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The SR pack is a new design separate from the LR pack which will continue as is.

Do you really think that if they came up with a new design that is significantly cheaper to build as well as 3x faster that they aren't going to apply that to the LR pack as well? If so, you haven't been paying attention to how Elon operates. You don't leave "good enough" alone, you make it better, faster, cheaper...
 
Do you really think that if they came up with a new design that is significantly cheaper to build as well as 3x faster

Source? Another commenter speculated that Panasonic's new battery cell line could be anywhere from 30% to 300% faster, but that's a completely separate line than pack assembly. Let's make sure we're not conflating the two.
 
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It has been posted in this thread many times: Behind the Scenes at Tesla’s Gigafactory: Field Notes From Our Recent Visit

Grohmann Engineering will help module production become three times faster, and three times cheaper, according to Viecha. Their new system will be sent to the Gigafactory by the end of Q3 or beginning of Q4. The Grohmann machine will be in Zones 1, 2, 3, and Tesla will be receiving three machines. The process was designed to alleviate the previous bottleneck in module production which delayed Model 3 production significantly. The machine is already built, and points to the advantage Tesla will have in building future Gigafactories. They have learned many painful lessons, but have a solid blueprint for porting the factory across the world.

What I can't tell is when they say "Tesla will be receiving three machines" are they saying one each in Zones 1, 2, and 3? Or are they saying that they will be getting three new complete lines? (Which would be 3x faster right?) So I personally am more interested in the 3x cheaper than the 3x faster.

And if they work out, and don't have enough capacity for demand they will surely shut down, and replace, one of the old cobbled together lines with the new better system.

Source? Another commenter speculated that Panasonic's new battery cell line could be anywhere from 30% to 300% faster, but that's a completely separate line than pack assembly. Let's make sure we're not conflating the two.

Correct, I have seen that the 3 new Panasonic cell lines would be 30% faster than the existing ones. (But we have also seen that someone said that the 30% faster was just the overall cell production capability which would make since as they are adding 3, or 30%, more production equipment.) The new information is specifically about module production being 3x faster and 3x cheaper.
 
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Profit. Gross margin is much higher when they charge $9K for the additional 25 kWh of cells, or $360/kWh. That's the best strategy with low production numbers. As production expands, they can occupy more price points, as long as the manufacturing technology grows with it to maintain gross margins.

It's the same reason why they don't sell 500K Model S cars, the demand isn't there. They have to move down market to expand. And that's the reason Tesla will sell 1 M cars or more at the $25K price point. But they're not there yet in terms of being able to produce that car profitably.

Cheers!
That's what my original reply to you was. The SR shouldn't be built until the LR demand is sated. My guess is that if Tesla cannot meet demand for LR in the US at their current rate they are not going to start producing SR until they can meet LR demand globally - which is unlikely to be by Jan-19 and more likely to be late next year at the earliest. They will still sell every vehicle they can make.
 
So bears tried to spin bloomberg news about new Exec departures as a negative
did not succeed
another positive
(Bolding by me)

Would you say it is positive?

I agree with TT007 on this. Stock stays strong on major negative news is a positive sign. But I wouldn't read too much into this indicator.

I saw on 5-minutes chart, between 13~14 pm, someone tried to push the stock down but failed.

His post was about news about new Exec departures being spun as negative. My point was that for those news to be spun as negative they´d have to be non-negative in the first place. I think it is not good so many execs are departing.
 
That's what my original reply to you was. The SR shouldn't be built until the LR demand is sated. My guess is that if Tesla cannot meet demand for LR in the US at their current rate they are not going to start producing SR until they can meet LR demand globally - which is unlikely to be by Jan-19 and more likely to be late next year at the earliest. They will still sell every vehicle they can make.

I don't agree. I think that they will start to make SR cars early next year, or late this year, once they are consistently being profitable on the LR models. Part of the reason is that they can make 3 SR packs from the cells required to make 2 LR packs. And I think cell production will be the next significant bottleneck.

My guess is that they will continue to make 5-6k LR cars per week, and will start to ramp SR cars up to 3-4k per week. Or whatever ratio works out best for their current production capabilities and parts supplies.
 
(Bolding by me)
His post was about news about new Exec departures being spun as negative. My point was that for those news to be spun as negative they´d have to be non-negative in the first place. I think it is not good so many execs are departing.
Can’t imagine why a non-technical lower level exec departure is bad. Accounting / finance guys are plenty and easy to hire. Losing someone with in depth knowledge of battery tech or autopilot would be bad.

I guess the spin is : there is something terribly not ok with Tesla’s finances and thus accounting/ finance guys are leaving.
 
Saying something like this is highly speculative at best. There is no history or reports of EM and Musk talking badly about each other, for eg. Something you'd expect if there is anything other than professional rivalry between them.

If by "EM" you meant Jeff Bezos, then absolutely: my speculation could also be wrong to the level of being the opposite of the truth!

Bezos might even be privately dismayed at how Musk is being handled by the media, and he might not have any stake or influence at BI anymore to stop it.

The negativity against Tesla is pretty much unprecedented, I don't remember any similar example in the past where an intrinsically innovative and forward looking U.S. company and its CEO would be singled out and mobbed by the U.S. media to such an extent. The mobbing of Tesla is even bipartisan to a significant degree...
 

Yes, I read the Wormcapital report on their GF1 visit earlier today. I will say that Martin Viecha is head of Tesla’s investor relations, but not an head of engineering. He leaves out important baseline information for the "3x Cheap/3x Faster" claim. Compared to what? The original machines from July 2017, which have already been replaced? Aug 2018?

Martin also is quoted saying "Last Fall, the Gigafactory faced production bottlenecks (and subsequent production delays) because of issues in modules production, but since then, these issues have largely been resolved".

I can readily accept that the new lines will be 3x faster/cheaper than the 2017 lines, but to get a 300% increase over the existing module production lines where "issues have largely been resolved" in Aug 2018 sounds somewhat dubious. I think its more likely his comparison is to Fall 2017.

Still, the new lines will be better than the existing lines, but those lines are making money at the current selling price. They will not be replaced until Tesla has no more pressing need for capital expenditure. With GF3 coming, I see them running the old stuff in parallel for quite a while yet.

Kind of like why the Model S will stay in production for about 10 years before a redesign. It's making money, sales are strong and steady, so let'em run and bank that cash. Who cares if its getting a little long in the tooth? Its got work to do, and it's doing it well.

Cheers!
 
Hmmm... not so sure about that.

Latency for geosync satellites is atrocious...at about 750ms for the bounce to the bird 24K miles up. Of course Starlink sats are supposed to be very low-earth-orbit, at somewhere in the neighborhood of 750 miles up, but that implies a round trip distance of more than 1500 miles added to the packet latency in the best case. Even if it's a coast-to-coast session, that's going to be something like 40% of the duration. If your session is to the nearest cache point 10-1000 miles away the latency will be far worse than fiber.

I suppose trans oceanic or really long haul sessions might start to show some advantage, which might help the developing countries scenario.

For certain routes Starlink can have lower latency than ground based fiber. Speed of light in a vacuum versus glass (or anything else not a vacuum, to include the atmosphere). Of course the ground to sat and sat to ground will be going through atmosphere, but sat to sat is actual speed of light. The longer the route, the bigger the advantage in speed of light, so over a certain threshold it will be faster than fiber.

Possibly fewer router hops depending on where point A and point B are, but I wouldn't assume that to be the case.

I don't recall if this depends on the VLEO constellation to reach better-than-fiber latencies though. Tintin A&B have been quoted as having a 25ms latency - and even if that's just ground-sat-ground and not ground-sat-sat-ground, that's pretty good. They're not exactly in either a LEO or VLEO orbit at the moment, closer to VLEO, but 25ms is nothing to sneeze at, especially considering that a home user might be lucky to get that over a physical distance of tens of kms rather than hundreds.

Of course, it won't likely be too useful in highly built up areas, so AT&T and friends don't really have too much to worry about in their denser areas. But don't be surprised if AT&T and so on are using Starlink to backhaul whatever-G cellular in the future, rather than running ever bigger fiber connections.

Starlink basically has two markets : the underserved (developing world, rural areas, etc, where oversaturation of user terminals isn't an issue), and aggregate backhaul (for cellular tower to telco's network, datacenter to datacenter, datecenter to last mile, etc). Actual "last mile" service in well served areas won't be as big of a market since there's a limit to how many user terminals can exist in one area (even with a zillion spot beams). They might still sell such "last mile" service but it'd end up having to be first come, first serve.

While I wouldn't be surprised to some day see Starlink terminals built into Tesla vehicles some day, they would only really be useful when not in cellular coverage.
 
Starlink basically has two markets : the underserved (developing world, rural areas, etc, where oversaturation of user terminals isn't an issue), and aggregate backhaul (for cellular tower to telco's network, datacenter to datacenter, datecenter to last mile, etc). Actual "last mile" service in well served areas won't be as big of a market since there's a limit to how many user terminals can exist in one area (even with a zillion spot beams). They might still sell such "last mile" service but it'd end up having to be first come, first serve.

While I wouldn't be surprised to some day see Starlink terminals built into Tesla vehicles some day, they would only really be useful when not in cellular coverage.

Note that having the "backhaul" is a large chunk of having good mobile service.

The actual ground cells and the "last mile" are comparably trivial installations: Tesla could even build completely self-sufficient cellular stations: solar cells, a large battery, a Starlink terminal and an LTE cell integrated, put on roofs and hilltops for a small fee.

The biggest hurdle are the terrestrial frequency allocations required to provide cellular service.

With Starlink "cable cutting" is a lot closer to reality than many realize, I believe.
 
While I wouldn't be surprised to some day see Starlink terminals built into Tesla vehicles some day, they would only really be useful when not in cellular coverage.

Hi. Elon replied on Twitter to that suggestion. He said the antenna would need to be the size of a pizza box, so he expects that StarLink will mostly be used for fixed bases.

Of course, SkyNet, that's a whole different movie... ;)
 
The negativity against Tesla is pretty much unprecedented, I don't remember any similar example in the past where an intrinsically innovative and forward looking U.S. company and its CEO would be singled out and mobbed by the U.S. media to such an extent. The mobbing of Tesla is even bipartisan to a significant degree...

Elon's battle front is very wide. He hit a lot of industries. Where he show up he is pointing with his business model what is wrong in this industry. What is wrong with car industry, big oil, utility, media...not only what is wrong, but he shows what is possible to do to improve it.
If he would pick only one of these industries, he probably wouldn't had such pressure.
All these activities are ruing current system of earnings.

The individuals who are not well informed (sheeps) can be easily lead by mass media in a FUD way. I can imagine that with heavy bombardment they see Elon as a part of the problem and not part of the solution. This illusion is based on information asymmetry(or no knowledge). I understand that current system are trying to block Elon. The worst part is that in the end we have to do all this improvements in the industries (with or without Elon) in sustainable way if we want to survive as a species on the mother Earth.
We even do not know where is no turning back point.

So the key is in the knowledge.
I always remember the Daimler's survey about users acceptability of EVs. Result was more you know about EVs more you like it.
If you turn this opposite. Lack of knowledge and you hate it.

So key: knowledge!
 
The person that is able to sell dirt for 10 cent a brick should be awarded as the best sales man the world has ever seen!



Elon Musk‏Verified account @elonmusk
First Boring Brick store opening in ~2 months. Only 10 cents a brick! Rated for California seismic loads.

12:27 AM - 13 Sep 2018

P.S. I am already convinced that they will be sold out every day.
 
Elon's battle front is very wide. He hit a lot of industries. Where he show up he is pointing with his business model what is wrong in this industry. What is wrong with car industry, big oil, utility, media...not only what is wrong, but he shows what is possible to do to improve it.
If he would pick only one of these industries, he probably wouldn't had such pressure.
All these activities are ruing current system of earnings.

The individuals who are not well informed (sheeps) can be easily lead by mass media in a FUD way. I can imagine that with heavy bombardment they see Elon as a part of the problem and not part of the solution. This illusion is based on information asymmetry(or no knowledge). I understand that current system are trying to block Elon. The worst part is that in the end we have to do all this improvements in the industries (with or without Elon) in sustainable way if we want to survive as a species on the mother Earth.
We even do not know where is no turning back point.

So the key is in the knowledge.
I always remember the Daimler's survey about users acceptability of EVs. Result was more you know about EVs more you like it.
If you turn this opposite. Lack of knowledge and you hate it.

So key: knowledge!

And what is Elon doing regarding knowledge? A LOT!
Just watch the Joe Rogan talking with Elon-Neurolink part (no other BS which distract). What is Neurolink?
It is systematic way to get the knowledge. It is highway for knowledge!
 
The discussion was about problems getting units shipped. Pickups, SUVs, and vans all take up spaces on carrier trucks and in rail cars. Why would we compare just automakers shipping cars?

This was not a discussion about market share. I think you have gone off on a different tangent.
Tesla does deliveries in exactly the same way all other companies do. Hiring delivery companies with auto-trains "hauling trucks".

Delivery by trains is extremely slow, and it takes months to complete. Actually all deliveries everywhere are slow, you can check it by looking at sold out models or special orders. If you don't find "your" car at the dealer slot you have to order and wait. Weeks at best.
Tesla delivery practice is not special and definitely it's not worse executed than in any other company. It's actually done by the same people and all reported problems real or not are of exactly same type one can found dealing with any other auto company. Existing "focus on "incapacity" of Tesla to deliver" is ridiculous.

If to look at the waiting times for EV after order in Europe Tesla is actually on a better side.
 
The person that is able to sell dirt for 10 cent a brick should be awarded as the best sales man the world has ever seen!



Elon Musk‏Verified account @elonmusk
First Boring Brick store opening in ~2 months. Only 10 cents a brick! Rated for California seismic loads.

12:27 AM - 13 Sep 2018

P.S. I am already convinced that they will be sold out every day.

I think they will too. Take the number of fans of Elon's companies, estimate the fraction of them building a home or business, and the fraction of those who might take inspiration to use his bricks, and it's still a huge number.

The only real problem I see with his bricks is he really needs to make a pre-insulated product. They'll be a lot more useful if he can do that.
 
Just for the record, and because of your name ;): BE-4 does not use the same cycle as Raptor. It uses Oxygen-Rich Staged Combustion, where Raptor uses Full-Flow Staged Combustion. Full-Flow is more complicated, as you can't test the various parts by themselves, but once running, it's a very powerful beast. BE-4 seems to be a very middle-of-the-road design by comparison. BE-4 will be larger than Raptor, but will have a worse weight-to-thrust factor. Also Full-Flow has been used in other engines, but it has never been flown.

Also, Hi. I'm now the proud owner of 10 long shares. It's not much, but they're mine. I've been lurking here for a while, and appreciate all the input from people who know far more about finances than me.

I started with 8 @ $270 back in July 2015, got quite a few more since then and at much lower price too...

But as everyone points out, average SP 150 of 300 won't matter too much when the SP is 4500, other than the fact that maybe you could have bought double at the time...
 
The person that is able to sell dirt for 10 cent a brick should be awarded as the best sales man the world has ever seen!



Elon Musk‏Verified account @elonmusk
First Boring Brick store opening in ~2 months. Only 10 cents a brick! Rated for California seismic loads.

12:27 AM - 13 Sep 2018

P.S. I am already convinced that they will be sold out every day.
That's a steep discount to typical bricks - if they meet structural and water absorption standards and look pretty good they'll sell.
 
It has been posted in this thread many times: Behind the Scenes at Tesla’s Gigafactory: Field Notes From Our Recent Visit



What I can't tell is when they say "Tesla will be receiving three machines" are they saying one each in Zones 1, 2, and 3? Or are they saying that they will be getting three new complete lines? (Which would be 3x faster right?) So I personally am more interested in the 3x cheaper than the 3x faster.

And if they work out, and don't have enough capacity for demand they will surely shut down, and replace, one of the old cobbled together lines with the new better system.
Going with an optimistic literal interpretation:
"The Grohmann machine will be in Zones 1, 2, 3, and Tesla will be receiving three machines."
"The machine is already built, and points to the advantage Tesla will have in building future Gigafactories."

One machine to rule them all (except Zone 0 which, I think, is already a Grohmann design). And three copies. This would eliminate the buffer/ transfer stages between zones helping lead to the 3x speed/ cost improvement. And a boost in SP.
 
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