Bob Lutz, car-guy-to-the-max, former VP of GM and Chrysler, with time at BMW before that, wrote this recent article --
http://www.roadandtrack.com/car-culture/a26859/bob-lutz-tesla/
The opening paragraph is gloomy:
Tesla's showing all the signs of a company in trouble: bleeding cash, securitized assets, and mounting inventory. It's the trifecta of doom for any automaker, and anyone paying attention probably saw this coming a mile away. Like most big puzzles, the company's woes don't have just one source.
and the prognosis goes downhill from there mentioning competition from Audi, the lack of enough dealers to attract more buyers and other problems.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Friday October 30 2015, @11:32PM
The main reason I hate shutting the plant down, is things never start up smoothly. Two weeks ago, it was the air compressor, last month it was the cooling tower, also last month one of the machines lost it's memory. The robots sometimes spaz out. It's always something at startup time, large or small. First shift loses at least a half hour of production, they might lose half the shift if things don't settle down. To much humidity in the plastic is a very common problem. First shift maintenance comes in three hours early to turn the dryers on, and that is just not enough.
Ehhh - I can't tell them how to run the plant, but some of this stuff should be so obvious. It's better to staff the plant with a skeleton crew, producing the minimum, just to keep everything running, than to shut down and start up again.
(Score: 2) by DECbot on Saturday October 31 2015, @02:34AM
Compared to automotive, semiconductor startup after a fab slowdown is much worse. Years ago back when I was still in semiconductors, our customer idled their dram/nand flash plant for the month of December to clear some of their inventory and ideally save some cash. Since production was slow, none of the equipment had any of its PMs due (after XXX runs do pm yyy). So once production started ramping up again, every thing was failing for particles, requiring reactive maintenance for everything and it took about 3 months before the fab started running smoothly again. So much for saving money.
cats~$ sudo chown -R us /home/base