How do you figure this? There is documentation that supports Tesla allocates lots of repairs to "Goodwilll" and i would bet anything that it helps keep the warranty expense (that is extrapolated to COGS/Sales) down. How have I been shown to be incorrect about this?
i had mentioned this before, as a tesla owner i see what gets billed to goodwill when i get my service invoices back. and it has not been repairs that should be covered under warranty. it has been stuff like: free summer/winter tire swaps, alignment checks, car washes, etc. this is also consistent with the experience of multiple owners i know. separately, i have also seen across multiple model years where the cost of warranty service has clearly declined. these are things you couldn't know from the outside, so you're left to speculate on a couple loose data points and what it means for the whole. being an owner would take you a long way from that faulty conclusion.
Huh? You dont agree that they treat them differently than other automakers? Ford has ZERO RD because its all in COGS. I am not even sure what you are asserting here?
so again, because you're not an owner, you don't see how much cost there is to be taken out and being taken out while maintaining quality/adding features. you're focused on the compares with other automakers, who have for the most part optimized the *sugar* out of their costs. from the start, it was obvious tesla could make very large profits on those cars. and even today, there are giant portions of cost that can be taken out. this would be very obvious to you as an owner, as it probably is to many owners reading this thread.
you're so focused on the accounting compares to other automakers and how that must imply some sort of accounting fraud, you don't realize how much room there is to take down as-reported cogs. the recent german dismantling hinted at this for model 3.
probably guilty of confirmation bias here, since i dont personally check all the updates
so again, as an owner you would automatically be checking them and knowing where they were on the development timelines.
I dont know that I have ever commented on 1, but it seems pretty logical given all the threads on TMC about not getting parts for their cars.
i think you missed it entirely here. you had mentioned before that the low service gross margins were probably warranty and rework expenses they had shoved out to the service centers to keep warranty costs down/gross margins on the autos up. however, as an owner occasional visits to service centers would have shown you how they have built out capacity over the last few quarters. you'd be seeing a lot of faces and spaces you had never seen before. and you'd also know you can schedule service pretty much whenever you want (in most metros). service is massively built out right now and has poor utilization, which is why the gross margins are poor. it's not because of expense shifting.
visiting the factory is irrelevant, if anything i think it would lend itself to a forrest::trees situation, some things are better analyzed from a distance and I think this might be one of them.
"irrelevant." i think if you surveyed 100 tesla investors on the most important metric for tesla they would say model 3 production. there's nowhere else you can go *except* the factory to get a firsthand look at production. so leaving aside all the other useful things you can see there, dismissing the value of that firsthand information as irrelevant is a mistake.
i do hope you come to the dark side. i don't want to cut off your hand!
Mod: video deleted for lack of taste. --ggr.
