It's impressive, really. This is the year that I've really started to see Teslas around here (Boston- there's a showroom in the Natick Mall). On the one hand, the car is risky: expensive battery, limited range / charging options, luxury car service cost. On the other, they found a niche: the coastal rich who are willing to use them as their daily commuting car.
They are cheaper than Maseratis, which I've also been seeing a lot of lately. When looked at this way, people are willing to take the risk on the cheaper car. Even so, if car sales are a zero-sum game, I think BMW is the one being hurt by them the most.
I was under the impression that they have less service costs due to fewer moving parts. Or maybe it comes out all the same since there's less to service, but when something does need servicing it's more expensive than usual.
I've heard this said, but I don't believe it. Teslas have many of the things that normally break on cars: tires, rims, brake pads / rotors / calipers, suspension, wipers, windshield, wheel bearings, AC.
Tesla does not have a transmission, so there's one thing. Also no muffler / exhaust system.
Tesla does not have an IC engine, but what's likely to fail on an IC engine? A bunch of things that fail often are cheap ($100 - $200): starter battery, ignition coils. Some wear items are often more expensive because difficult to replace: timing belt, water pump, alternator. It's possible but rare that you could have something really go wrong: cracked cylinder head: maybe $2000.
Now what does Tesla have? Electric motor- maybe same failure rate as an alternator? High power electronics- maybe same failure rate as something like an ignition coil? Battery- very expensive wear item.
Brakes are used far less in a Tesla than a normal car. Regenerative breaking means they wear very slowly. Besides tires, I have yet to pay anything for servicing my Teslas — combined 36k miles on them. The electric motors have MTBFs in the 100s of thousands of miles.
As in any modern luxury car, the parts most prone to failure are the 'luxury' features like powered accessories, air suspension and electric systems. Tesla has plenty of those, if not more than a comparable competitive products like let's say a Mercedes S class or Audi A8. Even though the latter have also engines and transmissions that can fail they usually don't and it's fairly rare to have those replaced or repaired (at least in the first 5-10 years/100k miles as these cars are usually not owned for longer than that by their original owners).
Consumer Reports and Edmunds are reportedly unimpressed with the reliability on their 30,000 mile tests. More problems requiring service than most cars.
Tesla charges $600 for their annual service, or $450 if you prepay four years in advance. This is a bit high, especially considering that they do very little. However it's not mandatory, especially the first year.
What's likely to be cheaper is long-term repair costs. No muffler replacements, no leaking head gaskets, no timing belts making an attempt at freedom.... But whether that actually works out remains to be seen.
They actually do an impressive amount that they don't have to (my dad is a Tesla fan/early adopter and has a Roadster, Model S and probably will get a Model X eventually).
When he took the Model S in they added that metal plate to the bottom (from that one crash that got a lot of press), swapped out all the door handles for new ones because people online complained that in rain sometimes the old ones wouldn't retreat into the car and changed a few other things I'm forgetting (at no cost).
I can't really think of another car company that proactively adds a bunch of stuff to the car for free as a part of routine maintenance. Of course this is in addition to all of the over the air software updates too.
In all fairness, most of that is warranty repairs. The initial door handles, for example, had reliability problems worse than your dad saw, which meant all of them ended up being replaced. (My car ended up having one replaced twice, because apparently the new version also has a problem, albeit more minor.)
Adding backup lines to the backup display, on the other hand, to 2 year old cars, that was unusual. It was purely a software upgrade.
All that long-term stuff is real, for sure, but mostly in the 7+ year range. I'd love to have a car where the the engine didn't start disintegrating part by part at the 10 year point, but I'm afraid with an electric I'd just have swapped alternators and water pumps for a decaying battery.
Battery longevity and replacement cost is a huge question mark right now, for sure. The data so far looks good (degradation is below what's been predicted) but trying to look 10 years out for a car that started shipping in 2012 is tough.
You should have at least had transmission oil changed, fuel and air filters changed, brake pads and rotors (I count this because the brakes on an electric car driven by a normal person will last 150,000 miles or more), and probably new spark plugs by now.
The efficiency gain from lowering the suspension on the highway is pretty small, to the point that it's really tough to measure. It might be a few percent at best, so in the neighborhood of 10 extra miles on a 100% charge, if that.
On the one side, yes. On the other though, the battery will need to be replaced after 7-10 years of service; that's going to be a very pricey affair, and right now I think that it'll seriously affect the secondhand market in the next couple of years, and/or the Tesla's resale value. You know, like electronics which become obsolete / too expensive to repair for most people after at best five years.
Tesla is warrantying the battery for 8 years, so the earliest you would pay for a battery replacement would be the 9th year- but they might very well last much longer.
An important thing to note is that a lot of countries - esp. in Europe - heavily subsidize pure electric cars (and low-emission cars to a lesser extent) thanks to CO2 emissions laws / targets.
I live in the Netherlands; for lease cars, you as an employee need to add a percentage of the car's value every year as income (because the company pays for your lease car, so it's part of your wage, etc). For regular gasoline cars, that percentage can go up to 25%; for purely electric cars, it's 0% (or used to be anyway, I'm not up to date on current laws). Doing all the maths, a Tesla can be half as expensive - or even less - than a similarly-priced petrol car.
Anecdotally the reason I've heard a lot of execs switching their 7/5-series Bimmers over to Teslas, is that they can use the HOV lanes at any time. Around here that can save up to an hour of commute.
While the subsidies aren't nearly as extensive here, you do get a credit. There's also free charging stations in most of the suburbs, so electrical cost is near nill if you plug in all day at work, and your car is pretty much always fully charged.
But all that is dwarfed by the opportunity cost of the time highly paid professionals were sitting in traffic.
Instantaneous torque from startup also makes it feel blazing fast (the torque-curve is very different in IC vs. electric engines.)
I wanted to purchase either Tesla or 5 Series BMW in 2014, I picked a BMW at the end.
I went for a test drive and while in terms of ride quality Tesla is not far behind BMW but in terms of interior comfort and quality BMW is miles ahead, Tesla inside looks and feels like a Toyota or Nissan, I doubt anybody who likes Bimmers or Mercs for their interior quality will go with a Tesla, nevermind Maserati, and if Tesla decides to make interior better - it will certainly raise the price a lot which will make it even less comparible.
I think it's unfair to compare Tesla to Maserati (Ghibli), BMW or Mercs, I think Tesla is not for somebody who otherwise would have purchased Maserati or bimmer, but for those who otherwise would have purchased Toyota or Lexus and saved up a bit and went with Tesla instead.
Having worked in the stock-trading world and seeing some of the murky things that go on first-hand, I would not be surprised to learn that many of the negative comments we see every time Elon Musk is mentioned is due to a concerted effort by short-sellers.
You might be right. Very unusual comments indeed. And ridiculous, too. Everyone's entitled to their opinion, but so much commenting here is literally just a catalogue of received ideas.
Tesla are on a mission to solve massive problems for humankind while taking into account modern humans' lack of commitment to solving those problems in a way that would feel like a step back, or that would create discomfort. Tesla's existence as a market solution to the oil and pollution problems is evidence that you don't always need political coercion to solve problems like externalities: Tesla's cars are not only electric cars - i.e. the answer to a problem that could potentially destroy civilisation as we know it - they are also great cars, by any "petrolhead" standard.
As a company and an investment, Tesla's long term mission, its strategy and its step-by-step tactics have been presented in a way that is extremely rare for a company. Most of the work I do for brands this size involves working with a 5-year plan that is nowhere near as clear as Tesla's, and the plans are 5-years because that's when the owners' exit plan kicks in. Tesla's strategy set a clear path for 15 years at least.
So what's not's not to like? I think many investors feel they may have missed the boat on the next great world company. It's quite normal to sit on the edge for a while, to miss out on the opportunity, and to then find a dozen reasons to tell oneself it was good to pass on it.
I hate to be a cynic, but, you know that your idealist, optimistic post could be seen as propaganda intended to boost trust (and by extension the price) in/of Tesla's stocks, right?
Just trolling, I agree with your points. I'm just saying that any posts about publicly traded companies should be taken with a grain of salt.
I would think that too, except for all the comments that are so financially ignorant. Unless the shortsellers have misread the HN audience and think that they don't understand these things.
I agree, and specifically I think of the confusion between gross profit margin and net operating cashflow. Tesla makes money on every car sold (as they actually have a gross profit) but have been spending cash really fast (as they have a negative cashflow). All this really tells you is that Tesla is investing a lot of money, which is to be expected for a company that is trying to spearhead a paradigm shift within the entire automotive industry.
Also, since one big weakness in Tesla is whether it relies on government subsidies and loans for its continued survival. Thats something I don't understand and if I had a horse in this race, I'd be weary of a company that relies on the whims of political support in order to survive.
Something is pushing this "Tesla loses money" angle hard. Since I bought mine, I've discovered that a lot of people who know very little about the company "know" that they make a loss on every car sold.
Regarding subsidies, the "good" news there is that at least in the US, there isn't much in the way of uncertainty, because the US federal subsidy starts to drop off at 200,000 units per manufacturer and is unlikely to be expanded. Given how quickly they're moving, they'll probably hit that within the next few years and one way or another they'll have to learn to do without. But at least they won't be waiting for politicians to drop the knife on them.
>"Tesla makes money on every car sold (as they actually have a gross profit)"
You knock people for financial ignorance, then say this?
You realize that gross margin is sales less cost of goods sold? And that cost of goods does not include things like paying your employees, interest on debt used to expand, the cost of running the factories, etc etc?
I come from a retail environment where our gross margin is typically 25-35%, while our profit margin is about 2-4%. So saying that Tesla "makes money on every car sold" simply because they have "gross profit" is about as fast and loose with "profit" as you can get. Of course, nobody in the finance world would think that...
Having a gross profit is not the same thing as making money on every car sold because gross profits don't include a whole bunch of per-unit costs like sales staff, shipping, after-sales support, repairs and recalls, etc - basically, any costs incurred after the moment the car rolls off the production line aren't included.
If almost all the downvoted top-level comments weren't from accounts with over 1k karma (or very close), then I would be tempted to believe you. Since they are, I think it's more likely in this case that he, and the companies he runs, are very polarizing.
That said, the reason he's polarizing may be because of other information that's readily available due to a concerted effort by short-sellers.
>""comments we see every time Elon Musk is mentioned is due to a concerted effort by short-sellers."
Oh, brother. This article is from a massive, mainstream financial news site, and is reposted all over the internet. But the short-sellers come here, to a niche tech site, to try to influence people to...what exactly?
Buy / sell Tesla stocks; the general audience here is the hip Silicon Valley startup crowd, of which some are 20-some year old instant-millionaires whose hip startup was bought by Google/Facebook/Paypal/etc, or who are making over 100K a year. You probably shouldn't underestimate the net worth and expendable income of the crowd here, or how easily they're influenced. It doesn't take much to get a stock to travel in an upwards direction, and even the slightest increase will cause some people or organizations to make a lot of money.
They are in a lot of pain right now. Something like 25% of the float is short interest and the stock keeps going up. It may not matter that the price is so divorced from the fundamentals because people are buying it for the long term gamble.
Don't forget there are also a lot of ultra-wealthy folks who have a vested interest in the status quo. The Koch brothers and their fellow carbon moguls really don't want people moving over to electric cars (or any other green tech for that matter), and they'll do anything they can to discourage people from adopting them.
If I had the right circumstances to make it feasible, I wouldn't hesitate getting a Model S.
Having dealt with lots of the "majors'" new car models lately in rentals, I doubt that they have much to bring to the table anymore. The amount of stupidity in design is astounding. I think that once Tesla scales, it will completely demolish any of the other US car companies. Toyota and Honda may be able to compete.
I'm really really hungry for competence in both manufacturing and design, which is something that is sorely lacking in the current large US car companies. Based on their current track record, Tesla has a much better chance of delivering than Ford or GM.
> Having dealt with lots of the "majors'" new car models lately in rentals, I doubt that they have much to bring to the table anymore.
I think it's more a matter of being shortsighted. If the ads from this season of the Startup podcast are any indication, they are so busy focusing on small pieces of the experience (such as having designing wear suits to simulate feeling old, etc) that they are missing the major advances. It's somewhat understandable, the major automakers have been making basically interchangeable cars for a few years, so spending time to enhance the entire experience in many small ways seems to make sense. That is, until some upstart shows up with something radically better.
They're definitely short-sighted, but I think that's just the most optimistic outlook, I think the short-sightedness is hiding much deeper incompetence in management. Their computer systems are universally terrible, they have no clue how to build something like a UI for a car. This is not something that MBA-type management can buy their way out of, because they have no competence, and no way to evaluate the contractors that may be able to build something real, and in fact they are likely to be taken in by poor contractors that are great at sales and terrible at engineering. The management also has no clue how to build/empower an internal team that could do the same, as far as I can tell.
>Their computer systems are universally terrible, they have no clue how to build something like a UI for a car.
Like a lot of legacy systems, right? Tesla has an advantage of starting from scratch, sure.
"This is not something that MBA-type management can buy their way out of, because they have no competence,"
No competence? These are century old companies that have created vast amounts of global wealth and emply hundreds of thousnads of people in what are still well-paying jobs. Yeah, no competence whatsoever.
Of course, I suppose if you knew that Tesla has hired engineers and managers from some of these companies that have "no competence"...
But building a new - and performant - UI for a car shouldn't be that hard, would it? I mean I've seen Tesla's touch screen UI, and TBF I thought even that one was pretty crappy; I can only imagine what other car systems are like.
With that in mind, I doubt it'll happen, but I'd still be curious what Apple could do if they made a car's display/OS (not counting Apple Carplay, of course).
Keep in mind that car UI systems are regulated like crazy. For example, Android Auto doesn't actually allow the independent app developer to make their own UI. You can choose from a few pre-approved templates and bind your own data in, but you can't differentiate because it might cause driver distraction.
Extending an inadequate legacy system rather than starting from scratch is a perfect example of the incompetence in management that I'm talking about.
Not sure why you're talking about engineers when I'm clearly talking about management. Also, today's management is not the management that built the companies or their wealth, so it's specious to suggest that that has any relevance on the evaluation of the current management. And finally, Tesla hiring the few competent managers is not a sign that those that remain at the current car companies are, as a whole, competent. While there are certainly individual managers that are competent in GM or Ford, the structure as a whole does not make good decisions, in my opinion.
Please, elaborate on all the design stupidity that the Tesla solves.
I've test driven a Tesla. It's awesome, thanks to the amazing torque delivery that comes from electric motors. It's a paradigm shift for a long time car guy, and has to be experienced to be understood.
..but, other than that...it's just a luxury car. What exactly has it "solved" that every other car company is still doing "stupidly"?
It may have a luxury price and technically it is very impressive but the interior quality is ridiculously poor for a car this expensive. I've sat in Hyundai and Daewoos that had better quality finishes and leathers.
You're allowed your opinion. I think the "majors" are too bloated to produce anything other than a mass produced clone. I unfortunately bought one of these cars recently, only because the Tesla isn't quite ready for me or my area yet.
When it is, I'll happily drop the majors for a Tesla.
I see the Chevy Bolt being hyped, like the Volt before it. The ferocity of this push in the media, without actual sales results, says that they're practicing FUD and that Tesla's bigger challenge remains making their shipping targets.
I think the real question is why would it want to? Ferrari is a specialist marque that, like most other super luxury brands, the parent company (in this case Fiat I believe) keeps around for the glow it gives its cheaper cars. There really isnt a lot of money is super expensive cars compared to the mass market. Have a look at the history of all the expensive car companies.. none of them are still standing.
Pretty hard to compare two vastly different arenas like that. In space flight even mature platforms have a 1%-10% failure rate.
Because of the physics involved, rockets operate at the very edge of the capabilities of the rocket. Modern auto's don't have this issue: you can drive at highway speeds all day long without stressing the materials in your engine anywhere close to the edge of the operating envelope. In short, from an engineering perspective car's aren't hard any longer.
They make money on cars (gross margin). They lose money on R&D and expanding the production line.
Any car company growing this rapidly would lose money. Any car company this small designing a new model would lose money.
I know why so many financial commenters harp on and on about Tesla losing money. What mystifies me is why so many HN commenters do the same, given that most of us are startup people. Many startups lose money for the same reasons.
Most car companies already have mature vehicle platforms (engines, transmissions, chassis and body experience, etc) to work off of and thus only have to charge R&D for a particular car against that car.
When you're developing a new car you have to do a lot of general R&D and a lot of car-specific R&D. What gets charged against the car and what are considered general? Who gets to decide? Why would they decide in a particular way?
It's not super obvious to me where you'd bill things even if they're ostensibly just for the Model S because in another year or two they might release a Model S2 with not a lot of R&D because they just stole parts from the Model S, Model X and Model 3.
Not saying it will happen, but it could. Then the R&D costs would be too low on that car and they'd have to go back and adjust their gross margin back as far as they've been selling the other cars and then the whole thing is a nightmare since I'm pretty sure the SEC won't let you do that.
The numbers released to the public include enough information to make direct comparisons. The problem is that it's really apples-to-oranges: large, not-growing-very-fast car companies are a very different beast from small, rapidly-growing, risky new entrants.
I suppose. Most car companies (i.e. all other car companies) don't have 56% year-over-year growth numbers either (per the linked article). So my money is with the "apples and oranges" crowd here.
Analyzing an investment in Tesla according to the rules you use for GM or Daimler is going to lose you a lot of money. Or realistically already has -- most people whining are whining because they didn't get in on the Tesla boom and are looking for reasons to prove it's a bubble.
Indeed, Tesla does things like startups do, not like big car companies. If you have a steady-state business, including R&D in COGS makes sense.
Another way that Tesla is different is that they don't announce monthly sales numbers. That means that a fair number of analysts ignore them; here's an example [1].
Though, to be fair, Tesla's monthly numbers would be like 4k/month, which in the ballpark of Porsche, and you don't see them on the analyst's list either...
Porche had no chance of nearly being the fastest growing car, 52% (Tesla) vs 55% (Elantra). Of course it's always up to what the financial reporter thinks is important, but I'd bet that Tesla's slightly-late release of their quarterly number vs. reliable monthly updates from existing companies played a role.
> No they don't. Net operating cashflow has been hugely negative for their entire existence and there is no conceivable path to profitability.
Sure they do. They're just always spending it elsewhere, like Amazon. Amazon doesn't sell products at a loss, their prices have become much less competitive over the years.
But the lack of profitability at Amazon isn't because the various business units are all operating at a loss. It's because the older units which make a profit finance the new ones that are starting up and not profitable yet.
Telsa may well be taxpayer subsidized and it may blow up. But on 2014 revenue of 3.2b the odds that they're cooking the books are vanishingly small.
Net operating cashflow is negative because they're piling money into expansion. Their gross margin is about 25%. If they wanted to be profitable in the short term all they'd have to do is stop spending money on expansion and just pull in the sweet profits from current sales.
The model X is the bogeyman in Tesla's house. If they fail to start deliveries by September as they have indicated they will likely not make their sales goal for year. The suspect in the X delay is the gull wing doors which like the ragtop they had before, Elon's insistence on particular features again is causing production issues.
"Elon's insistence" has also created a $35b company. I think anyone would happily delay a car launch to both improve the car and increase the company's long term value.
Tesla is more future proof compared to ford gm or Honda, if tomorrow the world decides to run on battery powered cars then form gm and Honda will have a lot to catch up.
>if tomorrow the world decides to run on battery powered cars
There's no indication that will happen in the next 10 years. Certainly not quickly. Any shift away from gas will be gradual and give automakers plenty of time to react.
$35B is reasonable if Tesla actually has a good chance of becoming as big as Ford, GM, or Honda. Maybe it doesn't, but a lot of people seem to think it does.
You're comparing a company that sold 11k cars last quarter to one who sold 11k F-150s last week and got raked over the coals for it.
Tesla is a boutique manufacturer. Their stock price is entirely based on dreams of future earnings, just as Amazon's price has been unnaturally elevated for 15 years despite never turning a profit worth writing home about.
You're saying what I said. Stock prices are ultimately an attempt to predict the future. If the price is vastly higher than would be indicated by what the company is doing now, that means people think it will get much, much larger. Whether or not this is sane or insane depends entirely on how realistic that expectation is.
Tesla is most certainly valued correctly, with a P/E ratios similar to that of Amazon, and a valuation just slightly above the likes of Snapchat, Twitter, and LinkedIn. Seems to be a reasonable estimation to me.
A high-risk $500M loan from Uncle Sam (read: You and me, against our knowledge or direct choice) has created a $35B company, in which we the investor have no stake.
Better than blowing another $1 trillion on another pointless Mideast war or a fighter jet that can't fight.
If making a $500 million loan that not only gets paid back but produces a valuable and productive American company is the worst thing my government did today, I'd count us all extremely lucky.
And local governments get sales tax on each car sold as well.. Figure 7% average sales tax (most cars are sold in CA - 7.5%, NY - 4.5%, MA & TX - 6.25%), and an average price of $80k; 11,500 Model Ss would equate to about $65M into state coffers for Q2 alone. Of course, many are sold overseas so discount that number a bit, but either way, states are probably happy.
That loan was made because the US has significant interests in catalyzing the growth of electric transport, for many reasons. It was not designed to make the country money directly. Tesla is far from alone in receiving such loans from the government. Oil companies receive far more money as direct tax breaks (i.e. never paid back).
I don't understand why this is getting downvoted. The 'loan' the US made was extremely high risk and taxpayers got a terrible ROI for the amount given and the risk taken:
Edit: I am a big fan of Tesla, SpaceX, and the feats Elon Musk has accomplished, but I don't think that means one can't be critical of him, his companies, or the way taxpayer money might have been spent to prop them up. It's undeniable that if the US govt had received some equity stake taxpayers could have more equally shared in Tesla's success, and I don't think there would have been anything unreasonable about that.
It's getting downvoted because it's unnecessarily inflammatory, and ignorant of common practices with many other companies, both for companies that are well-established and for companies that bringing forth strategic emerging technologies.
I think we as taxpayers got a great ROI on it, since new economic activity within the country translates into increased prosperity and increased tax revenue.
Looking purely at interest earned on a government loan misses half the picture since the government gets to essentially double-dip on all the success stories.
Tesla is almost single-handedly dragging the world into the electric car age so I think the loan served its purpose quite magnificently. Oh, and the government got all its money back and then some. The only mistake was allowing the buyback in lieu of equity upside.
Large government loans to big industries are not uncommon. Ford secured a 5.9 billion dollar loan from the government in 2009 (not a bailout, a loan to retool factories).
That loan will end up enabling billions of dollars of tax revenue for Uncle Sam. Probably the single most successful loan in the history of government loans.
Any tax revenue increase would remain if Uncle Sam had equity as well.
Look at this way: It's your money. Literally. Would you, as a VC, or as a kickstarter-type group, give $500M to a company, with no equity stake, but Elon telling you, "Hey, it's risky I know, but it's a great investment because it will kick off all this other economic activity that will benefit you in the long run, so you don't really need equity; you will reap the benefits indirectly in greater magnitude." Of course not. It's only acceptable because it's a cause many HNers believe in, and the money does not seem "real" since it's abstracted out through tax collection and distribution.
How much of a pay cut would you accept being forced on you to pursue these dreams? Might be the next dream, you don't agree with (like a trillion dollar war).
"Elon's insistence" (or Steve's insistence, for example) on particular features sometimes make great products. In the past he proved many times that he can deliver.
Well, it's called "insistence" when it comes from an average person. But when it comes from a visionary genius like Steve or Elon (or the likes of Larry Page for that matter), it's really something else.
Well, there's the "disappearing door" option.[1] Sadly, this never seems to have made it into a production vehicle. It wouldn't work for Tesla's cars anyway; they need that underfloor space for the battery.
Elon's decision to keep the gull wing doors is awesome though. The concept had them and he believes that a company shouldn't show one concept with cool features, then deliver the actual car without those cool features. All the other auto companies do it and it's incredibly disappointing.
Companies put stuff on concepts knowing they won't make it to production. If his concept had them and they just couldn't make it work out but they legitimately tried, that doesn't seem as bad.
I guess it depends on the idea of the concept car vs show piece of future production. I think some of the concept cars that GM/Ford/Dodge sometimes display are obviously concept cars that will never see the light of day. However, Tesla isn't really at that stage. So when they show a concept, it needs to be closer to reality. Toyota had a concept Rav 4 a few years ago that I really liked and had hoped they would put into production, they never did and it was extremely disappointing.
I guess what I'm saying is, if it's going to be a concept car, make it so outlandish that no one will believe it will be production.
Yes, the Model X is a big question mark for now. I think September may finally be it, because it's getting very close and there's no sign that it's going to slip.
Model X will tell us whether Tesla can pull it off again, or whether the Model S was just a fluke. I think/hope they can, but it's probably fair to say that the company is riding on it at the moment.
In my opinion, based on Tesla's maintenance cost today, it's a fancy toy for rich people.
It's out of reach of general consumer and when it comes to saving planet by consuming electricity, not gas in US I am skeptical. What I want to find out is a green house effect from 1 mile per gallon of gas vs. 1 mile per kWh off produced electricity. Considering US electricity is produced by coal burning plants, which are considered primary green gas effect contributors.
Expensive-toy prices are just barely keeping demand down to levels they can supply. They're using that money to ramp up production and lower their future costs. The long-term plan is to sell to progressively cheaper segments of the market, as they get rolling.
For years Tesla refused to make public it's sales numbers, after going public it's reluctantly doing so. I have read from 2012 to 2014 it's sales numbers in tenth of thousands per year. In comparison Mercedes Benz sells its gas powered toys in hundreds of thousands per year.
Nuclear power plants are of course more efficient and do not produce greenhouse gases. By switching to Thorium it would also be safer, cheaper and the waste would go away in 30 years.
I thought that meant they sold 52% more cars than Q1.
But what they really are saying is "Tesla sold 52% more cars in Q2 2015 than Q2 2014"
And they are still less than halfway through year end's target 2 quarters in which analysts feel certain they will not hit without the Model X release (2)
With all the discussion around the Unicorns preferring to stay private how much of a factor must avoiding the colossal pain in the ass of having to engineer this kind of financial-speak every quarter on top of just trying to run your business.
That's generally what people mean in finance - YOY growth. Otherwise you get seasonal data problems (pretty much every retailer's Q4 is huge relative to Q3 because of Christmas, for example).
As always, dig deeper. Tesla isn't out of the woods yet.
That is the case. But I think the word "surge" is confusing people. If it said "up 52%" I'd assume year on year. But somehow "surge" implies a change in continuous state.
How often are percentages used in a financial context that aren't year-over-year percentages?
Your statement about the Model X confuses me. Of course analysts think that they need Model X shipments to meet their year-end target, because that's exactly what the company itself has said.
They are cheaper than Maseratis, which I've also been seeing a lot of lately. When looked at this way, people are willing to take the risk on the cheaper car. Even so, if car sales are a zero-sum game, I think BMW is the one being hurt by them the most.