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While there might be margin improvements available by tweaking the battery design for SR, simply not including some cells is enough for now. Most of the cost is in the cells, and taking out 1/3 of the cells should work just fine for now. It's not like they have to ship SR w/o PUP any time soon, they can prop up the SR margins by only shipping SR w/ PUP in the near future. I doubt a significant overall margin improvement could be had by tweaking the pack/module design for SR specifically (most improvements would likely reflect on both SR and LR).
Tear downs already indicate that, for the per-vehicle costs, even a SR would already today have positive margin. The only need is to maintain production rate high enough and product mix suitably varied for all the fixed costs to be covered by the average margin across all the vehicles being built.
SpudLime
Active Member
damnit. should have bought 300 shares. my bad guys.
Yes, given the crap today it's much better than I expected!
Wow! Last second almost 300k volume sale stopped it going over 280. Amazing...
Tesla's official site has been notoriously inaccurate, especially for the standard range car. It's definitely not something to count on.
The report say in the next 8 months, which most likely means Q2 2019. Tesla tends to push the limit on timing, so "in the next 8 months" probably means somewhere between "8 months and 12 months"... and "8 months" if everything goes perfectly according to plan, which most of the time it doesn't.
Starting standard-range production in Q2 makes a lot of sense. Standard range Model 3 will be low margin, especially when ordered without options. Tesla wants to avoid this for as long as possible, so that it can increase scale, efficiency and design as to raise the margins of the standard range Model 3 to something more acceptable. This takes time, and can't happen that quick.
Most of the time people here on TMC believe the timelines given by Tesla and when someone like me points out the timeline is optimistic at best, then people discount that person's words. I was skeptical with the professed timeline/rollout pace of Tesla Energy rollout, Model X ramp, Solar roof rollout, Model 3 ramp, new Gigafactory locations, etc. And most people argued against me, defending Tesla's timelines. As long as Elon is in charge, Tesla will likely seriously miss all their timelines... and this includes the standard range Model 3. It's no big deal though. The car will come, and it will be great. It will just come a little bit later than most expect it to.
Me too. There is an SA "Breaking News" article spreading FUD from acknowledged shortsters making it seem that Elon is leaving or going to be forced out that is just pure unmitigated crap!!! Yet the shorts are buying it hook, line, and sinker. These bastards are trying as hard as they can to bring the best company I have ever owned a small piece of down and it pisses me off like a fair thee well!!
Ok, time for drugs now...
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Design changes to make the battery pack significantly cheaper doesn't sound like a minor thing. It's likely a very big undertaking and Elon is being unrealistically optimistic as usually with timeline.
From earnings conference call, "“We came up with a new design that achieves the same outcome, that’s actually lighter, better, cheaper and we will be introducing that around the end of this year – probably reach volume production on that in Q1 or something. That will make the car lighter, better, and cheaper and achieve a higher range.”
I'll interpret this. If we work our butt off and focus, and everything goes our way, we'll start production of standard range battery packs in late December, and then by end of March reach a decent production rate. But in reality, we'll probably get out the first standard range Model 3s in Q2, with Q3 and Q4 being the quarters that we ramp production.
All that said, Tesla doesn't have much incentive to rush out the standard range Model 3. Rather, Tesla has much, much greater incentive to sell the long-range car with options for as long as they can, and to as many countries as they can so they can make healthy margins.
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humbaba
sleeping until $7000
A solid outlook -- its starting to look to me like they will have no way to avoid going over guidance, but whatever.
What gets me is that I check the price at market watch. Okay, that's my bad, but I'm not sure where else to look and Yahoo finance seems to have just as much FUD.
But... market watch posted a link to seeking alpha where the title is something like "Model 3 is falling short of targets". Um, what?
I realize this might seem a naive question, but WTF? I guess its sales, not production, but [1] puts them at 55,000 with September still to go. Even if the claim is actually about production it seems difficult to spin Tesla having >30,000 M3s held back from the second quarter.
I'm not wasting my time going to Seeking Alpha so maybe someone here can explain this? I mean, I know its lies, but... in the face of reality... d*mn!
1) Monthly Plug-In Sales Scorecard
European deliveries will be much higher priority than standard range car, because they will be long-range with options and good margin.
Tesla will likely push off standard range car (due to low margins) for as long as they can. Makes too much business sense.
Tesla tends to push the limit on timing, so "somewhere between '8 months and 12 months'" probably means somewhere between "12 months and 18 months".
In case it gets lost, I'm pointing out that we're now stacking pessimism from outside sources to assume views that are even more pessimistic. Right now the site says 4-7 months, making the upper end 7.x months. They likely looked at that and just called it within the next 8 months. You guys are overthinking this.
Um, no. It's not pessimism. It's just realism regarding Tesla's timelines. We've gone through this dozens of times here on this thread over the years. The ones who've been here for years will understand more.
And one can be perfectly realistic with Tesla's timelines, and still be an avid Tesla bull.
humbaba
sleeping until $7000
From what I've read here, multiple people acknowledge that if Musk gives a timeline then the early portion of it is often optimistic, but that it ends up scaling faster than his preliminary estimates. While there will always be people who are overly optimistic there seem to be plenty enough realists here.
But at his worst, Musk is better than "DAZ soon (TM)". My point being that no one has a perfect crystal ball and all projections can, and likely will to some degree, be off. In the end, what matters are results. And we have every reason to expect 50,000 to 55,000 (at least) M3 sales by end of quarter.
If there are no RWD sales in the next eight months it is most likely because they are still having trouble meeting demand for the higher margin versions. Same for twelve months or whatever. Tesla is making and delivering cars as fast as they can and this will only continue. Prognostications as to exactly when a particular model will start being delivered are, really, just guess and nothing to get that wound up about.
[edited to add clarifying link: Talk:DAZ 3D - Wikipedia]
[argh: that just refers to a page that ultimately has this:
"DAZ soon: 1- A general good natured attempt at relating an unspecified or incomprehensible timeframe to human understanding. 2- An expression of a theory in quantum physics where time actually stops. 3- Equal to or greater than a Epoch. 4- Wishful thinking."
My point is Tesla/Musk are much better than some other companies in regards to timelines]
Just remember "Elon Time" and multiply by 1.5 to 2 and you'll be in the ballpark.
As shown at the end of Q2, I don't want him to work so hard it hurts him (and Tesla) in order to meet quarterly expectations. For that reason, I wish we could have gone private, but such is life.
Maybe SpaceX can buy Tesla... ?
Fact Checking
Well-Known Member
Tesla guided 50-55k Model 3 and 26-27k Model S+X production for Q3, with sales slightly above production.
Here's the 3 currently known estimates:
- The InsideEVs July and August sales numbers, extrapolated to end of September, put them within the guidance range.
- The Bloomberg tracker puts them beyond guidance.
- The "Troy Spreadsheet", which has a prediction track record of 96% and 98% for Q1 and Q2 estimates puts them in the middle of guidance.
SA is probably lying and misleading, as usual, most of the SA authors there are biased against Tesla with no rational basis, and the managers of the SA platform frequently promote anti-Tesla articles, which gives them even more prominence.
If you provide a link I can probably tell which particular lies and omissions this particular SA article relies on.
I'm a huge Tesla bull. But reality is Elon is terrible at giving guidance and timelines. Completely terrible. He often shares what is theoretically possible as guidance. He really ought to not be on the quarterly conference calls because it's gotten to a point where all the analysts just roll their eyes when Elon talks about guidance. Except maybe Trip Chowdry.
Sorry, you post like you know it as fact when it's just your opinion.
What I have noticed is that it used to say 6-9 months, then 5-8 months, and now 4-7 months.....so we shall see I guess...
This is not actually new news. Tesla had / has in fact a few remanufacturing engineer positions open at Lathrop for a while. What the Shorty Airforce doesnt know is this is so common that there is an industry term for it.
To my knowledge, the same location also looks at parts that are returned from service centers (like damaged drive units, etc.,) to figure out what improvements to make in the production processes. It's an iterative process to keep the product improving and there are a good number of Engineers in this area.
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