from the business-is-business-and-business-is-good dept.
Tesla produced 102,672 vehicles in the first quarter of 2020 and delivered 88,400 vehicles to customers, the company announced to investors on Thursday. While the delivery number is down from the previous quarter, the overall results were better than analysts had expected, sending Tesla's stock up more than 10 percent in after-hours trading.
"Our Shanghai factory continued to achieve record levels of production, despite significant setbacks," Tesla said in its Thursday release.
The results are particularly impressive in light of the ongoing coronavirus crisis. Ford, which also announced Q1 sales numbers today, blamed the coronavirus for a 12-percent year-over-year decline in sales. Presumably, economic uncertainty about the coronavirus discouraged some people from buying Tesla vehicles in March. Despite that, Tesla's deliveries for the quarter grew 40 percent from a year earlier.
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Report: Tesla plans to build a new car factory in Texas:
Elon Musk's recent clashes with officials in Alameda County, home of Tesla's Fremont factory, may have given him a heightened sense of urgency to find Tesla's next US factory. On Friday, several news outlets reported that Tesla was narrowing in on a new location to build the Model Y crossover and Tesla's forthcoming Cybertruck.
The reports started with Electrek, a pro-Tesla site whose co-founder Fred Lambert has good connections inside the company. Just before 3pm Eastern time, Lambert reported that Tesla had settled on Austin, Texas as the site of its next factory.
"We are told that the decision for the site is not set in stone since Tesla was apparently given a few options in the greater Austin area," Lambert wrote. "But Musk is said to want to start construction extremely soon and aims to have Model Y vehicles coming out of the plant by the end of the year."
That would be a remarkably short amount of time for any car company to build a new factory from scratch. Last year, it took Tesla almost a year to build its Shanghai factory—and that was considered unusually fast.
Nikola Unveils Three Reservation Packages for the Badger Electric Pickup Truck
Nikola, the manufacturer of an electric version of the heavy-truck, experienced a phenomenal bull run last week, prompted by the news of an imminent opening of reservations for the much-anticipated Badger electric pickup truck. Today, Nikola Motors tweeted further details regarding the seminal event, currently slated for the 27th of June.
[...] The first Nikola Badger reservation package will cost $250 and will entail a $500 discount applicable to the Badger's MSRP – expected to vary between $60,000 and $90,000. The package also contains a ticket to the Nikola World 2020 in order to view the Badger in-person. Finally, the package will entail 2 entries into a ballot for the Badger giveaway.
[...] As a refresher, Nikola unveiled the Badger electric pickup truck back in February 2020 to compete with Tesla's much-anticipated Cybertruck. According to the details revealed by the company, the Badger will retail in two power configurations: an FCEV (Fuel-Cell Electric) or BEV (Battery-Electric). Though it sports a much more conventional design as opposed to the Cybertruck's sharp corners and the futuristic vibe, the Badger offers impressive specs. As an illustration, the electric truck will offer a headline range of 600 miles through either of the two power configurations. Moreover, it will offer an acceleration from 0 to 60 mph in 2.9 seconds, a torque of up to 980 pounds-feet, and a peak horsepower of 906.
Previously: Nikola Semi Startup Shines on Wall Street With $34BN Valuation
Related: Nikola Corporation to Unveil Game-Changing Battery Cell Technology at Nikola World 2020
Tesla Unveils "Cybertruck"
Budweiser Brewer Makes First Beer Delivery With Nikola Semi Truck
146,000 Preorders for Tesla's Cybertruck in 48 Hours
Tesla Beats Expectations with Strong First-Quarter Delivery Numbers
Tesla's Robotaxi Fleet Will be 'Functionally Ready' in 2020, Musk Says
(Score: 2, Interesting) by khallow on Saturday April 04 2020, @06:44AM (23 children)
(Score: 2, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 04 2020, @10:33AM (7 children)
He had to be dragged kicking and screaming to shut down the Fremont factory.
Won't give him a hand, just a middle finger.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 04 2020, @04:58PM
fuck you, you suck ass bitch.
(Score: 1) by negrace on Saturday April 04 2020, @05:11PM
Exactly. fElon declared both SpaceX and making luxury cars essential businesses and violated the stay-at-home orders.
(Score: 2, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 04 2020, @07:33PM (4 children)
Fuck working people, fuck our competitiveness, we gotta shut the country down so the boomers have a better chance to survive this winter.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 05 2020, @12:21AM (3 children)
You should check out the actual odds of people in your age bracket dying from the virus. Are you ready to roll the dice on that so you can be "competitive"?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 05 2020, @12:28AM (2 children)
You mean the odds of somebody my age dying based on real probability (dead / infected) or MSM propaganda probability (dead / sick enough to seek help)? Based on real probability, I roll the dice every year I've lived.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 05 2020, @12:37AM
((underreported amount of dead + people who are going to die of Wu Flu soon) / (underreported amount of infected))
The infected are in your area code, coughing on all of the groceries.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 05 2020, @12:51AM
Probably informative to show CDC values for US cases here:
Covid-19: 6593 dead / 277205 cases
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/cases-updates/cases-in-us.html [cdc.gov]
The regular flu: 62000 dead / 26000000 medical visits (max estimates)
https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/preliminary-in-season-estimates.htm [cdc.gov]
Seems quite comparable, except for the apparent lower case count for Covid-19 at the end of cold season.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Saturday April 04 2020, @03:44PM (13 children)
You're looking for Jobs.... Steve Jobs.
Take a top 5% intellect, top 1% psychopathy (doesn't care what others think about them, or what effect they have on others at a personal level), top 0.01% fortuitous placements and connections, and adequate financial backing to do whatever the fuck they want.
If you're missing the intellect component be careful, you might end up with another Trump.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday April 04 2020, @07:50PM (12 children)
Multiple successes while others in similar "fortuitous placements and connections" can't manage to do anything other than lose money, indicates to me that you're missing factors.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 04 2020, @08:32PM (11 children)
> ... missing factors
How about luck and timing?
(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday April 04 2020, @08:42PM (10 children)
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Saturday April 04 2020, @08:58PM (9 children)
Not to detract from Musk/Jobs, but in a pool of 2 million punters, hitting that 1/125 shot three times is going to happen by simple luck for one of them.
The successful CEOs / investors I have had drinks with almost all say: "It was luck, the only skill I displayed was not screwing up more than the average bear." (and, the ones who haven't have displayed plenty of insecure posturing.) Certainly idiots in positions of opportunity can squander the opportunity, but the smartest / most talented people in the world aren't going to go anywhere without some lucky breaks.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday April 04 2020, @09:15PM (8 children)
In other words, you threw away part of your data set.
The danger isn't just downplaying the skills of the "smartest/most talented" people, but also destroying those lucky breaks. Personally, I don't care whether success is due to the person or to the circumstances. I want more of them. So how to do that? One way to get more such is to reward it amply such as allowing the alleged lucky one to keep what they gained. One way to get less is to tax it to oblivion.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by JoeMerchant on Saturday April 04 2020, @11:23PM (7 children)
Interesting thing about that data set -the ones I threw away were mostly wanna-bes on their way up. The old guys, retirees who made companies grow 100x into multi-billion valuations - they consistently had grown out of the bravado of "how great I am."
Oh, I do. When it's all luck and no talent: Trump. I want less of them.
So fucking irrelevant. That's not rewarding anything that motivates talent, that's rewarding psychopathic desires for control. Again, less of that would be better for my world.
Allegedly. Centuries of tax havens ridiculously friendly to the super wealthy in the third world haven't done much to build up their collections of captains of industry.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday April 05 2020, @12:27AM (6 children)
So you claim. What evidence supports your claim? I find the amateur pop psychology interesting as well though as usual one hasn't actually established that the alleged "desires" are psychopathic or a bad idea even if the allegations were true. It's just asserted.
Since Steve Jobs was brought up, I'll talk about him a little. First, note he also helped found Pixar - so that is another 1 in 125 event on his part. As to Apple, Jobs turned around a failing company (in 2007), and created 40k more jobs plus 100+k jobs in the supply chain (mostly in the developing world) for useful products like the iPhone. People who rant about psychopathic desires tend to forget such things.
I think the point here is not rewarding psychopathic desires, but to show the power of systems that reward people for creating and growing capital. In the case of Steve Jobs, he created several businesses that ended up greatly shaping our culture and communication technology. In the case of Elon Musk, his reward for creating Paypal, allowed him in turn to create two of the most remarkable industrial businesses of the past half century.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Sunday April 05 2020, @02:14AM (5 children)
Great, so let's find better ways to reward people than giving them giant Scrooge McDuck piles of cash to swim in.
>Steve Jobs died on October 5, 2011. At the time of his death, his net worth was $10.2 billion. Of that $10.2 billion, $8 billion came from his Disney stake, "only" around $2 billion came from Apple.
and he wasn't entirely sure what to do with it all, you can only commission so many yachts.
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2012/10/steve-jobs-custom-aluminum-hulled-super-yacht-venus-now-seaworthy/ [arstechnica.com]
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday April 05 2020, @02:52AM (4 children)
I guess you missed the bit where those piles of cash were used to create multiple companies. Some people will swim in their piles of cash and some will create businesses that better our societies.
And this "we can get them cheaper" smells like the games employers often play to pay employees less. Maybe that CEO will settle for half a giant Scrooge McDuck and free ping pong? Five star chefs in the company cafeteria? Teach every highschooler to be a CEO?
So what?
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Sunday April 05 2020, @03:10AM (3 children)
And what did Jobs create with his billions? His investments in early Pixar, while no doubt critical to their success, were relatively miniscule.
There's nothing magic about CEOs, and no reason they need massive compensation. Of the Forbes 500 richest, how many of them have turned their wealth directly into innovative new companies? Roll down the list to the 5000-5500 and you'll find just as much innovation and drive to make new and better stuff, probably more.
You may not like big government - I like big individuals/corporations with more power than governments even less.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday April 05 2020, @03:37AM (2 children)
You've already partially answered your own question with the investments in early Pixar. There's also Next Computer.
Aside, of course, from the massive repercussions of a bad CEO.
Like who? So what if you dislike something that is purely imaginary?
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Sunday April 05 2020, @12:33PM (1 child)
And you're ignoring the point: he didn't have Billions when he did either of those things, not even close.
Most of the best ideas are executed with other people's money. Yeah, it's a bureaucratic pain in the ass to have investors and a board of directors, but it's the way that the vast majority of businesses, including innovative disruptive tech, gets done.
Give me billions or I'll do a bad job? There's plenty of talent out there, most of the good ones won't throw a tantrum and go play golf if they don't get enough compensation to buy a new private island every month. If they're that high maintenance, odds are someone else would do their job better anyway.
W. Bush invading Iraq for his oil money handlers was not imagination, that was death and maiming of US soldiers and Iraqi civilians on a massive scale to serve the interests of money, not the people. And that's just one example, every year the interests of the people are subverted by the interests of big moneyed individuals and corporations in our legislatures, executive offices, and courts.
If government follows the will of the big-moneyed entities, how are the big-moneyed entities not more powerful than government?
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday April 05 2020, @03:09PM
I don't think there is a point to ignore here. You've already done the work. Moving on.
Or I don't work for your crappy, high stress problem. And who's getting paid billions for that? Jobs's wealth was due to his investments not his CEO activities. He was a founder of Apple, Next Computer, and Pixar. That includes capital investment.
That's an excellent example of the purely imaginary blaming "oil money" for someone else. Oil money doesn't care who's in charge in Iraq. They get their cut no matter if the oil is sold in petrodollars or Euros. But the military-industrial complex gets a huge piece of the action, if a war goes down. And you neglect the role ideology played in this - a bunch of nutty people who thought that they could conquer the Middle East into a better place. Finally, there is the pragmatic. For all the damage done to Iraq at that point, there was no way to ensure with Hussein's government that Iraq wouldn't be a nuclear weapon-powered problem in a decade or two with likely proliferation of nuclear weapons likely past that. I think that's what tipped the scale, certainly for the allies who joined in on it.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Saturday April 04 2020, @08:39PM
Jobs was also.
The people who rely on government handouts and refuse to work should be kicked out of congress.
(Score: 1, Disagree) by negrace on Saturday April 04 2020, @01:30PM (2 children)
Except Tesla sells cars to itself. So their sales numbers are garbage.
They have been caught selling cars to themselves at least in Canada, Norway, and China.
Oh, and they do not disclose when they call a car "delivered".
For example, they count cars with "resale value guarantee" as delivered. (Fleet buyer use this option, and then they can return the car a few years later).
Yet you never find in their accounting reports how many cars exactly were sold with RVG.
Oh, and they keep changing the definition of a "delivery" every time quarter without disclosing it.
They had "financially delivered", "factory gated delivered", etc. Just ignore their numbers, they cannot be trusted anyways.
All companies dress their numbers, and Tesla is one of the leaders in that, lol.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday April 04 2020, @03:06PM
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 05 2020, @12:05AM
Exactly this!
And how long can Tesla continue the Apple products fraud? Selling already obsolete technology to the stupid and then producing the next best thing six months later.
Tesla cannot be trusted to give correct numbers. They want to get big as soon as possible so no one would question their fraud. It is the little guy that gets the guillotine.
(Score: 1) by negrace on Saturday April 04 2020, @01:32PM (1 child)
http://taiwanenglishnews.com/tesla-catches-fire-after-crash-driver-dies/ [taiwanenglishnews.com]
(Score: 3, Touché) by bzipitidoo on Sunday April 05 2020, @03:06AM
Gasoline powered cars burn too. They can burn sort of like, you know, a fire that's had gasoline poured on it. The Ford Pinto was infamous for its fire and explosion prone gas tank. A decade ago, half a dozen GM models were recalled, twice, to fix issues that caused fires. Seems in certain conditions, oil would leak onto the hot exhaust manifold.
It's funny how people demand perfection of a new tech, instead of merely equal or slightly better performance. An anecdote is not much use. Do Teslas catch fire more or less often than GM cars?
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Phoenix666 on Saturday April 04 2020, @04:35PM (9 children)
I really hope Tesla weathers this storm well. I invested in the company more than a decade ago and have not been disappointed; if they recover to targets set by analysts before coronavirus I can retire.
Much more than that, though, I think it's critically important for human civilization to get away from fossil fuels. One, they're disrupting the Earth's climate in dangerous and unpredictable ways; that's gonna cause problems in human affairs. Two, they've been key drivers in armed conflicts throughout the last century. Three, supply disruptions and gluts are difficult to plan around, economically speaking.
Personally speaking, right now I'm quite glad there's an electric car at the inlaws' house where we're riding this thing out. It can't easily carry us thousands of miles across the country, but it can preserve a degree of mobility in case the gas stations run dry like they did during the last hurricane. Also, even with the relatively low price of gas now, electricity is still much cheaper and every dollar counts in a depression. (I wish I had also convinced them to switch to solar panels also, but alas that has been a bridge too far for them.) Putting a Tesla in every garage will get other families to the same level of security.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 1) by negrace on Saturday April 04 2020, @04:52PM (5 children)
Sure, convince as many as you can to convert to Tesla solar.
Highly recommend this story: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/episode-8-tiffanyphoto1-tesla-solar-victim/id1491394342?i=1000464110113 [apple.com]
There are dozens like that lady.
Tesla cannot die soon enough. There is enough great innovation from existing automakers (hybrids, hydrogen cells, etc).
Tesla is just destroying capital and endangering people on public roads with their idiotic autopilot.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday April 04 2020, @08:44PM
Sounds like you might not be an unbiased source!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 04 2020, @08:45PM (2 children)
"There is enough great innovation"
lol those are some truly innovative words you strung together.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday April 05 2020, @01:04AM (1 child)
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday April 05 2020, @03:38AM
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Sunday April 05 2020, @12:01PM
Hardly. My brother is an engineer in Ford's advanced research division. He's exactly the guy who would be doing your "great innovation from existing automakers." At the moment he's being asked to build ventilators and cussing up a storm because they don't know anything about medical equipment, but usually he laments how backward Ford and its fellows are and dreams of going to work for Tesla instead.
Sure, he's one guy, but of all possible such individuals he's exactly the guy in the sort of place you're looking for, and he does not support your claim.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 04 2020, @07:46PM (2 children)
Jeez, eggs and baskets. Especially on a lifestyle brand like Tesla.
I threw some casino money into their stock last June. Sold half at 450 in December, and the rest at 920 in February. Yeah, I wasn't disappointed, but this unprofitable company going over 900 was just absurd.
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Sunday April 05 2020, @03:33AM (1 child)
Lifestyle brand? Are you kidding, or do you just not want to get it? Tesla has demonstrated that the gasoline powered car is toast. 100,000 electric cars would never have been made if they didn't work, and work well. And now Tesla is banging out near that quantity every quarter. Whatever fudging of the numbers anyone can do cannot conceal such large quantities.
By 2030, gasoline powered cars will be the minority, if not completely gone. The corner gas station is going down with them. I expect a tipping point and collapse of the whole gasoline powered transportation infrastructure some time in the 2030s. Could be even sooner. Part of that collapse could be a massive shrinkage of dealerships, because people will need new cars far less often, as the battery electric is much, much more reliable. 2009 saw the collapse of CRTs, after a decade of slow but steady improvement of the flatscreen. At the start of 2009, the store shelves were about 50% tube TVs and monitors, by the end of 2009, the tubes were all gone. Now flatscreens are better in almost every way. I expect the same with gasoline vs electric car.
And it has nothing to do with Global Warming. The battery electric car would win the contest even if there was no such thing as Global Warming.
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Sunday April 05 2020, @12:11PM
Also Elon Musk is a deep strategic thinker. When building Tesla he realized a key objection would be, "But where will I recharge my car, Oh NOES..." so he built the supercharger network to go with it. He realized that they were going to be refining the cars so rapidly that they made it possible to send over-the-air software updates to the cars already on the road; no other car maker would ever have thought of that. When other carmakers started to work on their own EVs, Elon built the gigafactory to keep up with the demand for batteries and thus eliminate that supply bottleneck. He also started the home solar company (which, admittedly, they did fold back into Tesla), because he realized that charging at home would be increasingly a thing.
He has also fundamentally disrupted the auto industry. Every other car maker out there is scrambling to chase Tesla. It's been several years in a row that the Tesla Model S has outsold the flagship, keeping-the-lights-on models of BMW and Mercedes combined. Last fall when they unveiled the cybertruck my brother, an engineer at Ford, laughed and said they shit the bed on that one, and I thought, "famous last words;" BMW and Mercedes thought their cash cows were unassailable, too.
Yes, this is an important point. EVs drive better and are easier to maintain. Those are key advantages no matter what the climate is doing. Personally, I also like that they're building those cars in the United States and employing Americans. It matters.
Washington DC delenda est.