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“agree that it is still painful and sucks, and I guess most retail employees who are not comfortable with a showroom role are now actively looking for Service Center positions or another employer”.

This.....not ideal if your customer facing employees are unhappy or rapidly turning over.
True, but they've always had high turnover, and the gallery/store employees have been... well... they usually know less about the cars than we do, so I don't think most of them were worth much. I'd like it if they could get some stability on the guys in the call center.
 
Monthly Plug-In EV Sales Scorecard

If this is wrong, paint me stupid... but I don't have any other source.

For those who hate clicking things

2018 - Model 3
Jul: 14250
Aug:17800
Sep:22250
Oct:17750
Nov:18650
Dec: 25250

2019 - Model 3
Jan: 6500 (est)
Feb: 5750 (est)

So the last 2 months of 2018 averaged 21,950 and the first two months of 2019 averaged 6,125 which is a 15,825 decline. or around 70% (the 80% is Dec Vs Jan).

Is this wrong? Did Tesla sell 15,800 Model 3's in Europe in Jan and Feb?

Are you new to Tesla? It would be helpful for you to see how the company handled shipments to China and Europe for the S&X depending on which month of the quarter.

If you can’t find it, I will summarize. The company ships ex-US first one to two months of the quarter and then focuses on US in second and third month. This produces the pattern you are noticing, which is the same for S&X
 
What would the CFO have to do with this? A CFO is a glorified accountant.

Accounting is rather complex for a 50,000 employee company. Say you wanted to figure out the effects of closing stores, rather than just gut feel the decision (I’m giving Elon the benefit of the doubt here). Where is the data for such a decision? In the CFO’s department. Where are the trained expert spreadsheet jockeys that can analyze huge amounts of data? In the CFO’s department. Who is constantly looking at all manner of the comany’s Numbers to find efficiencies and weed out inefficiencies? The CFO.

In a normal company, decisions like store closings would also take into account discussions with several other departments. You need to understand what store employees are actually doing. Maybe most car purchases are complex due to trade ins and auto loans and need hand holding? And then, obvious to most of us here, store leases have very stringent terms and can’t be shut off without huge penalties, so you’ve got to understand that too.

Without knowing what’s going inside Tesla, it looks to me like they made the decision based on CFO analysis and didn’t do much of the other analysis.
 
Recently Tesla said they will first build the semi trucks for their own use. I think the purchase of the shipping company is part of a bigger plan. Tesla probably will ship their own products using Tesla Semi. Each Tesla semi can earn $200k in a year based on my rough estimates.

Tesla didn't buy a shipping company. Next.

Is your point that "trucking != shipping", or are you trying to make some other point?

Within the U.S. the two are pretty much synonymous, as most car shipping Tesla does on the west coast is point to point hauling using car carriers. There's no truck yards, train stations or ports involved. I guess the truck drivers went to work for Tesla too.

So what's the difference?
 
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I don't think prior years are a great indication given Tesla hasn't had anywhere near the volumes in prior years that they had in 2018, so it's difficult to know what kind of trend the Model 3 will follow.

You're missing the fact that there's a very obvious reason why Tesla does this every bloody year. You trigger a domestic surge in March so that you can stop shipping international at the end of the month (trying to time it so your international inventory reaches a minimum around the end of the quarter) and switch to (much faster) domestic shipping that you can complete by the end of the quarter. It's all about minimizing inventory at the end of the quarter.

Every year.

And shorts keep forgetting about this fact. Every year.

Your Norway numbers are not supported by that link you provided, unless I am reading it very wrong

You are.

Ignore the chart at the top; YTD is meaningless when trying to determine the current delivery rate because they only started in mid-to-late February, and had to ramp up. Look at the multicolored graph below. Look at the right-hand side - that's March. That's what we want to look at when assessing the current rate. Check out the number of deliveries. Now divide by the number of weeks that have gone by in March so far. That's the current delivery rate per week. There's 1123 thusfar in March, and it's March 11th - and the day is only partway over.

I think it would be very hard to extrapolate European sales from Norway's sales

We have entirely different sets of data for that - the initial February (fractional month, during rampup, so not full speed) numbers. Regardless, 3,5x would be a pretty normal ratio.
 
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http://ir.tesla.com/static-files/77f338fd-cbef-403e-984d-51ec3a902946

New SEC S-3 form filed. If I read this right they bought some trucks and trailers for $14M and issued 50k shares to cover that.

I think it's fascinating that the owner of the trucking company wanted shares rather than cash. (Although Tesla is just buying the trucks and trailers from the trucking company in this case, it seems to amount to substantially all the company's assets, so the company is probably more or less shutting down.) It does mean that he gets to defer taxation on the sale, if I remember the rules correctly. But still, I guess he's bullish on TSLA.
 
So has Tesla dropped it's plan to build its own vehicle transporters?
I'm pretty sure the comment about building their own was about some sort of stopgap emergency measure converting flatbeds into transporters, quite likely with lower capacity than standard transporters. That was my read on it. I don't think it was ever intended to be a long-term plan.
 
Deliveries only started second half of February. Next.

They did, and that will teach me to skim-read... but they also include March (3 full weeks) so about 630 per week. European demand right now is going to be reservation holders and other pent-up demand, I still really want to see the sustained growth we were all hoping for.

Since we started discussing this, 12 more have been registered in Norway! :p
 
Is there any reason for Tesla to pay a "mouse nuts" bill with shares instead of simple cash?
Trucking company owner WANTS shares.

Sure, Tesla could pay cash and then he could buy shares, but it's probably tax-advantaged for him to trade the bulk of the business for shares.
 
Trucking company owner WANTS shares.

Owner of the company is not involved in the filing. It's the company that is selling assets and it is the company that is getting shares.

Sure, Tesla could pay cash and then he could buy shares, but it's probably tax-advantaged for him to trade the bulk of the business for shares.

This would be the easiest tax avoidance scheme in the world. Tell me more.
 
Good points and I hope you're right, we'll all see soon enough.



I don't think prior years are a great indication given Tesla hasn't had anywhere near the volumes in prior years that they had in 2018, so it's difficult to know what kind of trend the Model 3 will follow.



Your Norway numbers are not supported by that link you provided, unless I am reading it very wrong. The site shows just over 1,900 deliveries in 2019 to date. I don't know what the cut-off is for those numbers, but I'll be generous and say the end of Feb, so that's 8 weeks or 237 vehicles a week (not even close to 700). Norway is very EV friendly with more than 50% of all car sales being EVs, but yes has a low population of about 5 million people.

I think it would be very hard to extrapolate European sales from Norway's sales, but if we take your 3.5x Norway as the baseline (I think it might be a little higher than that), you're still looking at under 1,000 deliveries a week, or less than 10,000 in total sales when including U.S. per month, which is still only 50 - 60% of Q3's average.

I'm not hating on the company, I own the car and the stock, and I'm worried. Last night's tweet and reversal hasn't made me more confident.
I’m worried too in the short term. This might be the most confusing quarter to predict. But in the end, our lord and savior Elon Tusk will bring us to the Promised Land
 
This deal is structured this way because Tesla wanted it structered that way.

*sigh*

OK, suppose you're at Tesla making the deal, offering cash, and the owner of the trucking company wants shares. He wants shares so bad he's willing to accept a substantially lower purchase price as long as it's in shares, not cash. (Because for him the tax break of deferring his capital gain on the corporate assets is worth it.)

Do you go ahead, make him happy, and pay him in shares? Of course you do.
 
Owner of the company is not involved in the filing. It's the company that is selling assets and it is the company that is getting shares.

This would be the easiest tax avoidance scheme in the world. Tell me more.

I'll hazard a guess... If you buy shares on the open market, your purchase time is set at that moment. But if you barter for shares, it might look like the stock is a long term capital gain from the purchase time for the carrier/trucks.

I don't know if such things are possible/legal. Its just a guess
 
Tesla didn't buy a shipping company. Next.
For clarification, this particular purchase is not a purchase of a shipping company, but of the *assets* of the shipping company (a highly technical difference). This does not prove that Tesla didn't buy some other shipping company, which they might have (and Musk said they were going to).
 
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I'm sorry Elon, I love you, I really do, but now you're just trolling.

While adjusting decisions like that is great and something I expect Silicon Valley tech startups to do all the time, communicating it in the way that you do is just blatantly stupid and irresponsible. You hurt your clients, you hurt your employees and you hurt your investors.

Imagine the headlines we would have had if you just made your internal due diligence properly about the stores you want to shut down and didn't announce outright the way you did. Imagine the SP we would have seen if the story was "Tesla finally releases $35k Model 3" and not "Tesla shuts down stores all over the world and fires employees in order to deliver their long-promised $35k Model 3".

I'm sorry, Elon, you're great, you're a genius, but nobody is a genius at everything they do. You need help, you need a COO or a CMO to handle this stuff for you. Last 2 weeks have been pure chaos and Tesla looks like a headless chicken running around trying to figure out what to do.

When you achieved profitability in Q3 2018 you wrote in your email that "Tesla has now become a real company". Please, start acting like one. You're no longer a startup. Your moves are admirable if you're a small agile startup trying to find their product market fit and figure out who its early adopters are. You are way beyond that point now. You're a grown up company.

It doesn't mean you should stop adjusting prices, stop being dynamic and agile. Not at all. But please, for the sake of everyone that loves you and for the sake of your mission, be responsible about what and how you communicate. Be responsible about the decisions you make and announce. If it only took two weeks to reverse your decision, why did you make it in the first place? Did you really have to lower the prices of all the cars so much?

I'm here with you for the long run and now that I have my Model 3 I'm not selling any shares until you scale up Semi at least, so I'm not too fussed about weekly fluctuations. But





You call it brilliant, I call it dumb luck. None of this was pre-planned. And if it was, then it's even worse than it looks.

Free advertising? Only if you agree with the rule that "it doesn't matter what they write about you, it only matters that they do write about you". I don't.



Yes, Tesla themselves.

It is too late for calling for order. I am glad that Tesla has corrected their mistake of shutting down all stores, as it was announced.
Today’s news, even though a continuation of seemingly haphazard planning was very much needed and move in the right direction.