SAP hits brakes on Tesla company car deal

German software giant SAP has reportedly elected not to buy new electric cars from Tesla, the EV manufacturer led by Elon Musk. According to German publication Handelsblatt, the company's fleet manager told it the €30 billion revenue software company decided to stop acquiring company cars from Tesla owing to delayed deliveries …

[elsergiovolador]

Image

stop acquiring company cars from Tesla owing to delayed deliveries and price fluctuations.

I think the real reason is bad image. Germans buying cars from the company, owner of which is appeasing Russian Nazis? That is not going to work.

[aerogems]

Re: Image

And don't forget the numerous antisemitic comments he's made on his own. These aren't US politics style antisemitism where simply disagreeing with a position taken by the Israeli government is called antisemitic, we're talking promoting conspiracy theories that there's a secret Jewish cabal of liberal elites secretly running the world and other tinfoil hat level shit.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Image

1st one is a protected belief under law in the UK as of this week. :-)

[cyberdemon]

Re: Image

Taking a stand against Nazis or Russians is hardly something i would associate with SAP.

Someone once told me that SAP originally started their company by developing a card-index system for Hitler's regime to keep track of ghetto occupants.. No idea if there is any truth to that.

So I don't think SAP cancelled because of Musk's ties to Russia, that would be quite hypocritical. More likely, they cancelled the deal simply because Tesla's build quality and delivery reliability are plummeting, because they are struggling to source the parts from China.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Image

"Someone once told me that SAP originally started their company by developing a card-index system for Hitler's regime to keep track of ghetto occupants.. No idea if there is any truth to that."

Whoever told to that was a moron. SAP was founded in 1972, more than a quarter of a century after the end of WW2, Hitler and Nazi Germany. And not a difficult fact to check, really.

As for the company that supplied punch-card computers to the Nazis for managing their concentration camps, that was the good old "International Business Machines" (IBM).

As for SAP not buying Teslas, I doubt that's because of the built quality (which has always been shit, not because of China but because of poor workmanship from Tesla's factories and a lack of quality control).

[cyberdemon]

Re: Image

> Whoever told to that was a moron. SAP was founded in 1972, more than a quarter of a century after the end of WW2, Hitler and Nazi Germany. And not a difficult fact to check, really.

Apparently the five founders of SAP were all ex-IBM, so perhaps that is what my friend was on about.

[seven of five]

Re: Image

Claus Wellenreuther is the oldest of the five founders of SAP. He was born in 1935, so theoretically could have been involved in Nazi war crimes.

Hector, Tschira and Hopp were born in 1940, being four and five at the end of the war. Hasso Plattner was born in 1944.

Also not a difficult fact to check, really.

[CowHorseFrog]

Re: Image

Religion and nationalist fantatics never let facts get in the way of their big statements.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Image

In general, US manufactured cars have QC on par with 1970s BL cars, handle about as well as an Austin Maxi that's being used to transport a pallet of bricks and have worse fuel efficiency.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Image

"In general, US manufactured cars have QC on par with 1970s BL cars, handle about as well as an Austin Maxi that's being used to transport a pallet of bricks and have worse fuel efficiency."

That was certainly true for '90s era cars, at least to some extend (the only car that comes close to an Austin Maxi is a Yugo). It's certainly not true for most American cars made this side of 2000. Which isn't really a surprise, considering how many Germans and other Europeans are working in the US automotive sector, and how globally intertwined the various suppliers of all the components that make a modern car are anyways.

[CowHorseFrog]

Re: Image

As opposed to Ford who wrote the book which inspired Hitler to his grand vision ?

[MMOaddict]

Re: Image

What I want to know is, if there is a secret cabal of liberal Jewish elites where's my cut?

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Image

It's being spent on bombing refugee camps right now it seems.

[seven of five]

Re: Image

on your foreskin, I'd presume :P

[Edwin]

Re: Image

Agreed - I suspect his Muskiness' dim view of organised labour contributes as well - German unions have been fairly vocal in their support of the Swedish strike.

[Dave Null]

I doubt SAP buy cars at all

Company cars are almost always leased from leasing companies. It would be rare for a large company to do this direct from manufacturer, they would go through a leasing provider. I can understand why they might be reticent to allow employees to spec Teslas though given long repair times and uncertain resale value due to constant random discounting which tends to make leases expensive on these vehicles...

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: I doubt SAP buy cars at all

Nope, they really buy them, and after four years they sell them. I know that for a fact, trust me. That's why the Fuhrpark is so miffed by the decrease of used cars' value.

Another reason (not mentioned in the article, but, hem, elsewhere) is that Tesla offers absolutely no 'big fleet' discount.

(anon for obvious reasons)

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: I doubt SAP buy cars at all

I don't know the exact figures but when just one leasing company (Lex, one of many UK leasing companies) make *profits* of nearly half a billion a year from leasing then that would suggest companies lease far more than they buy and SMMT figures also seem to back that up.

Many large companies shuffle costs round on the books too, so one I know of has their own finance arm which 'buys' their own cars but then leases them to other sections of the business so I'm really not sure where that would fall in the figures but it would seem to make sense t count the cars as leased because, to the letter of the tax laws, they are.

Tesla have a bad name for reliability, build quality and service/spares, regardless of the fleet discount that may or may not be on offer that makes them really unattractive to leasing and finance companies because it all adds up to high running costs, because of that they're either being dumped by those leasing companies or priced so high as to make them deeply undesirable to anyone who wants a leased car fleet.

[Steve Davies 3]

Re: make leases expensive on these vehicles

When the MuskMobile 3 was released in the UK (2019) the lease costs were around £599/month. Yesterday, I saw a Black (costs extra for that paint) MuskMobile 3 advertising £399/month lease costs.

not that I'd be seen dead in a 3 or Y. I nearly bought a Model S in 2018 but the handling was so bad that I passed.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: I doubt SAP buy cars at all

Leasing companies are also loath to buy Tesla because of horrific delays in obtaining spares and/or technicians to fit them, having a £90K car out of action for 3 months because of a cracked windscreen is entirely unacceptable but quite common.

[Michael Strorm]

Re: I doubt SAP buy cars at all

> a £90K car out of action for 3 months because of a cracked windscreen

Of course, such problems will be a thing of the past with the whizzy new Cybertruck and its unbreakable windows!

[Spanners]

Re: I doubt SAP buy cars at all

Not in Germany it won't.

Those things are designed to be lethal to pedestrians, cyclists and motorbike riders.

Probably not too popular anywhere in the developed world.

[Michael Strorm]

Re: I doubt SAP buy cars at all

I'm aware of that, but let's not nitpick over what was a fun excuse to have a laugh at Tesla and Musk's expense! :-)

[Professor_Iron]

Re: I doubt SAP buy cars at all

As above mentioned they do buy them - since SAP provides the software backbone of all 3 German manufacturers (and for pretty much the whole "Deutschland AG"), they receive huge discounts on outright purchases and grown their fleet to be one of the biggest in Germany. Due to the German corporate car tax system local companies do not shy away from procuring expensive cars for employees as a benefit - all the new upper-class and premium vehicles you see cruising on the Autobahn are corporate owned.

[werdsmith]

I’m interested in buying a car from the Jetta brand. Where can I find one?

[Gene Cash]

German cars?

BMWs and Audis do suck, but even as an EV nut I would take them over a Tesla.

And I'm kind of puzzled why they wouldn't be "buying local"

[Roland6]

Re: German cars?

> BMWs and Audis do suck

Audi do make some interesting, albeit expensive and very limited production run, bicycles..

[CowHorseFrog]

Re: German cars?

Those German cars are far better in every way than a Tesla....

When was the last time you heard of either one killing people because of its safety features ?

[Herring`]

Billions off share price

I am old enough to remember the dotcom crash. Also much of the 6502 instruction set and pubic hair in porn. But how does this work?

[Lurko]

Re: Billions off share price

"I am old enough to remember ...... pubic hair in porn"

Nobody is that old and still alive, mate. Even dinosaur fossils don't have pubes.

[MMOaddict]

Re: Billions off share price

Sadly I am that old as well but I wouldn't know about the porn because I am too innocent to watch that sort of thing especially as my Mummy told me I would go blind if I did.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Billions off share price

> as my Mummy told me I would go blind if I did.

Are you using Cortana or Siri now?

[Michael Strorm]

100,000,070s BC that is

That's only because hair doesn't fossilise well. They've got it all over the place in all that 70s dinosaur porn.

[Fruit and Nutcase]

Re: Billions off share price

How does it work?

IMHO, it's the same shareholder economics that gave Musk a $56billion pay deal. Just plain crazy

https://www.theguardian.com/business/nils-pratley-on-finance/2024/jan/31/three-cheers-for-the-delaware-judge-who-stood-up-to-elon-musk

[Roland6]

Re: Billions off share price

> But how does this work?

Tulips, South Sea bubble and Railway shares…

[Steve Davies 3]

Re: Tulips, South Sea bubble

And Trump wanting the US Economy to crash before November so that he can become POTUS for life.

Yet, the dumbass folks in middle america still think his economic policies are better than Bidens. I wonder what they'll say if the market does crash and their retirement pot rapidly heads towards zero and their home gets Repo'd.

Oh silly me. They'll still vote for Trump even if he is not on the ballot and heading for Gitmo.

Michael Bentine was right. It is a 'Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad world'.

[MMOaddict]

Re: Tulips, South Sea bubble

That really does show your age.

[CowHorseFrog]

Re: Tulips, South Sea bubble

No is a mad mad ceo worshipping America, not the world.

[Justthefacts]

Re: Billions off share price

I think it is (was) perfectly rational. First point is, Tesla’s shares aren’t “so high”, it’s VW, BMW, Ford etc that are low, and there’s a perfectly good reason for that. They have huge revenues, but wafer-thin profit margins. Toyota has 10% margin, hardly amazing, but 3x the others, and that’s why it’s market cap is so much larger. What you should take from this, isn’t that VW is smaller than Toyota; it’s that VW et al are on the edge of not existing at all. When you only make a couple % profit, it only takes a tiny fluctuation to make that negative, and then having a larger revenue just means you are losing more money faster.

The next point is that the legacy car companies don’t really have a business future in the EV era. Yes they can still make cars…but so can *everyone else*. There’s no unique expertise in electric motors like there is in petrol engines. There isn’t even any reason why the *brand* has to be the one assembling panels. In any other business, assembling panels is low-margin thing you subcontract to the hundreds of generic machine shops.

So, Tesla was high, purely because they had first mover advantage in making the new thing. But now there are a dozen alternatives, probably BYD will be the eventual winner. So Tesla is crashing.. But its important to understand that if and when self-driving finally becomes a reality (which might well not be until 2045), *NVidia Inside* could well be the automaker brand. Every other component is ultimately generic or commodity, even CATL batteries.

[munnoch]

Re: Billions off share price

"legacy car companies don’t really have a business future in the EV era. Yes they can still make cars…but so can *everyone else*. There"

What nonsense.

A car is a lot more than just the bit that makes it go forward. In fact the engine in an ICE vehicle is the one bit that you almost certainly never touch over the life of the car. Yes you need to push some fresh lubricant through it every so often, thats a 5 minute job. ICE's have become so good they are essentially sealed for life.

But you still need everything else. Wheels, brakes, suspension, seats, steering, climate control, wipers. You need crash worthiness, you need paint that can withstand temperature ranges of -30 to +40. You need to be able to manage supply chain and sub-contractors because car manufacturers are really car assemblers. There are a great many competencies required to build the modern car most of which will carry on.

Granted the incumbents have been a bit slow to catch on to the switch over to BEV's (like me, they probably have a hard time believing we're falling for that shit), but "start-ups" like Tesla are the ones struggling with the bazillion details you need to get right that the Toyota's and VW's have had 70 years to figure out.

[Justthefacts]

Re: Billions off share price

And how many of the items you mention are *made* by the badge automaker? Seats, no. Climate control, no. Wipers, no. Windows, no. Are you seriously claiming that *wheels* are differentiating thing that no off-the-shelf workshop can make? Literally any 5-person machine shop with a stamp press can do that, and *does* do that aftermarket. Brakes also are a generic, with hundreds of aftermarket makers, most of whom design to *higher* spec than the OEM. Suspension, the main components are dampers (off-the-shelf) and springs (off-the-shelf). The geometry is the main thing the automaker really owns. Automakers buy paint, not make it, they do apply it….but so can (and do) thousands of repair and custom shops around the country. Steering, ok, I’ll give you that….but we’ve been making steering for a century, this is not a cutting edge technology. None of these is a unique thing that only a unique company can do.

Automakers are *engineering primes*. They do system design and cost engineering, that’s their function. It’s necessary and is what the customer pays for, that and getting it through safety, regulatory and type approval. But just developing a car that correctly does all the things that a car has to do, if you remove the ICE, honestly any competent mechanical engineering consultancy can do it. I know that, because there used to be over a dozen small car companies in Norfolk, a decade or two ago. They all developed a perfectly workable, safe, conformant car with teams of no more than twenty engineers or so, from clean sheet on a budget less than £20M. Owning the IP of a system design of a good functioning car, is not worth literally 1000x that.

[werdsmith]

Re: Billions off share price

Absolute total lack of understanding of automotive engineering on display here from just the drunk pub bore facts.

[hoola]

Re: Billions off share price

This fashion for calling anything that is not "on-trend" (funky cloudy shite) as legacy is just marketing.

For the companies and people that do this it is for one reason only, to try and scare people into thinking that the perfectly good systems and equipment they have are somehow clapped and and a liability.

[Plest]

Re: Billions off share price

"I am old enough to remember ...... pubic hair in porn"

OK, note to self don't read El Reg during lunchbreak!

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Billions off share price

Got summat stuck between your teeth?

[aerogems]

Are they kidding?

A 50% year-over-year growth in production? That's a huge ask for any company, forget about something as complex as manufacturing cars. Even if EVs are less complex to build than ICEs, that's still a huge ask. They'd have to be building new factories left, right, center, and on the moon to be able to bring that much capacity online every year. That should have been a huge red flag to investors. The amount of capital required just to build out that level of infrastructure alone should have raised eyebrows from professional investors, and then the fact that you can't just build a new factory overnight and instantly hire enough people to bring it online. It is a multi-year process, assuming everything goes according to plan (and when does any kind of construction job go completely according to plan), and then it'll probably be another couple of years to really fine tune all the machines at that particular factory and get its output ramped up to capacity.

[DS999]

Re: Are they kidding?

Well they did manage 50% or higher growth a few years, since they were starting from a low level.

The problem is mostly on the demand side. Tesla used to have a massive waiting list, but when Elon went full MAGA and starting spouting conspiracy theories about Jews and so forth, a lot of people cancelled their orders. Because the problem is, the kind of people most likely to believe in climate change and want an EV are exactly the kind of people repelled by what he's saying/doing, and the kind of people mostly likely to love the new Elon are the least likely to buy EVs. I'm sure they cut back on planned manufacturing expansion as a result, and they've been forced to make repeated price cuts to even get enough orders to fill their available production capacity.

I have a feeling they could have had a lot better than 7% sales growth this year (though nowhere near 50%) if they had maintained their demand (i.e. if Musk had just shut the hell up instead of letting Nazis on Twatter and doing his personal impression of their views) As it is there are rumors that Tesla may have to CUT production next year due to that demand issue, and will see their sales decrease in 2025. If that happens, Tesla's stock price is going to be absolutely destroyed. No doubt he'd blame short sellers, or woke media, or textbooks turning fifth graders gay.

There's a Tesla I see at my local grocery store, with a bumper sticker saying "bought it before Elon went nuts". Anyone putting that on their car isn't buying another Tesla.

[Mark 65]

Re: Are they kidding?

I have a feeling they could have had a lot better than 7% sales growth this year (though nowhere near 50%) if they had maintained their demand (i.e. if Musk had just shut the hell up

They were always going to fade as soon as someone came along to eat their lunch. In this case BYD. Tesla had first mover advantage which they used. As soon as manufacturing was moved to China that advantage diminished as the IP was there to be taken. BYD are a battery manufacturer by trade, and what's the most costly and important part of a BEV? Advantage, and sales lead, BYD.

[Justthefacts]

Re: Are they kidding?

Manufacturing cars isn’t complex. Or, maybe it would be, but none of the automaker brands listed actually do that. They’re just assembling parts from their ecosystem, and most of those parts manufacturers can make the design mods for another nameplate brand within a few months. The thing that’s complex is petrol engines and their ancillaries (sensors, exhausts), and the future doesn’t have those in.

Tesla has proved rather unreliable, not because making EVs is hard, but because Tesla aren’t very good at manufacturing and QA. Wait until a competent firm comes in. But it’s not going to be one of the legacy automakers, they are clueless.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Are they kidding?

Wow, total lack of understanding and I'm gonna guess you've never spent any time around automotive manufacturing because you clearly have no idea.

[Justthefacts]

Re: Are they kidding?

“Never spent any time around automotive manufacturing”.

Its not my special subject, certainly, but evidence within my physical field of view show it’s the business, product definition, customer acquisition, supply chain issues that are the bit that is going to kill you, not the engineering of “getting a car on the road”. Whether it’s Zenos, Trident, Iceni, TVR, Sebring, Ariel, Radical, Ascari, Elemental, Caterham, there’s plenty more. Whatever else, these companies all make or made *cars*. They have wheels, engines, steering, brakes, suspensions, and even air-conditioning and a radio. Some of them are very good cars indeed.

A company like Radical employs 70 engineering staff *split between* design and actually building the things. If you have a decent size garden, you can have an entire car company over for beers in the summer as long as they don’t mind talking to each other. They are clearly smart, skilled and hard-working people, I’m not denigrating that. But in terms of project size and complexity, this is not an Apollo Space Program. As an engineering profession, the area has enough heritage that we have a very good idea of what needs doing, options and tradeoffs, and the components available. The tooling required is available in thousands of machine shops up and down the land, and skilled operators know what they’re doing. If your production volume requires it, an automotive robot costs less than the annual salary of the human they replace, and there are tens of thousands of them worldwide.

In contrast, it takes a company like Qualcomm about 50,000 people to design (several) smartphone modems, and they aren’t including manufacturing at the fab. There is *no* smartphone modem that you can design with 70 people. There is no smartphone modem chip you can take from clean-sheet to silicon with *700* people. The job is just too large, complex, and multi-domain. And when it comes to manufacture, the availability of the leading-edge chip tooling worldwide is in single digits and costs $340M each.

So, yes, by comparison to other engineering domains that I know well, designing and assembling a car is achievable by a very large number of skilled teams around the world. At very limited size and complexity. Not just a World Champion.

[MachDiamond]

Re: Are they kidding?

"Its not my special subject, certainly, but evidence within my physical field of view show it’s the business, product definition, customer acquisition, supply chain issues that are the bit that is going to kill you, not the engineering of “getting a car on the road”. "

When you hear people speaking a different language, it's way past time to quit digging.

The automotive industry is not easy. The stakes are enormous and there's considerable talent needed to move from four wheels, a power plant and a chassis into something that will sell and turn a profit. If you can find the 3 part special with James May, Kate Humble and some other person I can never remember when they followed a car from sheet metal to leaving the factory at the Mini plant, schedule the time to watch it. I had a manufacturing company for 17 years and the sort of operations that are required to be an auto maker is next level and beyond. I learned an enormous amount and it dispelled a load of misinformation I had installed.

[Justthefacts]

Re: Are they kiddin

“Speaking a different language”. Yes. “Not easy” very much depends on where you stand. I’ll suggest to you a truly complex product: pharmaceuticals.

The people who know what the problem is that you are trying to solve, are the clinicians working in hospitals - who don’t work for you, and you can’t influence. The biology of what causes the symptoms at the cell level is largely unknown for decades, has no “design”, and has hundreds of interconnecting feedbacks; it’s worked on by cell biologists, who speak a different language. Once that’s understood, a completely different set of biologist types, speaking yet another language, try to figure out a druggable molecular target. Then you need the pharma chemists, speaking a different language, who work out the drug structure that might bind. Then it’s into in vitro trials, then clinical trials (recruiting actual patients via those pesky doctors *who don’t actually work for you*). And then there’s scale-up performed by chem Eng types, who again speak a totally different language to the other chemists you had. Through this entire chain, from an initial drug to something on the market, the attrition ratio is 100:1 or more, often takes 20+ years, costs more than $1bn, and will have involved tens of thousands of people within hundreds of organisations by its completion. Through the whole “project” you are fighting the most complex set of interacting systems ever discovered, the human body, where you can’t change a thing to make the “component” design easier or more stable. Rather sadly, despite the dozens of brilliant people in that industry that I’ve known, I only know *one* who has worked on a drug that actually made it to humans in their entire career. Take a moment to appreciate just how hard that field is.

As opposed to, building cars where the entire project beginning to end has been designed rationally, not just to make your life more difficult. And where you know from day 1 what the overall architecture is, what subsystems there will be, and have a known-good working example from the previous generation. When you want to test something, just make a prototype and put in the lab. The project is staffed by people with all broadly similar background and expertise, mechanical engineering + power electronics. The amount of “language translation” is minimal. Next time you have to convene an ethics committee to decide the window mechanism, I’ll revise my opinion.

[DS999]

Re: Are they kidding?

So why don't you go into the automobile manufacturing business, if you think it "isn't complex" but neither Tesla nor any of the legacy automakers are competent? Show them how it is done!

Gotta be one of the worst cases of Dunning-Kruger I've ever seen.

[Justthefacts]

Re: Are they kidding?

No, re-read what I actually said. Designing and making ICE’s is super-complex. Designing and making many of the car components (which the automakers don’t do!) is complex. Being in the business of making cars, is *very* complex. The logistics and supply chain issues are murder, as in “almost every company that does this, it eventually kills them”. But that’s a business problem, not a metal-bashing problem. Deciding what car to build, which customers want to buy, that’s very hard. Cost engineering, that’s difficult. Actually assembling cars is not complex. It’s what most of their workforce are employed to do…..but it isn’t where actual value is.

The one “moat” that the legacy guys have always had, is that nobody else could make ICEs. Hundreds of companies *want* to make cars, but only a handful actually can. The rest have to buy their engines from the big guys.

If you step back from your outrage, you’ll realise that I’m correct. From scratch, Tesla didn’t have any car-making experience. They didn’t have any chassis design IP, and they didn’t know the manufacturing process. And it didn’t worry them, because that wasn’t the big hill to climb. Most of their effort went on “the new stuff”. An actual Tesla car, considered as a drivers car, is not good. People complain about the panel gaps, but that’s hardly the thing. Everyone has had a tear down of one by now, and the broad conclusion is…..the suspension both wallows and crashes painfully, which is quite a talent if you think about it. The chassis design (before the Gigapress) is right out of the fifties. The components are cheap and unreliable, and no thought at all has been put into Design for Repair so it’s almost unrepairable. None of this matters to its customers, because they are buying something else, not a car.

[DS999]

Re: Are they kidding?

You're still claiming all that stuff is "easy", but Tesla failed at it. You claim all the "legacy carmakers" are bad at it too. So either it isn't as easy as you claim, or you are wrong about those legacy automakers. Maybe they do know a thing or two about suspensions, unibodys and so forth after decades of experience. Because those parts of a car stay the same whether it has a gasoline engine or a hunk of batteries.

[MachDiamond]

Re: Are they kidding?

"Actually assembling cars is not complex. It’s what most of their workforce are employed to do…..but it isn’t where actual value is."

Once the car is at the production stage, it's easiER, but getting there isn't and every maker is looking for those little improvements at every stage of the process. The idea is to make the car assembly as simple as possible so the level of skill on the line is as low as it's reasonable to get.

Tesla did start out with some car making experience with Ian Wright, but he bailed as soon as Elon came into the company. Martin and Marc were not car guys and they knew it which is why they sourced a chassis from Lotus and much of the drivetrain was derived from AC Propulsion work. I see it as being cost effective for them to have seen where it was important to put their money. Yes, doing their own chassis would have been cheaper in volume, but it would have meant bringing in a shed load more talent, money and finding the time to do all of that work before they could bring out a product. Outsourcing was a good way to jump start the company.

Many of the land speed record holders don't have much 0-100kmh work as they'll use a pusher car to get them up to speed. They only concentrate on the going really really fast parts.

[CowHorseFrog]

Re: Are they kidding?

Because some people dont care about wasting their life running a factory and would rather enjoy life.

[Someone Else]

Re: Are they kidding?

That should have been a huge red flag to investors.

"Investors" can have quite a bit of tunnel vision, especially after an appropriately large dose of Kool-Aid. Also, they (especially the industrial ones) are basically stupid.

[MachDiamond]

Re: Are they kidding?

"A 50% year-over-year growth in production?"

Early on, it's not as hard as when the numbers and market share increase there's no way that sort of growth can be maintained. Maybe if they figured out how to make transfer booths and cars were made mostly obsolete, but EV's are only a car with yet another power train option. You can (could) get a Ford Mustang with a V6, a 4.6l V8 or a 5l V8. The trim levels also increase but the main chassis components are the same. The big makers will also fit diesel or 4cyl engines in a model for different parts of the world where a gas guzzling V8 would cost more in petrol every month than the payments. The main point is making the non-power plant of the car isn't something that Tesla is good at and there's no way they can continue growing the same way has they have done. When it's economically more feasible to make EV's (Time to railroad) everybody is going to be on the band wagon. Tesla might be able to compete with any one of them, but not everybody at once.

[Pascal Monett]

"well under the annual target of 50 percent Musk set three years ago"

Well what do you expect from an insanely rich guy who can't manage anything properly ?

He spouts some nonsense and you trust him.

Your fault.

But now he can wail that he is, once again, being unjunstly punished. Boo hoo.

[Anonymous Coward]

But wait, what?

Doesn’t Herr Muskenfuhrer know more about manufacturing than anyone else alive?

[MachDiamond]

Re: But wait, what?

"Doesn’t Herr Muskenfuhrer know more about manufacturing than anyone else alive?"

So he says.

Gwynne was saying that SpaceX was going to be offering point to point rocket travel within a decade about 6 years ago. With only four years to go and no SpaceX rocket on the horizon that can carry 100 people, I don't see that happening either. No $7mn Falcon launches. No FSD. No Roadster 2.0. No Robotaxi. No production on the Semi. Neuralink fitted a chip in a human's head, but no word on how well that's worked out that's hit the main stream media. Somehow I don't expect that the test subject is communicating over wifi or playing Doom in their head.

[Anonymous Coward]

Why does a software company need company cars?

Let alone Teslas?

[Plest]

Re: Why does a software company need company cars?

Software doesn't sell itself and the PR and sales teams have to go out to clients? The techies have to go places? Not all installs are in cosy datacentres under the watchful eye of Nadela or Bezos, still a lot of on-prem and/or high security, out of the way places where stuff runs.

[CowHorseFrog]

Re: Why does a software company need company cars?

Ever heard of trains or maybe the more efficient Zoom ?

[Alumoi]

Re: Why does a software company need company cars?

Ever tried to diagnose a not-freaking-connected-to-the-internet equipment over Zoom?

[CowHorseFrog]

Re: Why does a software company need company cars?

If sales people had any technical knowledge they would be engineers who earn far more than a sales person who sprouts human manure from their mouths.

[werdsmith]

Re: Why does a software company need company cars?

Ever heard of trains or maybe the more efficient Zoom ?

Ever heard of the real world?

[CowHorseFrog]

Re: Why does a software company need company cars?

Guess what, there are far more people who shit in a hole and dont have a toilet ?

Are you going to copy them ?

[Ghostman]

Re: Why does a software company need company cars?

Ever heard of trains or maybe the more efficient Zoom ?

How many houses, or business, have a train station at the front door?

[CowHorseFrog]

Re: Why does a software company need company cars?

You are complaining about walking to the station but you dont complain about wasting hours in a car ?

If its too much effort to goto your local station again i ask just skip the entire travelling process car, train or anything else and zoom or write an email ?

[MachDiamond]

Re: Why does a software company need company cars?

"Ever heard of trains or maybe the more efficient Zoom ?"

Trains can be very efficient for some trips, but if you have a day of visiting customers, you won't be able to see very many given the timetable and usual delays. For the cost of taxis to get from the station to a customer location and back, it might be cheaper to drive. For field service, there is no zoom and time is of the essence. Depending on the system, down time can be monstrously expensive. If the technician needs to haul tools and spares or a whole new box, that's not very fun on a commuter train. My boot is pretty full since there's no telling what I might need and getting a job done in one visit looks much better to the customer that has their arms crossed, their lips pursed and a foot tapping that's hovering over you.

[Anonymous Coward]

Tesla warp erp

Naïve question.

What is the advantage to develop your in house own ERP system at that scale of Tesla vs kuch kuch wink wink ... an off the shelve solutions from SAP S/4HANA or Oracle Fusion ( or even Microsoft Dynamics 365, Infor and maybe Huawei MetaERP )

I understand they didn't had the money, discipline in the upstart period of Tesla .. but now ? How much does it give them an advantage to in speed, cost, agility to do this? ( And i'm not talking about PR-stunts or bookcooking )

The new EV-giant start-ups Geely and BYD are SAP ERP customers ..

[Brewster's Angle Grinder]

Re: Tesla warp erp

I'd go read the comments on latest update on the Birmingham Council story. And that's just one of many ERP fiascos that have graced these pages. And those are the ones we know about.

Anyway, building your own was advocated by some people as a solution.

[MachDiamond]

Re: Tesla warp erp

"Anyway, building your own was advocated by some people as a solution."

I had a good mentor that taught me about that sort of thing. His advice was if you can buy it off the shelf and it isn't a component of your product, buy, don't build. Concentrate resources on what you do to make money. It will often sound like a great deal to do things such as software in-house, but only if it goes exactly as planned. I built tangible products, not software.

[Killing Time]

Re: Tesla warp erp

If you have ever been an end user of SAP I think you would know. God awful interface, a real pain to use. Never heard any actual end user sing it's praises. I understand they generated the majority of their income from customisation and training.

Will never understand how it came to dominate the market.

[sebacoustic]

Re: Tesla warp erp

> Will never understand how it came to dominate the market.

probably to do with an army of sales people, driving around in cars, helps with that.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Tesla warp erp

I think it's because the competition are all just as horrible.

[Michael Strorm]

Re: Tesla warp erp

I've heard it said that SAP is great if you can afford a large team of dedicated engineers that are pretty much essential if you want to customise it to your specific needs.

Whereas if you can't, and have to use it in the form it comes out of the box, it's a complete nightmare for much the same reasons as you said.

Of course, with SAP coercing encouraging their users towards the cloud version, I suspect that it's going to become even more impractical for your own (i.e. third-party) employees to do such things, and only SAP's own consultants will have the level of control needed. Which, of course, would suit SAP down to the ground and is most likely intentional.

[Mark 65]

Re: Tesla warp erp

Will never understand how it came to dominate the market.

Client entertainment goes to the person signing off on the payment not the poor bastard using the system.

[pip25]

Re: Tesla warp erp

Well, from what I've heard, off the shelf ERPs tend to range from bad to worse. Given how terrible the one we use is (which is supposed to be the best of what was available), that doesn't sound all that much of a stretch.

[MachDiamond]

Re: Tesla warp erp

"Well, from what I've heard, off the shelf ERPs tend to range from bad to worse. Given how terrible the one we use is (which is supposed to be the best of what was available), that doesn't sound all that much of a stretch."

It can be if you try to shoe horn in what you've been doing into how the software wants to do it. To think you have a better way isn't a great battle call. Yes, you may have a better way, but then you have to write and support the entire package in-house, train everybody you hire how to use it and spend resources on that endeavor rather than designing new products or improving what you already sell. With something as well entrenched as SAP, chances are good that you'll find new hires that already know it and don't have to spend the time and money on them which really sucks if they don't work out.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Tesla warp erp

Doing ERPs is hard. SAP have been doing for a very long time and are pretty good at it. I've been working with SAP for 20 years now, mostly in manufacturing, and it mostly works fine and does a reliable job day in and day out.

There are lots of high profile cases where it goes wrong, but that's not the software's fault but the people who configured it or chose the wrong way of using it. I don't know as much about Oracle, but I've been on several Oracle to SAP migrations and usually the biggest problem is people trying to may SAP work like Oracle which is a bad idea and you don't want to do that.

My current project for the last 18 months has been an Oracle to SAP migration, where another home made system is in the mix. To say the home made system is a pile of poo is an understatement. It's flaky, got no concept of transactional integrity and an utter joke and everything we do is slowed down with code to deal with impossible inputs from it, or its inability to accept data as fast as SAP can send it. I'm loathed to admit it, but the problem they had before probably wasn't because of Oracle, but their home made system... Switching to SAP won't fix their mess, but because we've been warned by the Oracle system's failure, we're better prepared in SAP.

Yes the SAP interface is a bit old and ugly, but once you get used to it, it works really well, and what I've seen of other systems does scare me...!

I'd never claim it's perfect, but it's probably the best there is...

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Tesla warp erp

I'm shocked - shocked - that El Musk missed his chance for another cheap pun. Should have named it Wyatt, not Warp.

[Michael Strorm]

Re: Tesla warp erp

He should have had it named after himself- TwERP.

[Anonymous Coward]

Legacy Automakers and EVs

In a word: Nissan.

Just like a real car (minus the noise, smell, expensive maintenance, lousy acceleration).

Been around long enough for there to be a decent 2nd hand market, if you don't need much range (e.g. a daily commute).

[eionmac]

Re: Legacy Automakers and EVs

Milk floats work well as Electric vehicles.

Limited range, overnight charging,centralised base depot, spare vehicles held on stock. In 1950s and 1960s these just worked.

[Sandtitz]

Warp?

"Warp, as in Star Trek's warp drive. Given recent delivery projections, it might have to rename it chug-a-chug-chug."

Consider Musk's attention span, they should call it the Musk Impulse Drive.