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LA Times used to post lots of negative articles/news against Tesla. It seems to me this has stopped. A billionaire recently bought LA Times, I remember his comment was something like "...bought the newspaper not to make money, but to do something positive for the society."
Random fact: Patrick Soon-Shiong (new owner of the LA Times), like Elon, is originally from South Africa. He is also an entrepreneur (from the biotech industry). Not sure if there are any other billionaire South African natives in LA but if so it has to be a very small group.
Not sure if any of that will matter at all but would be nice if the LA Times reporting were a touch more even handed ....
Random fact: Patrick Soon-Shiong (new owner of the LA Times), like Elon, is originally from South Africa. He is also an entrepreneur (from the biotech industry). Not sure if there are any other billionaire South African natives in LA but if so it has to be a very small group.
Not sure if any of that will matter at all but would be nice if the LA Times reporting were a touch more even handed ....
Interesting. I knew Soon-Shiong was from a Chinese family, didn't know he was born in South Africa. It seems he has quite a few billions.
As long as they publish articles that don't lie, don't try to mislead, that would be positive for the society.
ValueAnalyst
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SMT placement equipment - Wikipedia
Pick and place machines are not necessarily designed to guarantee parts arrive in the correct orientation for picking and placing, but instead usually have an intermediate step between the tape/reel and the board where either before or after being picked up their silhouette is captured and used to properly orient the part before placing. This will matter even for tray parts to ensure perfect alignment.
So expecting to be able to accomplish the same with larger robots is not unreasonable, though need more than a small rotation / offset probably means you've got some inefficient slop you could take out of your feeding to improve efficiency ...
Canada is (as good as) fully invited to configure : 85% reported receiving an invite. US is also nearing completion : 80%.
Those numbers are biased in two ways : some people may not report having received an invitation or have not found out yet they are already invited. This leads to underestimation. At the same time, some people may be unlikely to report a mere reservation but would report an invite. This leads to overestimation. All in all, I think both biases will more or less cancel each other out. This makes the numbers above pretty plausible. Also, even though reporting creates a self-selecting bias for some statistics, it doesn't for estimating who got invited : Tesla does the invitation and presumably does not care for any factor that may correlate with the likelihood of filling in that form (ie, self selecting).
There are 500k reservations worldwide. Let's assume roughly 60% of those originated in North America (Canada+USA basically). That's 300k reservations. 80% of those is 240k. Tesla is still predicting a delivery time of between 4 and 6 weeks. That means it estimates being able to produce all invited customers that actually order within that time frame. Let's say by early june or 10 weeks into Q3, 1 week of shutdown makes production run for 9 weeks. At 2500/wk on average and 12450 already produced in earlier quarters we have a total production of roughly 35 000 Model 3s by then.
This gets me to a current take up rate of about 15%. Agree/disagree?
One other mechanism (not relevant for the above but maybe for further analysis) : I suppose most people will only fill in one report even if they hold two reservations. This is due to the way to input data works : the question for the second reservation comes only at the end of a rather long questionnaire. Many posters will be fed up or have skipped over the latter questions because they aren't yet relevant to them. At that point they may very will just want to get it over with and answer in a way that gets them finished in the quikest way (by not detailing their second reservation)
Those numbers are biased in two ways : some people may not report having received an invitation or have not found out yet they are already invited. This leads to underestimation. At the same time, some people may be unlikely to report a mere reservation but would report an invite. This leads to overestimation. All in all, I think both biases will more or less cancel each other out. This makes the numbers above pretty plausible. Also, even though reporting creates a self-selecting bias for some statistics, it doesn't for estimating who got invited : Tesla does the invitation and presumably does not care for any factor that may correlate with the likelihood of filling in that form (ie, self selecting).
There are 500k reservations worldwide. Let's assume roughly 60% of those originated in North America (Canada+USA basically). That's 300k reservations. 80% of those is 240k. Tesla is still predicting a delivery time of between 4 and 6 weeks. That means it estimates being able to produce all invited customers that actually order within that time frame. Let's say by early june or 10 weeks into Q3, 1 week of shutdown makes production run for 9 weeks. At 2500/wk on average and 12450 already produced in earlier quarters we have a total production of roughly 35 000 Model 3s by then.
This gets me to a current take up rate of about 15%. Agree/disagree?
One other mechanism (not relevant for the above but maybe for further analysis) : I suppose most people will only fill in one report even if they hold two reservations. This is due to the way to input data works : the question for the second reservation comes only at the end of a rather long questionnaire. Many posters will be fed up or have skipped over the latter questions because they aren't yet relevant to them. At that point they may very will just want to get it over with and answer in a way that gets them finished in the quikest way (by not detailing their second reservation)
jeewee3000
Active Member
I don't think the invitation percentages for Canada and US are accurate (85 and 80%) and we have no way of knowing the actual number. Same goes for which percentage of pre-orders comes from North America. (Could be 35%, given huge interest in Europe and the Middle-East, or could be 80%,we can't know unless Tesla tells us).
Bottom line: too much unknown variables to perform any meaningful calculations. Not that I want to take away from your enthusiasm, of course
.I'm pretty sure Elon will give us a precise update at the ER next week. (I have a hunch he'll state a current rate of at least 3000/week but I'm not placing any short term bets)
Yeah, I would call that registration, or alignment, but yes it is orientation.
Sounds plausible. You could come to a similar conclusion by guestimating that 10% will want a P, 30% will want a D, and 30% will want a SR. Of remaining 30%, half of them will want a white interior, which means that the current production only is acceptable for 15%.
The question is, what do we do with that information? Given that D production will start around july, the only conclusion is that the config Tesla chose as initial config was good enough to test the production ramp to 5000K/week.
You were right in your original post. For SMT, the shillotte camera shot is only to correct the offset from center and 0 degrees to where the part is relative to the vacuum head. This must be done due to sub mm pin pitch. If you put your 144 pin TQFP in its tray rotated 90, it's going on the board rotated 90. The part datasheet calls out part orientation relative to the reel, tray, or tube. They can add extra camera system for optical emitter part centering, but that is not the norm.
Robots have limited rotation ability due to end effectors. It would require temp holding fixtures and grab points (along with programming) to correct gross orientation errors.
As day one in store waiter I got an invite on 4/10 and first day total was around 160 k worldwide. Since 4/10 the invites have been very few - so not sure how the assumptions can be made using 500 k tally
Why not? The spreadsheet has over 4000 samples. That's a pretty compelling coverage for a population of at most 500k (and likely much smaller) For simple yes/no selections that's way more than is necessary to get accurate estimates.
That would mean there is a significant difference in geographical interest in the model S and the model 3. Why would that be?
It's fine to say that we can't know exactly. But that's something entirely different from saying that any number is just as plausible as any other.
Note that we are talking North American reservations only. So using the 500k number is surely wrong. I account for that. Regarding your samepl : looks like it falls squarely into the numbers that you'd expect out of my analysis. There have actually been quite a few reported invitations since 4/10 : 777 to be precies. Add in half of the 4/10 cohort (we don't know were you are so we assume halfway) That's roughly 900 invites, representing about 20% of the reported invites meaning you are about 60% in the list. 160k out of 300k (NA reservations) isn't that far off. Thanks for confirming.
It's already been more than 10 days that highest VINs are in the 20 XXX.
Usually record VINs rarely stay more than a week (since end of February). Probably due to shut down.
Usually record VINs rarely stay more than a week (since end of February). Probably due to shut down.
jeewee3000
Active Member
Singer3000
Member
Hello everyone. Have lurked here for years, for longer than I’ve been long TSLA in fact, which is quite a while now.
Since the recent slide, I recently went back through the quarterly transcripts and financials of the early years, one by one, to make sure I hadn’t missed anything that would make me want to sell. I tracked anything that looked like a promise, forecast or prediction. Things that made me ponder:
Since the recent slide, I recently went back through the quarterly transcripts and financials of the early years, one by one, to make sure I hadn’t missed anything that would make me want to sell. I tracked anything that looked like a promise, forecast or prediction. Things that made me ponder:
- A promise that Model S would have a positive working capital cycle - a promise that’s been repeated for M3. This didn’t happen for MS, due to sustained build up of inventory. I’ll be watching this closely for M3 in coming months.
- On the Inventory build up - after removing Sales in Transit, finished inventory has at times exceeded what I expected would be needed for Store Display/Service Loaners, especially given Tesla’s claim that electric cars rarely go wrong and need minimal maintenance. But then again, I have been to a single Tesla showroom (in Shanghai, while pretty well oiled). How many vehicles you have in your big US showrooms I don’t know. Nor the service loaner density needed for a place like California. Maybe you can put my mind at rest. Again, one of the first items I’ll look for in Q1 / Q2 accounts to check the trend.
- Near term cashflow predictions have been pretty bang on, Model X launch delay aside. Betting against positive cashflow in Q3/Q4 this year seems a bold move if the M3 ramp looks like reaching anywhere close to 5,000.
- But medium term cashflow predictions have been mostly dreadful. Take your pick from this being a positive acceleration of the mission or a continual underestimation of capex requirements and a stodgy r&d department. When Elon says “a capital raise is not required”, we should take that to mean one is probably fairly imminent. This doesn’t necessarily mean he’s lying of course but until we see follow through on profit and cashflow, he’ll be open to that charge.
- You can fight over COGS accounting practices versus peers all you want. By Tesla’s own measure, gross margin predictions have been more or less there on quantum and timing. If Tesla predicts a 25% gross margin for the M3 at scale, I tend to believe them.
- But... operating leverage capability remains unproven. Deepak has promised “long term” high single digit net margin for years. Let’s see that please, given the first Masterplan is now complete and given there is very limited granularity on the largest components of Opex.
- Lease accounting. Variable disclosure, shallow detail and confusing comingling of different concepts (e.g. Resale Value Guarantee, direct leasing, price promise to third party leasing companies). This nags at me.
- Lease interest rates: tricky to quantify the impact of QE & record low rates on demand, other than to say it must have made a difference early on and was something that 2012 Elon saw as quite important to demand. Despite the turning of the rates cycle, Tesla’s brand strength means this doesn’t keep me up at night. But it might well slow some of the headier predictions of Xmln cars per year by 202X.
- Leasing resale value: I’d prefer much more detailed and regular disclosure on profit/loss from pre-owned inventory sales and the potential liquidity requirements from this component of past sales. That there is not yet a high volume/high transparency second hand market for Tesla’s products adds uncertainty to this line item.
- Technical promises: not much more needs to be said about Elon Time. But based upon performance promises of past models, there’s no good reason to disbelieve the Semi/Roadster specs. AI and autonomous driving? Maybe they’ll win the race, maybe they won’t. Doesn’t seem a core reason to invest or disinvest at this point.
bdy0627
Active Member
I think a lot of people (like me) are delaying configuring until additional options are available. When people reserved, it was with various configurations in mind - LR, SR, AWD, Performance. With only the one configuration available now, we are seeing the take rate for that one particular option. I think many are waiting for AWD. Many are also waiting for SR. It is speculative right now to assume that customers who are choosing not to configure are doing so because they have decided against the Model 3 vs waiting for those other options. What percentage of the reservations do you think were for the current LR rear wheel drive configuration? 15%? 20%? 25%? That's the unknown that we are seeing play out right now with configurations for the current option available.
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