Tesla truck

In reply to BradLTL :

Cant no one read that E36 M3. Get that outta here! lmao 

In reply to BradLTL :

Ok, I'll play (apologies to yupididit and others who are bored by the financial stuff).

Ford's debt is definitely a big number, but they're also a significantly larger company than Tesla by almost any measure.

Ford has 65 plants building vehicles and 175k employees. Tesla has 3 plants if you include the China Gigafactory which is still coming on line, and 45k employees.

In 2018, Ford sold 5.98 million vehicles globally, and had revenue of 160 Billion.

In 2018, Tesla sold 350k vehicles, and had revenues of 21.4 Billion.

If Ford's total debt looks bad, perhaps we should compare it to other comparably sized automakers?

Good points.

In reply to STM317 :

Thanks for writing about the financial side. I'm ambivalent to Musk/Tesla but hope that my next car will run on batteries. 

Musk seems to be playing the Wizard of Oz here. Everybody is distracted by the truck/gigafactory/model y, but the financial stuff happening behind the curtain is a truer picture of Tesla, and ultimately much more interesting.

STM317 said:
In 2018, Tesla sold 350k vehicles, and had revenues of 7.2 Billion.
 

In 2018, Tesla had total revenue of $21.4 Billion. I think you grabbed the 4th quarter revenues. (350,000 cars and $7.2B in revenue would be only $20k/car! I'd love to buy a new Tesla for $20k.)

In context, their debt of $13 billion on $21 billion in revenue looks pretty good compared to Ford's debt of $154 billion on $160 billion in revenue. I am not a Billion Dollar finance guy though!!

I disagree that the financials are more interesting than the vehicles. In 25 years, it will be the cars that will have affected what we drive, not whether Tesla is still around. The company has had a significant effect no matter what the balance sheet says. Maybe they’ll be Apple (which era Apple?), maybe they’ll be Blackberry. But either way, they’ve shifted an industry. 

In reply to Keith Tanner :

Yup.

dculberson said:

STM317 said:
In 2018, Tesla sold 350k vehicles, and had revenues of 7.2 Billion.
 

In 2018, Tesla had total revenue of $21.4 Billion. I think you grabbed the 4th quarter revenues. (350,000 cars and $7.2B in revenue would be only $20k/car! I'd love to buy a new Tesla for $20k.)

In context, their debt of $13 billion on $21 billion in revenue looks pretty good compared to Ford's debt of $154 billion on $160 billion in revenue. I am not a Billion Dollar finance guy though!!

You are absolutely correct. I actually caught that mistake myself and was pretty sure I fixed it with an edit, but apparently the edit didn't take or I screwed it up somehow. 

Correcting it now (hopefully).

Well, I put down my $100 for the tri-motor.  We'll see if Tesla or Rivian starts delivering trucks first, because I'm absolutely stoked for both.  I'm a little more excited for the Rivian as a truck, but my inner 9-year-old-engineer really likes the Cybertruck. 

So biased source obviously, but a comparison against the Ram trucks...

https://insideevs.com/reviews/385898/tesla-cybertruck-versus-ram-pickup/amp/

sobe_death said:

Well, I put down my $100 for the tri-motor.  We'll see if Tesla or Rivian starts delivering trucks first, because I'm absolutely stoked for both.  I'm a little more excited for the Rivian as a truck, but my inner 9-year-old-engineer really likes the Cybertruck. 

Thumbs up for “tri-motor”. Because there are similarities in construction decisions!

BradLTL said:

So biased source obviously, but a comparison against the Ram trucks...

https://insideevs.com/reviews/385898/tesla-cybertruck-versus-ram-pickup/amp/

Comparing quoted figures for a truck that won't go on sale for 3 years with verified ratings of a truck that's currently in production and on dealer lots isn't really fair, and seems pointless to me. The specs are wild. We already know that right? But they're just claims from the manufacturer until the truck is actually tested/verified and on sale. It's just mental masturbation and buying into the hype. We'll have to wait and see what the Cybertruck actually ends up being rated at, and what other makers are offering at the same time (Ford, GM, and Rivian are also targeting the same timeframe for their electric trucks) to really have any idea if the Cybertruck is as special as many people think.

That being said, if the Cybertruck comes to market with those specs, and is price competitive, the only things that will slow it down are the polarizing design and the fact that it's a Tesla rather than a more well known and supported brand.

I would actually believe those specs instead of considering them just claims.  Remember the Model S has one less motor than the Cybertruck (weighs less as well, I know) and in Ludicrous+ mode it does 0-60 in 2.28 seconds, making it the quickest/one of the quickest standard production cars in the world.  The Cybertruck is larger and heavier, but also has one more motor and everything is much newer than the tech in the Model S.  It's also geared much lower than the Model S/3.  Having driven Teslas, the claimed 0-60 times for the Cybertruck don't surprise me one single bit, nor do any other specs really.  Electric motors can tow a metric berkload and are very well geared towards trucks.  The ugly styling has grown on me, especially since I watched Total Recall last night with my wife again.  Honestly the only thing I don't like about the truck is those awful wheels.

Those wheels are hubcaps. They have to be, they overlap the sidewall. So that’s an easy fix. Maybe they’ll be like the Model 3 aero wheels, a surprisingly good looking wheel underneath.

I don’t think Tesla has ever failed to deliver on specs. They do tend to announce the most optimistic version of the timeframe.

In reply to infinitenexus :

I don't doubt the acceleration specs. I think everything else has some question marks. The Cybertruck that they showed was the top level, Tri-motor/AWD configuration ("starting @ $69,900"). They're claiming 800hp for that one. But there are also a single motor/RWD (starting @ $40k) and dual motor/AWD (starting @ $50k) options. The specs for those are much less flashy and currently full of asterisks and caveats with no specifics.

Single motor/RWD gets "estimated 250 mile range", "7500+ lbs" tow rating, 0-60 "<6.5s"

Dual motor/AWD gets "estimated 300 mile range", "10,000+lbs" towing, 0-60 <4.5s

As Kieth said, Tesla has a pretty good track record of delivering on Musk's claims...eventually.

 They've already pushed the cheap configuration back until "late 2022". 

It’s fair to expect the top speed and towing specs to be on the tri-motor. Top range will be the one with the biggest battery, most likely. 

I'm watching and waiting.

With my day to day travel to work (100kms-ish of highway) and having 2 trucks in the fleet now (06 Silverado 2500HD gas and 11 Colorado 2wd) I am looking at a Cybertruck as a future replacement for the Colorado, depending on how things go, will really come down to cost of getting it in Canada.

STM317 said:

 They've already pushed the cheap configuration back until "late 2022". 

I'm not surprised, but i'm still... nonplused I supposed? 

GIRTHQUAKE said:

STM317 said:

 They've already pushed the cheap configuration back until "late 2022". 

I'm not surprised, but i'm still... nonplused I supposed? 

Yes, but that is because it was only 17% of the pre-orders.  The other 80%+ were for the dual / tri motor variants.  They moved up the tri-motor a whole year, from "late 2022" to "late 2021".

Also, the shown / demo'd truck was a dual motor (not 3).  Motortrend or someone went for a ride in it after the reveal.  

Plus, they're gonna make more money faster with the others.

That's just the truck I could afford right away is all 

Can you imagine the fallout if GM started a GoFundMe

I assume you're just trolling, but you realize, assuming you pay taxes, you, and I, and every other taxpayer "gofunded" GM's bailout, to the tune of Billions (with a "B") dollars, right?

Wow cool.

poopshovel again said:

Can you imagine the fallout if GM started a GoFundMe

I assume you're just trolling, but you realize, assuming you pay taxes, you, and I, and every other taxpayer "gofunded" GM's bailout, to the tune of Billions (with a "B") dollars, right?

That's more than a little different than an individual customer voluntarily giving a corporation with billions in cash on hand some money for a product that will be here in some form or another, eventually...

If Apple said, "we're going to have a laptop in a couple of years that's totally going to be really awesome. We'd like some money from you in the mean time" I'd have a problem with that too. And a lot of people would gladly do it.

I just don't really understand the mindset of giving this company your cash right now. The truck will be made with/without your $100. The competing products will be made too. As far as I know, the deposit doesn't really get the customer anything other than a place in line (but the company already shuffling the production order kind of makes that spot in line irrelevant). Why not simply wait and see what's actually available in a couple of years and compare/spend accordingly when the time comes? The most common answer I've read, is that these people giving Tesla money want to support Tesla, and don't mind giving up their cash to do it. Hence the GoFundMe comparison I made. Individuals freely giving money to $60 billion corporations for very little in return seems crazy to me, and is not a precedent I'm crazy about moving forward. If supporting the company is important, why not just buy their stock at that point? You're likely to get more in return and it feels much less like a corporation that's worth many, many Billions, fronted by a charismatic billionaire, panhandling for whatever they can get.

A corporation can be financed by debt (bonds) or equity (stock). There's no particular reason to frown at one vs. the other. Tesla has a lot of stockholders with a lot of money invested. Ford has sold a lot of bonds. Without doing a whole lot of research I'm not going to say one is a bigger problem than the other.

Getting away from the financial discussion - here's how it looks in traffic.

There's other crap around this particular outing, but none of it a basis for useful conversation.