If the end of Q3 delivery rush was hectic, it will pale in comparison to the last week of Q4. It will not just be a matter of hassles and long waits, it will mean $3,500 to some people.
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If the end of Q3 delivery rush was hectic, it will pale in comparison to the last week of Q4. It will not just be a matter of hassles and long waits, it will mean $3,500 to some people.
3 months maybe, 6 months definitely. Or in other words - a good while. Could be longer than we think.Nvidia will keep getting their money for the next ~6 months until the new chip comes out.
They just don't want to accumulate another 100k+ worth of "free" replacements.
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tinm
2020 Model S LR+ Owner
They were announced a while back. Shareholder letter and the conference call were the best yet. Cash flow positive, upped estimates for production and deliveries in Q4, even rosier outlook for 2019, Model Y schedule moved up, two more gigafactories to be announced soon, why, it was no wonder the stock flew by 400! And now people are talking about 500 by end of Q1 2019!
Oh wait, this isn’t mid-November? Sorry, I blame my time machine. Nevermind. Hang in there a few more weeks.
Once again I would like to point out the mind blowing NHTSA results of the 3. Where Munro saw inexplicable structural choices and too heavy, too thick, too complex solutions, I see reasons for the 3 beating the cars Munro referenced.
I think (too lazy to google) he talked about the Bolt for instance and how some rear wheel well is just 1 pressed piece vs the 3's complex solution. Except if you check the side crash results the Model 3 has significantly less severe deformities and intrusion. E.g. the Bolt shrunk in width almost 2x as much as the 3, the Bolt's rear bumper moved 102 mm, the 3's was displaced by 1 mm, the height of the door cutout shrunk in Bolt by 69 mm, in the 3 it was 9 mm and so on.
dqd88
Member
My personal anecdote - like her I reserved on day 1. Was waiting for the SR model. Now very tempted to buy the lemur. If I weren't in a lease (1 year left) I would 100% pull the trigger. I live alone so don't need 2 cars. #decisions
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ValueAnalyst
Closed
October 31 is the likely date, but Tesla may drop it at any time. There is no requirement to announce a date. November 7 is also a potential date.
This is very interesting as this is the second time now I hear of this company (CNBC also quoted them for Q3 production numbers). AFAIK they are no industry standard, more seem like a new player that shells out some money to CNBC to keep promoting them.
Do you have a background in auto manufacturing?
ValueAnalyst
Closed
Electric-Car Market Share In 2013: Understanding The Numbers Better
"In the United States, each price drop of $5,000 roughly doubles the buyer pool; conversely, a $5,000 price increase halves the number of people who can buy the car."
On a separate note, @RobStark , are you still predicting Model 3 to not outsell Camry for a long, long time?
dqd88
Member
Per this guy
Brett Winton on Twitter
Addressable market in the US for cars that sell for greater than:
$100k -- $4 billion
$80k -- $13 billion
$50k -- $26 billion
$35k -- $52 billion
$25k -- $100 billion
humbaba
sleeping until $7000
FWIW they appear to have been around a while. May be a new marketing push -- the wikipedia article read more like an advertising fact sheet than anything else.
FactSet - Wikipedia
One of my favourite examples was the FRP control arms. People have been boggling over those since day 1. "They're not really saving any weight!" "Nobody builds control arms out of FRP!" "Those things are too fragile, they might break!". Fast forward a year to an article about how Tesla got such great crash test results: it turns out that the control arms are designed to break in a crash. They look fragile because they're supposed to be. When they fracture, it causes the front wheels to splay out in the opposite direction of the crash, thus steering away from an offset impact and helping prevent the object from getting to and penetrating the passenger safety cell.
Don't take too long to decide if you want to get it before New Years. I strongly suspect their order list is surging right now.
Munro is reported to claim that Musk's response was that he fired the guy who designed the chassis for production. This could be an interesting discussion if you guys actually were familiar with the topic.
dqd88
Member
I think that guys numbers are low too, based on 2015/16. And note, he's only talking US.
You are correct on margins. That's why I'm eager for Tesla to release more pricey models- Semi, Roadster.
MTL_HABS1909
Active Member
Since the MR pack is a LR pack with some cells missing, the pack cost won't be optimal for the capacity (more structure than needed).
However, Tesla once hoped to get cell costs to be down to around $100/kWh by the end of the year (optimistically, assuming various supply costs, etc). Let's optimistically/pessimistically (depending on your point of view) say they're $130 now, and assume MR is 20% smaller (which conveniently lets Tesla build a 5th MR for every 4 MRs, vs LRs). For nice easy math, we'll call the LR pack 80 kWh, which makes MR 64 kWh, a difference of 16 kWh. 16 * 130 = $2080 reduction in cell cost. Oh no, MR pack costs more per total kWh! Except that this assumes LR pack is built with zero margin.
Instead, let's look at it from the other direction. If SR is "50kWh" and making a naive but conveniently simple assumption that the 50/75 ratio of marketing (not actual) battery sizes gives us the true size, SR is 53.33... kWh. Let's round that down to 53 so we don't have annoying repeating decimals. 53 * 130 = $6890 for SR base cell cost. 64 * 130 is $8320, and 80*130 is $10400. So that means a MR customer pays $5000 for $1430 of additional cells (difference in cost is likely a bit higher from SR to MR/LR due to optimized cheaper packaging), and LR customer pays another $4000 for $2080 ($9000 for $3510) cells on top of that. This is still just cell cost, but for MR and LR the additional pack costs are identical as the MR is just a LR missing cells.
So the margin on cells relative to SR, for MR is $3570 or 40%. LR relative to SR is 39%. LR relative to MR is 52%, but in total they would make marginally more *per cell* sold to customer with MR vehicle. Combine that with MRs lower cell use per vehicle alleviating the cell bottleneck, and allowing more packs and thus vehicles to be built (and lowered starting price meaning more high margin option uptake, etc), and it makes a lot of sense to build the MR. You can fudge the numbers around but for any reasonable assumptions margins will be pretty close for the incremental cost of MR vs LR over SR.
On cell costs alone, the MR should have a higher margin than the LR to start with. The LR brings in more dollars, but the margins will likely be a close tie (depending on exact ratio of cells in MR and LR, as above with my easy math assumptions above), which means that building more vehicles faster before end of Q4 lets them sell more high margin upgrades to more people (EV incentive) plus also gets / keeps the production rate higher (so fixed costs get spread around more vehicles, margins on everything go up)
Now to guess at base costs:
Assuming pessimistically the $35k Model 3 requires $100 kWh cells to be break even (vs some 10% or such margin), and pretending pack costs are the same on SR (they'll be lower, but it saves us figuring out what the difference is there), then SR cell costs $5300, and everything else (including pack structure, electronics, etc) is $29700. That would make MR base cost at zero margin with cells at $130 be $38020, and LR would be $40100. That's quite a bit below your assumptions of base costs.
To get to your assumptions on base cost from an asssumed $100 kWh break even for SR, would mean the current cell costs are in the neighborhood of $250 (your MR base price) - $220 (your LR base price).
If, in the middle of this year, Tesla thought they would even possibly hit $100kWh/cell around the end of 2018, I don't see how their current costs could be anywhere near your assumptions. Even if they were at $175/kWh at cell level now, that would still only be $40900 and $43700 for base costs, which would mean MR requires PUP to break even (but only barely) and LR RWD just breaks even without PUP. To get to only 20% margins from there across the ASP you have to be pessimistic about the margins on options or ASP itself.
Actually they will hand the supplier a check an tell them that they've insourced the widget and will never buy from them again. And might even make other customers question how much value that supplier is actually bringing to the table.
At least that's what I would fear if I was a supplier.
Technically they can switch the cell lines from vehicle to TE chemistry, and vice versa. Some downtime to clean things out, but nothing major I suspect. But you'd also have to staff up the TE production side to build more powerwalls/packs, etc, and at this point there is likely more to be gained by selling another 10-15% vehicles.
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