Quote:
Originally Posted by Viffermike
Production at least a third below targets, now barely profitable ... and an announcement this morning that it will lay off 7 percent of its workforce and end all 'non-critical' contracts.
Yeah, I'm not gonna bank on Tesla.
Sell that stock now. It ain't gonna stay up for long.
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I'll not comment on the stock since if Tesla was a looked at by analysts like normal car company, Wall Street would have killed it by now; it gets a pass for some reason I don't understand.
But I do find it interesting that 100+ year-old GM announces a 15% RIF of employees and the news is GM is going under (again?). Tesla, a 10 year old car company that just two years ago was the golden child of the internet because 400,000 millennials signed up to forward-fund (go-fund-me) Musk's company at $1,000 a pop to get in line for a $35K electric car with 200+ mile range. Yet anyone can go on-line and order a $50,000 Model 3 and get it in 4 weeks and Tesla has made just 150,000 cars since late 2017; the $35,000 model doesn't exist. Like another Poster said, the Model S needs a refreshment if not an overall redesign to get the production cost out of it. The Mode X is very expensive to produce with the floating rear seat and X-wing door designs, which are very expensive to produce.
Designing and manufacturing automobiles is an expensive business that requires incredible amounts of investment. Musk has no magic formula to manufacture a car less expensively than any of the major auto manufacturers can, regardless of it being electric or ICE. Tesla keeps promising a drastic reduction in the price of its cars and NEVER delivers on that promise. The Model X was supposed to cost $50K in average transaction price, half of the Model S; it never happened, and it was two years late in production. Tesla is living off its investors and not profit-making automobiles. At some point reality always sets in. The investors will eventually want their money back, that's just the way it goes.
But everyone sees Tesla as a "disruptive" force in the automotive industry, which has me concerned, such as GM thinking it's going all-electric (except for trucks...) and big-tech all-autonomous as a transportation supplier (think Uber), which is a big stretch IMO, and about 30 years too early in financial viability - from a company that had to get a federal bailout not even a decade ago.