Perhaps Grohmann can now turn their attention to deliveries...
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Their (Groman) attention should and will be fully on their core competency which is automation of production. I guess you made anyway a joke ....
This above is really a very strong jump they are about to do with regards to module production. This kind of messages do often go under in all the daily noise but thats just an impressive improvement and will unlock further productivity increases.
Even more important is that this critical piece of core competence will be copied and installed in China and Europe moving forward with GFs and gives me confidence that the challenges we had in 2018 will not be repeated. Every new GF should ramp up way faster than what we have seen in the past.
Certainly new challenges and bottlenecks will appear but everything will continue from here on a different level.
I'm so sorry for this CNBC link, but I don't find the original Reuters source. It can be seen as bullish or bearish, depending on your interpretation/persuasion: INTERVIEW-Japan's Sumitomo to focus on battery material supply to Panasonic, Toyota
Fact Checking
Well-Known Member
$TSLA options are in large part included in the short interest: when a short buys a PUT option then in most cases the counter-party is an options market market-maker specialist firm or one of the large investment banks - who will, typically, 'delta hedge' that PUT option and hedge the risk of that PUT option by shorting the stock directly.
For example if $TSLA trades at $300 and a short buys one PUT contract at the money ($300 strike price) with next week expiry, then the market maker who writes the PUT option will almost immediately adjust their inventory and short about 100 shares of $TSLA.
In practice it's more complex than that: due to the non-linearity of options the exact formula depends on how much in or out of the money an option is, and what the expiry time is - but the majority of historic risk of current options is hedged with linear stock. As the price rises or drops, and as time passes, the market makers adjust their inventory as options move closer or farther away.
( Note that technically the short could be buying that PUT option from a long who writes a PUT option - and the market maker would only have to delta-hedge the net position. In practice this doesn't change the short interest for $TSLA much, because the PUT/CALL ratio is still around 3:1, and there's a mismatch between the choices of shorts and longs: shorts prefer PUTs, longs prefer CALLs, and only a small percentage actually writes options. So the overwhelming majority of options are written by market makers and directly delta-hedged as $TSLA short positions. )
BTW., this also has the effect that large PUT options open interest will influence the underlying stock price: the market makers will sell short even if the options traders never touch the stock directly.
I don't know, I kind of like the concept of the cars being delivered by giant industrial robots
(Whirrrr!!!!!!) "YOUR VEHICLE HAS ARRIVED. PLEASE SIGN HERE." (Whirrrr!!!!!!!)
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bdy0627
Active Member
I think you are right that losing a support level (not CFO) finance executive is not that big of a deal. By itself, it certainly should not move the stock or affect the company. It's the cumulative effect at this point that is supporting the narrative the media has formed about all of these Tesla executives jumping ship. The ship must be about to go down, right??? If not, it's a great opportunity to buy. If the media was not intensely reporting on each and every Tesla employee departure, I really doubt there would be an overall impression that the ship is about to go down. We would have expected to hear about Field, HR director, CAO leaving, maybe 1 or 2 others? But probably not the other dozen or so that the media covered because it supported the fear narrative.
HG Wells
Martian Embassy
I've been looking everywhere for dry powder.
Under the couch, back of drawers, everywhere !
I thought I found some at an old IRA I had with Lehman Brothers.
For some reason I cant log in!
Any Ideas ?
/S
Under the couch, back of drawers, everywhere !
I thought I found some at an old IRA I had with Lehman Brothers.
For some reason I cant log in!
Any Ideas ?
/S
HG Wells
Martian Embassy
I don't know, I kind of like the concept of the cars being delivered by giant industrial robots
(Whirrrr!!!!!!) "YOUR VEHICLE HAS ARRIVED. PLEASE SIGN HERE."
Ahhh the old Berserker tails. No wonder we are the "Good Life".
Have to pull out a few of those stories from the basement.
The Berserker series is a series of space opera science fiction short stories and novels by Fred Saberhagen, in which robotic self-replicating machines strive to destroy all life.
Fact Checking
Well-Known Member
You are justified to probe the accuracy of Worm Capital's overwhelmingly positive report about their visit of the Gigafactory, but I think the 3x and 30% figures might be accurate.
Here's what Elon said in the February conference call, when he talked about what went wrong with the Model 3 ramp-up:
Elon:
"And I think in part we were probably a little over-confident, a little complacent in thinking that this is something we know and understand. And put a lot of attention on other things and just got too comfortable with our ability to do battery modules because we've been doing that since the start of the company."
"And of the four zones, two of them, of which are subcontracted to – the production systems are subcontracted to other companies, flat out didn't work, it turns out like, I mean, we promised they would work and it just didn't work. So, we had to do what would normally be maybe an 18-month development cycle for a production system of that scale and complexity, and try to do that in basically six months or maybe little, six to nine months."
"And we've tackled that on multiple levels, so we have a design that is nearing completion for a new automated system for Zone 1 and 2 that is being led by our Tesla Grohmann team. It's an excellent design. All the other work that they've done has performed to spec, and we expect a single Tesla Grohmann line to be equivalent to three, if not four, of the current lines that we have and be smaller, which is kind of amazing."
"And I think in part we were probably a little over-confident, a little complacent in thinking that this is something we know and understand. And put a lot of attention on other things and just got too comfortable with our ability to do battery modules because we've been doing that since the start of the company."
"And of the four zones, two of them, of which are subcontracted to – the production systems are subcontracted to other companies, flat out didn't work, it turns out like, I mean, we promised they would work and it just didn't work. So, we had to do what would normally be maybe an 18-month development cycle for a production system of that scale and complexity, and try to do that in basically six months or maybe little, six to nine months."
"And we've tackled that on multiple levels, so we have a design that is nearing completion for a new automated system for Zone 1 and 2 that is being led by our Tesla Grohmann team. It's an excellent design. All the other work that they've done has performed to spec, and we expect a single Tesla Grohmann line to be equivalent to three, if not four, of the current lines that we have and be smaller, which is kind of amazing."
Note that at that time the Gigafactory was already at or around a 3k packs/week rate - their subsequent ramp-up bottlenecks were in Fremont. Elon specifically mentioned the Gigafactory peak rate in the next conference call:
Elon: "We got just in the last 24 hours at the Gigafactory managed to achieve a sustained rate of over 3,000 packs per day – sorry, per week, and actually reached a peak hour with extrapolated outward would be a rate of about 5,000 cars per week."
Here's what Worm Capital wrote yesterday:
"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."
I think the '3 times faster' should probably be measured to the 3k/week sustained capacity baseline of the four zones.
Here is how the math goes, approximately:
- 3,000/week on four zones means 750/week throughput per zone
- Grohmann machine has a throughput of 2,250/week and takes the space of a single zone
- early October one new Grohmann machine is going to replace three zones.
- Throughput is going to be: 1x750 + 3*2,250 = 7,500/week
"Big picture: After touring the facility, we feel highly confident in Tesla’s production process. Previous bottlenecks appear to have been remedied, and we’re increasingly optimistic in Tesla’s ability to hit— and sustain—weekly production rates of 6,000 Model 3 battery units per week, and with new Grohmann machine, scale to ~8,000 / week with minimal additional capital investment."
Note that if we instead take the about 4k/week production rate Tesla guided for Q3, then the new Grohmann machines should scale up to about 10,000/week 75kWh battery packs.
But even the more conservative math appears to support the claims from Worm Capital.
BTW., apparently there's also "Zone 0" and "Zone 1" in the Gigafactory. Does anyone know what's produced there - is it Storage modules? Could Zone 1 be the Storage line that got temporarily re-purposed to make Model 3 battery packs?
Update: as you pointed out in your subsequent reply, the four zones are part of a pipeline, they are not parallel. This changes the math the following way I think: 3,000/week gets increased to about 9,000/week - which is consistent with the Worm Capital update. Optionally if we now have 4,000/week it goes up to 12,000/week.
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cheshire cat
Member
You bought too soon--- the guys that moped-up Lehman (UK) just made seven - 7- times their money back!!!!
Artful Dodger
"Neko no me"
The 4 zones aren't parallel production lines, they are the 4 steps in an ordered sequence required to produce each pack. From the Q3 2017 update letter, Tesla wrote:
"The combined complexity of module design and its automated manufacturing process has taken this line longer to ramp than expected. The biggest challenge is that the first two zones of a four zone process, key elements of which were done by manufacturing systems suppliers, had to be taken over and significantly redesigned by Tesla." said Tesla in its update letter.
Zone 4 was replaced by the Grohmann robots flow in to GF1 in May 2018. That allowed battery production to reach 5000/wk (tweeted by a GF1 employee on June 25, 2018)
Sounds like the plan may be for the 3 Grohmann lines being installed might be to replace Zones 1,2, and 3 that have been in use with revised software since the fall 2017. If that's the case then they might indeed be replacing the old stuff, or possibly running it in parallel until the new Zones 1-3 are running.
So yeah, obviously I don't know either!
Cheers!
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With the repeated warnings that the expert auto makers will totally destroy Tesla once they at their leisure decide to start building BEVs, I as a TSLA investor find the EQC rather reassuring. As a resident of Germany, not so much.
In order to not go overboard with CapEx on their new BEV, Mercedes has compromised and will let the EQC share chassis (and axles) with the traditional ICE-based GLC platform,
Mercedes EQC feiert Weltpremiere
This decision perfectly demonstrates the dilemma that prevents a traditional auto maker from harvesting the benefits of designing a BEV from the ground up.
So in addition to the disappointing max speed, I believe we can expect the EQC to be suboptimal with regard to:
Cd (and thus energy efficiency),
crash safety (resistance to both cabin deformation and roll-over),
handling,
luggage capacity (e.g. no frunk),
and probably other parameters that more knowledgeable people can think of.
But hopefully the EQC will be good enough to not actually discredit the concept of the BEV.
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Sounds very similar to Greg Bear’s Forge of God/Anvil of Stars books.
Alistair Reynolds also had “Inhibitors” and “Greenfly” in his Revelation Space series.
Artful Dodger
"Neko no me"
Zhelko Dimic
Careful bull
It's Azure. Elon thanked Microsoft publicly
Fact Checking
Well-Known Member
Indeed, I missed that - and it's a key difference! I edited my original comment and added this:
Update: as you pointed out in your subsequent reply, the four zones are part of a pipeline, they are not parallel. This changes the math the following way I think: 3,000/week gets increased to about 9,000/week - which is consistent with the Worm Capital update. Optionally if we now have 4,000/week it goes up to 12,000/week.
Do you agree with that broad math? There's large error bars ...
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense - I was wondering how the April/May Grohmann installation fits into the picture - and now it fits perfectly!
BTW., Tesla could ship the old Zone-1-4 equipment to China. If my Googling of Chinese Wholly Foreign-Owned Enterprise (WFOE) regulations is accurate then there's an import duty/tax exemption for manufacturing equipment: i.e. Tesla could import that machinery to Shanghai with no duties paid. This would add a baseline output of 4k-5k/week battery packs, which is very close to the 250,000/year initial Chinese Gigafactory throughput Elon talked about.
This way Tesla could jump-start the Chinese Gigafactory battery pack production lines with very low capex.
Artful Dodger
"Neko no me"
The formulae are fine, though I'm not sure Wormwood nailed down the baseline timeline properly. 3x is a loose claim without properly stating the period being compared.
Still I think we can easily agree pack production will soon be around 8,000 / week in some mix of SR and LR versions.
Now, back to Market Action. Market opens in 10 min.
Cheers!
Fact Checking
Well-Known Member
I believe "sharing the platform" is the only way for ICE manufacturers to proceed, which is a major disadvantage.
The fundamental problem ICE carmakers have is the unpredictability of demand and the unpredictability of the transition from ICE to BEV. The only way to handle that uncertainty is to make sure that the production lines are 'shared' and that these dual-design BEVs where the cells are where the engine is normally can be made as demand shifts. The fundamental paradox: to an ICE carmaker a new BEV sale is also lost ICE vehicle sale, on average.
If they kept separate ICE manufacturing lines, and EV demand rises "too fast" for them and they cannot sell their ICE models, they'd have to run their ICE factories much under capacity, or even be forced to write them off altogether. This would be catastrophic to profits.
The big problem: as Tesla has demonstrated it, a grounds-up BEV design like the Model 3 offers various fundamental advantages, while Mercedes EQC has utility trade-offs due to leaving space for an optional ICE engine: no frunk, reduced interior volume, no sedan version, etc.
Tesla and other pure BEV carmakers don't have these problems: they do not hurt from dropping ICE sales, increasing EV demand is a pure upside for them.
It remains to be seen whether Mercedes will be able to sell these Frankenstein cars that are burdened with ICE legacies, as "premium" vehicles.
Fact Checking
Well-Known Member
Market action: about an hour ago there was news that China reacted positively to the Trump administration's proposal of negotiations over tariffs - this immediately increased NASDAQ and Dow futures, and weakened the Dollar, which are usually signs of risk-off equity rises in the full session.
$TSLA might correlate with that - but it's hard to tell, in the past couple of weeks $TSLA often shrugged off macro factors.
$TSLA might correlate with that - but it's hard to tell, in the past couple of weeks $TSLA often shrugged off macro factors.
Has Mercedes got a plan for long distance charging in the U.S? If not, all other features are in large part irrelevant. There is simply only a small niche of people willing to spend that much on a car that can only make a 200 mile round trip drive.
Edit: When they have Tesla as an alternative...
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