2017 Investor Roundtable:General Discussion

[Mkorpal]

Drone shots of stored cars: Tesla Fremont Factory Drone Photos/Video • r/teslamotors

Thanks for posting this. Of note, they seem to have torn up all rail car loading areas. Either they are shipping off site for rail car loading, or are just skipping it all together right now. Long term, when the Semi starts to ramp up, I expect them to skip rail all together and just run their own distribution.

There is a ton of earth moving/construction on the north side of the factory. Are they working on the next set of Model 3/Y lines up there? Also seems like they have a parking garage going up there, so that will be nice for the workers.

 

[mongo]

Thanks for posting this. Of note, they seem to have torn up all rail car loading areas. Either they are shipping off site for rail car loading, or are just skipping it all together right now. Long term, when the Semi starts to ramp up, I expect them to skip rail all together and just run their own distribution.

There is a ton of earth moving/construction on the north side of the factory. Are they working on the next set of Model 3/Y lines up there? Also seems like they have a parking garage going up there, so that will be nice for the workers.

One of the two new automated storage facilities (Tesla Tower) went up next to/ on top of the rail spurs.

 

[Mkorpal]

One of the two new automated storage facilities (Tesla Tower) went up next to/ on top of the rail spurs.

But the rails have been torn out and a road paved over them. The other loading area that was in the parking area is also gone.

 

[mongo]

But the rails have been torn out and a road paved over them. The other loading area that was in the parking area is also gone.

From my memory of the construction pictures, it looked like they may have covered the rails (protection?) vs removing them entirely. This may be a temporary setup until construction is finished. Or it may be the way it will stay.. So much interesting stuff, hope someone is making a documentary...

 

[ggr]

Thanks for posting this. Of note, they seem to have torn up all rail car loading areas. Either they are shipping off site for rail car loading, or are just skipping it all together right now. Long term, when the Semi starts to ramp up, I expect them to skip rail all together and just run their own distribution.

There is a ton of earth moving/construction on the north side of the factory. Are they working on the next set of Model 3/Y lines up there? Also seems like they have a parking garage going up there, so that will be nice for the workers.

I might be mis-oriented on the video, but I think the test track is gone too.

 

[mongo]

I might be mis-oriented on the video, but I think the test track is gone too.

I saw a squished loop with banked curves along the edge between the two main building areas, so they still have a track.

 

[Mkorpal]

From my memory of the construction pictures, it looked like they may have covered the rails (protection?) vs removing them entirely. This may be a temporary setup until construction is finished. Or it may be the way it will stay.. So much interesting stuff, hope someone is making a documentary...

Perhaps. But even if they do re-build it, i will be months away. I wonder how that is working right now?

*Edt. And I do wonder if shipping out finished cars will become a bottleneck. A 2000 car a week un rate for the Model 3 is double the output of the factory. That is a lot of trucks to fill up.

 

[hobbes]

Perhaps. But even if they do re-build it, i will be months away. I wonder how that is working right now?

*Edt. And I do wonder if shipping out finished cars will become a bottleneck. A 2000 car a week un rate for the Model 3 is double the output of the factory. That is a lot of trucks to fill up.

I doesn´t make sense to me to just use trucks. For California, yes. But not for shipping across the country. A train can carry an order of magnitude more cars at one time. Really surprised to see the tracks in that sorry state.

 

[Starno]

How many Tesla registration in Norway today ?

 

[mrdoubleb]

While I agree we should be cautious about the M3 ramp, a jump to 500/day is not completely impossible. Not saying that's what happened, but I've noticed many here think of the ramp as gradual, like an analog S curve.

However, since M3 production will be highly automated and, indeed, the main issue was a part of this automation. I expect the ramp to be more "digital" in terms of how the curve looks.I think big sudden jumps are entirely possible. If the automation works at the targeted speed, well it just works.

 

[oneday]

Anybody here predicting Tesla will hit the elusive 30% gm on model S for q4?

Last earnings call they said they were going to be slightly scaling back on the S &X lines to focus on the 3. I’m hoping they eliminated overtime and what not on the S &X line to increase margins.

It seems like we might actually be set up to hit the 30% gm on the S and hopefully close on the X.

Thoughts?

 

[oneday]

While I agree we should be cautious about the M3 ramp, a jump to 500/day is not completely impossible. Not saying that's what happened, but I've noticed many here think of the ramp as gradual, like an analog S curve.

However, since M3 production will be highly automated and, indeed, the main issue was a part of this automation, I expect the ramp to be more "digital" in terms of how the curve looks.I think big sudden jumps are entirely possible. If the automation works at the targeted speed, well it just works.

Reminds me of the TSLA stock price. Continually trending upward with a mix of volatility in between.

 

[Mkorpal]

While I agree we should be cautious about the M3 ramp, a jump to 500/day is not completely impossible. Not saying that's what happened, but I've noticed many here think of the ramp as gradual, like an analog S curve.

However, since M3 production will be highly automated and, indeed, the main issue was a part of this automation, I expect the ramp to be more "digital" in terms of how the curve looks.I think big sudden jumps are entirely possible. If the automation works at the targeted speed, well it just works.

The pretty graph gave many that impression. But Elon himself has said in reality it will jump quickly at times and will be flat others. I think over the last week or two we saw one of those jumps. Hopefully the next jump doesn't take 2 months to arrive.

 

[JoaoD]

I might be mis-oriented on the video, but I think the test track is gone too.

If you are talking about the test track for the cars where some of the first Model 3 prototypes where seen you can see it from 3:00 at the right side

 

[Mkorpal]

Anybody here predicting Tesla will hit the elusive 30% gm on model S for q4?

Last earnings call they said they were going to be slightly scaling back on the S &X lines to focus on the 3. I’m hoping they eliminated overtime and what not on the S &X line to increase margins.

It seems like we might actually be set up to hit the 30% gm on the S and hopefully close on the X.

Thoughts?

Maybe. I'm not sure if they will break it down for us or not.

 

[mrdoubleb]

How many Tesla registration in Norway today ?

107 and counting. the numbers should still refresh for a few more hours.

Then again it's all just gravy now. We are well past every record.

 

[mongo]

While I agree we should be cautious about the M3 ramp, a jump to 500/day is not completely impossible. Not saying that's what happened, but I've noticed many here think of the ramp as gradual, like an analog S curve.

However, since M3 production will be highly automated and, indeed, the main issue was a part of this automation. I expect the ramp to be more "digital" in terms of how the curve looks.I think big sudden jumps are entirely possible. If the automation works at the targeted speed, well it just works.

Agreed, especially when the slow down is due to lack of a supplied part (upstream automation). That takes an assembly line from max rate to zero in a hurry. Conversely, it also goes from zero to max rate nearly as fast once the parts arrive.

 

[NicoV]

His updated prediction this past summer was spot on for 2017. I am skeptical about his 2018 predictions.

I think Adam Jonas just got lucky that Tesla hit a showstopping bug in their production automation. Many will see him now as an authority on Tesla, but that ‘s not necessarily true if he got lucky. I doubt he will get lucky twice in a row (maybe Chanos also got lucky with his Enron call, but he doesn’t realise that and thinks he has supernatural prediction powers).
As I said before regarding engineering schedules, the big problem is that you don’t know what you don’t know. Tesla is now in the position that they know what they didn’t know, and that’s a much better basis to make accurate predictions.

 

[Waiting4M3]

I believe AJ originally projected based upon Tesla's execution history and the complexity of the Model 3 ramp. I thought his original projections were crazy low. However, he visited management sometime in late summer and then projected just a couple thousand. I was skeptical but it got my interest that he didn't project higher at that point because he appeared to have some strong intel from visiting with management. At this point, I view AJ as reasonably conservative. I will not ignore his projections personally. I believe 2018 will turn out to be better than his projections, but how much better is difficult to predict. EM's timelines are really not reasonably optimistic, they are wildly optimistic. I believe 2018 production will fall closer to AJ's than EM's projection. If it's somewhere in the middle, that's still a fantastic year.

Jonas is projecting 1K in Q4 in his latest estimate from Oct. I think Tesla will likely do double that. So does that mean 2018 will also likely be 2X? My guess why Jonas's 2018 # are so low is that he is using MS/X ramp history to model M3, which IMO will be completely inapplicable once Tesla's Alien Dreadnought 0.5 hits its stride. I don't think Jonas has any idea how to model the S curve for a new production automation technology. If he does then he should take over a "C" suite job at Tesla, because I don't think between Elon, JB and Deepak even they know.

 

[Reciprocity]

Agreed, especially when the slow down is due to lack of a supplied part (upstream automation). That takes an assembly line from max rate to zero in a hurry. Conversely, it also goes from zero to max rate nearly as fast once the parts arrive.

Slow downs in one part of production does not preclude Tesla from making improvements to other parts of the automation. Certainly there are limits to what you can do when one part is very slow or stopped or missing parts, but I'm sure they are not just sitting on their hands waiting.

On the last call Elon did say that they expected to get to thousands per week by the end of the year. This could be the minimum level where the automation is running but not as fast as theoretically possible. Which brings me to a question of just how you speed it up. Is it all just adjusting the speed and timing on the software? Tesla seems to be allowing for 3 months or one quarter to go from a guestimated 2k/w at the end of your treat to 5k/w at the end of the 1st quarter next year. Elon had mentioned that the speed of the robots was so high that mass is the moving arm was an issue due to inertia and how the supplier has never asked to increase the speed of the robots. I remember a quote about needing a strobe light to see the robots but I think that was related to the gigafactory and not Fremont.

They must have tested some of these processes before making the final decision on the robots as that would be a show stopper. Some is those welding stations have several arms and they must stop long enough to actually complete the weld. How do you make that 2.5x then 5x faster without running into timing issues. You have to imagine they aren't just relying on timing and could infact have a feed back loop and use machine learning and ai and maybe even vision or other sensors to get feed back on where exactly the arm is that is in the way for the next step. It cant be as simple as just turning the speed dial to eleven. Tesla might have even ordered custom robots with higher quality motors and lighter materials on the arm. Tooling could also be special in that they are lighter. This is where Space X advantages come into play.