If every person has put down $1k for a preorder, that means in the span of a few days Tesla has pulled in more than $250,000,000. That's a lot of green. I wonder if Musk is celebrating right now, or if he's starting to sweat the realization that he's gonna have to up his production game.
Edit: The goons in the comment section of the link are more entertaining than the article.
They deliberately downplayed the number of pre-orders they were expecting because whatever number they chose, if they didn't beat it by a substantial margin the shorters would hammer the shit out of the stock. Keep in mind: Tesla's factory used to be NUMMI, which had no difficulty making 400,000 cars per year, and electric cars are substantially less complicated to assemble than internal combustion, so long as you have the batteries, which they do. Tesla could reasonably be expected to cross a half million cars a year by 2018.
Hmm. I didn't know any of that. 2018 is a bit far away though. Hopefully nothing major disrupts their plans. I know in the '80s and '90s, shortages in microchips messed with some electronic companies' product plans. Also, I'm not gonna start another thread, but in case you haven't seen the latest news about VW and their American Dealers not getting along too hot . . . Talk to Our Committee to Avoid Lawsuits, Volkswagen Dealers Tell Automaker Diess Extends a Flimsy Olive Branch to Volkswagen Dealers It looks like VW isn't really handling this whole fiasco well on any front.
Well, their Model 3 deliveries aren't due until 2017, and they have 250k of them. To date they've made about 120k Model S and they're limiting their Model X deliveries to 23k for 2016. Best guess is they've got 2016 to ramp up on Model 3 and get delivered what they need delivered on the X and S. Then they've got all of 2017 to churn out 250k cars... or however many more orders they decide to take until they're sold out. And "sold out" is the way to go on this. Ferrari cuts production all the time because you know what? Nobody argues the price when they're lucky just to get one. Nobody really harps on quality either; scarcity is your friend when you're the manufacturer. Especially when you have a factory that just ten years ago was turning out more cars per year than you've ever made and all you need to do is ramp it back up. One in four Tesla shares out there is a short. That's $5.5 BILLION dollars worth of people betting that Tesla's going to fail. Shit - I've been one. Tesla is a cult stock and some of the people who hold it hold it for stupid reasons and you can occasionally make money off their stupidity. I do think Tesla makes cars worth owning, and I expect I'll own one at some point. They'll have to stop turning this:
Eh. It's a toss up for me. On the one hand, I like the 3's proportions better overall. On the other hand, there's nothing really going on with the front end. It looks like they didn't finish designing it. That said, with the Bolt, if no one told me, I wouldn't have guessed it was an electric car. If just figure it for another ugly Chevy commuter car, like the Cruz. That kind of says something about the normalcy of the design. Nissan and BMW could take notes on that.
I actually love the lack of a grill. It's bold and honest. It doesn't need one, so it doesn't have one. The Bolt (and so many other cars) have so many lines that seem to be an effort to over-compensate for a convergence on form. Pontiac was the worst offender, but I think that was ok, since they were going for the spoiler demographic. IMO the Model 3 embraces it's form and function.
I think also too, the cars are designed for different crowds. To go with kleinbl00's Ferrari example, People who buy Ferarris do it in large part because they want you to know they bought a Ferarri, so they're designed in such a way that anyone who sees one, knows what it is immediately. The same is probably true for the Tesla 3, so they designed it in such a way that there will be no doubt in people's mind what car they're seeing. They're aiming for a savy crowd, people who are more than comfortable dropping $1,000 on their I-Pad for a place in line for an electric car. Chevrolet, on the other hand, is building a car for a different demographic. Normal people, who don't buy cars sight unseen on their I-Pads. So they need a car that looks more like every other car on the road, a car that looks right at home in any of their thousands of dealerships. That front grill adds a lot of normalcy to that car.IMO the Model 3 embraces it's form and function.