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Comment by cryptoz | Hacker News Reader

The headline takes some random person's conjecture and displays it as if it were a fact. Not to mention, it takes a pretty-sounding number and makes a small nice soundbite out of it, despite being nearly meaningless. You can't infer Tesla's profit margin from this, and you also can't trust the number next week as so much is changing so rapidly that it hardly matters.

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This is not a random person but a service company which has reverse engineered 4 Teslas for german car manufacturers.

Among others these car engineers spotted that the new battery cells use nearly less then a third of cobalt (2,8% vs 8%) of ordinary cells what no other company has achieved. This should be a quite competitive advantage

That's just the difference between different lithium cathode technologies. ACM uses ~3% Cobalt and NCM 111 uses ~8% [1]

[1] https://www.cell.com/joule/pdf/S2542-4351(17)30044-2.pdf Table 1

Elon retweeted [1] the underlying article with the statement: "Best analysis of Model 3 to date". He also acknowledged [2] that $28,000 is a reasonable cost estimate once they reach scale.

Try doing a little bit of research before dismissing an article that simply doesn't happen to fit within your worldview

[1] https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1002270980755013632

[2] https://twitter.com/FredericLambert/status/10022714993598423...

There's a lot of assumptions buried in that statement. Once they reach scale, sure, but they also raised $1.26 billion to manufacture the Tesla 3. That's going to take a lot of cars to amortize out the cost of the production pipeline, and R&D.

These production cost numbers remind me of bad graphs. I'm always left wondering if the author really meant them to be informative and accurate, or just wanted to rabble rouse.

A Tesla 3 doesn't cost $28,000 to make. It contains $28,000 worth of parts and labor. Just like my sandwich doesn't cost $1 to make. That's only true if I ignore the waste materials, kitchen, lights, cleaning supplies, house, neighborhood and city I bought into in order to enjoy the privilege of making my own sandwich in peace and quiet. Just standing in my kitchen that long cost me 6 cents in property taxes, for instance.

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