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tooth
Trad climber
B.C.
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Oh yeah. How how could I forget. Fl and Elon are Satan. Ha ha! Listen to yourselves!
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Brokedownclimber
Trad climber
Douglas, WY
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Mar 12, 2018 - 08:31pm PT
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I'm ready to go! The weightlessness will relieve all my arthritic joints. My new business will be making Martian Mist from the carbon Dioxide atmosphere; purest ethanol, a Martian Vodka of highest quality. What Moose and I don't drink ourselves, we'll share with the Earthlings for $5000 a 750 ml bottle. Same as a superior grade Cognac.
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Chaz
Trad climber
greater Boss Angeles area
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Mar 30, 2018 - 07:06am PT
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Musk is launching another one of his st00pid rockets from Vandenberg in about 5 minutes.
7:13 am Yosemite Valley Time.
Look west and up.
http://www.spacex.com/webcast
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Reilly
Mountain climber
The Other Monrovia- CA
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Mar 30, 2018 - 08:09am PT
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Moody’s has downgraded Tesla’s credit rating to B3, one step from junk bond.
The shell game approaches its inevitable conclusion, but flashy rocket shows
are a nice distraction.
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10b4me
Social climber
Lida Junction
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Mar 30, 2018 - 08:18am PT
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damn it, where's my car?
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Reilly
Mountain climber
The Other Monrovia- CA
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Mar 31, 2018 - 01:57pm PT
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Moosie is standing strong with his Tesla stock. He’s gonna ride it like Major T. J. "King" Kong.
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MikeL
Social climber
Southern Arizona
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Mar 31, 2018 - 09:44pm PT
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Majid_S: Elon Musk is f*#king idiot with a company that has bad reputations among workrs
That's what I've heard from more than one quarter. I used to teach a case study on Musk & Tesla. I also have a close friend who's a scientist there. He calls Musk a sociopath.
Musk has had great difficulties making production deadlines, and keeping senior managers--especially in those functions . . . sort of like the POS.
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Reilly
Mountain climber
The Other Monrovia- CA
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Apr 15, 2018 - 10:17pm PT
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Hopefully the hyped-loop will have the unexpected benefit of instantaneous sterility.
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Majid_S
Mountain climber
Karkoekstan, Former USSR
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Apr 17, 2018 - 09:31pm PT
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wait till Chinese car company sells similar model car in the US for half price. Your stock will worth 1/3
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tooth
Trad climber
B.C.
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Apr 18, 2018 - 06:16am PT
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Got my Tesla last month. Can't say I'll ever buy another ICE. It snowed a foot here yesterday, northern BC, and the thing handles better with summer tires on the subsequent ice roads than my Subaru or Tundra 4wd did with not winters, but ice tires.
Convenience of not standing out in the cold to fill up with gas, or make gas stops at all. Sub 4.5s 0-60 is fun. More room to sleep in the back with the seats folded down than my 4Runner had and about the same as my Outback. But I can keep the climate control on all night if I want. There is a reason people like the product! Supply and demand. The demand is high for a reason, now I know why. The supply is well, higher than all legacy automaker's BEV production combined.
They got up to 4270 BEV's made last week, and no inventory left unsold. I wish my company could increase production at that rate. Or even have more than a week's production on the schedule.
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tooth
Trad climber
B.C.
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Apr 18, 2018 - 06:25am PT
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wait till Chinese car company sells similar model car in the US for half price. Your stock will worth 1/3
You mean 2/3. The fact that China has no respect for anyone else's intellectual property is already factored into the stock price. And 1/3 of Tesla is electric cars, 1/3 is electric production, 1/3 is electric storage. So make the cars worth 0 since we already know that anytime China makes a knockoff it overtakes 100% of the market, even the luxury market, isn't that right?
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Reilly
Mountain climber
The Other Monrovia- CA
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Apr 18, 2018 - 07:52am PT
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Today’s LA Times:
Musk has second thoughts on aggressive automation for Tesla Model 3
By RUSS MITCHELL. APR 17, 2018
In early 2017, Elon Musk told stock analysts that Tesla Inc.'s goal "is to be the best manufacturer on Earth." He'd get there by inventing a factory so dense with robots and devoid of human beings it would resemble an "alien dreadnaught" video game warship.
Speed, he's said, "is the ultimate weapon when it comes to innovation or production."
Instead, Tesla this week was forced to bring the Fremont, Calif., production line of its crucial mass-market Model 3 electric sedan to a complete halt, according to the company. It is at least the second shutdown in the last two months. And in an internal email, Musk said Tesla will add workers and go to round-the-clock production to meet goals.
Officially, the company is describing the weeklong shutdown of the Model 3 line as "planned downtime" to "improve automation and systemically address bottlenecks in order to increase production rates."
Tesla executives hatched the plan weeks ago, a spokesperson said. "This is not unusual and is in fact common in production ramps like this," the spokesperson said.
Auto industry veterans disagree. Several said that stopping an assembly line for a car in commercial production is not only unusual, it's exceptional. And manufacturing experts say the retrofits being made during the shutdown will make Model 3 assembly more closely resemble other automobile plants around the world.
"Periodic shutdowns of hours or a day are not uncommon during pre-launch pilot build. They are unheard of in regular production, where he supposedly is," said Bob Lutz, the former General Motors vice chairman and noted Tesla critic, who has also held top executive positions at Chrysler, Ford and BMW.
"This shutdown is most likely for the purpose of ripping out all the '22nd century' fully-automated assembly systems which were going to 'revolutionize automotive manufacturing' and turned out not to work," Lutz said via email.
Dave Sullivan, an analyst at AutoPacific Inc., said in an email: "Traditional automakers adjust bottlenecks on the fly during a launch. This is totally out of the ordinary."
The news was another blow to Tesla shareholders, who have seen the stock price recover somewhat after plunging 17% in one week in April on news of production problems, a car crash involving the company's Autopilot technology and a big recall. Tesla shares fell sharply at the start of trading Tuesday before finishing down 1.2% at $287.69.
The shutdown caught workers by surprise as well. Over the weekend, Tesla ordered Model 3 assembly line workers to not show up for work Monday through Saturday. Take vacation days, they were told, or use up remaining personal days off, or elect not to be paid at all.
Workers were told at the last minute, a Tesla spokesperson said, because "the exact timing (of planned shutdowns) may not be finalized until closer to when it happens."
But on Tuesday, Tesla said in an internal email it will begin around-the-clock production and add another factory shift in Fremont as it tries to ramp up Model 3 output to 6,000 a week by the end of June. (Musk said the carmaker produced 2,250 of the sedans last week.) Between the Fremont plant and its battery factory, Tesla will be adding about 400 people per week for several weeks, Musk wrote in the email obtained by Electrek.
The company had previously said it was targeting production of 5,000 vehicles a week by around the end of the second quarter.
"The reason that the burst-build target rate is 6,000 and not 5,000 per week in June is that we cannot have a number with no margin for error across thousands of internally and externally produced parts and processes," Musk wrote.
"We are burning the midnight oil to burn the midnight oil," he added.
Musk described the 6,000 car last-week-in-June production level as a "burst-build" that will "lay the groundwork" for steadily high production rates a few months from now. That means any given week of production could fall far short, making third quarter production forecasts more uncertain than ever.
The shutdown came just days after Musk appeared on a CBS This Morning segment, admitting that Tesla over-automated the Model 3 assembly line. In the taped segment, CBS This Morning co-host Gayle King was led by Musk on a tour through Tesla's then-bustling Fremont factory.
Musk sought to reassure viewers that lessons have been learned and that the Model 3 project, considered crucial to Tesla's continued existence, was back on track. Musk offered few details about automation problems beyond the admission that too many robots were installed. But he did say that "we have this crazy complex network of conveyor belts and it was not working. We got rid of the whole thing."
The too-many-robots admission appears to be a sobering comedown for Musk, who has said automation would one day become Tesla's primary business. Today, Tesla builds electric cars, solar energy systems and battery storage devices.
Although he's famous for warning that humanity should fear the arrival of artificial intelligence, Musk is eager to see robots replace human workers at Tesla. "Parking is one of my biggest nightmares," he said in 2016, referring to the always-overloaded parking lot at the Fremont plant. "It's like you can't fit everyone."
In the CBS This Morning interview, Musk backpedaled. "Maybe you need more people here working," King told him. "Yeah, we do," Musk said. Later that day he tweeted, "Yes, excessive automation at Tesla was a mistake. To be precise, my mistake. Humans are underrated."
He also copped to over-ambition in the design of the Model 3 in the interview. "We got complacent about some of the things we thought were our core technology, we put too much technology into the Model 3 all at once." Tesla owner forums are ripe with complaints including dead batteries, body panels that don't fit right and malfunctions in the input-output screen. Many customer service calls, owners report, result in instructions to reboot the system.
For years, Musk and his lieutenants have said that the Model 3 would be easier to manufacture than the Model X sport utility vehicle, which remains riddled with quality problems, earning low marks in Consumer Reports. "We're really trying to take a lot of lessons learned from Model X. We put a lot of bells and whistles on Model X and a lot of advanced technologies that weren't necessary for version one of the vehicle," Musk said in 2016.
If the Model 3 assembly line cranks back up as scheduled Monday, Musk will be hoping it marks a fresh start. Progress toward Musk's goal of 10,000 cars a week by the end of December is essential if Tesla is going to fulfill his prediction that the company will generate more cash than it burns in the third and fourth quarters of this year, alleviating the need to raise additional capital.
Analysts such as Efraim Levy at CFRA are skeptical. Barring some sort of "manipulation," he sees no way Tesla can produce positive free cash flow two quarters in a row this year.
In the CBS interview, Musk dismissed stock analysts.
"The problem a lot of analysts have is they kind of look in the rearview mirror instead of looking out the front windscreen," he said. "People have underestimated Tesla because they have looked at [what] Tesla's done in the past and used that as a proxy for what we're able to do in the future."
russ.mitchell@latimes.com
Bloomberg contributed to this report.
Hope they don’t run out of Kool-aid, too.
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MikeL
Social climber
Southern Arizona
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Apr 18, 2018 - 08:40am PT
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Musk: "The problem a lot of analysts have is they kind of look in the rearview mirror instead of looking out the front windscreen," he said. "People have underestimated Tesla because they have looked at [what] Tesla's done in the past and used that as a proxy for what we're able to do in the future."
The 20-20 foresight of a visionary.
The past has always been the best predictor of the future, albeit at very low rates of predictability—especially when speaking of human behaviors and results. With regards to complexity, meteorologists have purportedly have the most successful prediction rates—50%. The weather tomorrow is most likely to be what is today.
I may have told this story before. I was at a Dzogchen retreat about 8-10 years ago just outside Joshua Tree. The lama was a boisterous sort, so the retreat was wide open fun. At lunch one day, I was sitting at a table of 8, and we were arguing about cause-and-effect, free will, etc. Two fellows across from me were adamant that they had free will and could predict what they would and could do. Some of us were not so sure, so theoretical arguments ensued. One of the two fellows said he would predict what he would do next, by golly, and said he would get up and get another cup of coffee. His ideological colleague said that he’d do the same, and both walked smartly off to do so. Both went to the coffee pot, served themselves, and after getting cream or sweetener, they ran into each other and spilled their coffee onto the floor. We roared.
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healyje
Trad climber
Portland, Oregon
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Apr 18, 2018 - 08:52am PT
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Not sure about his cars, but Musk can and does turn on a dime.
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tooth
Trad climber
B.C.
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Apr 18, 2018 - 09:04am PT
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What is the point of piling on and criticizing the guy besides making small people feel bigger?
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Reilly
Mountain climber
The Other Monrovia- CA
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Apr 18, 2018 - 03:35pm PT
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You talkin’ about The Donald or The Elon?
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MikeL
Social climber
Southern Arizona
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Apr 18, 2018 - 05:53pm PT
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Ah, a believer.
My wife worked for Chambers in his heyday and then for Amazon. She's an excitement junkie. That's how we found our way to climbing. Most all of our climbing friends were working for SV firms. I taught MBAs who were working there. The hype was as thick as honey. And honey it could be for many people in the right place at the right time. Even now retired, my wife still gets drawn into missionary, visionary, strategy-critical projects.
It's like a drug or a tornado. You get sucked in. I mean, it's fun and all, but it takes your a part of your life from you.
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tooth
Trad climber
B.C.
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Apr 18, 2018 - 07:25pm PT
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So what benefits are there to cutting people down and being condescending or pointing out the negative with every post?
Power just went out all over Puerto Rico today except for 662 customers because they had Tesla PowerPacks or powerwalls. Which is entirely a good thing. But I’m sure you guys have only negative commentary available because it is connected to the nerdy kid you like to bully. Right?
days later Edit:*crickets*
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Reilly
Mountain climber
The Other Monrovia- CA
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Dood puts the ‘A’ IN Arrogant. I’d love to know what he said about Moody’s when they downgraded his credit rating to junk status.
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