TSLA Market Action: 2018 Investor Roundtable

[electracity]

I think Tesla advantages are batteries, brand, ride, overall tech appeal and AP today and promise. It’s the best car out there. That said, sounds like they have process opportunities. Not a dig, just an opportunity to get better. If the 3 had gone seamlessly think where Tesla would be? This would be the second or third quarter of profit and the Shanghai plant might already be under construction.
Even great can be better.

The day work starts on the factory in Shanghai the world will know.

If Tesla can turn cash flow positive with a ridiculous employee count of 45,000 they should be able to grow production substantially without adding many production employees.

The big medium term question is what the realistic max capacity of Fremont will be. Painting cars in California in a factory that is space limited may cap production. The major trade off for low VOCs is time in the paint shop. Time in the paint shop requires space in the factory.

I think Shanghai making cars in 2022 would be a big accomplishment for the people involved in that project. If there is a surprise to Tesla production capacity it would seem to need to come from Sparks.

Tesla doesn't seem to have anywhere to grow model 3 production in 2020 and 2021 unless the ramp in Fremont remains well under plan. The failure of Alien Dreadnaught is the loss of resources earmarked for capacity expansion.

 

[EVMeister]

The day work starts on the factory in Shanghai the world will know.

Nope. Only if it can be spun as negative. If something catches on fire or too many tents spring up.

 

[Foghat]

As Elon’s Fortnite tweet surpasses 800K lives and 271k retweets, one has to think how many key demo buyers have Tesla on their minds in a positive way? How many CEOs can garner this much positive attention with a single tweet?

In almost predictable fashion, CNBC prints a negative piece giving the impression Elon is CEO on brink of destruction.

And whomever told me Apple stock app would improve with iOS 12.0 was very wrong. It is worse. How is it that gossip rag BusinessInsider or Jim Cramer blog posts have multiple articles in the queue when I’ve never ever seen a cleantech article or insideevs or green tech media or utility dive... which many Tesla investors and potential investors would benefit from to make investment decisions? Isn’t this the point of Apple stock app, to provide investment news to help investors make better investment decisions?

As is right now, it is more of a manipulation tool for a few, at the expense of the many.

 

[dc_h]

Shanghai plant is already under construction.

But yes, we'd probably already have had the Y launch, much higher supercharger deployment, Giga 2 and Tesla Energy being flush with the cash they need, Model 3 launch launch in more countries, all versions of the 3 for sale, etc etc etc.

Is the documentation on construction? I thought they just got the land. I’m hoping they get an assembly tent for early 2019 while they work on the main plant.

 

[bdy0627]

I'm pretty sure they can speed up the body shop stuff.

I am not at all sure that they can speed up the paint. Even with baking, you can't make paint dry faster than a certain speed (without damaging it) and you can't spray it faster than a certain speed (without getting bad results).

I think they may have to bite the bullet and build additional paint shop, which is both expensive and slow -- and worse, where the heck will they put it? I don't think they'll admit this need until Q1.

It seems virtually certain to me that the paint shop limitation will need to be addressed for the model 3 ramp to approach 10k/wk. I'm hopeful the current situation can support a sustained rate of at least 6k/wk, but that's not clear. This paint shop bottleneck seems to be the least easily addressed lingering problem. Hopefully, Tesla is proactively preparing to eliminate this limitation even if they don't announce it for several months.

 

[dc_h]

If you read the comments from Tesla about the NHTSA crash report you can read how they set out to designed the most crashworthy/safest car. There is apparently no other car manufacturer that can design a better car body. So, Tesla has the best engineers who 'invented' the best car body. Neither Munro nor Ford or anybody else has shown that they can do better - because nobody has done better.
Perhaps the Y will be better? Or will it be the Ford F150?

They have made the safest car, but each car has been difficult to manufacture, especially ramping up. Making a car more manufacturable doesn’t mean less safe. I think the Munro critique was entirely constructive, even if not entirely correct. Throwing all criticism into the same bin with the haters is not helpful. It can be hard when there is so much made up or hyperbolic criticism, but soothe consumer reports braking issue and Grohmann’s early work was eye opening to Elon.
Not all of the Munro critique was on target, but some issues like the trunk assembly or the wheel well assembly sound like opportunities to reduce construction steps and increase production rates and increase productivity while improving quality.

 

[EVNow]

But you also got to drive your electric car at least six months earlier. So that's worth something, right?

I'm going to say something slightly contrarian here. While 3 is undoubtedly better than Volt I was driving, it is not as much a jump as any plugin is compared to ICE. So I'd still rate the change from Nissan Maxima to Nissan Leaf in 2011 for me a much bigger change - lets call it 10x change. Then, change from Volt to 3 was about 2x.

ps : Just to be clear, I've zero regrets about spending $15k more to save $10.5k.

 

[AlMc]

The day work starts on the factory in Shanghai the world will know.

It has started. It was translated for some of us already. Basically, the land was farm land/watermelons. Work started some time ago to prepare it for the factory.

 

[neroden]

It has started. It was translated for some of us already. Basically, the land was farm land/watermelons. Work started some time ago to prepare it for the factory.

Does this mean the watermelon supply will decrease? Will we see an increase in watermelon prices?

 

[sundaymorning]

Some drama at Google self driving unit:

A Google self-driving car reportedly caused a crash in 2011 after a former engineer changed its code to drive where it wasn't supposed to (GOOG, GOOGL)

Looks to me that google’s self self driving unit works like GM’s lane assist, the car only works on intended roads, take it outside of that area and it’s useless.

 

[2virgule5]

No, we'll know what's inside it as soon as someone charges it and measures the battery capacity.

The only unknown is number of cells in parallel. The voltage of the pack must exactly equal the LR in order to avoid extensive re-enginnering. Even the S/X and 3 share the same voltage for their various packs so they can all use the same chargers.

Cheers!

Hum, isn’t S/X low capacity packs (75Kwh or lower) 350v vs 400v for higher capacity packs (85Kwh and above)? Various chargers can easily adapt to these changes so not a factor.

MR may actually be same voltage but Amps has to be lower than LR to keep discharge rate the same. Another reason why we will probably never see a SR with AWD.

Edit: was catching up... where do we get current specs are all 400v?

 

[EVNow]

I’m hoping they get an assembly tent for early 2019 while they work on the main plant.

I won't be surprised if they build the main plant in China in the amount of time it took them to build the tent here

 

[sundaymorning]

Ford stocks at 9 year low, EV is the future:

Ford CEO seeks to rally dealers as shares sink to new low

No wonder dealers are scared.

 

[electracity]

It has started. It was translated for some of us already. Basically, the land was farm land/watermelons. Work started some time ago to prepare it for the factory.

Cool. The land looks like fill. Looking at google earth, it was likely marsh before Shanghai grew large. Fill also explains the raised farm beds shown on google earth and the video. The farmers had to improve the soil to grow crops.

 

[hobbes]

Paint seems tough. Not sure if they could build a second story above the paint shop or have a mobile encloywhile the car goes through the paint shop so you can paint more cars simultaneously. A mobile enclosure over the sprayer and around the car would also reduce fumes and paint loss.
Not my field, so may not make sense, but from what I’ve seen it seems like only one car can be painted at a time. If you could isolate each car and the paint, you could at least double if not quadruple your throughput.

Also, with multiple paint shops the number of color switches would be half, saving additional time.

EDIT: with two paint shops it would be half, with 3 1/3 - you get the idea .

 

[defc0n]

This was back in mid July from someone in the paint shop.

It seems virtually certain to me that the paint shop limitation will need to be addressed for the model 3 ramp to approach 10k/wk. I'm hopeful the current situation can support a sustained rate of at least 6k/wk, but that's not clear. This paint shop bottleneck seems to be the least easily addressed lingering problem. Hopefully, Tesla is proactively preparing to eliminate this limitation even if they don't announce it for several months.

 

[defc0n]

View attachment 345572

This was back in mid July from someone in the paint shop.

But that includes S and X as well, so hard to say.

 

[WentOffGrid]

Ford stocks at 9 year low, EV is the future:

Ford CEO seeks to rally dealers as shares sink to new low

No wonder dealers are scared.

Yes. From the article-

"Most dealers have their entire net worth sunk into a dealership so it was important for us to know what's going on,"

 

[BioSehnsucht]

Modern BMS can handle rather big drops in pack voltage and stabilize it for inverters. Of course it goes other way as well.
One of the serious advantages of Tesla modules is big number of cells in the module. It allows graceful degradation for Tesla's batteries because loss of the one cell doesn't cause chain reaction and module's loss, as it is the case for typical for car industry 4 pouch batteries packed together with no electrical protection in between.

P.S. I never heard about necessity of "aging" for proper LiOn batteries.
You build a cell , you charge it, you seal El gap, you test internal impedance, repeat with the next cell.

I had never heard about aging either, until details of GF1 starting being revealed.

Here are the aging racks : Jude Burger on Twitter

Also googled this up, per comments sounds like it takes around 2 weeks to 'age' the Tesla cells : Battery Aging - How long? : teslamotors - and one comment says that larger format flat cells can take 45 days.

Apparently one of the last steps of manufacturing is the initial charge (makes sense) followed by "aging" which is basically just waiting for that initial charge to finish causing various chemical reactions to occur?

It might be that not everyone calls it "aging", or perhaps many just assume it will age in a box on the way to a store or in the supply chain...

 

[EinSV]

Elon's Fortnite tweet is at 281K retweets and 834K likes. Already more than halfway to the list of Top 50 liked and Top 40 retweeted tweets ever according to Wikipedia.