Bloomberg Model 3 tracker shows production crashing below 1000/week

Not too surprising as there has been two news items lately that could explain this. There is a planed shut down which was supposed to be early May and an effort by Musk to get rid of many contract workers. It will take time to replace the contract workers with new employees and for the new employees to get up to speed.

 

Making significant changes to production methods 'on the fly' like this is NOT a good idea. Far better to stop down completely, plan the thing properly, and start again. Unfortunately, I don't think Tesla can afford to do this. I wonder whether replacing machines with people is a long-term solution too.

Conventional car companies have learned the hard way to set up a pilot plant first, in order to refine the production methods. Musk, who strikes me as something of a smartass, seems to have thought that he can skip this stage.

Also, modern cars are extremely complex, and in order to maintain them the manufacturer has to keep meticulous records of the build state of every individual model accommodating changes in supplier or variations as less costly components are found and incorporated. This is very easy to do with a fully automated properly designed production line, but a lot more difficult if the like is in a state of constant flux with machines being replaced with people and presumably vice versa. People make mistakes which are not noticed. Machine make mistakes - or go wrong - too, but these are far less likely to go unnoticed.

 

WOW! It's bad enough that there is a constant stream of Tesla bashing from serial FUDsters, based on the perfectly normal month-to-month variation in Tesla sales, which is mostly due to Tesla's quarterly shipping cycle plus the normal seasonal variation in auto sales.

But now, Tesla stock shorters and EV bashers are obsessing over week-to-week production estimates for the Model 3, provided by Bloomberg! That's almost as bad as their obsession over day-to-day and week-to-week fluctuations in Tesla stock prices.

A year from now, nobody is going to remember the numbers estimated by Bloomberg, let alone care what they were.

Here are the only production numbers which are a significant indication of Tesla's manufacturing performance:

Tesla’s global automobile sales totals:
2012: 2650
2013: 22,300
2014: 31,655 (+41.95%)
2015: 50,580 (+59.8%)
2016: 76,230 (+50.7%)
2017: 101,312 (+32.9%)

 

I don't know where you got them, Pushmi. but it seems you have acquired a pair of shades like Zaphod Beeblebrox's in the Hitch-hikers Guide to the galaxy. These smart sunglasses go completely black when confronted by bad news. As Beeblebrox observed, "Who wants to see bad news?"

Not you, it seems. Far more fun to admire Tesla's ads!

 

That might actually sting if it didn't come from someone who used to try to convince us EV advocates that "clean diesel" was going to drive BEVs into obsolescence, and now has switched to trying to convince us that hydrogen-fueled fuel-cell cars are going to drive BEVs into obsolescence. (When Toyota stops making the Mirai, perhaps you'll switch to preaching the advantages of using dried cow dung or uric acid as a fuel? )

As it is... thanks for keeping us entertained with your tinfoil-hat comments.

 

As I recall, you were one of the faithful multitude who spent their time singing the praises of the wondrous new world the EEstor miraculous invention would undoubtedly bring about, gloating over the money to be made by investing in it, and berating those of us who pointed out the obvious and totally damning flaws in it for 'spreading FUD'.

I would point out that in fact clean diesel is still with us and is being used in vast quantities. A properly designed and maintained modern diesel engine is a lot cleaner than a petrol one, despite the recent bad publicity. However, an Estor capacitor powered car has yet to be seen. It must have been shattering for you to have to accept the 'FUD' as more than justified, but evidently, you have found something slightly more plausible, but almost as flawed to campaign for.

 

That is weird given how poorly they performed against the Prius.

News brought by the people who wrote the code that VW used to cheat:
Breakthrough: new Bosch diesel technology provides solution to NOx problem - Bosch Media Service

Bosch CEO Denner also calls for transparency on fuel consumption and CO2 emissions

• Unprecedented emissions: NOx 10 times lower than limits set for 2020
• New Bosch technology retains advantage with regard to fuel consumption and environmental impact
• Denner: “There’s a future for diesel. Soon, emissions will no longer be an issue.”
• Internal combustion engines equipped with artificial intelligence have almost zero impact on air quality
• Appeal to politicians: fuel consumption should be measured on the road and emissions analyzed from well to wheel

​

Near as I can tell, the cheat software was written about 2006. So 12 years later they finally cracked the code?

The technical key is exhaust gas temperature management. It does no good to pass cold diesel exhaust through a converter that is too cold to handle the chemical reactions. The only mentioned change is an electrical heater for low power conditions. If the heater is built into the existing hardware, no additional back pressure losses. But they'll still sit humble next to the Prius, plug-in hybrids, and EVs.

The reason diesels will always under perform is the absence of regenerative braking. Now combine a diesel with a serious hybrid, I'd use on in our BMW i3-REX.

Bob Wilson

 

The production tracker doesn't really tell us much and is maybe more of a delivery indicator. It didn't account for the latest shutdown, etc.

My understanding is they are shipping to Canada now, so those units won't show up in the "production" tracker in the same way as far as I know.

 

The Bloomberg production tracker is often incorrect because it is not adjusted on the fly or corrected when it is wrong. And it is never outright stopped.

Bloomberg over-estimated April production by at about 3,000 units. Primarily this is because they did not account for the 5 days when production was down. Or the 3-5 days immediately following when production ramped back up to previous levels.

The current production is not 1,000 units / week. Far more than that. Rather than simply correct their number, they are adjusting it below actual production for a few weeks to offset the inflated numbers. Within 2-3 weeks it should be back on track.

The bloomberg tracker is useful and interesting to look back on over time. But it isn't particularly useful as a real time estimator.

 

I don't think there are any insuperable obstacles to making diesels quite clean. With decent particle filters and NOx suppression (I think it involves adding urea into the fuel or something) you get pretty well CO2 and H2O out and very little else. In the current anti-diesel hysteria it's really not worth trying to persuade people, but an awful lot of diesel owners here are perfectly happy with them

But I can't see regenerative braking having much effect. It surely depends on how often you use the brakes. I usually aim to keep enough distance between me and the guy in front to need them as little as possible. On a long journey, I hardly touch them. I like the fact that I can fill my tank at a local cut-price filling station, drive to - say - London and back without having to worry at all about filling up at overpriced motorway stations and still drive locally for a day or two before tanking it up again.

I have no idea of the merits or problems of Priuses. I am a bit suspicious of the degree of extra complexity involved as well as not entirely trusting service personnel to have the necessary expertise to diagnose or repair problems, but I could be quite wrong.

 

Neither is Mr Musk, evidently!

 

I don't know any more about Bloomberg's Tesla Model 3 production tracker than what's been reported in InsideEVs news stories, but based on what I know, there has not yet been enough time for anyone to judge its accuracy. Maybe after a few months we'll be able to get a sense of how good or bad Bloomberg is at estimating TM3 production.

But even if it proves to be quite accurate, that won't stop serial Tesla bashers from using the estimates to support their anti-Tesla FUD. Time and again I've seen, on Seeking Alpha, comments citing Tesla's production from three cherry-picked quarters which supposedly "prove" that Tesla's production has plateaued or is even declining. With weekly figures to cherry-pick, we will unfortunately see more FUD like what "TeslaInvestor" posted in comment #1 in this thread.
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As Hilaire Belloc put it:
...
Oh! let us never, never doubt
What nobody is sure about!

 

For the record, I never invested any money whatsoever in EEStor or its proxy, ZENN Motors. (I was rather bemused by the more ardent EEStor advocates trying so hard to persuade me to join their cadre of investors!) And Martin, you clearly have a problem differentiating between people expressing hope and expressing belief. For example, I hope that Tesla bashers everywhere will come to their senses and quit wasting their time in trying to tear down Tesla's good name, but my belief is that they'll never stop.
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As Richard Rogers (of Rogers & Hammerstein) put it:

There are times I almost think
Nobody sure of what he absolutely know
Everybody find confusion
In conclusion, he concluded long ago

And it puzzle me to learn
That tho' a man may be in doubt of what he know
Very quickly he will fight
He'll fight to prove that what he does not know is so
​

-- from "The King and I"
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Lacks Belloc's admirable qualities of succinctness and wit I think.

 

Nonsense!

You conducted yourself in exactly the same way on the estor site that you do here, with nonsensical cheerleading and name calling interspersed with demonstrations of scientific illiteracy, as a substitute for rational debate, which seems to be something you simply don't do. Your main aim seems to be to annoy. Fortunately, even that seems to be beyond you. I have never known you reach more than a low level of mild irritation.

 

"TeslaInvestors likes this"

Pretty much says it all, doesn't it? About both of you serial Tesla bashers.
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