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Ever have a post that barely doesn't qualify as being relevant but you wish you could share it anyway? Well now you can, 1/7th of the time.
Starting today, rules will be relaxed on Fridays only to allow posts that are :
automotive industry based (need not be Tesla)
Elon-centric
general investment/finance regarding automotive
etc
In return, I will be tightening up the boundaries the other 6 days of the week - we've had some borderline stuff lately, so we will make sure we bin it to Fridays. Have fun!
16
From their job listings via Twitter.
Any guesses who on this board already works in this capacity?
Social Support Specialist Tesla 1,053 reviews - Draper, UT
Tesla Inc. is seeking a Social Support Specialist to work on one of the most progressive vehicle brands in the world. We are looking for highly motivated & self-driven individuals that excel in working with both customers in escalated situations as well as internal stakeholders to improve the customer experience for Tesla long-term.
The Social team was built to bring peace of mind to both our internal and external customers, meeting our customers where they frequently interact, and surprising and delighting them behind the scenes to resolve their vehicle, ownership or service concerns, while driving positive business change through our delivery of insights and partnerships with teams across Tesla. As our vehicle, ownership or service concerns expressed through social media are usually following a bad experience, our focus is primarily on repairing and developing relationships with customers and internal departments to achieve the highest level of service now and for the future. This role could evolve into proactive posting via customer education / customer engagement, but not at present.
Experienced persons may have a background in dedicated case management, customer retention type roles, and if possible, social media experience. Candidates’ communication skills must be proficient in both public platforms as well as across teams internally, including the executive level up to CEO, and across the globe with our partners in other regions. Candidates’ core values should revolve around the obsession to deliver a world class experience, with a passion to do whatever it takes to do so, and done in a tactful and professional manner.
Given the current landscape within the business, candidates must be able to thrive in a high energy, high speed & ever-changing team environment managing multiple events at once, and often times with a high-degree of ambiguity. Candidates must be adaptable and willing to adjust course on-the-fly as needs of the business change and evolve. Candidates must be self-motivated and able to perform and excel with minimal guidance; not be afraid to raise their hand when success is in jeopardy.
Responsibilities
Monitor variety of social media channels, including but not limited to Twitter, Facebook, Tesla Forums, TMC, Model 3 Ownership Club and Reddit
Direct engagement with owner advocates in the social space where possible
Provide the highest level of written, and sometimes verbal, customer support
Coordinate services in urgent and non-urgent situations
Evaluate the needs of customers- proactively, and often times creatively, resolve issues with customers and their products
Effectively communicate to owners concerns across sales, service, delivery, engineering, our Executive stakeholders where needed, and enabling teams such as business resolutions, legal, and communications
Where needed, partner closely with both Social Communication team and Customer Experience teams to alert them of issues trending and escalating on social media
Accurately record concerns and data into CRM systems such as Salesforce, WARP, and Service Center Application
Track and measure insight opportunities presented through each concern that comes to our team
Work with internal teams in partnership with team manager to improve processes/systems across the business preventing us from delivering world class experiences to our customers
Requirements
Minimum 2 years of relevant work experience
Experience using Customer Management Systems
Proficiency with MS Office Suite
Excellent written and oral communications skills
Exemplary customer service skills
Flexible schedule to accommodate our customers’ needs
Understanding of basic automotive techniques and related service of vehicle systems
Ability to follow oral and written instructions with attention to detail
Willingness to learn new and innovative automotive technologies
Willingness to adjust course on-the-fly based on business need
Establish and maintain positive, cooperative, working relationships
Effectively handle multiple priorities, prioritize critical issues above others, organize workload, and meet deadlines
Ability to consume large amounts of data through social sentiment and concisely pull the salient points out for Executive level review
Good judgment/common sense on what’s appropriate to potentially be shared publicly
Ability to work within a broad range of tools while managing multiple customer complaints concurrently
Organizational savviness with ability to network and navigate the organization given heavy reliance on internal teams for quick resolution
Work in a team-based environment and achieve common goals
Apply
Tesla participates in the E-Verify Program
15
This is the default comment I post when someone online, usually a person who knows little about the company, asks me to explain to them why "Tesla is in trouble" or why it's the most shorted stock.
Any additions/removals to it? With respect to bringing a casual person up to speed with the Tesla situation.
Summary of Tesla's situation:
Tesla currently has 2.67 billion in cash.
About 1.1 billion of this is in loans that need to be returned early next year
Around 40% of their cash in hand is from refundable deposits, from people who thought they would get a $35k car
Tesla cannot make $35k Model 3s at a profit(this is generally accepted, and even Tesla hinted at it), they'll lose money even making $42k cars. They need to make $50k cars to earn a decent profit
When asked in the earning call last week about reservations and how many people chose to cancel/take up their car once offered, Musk stunningly called the question "boring" and "boneheaded" and went on take questions from a youtuber for 20 mins. This was considered unprecedented and bizarre and stock dove.
Tesla is losing about 800-900 million a quarter, so they will run out of money without a cash infusion. Literally everyone(all major banks/investors/analysts) knows that Tesla will need to raise capital this year.
Musk though, has insisted that Tesla will not need to raise cash because they will be "profitable by Q3 or Q4". A reminder that they lost 780 million in Q1, and even small profits won't be enough to prevent running out of cash. In order to make profits they need to sell 10,000 cars a week. They were supposed to produce 5000 cars a week in 2017. They have just now been able to produce 2500/week.
Even bulls say that Musk is bluffing and he will eventually raise cash this year. Moody's downgrade of Tesla to essentially junk stocks makes it harder to raise cash at good interest rates. Moreover, there is speculation and some evidence that the reason Tesla haven't already done so, is that they are under SEC investigation which would prevent them from raising cash without disclosing a lot of details harmful to them.
Tesla has access to standard credit lines for about 500 million, but they recently had to pledge their Fremont factory to just maintain these credit lines.
A lot of Tesla's financial executives have left the company - a red flag to many including Jim Chanos, who famously shorted Enron due to similar indicators. The head of autopilot left and the head of engineering left 'for vacation' last week.
Tesla's autopilot is complete false advertising. Their original autopilot was developed by MobilEye. MobilEye hated tesla's exaggeration of the system's capabilities and withdrew their supply after a person died using autopilot. Tesla responded that mobileye was jealous of Tesla's superior "Enhanced Autopilot" which has hardware capable of full self driving. It is generally accepted on owner and enthusiast forums that enhanced autopilot is worse than mobileye's system right now, and in general both are basically lane-keeping system with AEB. Waymo and GM/Cruise are far ahead with their FSD capabilities than Tesla(again, widely accepted)
Part of Tesla's debt comes from bailing out Solar City, a completely unprofitable company loaded with debt that was run by Musk's cousins. Some people saw this as nepotistic and a conflict of interest(Musk held part ownership of SolarCity while his cousins ran it), with a few investors suing Tesla over the deal.
Starting from 2019 and 2020, all the major automakers are bringing out electric models. This will further damage Tesla's competitiveness, since they have the wost QA and build quality due to their haphazard and panicked development process and their $7500 tax credit is about to run out.
Despite all this, the market cap of tesla is larger than Ford, Fiat and nearly equal to GM. Their inflated market cap(which even Musk admits is inflated if you "look at past results") is fuelling their funding which inflates the market cap even more as they lose more money trying to make bigger promises.
What does Tesla have to it's advantage? Tremendous marketing and brand value. They're probably inching towards or even surpassing Apple
What does Tesla have against it? The realities of running a business and actually making the products.
7
They are currently ok with the following set up: Tesla, a company in pretty serious financial trouble, has a CEO - who by way of Gwynne Shotwell's interview today - spends about half his time on SpaceX and by his own admission "hates" managing.
Let that sink in. Good? Ok, now ask yourself: what is the board actually doing to protect shareholders?
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1
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I've looked it up a bit, but an answer from people who have actually owned the vehicles would be helpful.
What's the general performance of used EVs in the 5, 10, 15 year age range, especially with regards to the batteries? It seems that the vast majority of folks who talk about EVs focus almost exclusively on the brand new models ("35k Model 3"), which doesn't really reflect how I tend to buy ICE vehicles. Does the option of buying a 5-10 year old car for a fraction of the price with reasonable performance simply not grab the headlines, or is there a fundamental reason why it doesn't get talked about much?
I'd imagine, given the common use of Li-ion batteries, that it'd be comparable to the way my laptop battery loses about 30-40% of its capacity over the course of 3-5 years. Is this about right, or is it way off base?
18
From a post in the other sub, it appears lots of deliveries for customers who have already configured will be pushed into July, presumably for tax credit purposes. Many have been configured+waiting since April.
This means that they are paying the non-refundable $2,500 configuration fee with a defined delivery window and, in some cases, going through the process of selling their current vehicles and/or obtaining loans.
Understandably, many are RATTLED:
I'm incredibly frustrated by this. Configured April 13th, nothing for 5 weeks, now this. Seems crazy that people with money invested have no say when we'll get a car. I'm probably just upset with my situation. I have a VW TDI that I'm selling back to VW and won't have a car until.... Tesla decides I can have one.
The biggest bullshit is that they took our mandatory $2500 deposit up front with false delivery times. Given the wide spread of these emails, this was planned. They should have been clear about delivery times BEFORE taking my $2500 and me securing a loan. Really leaves a bad taste.
4/18 order - midnight silver 19's - got July. Super frustrating. That will make it - up to 14 weeks from order to delivery almost TRIPLE the normal window. That's ridiculous, no? Trying so hard to stay positive.
Man...I want to be patient, but I just got pre-approved for a loan thinking I was getting near the end of my wait. I configured on 4/20 and on 5/18 decided to lock in a rate on a loan...and now the pre-approval will most likely expire before I get my vehicle... This is just asinine. They've basically doubled the estimated wait for me (I got a July email). They better deliver in the beginning of July or I may just decide to pull out and get an EV from one of their competitors instead. This feels like a slap in the face to me, and I have little to no faith left in this company.
What an honorable company.
Expect the full tax credit to last through Q3+Q4 and expect hugely inflated deposit numbers for Q2 financials.
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This is a new nugget taken from this article:
"Off camera Leung's father said he used Tesla's autopilot feature on highways but not usually on neighborhood roads. Leung worked as an engineer."
Now that we know he had AutoPilot, take a look at this map showing the path:
https://teslamotorsclub.com/tmc/posts/2755065/
Notice right around the area for him to have entered the path taken that the road abruptly changes to asphalt and also the lane markings get messed up from the dirt road entrance starting there too. It's not to say for certain that AP was used here, but if AP was on in there, it looks like a section of road where AP could fail.
EDIT: Now that I've seen the video here starting at the 2:35 mark that shows the tire marks, it looks like the path taken was not in a straight line from the road, but took some intervention of some kind after the car left the road for it to end up on its final trajectory:
The final path of the car had the left wheels of the car right on the edge of the shoulder. If you drive back and forth in Streetview you can see the shoulder where there is a visible line. A car can't miss the turn and run along the shoulder like that without making some change in direction, which the change in direction looks like it would have had to occur after the first gate as otherwise to ride along the shoulder that way would have hit a ton of things including that gate.
I would say seeing those tire marks limits what could have happened to: DUI, Mechanical Failure, Suicide or AutoPilot. It doesn't look like the car could have just passively gone that way, so it doesn't seem to have been distracted driving unless the driver was too complacent with AP so wasn't paying attention to the road as AP steered.
2
If it’s ok for Tesla to prioritize the AWD and high profit margin model 3s over the entry level units now. Why shouldn’t Tesla also be able to prioritize these units to the international market during all of 2019? Wouldn’t the right thing to be for Tesla to prioritize these costumers over the base model North American customers.
28
1
Hey folks, you obviously know much more about manufacturing than I do. Can you please explain to me why 35K model 3 is unrealistic?
Coming from IT/trading background, I have a very simplistic view that the actual cost of car breaks down to:
- cost of components.
battery, doors, seats, floor mats and all other physical shit that, when properly assembled, becomes a car.
- cost of labor
dudes who assemble physical shit from the point above.
- cost of capital equipment
scary looking robots who help dudes from the point above to assemble shit from the two points above.
Now, my thinking is that with high enough production rate, I can make sure that:
-- I'm squeezing my suppliers till the last drop, asking for discounts on large orders
-- Cost of labor and capital equiment, amortized (is it the right word?) per each car produced gets lower and lower.
So, if we will accept that Tesla will ramp up to, idk, 5K or 6K vehicles per week, fine tune their production lines to get rid of excessive human labor, and do it's best in finding very cheap components (or pressure suppliers to drop the price, promising to go out of business if they won't comply) -- why 35K USD basic model 3 is still unrealistic? I get that margin will be small, like, idk, 3%, but it's ok. This is a mass market case, where you make a modest margin but sell in huge quantities.
Appreciate your thoughts, as always.
18
Hearing so many of the excuses for why Teslas have been having fatalities and accidents I had felt a sense of de ja vu. Now I know why as Tesla had claimed to have solved for these issues with radar by claiming they alone had the solution to make radar as the primary better than vision as the primary. Reading the contemporary literature post-Josh Brown it actually raises a few questions with the recent incidents.
First is Tesla's blog post about the v8.0 release specifically claiming that radar was superior and in particular Tesla's radar was superior because it could not only work in zero visibility but can also see ahead:
"The net effect of this, combined with the fact that radar sees through most visual obscuration, is that the car should almost always hit the brakes correctly even if a UFO were to land on the freeway in zero visibility conditions.
Taking this one step further, a Tesla will also be able to bounce the radar signal under a vehicle in front – using the radar pulse signature and photon time of flight to distinguish the signal – and still brake even when trailing a car that is opaque to both vision and radar. The car in front might hit the UFO in dense fog, but the Tesla will not."
https://electrek.co/2016/09/11/tesla-autopilot-radar-processing-v8-update/
As part of the huge v8.0 announcement Musk had a conference call just about and his comments are fascinating to say the least, given what has transpired since then.
First is something I don't recall picking up before, but Elon Musk at the time claimed that AEB would be enhanced while AutoPilot is on and concurrent with that Musk specifically claims that AP will work extremely well against metallic/solid objects. Given the recent accidents this raises a lot of questions:
"But anything large, or metallic, or dense, we are confident that the radar system in the car will be able to detect that and initiate a braking event. Both when the Autopilot is active and when it is not active. When the Autopilot is not active, it will operate in an emergency braking mode. In that case, it’s more likely to mitigate the impact speed because if Autosteer it doesn’t know if the driver is actually going to get out-of-the-way of an obstacle or not. So it will only brake at the very last second.
If Autosteer is turned on, the car computer knows what its probable path is and whether it will actually turn in time or not. And so it will be a much more comfortable braking experience as opposed to the last-minute and in that case, we think mostly likely we will be able to brake to a complete stop instead of simply mitigating the impact velocity."
Musk then elaborates specifically why radar is better than vision by saying with radar all the car needs to know it's driving in a trajectory toward a solid object without requiring any specific identification to actuate but vision-based systems they don't function as well because they have to ID the object:
"The exciting thing is that even if the vision system doesn’t recognize what the object because it could be a very strange-looking vehicle, it could be a multi-car pileup, it could be a truck crossing the road, it really could be anything – an alien spaceship, a pile of junk metal that fell off the back a truck. It actually doesn’t matter what the object is it just knows that there’s something dense that it is going to hit – and it should not hit that.
It doesn’t need to know what that thing is – while a vision system really needs to know what the thing is. It is what I think will be a very dramatic improvement in the safety of the vehicle and entirely through software – no additional sensors are needed."
Nothing quoted from part 2, but here's the link:
What Musk says next about AEB and AP is retrospectively shocking as it details exactly why the subsequent AP-related accidents shouldn't have happened (or at least shouldn't have happened to the extent that they did) as Musk details examples of stopped vehicles and a fixed road object as things v8.0 is specifically supposed to address:
" So if Autosteer is not on, let say you are going around a sharp bend and there’s a metal guard railing or a post or some obstacle and there’s a sharp bend, if Autosteer is not on, the only logical thing to do is to only actuate the brakes at the last split second because it doesn’t know if you are actually going to hit the curb if you are distracted.
The assumption normally would be that the driver would actually take the curve and not actually power through whatever the object is outside of the sharp turn. It’s quite different with Autosteer on because Autosteer then knows what its predicted path is so it knows that it’s going to turn and it knows that it shouldn’t brake just because there’s an obstacle in front of you in a sharp turn – off the road in a sharp turn.
What it can actually do is scan ahead and see if there’s an obstacle on the road in its predicted path and in that case there’s much more time to brake – and can actually more likely come to a full stop. Let’s say that there’s a car or truck that is broken down or something on the road it can brake in a much more measured way and it is much more likely to reach a full stop and avoid hitting the object."
Part 4:
Part 5:
Musk giving other examples as to why radar is superior to vision:
"It’s hard if you are person, but the radar would not care if it was staring at the sun or what the contrast ratio of the object is relative to the background.
So yeah, the radar-only braking is quite powerful – it will superhuman."
Musk had wanted for a long time for radar to replace vision. This is rather important as this is Tesla saying vision-primary was the stopgap to radar-primary, not the other way around:
"It’s something that I wanted to do for a while. Probably since late last year, but I was always told that it wasn’t possible, you can’t do it, it’s not gonna work, nobody else has made it work, software is too hard, sensor is not good enough, but I really pushed hard on questioning all those assumptions last 3 or 4 months. Like there got to be a way to make this work and now we believe that there is.
It’s a very hard problem. No one else can solve this. And one could without having all their cars connected and fleet learning. It’s not possible."
Now given how Tesla described how AP would function post-Josh Brown, let's see how that comports with the fatal Mountain View crash:
"In the moments before the collision, which occurred at 9:27 a.m. on Friday, March 23rd, Autopilot was engaged with the adaptive cruise control follow-distance set to minimum. The driver had received several visual and one audible hands-on warning earlier in the drive and the driver’s hands were not detected on the wheel for six seconds prior to the collision. The driver had about five seconds and 150 meters of unobstructed view of the concrete divider with the crushed crash attenuator, but the vehicle logs show that no action was taken. "
https://www.tesla.com/blog/update-last-week%E2%80%99s-accident
According to what Tesla had said in 2016, the Mountain View driver should have basically had AEB+ protection since AutoSteer was activated and the vehicle should have excelled at avoiding/mitigating the crash precisely because the system had at least 6 seconds of knowing that it was on a course for a solid object.
This situation is also exacerbated by this being a well-travelled AP highway, which further should have meant that it was mapped extremely well from fleet learning:
"•Our data shows that Tesla owners have driven this same stretch of highway with Autopilot engaged roughly 85,000 times since Autopilot was first rolled out in 2015 and roughly 20,000 times since just the beginning of the year"
https://www.tesla.com/blog/what-we-know-about-last-weeks-accident
So Tesla in 2016 in response to the Josh Brown fatality claimed to have made a 'superhuman' update to AP that was supposedly to be especially effective on solid/metallic objects and those with AP activated would get extra protection because the vehicle would know the projected path. Yet here we stand in 2018 where Tesla's alleged strengths of 'No one else can solve this' then are now being described as it's weaknesses due to using radar, which makes it appears that Tesla materially misrepresented alleged improvements to the car because they apparently didn't solve it even 2 years after the highly publicized announcement.
24
Remember when GM was an evil ally of big oil because they didn't produce the Bolt in larger numbers? Remember when we were told GM was losing (insert large number of dollars) on every Bolt, so their cold Capitalist hearts didn't want to make any?
And now here with are with a $78,000 Model 3 available, and a $35,000 version nowhere to be seen, for at least another 6 months.
The reason? "This is good for Tesla. They need to make money". Oh ok, so now we're cool with a business making business decisions again?
But what about the hundreds of thousands of people currently driving ICE cars, waiting for a SR to accelerate the world's transition to sustainable energy? Fuck 'em, there's money to be made.
I thought Tesla didn't exist to make money?
Oh wait, you mean they need to make money immediately or face bankruptcy? I thought that was a story made up by shorts?
Here are your choices, Tesla fan.
Tesla is as greedy and profit driven as the OEMs you've demonized over the years, or
they aren't, but they are literally living quarter-to-quarter and the money is necessary to continue existing in the short term
Can't have both....
14
When people say it will never exist what do people mean?
That they will go bankrupt before they get to that point?
That the margins are too low --> Tesla raises the price? Thanks.
2
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