Those cars are just cheating the EPA test cycle. They’re programmed to get 28 MPG in an EPA test, and they get under 16 MPG in real life ownership. That would have been crazy talk just a few days ago. Sure, they go a little bit further on the highway when they’re cruising at 1500 RPM.
No, 2014 was 16.5 million.
Anyway, you said 1.5 million sales for Tesla a minute ago…now you’re saying it’s plausible they will be adding 1.0 million?
Adding 1.0 million to current sales of basically zero is 1.0 million, not 1.5.
As discussed earlier (by everyone but you, since you ignored it) Tesla is priced today for 1.5 milllion in sales, and Audi like profitability (really good). Problem is Tesla sells no cars and loses money on what they sell.
Let me know when you make up your mind.
US consumers will buy up to 20 million cars and trucks in 2020 unless there is a very bad recession.
You’re the only “analyst” trying to figure out the unit economics of a supply constrained startup automaker growing at over 100% a year. You’d also be the only investor asking them to return a small profit instead of investing in growth.
saki there’s crackers in your briefcase and you wore clown shoes today. You should buy some VW stock this is just a temporary setback. Everybody loves high maintenance cars. Everybody. They are literally out of ideas. They are so unwilling to leave behind 1890’s carriage propulsion technology that they attempted to defraud the US government just to keep the past going. The state of Saxony is now insolvent because they lost $10 billion euros this week on their VW shares. I don’t know how much clearer the market could be about what happens next. A lot clearer than I’m making this point.
http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_ll1fd0Egfp1qj9qhto1_400.gif
Again…what does VW have to do with me? Or anyone here?
At no point in this thread have you stayed on topic. You have the attention span of a ferret on crank.
Just hit -30 already .
This thread should be in the war room. Has little to do with Audi and it’s turned into a show that some are amused by. A few earnest folks would like to ban me from the Internet for thought crimes.
That’s because it’s not about Audi. And it’s appropriately placed in the General Discussion section - i.e., where non-Audi discussion takes place.
guess what you are wrong on the 28mpg thing at least with the 3.0T motor. On the highway I routinely get 29.5 mpg so I guess they cheated and understated it, city is less but then I’m stomping on it as well. MPG is how you drive it.
If you think the EPA cycle is designed to show you real world numbers then you are dumber than I thought. Which is dumb, because dumber than dumb is just dumb. West, you are pretty dumb.
What’s the point of redesigning literally every engine in every car to be turbocharged if actual fleet mileage doesn’t improve and we’re just lying to ourselves? http://fueleconomy.gov is more fantastical than any website I’ve ever seen, and I’ve seen a lot in Silicon Valley.
Pretend for a moment you could measure the actual fuel economy and emissions of every car on the road as driven (maybe these cars can talk to the Internet or something). The goal would be to improve overall manufacturer fleet economy while lowering emissions. The EPA and DOE is not doing this. They make easy tests that even easier to cheat on. Drive an RS7 around at 1100 RPM and it gets 28 MPG. Fantastic. Look at any owner’s dash even if it’s a family car with car seats and it says 17 MPG. Might as well be a Lambo V10 still, as far as economy is concerned. All they did was make engines that perform better, which is great for us but different than the stated goal.
Everyone got a bump from me to keep this thread going. I don’t want to see west gone yet, it’s not like he’s a tune stealer or a 3Ldickbeater, and you gotta admit, you ALL keep coming back for more.
FWIW, I agree with the original post of the article, and the shortcomings of Tesla, but keep in mind to even BE a car manufacturer these days, there is really no other avenue possible than the one they took - government credits.
How is it even possible to become an automobile manufacturer these days, electric or not? Isn’t it a little odd that in pretty much ANY of our lifetimes, there have been basically no new domestic automobile manufacturers? How could anyone do it? Should we just say - it’s not possible financially?
Of course it’s possible financially, if the market will sustain it. I’ll grant you that certain autos get govt breaks, but i doubt they hold a candle to the boondoggle that Tesla has managed to whip up. As has been noted, Tesla fleeces the taxpayers on both the supply AND demand side. And they still haven’t earned a penny lol.
Not to mention the fact that you don’t compound one error (govt assistance in whatever form) by making an even more egregious error–namely, subsidizing wealthy people’s purchases of wholly uneconomical vehicles. None of the govt breaks given to the major autos (however big or small they may be) justifies the Tesla racket.
Frankly, with all we know about the ironclad laws of supply and demand and how prices are at their core an information discovery mechanism, it’s insulting for Tesla to parade itself around like it knows something. In reality, all it knows is political pull, and the corresponding parasitic behavior that goes along with it.
P.S. Jspazz - karma bump to you as well 
Exactly, this is a car designed and only affordable by the 1%ers that everyone used to protest 3 years ago. Now the 99%ers’ taxes are being used to subsidize the 1%ers’ cars lol
Even the base model S 60 is only affordable by someone making $125,000/year or more.
Funny that the only Tesla anyone really gives a shit about is the p90d or p85d. The only buzz and the fan boys came about when those models started posting ridiculous short burst acceleration. And it’s only the one that people making $250,000-500,000/year + can afford.
The grand majority of the people lauding the p85d/p90d teslas for their ‘greatness’ can’t afford them. People like west are a good example . He even said it isn’t realistic for him to buy a $91,000 car, nevermind $140,000. So here you have someone with a good job with nice cars defending Tesla to the death…on behalf of a few thousand people who make triple what he does and can buy a supercar priced Tesla as a toy.
Is this a viable business? lol
And Jspazz is right. It’s not just Tesla. It’s everyone. The car business is a terrible business.
Capital intensive? Check
Lousy margins? Check
Lousy unions? Check
Existing brand loyalty? Big Check
Intense competition? Check
Awful business case.
You break in by being the low cost provider (something like a tata nano or a gee whiz) or you make a niche suoercar for ultra high net worth individuals (in other words you sell only a handful like Koenigsegg or Pagani).
Tesla is doing neither…yet the stock market is pricing them like they are already one of the top 20 brands by sales AND profit, on earth.
West you are probably being purposefully dense but I’ll give you the beit of the doubt. The EPA MPG test cycle is a benchmark for which you can make RELATIVE comparisons. It allows you to compare an RS7 and A4 FWD on a relative basis. It doesn’t tell you what you should expect. Like said above, I’ve seen 29 MPG on a work commute (reported in the cluster, which is probably 2 mpg off).
This is the same way that the 1/4 mile measures acceleration in a specific and controlled environment. There are cars that are tuned/geared to go very fast in the first 60 mph but slow top end. So yes, a vehicles control strategy can be to try and hit a lean burn during the EPA cycle. The same reason that dishwasher companies test their products performance with the same peanut butter/egg test that consumer reports will use. If you were an engineer working the calibration, why would you not use the final benchmark as a basis for your tuning?
The EPA does not and never will have the chops to enforce that the benchmark cycles are followed for every car sold. It is an honor system, but there is culpability if later it is found out consumers/laws were cheated. Hell, even manufacturers don’t have the resources to test every variation/trim/driveline of vehicle (especially in the platform sharing generation). This is why they sometimes rely on computational models to produce data, which while falling within the EPA guidelines, can be done dishonestly…which is why Hyundai, Ford gave customers money back for incorrectly reporting EPA MPG on window stickers.
Is the system flawed, yes, absolutely. The EPA needs to re-evaluate what the test cycle consists of because it favors certain types of cars, and could be considered somewhat "canned’ driving scenarios. But the “cheating” like you are saying to tune vehicle calibrations is nothing like what VW did.
So do rich people who own big houses and deduct $10,000 a month of mortgage interest steal from the poor also? Or are they just reducing their own tax liability independent of anyone else? Asking for a friend. Cars are an infinitesimally small problem in fair taxation relative to real estate.
The only thing unfair that has happened with car taxes is VW clean diesel credits for cars that actually pollute 40x more. Classic. You gotta give electric cars a pass there.
The reality is that Nissan and others can’t make a $30k pure electric that can go 300 miles. Tesla is going to be the first one to do it and the market believes in them.
And that is precisely why you are a koolaid drinker. When has tesla demonstrated to be even remotely capable of achieving that landmark? It’s all hot air from Elon Musk. I thought the model X was supposed to be the car for the people (50k with 300 miles of range), but now they are selling the first batch for 130k that does 0-60 in 3.2 seconds. So yea, completely the peoples car there. Probably more than a 30% of American’s houses are worth.
shit analogy. Rich and poor people BOTH deduct their mortgage interest, but at no point does the government offer you $7500 to buy a Ford Fiesta or the cars poor people buy. The reality is this is supernumerary. You have to pay capital gains tax on your principal residence when you sell it. So that deduction on interest is irrelevant. Most of the free world you don’t deduct the mortgage interest but you don’t have to pay capital gains tax on the principal residence when you sell it.
In fact a rich person is less likely to wrestle with their mortgage for 30 years, and are fare likelier to pay it off in 11. A poor person doesn’t have that option. So the tax ‘break’ on on principal residences in america actually favours the poor.
Next?
That was never the plan. No affordable electric cars until a cheap battery factory comes online. I view Tesla in 2015 as a transfer payments mechanism for getting rich people to lend both their investment capital AND their retail cash to make alternative vehicles a mainstream option for folks. I could imagine a senior citizen buying a Model 3 as the last car they ever buy. Currently they buy the Prius. The Prius is the mainstream market to conquer, and why wouldn’t we want a US company and domestic manufacturer to take that all back? It fixes the trade deficit, it fixes the environment, it makes life more affordable by lowering transportation cost for middle class people, and it wanes demand on oil over a medium term horizon. Meaning we don’t need to frack the hell out of the country to meet demand until we find safer ways to pursue that (I think it’s plenty safe now but some states like New York do not agree and have banned it).
Bingo
the Model X was supposed to be far cheaper than Model S, and be the ‘every mom in America soccer wagon’
Now they’re reserved for people who make $25 grand a month and the ‘cheap’ one with 50 miles of range will cost $90,000.
The Model 3 is not forecast to be priced at $30,000. It is forecast to be priced at $50,000. And when we see it, it will likely cost $75,000 unless Tesla gets lucky and drastically improves battery production cost.
That’s the thing everyone is missing. They’re betting on reducing battery costs AND weight by something like 30-50%…in 4 years…in factories that aren’t yet built…funded by a government that has yet to be elected…in order to make a $50,000 ‘mass market’ car. If ANY of those things are off, the whole thing gets kicked down the road. This is called ‘priced for perfection’ and is how you lose 75% in the stock market.
You’re either misinformed or it’s different in Canada. Let me explain it to you. Rich people are smart enough to know that a tax advantaged loan at 3% is a great thing to have. No one pays off their mortgage. A typical scenario is someone pays $3 million cash for a house just to get the one they want without a contingency, then they mortgage it for $2 million and put the money in the stock market and other fixed income investments.
The only reason there is no capital gains tax on personal real estate is because the Clintons squeezed that gem in. It’s why real estate is unaffordable to millennials unless they’re willing to live in Buffalo or Ann Arbor (sorry drob).
You can get the $7500 tax credit on the Nissan Leaf or the Fiat e500. You don’t even need to be rich. Again, you can’t get the tax credit unless you already paid income tax. If you and your spouse earn $500,000 a year to live a middle class life near an expensive crowded city, and pay approximately $200,000 in federal, state and local income taxes who cares if you get back $10,000 for a car you’re going to keep for 5 years? Those people are going to pay $1,000,000 in taxes over 5 years. They get 1% back for reducing the external effects of their transportation. It’s not a big deal.
You’re making stuff up. No analyst or physicist believes the Tesla can only succeed if it weighs less than a Porsche Boxster at 2900 pounds. Maybe you mean that the total weight of the battery pack, currently 1000 pounds, should really be a couple hundred pounds lighter. That is a sensible outcome and materials like lithium sulfur can provide that. The Model S batteries are like lego components that they get from Panasonic and others in small units, assembled into a pack. When they start building their own they can better reason about the packaging and shave grams off each cell to achieve the desired weight.
If he sent rockets to space that can land themselves, I think he can figure out how to package a battery cell and hire a team to manufacture that at scale. Wall Street thinks so anyway. Healthy skepticism is fair but it’s important to see both sides. It looks really bad for all of North America if Tesla fails.
Wouldn’t you rather every Prius on the road be a Tesla instead? I do.