I wonder if GM ever regretted giving then upstart Tesla the old NUMMI factory in Fremont for literally a song. I think they got it for $81 million or something completely absurd. Basically robbed GM blind at that price. Tesla would probably never have made it this far if they hadn't gotten a completely operational recently used car factory for basically peanuts at a time when they had no money and no product, just Elon's hopes and dreams.
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I believe it was $42 million. Hindsight is always 20/20. At that time, there were people who thought Tesla was going to go bankrupt for buying an albatross of a factory, and that Toyota and GM unloaded deadweight on their books onto a very naive new car company.
IANAL, and a WAG, perhaps that is why the vote for representation must determine whether union or not. Are periodic referendums needed? Is a referendum required when membership drops below 50% or some super majority?
JRP3
Hyperactive Member
I agree, I was just thinking that a different more rational union might cut the legs out from under the UAW and end their trouble making attempts.
Left out a possibility: Maybe I just don't understand your humor? As a baseline on how base is mine, here:
"Are you Syrious? You know I Babylon." Close enough if it weren't for Sykes-Picot.
zmarty
Member
Prominent Lawyer in Fight for Gay Rights Dies After Setting Himself on Fire in Prospect Park
“Pollution ravages our planet, oozing inhabitability via air, soil, water and weather,” he wrote in the email sent to The Times. “Most humans on the planet now breathe air made unhealthy by fossil fuels, and many die early deaths as a result — my early death by fossil fuel reflects what we are doing to ourselves.”
“Pollution ravages our planet, oozing inhabitability via air, soil, water and weather,” he wrote in the email sent to The Times. “Most humans on the planet now breathe air made unhealthy by fossil fuels, and many die early deaths as a result — my early death by fossil fuel reflects what we are doing to ourselves.”
Yes. I would like to see Tesla workers unionised at some point, but not with the UAW (raking up $130,000 in "hotel expenses" in their year long "fight" with Tesla).
I found some old articles on the UAW shenanigans at the old NUMMI plant. Article from a socialist website, so I don't think it is biased.
Anger toward UAW erupts at California auto workers meeting
The video linked in that article gives some colour !! I am sure some ex-NUMMI workers and now current Tesla workers have fond memories of the UAW.
These days there are so much fake news on the internet, lots of honest people got confused and can't tell what's real what's fake.
I will try my best to described what happened surrounding the NUMMI deal, hopefully someone can correct me if I said something wrong.
The UNMMI factory used to be a joint venture between GM and Toyota (see Wikipedia). GM expected to learn lean-manufacturing from Toyota. Toyota gets a foothold to produce cars in the US. Everything was good.
As time goes by, manufacturing in CA becomes difficult. I remember one article talked about the difficulty to get high quality workers ...
In June 2009 GM pulled out of the joint venture due to it's bankruptcy, so it became Toyota's property. A few months later Toyota also wanted to get out. I think the 2008~2009 recession scared a lot of companies. They started to do strategic re-planing. For Toyota, producing in some other states has advantages, they really don't need the UNMMI.
Although the plant was valued at $1B, selling it was not easy. Nobody wants to do car manufacturing in CA, you know the reasons.
At one point Toyota wanted to give the plant to the city for $0. But the city said no. They said Toyota has to pay a few hundred million dollars. - I read this part from an article. It makes sense to me. To Toyota, the plant is a burden. They have to pay a lot of property tax every year, while not producing cars.
Right at this time, Elon was looking for a plant, so they started to negotiate with Toyota. In the end Tesla got the plant for $42m (that's all the money Tesla had). I think that deal went through not because Toyota wanted to sell it cheap, it's because they really can't sell it at any price.
As part of the deal, Toyota bought 50 million dollars of Tesla stock, and Tesla helped Toyota on an EV - battery powered RAV4. Tesla supplied batteries and drivetrains. If you consider the stock gain Toyota got on those Tesla shares, the whole thing was a great deal for Toyota.
I suspect later Toyota and Mercedes realized that EV is not good for their business. They both sold their Tesla shares with huge profits. Toyota regularly makes $10B net profit from ICE cars per year, they have an edge producing ICEs. If the whole industry moves to EV, their profit would shrink a lot. So they started to say EV is not the future, Hydrogen is.
Overall the UNMMI plant was a fair deal for both sides.
Knowing how Elon does things, I think Tesla would still get this far without that UNMMI. Look how the Gigafactory2 started in Buffalo.
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IMO, you nailed it. The $50 MM stock purchase in a private placement at the IPO funded the purchase and removed the annual property tax millstone from Toyota's neck. Tesla's indemnity for environmental liabilities was icing on the cake for Toyota; if Tesla succeeds there will be a deep pocket to pay Toyota's exposure for owning the site; if Tesla fails, Toyota is no worse off and may have arguments that the harmful substances were deposited after Toyota's possession/ownership of the site.
Have you reached any conclusions on why Toyota (and for that matter, Daimler) would have sold positions in Tesla shares after multiple years of inside looks at Tesla's IP?
I am mostly worried about the gross margin right now. Elon said clearly that certain systems didn't work and they need(ed) a lot more manual labor. This is not only a loss on their investment (both faulty systems and stagnant capacities) but there are also additional costs for labor. When Elon announced a 25% gross margin target he still thought that the machine that builds the machine is going to work a lot better than it did.
With it's Alien Dreadnought plans Tesla viewed manufacturing mainly as a highly technical problem. The only humans in the factory were supposed to maintain the machines (end goal). The obvious advantage was that machines can physically move a lot faster than humans can and therefore the whole production line could be a lot faster. But there are disadvantages. It's not only very challenging to make these incredibly complex systems work, but they are also expensive and if certain sub-systems fail the whole line stands still. You are only as fast as your weakest/slowest part. While Toyota's lean production system and human labor in general is more flexible a failing technical sub-system can be disastrous.
After having thought about it a bit i now believe that EM comment "Yes, excessive automation at Tesla was a mistake. To be precise, my mistake. Humans are underrated." indicates a major strategic move away from pure Alien Dreadnought. It seems that EM is now valuing the flexibility of humans that saved the production in the Gigafactory while it took Tesla&Grohman half a year to built a new technical system/line that is not even proven at high volumes yet.
There are going to be fast systems like the new Grohman line (if it eventually works) and human labor for systems that didn't work, bottlenecks, downtime and so on. It's also going to be challenging to coordinate human labor in parallel so that it can match the speed of the fastest machines. There is no point of having machines that are crazy fast if you can not feed them fast enough. The conveyer belt system therefore needs to be replaced with something that is equally fast but EM seems confident. After all the whole production line needs to be smooth without idle running or congestions.
Given that those observations are true i now wonder how many more humans Tesla needs short term and how expensive this is going to be. Can anyone tell me how much a median worker earns at Tesla? What do you think are the absolut worst case scenarios? Something like 5.000 workers more earning 10k? (I'm just putting out numbers) Therefore absolut worst case additional expenses of approx. half a billion a year?
If the lines are less automated, they will certainly need more space for slower human labor and therefore the output per square meter is lower. I think there is no way to get capacity to 15-20k a week. As far as i remember EM said in the last earnings call that he estimates 600.000 Model 3 100.000 Model S/X max because pushing it further would make no economic sense.
The "recent successes" listed on the plaintiff lawyers' website have a median settlement value of $2.1 million and a range of $625K-$24 million. This is the record of shakedown artists/bottom feeders. Recent Successes: Rosen Law
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I haven't reached a conclusion. I have this theory:
Tesla's mission is "to accelerate the advent of sustainable transport by bringing compelling mass market electric cars to market as soon as possible." Legacy car companies' mission is "to make as much profit as possible". Tesla's mission goes directly against them. I guess someone woke up all the legacy car makers. That's why when Tesla offered to open Superchargers to other companies, as long as they are willing to share the cost, no legacy companies took the offer. They don't want to do anything that can help Tesla, and Tesla's mission.
Another possibility is that they were fooled by the shorts and thought Tesla was going to bankrupt.
In 2003, Microsoft sold the 18.2 million share stake in Apple, with splits, would worth a lot today. I still don't know the reason why they sold. I think it was for business reasons, not for the money.
Texas
Member
When people like to talk about how Tesla stole the NUMMI plant from Toyota, they need to remember that Toyota also bought a significant chunk of Tesla shares for $50 million dollars when the stock was selling for peanuts. According to Inside EVs, Toyota later sold part of its holdings in October of 2014 for $700 million, followed by a sale in 2016 of its remaining 2.3 million shares at about $480 million, for a total Toyota coup of $1.1 billion. This was a sweet good-bye present from the buyer of the NUMMI plant.
Waiting4M3
Active Member
Someone remind Toyota that they sold TSLA in 2016 for $209/sh
Texas
Member
Rating agencies: don't forget, Standard & Poor's downgraded the credit rating of the United States of America! Sometimes credit rating agencies seem to be interested in simply wasting ink.
Enlightenment: After some of the anti-virus companies discovered Stuxnet out on the open internet, someone(s) reverse engineered it and introduced malware called Duqu (after the bad guy in Star Wars) based on the vulnerabilities exploited by Stuxnet, none of which had been otherwise disclosed or patched. Other malware based on parts of Stuxnet, the parts that performed malicious damage to the Iranian centrifuges, were re-targeted to other SCADA systems. SCADA = "Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition", the software that controls power plants, sewers, oil refineries, ...
bambam4171
Member
Fully agree, and lets not forget now they have their own Tesla Automation and I guess those guys will be part of any future plant design. I'm sure that acquisition will pay out.
bambam4171
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