General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: Tesla is the new Hummer. Flying down the highway reading Drudge [View all]BlueStreak
(8,377 posts)The only thing shipping today is the S model. Most of them are going out with the 85 kWh battery packs which consists of 7000 toothbrush batteries hooked together. The weight of the battery pack alone is 1200 pounds.
Musk talks about the E car, and claims that this would be affordable by non-dicks, non-pretentious, non-status-seekers, non-Drudge-reading regular people. But that is based on absolutely nothing. That depends on a big step increase in battery cost and energy density that has never happened so fast since mankind started making batteries. It depends on a giga factory that has no investors. Tesla offers to put up $2 Bn, and would require a partner to put up $3 Bn. The obvious partner would be Panasonic, which supplies the toothbrush batteries to Musk today. But Panasonic is balking because they don't believe that toothbrush batteries will be the winning package during the life of this giga factory. So that whole deal is in trouble -- or at least not nailed down at this point.
Meanwhile there is the X car, which is essentially the current S with the current S economics but an AWD system and a higher "crossover" body. That is getting loads of deposits to build a nice backlog, but they won't deliver that vehicle for a year or so, Meanwhile, they have basically a zero backlog heading into April because the California sales peaked last August and they are getting virtually no sales from Europe other than Norway, which has a ridiculous subsidy that is also going away. They will make their forecast for the first quarter shipments, but that came at the expense of eating most of the S backlog. So they could have three very difficult quarters ahead.