Well, their cost per kWh is currently barely better than GM’s. There’s nothing truly revolutionary about Tesla’s battery tech - its simply their cost structure which comes from scale. And then there’s the risk of being overinvested in one tech. For example, solid state batteries could make their tech completely…

You assume that the competition can’t simply steamroll them once they build the will to.

The fact is that the amount of money Tesla has had to drop into their factories is peanuts for a large traditional manufacturer.  They can build up their capacity whenever they choose - and sitting on the sidelines making smaller…

“Mostly selling green credits, not cars.”

While complaining that other manufacturers make “compliance cars” - while not realizing that by taking the value of those credits, they, themselves are simply a compliance car contract manufacturer. 

?

I’m looking at their results announced last october for 2nd quarter, and they did pull a profit - but EBITDA was nowhere near $1.65 billion.  That was for full year 2018, but for full year 2018 their net loss was still $976 million.

5th:

This is why a simple change in laws could be in order:

1) Break up the AFL/CIO. Their non-compete attitude means that its hard for workers to switch from one union to another

2) Prior to commencement of a new round of negotiations, require workers to vote on which union should represent them. Ie, instead of the UAW…

It would be nice if they simply thought a bit about their dash design and took a small sacrifice for repairability.

For example, my ‘06 Fusion still has a passenger side bag where it deploys through a separate panel on the dash that inserts into the rest of the assembly. It isn’t as attractive as you see that line…

This is thanks, in part, to more reliable parts, better maintenance, and also slightly more depressing causes like lengthier auto loan terms.

The stupid part about it all is that the clean air act says clearly:

To my point: All of Oshawa is shut down for lack of parts, and they have been for a week now.

They built inventory on purpose in anticipation of the strike - but that 93 also includes previous generation models that were selling at a discount already, so they probably need more than the standard 40-45 days’ inventory at which point manufacturers start losing sales - I’d wager more in the 60 day range.

I didn’t forget about them at all. I was replying to the previous poster’s claim on the MEXICAN plants.

And you’re incorrect on the products - it adds the Impala (not Malibu) and XTS (not XT5) - those are two VERY low volume vehicles where the production was also already shutting down as they’re closing the plant. It…

They don’t have anywhere NEAR 90 days before they start feeling it. They’ve lost over 2/3 of their full size truck production, including ALL of their heavy duty production. A huge percentage of their higher profit margin vehicles is actually shut down at this point. They had significant inventories on some models going…

11 years under 2.25% then spiking to 10% should indicate to you that something has changed and has become seriously unstable lately.  If you can’t recognize the Fed’s sudden need to create money out of thin air again as a problem, you probably need to retake econ 101.

As much as the “they’re losing everything” take is wrong, so is your take.

GM had 77 days of inventory on hand at the end of August (https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/cars/2019/09/17/general-motors-gm-uaw-united-auto-workers-vehicles/2343312001/). But that inventory varies greatly with model. They had 57 days of…

“get rid of unreasonable rules like “make work” policies that don’t let people do simple jobs but require you to call the union and wait hours for 3 people to do something even Donald Trump could do in 5 minutes”

Most of that is actually done at the local union level, not in the national agreement.  If you look from…

In the shitter is a poor description.

But it also isn’t functioning well.  If it was, the Federal Reserve wouldn’t be dumping $75 billion each day into the repo market to keep it from collapsing.  Something is fundamentally unstable about an economy where the fed sets a target rate of 2-2.25% and the market pushes that…

“many Mexican plants in full production”...

Well, ok - that gives them the Chevrolet Blazer,, Chevrolet Trax, GMC Terrain, and some Chevrolet Silverado, Chevrolet Equinox
, and GMC Sierra production.

That’s still a small % of their normal sales.

Wheeler just had a “beautiful” phone call with California’s governor...

Neutral:

California should respond by withholding taxes that are due to the federal government.

Problem solved - in fact, California ends up much wealthier....

I’m aware that the first gen Fusions shared a lot with the Mazda6 (not really a rebadge, there were significant size differences - it was mostly a shared platform). But the point is that the 1st gen was when Ford went from not trying on midsize cars as they had been for about a decade to actually producing something…