Here's a summary video of the technical improvements Tesla are making to battery production and castings for their cars as announced yesterday.
Their focus is on improving the manufacturing process to make it industry beating. Their ambition is to be the best manufacturing company in the world.
No-one can doubt Elon Musk's commitment to Tesla for the long term, he has stated that making the machine is hard but making the machines that makes the machine is far more challenging.
He delivered this with far less hyperbole than expected and kept it quite technical. If Tesla can keep travelling along this path over the next 2-3 years, that stock price may just start to look justified, it's still a gamble, but one that might just come good.
Comments
Honestly, I prefer it when they don't make ridiculous claims. Now if they could just improve build quality on the model 3 and model Y, and add back some physical controls for important things and put an instrument cluster in the right place they'd be making a very strong argument for themselves.
Disagree on the buttons and instrument cluster, takes barely any getting used to, much prefer it, had mine over a year now, feels antiquated to get back in an ICE car with buttons everywhere
Think the stock price mainly took a tanking due to the amount of hype leading the event and no actual deliverables available immediately. What they are doing / proposing to do sounds incredible, hope it pans out.
This is why the virtual cockpit in VAG cars is so good, you just need to glance down for a split second to look at the satnav, but it's also the reason why the new Golf isn't as good as the old one: you have touch sliders to adjust the Aircon etc.
A German court has recently ruled that turning on the wipers on your Tesla through the touchscreen counts as "using a device at the wheel" and therefore may be illegal (and possibly uninsurable if you crash while doing it, as happened in the test case).
I agree about quality improving when Berlin opens. Berlin gigafactory will service European sales and those cars won't be made by Californian millennials!
I think the next few years is critical for Tesla, they have to nail continuous improvement in manufacturing and cost reduction so it becomes business as usual and can scale up while achieving high quality. That is a hell of a challenge but they have a pile of money, a tailwind and a huge technological head start over the competition.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/electrek.co/2020/08/04/tesla-wiper-controls-ruled-illegal-germany-crashed/amp/
However, I do see an issue with needing to squirt the washers to clean your windscreen when it's not raining, especially when following tractors in Lincolnshire!. How does that work in a Tesla, can you assign that to one of the steering wheel buttons?
There's all kinds of thing wrong with a Tesla but they are the only company that actually move things forward in the technical sense.
Auto wipers work fine, admittedly they were a little ropey when the car first came out, but software updates have fixed this. As an alternative you can also activate them with voice commands without an issue.
Tesla don't use a rain sensor on new cars, it's all done via camera, it got better because the neural net is learning rain patterns from the fleet!
Reliability on the Model 3 is great, I probably wouldn't however buy a second hand Model S or X out of warranty.
Yes, auto lights and wipers are there, nearly everything can also be controlled via voice commands.
The paint on Tesla's is my biggest complaint, Fremont have very strict rules which results in a very thin coating of paint, Berlin should definitely change that, they are having a specialist paint shop. China is already producing better cars, so the improvements are happening and fairly quickly now it's not just a USA operation.
The speed Giga Berlin is going up is incredible too.
The washer fluid button is on the stalk, no touchscreens involved. One press of said button also clears the screen.
Hard to give some of the replies without sounding like a fanboy, but most criticism tends to come from people who haven't driven one and have just read stuff online, which is frequently negative.
There are definitely faults with Tesla and how they currently operate, but I wouldn't swap back to the new BMW I had before hand or any other ICE car, my Model 3 is light years ahead, gets better (nearly) every software update and has supercar beating performance in a straight line at least
Makes me want one even more. Roll on retirement. A Tesla will be my retirement treat for myself!
You'll love it, let me know if you need a referral code for some free supercharger miles - The most recent software update has got speed sign recognition, it's taken a while to implement because MobileEye own the patent, so Tesla have had to find a way round it.
If you're a bit of a geek, you can also setup software (I'm using TeslaMate) to get more stats on your car via the cars streaming and rest APIs, I've got that running in the cloud so I can see the state of the car, consumption, battery, where I've been etc.. I've also put in some calculations on how much money I've saved since owning it
They've been deliberately futuristic to create a brand identity and make the car stand out from the crowd.
However, I predict that as they want to sell 20 million cars a year, they will gradually move towards more mainstream design, and at the same time other manufacturers will push the boat out a little more (and develop proper EV platforms).
Hopefully at that point Tesla will have sorted build quality. Any Tesla Model 3 I've seen has panel gaps that wouldn't pass muster on a base level Ford Focus, never mind a £50k car. The boot lid light design unfortunately draws attention to this, I've noticed 1 driving around that doesn't look wonky out of about 7 I see regularly on the road.
They will get there eventually though, and it'll be a great car when they do. It's just a question of whether that happens before for example the VW iD range gains a large market share.
There are panel gap issues on some Tesla's for sure, this is where China and Berlin will really help. Tesla will tend to fix / amend these for people if they are bothered, but they really should PDI them and fix before handing them over (and of course, put them together in Fremont with more care/attention to detail). Mine is no worse than my BMW was to be fair.
There are lots of great options now available, Kia have some great EV's (if you can get them, was a big waiting list), Hyundai's offerings are supposed to be good, MG's EV punches above its weight and the ID 3 now being available is brilliant (with ID4 from November I think?).
Biggest issue for non-Tesla EV's is still the charging network if you need to go on a long journey outside of your range, it's a minefield of needing cards for various charge points and reliability issues. For most people though, it's not an issue, the range should easily cope with the majority of peoples commutes.
The other brands are also still not doing over the air updates and the ID3 still isn't software complete, VW had to update the fleet via laptop before selling! Next update is due in January via a service appointment I gather.
I really like the like of the Kia Niro EV, and can see me getting one as my wife's next car.
I'm likely to stick with ICE for a while, the combination of strong residuals on EVs and generally high initial depreciation on performance cars means that if I'm looking at a 2 year old car that's fun to drive, for the same money the ICE car will be similarly fast and more entertaining to drive as a similar priced EV.
If VW bring out an iD R for reasonable money that may tempt me over though.