Few companies have done a better job of defying gravity than Tesla, but the California-based electric carmaker could see the bottom drop out, some observers are warning, after Wednesday’s worse than expected third-quarter earnings report.
Tesla rolled up a July to September deficit of $2.92 a share, well below the $2.45 a share deficit that a consensus of industry analysts had forecast. On the plus side, revenues for the latest quarter slightly beat expectations at $2.98 billion versus a consensus figure of $2.95 billion.
One reason for the weak numbers was the trouble Tesla has been having with the launch of its Model 3, the company’s first mainstream battery-electric vehicle. While final sales figures weren’t released, industry sources said the figure was expected to be in the “low three-digit” range, meaning the much-anticipated model was vastly outsold by General Motors’ own affordable, long-range battery-electric vehicle, the Chevrolet Bolt, which hit a record 2,781 sales in October.
“The Tesla Model 3 is a dud,” declared Harris Kupperman, the president of hedge fund Praetorian Capital.
The sluggish rollout of the Model 3 hasn’t been due to a lack of demand. The company has more than 400,000 advance reservations, but has been struggling to boost production after falling into what CEO Elon Musk has dubbed “production hell.”
“We continue to make progress resolving early bottlenecks related to these issues, and there remain no fundamental problems with our supply chain or any of our production processes,” Tesla said in a letter issued to shareholders on Wednesday afternoon.
While not everyone is ready to write off the new car, it’s clearly off to a bad start. During the first three months after its July launch, Tesla produced just 260 Model 3s, less than 20 percent of its 1,500 target and far worse than expected.
Plenty of automakers have seen new models get off to a bad start, only to turn around later. But the problem for Tesla is that things at its Fremont, California plant may not go well for a while.
The automotive trade magazine Ward’s quoted a Tesla source who said, “I can’t see them reaching 2,500 to 3,000 weekly until the end of next year.” If true, that would mean Tesla will likely produce several 100,000 fewer of the sedans than promised in 2019.
By then, a new report from automotive analysts at UBS warns, “competing EVs are coming, and a long delay could reduce (Tesla’s) market share opportunity.” The Chevy Bolt EV is being joined by a number of mainstream and high-line, long-range BEVs this coming year, including a second-generation Nissan Leaf and offerings from both Volkswagen and Audi.
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via The Global Warming Policy Forum (GWPF)
November 2, 2017 at 04:02AM
Iowa Climate Science Education 
Do you ever allow any alternate views to your own to appear? Of course not, you’re pathetic retards.
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We allow your lunatic rambling. It’s a comical sideshow, typical of the #ClimateCult.
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Perfect opportunity for all the other car makers who are all planning EVs and in many cases already have them to profit. Tesla is the showoff American EV few can afford and isn’t as relevent to EV takeup as the Nissan Leaf which most can afford, and which is taking off rapidly now, with a healthy second-hand market and new batteries giving more than 200 miles on one charge.
Your pathetic attempts to rubbish EVs with this are puerile and will have not the slightest effect, because you’re irrelevent and no one takes any notice of your lies except a bunch of acne-ridden male teens with an attitude problem and little education. Hardly an influential group are they? Most of them couldn’t afford a new bike.
I’m enjoying owning an EV. It’s saving me loads of money purely apart from the clean driving it enables, as I don’t have to pay road tax, and charging is a tiny fraction of the cost of dirty liquid fuels spewing CO2 and carcinogens into the air and poisoning all of us and our future. What’s not to like? Only a devient with thinking difficulty would object and prefer an ICE vehicle. So 29th century!
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