Tesla has Apple-like brand value without the Apple-like manufacturing efficiency or profit margin. For Tesla's stock price to be worth the current value they need to at some point be making industry-high profit on every car sold - so far they're barely breaking even on the model 3s.
They've _always_ fought against the odds and always looked like a bad bet if you only looked at numbers. The thing is nobody knows how far that brand value - which maybe only 2 or 3 other companies have, can take you: it's the confounding factor when it comes to 'Tesla predictions'. Fans probably buy into the Musk brand while skeptics underestimate just how far brand can take a company.
Funding shouldn't be problem for Tesla for the next couple of years, and neither should selling cars that they've made. But the so called production ramp up has been postponed for a year now.
If they face two or three more 'unexpected hurdles' in manufacturing and have an autopilot scandal or two, they are in trouble once Merc/BMW/Lexus/Audi start coming up with electric cars by 2020ish. That's the real danger. If they can mass produce model 3s by 2020, they should be fine.
Smells like a cult. I would love Tesla to succeed, but schedule is everything. I can claim I will cure the cancer, but if the deliver is 2000 years later. It means nothing.
I think people are just ready for a company likes musk's. People want an strong enigmatic company thats focused on technologically improving things. And for whatever sliver of time we're living in the stars aligned and for once what the people want was made a lucrative thing. I hope things change in his favor.
Musk's companies are putting better rockets in space than NASA. Optimism does get a premium sometimes, because sometimes it actually pulls through. Frankly I'll root for them to succeed over a company based around showing me the last product I reviewed on amazon again. It shows we're capable of so much more.
There's no need to compare Apple with Tesla. It's like comparing apples and monkeys. They're two completely different beasts.
Everyone knows building cars is a capital intensive business. You need to build expensive factories for every new line you want to roll out. It takes time. I think Elon has been whipping his employees a bit harder in the last few days - and I'm confident they'll be able to turn the situation around. All their jobs depend on it...
> I think Elon has been whipping his employees a bit harder in the last few days - and I'm confident they'll be able to turn the situation around. All their jobs depend on it...
Whipping your employees a bit harder is no cure for bad management decisions and promises. It also doesn't make problems simpler or quicker to solve.
Tesla is fundamentally trying to change a 100 year old industry and get cars off fossil fuels. If Apple never existed we'd have uglier mobile phones. If Tesla never existed the switch to electric cars might well be delayed by a decade.
Perhaps people forget the scale of the Gigafactory and how important batteries will be over the next 100 years.
Let's see when Apple starts giving all their patents away for free.
ehm, the real issue has been for the last three decades that electric cars rely on government incentive to be profitable and on top of that nobody knows really what to do with batteries if ev become _really_ widespread
the only thing that's credit to Musk is to have made EV "premium" and "novelty" enough so that people will to pay a higher total cost of ownership to be part of the brand vision.
Until the recent declines they were already worth ~20% more than Ford or GM. The market cap had already baked in massive success, but the financing necessary to get them there was dependent on an every rising share value. A virtuous cycle until it becomes vicious.
There’s a floor for the stock value: the value of the mark to a Chinese upstart EV company (of which there are already a dozen producing a higher volume than Tesla).
There are in fact not a dozen Chinese companies producing strictly EV vehicles at a higher volume than Tesla.
Fortunately China is no longer allowed to purchase consequential US companies. If Tesla were ever sold, it would go to a US, European, Japanese, or South Korean company.
You reminded me ... christ, can you imagine what a disaster an Apple car would have been had they continued pursuing it? Two companies competing in the same already-challenging space....
The Nissan Leaf was compelling to me. Only like $10k after tax incentives, though I think that's no longer the case. If I didn't already have three cars I might have bought one as my DD.
> the so called production ramp up has been postponed for a year now
In what sense?
Elon originally said they were going to try to start production in July 2017. He also said they’d probably miss that date due to supply chain failures, but that he needed to set a date so suppliers could set plans.
To say they delayed the ramp by a year, that would mean they were delivering the first units in Summer 2018. They’re obviously ahead of that so it would seem to me the delay is much less than a year.
The problem is not delivering the first units, but ramping up production to what they need to sell half a million cars. Tesla built 2000-odd cars in Q4; for comparison, Toyota pumps out around 14,000 cars every day.
That 2,000 number isn't meaningful to where they're at now, which is closer to 1,000 per week, or 12,000 per quarter. That should continue to gradually climb as the year goes. 24,000 in the last quarter of the year would be a solid goal.
At 50,000 units in the first year, it would be one of the most successful first year model vehicles in recent automotive history. At 100,000 units the second year, it would be one of the most successful luxury sedans on the planet.
But, in its first year it wasn't 50000, it was less than 3000. Even if you count full year since release, it looks like it's going to be closer to 20000 than 50000.
Tesla claimed they'd produce as many as 200000 Model 3s in 2017 and 400000 in 2018.
Restricting to "first year model vehicles" is silly and seemingly completely ignores how automobile companies work.
It is clear that Tesla is failing to deliver any competitive advantage besides its early start.
It has failed to achieve what is the standard baseline for mass production of cars today, a sustained production rate within controlled quality parameters, and failed to differentiate in other areas, falling behind most other automakers (and non-automakers) in innovation (especially autonomous driving).
There is still hope that it will solve the Model 3 problems, but at this point (including the desperate "volunteers to prove the haters wrong" email) it seems more and more unlikely.
If they’re failing to deliver any competitive advantages, why are there still no competitive cars available from any other company, or even just announced?
So far the closest thing is the Bolt, and it’s not all that close.
Momentum. Tesla got an early start. A decade means nothing. Ford was founded 115 years ago.
Here's the problem. Tesla's cars have two key things that make them competitively interesting: Autopilot and their electric drivetrain. Take those away and their cars are a special kind of "offensively uninteresting". The interiors are horrible, deserving of a car half the price. The build quality is inconsistent. The tech is pretty cool. Parts are unavailable.
So, start with autonomous. Which is easier: for another company to achieve autonomous on-par with Tesla, or for Tesla to fix the design and engineering problems they've been having? 3 years ago, people might have said the latter. But today, we can name 3 companies who arguably have on-par or better driverless tech than Tesla (Google, GM, Uber). There are cars you can literally go buy today that get 90% to what the Model S does (2018 Audi A8, 2018 Accord, 2018 Cadillac CT-6). In some cases, they do better. Where's the competitive advantage?
Electric drivetrain. Tesla is still leading here. For how long? BMW will have an electric mini out in 2019, an electric X3 out in 2020, and 25 all-electric models by 2025. Audi will have an all electric Q6 by 2019, you can put a pre-order in today, 310 mile range. Toyota is planning 10 EVs by early 2020s. Ford is releasing an EV performance car in 2020 (huge missed opportunity to resurrect the Thunderbird brand, as they went with "Mach-1"). Volvo just spun off Polestar into a performance EV brand. The list goes on.
Tesla's massive investment in energy development will be the single thing that might save them; if they fail at making cars in 6 years, at least they can sell batteries to the companies who, well, know how to make cars. But, oh guess what, VW is sourcing their batteries from LG Chem and Samsung. Toyota is making them in-house, and they've said publicly they've achieved a "research breakthrough" on solid state batteries they aren't sharing [1].
I want Tesla to succeed. But, frankly, they have about a year to get it together. That means fix their QA issues, up the interior quality, get autopilot working, drop prices across the line. Possible? Honestly, it doesn't seem likely. But I'm holding out hope.
It's also entirely possible that AfD wins 2021 election, kills all CO2 incentives, after which no new BMW EV model will be built, because they are not competitive on level playing ground.
> It has failed to achieve what is the standard baseline for mass production of cars today, a sustained production rate within controlled quality parameters
Which is ironic given that Tesla is in the old Fremont facility where Toyota schooled GM on how to do exactly that ...
Exactly, with industry-standard infrastructure and plenty of highly-qualified and experienced professionals up for grabs, it is puzzling how they are failing so hard.
My guess is a mentality of "everything is wrong, let's rebuild it from scratch internally and it will be better", ignoring decades of practice and experience.
Which is kind of amazing because their issues of just trying to get cars down the line and trying to fix them after they are built before delivery sounds exactly like the kind of stuff GM used to do that Toyota amazed them by avoiding.
As someone who spent $8K on Enhanced Autopilot 15 months ago, I'd say that pretty much everyone has better autonamous driving. My brother-in-law got a new Honda Accord a few months ago, and says on the highway he can just take his hands off the wheel and let it do it's thing.
My fancy-schmancy Tesla Models S meanwhile can do an ok job of following lanes as long as you keep your hands on the wheel and pay attention to ensure that whenever it doesn't detect your hands on the wheel that you give it a little tug.
I love my Model S, but they really bit off more than they can chew in the "writing our own software" department.
Do you have 2018.10.4 or above? It drove me through 220 miles of rain including torrential downpours yesterday with ease. Up until that update, I’d agree that AP2 was sub par but the new update has dramatically improved EAP.
I just got 2018.10.4 a week or less ago. I haven't put many miles on it yet, but it does seem like a big improvement in the small testing I've done, as far as the driving.
> My brother-in-law got a new Honda Accord a few months ago, and says on the highway he can just take his hands off the wheel and let it do it's thing.
I have the new Accord. It's not really autonomous. Adaptive cruise control and auto-braking aren't bad, but the lane keep mostly just jiggles the steering wheel to notify me when I depart the lines, and all the time it mistakes construction and seams in the pavement as lane lines.
To each their own of course. I'd have no qualms about buying my Model S again.
I'm unwilling to buy a car stuck in time in it's model year, or that must wait years for a software upgrade. Then again, I'm happy with my iPhone, bugs and all; it'll get updates too, and works just fine between iOS updates.
I can appreciate that perspective. I want to live at the bleeding edge, and don't mind the inconveniences or regressions. I can't take my money with me when I die, so after savings and basic needs are met, I want to live in the future (even if the products are still in beta!).
I can't get that sort of experience from stodgy, risk adverse legacy enterprises. I want to support enterprises that want to succeed or die.
EDIT: Edit after your edit, keep the LTS builds, give me nightly! Tests pass? Ship it!
> I want to live in the future (even if the products are still in beta!)
Now we're getting in to why traditional automakers are 'stodgy' and 'risk averse'.
I do agree that there is a lot that can be improved in cars, but a ship software at a million miles an hour approach seems like the kind of practice that will end up externalizing the costs to the rest of us.
Edit: I'm gonna leave this up, but it doesn't really reflect the friendly tone I'm trying to put across - I've enjoyed this chat.
I’m the one who is responsible for the vehicle at all times, not an Uber safety driver who isn’t paying attention, and I take that responsibility seriously.
I only spent a bit more than half that on a CPO Model S, and I'd do it again in a heartbeat. If you have the means, I highly recommend it. By far, my favorite car having owned several Corvettes, an SLK 350, a luxury pickup truck, and a Subaru STI.
Being a "leap forward" still puts it behind others. But if your criteria for quality is being able to hope that one day you'll get an update, well, that still puts you behind Cadillac and possibly others.
You can continue to hope and wait for Tesla to deliver. So far, it hasn't.
Given the accidents, you might as well drive a regular car and take your hands off the wheels and you'd roughly replicate the quality of their "autonomous diving".
I don’t see evidence of the failure. As far as I’ve seen, Tesla has met and then exceeded every single production target they’ve set, including Model 3 production start (which was on time even, last summer). Some were delayed by _years_ but they hit them.
The most recent goal they have set is 5000/week. It was originally slated for Q4 2017. So that date has slipped now by at least 3 months.
I doubt they’ll hit it in Q2. Maybe they won’t hit it until 2019.
But all available evidence suggests the will hit it. Every previous goal was met, why would this be the first one that isn’t?
This is just one (of many) "short case" articles against TSLA. According to almost every source I've come across, Tesla has continually shifted the goalposts around meeting their production schedules, and is burning through cash at an unsustainable rate.
Recently their credit rating has been downgraded, and they need, and it will be difficult to get, a massive amount of debt to continue operations.
I'm not real clear on what people base their expectations on them succeeding on.. hype?
An excerpt:
"In downgrading, Moody's states:
Tesla's ratings reflect the significant shortfall in the production rate of the company's Model 3 electric vehicle. The company also faces liquidity pressures due to its large negative free cash flow and the pending maturities of convertible bonds ($230 million in November 2018 and $920 million in March 2019). Tesla produced only 2,425 Model 3s during the fourth quarter of 2017; it is currently targeting a weekly production rate of 2,500 by the end of March, and 5,000 per week by the end of June. This compares with the company's year-earlier production expectations of 5,000 per week by the end of 2017 and 10,000 by the end of 2018."
That doesn't sound like "exceeding production targets" to me
We ban accounts that post uncivilly. We've warned you repeatedly in the past. If you keep doing it we're going to have to ban you. Would you please fix this?
Tesla high valuation is the only thing that has prevented it getting bought by one of the big car companies, and that's a good thing. GM used to buy smaller competitors to take them off the market and just keep the name as a token of the brand. Hundreds of players from the first half of the 20th century got swallowed into a few brands.
Tesla has pushed the car industry forward decades in a few years. The big players were just competing in price and size of vehicles and never taking risks. Elon Musk has the vision and charisma to execute and move Tesla to the forefront of innovation, keeping everybody else in its toes trying to catch up. I don't think the market cap will fall anytime soon for this company.
> I don't think the market cap will fall anytime soon for this company.
Really? The stock is down about 20% since the beginning of this month. It already happened.
I want Tesla to succeed. I think the company has done a lot to make electric cars mainstream, at least in people's minds if not in their driveways. But I see no justification for Tesla having a market cap in the same range as GM, which sells 10 million cars per year, or Ford, which sells about 7 million cars per year. Tesla sells about 100k cars per year and is burning through money pretty fast. It might have made a positive contribution to society, but at the end of the day it's a money-losing company and the stock price is going to reflect that.
A little over a year ago Tessa stock had fallen from 280 to 150. +/- 20% is fairly normal for the company. If it falls to say 10 billion that's a major crash, until then it's hard to say how meaningful the week to week changes are.
> Tesla high valuation is the only thing that has prevented it getting bought by one of the big car companies
I don't think so. Musk doesn't seem like the type of person to compromise on a vision for a (relatively) small buyout. He'd have probably declined if given an offer.
I think at the end of the day they are solving a really hard problem and being one of the few players in the space actually innovating. There is a lot of appreciation and I think customers and fans of Musk and the brand will HODL. They need to get through the hiccups and learn as they go, but ultimately it's a space that has a future.
It's a space that has a future, sure. But the thing that kills more companies than anything else is failure to execute effectively.
Tesla is failing at manufacturing. They have been for a while but they got away with it because their innovation was perceived as far enough ahead. With Nissan, GM, Jaguar, BMW, Porsche, etc. now in the EV space and Uber, GM, Waymo, etc. in the SDC space they have meaningful competition.
They have survived on innovative products for a while...they are trying to continue that with the Semi and with the power wall, time will tell if they can actually build them - which is a precursor to just about everything else.
This is especially confusing because, of all industries, the general public knows the most about manufacturing excellence when it comes to cars. There have been tons of books written about Toyota, and we've even seen the birthplace of auto manufacturing crushed by that manufacturing prowess. It's practically a religion.
The mood on this site is funny you never worked on software project that delivered late? Did it mean that your company with multi-billion market cap was immediately doomed? The challenge they face now is big but on this road they already faced many challenges.
Car companies and software companies have completely different capital requirements and cash-flow constraints.
Tesla is not a small software startup. They are a 40-60 billion industrial manufacturing company that is burning through its already-dwindled cash reserves while struggling with manufacturing bottlenecks. Coincidentally, said manufacturing is Tesla's sole method of generating revenue. They already have massive amounts of outstanding debt. Even before Moody's downgrade, it was not going to be easy to finance.
In general, comparing a massive company's notable operational issues to "software project delivered late" is nonsensical. If your software company's sole source of revenue is selling packaged units of your software and your company is continuously showing that it's unable to deliver those units of software in time, creating massive cash shortages - then yes, the market cap of your software company is going to suffer.
Tesla is not valued as car company by the market. 30% of Tesla float is shorted and yet it still has a market cap on par with Ford. I've read a ton of similar arguments about Amazon how it's burning through cash for years how Walmart will crush etc.
Except of course for the fact that Amazon isn't burning through cash. Amazon has had many profitable years and it's revenue has grown exponentially thanks to agressive reinvestment.
Technology is not the only space where Tesla is innovating. Tesla has also very innovative financing and they are really starting to stretching it.
Tesla made financial bet that they deliver high volumes of Model 3. It does not matter if Model 3 is good car and customers love it. Tesla must ramp up their production very fast or Tesla runs out of cheap money.
Tesla has no problems with customers. They love the car with passion. It's the investors who will choke Musk to death later this year if he has to ask more money to continue with struggling production. He will get the money but it will have high interest rate and Tesla stock will come down 30-50 percent. Currently Tesla is producing 20% of it's target. Their production curve is not growing steeply enough. In fact it's slowing down.
ps. High flying arguments that don't look into details of each case, like "Never bet against Musk" or others have solved technical difficulties too, are not really useful for investor.
Tesla is not going to financially recover if Model 3 fails to deliver within a year. Musk is taking huge risks and so far it has paid out. That's a thing to admire in him.
But the risk taking means that there is no fallback. Model 3 will either make or break Tesla. They have to deliver Model 3 in large volumes or it's game over. They have no time or money to try again or fall back into the small volume luxury car business where they have time to develop the technology.
"Tesla is not going to financially recover if Model 3 fails to deliver within a year" again define deliver if they are at 50% of the planned rate by the end of the year but on a good trajectory to reach 100% within 4 month or whatever else situation might be it's a scale.
They are not in the planned trajectory. They are in a trajectory of constantly revising their plans downward while hemorrhaging several billions per year.
Over 1058 per week is not half of the 2500 per week is not the 5000 per week is not 10,000 per week that was the plan.
The issue is that their spending grows much faster than their plans for delivery and they will end up diluting their stock.
More serious answer: I think its fair to say the concern isn't the miss of an individual deadline or even multiple deadlines. Its the attitude and the process and the communication that surround those misses. There is no seemingly justifiable cause for continued misses beyond Tesla not having the internal knowledge or controls to make this happen. That, the process concern, is more of what you are seeing than a concern over a late project. When the response to missing a project deadline seems rooted in CEO ego I get concerned.
"There is no seemingly justifiable cause for continued misses beyond Tesla not having the internal knowledge or controls to make this happen". Thats again a fairly strong statement setting a bar high enough that very few if any software companies can clear.
It depends on whether you see Tesla as a software company or a car company. Car companies seem to launch and deliver new models of cars profitably and on schedule with regularity.
I see Tesla as a tech company and looking at the market cap it looks like the market is valuing it as a tech company it's market cap is about that of Ford and that's with over 30% of Tesla's stock float being shorted.
To everyone saying “they’re just about to ramp up production, then they’ll be fine”, keep in mind that might be “out of the frying pan and into the fire”. There are already some serious questions about quality control at Tesla, and a lot of suggestions that they are cutting corners to meet these production deadlines, which will come back to hurt.
> There are already some serious questions about quality control at Tesla,
Quality control specifically for the Model 3 or quality control for the Model S? Clearly the Model 3 quality isn't good enough right now, but it seems quite likely that given time they should be able to bring it up to Model S levels. I don't know if that's good enough, but I think it might be. Will Tesla have time to reach that quality level? I think they probably will, but they may have to raise more money to pull it off. And they may have to raise that money at a less than favorable valuation. However, the idea that they won't be able to raise money at all seems unfounded to me, just like the implied notion that they can't fix the quality problems.
There's a big difference between "Tesla is struggling" (yes they are, and it's not even the first time) and "Tesla is going to fail".
I still seem to see reports of problems with brand new model S cars off the line, so while moving up to S quality would be an improvement for the three it’s still a pretty low bar.
Why aren’t they where Ford/Toyota/GM/Honda/Kia/anyone else is?
I thought one of the big ideas behind the model S was that they would use it to learn higher volume manufacturing (relative to the roadster) so that when the model three came they be ready.
No opinion whether Tesla will or won't fail, but driving behind a Model S you can see that it was assembled by people who would not get a job at a Yugo factory. Model S levels of quality is... not impressive.
I'll tell you when I buy a car the first thing I look at is how many millimeters between the door panels. Nothing else makes me happier than to have a car with 2 millimeter gap between door panels. Driving Experience, fuel economy, range, safety - those are always secondary to 2 mm door panel spaces. And that is what people mean when they talk about Tesla's low-quality they mean 3 4 5 mm door panel spaces...
A year has hardly gone by over the last seven or eight, where the crowd hasn't largely proclaimed Tesla would die, and die very soon. Analysts were overwhelmingly bearish at every step. Competitors said none of what Tesla has accomplished could be done, including the Model S period.
I keep seeing people say that Tesla is dead in three months. They have ~$3 billion in cash with the ability to dilute at will. The irrational, negative emotionalism that's being directed at Tesla right now is incredible. I can't imagine where it's coming from or why. There's almost a lust for them to fail. Nobody cheered for the death of Fiat or Jaguar like this.
"If it bleeds, it leads." News media will rarely say something positive about any tech company, probably even worse so than the general bias towards negativity
If you think that's true, you should check out all the glowing write-ups of Theranos, Amazon (specifically Bezos), and Microsoft (specifically Nadella). The coverage isn't/wasn't universally good, but I think we do get a pretty good picture of most tech companies from mainstream media.
Looking at the last week, I count at least five positive articles about tech companies, including Apple's new iPad, Waymo's expansion, an AI VFX startup, Dropbox's IPO, and Safari's picture-in-picture mode.
A big issue around Tesla is hype. Don’t get me wrong - FOR Tesla it’s great (boosts demand, brings in investment money) - but for those of us watching, it makes it hard to see what’s going on.
To be honest with y’all, I have no clue how amazing or horrible Tesla is doing. Headline after headline just pumps the hype and makes connecting the dots and fitting real performance into a context harder and harder. I do get value from others’ speculation as it helps me see things from new perspectives, however each new hyped story seems to obfuscate what’s really happening.
Obits for Tesla are premature. The model 3 won't have any direct competition for two or three years. Other EVs on the market are a generation behind, and have production numbers that are a fraction of today's Model 3 numbers.
On the other hand, to be worth its valuation, Tesla probably needs more than a year of uncontested dominance. So even if Tesla retains all the pre-sold Model 3 customers and is on track to fulfill those orders, "too late" could come sometime later this year.
The Bolt is exactly what I mean by a generation behind and with low production. China EVs interesting, and potentially much more disruptive if they turn out to demonstrate that entering the EV business is cheap and easy.
NYTimes doesn't truly paywall anything. You get a finite number of articles each month but easy to get around that with incognito mode. That being said, I'll probably subscribe soon.
>And it was Autopilot that set off a race to develop advanced driver-assistance systems that can guide cars under certain circumstances and actively prevent collisions — though Tesla’s technology appears to have been surpassed by the self-driving systems from other companies, including G.M. and the Google spinoff Waymo.
Is this in any way true? My understanding was that Waymo, or even the DARPA grand challenges, were what kicked self driving cars off, and the driver assist features were picking up steam before Tesla.
A bit of both; there were self-driving cars before Tesla, but Tesla was the first to commercially field any kind of "autopilot" feature, spurring on the existing competition
It's a lot harder for a company to die than people think. Aol is still around. Bankruptcy is, by design, not a death sentence, and Tesla can always use that escape route if they need to.
For now it seems that investors will continue to pour money into them and they won't need to.
Bankruptcy is a death sentence if you rely on suppliers that won't sell you the supplies you need because they fear they won't get paid for them. This is what happened to Toys R Us.
You're right that it's not a death sentence because the brand/trademarks have value and are part of the bankruptcy process. But many companies that still exist in name aren't "really" the original companies. Such as Pabst Blue Ribbon beer, Blockbuster Video, or Atari, to name a few.
Seriously. I bought a Renault Zoe (in europe). What the F has Tesla to offer to maintain that kind of valuation?
I can find zero compelling reasons to by a Tesla compared to the Renault. Oh and also, I can't buy a Tesla at this date at that price.
I don't know about Tesla, so many people are saying how it's going to fall apart, but I'm fairly optimistic. But, maybe that's because I'm both a Tesla owner and stock holder?
I feel like Tesla is spending money like it's going out of style, because it's building a new industry. They have a great network of charging stations and are expanding it extensively. A year ago when I got a Model S I drove it 2K miles each way to the family's place (CO to NC). And honestly it went fairly smoothly. Since then the charging network has expanded dramatically.
When I first got the Model S, my fiance thought about taking a road trip from CO to Nebraska, but because I got the cheap model, I could make it to Nebraska because it was downhill, but I couldn't make it back uphill. But, they've dramatically enhanced the I-80 superchargers.
Ok, so if you are building a new infrastructure, how much money spend is too much? How do you know if spending money like it's going out of style isn't going to end up in returns later? Tesla is building out a great infrastructure for charging, nationwide. One of Tesla's products, and one of it's determiners for success, is the charging network. When I got my car, Dec 2016, we started on a trip cross country with the kids, and I was like "I only give us a 50% chance of success". Between not knowing how charging was going to work, and not knowing if the kids were going to get into a fight because of being cramped in the back. I expected we wouldn't event make it out of Colorado before something turned us back. But, we made it there and back fairly smoothly. Had to learn some things about electric cars, but it worked great.
I'm really a car guy, and I love the sound of a V8. But, the Tesla is amazing. Could I have gotten something better from Audi for $75K (about my spend after incentives)? Probably. Do they have better self driving? Probably. But, with the maintenance on my A8 that the Tesla replaced, it's cheaper to run the Tesla than it was my Audi. Which, honestly, isn't a high bar to reach. My 2008 Audi A8 was a better car in many ways, as far as toys. But, the Tesla I've put over 20K miles on, with $0 for maintenance.
I think Tesla is building the infrastructure of the future, and they are spending money now to make something of huge value in the future.
That statement is pretty irrelevant, though, when it comes to whether or not Tesla can be a going concern. There were tons of railroad companies in the late 1800s that "built the future", and same thing with telecom companies in the late 1990s. While we're still reaping the benefits of those investments today, almost all of those original companies went bankrupt.
Exactly what "new industry" are they building? They're just selling people movers that get you from A to B. They're an EV Mercedes of the 21st century... The implementation is interesting, but the idea is old and tired.
They aren't building people movers. They are building the whole infrastructure: Solar, national chain of "gas stations", people movers, long haul thing movers, technology for self driving, industrial and home power infrastructure. They are competing with the car companies, the petrol industry, and they are starting to compete with convenience stores.
On top of that, their platform is a rolling data gathering system. Images, temperature, time, speed, density of vehicles around it, battery charge level. Do you want to know if it makes sense to build a hotel in a new area? Tesla has data that can be useful in making that decision.
Tesla is way more than just a new incarnation of the struggling auto industry.
They've _always_ fought against the odds and always looked like a bad bet if you only looked at numbers. The thing is nobody knows how far that brand value - which maybe only 2 or 3 other companies have, can take you: it's the confounding factor when it comes to 'Tesla predictions'. Fans probably buy into the Musk brand while skeptics underestimate just how far brand can take a company.
Funding shouldn't be problem for Tesla for the next couple of years, and neither should selling cars that they've made. But the so called production ramp up has been postponed for a year now.
If they face two or three more 'unexpected hurdles' in manufacturing and have an autopilot scandal or two, they are in trouble once Merc/BMW/Lexus/Audi start coming up with electric cars by 2020ish. That's the real danger. If they can mass produce model 3s by 2020, they should be fine.