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Tesla Hype

In October, Jean-Louis Gassée wrote:

As I watched Tesla’s messy, hiccuping line, with workers dashing in to fix faulty parts in place, my mind travelled back to the Honda plant I had visited years ago in Marysville, Ohio. Clean, calm, everything moved smoothly. I was so shocked by the contrast that I imprudently voiced my concern. That didn’t go over well with my fellow Tesla owners. I was a killjoy, I was calling their choice into question.

I forgot about the episode until recently. In an exchange with a trusted industry observer, I found out that he had had exactly the same experience only weeks ago, but he couldn’t write about it by “virtue” of the NDA he’d signed.

Today, Timothy B. Lee writes:

One engineer told CNBC that a lack of spare capacity leads to frequent shutdowns: “There’s no redundancy, so when one thing goes wrong, everything shuts down.” But automated production with frequent shutdowns is better than manual assembly. And this is presumably a problem Tesla can fix in the coming months.

The company only managed to produce about 1,800 Model 3s in the third and fourth quarters of 2017.

I’m skeptical. Tesla has a huge valuation but their production is minuscule compared to other car companies:

Tesla is currently the most valuable American car company, worth $53.5 billion at market close today — about $3 billion more than General Motors.

Tesla sold just over 22,000 vehicles this quarter. That’s a little more than 1 percent of Ford’s 1.7 million in sales this quarter and a little less than 1 percent of General Motors’ 2.3 million.

To complicate things, Jack Baruth writes:

There are only two American cars with any sales volume whatsoever in Europe — those cars being the Ford Mustang and the Tesla Model S.

Tesla is a legitimate presence, doing about 15,000 sales per year in Britain and the Continent combined. In fact, the Model S outsold the Mercedes-Benz S-Class across Western Europe in 2015.

and (in a different article):

It’s apparently not unusual for Electrek writers to hold positions in Tesla stock, and although they periodically disclose that fact, it’s not usually disclosed in close proximity to stories like “Tesla Model S Crushes All Competition.”

What you will find right beneath that article: an invitation to use the writer’s code for a Tesla referral. That’s where you’ll see that the writer has made twenty referrals for new Tesla purchases.

We need a new word for religions like Tesla and Bitcoin, where people are true believers that it will all work out in the end.

©Andrew Swift · top · more · contact