Tesla are running out of money and will be bankrupt by early 2019, they're asking suppliers to offer "retroactive price cuts"

[jagdtigger]

12 minutes ago, Deus Voltage said:

So anecdotal evidence is the basis of your arguments? 

If an existing and real issue is anecdotal for you. Or there is the issue of fire hazard. It can catch on fire on its own, and it cant be put out once lit. If a normal car catches fire you just pick up the nearest fire extinguisher and in most cases thats the end of it. Not so much in case of a EV's....

[Deus Voltage]

Just now, jagdtigger said:

If an existing and real issue is anecdotal for you. Or there is the issue of fire hazard. It can catch on fire on its own, and it cant be put out once lit. If a normal car catches fire you just pick up the nearest fire extinguisher and in most cases thats the end of it. Not so much in case of a EV's....

What is the scientific/ academic basis of your arguments? 

[D13H4RD]

Also, Volkswagen Soundaktor

[jagdtigger]

4 minutes ago, Deus Voltage said:

What is the scientific/ academic basis of your arguments? 

https://jalopnik.com/watch-volunteer-firefighters-in-austria-extinguish-a-fi-1819665352

 

End of debate.

[jeffmeyer5295]

6 minutes ago, jagdtigger said:

https://jalopnik.com/watch-volunteer-firefighters-in-austria-extinguish-a-fi-1819665352

 

End of debate.

I mean if we are being completely honest with ourselves any vehicle fire is very serious and is never a 'grab a fire extinguisher' kind of thing, and even if it was, who tf outside of track cars keep one on hand? A ton of gasoline cars burn to the ground all the time. Of course a car made out of lipoly batteries is going to burn once ignited but lets not pretend gasoline is any less flammable lol.

 

Don't get me wrong I get what you're saying but still.

[Deus Voltage]

1 minute ago, jagdtigger said:

https://jalopnik.com/watch-volunteer-firefighters-in-austria-extinguish-a-fi-1819665352

 

End of debate.

I was specifically referring to your initial argument in which you said EV cars are worse than IC, what is the scientific backing of your arguments? What is the scientific consensus that says so? 

 

Perhaps you do not fully see why it is impossible to argue for your position in current times, so I'll remove some of the potential confusion.

 

First, there aren't enough EV cars circulating globally to have any meaningful scientific study on the subject. In other words, not enough sample size. Until they do become mainstream, studies about how better or worse EV cars are than gas cars will, again referring to the studies, paint a fragmented image at best, and a misleading one at worst. 

 

Second, EV market is in a constant state of flux, and battery technology is still developing. Therefore, to make the brazen claim that EV's are worse without knowing the future (yes I do realize it's impossible to know the future, that's why you don't make the claim in the first place) is misleading in my view. 

[Rohith_Kumar_Sp]

i'd like you to point out this video which i saw long ago

 

[Selah]

3 hours ago, jeffmeyer5295 said:

Yeah I get that, but that's on both sides like you said. Don't drive like a mad man and obvs because batteries are involved temperature needs to be on your mind, you should be alright most of the time. You can't really take an electric car on a long road trip but tbh if I'm spending 60-100k on a car I don't really want that kind of wear and tear on it regardless of gas/electric when rental cars are so damn cheap.

False, I've ridden in a modelx from Denver to california

[jeffmeyer5295]

1 minute ago, Selah said:

False, I've ridden in a modelx from Denver to california

Good for you lol. Not everyone wants to deal with the charging and junk. Glad you made it.

[AlTech]

3 hours ago, Master Disaster said:

Yeah, totally agree. Concentrating on the high end first wasn't very smart, they were never going to shift enough supercars to become self sustainable.

 

As you said, now electric has become mainstream other manufacturers have joined the party and taken a huge chunk of Tesla's potential customer base away.

 

Why wait months for a Tesla when you can have the cheaper Nissan, VW or (insert your manufacturer of choice) tomorrow?

1

Because other car companies don't know how to make Electric Cars with enough range to be actually meaninful. Right now, the only truly 100% electric car I'd be willing to buy if I had money and had to buy a car is a Tesla.

[dizmo]

This doesn't surprise me at all. Musk has had a lot of cash invested in this from many different areas, and he's been burning through it at a pretty high rate.

I mean, I hope he pulls through, but honestly I don't really see it happening. He's expanded into too many areas too rapidly, a problem a lot of people with his IQ have. More brains than business sense, some might say. For example, what ever happened to the Tesla trucks? I haven't really heard much of anything about those. He has done wonderful things for the industry though, and really kickstarted the push to EVs.

 

It'll be interesting to see if he can rustle up enough investors to keep the company afloat.
Personally, I think he should try and find a way to mine some of the quadrillion tons of diamonds they've discovered 100 miles under the earths surface.

Boring Company's best feat, anyone?

 

4 hours ago, Hip said:

I doubt that this is true. All the big motor companies are trying to badmouth Elon Musk and Tesla for the last years. Due to his will to change something he didn't stop when they tried to erase them from the playground and now all the motor companies will need to follow his steps. They just want to get rid of Tesla and stay in the place they are.

Haha, no. Tesla has been bleeding massive amounts of money for a very long time.

Musk is more of an engineer, a hopeful scientist. Not so much a businessman.

 

He might be able to pull it out over the long run, but it'll take a lot of people with very deep pockets and a lot of faith to do it.

4 hours ago, jagdtigger said:

Well well, the bubble is about to burst... As predicted, electric cars arent ready for mainstream. Short range, long charging time, relatively short battery lifespan.

Sounds like you don't know much about the auto industry

4 hours ago, jagdtigger said:

Which means quick charge, i love how everyone likes to forget that any form of quick charge is damaging the battery shortening its lifetime....

For now. Believe it or not, technology tends to advance, and things that were once detrimental can be corrected and improved upon!

3 hours ago, D13H4RD2L1V3 said:

I don't know if Tesla is actually going bankrupt

 

I've heard it so many times but I haven't actually seen much of it

They've been burning through a lot of money for a very long time.

I mean, they could maybe turn it around, but it'll take a lot more sales...and, honestly, more reliable vehicles.

3 hours ago, laminutederire said:

Elon musk is a confidence man. As long as people keep having blind faith in him even if nothing he does is either genius nor is it really profitable, his endeavours will succeed somewhat for him.

I wouldn't say that. I would say he's a scientist and inventor, and not a businessman. They're very rarely interchangeable.

3 hours ago, DrMacintosh said:

They have a market, but they decided to occupy the high end before they occupied the mainstream and have not been able to get the mainstream models to the masses. 

 

Electric cars are ready to replace fossil fuel cars, they just need to be commodity cars like the Model 3. Existing car makers know this and have been pumping a lot of R&D into making affordable electric cars. 

See below.

3 hours ago, Master Disaster said:

Yeah, totally agree. Concentrating on the high end first wasn't very smart, they were never going to shift enough supercars to become self sustainable.

 

As you said, now electric has become mainstream other manufacturers have joined the party and taken a huge chunk of Tesla's potential customer base away.

 

Why wait months for a Tesla when you can have the cheaper Nissan, VW or (insert your manufacturer of choice) tomorrow?

When they started out they were a small company. Focusing on the high end makes the most sense, since you need small units to make large profit. Then you can move forward from there. You don't really have the option to expand into the mainstream market right away. The luxury cars drive desire for the masses to own something made by the same company.

3 hours ago, D13H4RD2L1V3 said:

Chevrolet Bolt

 

At this point, the reason why I'd have a Tesla is for the "cool" factor. And even then, I'd pick a Model S as a daily

Except most people can't afford a Model S Or, honestly, a lot of the EV's the big manufacturers are set to push out.

3 hours ago, yian88 said:

Tesla maybe no, but the electric car with long miles will be missed, and less polution dream.

Im sick of old cars, expensive, break down a lot due to transmission/engine/oil issues and so on, i could only dream of owning any electric car, even a 2 seater ~100km range battery without any mechanical hassles of the traditional car...

 

If ElonMusk would worry more about tesla and less about Thailand kids trapped in a cave maybe this wouldnt be happening, he's overextending and making a fool of himself on twitter, all that lack of sleep is taking a toll on his brain IQ.

To be fair, you'll still get breakdowns in electric cars. In fact, Tesla's have some of the worst reliability in an automobile.

There aren't as many things to go wrong, no, but there's still plenty of failures. How are you going to get into a Tesla when the door pulls fail to extend?

 

That was an extremely brief amount of time. A couple of days doesn't hurt a company. Don't be so naive.

2 hours ago, Stefan Payne said:

Yes and weight tripple or quadruple as much as a gas tank.

Gasoline is sadly a very potent energy carrier. Thunderf00t made a video about that. I think it was the "Perfect Battery" one.

A battery carries ~1/100th the Energy of gasoline per kilogramm...

I don't think the argument is that they're currently (key word) more potent than gas, but more-so that electricity can be a renewable resource whereas gasoline cannot.

We simply can't afford to not investigate other means of powering things. To do so would be extremely self destructive.

2 hours ago, GoodBytes said:

So which is it? Is Tesla d000000000med like Nintendo was since the N64, or Tesla is correct and they are being very aggressive in dealing with their suppliers to ensure the lowest price, to bring the most revenue per car produced, and allow the car to be made cheaper, especially after car manufacturing optimization, and improved quality of production resulting in increase output of cars and, well, high built quality without added cost to the consumer.

They definitely need some quality improvements

While they do make considerable revenue, they also burn cash like it's better than fossil fuels. Take for example 2017. Their revenue was 3.4 billion dollars. The best it's ever been. Yet, they still came out with a nearly 1 billion dollar deficit. So yes, while their revenues are going higher and higher, their income to loss ratio is also increasing. It's simply not sustainable.

2 hours ago, GoodBytes said:

Sorry but no. Electric cars pollutes less. If your country you live, produces electricity by burning coil, oil, or whatever highly pollutant product, than that is their problem. Push your government for green solution. Quebec, for example, has all it's power from hydro.

I believe he was referring to the production of the battery. Which is likely a lot less of an issue with the Gigafactory, since they're made in house.

Really though, mankind is going to mine something. We're a destructive force, and realistically we're going to have to find another planet to harvest regardless of what steps we take in the future.

2 hours ago, Eaglerino said:

What about long road trips? NO guarantee there will be a 'quick-1-hour-to-full-charge' station. May as well just have a hybrid, and over that may as well get a car that gets 50 MPG to save yourself the trouble for now. Until electric cars can travel 600 miles without having to take an hour to charge I don't think they're going to be ready yet, but for city living they're already there.

 

I mean my phone friggin gives me an advertised lifespan of 24 hours before I have to charge it and that never happens. The Grand Tour episode with a BMW electric vs VW Golf showed it still isn't quite ready, and that was in Britain where the distances are even shorter. The electric car is going to suffer when it has to heat/cool me too since the battery ranges I see advertised are usually at a perfect 70 degrees with no wind resistance on a flat road (but car mileage ads do this too)

Yes, long road trips. How many of those do you take a year? Maybe one or two? So rent a car. The money you've saved with an electric vehicle will easily cover it.

Do lots of road trips a year? Yes, ok, that's different, however that's far from the norm. There will always be outliers, and outliers are not what standards are based on.

 

To be fair, the i3 (that was the car, wasn't it?) is very much a first generation EV from BMW, and they'll come a long way with future iterations.

2 hours ago, GoodBytes said:

You can get great mileage out of a Chevy Bolt in winter where you need to turn on heating in the car.. and that is a Bolt.

Really? I've often wondered that. I remember people saying their batteries life was halved when using them in cold climates...but I do live in the northern most Canadian city with a population over 1mil.

2 hours ago, Eaglerino said:

 

Then what if you're stuck on the side of the road? Will AAA have battery bank trucks for you, or will they need to take generators and wait a few hours for you? I just feel gas is safer and more reliable for now, and that won't change for many years in a country with long swaths of road like America. But again if I lived in the middle of a city and never left (mostly cause if I lived in the middle of a city I'd be making enough to money to fly anywhere) then I'd probably have an electric car already. Imagine all the noisy roads becoming silent with electric vehicles

They'll figure that out when the time comes. Battery bank trucks is a very probable solution. They already have fast charging for phones, it's not beyond reason to believe that something similar in a specifically designed service deck would be possible as well.

It'll never be silent, safety standards wouldn't allow it

2 hours ago, jagdtigger said:

Keep on dreaming pal..... Even if i take the best case scenario in 5 years it will loose at least 40% of its capacity.

Proof?

2 hours ago, AnonymousGuy said:

We see iPhones losing 30% of capacity in 2 years, 2% per year is some sort of theoretical / world's most gentle usage scenario.

I don't think that's really comparable.

1 hour ago, GoodBytes said:

 

By the way, the lack of fuel level info on the go in cars, is how gas station makes money, while I can't speak for every place around the world, at least in Canada and many places in the US, Monday and Tuesday you have the cheapest fuel prices as most people filled up, but the week-end when you realize you are low in gas, or plan to go on trip of any kind with the car, you notice you are low in fuel, and have to gas up. Prices are the highest then. Fun.

The price of electricity will certainly go up. There's also the problem of feeding the grid once electricity really starts to take off.

1 hour ago, yian88 said:

-snip-

No noise, no smell inside or outside, not expensive, no expensive infrastructure, i dont understand why they dont have these by law on all main routes of busses everywhere in the world by now, and use regular gas busses for rarely used routes etc.

Electrco-phobia?

I think it's more because trolly buses require a great deal of infrastructure, and they're not that great in the winter.

Granted, the former is not an issue everywhere.

1 hour ago, GoodBytes said:

 

Anyway back to sound: Look it up. More and more cars are adding fake engine sound through the car speakers due to the smaller engine that they start putting. (like processors, smaller but more powerful.. now imagine an Intel CPU that outputs fake fan noise through your PC speaker to show how power hungry your new PC is, and therefore tells you how more powerful it is.

I hate the sounds they're pumping through the speakers...I mean, if you have an electric car, embrace the silence. No need to lie to yourself.

I do get the ones they pump out through external speakers, though.

1 hour ago, jagdtigger said:

More like basic economics. There is no advantage using a EV over a IC car....

Have any proof of that? Because electricity is far cheaper than gasoline.

[AlTech]

Also, I really hope Tesla doesn't go Bankrupt cos Elon Musk and his companies are insanely awesome.

[MoonSpot]

Bet you wish you had dealers with pockets of their own, whom would have bought vehicles, tons of costly spare parts, serviceable consumables, and would have paid for factory training, even franchising rights. Sure could have helped that cash flow thing by spreading things out.

Whoops.

[ARikozuM]

5 minutes ago, AluminiumTech said:

Because other car companies don't know how to make Electric Cars with enough range to be actually meaninful.

They don't want to. They would rather keep their cars IC before going to hybrid or electric.

 

[AlTech]

1 minute ago, ARikozuM said:

They don't want to. They would rather keep their cars IC before going to hybrid or electric.

 

IC?

[ARikozuM]

Just now, AluminiumTech said:

IC?

Internal Combustion. I saw some users use the term in this thread, so I guessed it was a common acronym. It did take me a few minutes to figure out, though it made sense with context.

[jagdtigger]

6 minutes ago, dizmo said:

Proof?

Dig up any graph that shows capacity vs charge cycles at different charge/discharge rates...

[AlTech]

1 minute ago, ARikozuM said:

Internal Combustion. I saw some users use the term in this thread, so I guessed it was a common acronym. It did take me a few minutes to figure out, though it made sense with context.

The current EVs made by Chevy, Nissan, Toyota, and Ford do have wayy more limited range than Teslas.

 

Partially because Tesla figured out how to use really dense and compact batteries and put them in their cars.

[dizmo]

7 minutes ago, ARikozuM said:

Internal Combustion. I saw some users use the term in this thread, so I guessed it was a common acronym. It did take me a few minutes to figure out, though it made sense with context.

Glad I wasn't the only one that had to think about it for a second

4 minutes ago, jagdtigger said:

Dig up any graph that shows capacity vs charge cycles at different charge/discharge rates...

That's what I thought.

[jagdtigger]

2 minutes ago, dizmo said:

That's what I thought.

So you do not like the scientific way huh?  If the situation was so good as you seem to think why is that there is no official spec sheet was published regarding this issue by the manufacturers? There is only one answer to that and it seems you want to deny it at all cost.

[ARikozuM]

Just now, jagdtigger said:

So you do not like the scientific way huh?

I think a chart and publication is better than "look it up". Let me point out that Tesla took off a safety limiter, giving much needed extra mileage, for those of us in the path of last year's hurricane. Gas vehicles? They were stuck wherever they ran out and most of the gas stations in Florida ran out of fuel three days before the storm landed. 

[dizmo]

10 minutes ago, jagdtigger said:

So you do not like the scientific way huh?  If the situation was so good as you seem to think why is that there is no official spec sheet was published regarding this issue by the manufacturers? There is only one answer to that and it seems you want to deny it at all cost.

Hhaa, I just think if the charts were that simple, you'd have included them to back up your claim

I didn't make any statements saying how good it was, did I?

[jagdtigger]

1 minute ago, ARikozuM said:

I think a chart and publication is better than "look it up". Let me point out that Tesla took off a safety limiter, giving much needed extra mileage, for those of us in the path of last year's hurricane. Gas vehicles? They were stuck wherever they ran out and most of the gas stations in Florida ran out of fuel three days before the storm landed. 

I didnt want to cherry pick like you did with your example. I assume he has a goto battery manufacturer, and that battery has a spec sheet containing the graph in question(at least IMO any reputable manufacturer should include it).

[ARikozuM]

2 minutes ago, jagdtigger said:

I didnt want to cherry pick like you did with your example.

Cherry picking for which example? 

[GoodBytes]

1 hour ago, jeffmeyer5295 said:

Good for you lol. Not everyone wants to deal with the charging and junk. Glad you made it.

To add, which this reminded me, I have already seen, in Montreal, Quebec, Canada, a Tesla (Model S) with a California license plate.

That is one heck of a travel. Clearly he also made it. Good for him.