Yes, $560 a month for just the payment on a vehicle is crazy. The most I’ve spent on a car is $345 a month all in (purchase, fuel, maintenance, insurance) That was for a 2003 VW Jetta TDI that I drove 24,000 miles a year.

The Amazon guys says he delivers 140 packages a day. That was about what I did driving for UPS and I never got a ticket on the job.

The NHTSA is the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. They are a federal agency and have jurisdiction in all 50 states.  Their rulings are tried in federal court.

Exactly.   Similar to the Chinese plant were they sold line testing cars to Tesla employees and called them production vehicles.   Real production cars sold to the general public followed a month later.

50% done is about right. They broke ground in July 2020 - 9 months ago. That would mean they get it finished at the end of the year 18 months later and is very believable. 18 month to 2 years is the typical time it takes to build an auto factory from scratch depending on how much a company wants to spend to rush it.

No one is going to license Tesla’s charging network because Tesla uses a different plug than every other manufacturer. As to charger density - according to the Department of Energy there are:

Considering that MotoGP isn’t going to broadcast until 10:30 PM Sunday night a lot of us won’t be watching it until Monday. (I’ll stream it on my lunch break)

I’ll still be shocked if any cars drive off the line by the end of September 2021.   Even by the end of 2021 would be a huge accomplishment.

Just staying up for the new time works for me up to about 6 hours time change. More than that and it works the first night when I’m just exhausted from being up more than 24 hours but the second night I can’t sleep. One or two night with an ambien and I’m on the new sleep schedule and I don’t need it anymore.

April 1st and not even fully under roof yet?   That does not bode well for a a Q3 ramp up.    The shell is the easy part.

Good for them. I’m not a Musk fan and grow VERY tired of his devoted following that takes everything he says as gospel. However, it is great to see a new US automaker doing well.

Disagree. It worked great for me when I was travelling internationally for work and jumping form timezone to timezone. Lay down in the hotel bed, take an ambien, wake up 8 hours later on the right time and ready for my meeting.

It also reduces financing costs.   With JIT the car should be sold before the bill is paid for the parts.   If you hold stock in the warehouse you have to buy parts upfront and pay interest on that money.

Net profit margin 2019:

The chip shortage will not kill EV model plans. VW has to build EVs to meet the EU regulations requiring a fleet averages of 95 g / km CO2. They actually have to built more EVs and PHEV in 2021 because the electric super credits are phasing out.   In 2020 every vehicle with less than 50 g/km CO2 was double counted in…

Toyota stockpiled chips because they learned from the 2011 Japan earthquake that knocked key suppliers offline for months - which shut down Toyota plants worldwide.    After that happened they looked at their supply chain and decided which parts where hard to shift to new suppliers and added stockpiles.

SK hired some employees from LG. They brought with them knowledge of LGs trade secrets.

If they want to boost EV sales they need to turn the Federal EV tax credit into a point of sale rebate. The majority of households don’t make enough money to get the full $7500 tax credit

In the USA no. In China they have 10 EVs for sale.

One that you can hose out the cargo area.