Gigafactory

Quote: Fleastiff

Be advised. Automatic garage openers are transmitters that can be picked up by 'war drivers' and used by anyone. Most baby monitors and wireless surveillance cameras are equally insecure.

If I have to open it by hand, it ain't never coming open.

Quote: petroglyph

If I have to open it by hand, it ain't never coming open.

A properly designed garage door should be fairly easy to open with just a hand. I have a 2 car garage with a huge horizontal spring at the top inside.
Doesn't take a lot of effort.

The stock is overpriced, I don't dispute that. But considering that between 2008 & 2011 Tesla manufactured just 2,400 cars, their production growth since then has been extraordinary.

Quote: AZDuffman

I will maintain my point that the EV market is now mature and more growth will be a slow slog.

Things have changed a bit since AZ wrote that in May 2015.

An example of how get around some problems.

Quote:

Storage is an over-rated problem, mostly brought up by people selling storage or opposed to renewables. Denmark has no storage and received over 30% of its electrical demand from wind energy in 2013, with 120% on one day.

It did this with grid interconnections to neighbouring jurisdictions with different weather conditions and mixes of generation sources. More and more grid interconnections are coming on line to enable shifting of electricity from where there is a surplus to where there is a shortfall. This makes every jurisdiction's generation fleet more efficiently used, whether legacy or renewable.

Grid interconnections allow already built major hydro projects to act as huge passive storage devices. When the wind is blowing and the sun is shining, they can build up more water. When the wind is light and the sky is dark, they can release more water. That requires changes in management of the hydro plants and some care with environmental impacts of a rising and falling reservoir and downstream water needs, but it's very viable

Grid interconnections allow already built major hydro projects to act as huge passive storage devices. When the wind is blowing and the sun is shining, they can build up more water. When the wind is light and the sky is dark, they can release more water. That requires changes in management of the hydro plants and some care with environmental impacts of a rising and falling reservoir and downstream water needs, but it's very viable.

This is far from a new 'green idea' and has been used for decades by those electrical suppliers that are fortunate enough to have significant amounts of hydro generation. I have called the dam/reservoir a 'battery' several times in posts on this board over the years. British Columbia generates the majority of it's power from hydro and has perfected this management technique over the last 30 or more years. They were so successful with it during the California energy crisis buying cheap power during low demand periods and selling higher priced power when demand was high that they were successfully sued for $10's of millions by California as an unfair business practice.

Tesla sales down 100% in Hong Kong after subsidy removed.

Some sales may have pulled forward when the announcement came, still, kind of sensitive to government help.

There was a surge of buying the month before - so everyone that wanted one bought it before the tax credit expired.

http://www.businessinsider.com/tesla-sales-stopped-in-hong-kong-tax-break-for-electric-cars-scrapped-2017-7

https://electrek.co/2017/02/22/hong-kong-electric-vehicle-incentives-tesla/

the waived tax was something like $56,000 PER CAR, so you can imagine why everyone who was thinking of getting one bought before the credit expired.

Quote:

The local government imposes a massive first registration tax in order to control new vehicle deployment, which so far had been waived for electric vehicles.

the proper 'government help' would be to slash that tax on all vehicles, electric or otherwise.

Ben Van Beurden, the CEO of Royal Dutch Shell, has conceded that his next car will be electric. He's shopping for a plug-in Mercedes-Benz S500e. It has 479 lb-ft of instant torque.

Quote: reno

Ben Van Beurden, the CEO of Royal Dutch Shell, has conceded that his next car will be electric. He's shopping for a plug-in Mercedes-Benz S500e. It has 479 lb-ft of instant torque.

That car is a hybrid with a fuel capacity of 70 liter with an average range of 536 miles per tank.
The fact that an oil CEO is buying a high end hybrid is not really shocking

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A Prius Prime has a starting msrp of $27,100 and can go an estimated 25 miles on plug in electric. But you still have that 43 liter tank for longer ranges.

The Model 3 is finally in production. The first 30 were delivered at the end of July. The company plans to manufacture 100 of them in August, and then ramp up production exponentially: by the beginning of January 2018, the company will (supposedly) be cranking out the Model 3 at a rate of 5,000 cars per week. In all of 2016, the company produced 83,922 vehicles, (Model S + Model X) which works out to just 1,613 per week. They burned through $1 billion in cash reserves in the last quarter, leaving them with $3 billion cash in the bank. So this morning, they announced they'll be selling $1.5 billion in corporate bonds.

Demand is there (after 63,000 cancellations, the company still has Model 3 deposits for 450,000 cars). And even if they don't actually hit 5,000/week production until say February or March, surely they'll hit it eventually. I think the big gamble for the company is their (non-existent?) profit margin on the $35,000 base model.

Tesla will be employing several gimmicky strategies to guarantee that no one will buy the cheapest version. The base model comes in just 1 color (black). If you want a different color, (blue, silver, white, or red) you'll need to shell out an additional $1,000. If you want cruise control, you'll need to shell out an additional $5,000. The base model can do 0 to 60 in 5.6 seconds, and has a battery range of 220 miles. For an additional $9,000 you can upgrade to a faster version (0-60 in 5.1 seconds) with a bigger battery (310 miles) and a top speed of 140 mph.