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Tesla, TSLA & the Investment World: the Perpetual Investors' Roundtable

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At 0:27 the video has 27 images spanning half the lower line of the door handle with a fixed camera. I think that lower line of the door handle measures 17.3 cm (I wish I had one in my garage but I am holding TSLA instead) thus half is 8.65 cm in 27img/30img/sec = 0.9 sec.

Thus 0.0865 m / 0.9 sec = assembly line speed of 0.1 meter per second would be my guess.

That's useful - any idea about the distance between the cars?
 
Two days ago one of the most important and most watched Chinese state TV channels had a prominent segment on Tesla and GF3:


There's now a translation by a Twitter user on what was said, and there's quite a few interesting nuggets to investors:
  • Tesla started working since Feb 10.
  • All lines are fully working.
  • 2,000 workers (600 newly employed).
  • The government provides 10,000 masks, more than 600 rooms for workers.
  • Moreover, all companies providing essential materials to Tesla are also working.
Another tweet also said:
  • "To make things easier for customers, @teslacn favors #Model3 home deliveries. New protocol requires all vehicle to be disinfected before being handed over to new owners."
  • "Ray4️⃣Tesla⚡☀️ on Twitter"
This should address reluctance by Chinese customers to take delivery at a crowded delivery center.

This is huge news IMO:
  • The second GF3 shift was also hired, which would double their production.
  • The end of December GF3 group photo showed less than 1,000 workers, so the ramp-up is in full swing.
  • The Chinese side of Tesla's supply chain was specifically brought up early on February 10 while still about half of companies were shut down due to the statutory quarantine "vacation".
Presumably this also means that they switched to a 2-shift utilization of the factory: 8+8 hours, with 8 hours left for maintenance, on 5 or 7 days per week.

Based on this information I'm now more bullish about Q1 GF3 production and deliveries. In particular the early February hiring of the second shift should help them ramp up.

Edit, there's also this fresh GF3 production data from a Chinese government official:

Breaking: Tesla Giga 3 Shanghai Soon Achieves 12K Monthly Production, Number Will Gradually Rise

Sun Xiaohe, Chief of the High-tech Industry and Technology Innovation Division of the Management Committee of Lingang New Area said, "Tesla Gigafactory 3 Shanghai is expecting to achieve 12,000 monthly production rate soon, and the number will gradually rise."​

12k/month is 3k/week and 144k/year, very close to the 150k/year milestone already.

A bit of a perspective of how huge this is: last summer Adam Jonas was projecting just 35k-40k GF3 sales in China, for the whole of 2020:

Tesla, TSLA & the Investment World: the 2019-2020 Investors' Roundtable

How many units of Model 3 would you expect Tesla to sell in China on a full year basis by 2020/2021?

We expect 35-40k units for 2020, and 60k units for 2021.

At 12k/month they'd meet that in just a little over 3 months...

If they can reach this in February and sustain it in March then even some of the more bullish GF3 estimates for Q1 I've seen here will have to be raised significantly. :D
Later this year we need to loudly publicize the difference between the reality of Tesla in China and what Jonas projected. He could not have been more wrong, with a very specific forecast only a year out. It's time for his credibility to be shredded in every corner of the investment community. Jonas needs a new line of work.
 
Some reports on twitter of people being unable to pick up a Model X because of a “firmware update” and told to come back in 2-3 weeks.

Dennis Mihalatos on Twitter

▼ Kiel James Patrick on Twitter
I understand their disappointment but last year I got a FitBit Ionic and before I could use it I had to spend 2 hours updating the software. I was miffed to say the least, And I let Fitbit know they should not send a "new" product to a customer that requires them to try and figure out what to do as far as manually updating the software on a device they have never used and had a limited interface.
I told them it was poor customer service. They knew the product was in need of an update to be functional, and they should have performed that update before delivering the item to the novice consumer/me.
So did Tesla look at the scenarios and decide on what they felt was the best scenario for the customer? I think so.
It isn't what the customer wanted, they were hyped to get the car, and probably arranged their lives around the delivery. SUGAR happens.
 
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Money makes you only happy for a short period when it increased but after you gonna find yourself comparing against a new peer group and trying to do better than they do. Its a stupid game but there is a way out of it if you are willing to work on your personality and character.

Just quickly, mostly just vegetated for 5-6 months. Really had no idea how much damage and psychological weight had been lifted until I seemed to wake up after that decompression period. Go out and study something challenging and mysterious. I took up beekeeping and can attest it is a deep rabbit hole that can yield a lot. Try to figure out fruit trees and grafting and food preservation. Lots of seasonal variation and excitement.

It is true that friends will change but bees and trees and pets will love you unconditionally (or maybe not).
 
Some reports on twitter of people being unable to pick up a Model X because of a “firmware update” and told to come back in 2-3 weeks.

Dennis Mihalatos on Twitter

▼ Kiel James Patrick on Twitter

There is ongoing discussion on this issue within a thread on TMC - the issue is possibly related to Monroney stickers (can’t label the cars as LR+ on the monroney sticker until the firmware is in place; can’t retroactively modify the monroney sticker once the car is sold). Also, that first twitter thread is in need of some serious pushback by Tesla advocates. Outrageous TSLAQ trolling.
 
Lots of lens distortion so it is hard to tell. I could not find a place in the video to make a frame by frame measurement so i can only guesstimate 1.5 meter.

So your estimates are:
  • GA line moves 10 cm/sec ± 3 cm
  • Distance between cars is 150+469 = 614 cm ± 50 cm
(I added pretty arbitrary confidence intervals.)

This gives an estimated upper and lower bound for observed line peak throughput with two 8-hour shifts working 7 days a week:
  • Low estimate: 664/7 = 95 seconds per car, 4,244/week,
  • Mid estimate: 614/10 = 61 seconds per car, 6,610/week,
  • High estimate: 569/13 = 43 seconds per car, 9,376/week
The GF3 assembly line is much faster than I thought. Any way to narrow down the 10 cm/sec line speed estimate some more? It's the biggest source of statistical uncertainty.
 

I encourage everybody to read the full letter, or at least page 9 for what he has to say about renewable energy. The quoted pieces leave some stuff out (as you'd expect - it's the nature of quotes), and the missing pieces are important.

One of the observations here was about Berkshire's interest and ability to run $100B projects. That might sound new or different, but if you've been reading his letters to shareholders for long enough (more than a decade in my case), then that doesn't sound at all unusual. When Berkshire purchased the railroad BNSF, one of the points they made is that unlike most purchasers, Bershire was particularly enthralled by the fact that railroads were significant consumers of capital (with good returns).

One of Berkshire's big problems has become how big the company is, and how they get all that money to work earning a good return.


Their experience in Iowa, both their own and their customers, tells me that Berkshire is directly or indirectly (through subsidiaries) looking for states with an RE investment climate where they can replicate what they've done in Iowa. And the more the merrier.

(The punchline that I haven't seen anybody quote - that Iowa utility hasn't raised rates meaningfully for years, and has committed to new increases in the base rate through at least 2028; sourcing all of their electricity from Wind has lowered their acquisition cost so low, it wouldn't surprise me if they're earning particularly generous profits while the other Iowa utility is busy raising rates constantly to keep their profits and pay for the fossil fuels they're burning to make the electricity)
 
Later this year we need to loudly publicize the difference between the reality of Tesla in China and what Jonas projected. He could not have been more wrong, with a very specific forecast only a year out. It's time for his credibility to be shredded in every corner of the investment community. Jonas needs a new line of work.
The concept of More Wrong, or Wronger then Wrong,,,
Asimov's axiom, "When people thought the earth was flat, they were wrong. When people thought the earth was spherical, they were wrong. But if you think that thinking the earth is spherical is just as wrong as thinking the earth is flat, then your view is wronger than both of them put together."
 
So your estimates are:
  • GA line moves 10 cm/sec ± 3 cm
  • Distance between cars is 150+469 = 614 cm ± 50 cm
(I added pretty arbitrary confidence intervals.)

This gives an estimated upper and lower bound for observed line peak throughput with two 8-hour shifts working 7 days a week:
  • Low estimate: 664/7 = 95 seconds per car, 4,244/week,
  • Mid estimate: 614/10 = 61 seconds per car, 6,610/week,
  • High estimate: 569/13 = 43 seconds per car, 9,376/week
The GF3 assembly line is much faster than I thought. Any way to narrow down the 10 cm/sec line speed estimate some more? It's the biggest source of statistical uncertainty.

While the above speed calculation may be very well true the real output of cars/week may be for a variety of reasons very different.
 
What kind of dumb reaction is that? I’m trying to discover if there are any bottlenecks preventing GF3 from expanding production and I get this? Why don’t you call me a care bear while you’re at it?
It’s great advice if you believe what your posting. If you don’t believe what your posting, than why post it without disclaimer. Is it moderators job to label ideas dumb?
 
In fact at 12k/month GF3 production rate Tesla would in just 8 months surpass the Adam Jonas GF3 sales estimates for the entire 2020+2021 time frame ...

And Tesla wants to ramp significantly higher than that...

can we all just agree that Elon has one less person to send to Mars because Jonas is already there when it comes to understanding Tesla?
 
What kind of dumb reaction is that? I’m trying to discover if there are any bottlenecks preventing GF3 from expanding production and I get this? Why don’t you call me a care bear while you’re at it?
Fred be careful, this comes off as "aggressive" and I've been having my posts deleted for much less lately by overzealous mods. ;)