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Tesla produces its millionth car
- jfim 7y agoThat's a pretty impressive milestone. Cheers for the hard work from Tesla employees!
- chirau 7y agoWhat exactly is impressive? Leaf has more than that in prod already.
- travbrack 7y agoNissan had a bit of a head start on Tesla.
- TheSpiceIsLife 7y agoThis article claims Tesla is the first to have made 1 million electric vehicles. Is this incorrect?
- thordenmark 7y agoThe way it is stated "No other automaker has achieved that kind of volume when it comes to producing long-range electric passenger cars." gives them some wiggle room in their claim. Still, it is a very impressive feat for an automobile startup.
- TheSpiceIsLife 7y agoAh, I see, it’s the somewhat subjective claim long-range. You Jamie for pointing that out.
- TheSpiceIsLife 7y agoThat should have said "Thank you for pointing that out", but my new phone seems to like changing ordinary phrases in to nonsensical words.
- standardUser 7y agoPer Wikipedia... "Global sales totaled over 400,000 Leafs by March 2019" That is awesome and the Leaf is a fantastic vehicle only limited by its range. But it does not sound like one million Nissan Leafs have been produced. And the Tesla milestone still carries extra significant because all of its models are reasonable replacements for ICEs in most households. The Leaf is suited to a much smaller set of use cases.
- CriticalCathed 7y agoI can understand critiquing Tesla's business models, their claims about the cars, their financial status, or even Musk's character. But calling what Tesla has done over the last 10 years unimpressive makes no sense to me.
- ltbarcly3 7y agoThey produce great cars that people love, but people generally love high-end very expensive cars. A Nissan Leaf is not as nice of a car as a Tesla Model 3 in pretty much any way, but it also costs 3/4 of the price. Meanwhile, the Leaf is profitable per-car, and the base model Tesla Model 3 is barely break-even per-car, even with the very aggressive accounting that Tesla uses. Tesla can't keep producing base Model 3's at the price they are selling them for (even at over $40k), they are a loss leader to look competitive on price, the profitable version is well over $50k without government subsidies that will end this year (and the performance model is over $60k). A leaf is around $30k.
- sabertoothed 7y agoWhat is your point?
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- 283627283637 7y agoYou're getting a lot of flak but this was my reaction too. The mistake was comparing it to the leaf instead of all cars the company produced and confronting the futurist hype train head-on. This is 2020, a million cars isn't impressive. Fuel efficient hybrids have done more to help the climate than Tesla has. Just look at Europe, electric cars are so practical and efficient that countries are working to ban their competition.
- enchiridion 7y agoTesla basically created the electric car sector. Almost every major car company has or will have an electric out in order to compete.
- ltbarcly3 7y agoWhoever invented lithium batteries created the electric car sector (In fact he won a Nobel prize for it, https://news.uchicago.edu/story/john-b-goodenough-shares-nobel-prize-invention-lithium-ion-battery https://news.uchicago.edu/story/john-b-goodenough-shares-nob...). Everything else has existed since the 1800s (although it has been refined over time). There were even attempts at electric cars in the 1800s. In fact, almost 40% of all cars in 1900 were electric! If they had lithium batteries in 1890 we would have been driving electric cars for the last 130 years. GM had a great electric car in the mid 90s that couldn't compete due to lead acid batteries being heavy and having poor energy density (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_EV1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_EV1). Put Lithium batteries in an EV1 and people still wouldn't have wanted it because oil prices were low, but it beat the Model S to market by nearly 20 years and again given a better battery technology like lithium would probably have led to a majority of cars being electric today.
- TheSpiceIsLife 7y agoWhy do designers seem hellbent if making electric cars look strange. The tide seems to have turned... a bit.
- 283627283637 7y ago
- asaph 7y agoThe 1,000,000th car was a Model Y.
- animalnewbie 7y agoTesla should now focus on a mass market electric vehicle to take the climate crisis- something like a closed two-wheeler with broad tyres. Good for traffic and temperature controlled too. Chinese people would buy it in droves.
- bdamm 7y agoThe Model 3 is a mass market electric vehicle with broad market appeal. Tesla doesn't make toy cars, they've left that up to Nissan, BMW, and the like.
- boznz 7y agoouch..
- whatshisface 7y agoTwo-wheeled Chinese vehicles is a market that's already cornered by cost-effective incumbent Chinese manufacturers. What exactly would this American luxury brand have in that market?
- trhway 7y agoThe question sounded like a challenge, so how about Autopilot? Even for two wheelers. I think going forward the autonomous driving will be even stronger differentiator.
- Avi-D-coder 7y agoHow would you keep your balance on a self driving motorcycle? You would always have to pay attention to the road.
- trhway 7y agohttps://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-06-03/ford-s-two-wheel-concept-car-gets-a-chinese-electric-makeover https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-06-03/ford-s-tw...
- gordon_freeman 7y agosuch a great milestone! I hope they hit 10 million one by 2030! We need more companies like Tesla in this world.
- ro-_-b 7y agoThe one thing I don't get is that everybody assumes there is unlimited demand for Tesla cars, Tesla just needs to be able to produce. But realistically, let's assume that in 1-2 years government subsidies will end then how many people will still want an EV for a price tag of minimum 30k & can afford it? All that Tesla produces are cars for the premium segment despite some mass market rhetoric.
- saagarjha 7y agoDoes Tesla still qualify for large government subsidies? I thought they had ran through their allocation long ago.
- alphabettsy 7y agoIn the US they have. Some state governments still have them.
- svet_0 7y agoThey did mostly in US, there are still some significant subsidies in European and Asian countries. Regardless I believe demand for EVs will explode in the next decade and Tesla's challenges will stay in production, not in demand.
- bfieidhbrjr 7y agoMy God, you're right! Nobody has ever thought about that, or Googled it, let's short TSLA immediately! I wish I could respond nicely, maybe it's been too long of a day.
- mikeg8 7y agoI think there is a massive market of young people that would love to own a Tesla when they reach the required income level. It’s a green product, from a company with grand ambitions to address climate change, and an incredible car. Everyone I know who has one loves it, and most who get to drive them, wish they had one. It feels like the future, and 30k isn’t a crazy price for the value if offers.
- spectramax 7y agoIt's remarkable how simple it appears to build lots of cars, but its one of those things that is completely and utterly counter-intuitive. Logic says - get all these parts together, assemble them and off a car comes out. Forget about engineering - assume all R&D work is done/frozen, the supply-chain complexity alone is staggering. 2000+ suppliers, with multiple redundancies. Keeping the assembly line moving without a hiccup is a compounding a chain of all problems - all probabilities of things going wrong at each station/module/step. Another beast of an industry(which I am intimately familiar with) is semiconductor manufacturing. But, it actually appears to be hard unlike car manufacturing. Making 4 million chips a day, containing 2 billion transistors sounds hard af and it is. Manufacturing is a very interesting field to get into (even as software engineers). Ever heard of this game - Factorio? You get to play that in real life (with some pain and big rewards). If you can master manufacturing, you're unbeatable because the entry point is so steep, learning curve is steeper and scaling up is nothing like spinning up Kubernetes clusters and instances (no offense meant). Hey, kudos to all the people that burned midnight oil, persevered through tough times at Tesla, congratulations. If you work at Tesla plant, please share your story!
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- JohnJamesRambo 7y agohttps://www.statista.com/statistics/267272/worldwide-vehicle-production-of-toyota/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/267272/worldwide-vehicle... Toyota makes ~9 million cars every year. Tesla just made its millionth car ever. Toyota market cap 201B. Tesla market cap 112B (was ~170B at peak). The stock market still has very far to fall before it comes back to reality again.
- Harlekuin 7y ago1,000,000th electric car
- nine_k 7y agoIt's being on a mature market vs being on a new, not yet well-developed market. The second has a much larger growth potential. That is, while Toyota is great, it's unlikely that your investment in it will return tenfold. With Tesla, the chances are much higher. Also, Toyota started making cars in 1933 (licensed GM models), Tesla, in 2012 (an all-new class of cars).
- kakwa_ 7y agoThat's one way to see it. Another would be to say in the end, it's the same "mature" market, one more EV sell is most likely one less ICE sell. And it's not like EVs have tremendously changed the equation, the price is about the same (total cost of ownership), the capabilities are about the same (slightly better on some aspects, like performance, slightly worst in term of autonomy and refueling/recharging time). Right now, EVs are not extending or creating a market but are triggering a re-composition of this market. Maybe in the future, we will see more deeper changes which will trigger a major shift (autopilots that work? reduction in cost? (EVs are engineeringly simpler than ICE vehicles)) but we are not there yet.
- coder1001 7y agoWill Covid-19 affect its production rate going forward? It is intriguing to see what these companies do to deal with disrupted supply chains!
- est 7y agoThe Shanghai municipal government took special care of GF3. They resumed production one month ago on 10th Feb. http://www.xinhuanet.com/2020-02/10/c_1125555728.htm http://www.xinhuanet.com/2020-02/10/c_1125555728.htm However I do think the supply chain will need more time to recover. And consumer market wise it's quite uncertain. People are locked in doors with limited travelling needs, and oil prices are historically low.
- AnthonyMouse 7y agoStill never understood why governments don't take "oil prices are low" as an opportunity to put in a carbon tax. The low prices offset the tax for the consumer, but then you make it revenue neutral by either cutting some other taxes (e.g. payroll tax) or paying out the money as a UBI. The result is you stimulate your economy because some of the tax is getting paid by foreign oil interests but all of the money is going to your citizens.
- eBombzor 7y agoCan't wait till they hit the 1 millionth super charger milestone!
- antisocial_ 7y agoThe funny thing is that the corona virus will do more to reduce pollution than tesla cars ever will. Currently, they just sell luxury vehicles that are much heavier than existing cars (where did all that mass come from?), require hours to refill, and have poor range. The one trick they have is that they can accelerate fast, once. What progressives never mention is that the number one cause of pollution is population size. Elon Musk is another one of those progressive tech people that the rest of society has stopped caring about because they realized that we weren't progressing to anywhere good, and that technology doesn't solve anything. None of them are leaders to anyone other than a small group of naive 20 somethings.
- chirau 7y agocritically speaking, we are still WAY WAY short of their promise. Yeah, downvote or whatever, truth is truth. Also... please don't come at me with what they accomplished, it's well documented. Simply assess them on the promise on where we'd be today according to them. Not even close. And this charlatan had words for Bill Gates... hahahhaha
- chirau 7y agoOf course i was always going to be downvoted. Did i touch your feely feely HN subscriber? Welcome to the real life. Where your heroes promise and don't deliver. Elon being the biggest culprit. He used to be my hero, given we come from SA together and all, until i cut through the bs. Downvote to oblivion HN, i have enough points. Someone had to say it. Feel free to deny it. You are probably a fucking bootcamp kid anyway if you're incensed by this. NO ONE CARES.
- lqs469 7y agoThat's a really imperssive milestone. And Tesla still has a huge prospect of the mass market in the future(e.g. in China or India), and that's exactly what their current direction. [1] https://techcrunch.com/2020/03/06/tesla-gets-ok-to-produce-long-range-model-3-at-china-factory/ https://techcrunch.com/2020/03/06/tesla-gets-ok-to-produce-l... [2] https://fortune.com/2020/01/07/elon-musk-tesla-gigafactory-shanghai-china-ceremony/ https://fortune.com/2020/01/07/elon-musk-tesla-gigafactory-s... [3] https://www.benzinga.com/news/20/03/15507012/tesla-now-chinas-largest-ev-manufacturer-by-output-report https://www.benzinga.com/news/20/03/15507012/tesla-now-china...
- Alex_P13 7y agoWow, Just! Awesome
- ltbarcly3 7y agoIt's great what tesla has done to push electric vehicles to the point of a status symbol, and prove their viability as an every day driving car. Tesla is a remarkable company, but they are terrible at building and delivering cars, which is very much the primary competence needed to succeed as a company that sells cars. Their production rates have dramatically trailed their promises, and while they are valued at around $160B, they are hoping to build about 500k cars this year. Volkswagon builds that many cars every 2 weeks or so, and actually makes a profit on each car, as does Toyota (10M cars each, per year, for VW and Toyota, 7M for GM and Hyundai, per year). Tesla is worth more than any two other car companies (other than Toyota) while producing around 5% as many cars as any one of them, if Tesla hits their goals. Success as as a car company is more about being able to produce cars that people want -- efficiently, than it is about designing cars that people want. Otherwise Lamborghini would be selling more cars than all the other car companies combined, if posters and dreams could somehow translate into units shipped without regard to price or ability to actually build cars in the necessary volume. The two huge success stories in cars are Ford, who invented the assembly line, and Toyota, who invented Kanban, both of which dramatically increased the quality while decreasing the labor input of manufacturing cars. Tesla, with all their claims of automation, produces cars using about 1/3 the automation of Toyota today (9 vs 24 cars for full-time employee per year) while using accounting tricks to claim large per car margins, while showing a large loss using standard accounting practices. I think if I had to make a guess, Tesla will be in the same chapter in the history of cars as DeLorian and Duesenberg.
- briffle 7y agoTesla is just starting to ramp up their gigafactories. The one in Reno is still only 20-25% built. Plus china, new one in Germany, and rumors of one soon to be announced in Brazil.
- ltbarcly3 7y agoEven the factory they have now is not very well automated and it shows in the price and their ability to deliver cars at volume. Maybe they will improve that over time, but that's like saying maybe RedHat will make a desktop OS that displaces Windows and OSX, it's possible if they do the hard part - which they haven't been able to do so far. The hardest part about being a car company is building the cars.
- anordal 7y agoMeanwhile, the number of teslas in Norway passes 50 000: https://www.tu.no/artikler/na-har-tesla-solgt-50-000-biler-i-norge/487010 https://www.tu.no/artikler/na-har-tesla-solgt-50-000-biler-i...
- baluicu 7y agodfsd
- baluicu 7y agoOmg, Milestone reached https://www.posterdp.com/tesla-cars/ https://www.posterdp.com/tesla-cars/
- jerome-jh 7y agoOver the last year? Oh no, in its entire lifetime. Still it is valued more than many traditional manufacturers, and there is no mystery tech in building an EV.
- RickJWagner 7y agoI am surprised. A few short months ago, many were writing Tesla's obituary. (Mostly in the financial news. Maybe it was an attempt to manipulate the stock price.) I'm glad to see this. Keep rocking, Tesla!
- dusted 7y agoI'm impressed there's so few, they're everywhere these days..