Tesla Produced Over 80,000 Cars In Third Quarter, Beating Estimates (electrek.co) 172
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Electrek: Tesla has now confirmed the official record production numbers of 80,000 vehicles. The automaker has also confirmed Q3 deliveries of 83,500 vehicles. Yesterday, Electrek reported the production numbers, which Tesla has now confirmed to be exactly 53,239 Model 3 vehicles and 26,903 Model S and X vehicles. Tesla elaborated on the Model 3 production ramp-up: "During Q3, we transitioned Model 3 production from entirely rear wheel drive at the beginning of the quarter to almost entirely dual motor during the last few weeks of the quarter. This added significant complexity, but we successfully executed this transition and ultimately produced more dual motor than rear wheel drive cars in Q3. In the last week of the quarter, we produced over 5,300 Model 3 vehicles, almost all of which were dual motor, meaning that we achieved a production rate of more than 10,000 drive units per week." Tesla delivered a total of 83,500 vehicles during the third quarter: 55,840 Model 3, 14,470 Model S, and 13,190 Model X.
Here's what Tesla had to say about the Model 3 deliveries: "Our Q3 Model 3 deliveries were limited to higher-priced variants, cash/loan transactions, and North American customers only. There remain significant opportunities to grow the addressable market for Model 3 by introducing leasing, standard battery and other lower-priced variants of the car, and by starting international deliveries."
Here's what Tesla had to say about the Model 3 deliveries: "Our Q3 Model 3 deliveries were limited to higher-priced variants, cash/loan transactions, and North American customers only. There remain significant opportunities to grow the addressable market for Model 3 by introducing leasing, standard battery and other lower-priced variants of the car, and by starting international deliveries."
I would buy one... (Score:1, Offtopic)
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If you define successful as selling all your products at a loss, then yes - Tesla is successful.
Their financial statements are quite clear in that the raw cost of building their cars is less than the income from selling those cars. All the other stuff that's dragging them into the red is the problem, and the reports are not granular enough to determine if each car made is sold at a loss because of other costs like general overheads (a separate line item), whether the expenditure on assembly lines upgrades/installs is dragging it down (no idea where this is represented), or the loss comes from other a
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No, sorry. they [electrek.co] don't [businessinsider.com].
Re:I would buy one... (Score:5, Informative)
You realize that Sandy Munroe, the guy you're citing, later changed his mind and called the vehicle a symphony of engineering [insideevs.com], among other high praise? Literally stated "I have to eat crow" concerning his earlier analysis (aka what you linked)
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The complete reversal and over the top priase, doesn't at all smell like money changed hands.
Oh, money changed hands all right. But it didn't involve Tesla.
UBS [ubs.com] (an investment company that has been consistently anti-Tesla) paid Munro Associates to perform the Model 3 teardown. Munro's initial impression of the Model 3 was prior to the teardown, and they rightfully focused on the car's poor fit and finish [insideevs.com]. But after completing the teardown and realizing just how inexpensive the car would be to manufacture, Munro had to "eat crow" [insideevs.com], and publicly, otherwise his company would look foolish and it wo
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10 year old? (Score:2)
2007 would be an 11 or 12 year old car. 2007 models hit the "showroom" in summer of 2006 usually.
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where is this 30k tesla?!!!
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umm. Seriously?
Take a look at the average repair list for your make/model.
https://repairpal.com/cars/hon... [repairpal.com]
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Re: I would buy one... (Score:4, Insightful)
I note that people only go into "but what about the mining!" rants when talking about EV batteries, and not.... literally everything else they consume which is also made out of mined products. E.g. why should we give a rat's arse whether we use nickel in the form of stainless steel or in the form of the nickel oxides that make up the lion's share of an EV cathode? Why shouldn't we care about other mined products like platinium for catalytic converters (you don't need much, but it's mined in hundreds of ppb/low ppm quantities after stripping vast quantities of overburden) and the like? Heck, if you want to look for low impact mining, it's pretty dang hard to beat salar lithium. Really... why are the steel, alumium, vanadium, manganese, molybdenum, silicon, chromium, magnesium, etc etc in the ICEs considered irrelevant?
And as for cobalt - the element that's been dwindling in EV batteries - even in Congo, 80% of it is mined in mines run by international conglomerates, to modern standards, and of the artisinal mining, most is just villagers mining their own land; the concern is over a minority of a minority of mining in a single country. And even that is irrelevant - not because western companies generally have procedures in place to prevent buying artisinal cobalt (it's generally purchased by less scrupulous buyers, such as in China), but because this article about Tesla, and Tesla has historically acquired most of its cobalt from Canada.
The mass of a Model 3 is is about the same as its performance equivalents from BMW. The mass of "stuff" that makes it up is about the same as the mass of "stuff" that makes up the BMW. Why are we supposed to freak out about one but not the other?
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No, you focus on Tesla because you like to think of yourselves as dead clever: "oooh, you may *think* you're helping your planet with your EV, but LET ME TELL YOU, you are in fact not, because look at the brilliance of my logic as I tell you about mining impacts and how did you know that electricity is made out of oil?"
This performance convinces you and makes you feel good. But it's fairly shitty for the world, in terms of the damage it does to civil discourse, the fact that you slow the adoption of EVs, th
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Re:Incomplete data, bad news. (Score:4, Interesting)
Wouldn't be surprised if they do it even sooner. After transportation, their next bottleneck is going to be cell production; Tesla's growth has outpaced Panasonic's ability to provide cells. They're trying to get three new lines online at Giga as soon as possible, but it'll take months. When cells are the limiting factor, it makes sense to switch to SRs so you can make more vehicles with a limited volume of cells. Well optioned out SRs surely first, of course, but SRs nonetheless.
Amolst every sector is up (Score:3, Informative)
The economy is running hot right now such that most products are selling above average.
(Since it's likely to come up, as far as the political credit for the economy, the "tax-cut stimulus" did help, but also jacked up debt. It's counter-Keynesian, which is bad my book. Pay down debt during up-times and save the stimuli for slumps.)
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Except for bloody spell-checker and re-edit button makers (grumble grumble)
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It appears to be caused by three factors:
1. Higher interest rates make auto loans more difficult
2. Uber/Lyft
3. Newer cars last longer, so replacement rates have slowed
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It's not just the existence of debt that bothers me, it's the anti-plan the administration has to deal with it: Reverse Keynes.
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He literally only made a claim that our corporate taxes are much lower than those in US. It's a fact that they are. It takes an utterly ignorant nutjob to deny something you can double check with a single question asked from google.
Fun detail: just a few years ago, my native country of Finland and neighbouring Sweden were engaged in small tax war when we lowered our corporate tax rate from 24,5% to 20% which is below theirs, and a few years later, they lowered theirs as they saw clear loss of companies movi
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We lowered our tax in 2014. Sweden followed up a year or two later. Ignorance of reality is a common theme for Trump's critics that argue about specifics of his economics macro level policies.
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Blame? Not entirely, but they contribute to an already bad problem. Just because it's already bad is not a license to make it worse.
Sitting on lots (Score:2)
Also, coincidentally, a story came out today about thousands of Tesla Model 3s sitting in parking lots all over the place.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/ne... [dailymail.co.uk]
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It may be like when Scientology purchased tons of "Dianetics" books to get on the best-seller lists. (Ok, allegedly, don't come after me, please.)
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Guess they tricked InsideEV's independent count, too. And made everyone helping with the deliveries hallucinate a huge volume of vehicles going through the delivery centres. Sneaky, sneaky Tesla.
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You know, delivery issues are exactly what a DEALER NETWORK solves. Oh, and it also slashes the SG&A (which is 20% of Tesla's revenue - about 3X that of any other car maker) and makes you profitable. For the dealer taking a few thousand off the top, you can save thousands more in direct SG&A costs, and you can actually get CARS INTO THE HANDS OF PEOPLE that much faster.
But Tesla is different. It's post-dealer. It's hip, trendy - and loses money on cars it cannot deliver.
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1) Lol, Daily Mail ;)
2) The shorts have been pushing their "See, there's cars in lots, therefore there's no demand and they're just building to throw them away!" conspiracy theory every week since June. They never really caught on to the concept of a staging yard for shipping.
3) They cite under a thousand cars spotted. But Tesla has over 8000 cars in transit right now, according to the quarterly delivery figures. The "Shorty Airforce" needs to do a better job, they missed nearly 9 in every 10 cars in tra
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Breitbart is reporting the same story. So is the New York Times. So is Fox, and CNN. Forbes, Wall Street Journal too.
Is it a vast bipartisan conspiracy against Elon Musk?
Interested to see the long-term quality (Score:2, Interesting)
I have a coworker who is from the former USSR. His take on Tesla is that the current output is gonna suck and warranty repair is going to eat them alive. He tells me that at the end of the fiscal year often factories would be under pressure in the USSR to up their output, and no one wanted what they made (which wasn't actually good quality to begin with).
I have a good friend who just got a Model 3 a few weeks ago. She needs warranty service (not Tesla's fault in this case, a pinecone fell on the car and sma
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That depends on what the pine cone was made of. An ornamental gold pine cone might be more damaging, but it could also help defray the repair cost.
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California is their biggest market; could well be coulter pines [ytimg.com] ;) The cones can weigh 2-5kg when fresh. There's also sugar pine cones, which can be 2/3rds of a meter long (but narrow).
As for the time to get an appointment, it depends entirely on where they are. While Tesla is working on switching to Tesla-owned body shops, right now, body work is contracted out to local body shops. So if you can't get an appointment, then the local body shop is overbooked.
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Coulter pine is the first thing I thought of too... those unopened cones are as dense as a solid block of wood.
There's a reason they have the nickname "widowmakers."
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You've obviously never been for a drive in a Soviet era Lada car [wikipedia.org]?
"no one wanted what they made" for a damn good reason.
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Having driven one as my first car, it was amazing. Cheap enough that you can do whatever the fuck you want with it without regrets. I literally drove mine to death by driving just over the legal limit on the road, which was close to maximum rated speed of the car for thousands of kilometres with no maintenance until the housing that held the generator failed from stress and wheel that connects generator to engine via a belt went flying into the radiator. Fun part: car still kept driving. It's just that sinc
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Something falling on your roof, is not under warranty.
Perhaps she should convince her insurance to pay for it.
If an idiot came for an appointment for warranty repairs for stuff that clearly is not under warranty, he would be pretty low on my list of customers, too.
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No I'm not shorting the stock. I don't own any company stock of any company. She's been driving around with a broken roof for about three weeks and she lives in Silicon Valley so I don't think the location is the problem.
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Actually, the location probably IS the problem. There are a LOT of Teslas running around the Bay Area, and not that many service centers.
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Consider the possibility that everything is still going according to plan.
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The shorts made money today. Stock is down again. They are gonna make even more when the financial report show the massive amount of money they lost on each car.
Re:Propaganda (Score:5, Insightful)
But they are profitable this quarter. As they get better and learn more, and have stronger economies of scale, they will increase margin, just like what happens to most businesses after the initial spending to build segment is over.
Shorting such an innovative company is lunacy. They are years ahead on battery tech, years ahead on drivetrain, years ahead on driving assistants, and years ahead on infrastructure (power wall, solar panels, superchargers) as any other competitor. News and articles and tweets and this crap is fine for shorting in the immediate term, but over the long ark of time, financial performance is what will govern the stock price, and I don't think there are any worries there. They have a product, people want to buy it, and they are learning how to build that product profitably. Everything else is noise.
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But they are profitable this quarter.
Are they? Are you sure about that? Tesla has consistently claimed they're profitable - but their financial reports say otherwise. My guess is it's a solid $650MM+ loss for Q3, we'll find out soon enough!
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Don't tell him not to short! I rely on such idiots to sometimes drive the price down so I can snatch up a few more stocks below market value.
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Not sure they are years ahead on anything but possibly charge station network. While their competitors are decades ahead in things like dealer support, parts delivery, build quality, and most importantly paying down their debts. Their are many companies with decades of more experience on mass producing electric drive trains over Tesla. Panasonic is the primary holder of the battery technology, and manufacturing even at the Giga factory.
Personally their is no way I would consider a car that is locked down in
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From a technical perspective, I honestly wish everything you said was true. Personally I'd love to buy an electric car now (and powerwall-type product) but given the large investment it would have to be from a stable manufacturer.
Since it's pretty clear now that Tesla is a few months away from being forced into DIP financing based on their convertibles situation, and what the bond yields and CDS rates are saying, it's definitely a no-go. Even in chapter 11 I wouldn't trust that any warranty promises could
Re:Hey, halfway to matching the Model A Ford (Score:5, Insightful)
The ford Model A was a bargain basement model. Tesla are hardly aiming at that market segment.
Go here : here [cleantechnica.com] and click on August and see how they are doing relative to similarly priced models today.
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The ford Model A was a bargain basement model. Tesla are hardly aiming at that market segment..
The model 3 is probably the cheapest electric car with any decent range on the market, I would suggest that they are already in that market.
Nissan Leaf and the Mitsubishi MiEV don't even compare.
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You mean the car that few want? A car sold in 1/14th the volume of the Model 3 this month? A car whose sales have collapsed over the past year?
Imagine that - people don't want a dorky-looking econobox that takes 2 1/2 times as long to recharge from a fragmented, poorly maintained network. Whodathunkit?
GM got some things right. Performance is decent, although not to Tesla standards. The battery is properly liquid cooled. Etc. But... sorry, Bolt was a miss.
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So what we've learned is that the ONLY market for EVs is rich folks wanting to show "how much they care about the Earth" by buying $60K cars (well, $50K and then with tax and license putting you at $60K). While the average person spends about half that on their new vehicle. Congrats, Tesla, on building a car for the rich only, and letting all those around them see how good and noble and Earth-caring they are!
In the real world (you know, where the real volume of vehicles is sold), EVs are a non-starter bec
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Considering BYD's success, I suspect that it's actually quite possible in a decade or so.
Granted, probably not in the West, where even South Korean cars have serious problems penetrating the market for image reasons.
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My understanding is that Tesla imagines the same thing as BYD, it just approaches it from the opposite direction. BYD comes from public transit, where price per passenger and per distance is critical. Tesla comes from the mid end luxury vehicle, where comfort and performance are critical. Both are aiming at the mainstream consumer vehicle market.
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What are you talking about? I wrote a good chunk of a dozen posts over there. Not like it would even matter if I hadn't; I don't hang out on Slashdot 24/7.
(Rest of your post not even worth bothering with a reply).
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Yes the Tesla is better than the Leaf. I've tried the Tesla S and 3 and I own a Leaf. The leaf is still very nice to own compared to the petrol cars I've owned. It's quick off the mark, cheap (I got it used), cheap to run and I never have to visit a gas station.
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BYD's cars compete on range and are much cheaper. They just don't get sold in much of the West due to regulatory obstacles for foreign entrants as well as image reasons. "Chinese car" tends to get viewed with severe suspicion in markets where even South Korean brands are having trouble breaking into for similar reasons.
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Regulatory obstacles: you mean like not killing you at a 20mph collision by collapsing into a tangled mess. Look if European, Japanese and Korean manufactures can make cars that pass the regulatory obstacles without issue then the fact the Chinese can't should tell you the cars they are making are in fact death traps.
There is also the issue that a lot of Chinese cars are design knockoff's of western designs. They simply can't sell them in the west even if they could pass the regulatory barrier.
So for exampl
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This is just nonsense. You can buy Chinese cars in Europe, including BYD ones. Availability is a bit limited but BYD is popular for taxis in London, for example. I've seen some privately owned Chinese SUVs too.
Obviously they meet all European safety standards.
The main limitation is that they can barely keep up with demand in China, and expanding into Europe requires a fair bit of investment. The cars need to be localized (software, manuals, EU requirements) and they need a network for sales and servicing. R
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If you can't comprehend written text, and read it as "you can't buy them", it's indeed nonsense.
Next time, do try to actually comprehend the text before you reply, so you don't look quite as daft as you ended up doing above.
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They do make cars that sorta kinda comply with regulatory standards. But they have little chance of breaking into the market, because of all the factors you mention affecting reputation of the brand.
Notably, South Koreans are still suffering from their branding issues because they had most of the problems you list just a few decades ago. Back then, they had the same problem with the utterly protected local market where they had really easy time selling their cars. And as a result, they didn't really have to
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Compared to Western brands, not in most of the Western countries. The struggle just to break into most Western European markets for them for example was huge and is ongoing.
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Oooh! N=2, at the start of production of a new product. Very convincing.
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Anecdotal evidence is a poor indication of a trend. If you want to prove your point, show us lemon law'd return rates of these cars vs their categories.
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Unconvincing claim considering that they've been asking you for evidence for last few posts, and you expressly suggest that it's unnecessary because [reasons you listed].
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I had no idea that Honda Accord and Toyota Camry were EVs. Or in your mind is that an irrelevant niggling detail?
Tesla makes more EV battery capacity than everyone else in the world combined. And they're still struggling to keep up on batteries, their volumes are so high. Point at ICEs all you want, but said "production experts" keep falling further and further behind Tesla in the race to make what they almost universally agree is the future (EVs).
Your argument is like someone in 1904 saying, "This 'Ford
By "the world" you mean "the United States" (Score:2)
BYD makes more EVs than Tesla does. Zhidou may also.
Tesla *is* the premiere supplier of luxury EVs in the United States.
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Did. Not does.
BYD made 114k vehicles in all of last year combined. Tesla made half that in just one quarter. Furthermore, note that I wrote battery capacity. The limiting factor.
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Ed: half that in terms of Model 3s alone in just one quarter.
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They make a profit on every car, it just takes a while for production to increase for those profits to accumulate to cover the costs of development, i know that hard to understand that but keep at it and you'll understand eventually
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So how many will they sell (most likely at a loss) at $35K? Because right now, Tesla is well out-sold by other car models, let alone car brands.
Bullshit.
According to Bloomberg [bloomberg.com] the Model 3 is the 5th best selling sedan in America, regardless of price or size.
1st - Toyota Corolla
2nd - Toyota Camry
3rd - Honda Civic
4th - Honda Accord
5th - Tesla Model 3
That's pretty damn good.
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Tesla makes more EV battery capacity than everyone else in the world combined.
That is nonsense.
Despite the success story of Tesla, European and Asian car manufactorers sell probably 10 times to 50 times more EVs or hybrids than Tesla does.
Tesla is impressive, but it is only a single car manufactorer.
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False. Plug in hybrids exist.
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Regular hybrids are a different story. They don't charge from the mains, they charge from running the combustion engine. That means the combustion engin
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Hybrids have a battery. ...
That was the point of the parent.
Smart ass
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The big difference is the part that provides range. Hybrids can only ride a short distance on battery power, even with plugin hybrids mostly ranging between 20 and 30 miles. But for longer distances, the gas tank provides the range. The battery is only for short time storage of electric energy, and with plugin hybrids, the electric power train is more or less a replacement for a mechanical gear box.
Thats
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This is complete and utter bullshit. BYD makes far more electric vehicles than Tesla at this point, and many of their vehicles are heavy duty, ranging from busses to sedans. So they need more battery capacity per vehicle on average. Tesla iirc is barely in the third place, well behind both BYD and Luxgen.
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Believe what you want; facts state otherwise [inverse.com]. I know it's hard to comprehend [electrek.co] the rate at which they're churning out battery capacity, but it's reality whether you want to believe it or not.
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No it's true, at least it was for the last complete year (2017): https://www.greencarreports.co... [greencarreports.com]
Note that passenger cars only, not including commercial vehicles like busses and trucks that BYD also makes.
It will be interesting to see what happens this year, but if you look at the historic numbers BYD is ramping up sales fast so it will probably be close.
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You're lying again. This is a discussion about electric vehicle manufacturing. You lied about Tesla being on top. It's not.
Now you're trying to shift the discussion toward "battery manufacturing capacity".
So in your view, is Aramco the biggest automotive manufacturer in the world by the same logic?
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I'm sure Slashdot is the most important place for stock market altering news.
Troll feeding aside... If you want to talk about crazy, positive pieces.... I saw the title of an article the other day (didn't bother reading it) that said some stock analyst is predicting Tesla will easily be worth 20+ billion by 2030, and how it'll be the next big amazing mega stock.