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Tesla announces biggest quarterly loss
- ProAm 9y agoIm interested in their earnings release in 7 quarters from now. I expect this to remain poor for awhile.
- sien 9y agoMeanwhile: The Nissan Leaf is expanding where it is being sold. https://electrek.co/2018/02/06/nissan-new-leaf-sales-seven-additional-markets/ https://electrek.co/2018/02/06/nissan-new-leaf-sales-seven-a... There are now 300K Nissan Leaf's on roads: https://www.forbes.com/sites/sebastianblanco/2018/01/09/nissan-leaf-300000-sales-global/#5b27e5b41cf6 https://www.forbes.com/sites/sebastianblanco/2018/01/09/niss... Kudos to Tesla for pioneering and kicking off electric cars.
- adsfasdfsad111 9y agoWow, I haven't been following Nissan recently, but is that really their electric car? Looks terrible :( Really goes to show how far behind Tesla's competitors are.
- Waterluvian 9y agoSurely there's a term for this? A company exhausts its resources blazing the trail for those behind it.
- aesthethiccs 9y agoFirst mover and Fast Followers, I think these are the terms your looking for.
- blang 9y agoSecond rat gets the cheese.
- gamblor956 9y agoThe Leaf has been in mass production since at least 2010, predating all Teslas but the Roadster, a limited edition vehicle based on the Lotus Elise chassis (edit) first designed sometime in 2004 or 2005(end edit). The Leaf itself first premiered in 1997 as a prototype at the LA Auto Show, and was sold in similar numbers to the Roadster over the next decade until the production model was released in 2010. Why is Tesla getting kudos for something Nissan did first?
- adventured 9y agoWhy is Nissan supposed to get credit for something GM did first? edit: cute downvotes, but the fact is GM was the modern pioneer on electric vehicles. "The General Motors EV1 was an electric car produced and leased by General Motors from 1996 to 1999. It was the first mass-produced and purpose-designed electric vehicle of the modern era from a major automaker" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_EV1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_EV1
- gamblor956 9y agoLol, Nissan shouldn't either. I didn't bother to do an exhaustive dive into EV history, just the two brands in the OP's comment. If you want to be technical about it though, then Pope Mfg deserves credit first the first mass-produced EV, released in...1897. (see http://www.pbs.org/now/shows/223/electric-car-timeline.html http://www.pbs.org/now/shows/223/electric-car-timeline.html)
- Retric 9y agoEV1 was never sold to the public. It was only operated as a lease program at a loss in response to a California mandate.
- dragonwriter 9y agoIt wasn't an in-house test program. They were leased to the public in California, as GM s way of working within an incentive/mandate system that existed at the time (Toyota’s original RAV4 EV and Honda's EV+ were, as well.)
- pavon 9y agoMan I wish it was more widely available in the US. I've been interested in once since they were first released, but they were never available to test drive in NM when I looked. I know that someone must be selling them because I occasionally see them on the road, maybe I just have bad timing. I finally gave up last month and bought a Bolt because I'm convinced that GM will hit the 200k federal tax credit before the 2018 Leaf is available here. I love my new Bolt, but wish I could have compared with the Leaf first as it is a much more affordable car, and has sufficient range for our purposes.
- ams6110 9y agoThe Bolt looks to be a much more useful vehicle, with a range of over 100 miles more than the Leaf. I'm not crazy about the styling, but that's just personal preference. I wish automakers didn't feel the need to make EVs so gaudy and quirky looking. They just scream "look at me I'm a complete nerd!!" Tesla is the only one who gets this right.
- pavon 9y agoI could see it being more useful in an area with a large metropolitan area or many closely spaced towns. In a more sparse state like NM, that extra 90 miles round trip isn't big enough to make much of a difference, unless charging stations expand significantly in the future. We bought it knowing full well that we would take our other vehicle out of town most of the time.
- twelve40 9y agoThere are some attempts to make normal cars electric. The current one is VW Golf, it's small but it's a regular-looking car that also has a fully electric version.
- yakitori 9y agoTesla didn't pioneer nor kick off electric cars. The only thing they did is market well. They are the kings of marketing.
- adventured 9y agoThey did in fact ignite the electric car market. The attempts to deny them credit for that are fascinating. Every major auto manufacturer is aggressively moving to electric vehicles because of the spark that Tesla provided. It wasn't the Nissan Leaf that caused BMW to freak out and radically alter their plans and move everything toward electric. The same goes for all the rest of the automakers. It'd be like pretending the iPhone didn't set off the smartphone boom, because hey the blackberry existed.
- balnaphone 9y ago"The iPhone didn't set off the smartphone boom, because hey the blackberry existed." My sentiments exactly, and I can't understand what you're trying to say here. You've defeated your own point.
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- FullyFunctional 9y agoThat's pretty funny right there as Tesla has no marketing budget to speak off. Kindly tell me last time you saw a Tesla ad (made by Tesla)? Electric cars are as old as ICE cars (look up Baker Electric for one's). That's beside the point. What Tesla did was to produce an electric car that was truly desirable and from many metrics, better than an ICE car. You simply cannot deny Tesla's massive impact on the car industry, even GM have publicly acknowledged it.
- ImNotBeingADick 9y agoI'm starting to think that Prius and Leaf and other EVs are making the car look sooo bad on purpose. The car gets the best mileage per charge in town (hybrids anyway), so "wind efficient" isn't really a thing.
- konschubert 9y agoI really wish Tesla would succeed. But between their build quality issues and their production issues, it's not looking good. And this isn't even their biggest problem, which is that the cars are too expensive for the mass market.
- cryptoz 9y agoTheir build quality problems are solvable. So are the production issues. These are not issues that will sink the company, especially because they are solvable and generally something to be expected during hyper growth like Tesla is right now. > And this isn't even their biggest problem, which is that the cars are too expensive for the mass market. How is Tesla's biggest problem that their cars have a very high ASP? Demand is not a problem for Tesla at all, much less their biggest one. Now, if you think that Tesla should make a cheaper car, don't hold your breath. Elon has said many times that rather than make a cheap electric car, he thinks it will make more sense to make a mid-price car that can do self-driving to earn the owner money during off-driving hours that the owner can then use to offset the cost of ownership of a Tesla. Yes it is a bold play, and it might not work. But Tesla's biggest problem is not that they make expensive cars. I'm not sure what their "biggest problem" would be, except for solving their current issues so that they could scale up more smoothly.
- matte_black 9y agoYou have to be incredibly out of touch to think people are going to want to rent out their personal car to filthy strangers to help offset the cost of ownership.
- maxxxxx 9y agoEspecially once more people start doing this the profit margins will go down quickly.
- cryptoz 9y ago> You have to be incredibly out of touch to think people are going to want to rent out their personal car to filthy strangers to help offset the cost of ownership. You have to be incredibly out of touch to group all car consumers into the same category. That's insulting and rude and wrong. I, for one, and literally everyone I know in person, would absolutely jump up and down with excitement, throw-our-money-at-Tesla-forever if I could buy a Tesla and rent it out to offset the cost. You are incredibly out of touch if you think that there aren't hundreds of millions of people just like me on this one. Edit: And, what, HN agrees that "filthy strangers" is a good way to talk about your fellow peers and neighbours? Ugh. The people renting cars are not "filthy strangers". They're just people. Why is all this hateful language, specifically pointed towards the less-wealthy in society, considered reasonable language on HN? It's rude as shit and infuriating that it's tolerated here. Your fellow humans are not "filthy strangers".
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- rak00n 9y agoAnd yet their stock went up by 3%.
- adventured 9y agoThat's because their cash burn declined dramatically. Cash burn is the primary threat to their business today. The path they're on now, puts them to near profitable by the end of the year. That's while simultaneously missing the old Model 3 forecast by a mile. They're forecasting 5k Model 3s produced per week in the second quarter. Assume that production rate is further delayed until the fourth quarter, they'll still be near break-even on their cash burn rate.
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- csours 9y agoDisclaimer up front: I work for a Tesla competitor. The SpaceX launch was truly amazing, everybody was talking about it at work! I wonder if that was the most expensive car commercial in history? Did Tesla pay SpaceX for promotional consideration?
- mburns 9y ago>I wonder if that was the most expensive car commercial in history? Surely it was the cheapest, no? Tesla spent ~$0 for a huge amount of global advertising. SpaceX was already going to spend the money for the launch and the media has given what is effectively free advertising covering the historic event.
- csours 9y agoTANSTAAFL - There ain't no such thing as a free launch. Certainly someone paid for the launch. I think it was a super clever play.
- mstank 9y agoI guess the US Government / Air-force, and other launch customers paid for the launch since they have active Falcon Heavy contracts with SpaceX. This test was part of the certification process. I'm pretty sure that Tesla didn't pay anything for the advertising. It was Elon's own Roadster. If you look closely, the Tesla logo wasn't included in the Falcon Heavy launch promotional video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tk338VXcb24 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tk338VXcb24
- rapsacnz 9y agoWho cares about their loss if Elon is blasting cars into space? How can you get better marketing than that?
- gok 9y agoThey were expecting to lose even more money this quarter, so that headline is slightly misleading.
- pavlov 9y agoWhat do you mean? It’s still their biggest loss ever, regardless of what they predicted.
- adsfasdfsad111 9y agoguidance matters a lot.
- ChuckMcM 9y agoInvestors look at what management expected versus how they performed to gauge how well they know their business and market. When they say "We expect to lose $100M this quarter." and "only" lose $90M, even though it may be the most they have ever lost, it was less than they were expecting. So perhaps the business is better than they know.
- gok 9y agoThe headline makes it sound like bad news. This was actually better than expected news. This would be like having a headline of "Sports Team Scores Least Points This Season" burying the lede that they actually won the game. To be sure, there is plenty of mediocre to bad news in this quarterly report. They still can't make cars at nearly the rate they expected. They're not even mentioning the the autonomous stuff any more. But the loss itself wasn't really bad news.
- pavlov 9y agoIf I was going to lose $675 million of someone else’s money, I might be tempted to cushion the news by first predicting an even bigger loss, then putting a positive spin when things didn’t turn out as bad as predicted - “clearly things are turning around”. You anchor down and focus on the improvement.
- 9y ago