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Auto production is hard:
Having racked up its first quarter of burning through more than $1 billion of cash in the three months ending in June, Tesla topped that with $1.4 billion of negative free cash flow in the third quarter. In the past two quarters, therefore, Tesla has burned through more cash than the previous six combined. More importantly, it has burned through roughly four out of every five of the $3.2 billion dollars it has raised since late March through selling new equity and convertible debt and its debut in the high-yield bond market.
Consequently, debt has soared. Even just using debt with recourse to the company, on a net basis it has almost tripled since the start of the year to $3.36 billion.This would matter less if the primary objective of sucking in most of that external funding -- mass production of the Model 3 -- was fast approaching. Instead, it has receded further.
When Musk first talked about production targets for the Model 3 in 2016, they implied Tesla would be producing roughly 3,800 to 7,600 a week in the second half of 2017. By July of this year, Musk was guiding toward production hitting about 5,000 a week by the end of December. I estimated at the time that this implied a second-half average of maybe 1,400 a week.
Now, Musk estimates production might hit 5,000 a week by the end of the first quarter of 2018. As for this year, it might be in "the thousands" by the time New Year's Eve rolls around. He refused to say what the current run rate was. But I would estimate Tesla will be lucky to produce 10,000 Model 3 vehicles in total this year, or an average of 400 a week for the second half -- roughly 5 to 10 percent of the original guidance. As for the earlier target of 10,000 a week in 2018 ...
Also at NYT and MarketWatch.
Previously: Tesla Adds Lots of Certified Pre-Owned Model S Vehicles for Under $40,000 with New Warranty
Time to Bash Tesla Model 3
Tesla Reportedly Teaming Up With AMD for Custom AI Chip
Tesla Fires Hundreds of Employees
(Score: 3, Informative) by realDonaldTrump on Friday November 03 2017, @11:02AM (1 child)
So true. Our national parks are a DISASTER. #Infrastructure in horrible condition. We're raising the entrance fees. So we'll have money to rebuild. And Yellowstone may have oil under it. So we can open it up to our oil companies. They get the oil, we get the money, we rebuild the grid, your electric car gets charged in the park. There you are driving your electric in Yellowstone, looking amazingly environmental, but our great oil industry has a big hand in it. Everybody wins.
We can do the same thing in Florida, in the Everglades. As Michele Bachmann said. I'll tell you, she would be a terrible President. But she had a very smart idea. Get American oil & gas flowing, so we don't have to import as much from Russia, China and Venezuela.
And the Grand Canyon has uranium. As you know, Jeff Flake and John McCain are disgusting. I call them traitors to the party. Or maybe they're just morons. To be perfectly honest with you, it's probably both. But they listened to our great mining companies. The mining companies gave some big donations, so they listened. And they said, let our miners get that uranium out. I'm very glad it happened. Because right now, we need all the uranium we can get. For our nuclear, for our nuclear energy & our arsenal. Some people will say, "Oh, no nukes! Please Mr. President, no nukes!" These are foolish people. I am the first one that would like to see nobody have nukes, but we’re never going to fall behind any country. Even if it’s a friendly country, we’re never going to fall behind on nuclear power. It would be wonderful, a dream would be that no country would have nukes, but if countries are going to have nukes, we’re going to be at the top of the pack. The United States must greatly strengthen and expand its nuclear capability until such time as the world comes to its senses regarding nukes. We've fallen behind on nuclear weapon capacity. And the Uranium One deal isn't helping. Crooked Hillary really put us behind the eight ball on that one. So uranium is very precious to us right now.
A couple of years ago, Senator Murkowski, one of our great Republican Senators (with great legs), tried to do something called SA 838. Which had a lot of support in our Senate. And what it would do is, we could sell our national forests, wildlife refuges & wildernesses. SA 838 would let us sell them. For some reason -- very complicated -- we can't sell our national parks, monuments or preserves. But if we do SA 838, we can sell the other. If we have the votes. We will have the votes. We need to get rid of the Filibuster Rule.
And Senator Hatch from Utah had a very smart idea. We can't sell our national monuments, but I can make them smaller. Orrin comes to me, he asks me to shrink the Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante national monuments out in Utah. And I approved his recommendation. @SecretaryZinke got some tremendous comments on that. Amazing support from the American people! Who I always, always put first. Grand Staircase-Escalante was created by President Clinton, by Bill Clinton. Not very long ago, not long at all. And Bears Ears was created by President Obama. Last December, right before he quit. Believe me, I stand for protecting our heritage, our history, our beautiful statues and monuments. 100 percent. We must #NeverForget the Civil War. But these monuments aren't very old at all. Not even as old as Ivanka. When she was 17, I made a deal with her. She made me promise, swear to her that I would never date a girl younger than her. And if these monuments were girls, I couldn't date them. They're very new. And they were as big as Connecticut! INAPPROPRIATE. A big mess for me to clean up. #MAGA 🇺🇸
(Score: 2) by realDonaldTrump on Tuesday November 07 2017, @09:30AM
Puerto Rico also has a shitty grid. It FAILED before Hurricane Maria even arrived. And it will cost a lot to fix. Thinking of charging an admission fee to Puerto Rico! 🇺🇸