Tesla misses Q4 delivery expectations as stock keeps sliding Tesla has finished 2022 with a dismal fourth quarter that saw it fail to meet analyst vehicle delivery predictions, fall short of its 50 percent growth objective and watch its stock rappel downward, shaving billions from the electric car maker's market value. In a brief statement posted to its investor relations site, Tesla …
Quite. On a similar theme it would be nice if the tech bro analyst community would stop referring to the likes of Ford and Toyota and VW as "the legacy companies" as if they're some once-hot two-bit software house past their glory days about to sold on to some third tier private equity firm for parts.
They are busy expanding capacity but their wait list evaporated over the last few months to the point where they are having to offer heavy discounts to even find enough people to take what they are making now. Anecdotal reports say that Tesla employees are reporting people canceling orders in droves, with those willing to say why blaming Musk's behavior.
Going full Trumper when your major market is liberals who want more environmentally friendly transportation was never going to end well for Musk, and the damage is only beginning. Between allow their lease option to expire and people selling theirs the used market is going to be flooded with them adding competition for the new ones. They are going to have a lot of idle production capacity before long, and I wouldn't be surprised if their YoY sales growth has turned negative by this time next year. If that happens today's stock price will be a fond memory for its investors.
This is a huge part of it. Tesla had a near-enough ten year head start in this market. Instead of doubling and tripling down on factors like vehicle range, price and quality they've pissed their advantage and equity pricing away on a doomed "self" driving project and a bunch of products nobody wanted. Now a Tesla's range is simply competitive, whereas it once blew the market out of the water. Now the price is eye-watering and the quality just... meh.
It's not so much a problem with Elon as it is a problem with the cars and the company.
Particularly the cybertruck. You have to work hard to fail to sell a pickup truck in the US.
I think EV pickups are kind of ... well, only appropriate for a very limited set of applications, to put it kindly. But Ford's selling the F-150 Lightning, and while sales are modest by anyone's standards, they've help up better than most of Ford's range in 2022. Rivian claims to have delivered over 12000 EVs in the first 9 months of 2022, and probably at least a third were electric pickups; and Rivian has a lot of buzz among influential reviewers such as Doug DeMuro.
Even GMC managed to sell more than 700 of the absurdly overpriced Hummer EV trucks, presumably to people kicking themselves for failing to buy an Escalade EXT ten years ago.
It's one thing for startups like Bollinger and Lordstown to cancel production or only produce a few units. They're startups; they're a long shot pretty much by definition. Tesla is an established company, and they announced the Cybertruck three years ago. It's a complete embarrassment.
Of course, it doesn't help that the Cybertruck has "inspired by Homer Simpson" styling and failed to live up to promises from its first public appearance. But that's rather the point. Tesla could have just made a competent electric pickup (for some value of "competent"). If they insisted on adventurous styling, they could have done something like what Rivian did, or even Bollinger; those things are at least recognizable as pickups to the pickup-buying public. Instead they've wasted years and who knows how much money and engineering resources on a 1950's-SF-movie prop.
Were those really a distraction or just clever marketing?
Tesla is probably the worlds best known, or most talked about, car company and spends nothing on adverts
Getting a coupe of interns to knock up a ridiculous low-polygon cybertruck gets Tesla a lot of front pages, and possibly derails plans vehicles at Dodge etc.
I think people are also starting to realize how chintzy the Model 3s are. Besides the parts falling off, once you've been in a Model 3 and the much nicer Chevy Bolt there is no way in heck you're going to buy the much chintzier Model 3 (with much less rear leg room). And the Bolt is much cheaper! What sold Teslas was the reputation, and now Elmo's rather torpedoed that.
The Tesla Model S is still pretty sexy... but those aren't driving their bottom line.
I hear the heater is very good on the bolt. Hard to turn off though....
The quality on all the EVs being made by startups seems to be total crap. The Rivian pickup looks good from a distance. If you're paying S-Class or 7 series money you don't want the build quality of an 80's metro.
That shouldn't really be a surprise. As I'v'e said before, the electric part of EVs is the easy part, consistently producing high quality vehicles and doing it profitably is the hard part. It took the better part of a century for most auto makers to get there, some still aren't. To think you can just put together a company from scratch and pull off the same levels of quality manufacturing is a good example of Dunning-Kruger in action.
Look at DeLorean for a classic example of this. Thatcher gave DeLorean a sweet tax deal to build them in Northern Ireland. Nobody in NI had any experience building cars. The first batch of cars off the production line were so badly built they effectively had to be rebuilt once they made it to the US. You couldn't take a panel of one car and put it on another, it wouldn't fit.
The EV bit should be the easy bit (well, maybe not the battery) but the model S has had a whole load of drivetrain issues from failed bearings to coolant leaks into the drive units, the flash wear issue in the main brain, duff door handles along with a load of numpty little issues that would have been resolved in a more normal development process. Everyone always seems to be talking about how good the NEXT thing will be while ignoring the glaring issues with the current products. Telsa is not a car maker. It is a lifestyle brand which has suckered people into spending a LOT of money on the badge. They have brought some good features to the table which is going to help EVs going forwards but also a lot of fluff.
" Everyone always seems to be talking about how good the NEXT thing will be while ignoring the glaring issues with the current products."
Pretty much sums the software industry up in a nutshell. I've had a few cars over the last 10 years (VAG) or so where the worst part of them was software - ironically the thing they could most easily fix post-build with a firmware update at service time. One went back 7 times before they sent out a factory engineer to sort out the satnav in it - with hindsight I should have rejected the car.
Obviously they can't. They would have been booking way more profit if they had 40%+ net margins.
Part of that $47K price is "because they are [were] selling all they can make". Why not price it higher if you are selling them all? The other part is probably the $30K was one of those Musk promises that had no basis in reality, like all his FSD promises, and he just figured "if we use economies of scale they will get cheaper to make so we'll get there somehow".
With the $7500 rebates they are giving, they are effectively selling them for $40K now. Or $32K if you include the $7500 rebate the government gives you (not sure if the Model 3 can quality for the full amount, and your income has to qualify, so YMMV) but I guess Musk would try to argue they've kept the promise in a similarly sleazy way.
When in a few months you go from "selling all you can make and there's a waiting list" to "you can take immediate delivery and here's a $7500 bribe to buy from us" you know something has gone seriously wrong. That's not just people rejecting Tesla because of other automakers' electric cars or getting mad about the poor build quality. Those types of turnarounds don't take place in one quarter.
Someone else has posted in the past that Tesla's profits don't come directly from vehicle sales but from the emissions certificates it gets issued and that these were winding down over 2022.
The only market where it has real volume is China and that is the market with the fiercest competition, not least in the area of batteries.
The cost is bonkers... but not in the brave new world of EV's
We just sold a 2020 Petrol Evoque, monstrously unreliable, but a solid, classy, lovely thing to behold... the next car was to be EV, but...
Over her in blighty, £40k just about gets you a range of cars - Hyundai, Kia, VW... without any options plus none of which are anywhere close to the Evoque. I know the new retail was £10 more, but these Electric cars should be in the £20k range, they are 'nice' and all perform the functions of transportation equally as well, but add a few niceities to the cars and they suddenly become almost £50k a few years ago, that sum bought a premium badge, upper mid spec car that was a bit special...
2020 base petrol Astra - £19k
2023 base electric Astra - £40k
in 2020 a 5 series BMW was £38k and thats a lot more car than an astra!
I have my second EV, it’s not a Tesla and it was expensive. But I haven’t got it for the economics, that is not the first consideration, I know it would be cheaper to drive an old fashioned petrol car. There is no economic justification claimed.
But there’s no way on Earth I would ever willingly go back to driving an old fashioned ICE powered car, the EV experience is just so much better for me. I also like that my engine isn’t adding to local air pollution.
The problem for Tesla is that there are better alternatives now, and the alternatives are improving still faster. When I was buying the first EV years ago, I considered Tesla but found better. For my next EV car, didn’t even consider Tesla.
The first to market was VisiCalc. I got it on my Apple II+ and I must admit I was impressed by it.
"VisiCalc (for "visible calculator")[1] is the first spreadsheet computer program for personal computers,[2] originally released for Apple II by VisiCorp on 17 October 1979.".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VisiCalc
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