Tesla has had some issues with their drive units, especially in the fall of 2013 through spring of 2014. Oddly enough, the 2012 model was better in this regard.

Only if you opt for the 21" Pilot Sport PS2's. Those are known to have short life on pretty much any car you put them on. If you go with the 19" wheels with OEM MXM4's, the normal age is 30k to 50k, or pretty much like any other heavy sedan.

Tesla did not create the construction schedule you are referencing. It was made by a 3rd party consultancy as an example. To examine whether or not they are late according to the original plans, they wanted the last phase to be online in 2020. That means the last phase’s shell needs to be ready in late 2019. There’s…

They do have running prototypes. Motor Trend did a photo shoot with one of them a little while ago. That red one is a static display and building one or a few of those is common during new vehicle development.

Selling Tesla vehicles requires a lot more education of the customer. It is far more difficult in a retail setting to sell electric vehicles. We have plenty of examples of the way dealerships handled Leaf and Volt sales. It would be far easier for the salesperson to walk you next door to their sister…

It should be noted that they are justifiably proud of coming in last based on those metrics.

Your argument completely ignores a whole bunch of history of the Apple experience with retail. There is a reason why Apple Retail Stores exist, and it wasn’t because CompUSA or BestBuy or other retailers were doing such a bang up job at sales, support, and training.

They didn’t modify the battery at all. Given a particular battery chemistry, the bigger the battery, the more power it can generate. Therefore, removing 80% of the battery is to remove 80% of the power output too.

That vehicle is north of 180,000 miles now.

I do wonder when your average car reviewer will have ready access to a J1772 EVSE. It’s like doing an computer review without electricity at home.

The losses for inductive charging are too high to be worth doing for most people. Plus, it is expensive and there’s a substantial amount of weight on the vehicle side. Oh, yeah, it’s also slow.

Tesla already has a Lexus production manager on staff... Gilbert Passin who as VP Manufacturing, Toyota Motor Manufacturing Canada and was part of the production planning and launch of the Lexus RX 350.

In theory, that is correct. However, there are significant packaging issues as there is always the weight and space trade offs between the electric and the ICE power trains. You can see the difference in the extended range BMW i3 ReX, the Chevy Volt, and the Tesla Model 3. One of the issues is battery chemistry…

This isn’t the forum for it, but Tesla’s financial situation is actually quite good. They just completed a major expansion which has meant very high cash use ahead of increased revenue (roughly increasing by 50-60%). They are now able to borrow against finished goods inventory to the tune of $800 million, which makes…

The Supercharging network is not intended to compete with the entire gasoline station infrastructure. The vast amount of charging needs are best fulfilled at a slow rate overnight. That is the most grid friendly and helps the power companies by relying on more base load power generation. The daily cycling up and down…

The Michigan LG plant will likely be able to handle about 25% of the first phase of the Tesla Gigafactory. There are 5 phases to the Tesla Gigafactory. Panasonic’s output in Osaka, Japan for Tesla already vastly exceeds the eventual expansion level of that Michigan plant and will likely rival all of LG’s output…

I don’t think you guys are understanding this.

All they had to do was dump lots of water on it... No special chemicals or water formulation.

You aren’t supposed to use foam. Instead, they should have used a lot of water. Even though water reacts with lithium, the undamaged cells are waterproof, so the big issue is lowering the temperature of the pack to avoid further reaction. Basically, by using foam, they let the car burn the the ground and helped…

Seriously, read the 10-Q yourself. They are gross margin positive, which means each additional Model S sold reduces the overall loss. In other words, they make money in the Model S and invest those profits directly into growing the business. They are using the profits from tens of thousands of vehicles to build the…