel cost, and practical standpoint, hybrids are still the best choice available.

Just my $0.02

[BeauV]

Regarding self-driving cars, meaning completely, fully, totally, you can sleep behind the wheel sort of self-driving, I think that is a long way down the road from here. Regardless of what folks say (Elon included), there are too many corner cases to make the software reliable.

I also think that discussing complete self-driving of this sort is almost entirely irrelevant and a waste of time. Since when have we ever gone from an entirely manual system to an entirely automated system where lives were at stake in one product shift. I certainly can't think of any. EG: today a modern airplane can take off, fly someplace, and land without anyone driving. But, that's irrelevant too. There are just too many corner cases. (Like when you bought the cheap plane without the safety options)

I strongly believe that we are seeing many of the drive functions either augmented or automated. Automatic distance following cruise control is a great example. No moral debate, it just does it's best. If some drunk changes lanes right in front of you and you rear-end him because the cruise control couldn't stop quick enough there aren't any folks with pitchforks demanding a return to totally manual driving. Next, you have lane-following. Same deal.

The point is, that eventually, we will have completely self-driving cars that will still do things like stop at an intersection and simply not have a way to get across. This is exactly what my grandmother used to do. So, the cars will be as good at driving as my grandmother was. Once again, there are just too many corner cases to the problem for it to be solved in a few years, or perhaps in a couple of decades. Again, it's irrelevant.

Folks are talking about the wrong problem. No one, not even me - a certified crazy early adopter, wants to take a name while some piece of 2-year-old software drives me to LA. However, I'm perfectly happy having my Tesla drive me to and from San Francisco, a 160-mile round trip, using Autopilot at least 90% of the time. It's been doing that for at least 40,000 miles and there has never been a moment of drama, not one. Why? Well, I think the "Autopilot" is exactly that, an autopilot. It's just like the one on MAYAN and the ones in Airplanes. It automatically pilots the car/airplane/boat. It does NOT do a perfect job in every corner case, and I don't' expect it to. Nor does the manufacturer tell you that it will.

It's an autopilot which is named "Autopilot". I just can't figure out why so many folks have trouble with this. But I've been deeply disappointed in folks ability to understand the obvious for quite a while now.

[BeauV]

Regarding using SuperChargers to take long trips. I've found that the vast majority of SuperChargers are set up at restaurants, coffee shops, and shopping centers. There are a ton of things to do while the car is charging.

Things have become so fast and easy that I now hit a SuperCharger and catch up on 20 minutes of email at Starbucks rather than bothering with the extra range charging on the Model S. It'll go from home to SF and Back with the extra range and have 50 miles in the battery when I get home, but the long range charging shortens the battery life a little, so I simply avoid it and use the SuperCharger just south of San Francisco. I've never had to wait for a slot.

[avramd]

But if you were using autopilot, aren't you already caught up on email before you get to the supercharging station?

[BeauV]

But if you were using autopilot, aren't you already caught up on email before you get to the supercharging station?

Seriously, it's a lot like the autopilot on your boat or plane; how much do you trust it? Out on the freeway, it's great, email away. Around town, it won't even let you turn itself on because it can't handle it and the car knows it even if the people are too uneducated to understand. Do people use their boat autopilot to drive through the middle of Newport RI on a busy weekend? Not hardly. Folks need to look up the definition of an "autopilot", but that would require RTFM (one of my favorite tech acronyms: Read The F**KING Manual).

[Olaf Hart]

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[kdh]

Regarding self-driving cars, meaning completely, fully, totally, you can sleep behind the wheel sort of self-driving, I think that is a long way down the road from here. Regardless of what folks say (Elon included), there are too many corner cases to make the software reliable.

I also think that discussing complete self-driving of this sort is almost entirely irrelevant and a waste of time. Since when have we ever gone from an entirely manual system to an entirely automated system where lives were at stake in one product shift.

Beau, I agree completely, though this seems to be heresy these days. The standard view is that in 5 years we'll all be in a self driving electric and the car culture we have now will be the province of stuck-in-time old people.

Hardly. Machine learning is automated learn-by-example. It's hard and requires a lot of examples. The "curse of dimensionality" as we statisticians describe it means that practically speaking all those sensors on a car mean that practically everything is in a corner in feature space. Problems get exponentially (literally) harder with the number of sensors.

Cars will be automatically driven when road infrastructure and traffic rules are adapted to support them. Think trains running in tracks with automated crossings.

[kdh]

Porsche is going electric with the Macan and the new Tacan. Won't have to worry about the engine in the back much longer.

This is a small SUV for $47,000 with the extra large battery pack (over 300 mi. range) and it goes from 0-60 in 3.2 seconds. Key to this product is that it just creams the $77,000+ Porsche Turbo Macan, with good range, zero emissions, and it is even faster in a straight line (Macan is 0-60 in 3.6 seconds).

Thus, Tesla has taken the industry through the loop at least three times and is still rolling along. The company has gone from 1 car built 11 years ago to 1,000,000 this year if they stay on track. Every one of those products was poopooed by the pundits - as the Model Y is being now. There are a LOT of pundits who are still eating crow about the Model 3 while continuing to sling the poopoo about the Model Y. This too is exactly the behavior of the industry analysts who entirely missed the iPod, iPhone and iPad as Apple crushed competitors.

Model 3 deliveries went from 43,900 during Nov/Dec 2018 to 12,250 in Jan/Feb 2019. Porsche are scrambling to meet pre-ordered demand (mostly from Tesla owners) for the Taycan while Tesla hemorrhage cash, so much so that the first model Y is not promised (an Elon Musk promise, so subject to change) until the fall of 2020.

The Taycan has the world's first mass-production 800-volt battery pack, which will allow it to charge more than twice as fast as a Tesla at a Supercharger—adding about 240 miles in less than 15 minutes.

This is a critical time for Tesla's survival.

https://www.greencarreports.com/news/1120661_porsche-taycan-sold-out-for-a-yearto-mostly-tesla-drivers

Re: Tesla stock (TSLA) and the news release last night. The early numbers cited above proved prescient.

Tesla as a growth story is going to require some 'splainin.

[LarryHoward]

Regarding self-driving cars, meaning completely, fully, totally, you can sleep behind the wheel sort of self-driving, I think that is a long way down the road from here. Regardless of what folks say (Elon included), there are too many corner cases to make the software reliable.

I also think that discussing complete self-driving of this sort is almost entirely irrelevant and a waste of time. Since when have we ever gone from an entirely manual system to an entirely automated system where lives were at stake in one product shift.

Beau, I agree completely, though this seems to be heresy these days. The standard view is that in 5 years we'll all be in a self driving electric and the car culture we have now will be the province of stuck-in-time old people.

Hardly. Machine learning is automated learn-by-example. It's hard and requires a lot of examples. The "curse of dimensionality" as we statisticians describe it means that practically speaking all those sensors on a car mean that practically everything is in a corner in feature space. Problems get exponentially (literally) harder with the number of sensors.

Cars will be automatically driven when road infrastructure and traffic rules are adapted to support them. Think trains running in tracks with automated crossings.

Unfortunately, Elon seems to brush away all concerns and is selling and hyping "autonomous cars and trucks are imminent and at least implying the government is lagging on policy/approvals." Public announcements about autonomous coast to coast trips in the very near future are hype from a practiced showman but the availability of devices to mimic hands on the wheel are evidence that there are folks that believe "autopilot" means autonomous today.

I read over the weekend that Keen Security Lab, a "black hat" company, spoofed autopilot by placing 3 small, reflective patches on a road to mimic a merge lane and Tesla' Autopilot happily swerved into the oncoming lane. Tesla shrugged it off as not a realistic concern. GM's "Super Cruise" gets blinded at low sun angles. As Keith says, corners are everywhere in future space. In aviation, we look at a safety issue that may cause loss of life once in 100,000 events unacceptable and will urgently address a 6 sigma fatal condition. What will we tolerate in an autonomous world?

[BeauV]

Keith, in listening to the various folks talk about getting self-driving cars to work, I'm struck by the similarities to what we lived through when AI was new. I'm talking about the period just after John McCarthy invented the term and then rued the day. I was an investor in and then CEO of a company called Quintus with a declarative programming language called Prolog, some around here might be old enough to remember it. What happened was that the declarative folks, using tools like Prolog and LISP to define what to do in every instance, had tremendous success on the first 2/3 of a class of problems; and we had 100% success on small well-understood decision spaces. Effectively, we had simply created a much better tool to use to declare what a computer should do in every instance.

Naturally, we had no idea where the limits of this approach actually were...... There lay dragons!

You can read about MYCIN, which is a great example of us in the land of dragons, HERE. With a lot of positive evidence that we were going up the learning curve, we were as bullish as Elon Musk is today. What we did NOT internalize was that we were on an exponential curve of difficult not a straight line. (I'm oversimplifying here, but it's close.) You are entirely correct in pointing out that folks today appear not to really be internalizing the dimensionality of the problem. You obviously know this, but most don't. When faced with N dimensions, the decision space is multiplicative - best case. Worst case, interactions between the dimensions drive up complexity at some unknown rate well beyond anyone's willingness to accept during the frothy days of new technology.

We humans think of growth as a linear thing. It's one reason we're still amazed by Moore's Law, even a simple exponent seems magical to us. When one has multiple dimensions of a problem which are all becoming complex at an exponential rate simultaneously, we simply can't understand it intuitively. Even those who understand the problem have real difficulties with what the implications are.

Of course, in our early days of AI, we had all sorts of ambitions, many prognostications, and an ocean of failures that lead to the AI winter. Now, we have much larger computers which can attempt painfully difficult problems we could only dream about in the mid-'80s.

I'm struck by a question a good friend asked me: "Why do you think we need a lot of cameras and LIDAR to drive a car? Humans only have relatively poor vision and they drive pretty well... some of them. Why can't the computer?"

Clearly, the answer is that there is a massive amount of parallel processing going on within the human visual system which we simply don't understand. Yet, I don't think true self-driving vehicles will require the sorts of separate infrastructure you describe. I'm struck by the massive improvement in driving which the Russian discovered when insurance companies required dash-cams and data monitoring on cars as a condition of providing them with insurance. My understanding is that you weren't required by the government to be monitored or to have a dash camera, but you weren't going to get insurance without it. It would be interesting to see how Americans would respond to that form of enforced good driving. Certainly, the Libertarians would howl about big-government, etc... But, those two simple tools which cost less than 1% of the cost of a car would probably save thousands of lives and would make the problem-space of automated driving much more reasonable.


Larry,

I believe the Air Travel market is a wonderful example of a place where Government regulation is a massive win for society. One place it manifests itself is in the safety level, which is breathtaking. Of course, it also manifests itself in various other negative ways, but if we were to apply the training regulations and requirements of Pilots to automobile drivers, we'd have had a chance to save thousands of lives.

However, humans don't appear to value their lifes highly enough to submit to the sorts of regulations about DUI, equipment maintenance, etc.... that would actually make driving safer. This problem has nothing to do with self-driving cars. It is entirely based on the simple fact that human drivers don't want to have their freedom to kill themselves and others inhibited in the way it is for Pilots. If they did, all cars would have alcohol sensors in the dashboard, as one example.

Of course, a "real pilot" knows exactly what an "autopilot" is, and treats it appropriately. While car's driver assumes "autopilot" means "self-driving car" despite repeated and loud protestations to the contrary by pundits and the car itself.

As is true of so many problems: it's the people, not the machinery. Or to paraphrase the NRA: Autopilot driven cars don't kill people, people kill people.

As to Elon, he wouldn't be where he is if he weren't good at selling his way out of a problem.

[TheOffice]

The model 3 delivery numbers were caused by a number of factors, including thousands of them sitting in ports or on boats on the way to China and Europe. I expect there to be a significant bounce now that the cars are being delivered overseas. If they ever sell the 35,000 version of the car, there will be another, less profitable bounce. I doubt few people will order the base version stripped down. Nicely equipped it will still run around 45k.

[BeauV]

The model 3 delivery numbers were caused by a number of factors, including thousands of them sitting in ports or on boats on the way to China and Europe. I expect there to be a significant bounce now that the cars are being delivered overseas. If they ever sell the 35,000 version of the car, there will be another, less profitable bounce. I doubt few people will order the base version stripped down. Nicely equipped it will still run around 45k.

Well, I think there is most certainly at least one other factor. Yes, there were a lot of cars on the way to overseas markets. I just heard from a friend that the 2nd calendar quarter, the Model 3 will become the best selling car in Germany. I was shocked by that, but he has been right previously so I'm going to watch. The other factor is that I watched as Tesla sucked on the funnel HARD! They busted their butts to get as many cars sold as they could before the Federal subsidies were reduced. As a result, every car they could get sold and shipped in Q4 of last year was shipped. This lead to draining the funnel of buyers and a significant one-quarter downturn in sales.

What I don't know are the detailed numbers about how much is: Competition, Sucking on the Funnel, Cars on Docks, or something else. We simply don't have enough data to be certain, despite all manner of pundit thinking they know.

[kdh]

Sufficient demand at prices that allow profit is the issue at this stage.

The stock is fun to follow.

[BeauV]

Sufficient demand at prices that allow profit is the issue at this stage.

The stock is fun to follow.

Yes, I agree, that's the issue for the Tesla car company. I think that more critically Elon's ambition and arrogance need to be tempered a bit by someone. I have no idea who. On its own, I don't think the car company is a reasonable bet. But when looking at it as a vertically integrated system from batteries, through Cars and Power-Walls, to Electric Re-Fueling stations, it takes on a rather different hue.

With over 12,000 electric refueling stations already in place and about 2,000 more to come online soon, Tesla may be reaching the point where it will be very hard for an alternative charging format to be introduced. The auto industry isn't used to having to battle fuel-lock-in, but it's a classic technology company move. Eventually, it's obvious that someone will dominate the charging format war, but right now Tesla owns it hands down. The other formats are too slow or simply not deployed at all (eg: Porsche). Locally, which is obviously suffering from selection bias, the "ChargePoint" recharging stations are being replaced by landlords with Tesla Superchargers. In the tech world, we'd be trying to call the tipping point where the entire market makes the Tesla Supercharger the default winner and the market standardizes. If a less arrogant and more seductive CEO was running the company, I think it might have already happened.

[TheOffice]

In the 'clearly not an electric' news, saw two McLarens driving on route 70 in Maryland. Very cool! Had to get close enough to read the script on the spoiler to even know what they were.

[BeauV]

In the 'clearly not an electric' news, saw two McLarens driving on route 70 in Maryland. Very cool! Had to get close enough to read the script on the spoiler to even know what they were.

There are a few of these cars motoring around San Francisco. You can sometimes hear their front air-dam crunch on the bumps and their wheels thump on the potholes. :/

[BeauV]

One of our sons borrowed our Tesla-S tonight to do the 156 mile round trip to San Francisco and back. While driving along, he did the calculation on the fuel cost, compared to his F-150 pickup.

Tesla: $6.58 for the trip @ $0.152/kilowattHour (CA daytime price, we actually pay $0.12 charging after midnight The US average is $0.029/kilowattHour.)

Ford F-150: $26.27 for the trip @ $3.08/gallon (what he just paid to fill up) The pickup get 19 MPG

As he pointed out, this leaves out oil changes etc.... Tesla's don’t ever have that sort of service requirement.

He drives a lot, he’s scratching his head.