After record quarterly loss, Tesla's Elon Musk tells reporters that "boring bonehead questions are not cool"

boing
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Tesla has a huge margin for mistakes but is squandering it because of Musk’s hubris. Adding in the Autopilot is an act of sheer lunacy - your car is already experimental, the batteries by themselves are dangerous enough, no need to simultaneously try to solve one of the greatest open hard problems in technology today. Even worse is the attempt at 100% line automation in production (i.e., 0% labor costs), a fantasy technology that does not exist and that the auto industry has been unable to produce for decades.

Meanwhile, Detroit has figured out how to make electrics and is cranking them out by the thousands: http://www.buzzsmith.us/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/sales-chart.jpg

If Musk does not let go of his ego, focus on his company’s core competency (auto engineering) and work on using existing solutions to get Teslas made, within a few years he will have missed the boat despite having jump-started this whole industry ten years ago.

But I suspect he is going to keep on burning through cash until someone else comes and takes the reins from his hands, or Tesla burns to the ground.

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Whenever possible, thanks!

That completely neglects the effect Tesla has had (and continues to have) in pushing the industry to market EVs. Without Tesla, it’s unlikely any mainstream car companies would have marketed a full EV. None have marketed a mainstream EV. The Bolt, Volt, Leaf, Golf E, etc. are all city cars with unworkable range for most Americans. The Model S, Model X, and Model 3 are real, desirable cars. If Tesla gets gobbled up, the pressure on the rest of the industry to make mainstream EVs goes away. With the administration rolling back the steep future CAFE standards, that goes double.

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That might explain a lot about the far right in the tech industry

Bonehead can refer to:

As a derogatory term:

White power skinhead (used by punk rockers and Skinheads Against Racial Prejudice)

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Sorry, quite right.

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Sorry, my mistake, you are quite right. Revenue.

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An the kid got to ask ten questions.

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Indeed.

I’m a (very small-fish) Tesla investor, and their cash-flow figures are about where I’d expect them to be at this stage of the game. See the chart of “Tesla’s Free Cash Flow” that @Jandrese posted upstream in this thread, and see if you notice a pattern. (-:

Moreover, I’ve always seen Tesla as a high-risk, high-return play with a fairly long time horizon. I expect cashing out my Tesla stock to make a nice bump in my retirement income — but I didn’t bet my retirement on it.

And I’ve gotta say, Elon has been a whole lot more polite than I ever would have been to the crew of dimwitted pundits and grifters who infest public stock ‘analysis’.

My investments are always well-researched, and I’ve often found analyst advice to be surprisingly clueless, but the Tesla ‘analysis’ has truly opened my eyes to what a laughable charade most of it is.

Most of them can’t see past the tips of their own noses, and half of them haven’t even bothered to read the company mission statement. Bunch of useless blather, IMnvHO.

(N.B.: If you’re a day trader looking to make bets on which way a long-established company in a mature, stable industry will twitch over the next quarter, their advice is probably marginally better than using dartboards and flipping coins — but anything outside that zone, forget it.)

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If it was such a waste of his time shouldn’t he take his own advice and walk out?

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No, not yet.

But don’t underestimate Blue Origin. Their approach is very different from SpaceX, because they have a very different business model (i.e., Jeff liquidates a billion a year in Amazon stock, and gives it to Blue Origin. And there’s more if they need it. ).

This permits a very different path to development, since they have no need to fly customers, or to partner with NASA, or to impress investors, until they already have a working, well-proven system.

And they’re well on their way.

The “New Shepard” suborbital vehicle has served as a testbed to validate:

  1. A unique new hydrolox engine capable of serving as a high-energy second or third-stage engine for an orbital launcher, or as main engine for a retropulsive lunar lander, in addition to its current role as primary propulsion for a suborbital tourist vehicle.

  2. High-precision retropulsive landing techniques for use on Earth with New Glenn’s large reusable orbital booster, or, with future vehicles, on the moon or other planetary bodies.

  3. A novel biconic composite pressure vessel for a manned spacecraft .

  4. A novel pusher abort system that allows re-use of unused escape rockets instead of discarding them with every flight.

  5. Life-support systems for a crewed capsule.

  6. An greatly improved version of the traditional Soyuz “a series of explosions followed by a car crash” system (-: for landing a crew capsule on land with parachutes and retro-rockets.

In addition to New Shepard, they’ve also built and tested a new large methalox engine, a pair of which will (most likely) power ULA’s new Vulcan launcher, and seven of which will power New Glenn’s first stage.

They’ve already accomplished far more than any private launcher start-up other than SpaceX, and they still have (essentially) limitless funds to complete their projects, with no need for any sort of revenue until they’re operational.

They also have no need to set deadlines, aspirational or otherwise. They’ll fly when they’re ready, and not before.

(And when they do, I expect the results will be very, very impressive.)

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If the Bolt and Leaf qualify as unworkable niche products Tesla is in even worse trouble because the leaf is outselling most of Tesla’s line https://arstechnica.com/cars/2018/01/2017-was-the-best-year-ever-for-electric-vehicle-sales-in-the-us/ Not to mention Nissan has shown the ability to turn a profit somewhat reliably.

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Thx for the reply. And in a decidedly civil tone. Much appreciated. I’m a fan of anything that gets us ‘out there’ asap. It’s a great big universe. Plenty of room for multiple private space flight companies. Just wait until they start prospecting water and various metals and fun stuff.

Amazing to me that Rs want to fund giant $1B a pop throwaway rockets when we are clearly undergoing a revolution in much cheaper reusable rockets. Gotta waste that money somehow I suppose.

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Volume of sales does not a compelling product make. Nissan is practically giving the Leaf away with cheap leases. It’s range is ridiculously small in practice. I took one for a test drive. A 2.1 mile trip from the dealership to the highway, one exit and back dropped the range from 70 miles to 35 miles. Non-starter, except as a means for Nissan to massively bump up their CAFE scores to counterbalance an aged, gas-guzzling V6 and oversized V8 trucks.

From what I can tell, the major automotive manufacturers keep starting from the basic building blocks of a ICE-powered car, and retrofit electric drive and batteries into it. Tesla has the huge advantage of starting from a blank slate and designing an EV from the start, to take full advantage of the technology and avoid the disadvantages.

I recognize that this is highly subjective, but to me, every other EV that’s been put forward by the industry is a shitty car. They are all ugly, tiny, weak-ass cars, and they would still be if they were gas powered. Every Tesla is a compelling vehicle - design, interior, functionality, performance - even if they were gas powered. That tells me two things: the rest of the industry is only reluctantly embracing EVs, and if Tesla went away tomorrow, progress in that direction would come to a screeching halt.

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Niche products =/= “unworkable”.

There are plenty of successful niche products in the automotive market.

But the fact that some of these niche products are outselling “most of Tesla’s line” — most of which (a high-performance two-seat roadster, and luxe high-end “executive” sedan and SUV) are ALSO “niche products”

Only the (not-yet-produced-in-volume) Model 3 is a “mainstream” car.

And this is exactly the outcome Tesla has always intended. The whole point of the early luxe machines was to completely alter the perception of electric vehicles from “wimpy golf cart” to sexy, desirable high-performance status-symbol.

And they succeeded at that. So now major auto manufacturers all over the world are scrambling to field their own electric vehicles.

Which was what was intended. Tesla doesn’t see new entrants in the EV market as “competition” so much as newly-recruited co-conspirators. Because, as Elon has said,

the overarching purpose of Tesla Motors (and the reason I am funding the company) is to help expedite the move from a mine-and-burn hydrocarbon economy towards a solar electric economy, which I believe to be the primary, but not exclusive, sustainable solution.

–Elon Musk, The Secret Tesla Motors Master Plan (just between you and me), Tesla blog, August 2, 2006.

Almost everyone wants a slice of the EV pie, but the pie is getting bigger at a prodigious rate. (Before Tesla, there wasn’t really any pie. )

Tesla can’t possibly hope to service the rapidly-growing demand for EVs all by themselves. All the big auto companies need to pitch in.

So yeah, ‘growing competition.’ Bring it on, says Tesla. That’s what they’ve always wanted.

(I really do recommend that anyone who really wants to understand Tesla start with the 2006 Secret Plan mentioned above, and follow up with the ten-year update, Master Plan, Part Deux, from 2016. It’s a lot more than just a car company.)

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Perhaps he earned a lot of overtime pay while he was organising the coverup of the My Lai massacre.

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In between the Iraq Yellow Cake bullshit. But I was talking about back in the day when he wasn’t a known entity outside the Pentagon. After bringing that up I thought he was born to wealth, but nope. Hope for his sake it was book sales, because otherwise shady AF,

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So many of my hopes for the future are tied up in Elon Musk. I definitely want a Model 3 when the right hand drives are made and are a few years old second hand in New Zealand. And I’d love to invest a bit of money once the mortgage is paid off this year.

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Chairman of the Joint Chiefs gets apretty healthy cheque every other week, plus approx the same in retirement, plus membership of boards, etc.

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Luckily there are a bunch of car companies who are making them. I dont really believe Tesla will be one of them.

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Nearly every American family with 2-3 cars could replace one of its ICE cars with a city car EV, right now. We could, and would, today, if we did not already have two cars which are in very good condition and all paid for.

But if I did want to do so today, I would not be looking at Tesla, due to price and marginal build quality. (edit: and doubts about long-term manufacturer support -we tend to keep our cars for a decade)