New 'Tent' Assembly Line Is 'Way Better' Than Conventional Factory, Says Tesla CEO (arstechnica.com) 289
A few days ago, Elon Musk announced a "new general assembly line" made with "minimal resources." As Ars Technica reports, this new tented facility "is seemingly the first phase of an entirely new building, dubbed 'Factory 2.0.'" From the report: The tent is easily visible from the nearby Warm Springs BART station platform. When Ars visited on Monday afternoon, there appeared to be cranes and forklifts moving around the site. We could not easily see inside the long white temporary structure, but there did not appear to be any newly completed vehicles rolling off the lines in the adjacent parking lot. Still, one automotive expert that Ars spoke with said that a new temporary manufacturing facility on the same site as conventional automotive factories was unprecedented in the industry. Dave Sullivan, an analyst with Auto Pacific, told Ars that he wondered what was wrong with Tesla's existing facilities, if Musk decided the company needed more capacity. "It's almost a sign of desperation," he said. "It's a sprint to be profitable in the third quarter." Ars notes that "each tent is 53-feet-high by 150-feet-long -- there seem to be several connected in a long line, mounted with aluminum framing." In a tweet, Musk said: "It's actually way better than the factory building. More comfortable & a great view of the mountains."
More room for manual assembly? (Score:3)
Didn't they say they tried to automate too much? If so all this room is probably needed to allow more manpower to work in parallel.
Whatever works.
Re:More room for manual assembly? (Score:5, Interesting)
I think the real problem is they did it too quickly. Too much means that some things can never be automated. Too fast just means they have to take longer to get it right. Some lines that were made manual are now automated again, as they got the process working.
The main point of manual labor is that you can speed up by hiring more people. With automation, you have to make the machine actually work before you can scale up by buying more machines.
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Welcome to the news by Twitter. We are now left to trying to distill the underlying meaning and rebuild the absent press release all out of a 280 character message.
Musk said he automated too much. What does that mean? Who knows. Maybe too many robots for the number of people too look after them. Maybe too many design decisions for robotic assembly caused problems in car assembly. Maybe he automated things he shouldn't have.
The world of production problems is far more complicated than a 280 character limit c
Re:More room for manual assembly? (Score:5, Interesting)
Um, everyone who listens to the conference calls and the investor meeting knows? Just because you don't know something doesn't mean that nobody does :)
You want an example? Flufferbot. There's a loose fluff used in the battery packs, and they made a robot to place it. Now, if you're trying to come up with something that would be difficult for computer vision systems to process, and for robotic arms to handle, you couldn't do much better than "fluff". The robot spent most of its time finding new and creative ways to fail to pick up the fluff, as well as to put it in inventive new locations. So you had these expensive robotics technicians both bailing it out of its mistakes and trying to adjust its programming to prevent them, on and on for months on end. When you could just have simply paid people to place the fluff.
Flufferbot is gone, by the way ;)
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You want an example? Flufferbot.
That is not a job I would trust to robots just yet. At least not until the Westworld bugs get worked out.
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Flufferbot went away when they stopped putting fluff in the battery packs.
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Not at all. They just went too far too fast. It's still a very heavily automation-focused facility. [bloomberg.com]
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1. The conversation was about automation.
2. You can view the general market's view of the company in its stock price. Hint: people very strongly disagree with you. Also hint: most of Tesla's stock is held by large institutional investors.
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The lion's share of Tesla's stock is owned by major institutional investors.
Carnie's gonna bark (Score:3, Funny)
We already know who the clown is, now we've got tents for this circus. Very good, Elon.
Makes sense (Score:2)
Hey, it worked for circuses for years. Why not car production?
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Hey, it worked for circuses for years. Why not car production?
And, if he gets a better tax offer from another state - easier to roll up, load onto a train, and move (again, like the circus).
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Huh, that part never occurred to me. That's ingenious.
Since these buildings are standardized and designed for assembly and disassembly, with stockpiled components for them, you don't even have to use the same building. Just wait until your new building is ready then disassemble the old one.
Just have to make sure that the line is easy to take down and set back up. Wonder if the sizes of components on their next line will be based on what fits into a shipping container? ;)
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FWIW, back in the 1980s one of the PC makers -- can't recall the name -- had an assembly line in a circus tent next to Interstate 5 in Carlsbad, CA. Apparently, it worked out OK as the tent was there, and apparently in use, for several years.
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I don't know about circuses, but the whole thing sounds like a comedy routine. I figure this is how it went down:
Minion: We're at maximum capacity.
Musk: Well, we have to double our production in the next three months.
Minion: Are you nuts? Ramping up that fast would be intense.
Musk: Sounds good. Start building them.
Minion: Building what?
Musk: Tents.
Minion: Brilliant!
Humans take space (Score:3)
Not surprising. Tesla has been shifting to humans over automation. They probably had some difficulty working around the existing layout and instead of reworking much of their factory floor I'm guessing they decided to move people outside. Heat from bodies may also make the factory uncomfortable if it wasn't designed for it.
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Weak. Luke Skywalker was able to send a projection of himself to a distant solar system and it was so strong it convinced his force-sensitive twin sister, once of the strongest (and most emo) force wielders in the universe, AND his favorite droids.
There's a lot to be said for agility (Score:5, Insightful)
So, Elon Musk and his company just built in 5 weeks, literally from the ground up, what GM might spend 10 years architecting and designing, getting the EIR, hiring the right unions and negotiating their contracts, contracting for an acquiring equipment, actually assembling it, staffing it, and starting it running.
This race for profitability is actually viewed with contempt by a commentator of the conventional auto industry.
There is a lot to be said for agility, as any manager or investor in a start-up will tell you. This is simply another difference between Silicon Valley business and the conventional auto business. The same sort of difference that allowed Tesla to make electric cars that could actually compete with gasoline cars on their own turf.
I hear Ferrari is just starting to introduce one that might compete, after Tesla has had theirs on the market since 2007, with three new models since. But that's it so far. Ferrari is pretty agile as auto manufacturers go, but at the cost of low manufacturing volume. Ferrari won't be selling its cars at even 5000/month. Tesla is trying to get both the volume and the innovation.
Re:There's a lot to be said for agility (Score:5, Insightful)
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"The German folks who disassembled a Tesla showed that the parts costs would allow Tesla to make a nice profit."
On manufacturing costs, ignoring all development costs such as R&D.
R&D, the cost of the land and building, etc are sunk costs. They are not considered in the decision to continue operations, they have no impact on the cost of operations. Now ongoing costs, taxes on the land and building, maintenance of the building, etc will be considered.
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Kinda helps to understand concepts such as marginal costs if you want to talk about profitability, no?
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Those old, slow dinosaur automakers actually make a decent profit.
Yes, but probably not on electric cars. I'm living in Europe, and there's a shortage on EVs. Meaning, if you order them, you'll have to wait for 6 or more months. Now in that market, some manufacturers are winding down production on EVs. For instance, the Volkswagen e-Golf takes more than 6 months to deliver however its production will be stopped. Volkswagen says they need the capacity for their new series which comes out in 2019. However it's suspected that VW simply cannot make the e-Golf profitable at th
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It's the standard nonsense people post on Slashdot every time Tesla comes up. They ignore that Tesla was earning ~25% margins before the Model 3 production started, and even with the current scaleup is still getting a net margin of ~19%. They're simply comparing net profit and ignoring all of the capex's contribution to that.
It's just embarrassing how someone can think that they're doing a "financial analysis" where they compare current sales as cash inflows vs. current expenses designed to produce vastly
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What on Earth are you talking about? COGS is part of gross profits. Gross profit equals revenue minus COGS. Tesla has generally maintained ~25% gross profits, only dropping recently with Model 3 production start, and that's been going back up as they've been scaling back up, now around 19%.
I think you mixed up your short arguments. You're supposed to say that Tesla's SG&A is too high, because it's a standard (and false) short pretense that SG&A 1) scales linearly with sales, and 2) has no lag be
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See the post immediately above yours [slashdot.org], written three hours before you wrote this.
I didn't even bother to mention there that, hey, you remember that 9% they cut from the workforce (mostly middle management, and much of the old Solar City sales division, as they're switching that to roofing products)? That's a SG&A cut. But that's actually beside the point.
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I usually ignore ACs, but you're special...:)
Here are Tesla's financials [yahoo.com]. Check the Quarterly link. You'll see they had a gross profit of $456MM. Now, let's look at expenditure. SG&A is $686MM itself. So even before R&D or capex, we're already negative. R&D is another $367MM. Interest is $150MM. Heck, R&D and interest alone wipe out all (and then some!) of their gross margin. They lose money on each car they make, just with the cost of the vehicle and SG&A (which is kind of req
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No matter how many times you make it, that's still a terrible argument [slashdot.org]. SG&A does not scale linearly with number of vehicles, and much of the costs of scaling up production / sales comes in advance of the actual revenue from them. And R&D is closer to constant than linear with respect to volume.
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OK idiot, R&D is fixed and finished
Uh, not when they want to develop new cars, or update and fix the beta cars they're selling to their beta testers.
interest is fixed and finished
So they have no outstanding debt?
Both those things will go down per car as more cars are made.
Only if they stay fixed, or don't grow as fast as production does. They're not staying fixed. They're growing. Production is growing very slowly, and growing that production capacity is costing them heavily.
So the more cars they make the smaller your 'nonsense claimed loss' is. When that number gets smaller and smaller it will turn positive. Selling more cars won't make the number worse, it will make it better. Why you might ask (well if you had a brain) because the cars are profitable to make once those fixed costs are paid.
The costs aren't fixed. Tesla is still struggling to build a fraction of a real auto factory. They're still bleeding R&D costs to tweak and update th
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Considering Tesla currently makes the quickest production car ever built, that is a strange statement to make. Claimed top speed of 250MPH would put it in the top 10 fastest cars in the world, well ahead of the fastest Ferrari at 217MPH.
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you fail to mention they don't actually make that car yet so no it is not the quickest production car ever, that is what they intend to make by 2020 which by then I am sure the current top 10 will have also upped their game. current Tesla's do not do 250mph and are NOT in the top 10 fastest cars or anywhere near it. incidentally at 250mph even if they did make it today that would NOT make it the quickest production car ever, still well short of the top.
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OP is probably referring to 0-60 times for the "quickest" claim - Tesla is just behind the Porsche 918 on that metric, and that was a sub-1000 "production" car. Considering the other cars on the list, it's pretty impressive:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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All the top track cars have at least some electric component to their drivetrain - why do you think the Roadster will be a poor track car? I can see it having poor endurance due to battery overheating, but on paper it does not have any inherent problems with track performance.
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More to the point, if the "SpaceX options package" materializes, the thing should be capable of things like accelerating at high speeds straight sideways from a standing start. No other vehicle could even remotely hope to compete on maneuverability with a car that has an honest-to-god RCS on it. It's like stepping up to a fight, and on one side the person is armed with a knife, and on the other side it's an Abrams tank.
Without that, though, the Roadster will indeed suffer from being heavier than its compe
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IIRC, The MS beats all of the ferraris that are less than $300K, but loses once they hit $500K.
And the roadster 3 should be beating ALL ferraris in terms of speed/acceleration, and will likely out-do them on the track.
As to battery overheating, not on the roadster.
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Minor correction: This is a common myth; it's not battery overheating that prevents S and X from doing sustained track duty, but motor overheating - in particular, rotor overheating. Induction motors mean you have induction currents in the rotor, which means rotor heating. There are limits on how much you can cool a rotor; cooling the stator is much easier, as you can extend alumium or copper vanes from it in all directions and run coolant along them.
Tesla's new primary motor is PM and thus has no rotor ind
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I have to say that the acceleration really can be useful on the road, but other than Germany, anything faster than 100 mph is just a waste.
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keep in mind that the roadster's numbers are bottoms, not tops.
So are Elon Musk's fans.
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Meh, it's the announced car's numbers that I used. I'm taking some liberties because I can't have one whether they are "available" now or in 2 years. To me, they aren't available.
Point is, they are absolutely competing with Ferrari.
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Notice I said "quickest", as in acceleration. And they still rank far above any Ferrari in top speed, too. They don't hold lap records with the current Roadster, though that could change with this new one. It rather depends on how good of a thermal management job they do with the battery. One thing is clear - you need electric motors to hold a lap record these days.
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Right, no one buys a Tesla Roadster for bling. Sure.
I see (Score:3, Funny)
Looks good/makes sense except... (Score:2)
Where's the paint shop?
I don't see any issue assembling parts and, since it's an electric car, you don't have to worry about carbon monoxide when the engines are running (driving off the line).
But I can't see how you could implement a paint shop in a structure like this in short order.
Can anybody comment?
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Automated paint shops aren't Tesla specific, they might already be perfectly able to run at the originally intended rate.
Re:Looks good/makes sense except... (Score:5, Insightful)
Tent in tent, repeat as required. Been in several aerospace composites factories that are little more than tents-- a Butler Building really isn't all that different. Usually the floor slab does a lot to moderate temperatures, but you can easily set up a modular clean room inside if you need to.
Re: Looks good/makes sense except... (Score:5, Interesting)
The paint shop would most likely be in the existing structure, not the tents. But there's really no reason why you couldn't put it in a tent; all you need is a positive pressure system. Mobile chemical warfare decontamination units use tents; you just plug some air pumps with filters into them and make sure the pressure inside is higher than the pressure outside. Air will keep leaking out, but that stops any contamination from leaking in.
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This isn't a paint shop. It's GA4 (General Assembly #4). Just one portion of assembling a vehicle.
Working conditions (Score:2)
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When we built DIA, our temps used to run from -35 to 40C, and still the tent works fine.
Europe's coming factory (Score:5, Interesting)
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Yeah, Elon recently tweeted this:
'Germany is a leading choice for Europe. Perhaps on the German-French border makes sense, near the Benelux countries'
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>> Yeah, the German-speaking bit of France. Germanic quality for French prices. French assholes.
Yep. And swiss customers.
Win-Win-Win.
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Elon Musk has NO issue with unions. He has told the employees that if they want a union, go ahead and create one, though he points out that they will lose their stock.
Where he DOES have an issue, is with UAW and other corrupt organizations. The UAW, like many large blue collar unions, are ran by ppl that are as corrupt as the businesses that they work for. Mafia has been in teamsters over an
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Nope (Score:2)
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Lets see. USA, China, and Canada account for 68%. That means that Europe is somewhere around 32%. I would take Europe's 32% over China's 16%.
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Compulsive liars gonna lie (Score:2)
Sprung structure (Score:2)
It's a Sprung Structure, manufactured by Sprung Instant Structures, LTD:
http://www.sprung.com/structur... [sprung.com]
They refer to it as a prefab building.
Sam
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Ouch. It did not take much to /. them...
Tent factory? (Score:2)
This only confirms my theory that the new product out of Tesla is going to be a pop-up camper trailer.
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Re:Better TODAY... (Score:4, Funny)
I saw that photo of eight blazing Core i9 CPUs, bathing in heat-sink grease and wet with cooling water, nestled in a motherboard carrying an entire 256 gigabytes of RAM. I'm still panting today!
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I saw that photo of eight blazing Core i9 CPUs, bathing in heat-sink grease and wet with cooling water, nestled in a motherboard carrying an entire 256 gigabytes of RAM. I'm still panting today!
Heh - nice :)
You think that's cute, check out a real computer: the 2123BT-HNR from SuperMicro [supermicro.com]. Yeah, baby! In 2U, you can get 8x 32-core CPUs, 8TB RAM, and 24x NVMe SSDs. Plus some M.2 boot drives and multi-gigabit connectivity.
Tents (Score:5, Insightful)
Have you guys ever been in Denver International Airport main terminal? It's a tent. It gets as hot in Denver as it does in Fremont.
Snark all you want but just because something is a quote TENT unquote doesn't mean it isn't a robust and practical structure.
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This is a Sprung Structure:
http://www.sprung.com/structur... [sprung.com]
The people at Sprung call it a "building."
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Have you guys ever been in Denver International Airport main terminal? It's a tent. It gets as hot in Denver as it does in Fremont.
Snark all you want but just because something is a quote TENT unquote doesn't mean it isn't a robust and practical structure.
Note to self, don't fly to Denver.
Tent indicates its a temporary shelter, using one permanently is very problematic as canvas or synthetics will give way to the elements (wind, rain, sun) long before metal, wood or concrete. So you either need to be replacing them on a regular basis or using them on a temporary basis. In Perth, Western Australia (and you thought Fremont was hot) shade sails are a common thing as they provide shade to a large area for minimal cost, the biggest problem is that they need re
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Lots of food courts in shopping malls are under translucent tents. And Google's Charleston East [mountainview.gov] campus is going to be a giant tent. Do you suppose all those folks might know something that you don't? Like the fact that the c
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I just like arches ;) I'm a big fan of structures in compression, not so much of structures in tension.
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Union or no, you don't increase productivity by having people keel over from heat prostration!
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Whoa, there. If Earth were really only 56.7 degrees, it would be a frozen hell already. I think you mean that the hottest temperature ever recorded
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Whoa, there. If Earth were really only 56.7 degrees, it would be a frozen hell already. I think you mean that the hottest temperature ever recorded on Earth was 331.15.
Hmm, you said degrees, so you aren't talking K. I wonder which scale you are using?
Re:Better TODAY... (Score:4, Funny)
Since the highest temperature ever recorded was in 1913, but the degree wasn't removed from the Kelvin standard until 1968, I think you are shaky ground here.
You're all wrong (Score:4, Informative)
Brookhaven National Laboratory is on Earth. They achieved at least 4 trillion degrees Celsius.
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Any measurable scale can be referred to as being measured in degrees.
Kelvin is a (nearly) open ended scale that starts at 0 and goes up, up, up (probably to the Planck temperature).
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He knows that, he's just an asshole.
Re:Check back after the first run (Score:5, Insightful)
I've never been in a modern auto factory, but I've spent a lot of time in places where complex weapons systems were assembled. Temperature and humidity control wasn't an issue. In California, there wasn't any of either although the sheer mass of the facility tended to moderate temperature swings. In colder areas elsewhere there was some heating.
We're not talking a semiconductor fab facility here.
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Which makes sense because individual components may (or may not) need careful climate control for manufacture, but if the assembly of the whole vehicle is so fussy that cleanish non-wet conditions can be a problem, then those components probably have no business in a car that must survive weather.
Cars are OK in the open air ... (Score:4, Insightful)
What are the open air and humidity problems that you are referring to?
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Hundreds of casino's in the US use this same style tenting, none have rusting and ruined slot machines, nor do they have standing water by the craps table.
People in the business of making money love the tents.
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And, they all sing Kumbaya around the campfire on breaks.
I think they had a campfire marshmallow roast on top of the Gigafactory last fall
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And, they all sing Kumbaya around the campfire on breaks.
If they make their production goals, all employees will get their "car maker merit badges".
To raise capital for Tesla, they plan to go out canvasing selling "Muskscout" cookies . . .
Re:Tents. (Score:5, Informative)
Congratulations, you're the thousandth immature male to make that joke :P
Concerning the article, some of this is head-smackingly stupid. E.g.:
*facepalm*
There Is No More Space At Fremont. Something that has been discussed endlessly in the conference calls and at the investor meeting. Tesla applied for a permit long ago to build a new building, but it's still in progress, and meanwhile, they've been filling up Fremont at a rapid clip as they expand Model 3 production alongside the existing S and X lines. They could build a new line in a temporary building, get it up and debugged and running and turning out vehicles, or they could sit around waiting for months (or more) for a new building. Gee, I can't imagine what's the right choice here, hmm...
The current building (still being improved, but with the line in place inside) is permitted for six months, but given that they've been liking it, it may become permanent.
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Being unable to satisfy all of your demand is literally the opposite of being the end of a business. It's an existential requirement for a business. If you satisfy all the demand, and therefore have no demand left, you go out of business because you're not generating any more revenues.
Apart from that, you were right on everything. Well done!
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You forgot to talk about Canada's new cars. Our new maple-syrup-powered cars can run 25000km on only 1.2 litres of maple syrup.
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1970s Britain's problem was more to do with the cars being shit than anything else. People used to take it for granted that cars were unreliable and disintegrated after a few years. Then better foreign cars became available and they wouldn't put up with it any more.
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Re:Explains the gaps (Score:5, Interesting)
Meanwhile, if you actually hung out on Tesla forums and watched people take delivery and write about their cars, you'd know that this is a myth. Yes, as with any brand, the occasional vehicle has problems, and needs to be corrected by a service centre. But it's not at all like the shorts portray, in their endless glee sharing every last case that they can get their hands on.
Tesla has always had the highest consumer satisfaction rate in the auto industry. Back in the Roadster days when they were selling hundreds of vehicles, you all said, "Well, that's only because you have hardcore early adopters - once you get more mainstream, people will stop putting up with it and will hate Tesla!". Then Tesla started selling thousands of vehicles with the early Model Ss. And you all said the same thing. Then they were selling tens of thousands of vehicles. Then a hundred thousand per year. And are now moving into the hundreds of thousands per year. At what point is your "people are going to start hating Tesla" hypothesis going to come true? Did you ever stop and think that the reason people tend to rate them well is that they actually really like the cars after having owned them?
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Those recordings are over a week old. You can tell by counting the number of windows and panels visible on the buildings that they're from earlier in the construction. The building wasn't even fully built yet.
Contrary to your article's assertion, Tesla has never had a goal to build 5000 cars per week every week in June. The goal is to get the line capacity up to 5000 cars per week by the end of June. They'll want to ideally have one week at that rate by that point, but at least 1-3 days to show that it can
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Seek psychiatric help, please.
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It was 1/4th. Over the course of two years. With new reservations keeping pace or outpacing cancellations. With a reservation list that even at 5k per week would take them nearly two years to get through. With massive potential for reservation growth [seekingalpha.com].
Complete. Non. Issue.
Half a billion dollars from the federal government to customers - some of which will be spent on extra options packages - is anything but "bu
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I can't stand it, I know you planned it
I'mma set it straight, this Autogate
I can't stand driving' when I'm in here
'Cause your auto drive ain't so auto stear.