Welcome to Tesla Motors Club
Discuss Tesla's Model S, Model 3, Model X, Model Y, Cybertruck, Roadster and More.
Register

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

This site may earn commission on affiliate links.
I’ll comment. Don’t ever underestimate the power of lobbyists to buy politicians. Think of the environmental impact of essentially killing PV in sunny California. I can’t move out of this state fast enough...
To one of the other sunny states that today don't have net metering? California is doing much better with renewable energy than many other states. And legislators introduce nut job bills in every state.
 
  • Like
Reactions: Tim S and bkp_duke
To one of the other sunny states that today don't have net metering? California is doing much better with renewable energy than many other states. And legislators introduce nut job bills in every state.

Problem is time and energy have to be expended to fight the nutjob bills, or as we have seen in other states, they WILL pass. Don't underestimate the power of lobbying to cajole votes for things, even if they initially seem dumb-witted.
 
Chicago Tribune - today: CME Closing Pits for Good

In 2007 the CME became a merged combination of the CME & CBOT and settled relations with the CBOE. All are located in the Chicago financial district. In my TV role during the nineties, I would regularly visit those pits to interview market makers, most often at the CBOE. In fact twice I participated in after-hours mock trading in a CBOE pit. Even then we realized the open-outcry pits would eventually become superseded by electronic trading. Finally, that transition is virtually complete.
 
Last edited:

In Q1 2021, Tesla sold 184,500 vehicles, which once again made it the best-selling EV brand globally. By registering this number of units, Tesla took 16% of the plug-in car market share. It should be noted that in the first three months of the year, the company did not sell Model S and Model X, which affected the final results. However, that didn't stop Tesla from taking first place, beating its closest competitor by 39,500 additional units sold, according to EV-Sales.

And that's including gross PHEVS...
 
I’ll comment. Don’t ever underestimate the power of lobbyists to buy politicians. Think of the environmental impact of essentially killing PV in sunny California. I can’t move out of this state fast enough...
There is no lobby that can do that. Lobbies work best on things that are out of the public eye - and don't run counter to the overall political message. One tweet from Musk addressing the governor is worth millions spent on lobbyists.

Remember the Governor is facing a recall campaign. He needs all parts of the Dem coalition to support him.
 
This is about what I would expect. Not very "overwhelmingly positive."
Here's a quick public opinion poll:
5,300 likes vs 66 thumbs down.

1620237624600.png
 
Nice, so because poor people can't afford it, make it more expensive for everyone else. Not to mention it's not like that money is going to taxes where it could theoretically be used to lower solar for less wealthy residents; the money will just go straight to the utility companies profits.

It's kind of hard to imagine this passes the full house, much less the Governor's desk. Any Cali politics watchers care to comment?
FYI Governor Newsom is a total Tesla fanboy from way, way back. Bought two early Model S.

The economics of solar without batteries in California are getting worse, but this was always expected. We all know flat-rate no-battery net metering works if only a few people have solar, but if everyone has solar it breaks down.

In California all solar accounts are being moved to time-of-use, which means midday solar production being pushed to the grid will get much less compensation than evening electricity being pulled from the grid. This also has the effect of promoting batteries, so solar customers can time-shift their own production, using or selling it in the evening, instead of dumping it to the grid at cheap midday rates. But even this time of use and battery push is meant to clear the way for more solar, not undermine solar.

Newsom is as pro-solar as politicians get. So Newsom is not going to sign a bill hurting the solar industry, especially wealthy solar customers like Newsom himself, unless someone convinces him it's absolutely necessary to keep utilities afloat.

Now if Newsom gets recalled and replaced by some fossil-friendly Republican? That's a different discussion.
 
The California grid has another big issue few people have touched on. Between conservation efforts, rising energy efficiency, lots of solar customers, utilities are seeing declining demand for (utility supplied) electricity. At the same time, with rising fire danger the utilities are seeing rising costs for maintaining the grid.

The utility business model is to collect money by selling electrons. But the electrons themselves are only a fraction of utilities' costs. Most of the cost is building and maintaining infrastructure. So in California utilities are facing a serious squeeze because they have to pay more costs while selling fewer kWh worth of electrons.

One of the reasons California is pushing electric cars, buses, and trucks is that it can help stem the falling demand for electricity. If more people in California have EVs, utilities can sell more electrons to cover their fixed costs and the price per electron can go down. But right now the proportion of EVs in the fleet is still low single digits, even in California.

Eventually, when batteries are everywhere, the utilities can cut some of their transmission line costs, but like universal EVs that's still decades in the future.

So in the long run the utilities may have a viable business model again. But for the time being the only way for utilities to cover their expenses is to extract more money per electron from their current customers, solar and non-solar. California has this valley of pain to get through over the next 10-15 years before the happy EV/solar/battery future can be a real economic positive.
 
Didn't see the latest FUD from Germany posted, looks like the German auto's are doing everything they can to slow down Tesla over there.


"The State Office for Occupational Safety and the agency tasked with fighting illicit work were investigating whether minimum wages are being paid as well as whether rules on working hours and conditions for construction workers’ housing were being adhered to, the news outlet reported."

It's confusing to me that they aren't also probing whether there is sexual intimidation and sexual harassment going on at the Tesla site.

I mean, don't they even care about women's rights? 🤪
Or racial harassment like at GM?
I mean, seriously. Oh that's right, GM left Germany already.
/s
 
  • Funny
Reactions: wipster

That's...........just embarrassing.

Saw some on Twitter saying Ford was sending Mach-E's to Europe/Norway to offset EU carbon penalties and that's the reason for the continual decline in sales......which makes no logical sense. Ford still has access to the full EV tax credit here in the US and they don't sell that many cars in Europe so it's not like their fines would be big over there. There was a report (that Ford put out themselves to try and bring attention to it) that they started delivering to Norway, but it was only like a couple hundred Mach-E's. Simply put, there's just no demand in the US for the Mach-E

Just imagine what's going to happen to Mach E's sales in the US when Tesla get's access to the tax credit again....... 😬

No wonder the Ford CEO was on Twitter for the past couple of weeks throwing constant shade at Tesla.
 
When fossil fuel industries and ICE automakers start laying off workers by the millions, the anti-Tesla hate is going to intensify, not ease up. Elon may be weird but he is no fool. There's a reason he's sidling up to greasy oil-funded right wing politicians. Elon has been opening ties to Republicans, Saudis, German industrialists, etc. in order to mitigate the backlash against Tesla and the Tesla mission.
 

That's...........just embarrassing.

Saw some on Twitter saying Ford was sending Mach-E's to Europe/Norway to offset EU carbon penalties and that's the reason for the continual decline in sales......which makes no logical sense. Ford still has access to the full EV tax credit here in the US and they don't sell that many cars in Europe so it's not like their fines would be big over there. There was a report (that Ford put out themselves to try and bring attention to it) that they started delivering to Norway, but it was only like a couple hundred Mach-E's. Simply put, there's just no demand in the US for the Mach-E

Just imagine what's going to happen to Mach E's sales in the US when Tesla get's access to the tax credit again....... 😬

No wonder the Ford CEO was on Twitter for the past couple of weeks throwing constant shade at Tesla.
My understanding is that they can sell about 20K this year in US, the rest of the production is earmarked for EU where they need the EV credits more.
So based on that, if you subtract the first 3 month of sales and divide by 9 for the rest of the year, you get an average of 1297 per month they can sell, so expect the numbers to keep going down.

In short: they are production constrained.
 
Saw some on Twitter saying Ford was sending Mach-E's to Europe/Norway to offset EU carbon penalties and that's the reason for the continual decline in sales......which makes no logical sense. Ford still has access to the full EV tax credit here in the US and they don't sell that many cars in Europe so it's not like their fines would be big over there
I'm pretty sure that Ford said that 60% of MachE production was going to Europe this year. So obviously they think they need the credits there more than here.

Of course they can buy cheap credits from Tesla here, they can't buy credits there. (Since they didn't join a pool.)
 

That's...........just embarrassing.

Saw some on Twitter saying Ford was sending Mach-E's to Europe/Norway to offset EU carbon penalties and that's the reason for the continual decline in sales......which makes no logical sense. Ford still has access to the full EV tax credit here in the US and they don't sell that many cars in Europe so it's not like their fines would be big over there. There was a report (that Ford put out themselves to try and bring attention to it) that they started delivering to Norway, but it was only like a couple hundred Mach-E's. Simply put, there's just no demand in the US for the Mach-E

Just imagine what's going to happen to Mach E's sales in the US when Tesla get's access to the tax credit again....... 😬

No wonder the Ford CEO was on Twitter for the past couple of weeks throwing constant shade at Tesla.

I think Ford is shipping the overseas to start up the European market and there is merit to that... but even if there was huge demand, they don't have the capacity to do much with it. I do think that that even with the low numbers there might be signals things are off with the Mach-E. A quick search on cars.com showed 24 of them available within 150mi of me (SE Wyoming, so includes Denver). Expand that nationwide and there are over 1200 available. Being generous and saying they produces 4700 a month and all destined for the US... 25% are in inventory around the US. There are no Model Ys in my area in inventory with likely a higher production rate.