2017 Investor Roundtable:General Discussion

[esk8mw]

Can anyone speak to the implications of merging the Model S/X lines at Fremont? I've never been to the factory and I'm ignorant of auto manufacturing generally, but I've heard several people mention this after tours.

Can S/X output hold stead at ~2k/week post-merger? Will there be major production disruptions when this happens or can it be seamless?

Any idea what this would free up room for? A second M3 line or Model Y line?

 

[22522]

Can anyone speak to the implications of merging the Model S/X lines at Fremont? I've never been to the factory and I'm ignorant of auto manufacturing generally, but I've heard several people mention this after tours.

Can S/X output hold stead at ~2k/week post-merger? Will there be major production disruptions when this happens or can it be seamless?

Any idea what this would free up room for? A second M3 line or Model Y line?

Ecologically the 3 as a commuter car is what you want make the most of.

 

[vgrinshpun]

Can anyone speak to the implications of merging the Model S/X lines at Fremont? I've never been to the factory and I'm ignorant of auto manufacturing generally, but I've heard several people mention this after tours.

Can S/X output hold stead at ~2k/week post-merger? Will there be major production disruptions when this happens or can it be seamless?

Any idea what this would free up room for? A second M3 line or Model Y line?

The lines referred to in these conversation are BIW assembly lines. The factory had originally a BIW line for Model S with the nominal production capacity of about 1200 cars per week. The new BIW line, with capacity of 2500 cars/week, was added in preparation for Model X production. The final assembly line was also upgraded to a nominal capacity of 2500 cars/week (from original 1200 cars/week).

The plan as stated by Tesla back then was to ramp production of Model X bodies on the new BIW line while continuing manufacturing MS body in white on the old BIW line. This was done to minimize impact that ramp up of Model X production could have on MS production. As stated by Tesla at that time, the plan was to blend production of MS from old BIW line to the new one once the production of MX stabilizes. This was supposed to free space occupied by the old BIW line for the Model 3 production.

In reality space for production of M3 was found elsewhere at Fremont, and urgency of blending BIW production of MX and MS went away. So currently MS and MX bodies are being produced on separate lines. Last I heard from the factory tour personnel is that above blending will occur at some time in future.

 

[MartinAustin]

Anyone know if Tesla used to lease their tooling plant in Michigan? From this article, Tesla's leasing that building now: click-bait title --> Tesla Motors' Michigan factory sold for $9.5M

Not sure who the seller was though.

Seems like Tesla does that a lot. They built a brand new service+deliveries facility in Austin TX, and when it was operational, they promptly put it on the market for $10million with the objective of leasing it from whoever buys it. Must be something to do with unlocking equity to use it for something else.

 

[Curt Renz]

Seems like Tesla does that a lot. They built a brand new service+deliveries facility in Austin TX, and when it was operational, they promptly put it on the market for $10million with the objective of leasing it from whoever buys it. Must be something to do with unlocking equity to use it for something else.

The new Tesla store and service center in Westmont, Illinois is being leased. It previously housed a Lincoln dealership. The building owner has it up for sale: 50 W Ogden Ave, Westmont, IL 60559

 

[vgrinshpun]

The lines referred to in these conversation are BIW assembly lines. The factory had originally a BIW line for Model S with the nominal production capacity of about 1200 cars per week. The new BIW line, with capacity of 2500 cars/week, was added in preparation for Model X production. The final assembly line was also upgraded to a nominal capacity of 2500 cars/week (from original 1200 cars/week).

The plan as stated by Tesla back then was to ramp production of Model X bodies on the new BIW line while continuing manufacturing MS body in white on the old BIW line. This was done to minimize impact that ramp up of Model X production could have on MS production. As stated by Tesla at that time, the plan was to blend production of MS from old BIW line to the new one once the production of MX stabilizes. This was supposed to free space occupied by the old BIW line for the Model 3 production.

In reality space for production of M3 was found elsewhere at Fremont, and urgency of blending BIW production of MX and MS went away. So currently MS and MX bodies are being produced on separate lines. Last I heard from the factory tour personnel is that above blending will occur at some time in future.

As for the space to be freed up after elimination of the need for old MS BIW line, my speculation is that it might be used to install second production line(s) for M3, the one(s) that is (are) supposed to achieve 10k cars/week. My thinking is that the current 5k cars/week line(s) will be operating until the new 10k line(s) is (are) installed. The 10k lines will then be ramped up, and at certain point later the old 5k line(s) will be upgraded to 10k as well. My hypothesis is that as a result of this Fremont will be able to produce 500k M3 in 2018, 500k MY in 2019, and about 120k+ MS/MX.

 

[dirtyofries]

Elon Musk says Tesla could rebuild Puerto Rico’s power grid with batteries and solar

 

[kenliles]

SpaceX president slams space regulations: 'It requires heroics' to make minor changes

“If we want to achieve rapid progress in space, the U.S. government must remove bureaucratic practices that run counter to innovation and speed," Shotwell said.”

 

[adiggs]

Daily Kanban is doing what they do best...spread FUD. Saving you a click, entire article below.

Whether we agree or disagree with an article somebody writes, I'm pretty sure that complete reproduction of somebody's article is well outside of the bounds of fair use, and something we shouldn't do (even including a link). A link, encouragement not to click through due to the waste of time and death of brain cells, and a short snippet and commentary of your own is entirely within fair use.

 

[D-egg-O]

Whether we agree or disagree with an article somebody writes, I'm pretty sure that complete reproduction of somebody's article is well outside of the bounds of fair use, and something we shouldn't do (even including a link). A link, encouragement not to click through due to the waste of time and death of brain cells, and a short snippet and commentary of your own is entirely within fair use.

Edited.

Edit2: post deleted. Didn't notice the article was already discussed. No point in bringing it up again.

 

[racer26]

SpaceX president slams space regulations: 'It requires heroics' to make minor changes

“If we want to achieve rapid progress in space, the U.S. government must remove bureaucratic practices that run counter to innovation and speed," Shotwell said.”

(She's talking about ITAR and how it restricts SpaceX's ability to hire the best talent)

 

[Mike Smith]

A GM executive has described Elon Musk's self-driving claims as 'full of crap'

"A fully autonomous vehicle available for consumers to buy, however, could be 10 to 15 years away"
-GM's director of autonomous vehicle integration, Scott Miller

 

[ls7corvete]

That is correct, but you notice that what that said "It means that they could hit the threshold during the first quarter or Tesla could (and should) time its 200,000th delivery right after the end of the first quarter " In other words they are thinking Tesla will make the 200,000th US delivery at the start of Q2 meaning the full credit goes through Q3.

Can any of you more knowledgable folks speculate as to what the M3 ramp up would look like using this as guidance?

 

[ValueAnalyst]

A GM executive has described Elon Musk's self-driving claims as 'full of crap'

"A fully autonomous vehicle available for consumers to buy, however, could be 10 to 15 years away"
-GM's director of autonomous vehicle integration, Scott Miller

Thanks for posting this; very informative. I note that his actual words cited in the article sound less certain than what the headline implies.

 

[Oil4AsphaultOnly]

Can any of you more knowledgable folks speculate as to what the M3 ramp up would look like using this as guidance?

Just spitballing here, but here goes:

Oct '17 - 300
Nov '17 - 600
Dec '17 - 2000 (build 5k, but not delivered)

That leaves ~42k (140k + 15k model S/X + 3k model 3 = 158k used) available for Q1 2018. model S/X would consume ~12k, leaving 30k for model 3 deliveries. If they continue building at 5k/week for 10 weeks (minus 2 weeks downtime), production should be able to build 50k model 3's. They'll just have to deliver 20k model 3's outside of the US until the end of quarter.

Frankly, I see them shooting to hit the 200,000th US delivery in Jan 2018. There's too much production/delivery throttling required to push that last delivery into the Q2 '18. Seems counter to objective #1 - accelerate transition to renewable energy in transportation.

 

[AlMc]

On topic/off topic: November Car and Driver magazine has a large section devoted to Autonomous Driving. (about 25 pages in all)

A good read about the technology, regulatory issues and gives their assessment of where different manufacturers currently are (including Tesla)

 

[ValueAnalyst]

On topic/off topic: November Car and Driver magazine has a large section devoted to Autonomous Driving. (about 25 pages in all)

A good read about the technology, regulatory issues and gives their assessment of where different manufacturers currently are (including Tesla)

Here's more information on the topic from the same source: Auto•No•Mo'•Us: Addressing the Totality of the Driverless Car | Feature | Car and Driver

 

[Reciprocity]

Thank you for posting this. This is very good information.

I note that his actual words cited in the article sound less certain of his claim than what the headline implies.

The only way for me to simply describe the differences between the approaches to autonomy is GM believes brute Force hardware is required and Tesla believes brute Force software will work. GM is right on that their approach will take 10 years or now because hardware only doubles in terms of power per dollar every 18 months. Where as software really had no limits in how fast it can actually improve. Elon often points to Google and how it was thought it could never beat a good go player in 20 years and now after just a few years it can beat the 18 best go players at the same time. This level of acceleration can't happen in hardware like it can on software.

I don't know who is right, but I can conceive of a solution in my imagination of radar + gps + vision that would work given enough advances in machine learning and neural networks. Usually one of the hardest things is a good variety of driving data, but Tesla is gathering more then it can handle. If anything they need more and more processing power to handle the massive amounts of driving data.

Another thing to note, GM is handling redundancy in a way that may or may not be necessary. My point is that every system does not need 3 backups. If one system fails, the car just stops, you know like a car today would if it ran out of gas or the motor seized. Things on cars fail and the world does not end and rarely people get injured. From my most amateur assessment, Tesla is using overlapping redundancy from different systems to have good enough redundancy to have the car safely move to the side of the road safely in case something fails. For example if the vision system fails, the high def 3d maps and sonar + radar can get the car to the side of the road. Not ideal, but similar to what might happen if you have a tire blow out. If a system fails, the car is disabled to drive in autonomous mode and a driver has to fetch the car. It's not the end of the world even if the car has to come to a dead stop in the middle of a road and roadside assistance, which could be remote and have access to move the car to safety.

To be Frank this is not rocket science, and everything does not have to be perfect. If you think about a system that is good enough, not perfect, and a system that doesn't need to be redundant enough to work on Mars where you can't get there easily to fix it. If on rare occasion a system fails, which happens all the time for cars today, the car just needs to safely shut down. The system can be held to higher standard and monitored more closely to guard against failure. If your check engine light is on, you can't engage the system. If you have not had a break job in years, you cant use the system.

I am confident that no one knows how long it will take, but I'm also confident Tesla is taking a path that will work and if I'm right, it should take less time then other methods because software > hardware in terms of adapting quickly.

 

[Alketi]

@Reciprocity I would take a different view on most of what you said. I think it's a false equivalency to assume that LiDAR equals a hardware solution and cameras equal a software solution. Self-driving is a software problem regardless of hardware.

The issue is that using cameras for object identification (and off-axis distance) vastly complicates just that portion of the problem. For both approaches, the rest is still software.

Further, self-driving is unequivocally harder than rocket science. We've been launching rockets since the 1950s. The equations and physics are all known. The same is not true for self-driving. No one has achieved self-driving in 2017. Nothing more needs to be said.

And I would also disagree with "everything doesn't have to be perfect". Human nature dictates that people would be significantly more willing to risk injury/death if they're in control than if they're innocent passengers and a computer were to make an occasional fatal mistake. In other words, while a 50% reduction to the 35,000 U.S. driving fatalities would seem miraculous, absolutely NO ONE would tolerate 17,000 innocent deaths under computer control. How many self-driving cars driving off California cliffs do you think would be tolerated before everyone on that road avoided self-driving cars? 10,000? 5,000? Or just 1? How many deaths before everyone avoided self-driving cars all together?

Tesla's progress to date has been pretty sobering for me. And I think we should all, as ValueAnalyst appears to have done, discount any revenue from the Tesla Network until 2020 at the earliest, until Tesla proves otherwise. My .02.

 

[dc_h]

(She's talking about ITAR and how it restricts SpaceX's ability to hire the best talent)

Way more than ITAR. FAR contracting is time consuming and extremely wasteful. The idea that accounting for engineering time in 5 minute increments and spending 90% of your time on metadata of metadata will produce better results than an entrepreneurial company is wrong. Results might be more consistent, but consistently mediocre. We've lost capabilities since 1973 and the SLS program at 3 billion a year, when Musk and Bezos could build an entire rocket and mission platform for less is a sign of the waste of the current system. ITAR is a tiny slice of the problem. We've been depending on Russian rockets to launch American satellites to spy on Russia. Congress has built a wasteful system with no strategy combined with burdensome regulations to block innovation outside of their purview.