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> with the final car rolling off the assembly line on Sunday morning, several hours after the midnight goal set by Chief Executive Elon Musk No, they missed th

> with the final car rolling off the assembly line on Sunday morning, several hours after the midnight goal set by Chief Executive Elon Musk No, they missed the deadline, twice now. Lot of Muskites in these comments, remember, Tesla failed to meet the same deadline in January and pushed it to June. (EDIT: I've been told they missed this 3 times now, the 5K/wk figure was originally Dec '17, then Jan '18 then Jun '18). When it was clear they would miss again, they put up a third production line in a canvas tent, which the NYT quoted as "never heard anything like this ever" using what Musk tweeted as "scrap we had in warehouses" to build the cars. And even then, and running all three lines 24/7 striving to hit that goal for just 7 consecutive days with the whole world watching... they still came up 150 cars short. (5k/wk / 168 hrs/week = 30/hr * missing the deadline by 5 hours = 150 cars short)

ChildOfChaos 8y ago
Okay Mr negative happy pants, who cares if they needed a tent to reach that goal, they reached it and the tent is not going anywhere.
drdeadringer 8y ago
This reads like the film "Gung Ho" made reality.
- stcredzero 8y ago
  What about "Tucker?"
  - drdeadringer 8y ago
    That too would work.
arthurcolle 8y ago
> Elon Musk continues to kill the game
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
danso 8y ago
I actually thought he was underpromising, and that Tesla would surprise the world by blowing past 5K weeks early. That they pulled out all the stops in the final weeks and still missed the deadline feels like a bad sign.
- mjevans 8y ago
  It's not the one time performance that matters, it's the rate of flow as time continues. Also recall that band //width// can be increased for a cost while latency has hard upper bounds. For anyone complaining about profit margins, think per unit profits rather than hitting some round base10 number.
panarky 8y ago
Imagine that today is July 1, 2020. Looking back I see three scenarios. 1) It's clear now that the company is a sham and Musk is a snake-oil salesman. It's all smoke, mirrors, bubblegum and baling wire. After hitting 5000 cars per week one time, they never reached that level again. The company had to do a punishingly dilutive capital raise just to get 6 months more runway, and the company's market cap is now $6 billion (down 90% from 2018). 2) The company has continued to stumble from failure to failure with just enough successes to delay the day of reckoning. Musk is still sleeping in the factory trying to iron out kinks in the manufacturing process and automation. They're producing 3000 cars per week, but the quality is so poor that 30% of cars must be returned to the factory for rework. Competitors are likely to match Tesla's battery technology in the next 3 years, and the company's market cap is down by 50% from 2018. 3) After many delays and billions of dollars of cost overruns, Tesla has perfected the "machine that builds the machine". It's producing 40,000 cars per week in three factories in the US, Europe and China, and a fourth factory in South Korea opens next year. Tesla is cash-flow positive and the company's market cap is $600B (up 10x from 2018). In hindsight, all the delays people anguished about in 2018 proved to be nothing but amusing anecdotes in the company's history. I assign probabilities of 10%, 50% and 40% to these scenarios, which equates to an expected market cap of $250B in two years. At $60B today, it looks like a bargain.
- SEJeff 8y ago
  Musk's future compensation directly hinges on your third scenario (well market cap of $650 billion, but close enough!): http://fortune.com/2018/03/22/elon-musk-compensation-tesla/ http://fortune.com/2018/03/22/elon-musk-compensation-tesla/
- shafyy 8y ago
  You think there is a 10% chance that Musk is snake-oil salesman and a sham?
  - panarky 8y ago
    Is that too high or too low?
EastSmith 8y ago
Your comment reminded me about this article "The War on Tesla, Musk, and the Fight for the Future" https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2018/5/29/1767826/-The-War-on-Tesla-Musk-and-the-Fight-for-the-Future https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2018/5/29/1767826/-The-War-...
8draco8 8y ago
Tesla is most overpriced startup currently on the market. It will crash in a spectacular way in near future. They are constatly missing deadlines, have quality issues, troubles to manufacture spare parts in sufficient quantity and have terrible work environment yet everybody are coming up with excuses for them. This will end at some point and that even beside the fact that electric car in reality create more pollution in vast majority of the world more than modern engines.
- justAnotherNET 8y ago
  >This will end at some point and that even beside the fact that electric car in reality create more pollution in vast majority of the world more than modern engines. Is this thread being linked to by some Tesla short seller blog of what? Surely this kind of misinformation isn’t organic to HN.
- Latteland 8y ago
  I'm sorry but I think your facts are not true. Only people with an agenda to support the oil companies or something come out with claims that evs are terrible polluters. First, regular ice cars have pollution in their manufacture, and the production of gasoline has a lot of inefficiences, it must be transported physically. ICE engines are vastly less efficient in use of energy. Coal is a decreasing amount of power generation. It's just a silly argument that evs are terrible polluters. Of course there is some pollution in their creation, like any object on earth.
anoncoward111 8y ago
Oh my god, come on. I'm a Tesla bear, and I don't really see a massive different between a rate of 4,850 cars and 5,000 cars....
- ambicapter 8y ago
  52 * 150 * 35,000 = 273M in revenue.
  - anoncoward111 8y ago
    assuming Tesla can't find a way to boost production by just 3% over those 52 weeks, it will take less than two weeks to make those additional cars. Their revenue isn't supply driven anyway, it is demand driven. Two weeks of delay will not result in 273M in lost sales. It will just result in delayed sales.
    - xyzzyz 8y ago
      It will just result in delayed sales. I know two people who withdrew their Tesla Model 3 reservations due to them failing to meet a deadline. Their reasoning was that they'd like to buy a Tesla, but if they need to wait years for it, they prefer to get a nice car to drive in the meantime. The longer the delays are, the more people will give up.
      - anoncoward111 8y ago
        Yeah I agree with you, but we're talking about a delay of two weeks, not years. That's how long it will take to make up the shortfall. Anyway, Teslas are overpriced and of questionable quality.
        xyzzyz 8y ago
        The original deadline for 5k production was in December. It's more than 2 weeks.
austenallred 8y ago
OK, sure, but call it 4850 of 5000 when everyone says there wasn't a prayer of making it is pretty remarkable. Call it 97% of the way. The fact that they built out a tent and hustled 24/7 to hit the goal is impressive to me. Overall it's pretty classic Tesla/Musk. Predict the absolutely impossible, get 97% of the way there, and regardless of how you slice it the only thing that's not impressive is the facxt that they didn't meet the arbitrary guideline. They still crushed everything that anyone else thought was possible, so IMO it's a victory just a hollow one. Will they be able to repeat this sustainably? Probably not unless they figure some other things out, but the point is that it's within striking distance. The company has a shot at profitability in the near future, and I see Teslas everywhere now. In the past they missed it drastically; the number is important because if they can figure out a way to get to that level of production they have the chance to become cashflow positive relatively quickly.
- jjeaff 8y ago
  >I see Teslas everywhere now. Meaning you live in one of 4 coastal cities. Teslas are exceedingly rare everywhere but the wealthiest cities.
  - austenallred 8y ago
    I see them all over in Utah. In the coastal cities it feels like 1/4 of the cars on the road.
  - veb 8y ago
    I see them quite often in New Zealand, but saw my first Lamborghini in the flesh the other day!
    - Fins 8y ago
      Don't Lambos cost slightly more than even the fanciest Tesla?
  - ericcumbee 8y ago
    I live in a small state University town in South Georgia and there are at least 3 model S and a model x running around time.
Maro 8y ago
> When it was clear they would miss again, they put up a third production line in a canvas tent, which the NYT quoted as "never heard anything like this ever" using what Musk tweeted as "scrap we had in warehouses" to build the cars. I'm a software guy. Can somebody explain to me how you can build a high-tech auto production line from "scrap"?
- grizzles 8y ago
  I saw a drone video inside the tent, it looks mostly like service bays inside like you'd find at a small local car place that uses hand jacks. A mix of lift + non lift bays is common in any factory at the end of the line. That fits with my analysis from a few days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17397505 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17397505
  - _Microft 8y ago
    Interesting analysis, thanks for sharing!
- manicdee 8y ago
  You can't. GP is completely misrepresenting everything about this situation: not a tent, not canvas, not scrap. Musk's tweet about scrap in a tent was very clearly a joke.
  - philipodonnell 8y ago
    I can't link NYT because I get the paper version and lost my login, but I'm quoting from the paper in front of me: > A tent, about 50 feet high, its taut grey canvas membrane supported by aluminum columns. I don't think it was a joke. The tweet was specifically in the context of trying to convince investors that the cost of that tent production wasn't substantial and by "scrap" he meant equipment they had discarded from their main production lines because they are constantly upgrading them. You can't have it both ways. It was either discarded "scrap" machines they had lying around and he was not joking or machines they bought and he was lying (a.k.a "joking") about it. I'm giving him the benefit of the doubt that they really had all that equipment in a warehouse because its been reported they have re-tooled the line several times.
aerovistae 8y ago
So when musk just tweeted 7000 cars in 7 days, you’re saying you have information proving he’s committing some form of fraud? Could you elaborate? This is going to be a huge story and it looks like you’ll be the one to break it, which is pretty exciting.
- konschubert 8y ago
  They're also building Model S Cars
- philipodonnell 8y ago
  When you miss a deadline to produce 5000 cars of a specific model I guess the other thing you can do is brag about producing 7000 cars and include all your models in that number.
  - Latteland 8y ago
    It's not much of a story that the company that people think will go out of business and promised to make 5k cars a week only made 4800 or something, and is raising production goals to 6k for the next month. This might matter if say a bank was going to end their credit line if they didn't make that number. That's not the situation.
WheelsAtLarge 8y ago
Musk is certainly a self-promoter in the vein of P.T. Barnum. It's gotten to the point of irritation. But you can't deny he's changed the car industry. A company's true function is to benefit society. Tesla has done that, so he gets a win from me. He's done it by taking chances and thinking outside the box. The tent is an example. Most companies would have given up but they did not. 20 years from now Tesla might not be alive but we will see its impact on the car industry. Very cool, Musk.
- eptcyka 8y ago
  > A company's true function is to benefit society. Could you elaborate on how did you come to said conclusion?
  - WheelsAtLarge 8y ago
    Sure, at its basics, society has needs, known or unknown, good or bad so companies are created to fill the needs. Companies survive if they reach enough people with their solution. Sure there are ways to manipulate needs but at its basics companies are supposed to benefit society by filling those needs. We are fed the idea that companies are created to profit the investors but profits are a side effect of meeting needs.
    - davnicwil 8y ago
      More specifically, profits are a side effect of meeting sufficient numbers of individuals' needs. It does not necessarily follow that meeting the needs of those individuals benefits society at large. Profits are also a side effect of meeting needs today. It does not necessarily follow that meeting needs today benefits society in a meaningful way in the longer term. For what it's worth, I think your implication is true. Clearly most companies create wealth and deliver benefit to society, it's that aggregate effect that makes capitalism the most successful system we know of under which to run a society. But the reality is that it's entirely the other way around: companies do exist to profit their investors and it's the benefit to society that's the (usual, aggregate) side effect. It's not good, or bad, it's just a fact.
antpls 8y ago
If you look at SpaceX launch schedules, many are delayed for several weeks/months. Yet it has a better public image than Tesla. I think missing deadline isnt that unexpected, it happens in many projects. If the goal is still achieved at a reasonable time after the deadline, it is still a success imho. It means the project is now a reality, and that's awesome.
- GW150914 8y ago
  Missing a launch in rocketry is a normal and expected part of life in the industry, and no matter who is launching it happens. Missing targets for producing a car isn’t. This is what people mean when they say “comparing apples and oranges.”
  - antpls 8y ago
    > Missing targets for producing a car isn’t. Why should we trust you on that fact? Do you have all the documents required to prove that all the previous car models of all manufacturers in the world were built and sell on time? In my experience (not about car manufacturing), several projects didn't meet the deadlines, and still succeed at the end.
ec109685 8y ago
They built almost $250M worth of cars in a week, which is a pretty large number (assuming avg selling price is 50k).
Latteland 8y ago
If they almost got to that rate of 5k it's just as good. There's nothing magical about that number. Musk sets high goals and usually gets close, but it takes longer than he said it would. Reusable rockets, impossible, took years - but now we have them. I can't understand the people that think he's a charlatan. They have sold approaching 200k electric vehicles. They are great cars, I have one. But separate from that, they always had a plan to increase production and sell more of cheaper cars, ramping up from first selling expensive ones. The latest ones are going to need a lot more volume before they can make them cheap enough to sell at 35k, such as higher battery production. They will lose money until they make them at high volume. It's not crazy to say they'll have a lot more money coming in as they raise production, that's like any business. The open question is will they actually make a profit. We can't know what the numbers are until they come out. Based on history, I think they'll get close to profitable but won't quite make it, but they'll clearly be headed in that direction as the early hurdles of increasing production are met. Again - it won't matter exactly when they are profitable if they are close. Just like the 5k/week number.
- cjhopman 8y ago
  His goal was 20000/mo with less than a quarter of the current manual labor that he's using. We're now twice as far along as the original goal, and he can't even make 5000 in a week when rushing cars through as fast and shittily as possible. Building 5000/w is nothing if you're just willing to throw more and more money at it. The point of the original goal was that it was actually going to be a sustainable, profitable approach.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]

ChildOfChaos 8y ago

Okay Mr negative happy pants, who cares if they needed a tent to reach that goal, they reached it and the tent is not going anywhere.

drdeadringer 8y ago

This reads like the film "Gung Ho" made reality.

stcredzero 8y ago
What about "Tucker?"
- drdeadringer 8y ago
  That too would work.

arthurcolle 8y ago

> Elon Musk continues to kill the game

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

danso 8y ago

I actually thought he was underpromising, and that Tesla would surprise the world by blowing past 5K weeks early. That they pulled out all the stops in the final weeks and still missed the deadline feels like a bad sign.

mjevans 8y ago
It's not the one time performance that matters, it's the rate of flow as time continues. Also recall that band //width// can be increased for a cost while latency has hard upper bounds. For anyone complaining about profit margins, think per unit profits rather than hitting some round base10 number.

panarky 8y ago

Imagine that today is July 1, 2020. Looking back I see three scenarios. 1) It's clear now that the company is a sham and Musk is a snake-oil salesman. It's all smoke, mirrors, bubblegum and baling wire. After hitting 5000 cars per week one time, they never reached that level again. The company had to do a punishingly dilutive capital raise just to get 6 months more runway, and the company's market cap is now $6 billion (down 90% from 2018). 2) The company has continued to stumble from failure to failure with just enough successes to delay the day of reckoning. Musk is still sleeping in the factory trying to iron out kinks in the manufacturing process and automation. They're producing 3000 cars per week, but the quality is so poor that 30% of cars must be returned to the factory for rework. Competitors are likely to match Tesla's battery technology in the next 3 years, and the company's market cap is down by 50% from 2018. 3) After many delays and billions of dollars of cost overruns, Tesla has perfected the "machine that builds the machine". It's producing 40,000 cars per week in three factories in the US, Europe and China, and a fourth factory in South Korea opens next year. Tesla is cash-flow positive and the company's market cap is $600B (up 10x from 2018). In hindsight, all the delays people anguished about in 2018 proved to be nothing but amusing anecdotes in the company's history. I assign probabilities of 10%, 50% and 40% to these scenarios, which equates to an expected market cap of $250B in two years. At $60B today, it looks like a bargain.

SEJeff 8y ago
Musk's future compensation directly hinges on your third scenario (well market cap of $650 billion, but close enough!): http://fortune.com/2018/03/22/elon-musk-compensation-tesla/ http://fortune.com/2018/03/22/elon-musk-compensation-tesla/
shafyy 8y ago
You think there is a 10% chance that Musk is snake-oil salesman and a sham?
- panarky 8y ago
  Is that too high or too low?

EastSmith 8y ago

Your comment reminded me about this article "The War on Tesla, Musk, and the Fight for the Future" https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2018/5/29/1767826/-The-War-on-Tesla-Musk-and-the-Fight-for-the-Future https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2018/5/29/1767826/-The-War-...

8draco8 8y ago

Tesla is most overpriced startup currently on the market. It will crash in a spectacular way in near future. They are constatly missing deadlines, have quality issues, troubles to manufacture spare parts in sufficient quantity and have terrible work environment yet everybody are coming up with excuses for them. This will end at some point and that even beside the fact that electric car in reality create more pollution in vast majority of the world more than modern engines.

justAnotherNET 8y ago
>This will end at some point and that even beside the fact that electric car in reality create more pollution in vast majority of the world more than modern engines. Is this thread being linked to by some Tesla short seller blog of what? Surely this kind of misinformation isn’t organic to HN.
Latteland 8y ago
I'm sorry but I think your facts are not true. Only people with an agenda to support the oil companies or something come out with claims that evs are terrible polluters. First, regular ice cars have pollution in their manufacture, and the production of gasoline has a lot of inefficiences, it must be transported physically. ICE engines are vastly less efficient in use of energy. Coal is a decreasing amount of power generation. It's just a silly argument that evs are terrible polluters. Of course there is some pollution in their creation, like any object on earth.

anoncoward111 8y ago

Oh my god, come on. I'm a Tesla bear, and I don't really see a massive different between a rate of 4,850 cars and 5,000 cars....

ambicapter 8y ago
52 * 150 * 35,000 = 273M in revenue.
- anoncoward111 8y ago
  assuming Tesla can't find a way to boost production by just 3% over those 52 weeks, it will take less than two weeks to make those additional cars. Their revenue isn't supply driven anyway, it is demand driven. Two weeks of delay will not result in 273M in lost sales. It will just result in delayed sales.
  - xyzzyz 8y ago
    It will just result in delayed sales. I know two people who withdrew their Tesla Model 3 reservations due to them failing to meet a deadline. Their reasoning was that they'd like to buy a Tesla, but if they need to wait years for it, they prefer to get a nice car to drive in the meantime. The longer the delays are, the more people will give up.
    - anoncoward111 8y ago
      Yeah I agree with you, but we're talking about a delay of two weeks, not years. That's how long it will take to make up the shortfall. Anyway, Teslas are overpriced and of questionable quality.
      - xyzzyz 8y ago
        The original deadline for 5k production was in December. It's more than 2 weeks.

austenallred 8y ago

OK, sure, but call it 4850 of 5000 when everyone says there wasn't a prayer of making it is pretty remarkable. Call it 97% of the way. The fact that they built out a tent and hustled 24/7 to hit the goal is impressive to me. Overall it's pretty classic Tesla/Musk. Predict the absolutely impossible, get 97% of the way there, and regardless of how you slice it the only thing that's not impressive is the facxt that they didn't meet the arbitrary guideline. They still crushed everything that anyone else thought was possible, so IMO it's a victory just a hollow one. Will they be able to repeat this sustainably? Probably not unless they figure some other things out, but the point is that it's within striking distance. The company has a shot at profitability in the near future, and I see Teslas everywhere now. In the past they missed it drastically; the number is important because if they can figure out a way to get to that level of production they have the chance to become cashflow positive relatively quickly.

jjeaff 8y ago
>I see Teslas everywhere now. Meaning you live in one of 4 coastal cities. Teslas are exceedingly rare everywhere but the wealthiest cities.
- austenallred 8y ago
  I see them all over in Utah. In the coastal cities it feels like 1/4 of the cars on the road.
- veb 8y ago
  I see them quite often in New Zealand, but saw my first Lamborghini in the flesh the other day!
  - Fins 8y ago
    Don't Lambos cost slightly more than even the fanciest Tesla?
- ericcumbee 8y ago
  I live in a small state University town in South Georgia and there are at least 3 model S and a model x running around time.

Maro 8y ago

> When it was clear they would miss again, they put up a third production line in a canvas tent, which the NYT quoted as "never heard anything like this ever" using what Musk tweeted as "scrap we had in warehouses" to build the cars. I'm a software guy. Can somebody explain to me how you can build a high-tech auto production line from "scrap"?

grizzles 8y ago
I saw a drone video inside the tent, it looks mostly like service bays inside like you'd find at a small local car place that uses hand jacks. A mix of lift + non lift bays is common in any factory at the end of the line. That fits with my analysis from a few days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17397505 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17397505
- _Microft 8y ago
  Interesting analysis, thanks for sharing!
manicdee 8y ago
You can't. GP is completely misrepresenting everything about this situation: not a tent, not canvas, not scrap. Musk's tweet about scrap in a tent was very clearly a joke.
- philipodonnell 8y ago
  I can't link NYT because I get the paper version and lost my login, but I'm quoting from the paper in front of me: > A tent, about 50 feet high, its taut grey canvas membrane supported by aluminum columns. I don't think it was a joke. The tweet was specifically in the context of trying to convince investors that the cost of that tent production wasn't substantial and by "scrap" he meant equipment they had discarded from their main production lines because they are constantly upgrading them. You can't have it both ways. It was either discarded "scrap" machines they had lying around and he was not joking or machines they bought and he was lying (a.k.a "joking") about it. I'm giving him the benefit of the doubt that they really had all that equipment in a warehouse because its been reported they have re-tooled the line several times.

aerovistae 8y ago

So when musk just tweeted 7000 cars in 7 days, you’re saying you have information proving he’s committing some form of fraud? Could you elaborate? This is going to be a huge story and it looks like you’ll be the one to break it, which is pretty exciting.

konschubert 8y ago
They're also building Model S Cars
philipodonnell 8y ago
When you miss a deadline to produce 5000 cars of a specific model I guess the other thing you can do is brag about producing 7000 cars and include all your models in that number.
- Latteland 8y ago
  It's not much of a story that the company that people think will go out of business and promised to make 5k cars a week only made 4800 or something, and is raising production goals to 6k for the next month. This might matter if say a bank was going to end their credit line if they didn't make that number. That's not the situation.

WheelsAtLarge 8y ago

Musk is certainly a self-promoter in the vein of P.T. Barnum. It's gotten to the point of irritation. But you can't deny he's changed the car industry. A company's true function is to benefit society. Tesla has done that, so he gets a win from me. He's done it by taking chances and thinking outside the box. The tent is an example. Most companies would have given up but they did not. 20 years from now Tesla might not be alive but we will see its impact on the car industry. Very cool, Musk.

eptcyka 8y ago
> A company's true function is to benefit society. Could you elaborate on how did you come to said conclusion?
- WheelsAtLarge 8y ago
  Sure, at its basics, society has needs, known or unknown, good or bad so companies are created to fill the needs. Companies survive if they reach enough people with their solution. Sure there are ways to manipulate needs but at its basics companies are supposed to benefit society by filling those needs. We are fed the idea that companies are created to profit the investors but profits are a side effect of meeting needs.
  - davnicwil 8y ago
    More specifically, profits are a side effect of meeting sufficient numbers of individuals' needs. It does not necessarily follow that meeting the needs of those individuals benefits society at large. Profits are also a side effect of meeting needs today. It does not necessarily follow that meeting needs today benefits society in a meaningful way in the longer term. For what it's worth, I think your implication is true. Clearly most companies create wealth and deliver benefit to society, it's that aggregate effect that makes capitalism the most successful system we know of under which to run a society. But the reality is that it's entirely the other way around: companies do exist to profit their investors and it's the benefit to society that's the (usual, aggregate) side effect. It's not good, or bad, it's just a fact.

antpls 8y ago

If you look at SpaceX launch schedules, many are delayed for several weeks/months. Yet it has a better public image than Tesla. I think missing deadline isnt that unexpected, it happens in many projects. If the goal is still achieved at a reasonable time after the deadline, it is still a success imho. It means the project is now a reality, and that's awesome.

GW150914 8y ago
Missing a launch in rocketry is a normal and expected part of life in the industry, and no matter who is launching it happens. Missing targets for producing a car isn’t. This is what people mean when they say “comparing apples and oranges.”
- antpls 8y ago
  > Missing targets for producing a car isn’t. Why should we trust you on that fact? Do you have all the documents required to prove that all the previous car models of all manufacturers in the world were built and sell on time? In my experience (not about car manufacturing), several projects didn't meet the deadlines, and still succeed at the end.

ec109685 8y ago

They built almost $250M worth of cars in a week, which is a pretty large number (assuming avg selling price is 50k).

Latteland 8y ago

If they almost got to that rate of 5k it's just as good. There's nothing magical about that number. Musk sets high goals and usually gets close, but it takes longer than he said it would. Reusable rockets, impossible, took years - but now we have them. I can't understand the people that think he's a charlatan. They have sold approaching 200k electric vehicles. They are great cars, I have one. But separate from that, they always had a plan to increase production and sell more of cheaper cars, ramping up from first selling expensive ones. The latest ones are going to need a lot more volume before they can make them cheap enough to sell at 35k, such as higher battery production. They will lose money until they make them at high volume. It's not crazy to say they'll have a lot more money coming in as they raise production, that's like any business. The open question is will they actually make a profit. We can't know what the numbers are until they come out. Based on history, I think they'll get close to profitable but won't quite make it, but they'll clearly be headed in that direction as the early hurdles of increasing production are met. Again - it won't matter exactly when they are profitable if they are close. Just like the 5k/week number.

cjhopman 8y ago
His goal was 20000/mo with less than a quarter of the current manual labor that he's using. We're now twice as far along as the original goal, and he can't even make 5000 in a week when rushing cars through as fast and shittily as possible. Building 5000/w is nothing if you're just willing to throw more and more money at it. The point of the original goal was that it was actually going to be a sustainable, profitable approach.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]