Watch Autoline this week on Thursday

[insaneoctane]

Interesting that Munro feels like the Model 3 has lots of extra weight. I know that I was impressed that Tesla reduced the mass of the Model 3 by almost 1,000 lbs over the Model S... The curb weight on the Model S is ~4,600 – 4,750 pounds for the 85kWh variants. The Model 3’s curb weight, in contrast, is 3,837 pounds. That’s a significant slash compared with the Model S especially considering the adoption of more steel for cost, preservation of most of the interior passenger volume and maintenance of the beautiful Tesla body lines.

 

[Brando]

They specifically the upper A arm was over engineered for RWD car. It's perfect fit for AWD car.

Imagine a year from now and all these Model 3 competitors cheaper and then Tesla is "forced" to only sell the top performance 4 wheel drive version? Seems to me that in 2017 the top 5 Electric car makers all brought in about $2.5 billion each. Except Tesla brought in $10 billion for cars.
Easy to understand - Leaf vs Model S MSRP. you get the idea.

Newly announced Mercedes all electric Class S - 2020 or cetainly by 2022. We shall see.
Elephant in the room are still batteries, right?

 

[voip-ninja]

Imagine a year from now and all these Model 3 competitors cheaper and then Tesla is "forced" to only sell the top performance 4 wheel drive version? Seems to me that in 2017 the top 5 Electric car makers all brought in about $2.5 billion each. Except Tesla brought in $10 billion for cars.
Easy to understand - Leaf vs Model S MSRP. you get the idea.

Newly announced Mercedes all electric Class S - 2020 or cetainly by 2022. We shall see.
Elephant in the room are still batteries, right?

VW announced a deal for $20B worth of batteries from LG Chem. Everyone keeps insisting that nobody can do what Tesla is doing with battery production and that this gives them a nearly insurmountable lead in the market for many years.

Next 3-5 years are going to prove this out one way or the other. Koreans have proven repeatedly that they can beat the Japanese at their own game when it comes to cranking out obscene amounts of high tech products.

 

[kengchang]

Imagine a year from now and all these Model 3 competitors cheaper and then Tesla is "forced" to only sell the top performance 4 wheel drive version? Seems to me that in 2017 the top 5 Electric car makers all brought in about $2.5 billion each. Except Tesla brought in $10 billion for cars.
Easy to understand - Leaf vs Model S MSRP. you get the idea.

Newly announced Mercedes all electric Class S - 2020 or cetainly by 2022. We shall see.
Elephant in the room are still batteries, right?

What's stopping Tesla from making changes to the parts? Tesla doesn't wait for model year to update the car and prototype Model 3 were all AWD.

 

[Brando]

What's stopping Tesla from making changes to the parts? Tesla doesn't wait for model year to update the car and prototype Model 3 were all AWD.

Still in the ramp up stage. Customers invited to convert deposit into configured order. But they can only order what is offered. Some choose to wait for AWD for example. Don't order what you don't want.

 

[seattlite2004]

If true, I guess that says a lot. Can't make any margin on the Bolt, seriously? They can buy back $16 billion of GM stock.
But can't make any margin on Bolts? Nor work on their battery supply problem - yes, my assumption.

Munro also tore down the bolt for UBS: Swiss Financial Giant UBS Tears Down Chevy Bolt For Analysis

and some pre-teardown analysis of the Model 3 SR...can't wait for full Model 3 report. Guess the PUP and Autopilot will help Model 3 margins.

 

[BioSehnsucht]

There was a very recent thread where someone was helping a friend pick up their 10,000+ # VIN car and he showed photos of how badly misaligned the A pillar join to the fender was.

What's more he said there were around half a dozen cars awaiting pick up and they all had the same defect which points to a common assembly problem, robotic problem, etc.

I don't actually expect Elon's claims of current, much less future, quality to have been met yet, but the VIN assignment process is just sufficiently opaque (since there's no guarantee of being built in any order) that they could have in theory achieved it very recently and nobody would know yet.

 

[voip-ninja]

I don't actually expect Elon's claims of current, much less future, quality to have been met yet, but the VIN assignment process is just sufficiently opaque (since there's no guarantee of being built in any order) that they could have in theory achieved it very recently and nobody would know yet.

Well that is certainly possible I’m just not holding my breath.

 

[Brando]

Since the "min. price now is what? $44,000?
35 + 5.7 = $40,700 So at least at break even, right?

 

[voip-ninja]

Since the "min. price now is what? $44,000?
35 + 5.7 = $40,700 So at least at break even, right?

From what Munro analysis shows Tesla would be losing a substantial amount of $$ selling $35,000 base model at this time. It's possible that they can get the battery costs down enough a year or two from now that they wouldn't be losing any money or could maybe break even.

Keep in mind that at a 50% assumed margin on PUP, even the $40,000 SR w/PUP is a money loser for Tesla right now.

It also means that assuming $7500 in profit on LR/PUP w/50% margin they aren't making a lot of money on the $50K model.

The real profit for them is on auto pilot, which I suspect has margins over 50% since it's nothing but software.

 

[GregRF]

Some screen shots from the vid:

 

[FloridaJohn]

The real profit for them is on auto pilot, which I suspect has margins over 50% since it's nothing but software.

I wonder how much it costs to write that software? I’ll bet Tesla is smart enough to include those costs in their margin calculations for Autopilot.

 

[Devanish]

The VINs of the two cars taken apart would be interesting to know.
Early for sure

Yeah I was trying to see if they had the Alcantara headliner.

 

[Devanish]

IIRC what he said was that the spec was 5700 mA (he left out the h which is important as without it it leaves one wondering if he's talking about current or energy), but they measured it just under 6000 mA (again, missing the h).


This was annoying - them wondering who makes the board for Tesla, when it's pretty clear that Tesla designs the board - the fabrication is probably done overseas to Tesla specs. The PCBA might be trackable using other board markings. Then one of the other guys said "Nvidia" - to Munro's credit he paused a bit and noted that it had Nvidia chips, but didn't seem to think that Nvidia made the board.
He sure was impressed by the PCBA, but it didn't seem like he fully understood why it was impressive except for the fact that it had a lot of parts stuffed close together on it because parts that are close together communicate faster (all else being equal is true, but not always).

Yeah his amazement with the board really showed his age and how out of touch he is. It's like he expected to see huge capacitors and resistors circa 1990. And then there was the youngest guy pronouncing Nvidia as "Nuh-vidia". Clueless. Munro's level of enthusiasm would have been justified only if the board had an AI specific processor, something we will start to see in computers and cellphones starting next year.

 

[Devanish]

Imagine a year from now and all these Model 3 competitors cheaper and then Tesla is "forced" to only sell the top performance 4 wheel drive version? Seems to me that in 2017 the top 5 Electric car makers all brought in about $2.5 billion each. Except Tesla brought in $10 billion for cars.
Easy to understand - Leaf vs Model S MSRP. you get the idea.

Newly announced Mercedes all electric Class S - 2020 or cetainly by 2022. We shall see.
Elephant in the room are still batteries, right?

Good luck to them catching up to Teslas charging network and autopilot data. I don't see that happening any time soon.

 

[SageBrush]

Here are some pictures of the Nvidia boards that are sold for AP.
I would have to go back to the video and look at the Tesla board to compare.

 

[Thomas Edison]

Yeah I was trying to see if they had the Alcantara headliner.

For how long they've had the car, one would have to assume it must be alcantara.

 

[omgwtfbyobbq]

Interesting that Munro feels like the Model 3 has lots of extra weight. I know that I was impressed that Tesla reduced the mass of the Model 3 by almost 1,000 lbs over the Model S... The curb weight on the Model S is ~4,600 – 4,750 pounds for the 85kWh variants. The Model 3’s curb weight, in contrast, is 3,837 pounds. That’s a significant slash compared with the Model S especially considering the adoption of more steel for cost, preservation of most of the interior passenger volume and maintenance of the beautiful Tesla body lines.

I think it's just the body in white (BIW) he thought was heavy. The thing is, if Tesla really does plan to re-use as much as possible from the 3 for the Y, it makes sense for them to standardize as much of the BIW as they can, which would mean at least some of it has to support both the 3 and the larger Y and will be a little stronger than it would if it was built just for the 3.

After watching the video, I'm kind of on the fence about Sandy. He's knowledgeable, but at the same time he tends to be a little critical of things he by his own admission doesn't understand the purpose of. It's probably just his background as a consultant and being used to questioning/being critical of things, but I wouldn't be surprised if Tesla had good reasons for what they did.

Take the upper a-arms. If Tesla's using a FRP/steel hybrid part, which is becoming fairly common in civil engineering, it could provide much better stiffness/strength to weight than a pure steel or Aluminum part, and if the FRP does fail, the steel core can hold everything together until it's fixed. I was wondering why Tesla wouldn't use it on other parts of the suspension, but this article suggests that hybrid parts can be adversely affected by exposure to water, especially salt water, so using hybrid parts in the lower suspension isn't a good idea.

https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/9491/6d36ce588cf0edea05e38eb9bc02fa552ffa.pdf

 

[igotzzoom]

The first one where they were talking about the panel gaps came across as a bunch of Detroit "homers" trash talking the new kid on the block. This one I think is much more balanced and candid. Sandy on several occasions warns the legacy OEMs to ignore Tesla "at their own peril" especially when it comes to electronics.

 

[moridin2002]

Is this the disassembly done by Munro & Associates? I will be interested in seeing the results but calling Munro "impartial" is a stretch.

Please elaborate on why you think Munro is not impartial.