Tesla opens the Model 3 reservation floodgates
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
For every 10,000 customers that place an order of the, likely, several hundred thousand current deposit holders, that's somewhere around $600 MM in additional customer money that Tesla would be holding. For every 10,000 customers. But that money won't deliver a physical product for months.
Is this a play to make billions more in deposit money? Is this how they plan to take no more investment/debt this year?
Is there anyone on the list looking to buy one that can confirm if this requires full payment?
EDIT: Apparently, the ask is for an additional $2,500. [2] That would make $25MM per 10,000 customers that place an order.
Putting forth the additional $2,500 also removes the ability for you receive a refund of the original $1,000 deposit if you do not cancel within three days.
[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2018-tesla-burns-cash/
[2] https://www.cnbc.com/2018/06/28/tesla-model-3-orders-cost-25...
Alas: that's not what is being discussed. If Tesla were to enter bankruptcy, then it legally is no longer necessary to uphold its end of any bonds, payments, or other such financial issues.
Tesla might go bankrupt in the next few years, if this Model 3 thing doesn't work out. At which point, it won't return any of the money from these reservations.
Now it is true that Musk would hate to do this, because it would mean giving up some independence, but if necessary he no doubt will.
I think the real reason we are seeing all these claims that Tesla is about to go under is that there is about $10 billion bet on stock shorts that is going to explode in the near future, and so the financiers are desperately trying to put a scare into people and drive down the stock price.
A quick searched reveled that the final payment is due at delivery, or shortly before deilivery [1].
When you finalize configuration, Tesla asks you for a $2500 non refundable deposit (although I have heard that they refund it in some circumstances as a matter of goodwill). This deposit is the same for all models even the Model 3, as stated here [2]:
> And finally when you’re ready to place your order, a deposit of $2,500 is required which isn’t any different than placing an online order for a Model S or Model X.
The only thing I cannot tell you is if the initial deposit counts toward the 2500 deposit or the final price. So Tesla doesn’t get billions in deposits and doing that would probably cause a lot of logistical problems and the media would scream that they are scamming customers and only do that because they are about to go bankrupt.
[1]: https://forums.tesla.com/forum/forums/payment [2]: https://www.teslarati.com/tesla-model-3-design-studio-config...
> Those reservation holders must pay an additional $2,500 to turn their reservations into an order, at which point the original $1,000 deposit goes toward the overall payment for the car. Buyers can cancel their orders within three days for a full refund, the company confirmed, but after that their money is Tesla’s for good.
https://www.cnbc.com/2018/06/28/tesla-model-3-orders-cost-25...
I thought it is common to pay full amount upfront upon ordering cars, then wait a month or two for actual delivery.
Regarding the delivery, there's two aspects: the first one is that delivery can take even more, even for regular cars. The second one is that I wouldn't be too confident as a Tesla customer, that I'll get the car in 2 to 4 months. 6+ months seems more realistic, based on their track record.
All-in-all, if you really like the car, it doesn't seem a blocker.
Right, and so the premise of your original comment no longer applies. Or am I missing something?
Better still most of their would be competitors are either not shipping at all right now, years away from shipping at scale, just plain not even bothering to compete, or shipping limited volumes of not so great products, and generally being vague about timelines, volumes, etc. On top of that they and are struggling with over production of vehicles based on legacy petrol/diesel technology.
E.g. the Germans are doing a lot of hand waving around maybe shipping some electric cars in the next decade while the likes of BMW continue to ship seriously underwhelming electric cars. Ford just discontinued a lot of their petrol sedans. And diesel gate continues to impact most manufacturers involved with basically anything Diesel based.
The way I see it, Tesla will be essentially unchallenged for the next 2-3 years. That's a lot of time to get on top of some simple logistics. And that's assuming the existing car manufacturers actually get their act together. IMHO, most of them are at far bigger risk of bankruptcy than Tesla since they'll be bogged down in demand issues, layoffs, and restructurings for the next few decades.
I don't see the logistical situation as something that can't be resolved by Tesla. Kind of silly to short Tesla under the assumption that this won't be solved; cannot be solved; and that Tesla will perpetually be unable to solve this. The argument seems to be that it is simply impossible to produce the vehicles for Tesla.
If the latest rumors are to be believed, they are pretty much close to the promised rate of 5K cars/week. At 50K price (conservative) that means 250M per week in revenue, or 1 Billion per month. That sounds like a decent business to me. I'm assuming they are not stopping at 5K per week.
Moody’s downgraded Tesla’s bond rating because Tesla will need to raise more money this year, at least $2B (which is an extremely conservative figure), to avoid Chapter 11 bankruptcy.
Elon Musk also owes >$600M in personal debt that he financed using Tesla stock as collateral. This means that if Tesla stock dips below around $233/share, Musk would face a margin call (sell Tesla stock, driving stock prices lower), or put down more Tesla stock as collateral to fund his debt.
By the way, 90% of the Boring company’s funds come from Elon Musk himself, possibly funded by this personal debt.
Other red flags are that shareholders sued Tesla board members for breaching their fiduciary duties by allowing Tesla to acquire Solar City, assuming an extra ~$3B in debt; and Tesla’s CFO Jason Wheeler left Tesla in 2017 with over half of his stock left to vest.
The reason people are shorting Tesla is that beyond Elon Musk’s cult of personality, the numbers don’t add up. Tesla will need to raise more money this year to survive.
Feel free to fact check all of this.
https://simplywall.st/stocks/us/automobiles/nyse-gm/general-...
On top of the fact they were bailed out.
Five years ago was 2013. The Nissan Leaf and Chevy Volt were first released in 2010. Tesla Autopilot was announced in 2014 (four years ago!), which used technology by MobilEye, which was already supplying BMW, GM and Volvo with the same technology.
I don't know where this revisionist history comes from. Large automotive manufacturers did say that it would take time for the technology to mature, and it took roughly as long as what they said it would, around the same time Tesla launched theirs as well. If that's not a roadmap, I don't know what is.
Starting a lawsuit is easy. What’s under-reported is how many of such lawsuits are won.
I guess my question right now is: if the situation is so dire, and the facts are all out there, why is TSLA not priced lower? Is it that there's enough dumb money holding/buying it propping up the price? Or are investors confident in Musk's ability to raise money and eventually turn the corner? Or something else entirely?
Model 3 is honestly the best looking car I have ever seen.
Also fewer people know these facts than you might expect. I dug through Tesla’s SEC filings to find out, which are hundreds of pages of documents. It took me at least 10 hours of reading. Doing the due dilligence is time-consuming, and it’s really easy to just roll with a speculative opinion, as you’ve seen from many comments in this thread.
Based on my recent experiences seeing friends fundraise in YC, there is a lot of easy money going around, possibly because the low interest rate has pushed investors to look for more profitable investments through Silicon Valley, and money from Asia is pouring in.
Corporate debts is also at an all-time high - there is $6.3T in corporate debt and a cash-to-debt ratio of 12%, a record low. This means that companies are taking an unprecedented amount of risk, so maybe Tesla numbers are relatively less shocking in comparison, but I'm not optimistic it will end well. See junk bond defaults from the 80s.
By the way, Tesla bonds are considered junk bonds. They're officially labeled as B3, or "Highly speculative", and only one rating above "Substantial risks".
I am not a fan, but there's no denying that Musk is a marketing genius. What percentage of people can even name the CEO of another car company? Plus he's not just selling a car; he's selling the future. As we see with Theranos, people really love the tech-as-future-magic story.
So much of the "dumb money/smart money" distinction is decided after the fact. If he pulls it off, the people who stuck it out will think themselves geniuses. But a ratings agency downgrade is a pretty good sign as to what professional investors make of it.
Elon Musk may owe a little money indeed but he's also a shareholder in SpaceX. I'm not up to speed on how much he owns of that exactly but I believe it is a fairly large chunk of that company. And given the amount of rockets going up lately, his shares are probably worth quite a bit at this point. Magnitudes more than the 600M you mention, I imagine. So, I don't think a personal bankruptcy is that likely for him any time soon.
Tesla 'lost' money investing in production capacity, R&D, opening up a huge battery production facility, etc. That's not wasted money unless demand for utilizing these to full capacity disappears. As it is, the opposite seems to be the case. Tesla is talking about opening additional Giga factories even. That will cost more money of course but I think they can make a case for that being a good investment given demand in their products.
That's perhaps why it's stock valuation is so high: shareholders are expecting these investments to translate into revenue and growth. People that shorted Tesla seem to be getting a bit nervous about maybe ending up on the wrong end of that bet, which could end up being an expensive mistake for some.
Boring and Solar City are interesting wild cards. I think owning Solar City is not necessarily a bad thing for Tesla. Solar panels are in demand and Tesla seems to consider charging infrastructure as part of their strategy. Also up-selling batteries that they produce to people that install solar panels seems like a smart move. Unless there's something wrong with their product, I see no reason for that to fail. They do seem to have acquired a bit of a cost overhead problem, which they have been fixing through layoffs. But other than that, this could very well turn out to be a pretty good bargain.
Boring seems like a weird project at first glance. But it wouldn't be the first side project that Elon Musk is involved in that turned into a real business.
"One car alone doesn’t crowd the field. But Geneva was a showcase for a rush of coming EVs and hybrids."
The i-Pace is almost out. The others... aren't. I'm particularly skeptical of Audi's gigantic marketing machine.
They might hit that goal, but I'm very concerned about how they're getting there.
Toyota was the company that really figured out how to make good cars economically. They came out of Japan's post-war economic devastation to kick the asses of US carmakers. Their thinking was so alien to traditional approaches that Detroit spent decades trying to catch on and catch up. That depite Toyota doing their best to help their competitors get it. [1]
A pillar of Toyota's approach is patient, gradual, relentless improvement. There are a lot of signs that Tesla has never really warmed to that. Musk likes drama, action. But he's been overpromising and underdelivering for a while now. That he's sleeping at the factory might sound impressive, but to me it's a sign that he hasn't built an organization that can handle this.
Even if they hit the arbitrary 5K goal, I'm concerned they'll will reach it not by building a great, reliable process, but through the sort of rushing and corner-cutting that leaves them in bad shape for the future. That's very common in the tech world, and we pay for it with high tech debt and low long-term productivity. Perhaps he's doing the same thing here.
[1] e.g., https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NUMMI
I guess it depends how you interpret the news and what Musk has said in shareholder meetings. At the last one he explicitly said that they continuously improve the process at Tesla.
Why should that be a good thing? Consider what this means:
* Safety-critical systems are not air-gapped. (Granted, Tesla is far from the only offender here).
* The fact that the fix was turned around in such a short time would seem to suggest that it was relatively quick to diagnose and debug. Why wasn't it caught before release?
* On another note, it also calls into question how rigorous their update fix testing is. I've seen plenty of "this must go out fixes" that broke a lot of stuff by collateral when people felt it was too important to get out quickly to do the full testing.
The issue was easy to find. The root cause may not have been. Vehicle stopping distance is a standard metric. Simple black box system level testing at Tesla should have caught this. Why was nothing done then or why was it a test escape?
I also think you miss the real value of patient continuous improvement in production lines. Extreme changes work against the drive to reduce variance and waste. The OTA software fix is indeed impressive, and last I heard Toyota software process lagged well behind their manufacturing process. But from Tesla's continuous failure to meet goals, it looks like the opposite is true. And Tesla's at a point where software, no matter how good, won't save them.
Musk being out of college at release if the Prius is irrelevant. The battery technology in early Prius was very bad. The delivery of the product was good, but if your inplication that the Prius fueled full EV you're off base by a significant margin. Also look at the growth of Prius from day 1. It wasn't an overnight success and many naysayers existed then about the viability, efficacy, reliability, etc. They were all proven wrong and the minimal gamble of Prius compared to a full EV including the Supercharger network pales in comparison with regard to market resistance (both consumer and competitor).
I don't think you understand continuous improvement if you equate it to being "slow". Speed has no bearing, the meat is in the process itself.
Continuous failure? Please elaborate. Failure in the product? No different than existing manufacturera and impressive track record given their time in the market. Failure to meet shareholder expectations? Sure. That's every company, and it's too bad Musk had to go public when he did. But if Tesla is a failure I'd like to see your success. Your argument devolved into pure subjective opinion rather quick.
My point about Toyota working on the Prius well in advance of others, Musk included, is to demonstrate that their continuous improvement approach doesn't prevent them from making big changes.
I don't know where you get me equating continuous improvement to slowness. Despite your quote marks, I did not use that word.
As to Musk's failure to meet goals, you need look no further than the article up top, which says, "The company has failed to meet any of its production and delivery targets for the Model 3 since its splashy event in July 2017". That isn't a matter of opinion. Musk's ongoing failure to hit his own self-declared goals is a sign of a severe process problem.
This is a complete straw man. The argument is that its impossible for TSLA to produce cars in the volume necessary, at the margins necessary, in the time frame necessary to both pay down their massive amounts of debt and justify their enormous valuation. And, looking at the numbers, that seems like a pretty solid argument.
Jaguar, Audi, and BMW arent three years behind.
Right now its about perceived luxary and marketing, and a bit of a software / business model lead.
I dont think any of those companies would be three years behind if they actually tried to deliver a market leading luxury car, although some might need to acquihire some better software divisions.
I don't know if I would purchase a 35K+ car that was assembled outside in the open. Also it appears quite chaotic with chassis being transported around also in the open.
[1] https://twitter.com/IspyTsla/status/1009134913881190400?s=19
[1] I’d prefer to invest most of the money and have a cheaper second hand car, and if I had enough spare that $35k was pocket change, I’d be more interested in a tiny aircraft or a small liveaboard boat.
If that was the case you'd probably only be buying a Model 3 out of curiosity rather than as your main, every day car. Most people aren't in that position, and will be buying a Model 3 because they think it's the best car for their money. They'll be a lot less willing to accept defects.
Is "I don't own a car" the new "I don't own a TV" virtue signalling?
Seriously, you are offering up your opinion on a product you admittedly have no knowledge of,and no interest in owning.
That said, although I don’t own a car, I didn’t actually say that in my previous post. I’m lucky that where I live, I don’t need to. That situation is likely to change, and I have no intention to build an identity of, or make a virtue out of, either having or not having a car. If that seems contradictory, consider it virtue signaling “flexibility”.
Do you not believe in the existence of true dialectics?
Then why are they producing cars in a tent in then first place? NUMMI was building 6000 cars a week at its peak,and Teslas are supposed to be simpler and the manufacturing process more advanced.
I mean if you have a waterproof smartphone and it was made under water (I know, taking it to the extreme here)...
This might even act as a precedent for other factories :D
Some issues may arise later. Tesla plans to fix them later and that's doable because their production volumes are still low and they manufacture only expensive cars.
Tesla owners know by now that they get a car that is incredible to drive, has very high quality 'skateboard' but all the normal parts build on top of that are low quality with high tolerances compared to other manufacturers. It seems to be accepted trade-off.
How did you come to that conclusion? Are there customers who aren't whole? Are there customers who have ordered a Model 3 that wasn't delivered as promised?
Look at it this way...
Tesla is operating at a loss and is reliant on investors to keep it afloat until it becomes profitable. The only way to do that is to demonstrate to investors that you will eventually become profitable by meeting your own schedules, timelines, and sales targets.
Tesla can hit it's 5000 cars a week mark by the end of June but if there aren't customers to deliver those vehicles to then they're not hitting their sales numbers and still fail.
Tesla has said that they're not producing the low end Model 3 and instead focusing on the high margin trim levels. What percentage of reservations are holding out for the low end Model 3? We know there's ~450000 reservations, what percentage are in the US/Canada? Lets pretend it's 50% or 225000. How many of those reservations are holding out for the cheapest model? Lets pretend that to is 50% or 112500. That leaves 112500 reservations who will buy a high trim level Tesla 3.
If Tesla has hit it's 5000 vehicles a week mark and is promising fulfillment in 2-4 months then by the 4 month mark they'll have produced 80000 Model 3s. That's pretty close to the hypothetical 112500 number.
The danger to Tesla was from two fronts, running out of money before getting into positive cash flow or failing to execute long enough for other manufacturers to take market. Jaguar will certainly eat into higher end vehicles from Tesla as they have a storied brand and other similar brands are not far behind.
I think someone finally realized that you can have as many steps in the assembly line as you want so long as no single step exceeds your quota divided by the time per day. (i.e. need to make 1000 cars per day, no single step in your production process can last longer than 86.4 seconds; but you can have as many steps as you want) In order to make 5,000 cars a week you need to keep your slowest step in your manufacturing process to around 2 minutes. This should be doable.
It's not exactly a subtle point that throughput is limited by, what's the cliché, the bottlenecks.
2. If no parallel allowed, 86.4 seconds is the average not the maximum. Longer steps balanced by shorter steps.
Hopefully they to to 700 cars a day this week.
However, getting to the 10,000 cars a week (another doubling) seems impossible unless they add another factory.
https://www.rt.com/business/431118-tesla-tent-outdated-manuf...
Seriously,give it a try. Everything has bias,but RT does a better job covering global stories than most American cable networks.
Attacking the source is the weakest form of argument.
As for my "argument", there is none. What's in the article may very well be true, I have no opinion on it.
If you are right, a lot of highly trained and paid people have made a grave mistake in their throughput estimates and might still be lying about it.
On the other hand there could be bottlenecks they know how to solve but are waiting for the tooling to be done.
They are constantly facing bottlenecks that take them by surprise while they are learning to mass manufacture. Tesla is small volume luxury car maker that attempts to transfer into mass manufacturer with NIH attitude.
But in this thread I see no complains about why this also not clickbait. How often do we see another companies car launches - electric, ICE or otherwise getting so much attention on HN?
So, for Tesla fans I can only say this - you will live the sword you die by the sword. Tesla gets coverage irrespective of bad, good or neutral. So, next time there is a negative news let's try and have a healthy debate about Tesla issue rather than about "biased media".
The news value comes from the scope of impact and the amount of change from the original state (hundreds of thousands of reservations effectively unable to move forward and commit delivery).
Even if it's just basic reporting, the number of people with personally significant financial positions at stake justifies reporting. $1,000 might be nothing to you or me, but undoubtedly to many reservation holders considering the pricing of the car, $1,000 is a sum they had to actually debate spending, so there's a significant public interest.
This is newsworthy.
And yes, I'm one of the aforementioned complainers (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17409396). I don't own a Tesla nor do I have any interest—or any interest—in the company.
The Leaf is mostly ignored because unlike the Model 3 and Bolt, it is a compromise due to it's limited range and it is not a true replacement for an ICE car. For normal usage it's fine but exceptions like mid-day doctor appointments or spontaneous errands after work are sometimes impossible.
The first generation Leafs had a 24kWh battery with an EPA MPGe range rating of 84 miles. The second generation 2018 model has a 40kWh battery with an EPA MPGe rage rating of 151 miles.
The first generation base models of the Tesla Model 3 and Chevy Bolt have EPA MPGe ranges of 220 and 238 miles respectively.
That might not seem like a big deal and an 84 mile range should be fine for most people most of the time. The problem is that the 84 mile range is not entirely accurate.
My Leaf typically reports my range as 90+ miles and my 25 mile commute can use anywhere from 28-42 miles of that reported range. So if I drive to work and back without charging in between then my remaining range is 8-34 miles. That's ok unless I get home from work and my kid needs to go to the music store 5 miles away to buy a replacement reed for their oboe.
Additionally Nissan recommends not charging above 80% or letting the battery fall below 20% to increase the longevity of the battery as over/under charging can degrade the Lithium Ion Cells. So basically they're telling you not to charge your car past 80% and to stop driving when you hit 20% which means they recommend you only ever use 60% of your battery (50 miles).
In comparison, Chevy and Tesla both have built-in buffer capacity in their batteries that's unavailable to you. This buffer prevents you from over/under charging your battery. Because of this buffer you're able to utilize the full advertised range of the vehicles without fear of battery degradation.
That said, were it time to replace the Leaf, today I'd a Bolt (and I own shares of TSLA, no GM). Good enough range, and say what one will about GM quality, they can at least build a car without huge body panel gaps.
Making electric cars is not just a business, money and accounting doesn't matter at this point. The money side for large projects like this, is an abstraction you cannot focus on. Negative account books will always exist where innovation happens.
Forget the money, and try to think what gets made. That's all that matters.
If nothing else, Tesla customers are buying (or attempting to buy) a piece of history.
You're playing bank. Hot tip: don't buy cars that are not in front of you and that you can walk around, only buy cars from manufacturers with long term stability to ensure that the vehicle you've bought will function during its economic life in your hands.
I use firefox containers, I disabled 3rd party cookies, and all of my cookies are cleared when I exit firefox.
Not sure if doing this really escapes tracking though. I'm still wondering what the firefox tracking protection is really doing.
AFAIK, you can buy bonds, buy a Tesla reservation, and sell this reservation without the blockchain.
Why?
How so? If you a decentralised system like that, you need some sort of consensus mechanism, and that is costly, especially when using like PoW. All this would do is to replace robust established mechanisms with expensive and fragile technological overkill that offers no advantage for the user.