(electronic music)
- Hello and welcome everyone to Teslanomics Live.
I'm your host, Ben Sullins,
and this is the show where we break down
the biggest news related to Tesla
from the previous week.
We do it live,
because, well, things change very quickly
in the world of Tesla,
as you probably know.
For those of you joining me on YouTube,
thanks for stopping in.
I am gonna have a Q&A that is private,
just for folks on Crowdcast,
which happens on a separate platform.
It's free to join,
but in order to get the invite,
you need to be in the community.
And in order to do that,
you need to get on our list at teslanomics.co/join.
So, that's first up.
If you want to be part of the Q&A,
that's how you get in there.
Second up,
is the referral program is ending soon.
And so if you are looking to buy an S or an X,
make sure to get a referral code,
and get the free supercharging.
We assume, many of us,
that it will continue.
But you never know with these things.
It may change,
it may be limited.
They may get rid of it entirely.
I doubt that.
But in any event,
if you are looking for one,
you can check up mine at the link below.
So, today's show is all about the Model 3
and the progress.
So, without further ado,
let me jump right into the data.
So, first and foremost,
yesterday, the Model 3 tracker,
this is from Bloomberg,
they've been doing this for a little while.
Tom Randall and Dean Halford
have these methods of tracking this information.
They want to actually see,
look at the VINs,
and look at all these different things,
and kind of how they're progressing,
to see what the ramp is looking like for the Model 3.
And I like looking at data and numbers like this too,
as you probably know,
and so I've taken these numbers
and plugged them into my forecast model,
to try to figure out exactly if they will hit
that 2500 per week goal
by the end of Q1,
which, by the way, is in like five days.
So, needless to say,
one of the biggest things,
was that they just jumped,
you can see that Tom Randall had an update here.
He said, "This is the last week of production
"before Tesla reports its quarterly progress.
"Our weekly estimates don't respond quickly enough
"to capture last minute bursts in production."
So, literally, this number,
last night, yesterday, was 800.
So, they went from 800 to 975 in a day.
And that's because of how their model works.
I think it's a good model.
They have a couple of different variations here.
But I do not believe that they are going to hit the goal
of 2500 per week by the end of Q1;
literally in five days.
But I don't think that matters either.
So, what I did,
is I actually took these numbers,
and I plugged 'em into my model here.
Let's take a look at that for a second.
First, this is the function,
the log function,
if you're unfamiliar,
maybe in stats class in college or something
you guys remember how it all worked.
But the way that this actually comes together,
is you have, basically, the midpoint
and the maximum,
and you're trying to guess two different points.
Now, there's another way of doing it,
but in any event,
you have this kind of sigmoid or S curve.
And this is what Elon always talks about
with the delivery ramp of the Model 3
and how it all works.
So, what I did,
is I basically modeled that into Excel.
And I couldn't find the link of the guy
who originally built this,
but if and when I do, I'll post it.
But he basically did a version of that in Excel,
which instead of having a single midpoint,
we have two points,
kind of the starting and end points,
or, I'm sorry,
the beginning and then the midpoint,
and then the maximum.
So, you can see what I've done here
is I plugged in the date, today,
the number 975,
which is what they're currently at
based on that Bloomberg tracker.
Now, the 2500,
I'm putting out to 630
instead of this, you know,
the end of Q1.
And then I'm giving 'em a maximum of 10,000.
So, a lot of these things are speculative,
and that's why I like to look at these
a few different ways,
and actually come up with different models.
So, from there, what I did,
is I plugged it in to two different angles here:
one is a 5K maximum weekly production,
and a 10K maximum weekly production,
because we still don't actually know,
now, Elon has said that they can reach 10,000 per week
on the Model 3 line at Fremont.
But until that's proven,
I think it makes sense to have
a really healthy dose of skepticism,
because all the other numbers and everything
that they've came up with
have not actually panned out.
So, I modeled both of them.
The dark, kind of red, or pink,
is the 5000 one,
you can see that line kind of referencing there,
and then the other one is the 10,000 one.
So, all of these are using that midpoint
of June 30th at 2500,
and kind of where would they go from there.
So, this is what that ramp looks like.
And if you extrapolate that out,
you can see what the totals would be by year.
So, for 2018, we're looking at 85,000
if you're on the 5K maximum.
If you're on the other model,
the 10K model,
then we're looking at 170,000.
So, that's a big number for Tesla.
And then going in to the future,
you're looking at, you know, 250,000,
260,000,
and then on the 10K model,
all the way up,
north of 500,000.
So, there's still a lot of cars to be made,
very likely, by Tesla this year for the Model 3 alone.
I mean, we're talking double all their,
this is equivalent to all of the production
of S and X from last year,
in fact, more so.
So, they're gonna double production this year overall,
is what it looks like on their current trajectory.
So, I think this is good news.
I think that even though they're obviously delayed,
lots of people are getting their cars.
The more you look online,
the more you see,
truck loads of them going by,
and people posting videos from their Fremont factory.
There's all kinds of things,
that are all kind of good signs that this is really,
the ramp is going well,
or at least it's improving.
So, I'm gonna continue to monitor this,
as you guys know.
One other tidbit about this,
that there was...
The current consensus of the total vehicles in 2018
from a different Bloomberg source,
this is the Gadfly,
this is a chart kind of thing,
where you just get charts everyday.
I love this email list.
I watch it all the time.
And so they're currently at 143,000 for their guess
for 2018.
That fits right kind of neatly
between my low and high estimates.
So, we'll see.
I'm curious what you guys think.
Leave me a comment down below.
And if you have any other insights in here
that you want to share,
please hit me up on Twitter
or just in the comments down below,
and we'll take it from there.
So, that's kind of the first bit of news.
The next thing I want to talk about
is a bit sad.
This is the Uber Self-Driving Car
that killed a pedestrian in Tempe,
not far from where I'm from.
I used to live, actually,
about a half-mile from this location.
And this is pretty sad.
So, the just of it is,
one of the self-driving Ubers,
these are the test vehicles that they have out there,
there is a person behind the wheel.
There was a lady crossing the street on a bike,
and she was struck by the car,
and later died at the hospital.
Those are kind of the basic facts of it.
I'm upset about this.
This really kind of hit me hard,
because as someone that,
I guess this is like an industry I work in now,
you know, digging into these details,
and sharing that information,
it's sad because I think it could've been prevented,
mostly because I think going for
level five autonomy right now is early.
It's way early in my book.
I understand that we want to get there
and this is how progress is made,
but I don't think that we need to be pushing so hard
to get there just to make more money.
I just think it's kind of lame.
And, so, I'll show you the exterior video here.
So, you know, viewer's discretion advised,
if you're sensitive to that.
This is kind of graphic.
But you don't see the person actually die or anything,
so, don't worry about that.
And I'm gonna show you this one solely,
just to demonstrate how dark it was,
and how, basically, you couldn't see anything,
even a human probably would have,
this would've been the same result.
I mean, it's completely pitch-black.
Bad news.
It just didn't work.
And that really sucks.
Now, two things that made this worse, I think:
one was that they posted,
not only this video,
but the video of the driver,
who appeared to be on his phone at the time,
and they released his name.
So, the way the internet works,
this really pisses me off,
because this guy, yes,
he's at fault here to some extent,
I'm sure people will be digging into that in details,
and there'll be investigations,
and all those kinds of things.
But this guy doesn't need to be publicly shamed like this.
Like, he killed someone.
He's partly responsible for that
in some way or another.
And that is gonna be something that he's gonna live with
for the rest of his life.
And so he has enough pain and suffering
to deal with already,
that he doesn't need to be internet shamed out of it.
And, so, the fact that they released that video
and his name,
to me, is kind of below the belt.
It was unnecessary.
I think even this exterior video isn't necessary at all.
Just the details of the story,
things like this graphic,
all of that is really, really enough
to make this something newsworthy.
Like, I love the New York Times,
but that really got to me.
So I'm curious what you guys think about that.
Is it right?
Is it wrong to release these videos
and the guy's name?
Is it too early to be really trying to test these things,
especially at night?
Should there be tighter controls?
Or is the guy totally to blame here?
I'm curious what you guys think.
'Cause, yeah, this'll be an ongoing thing
that we, unfortunately, have to get more comfortable with.
So, curious what you guys think.
Let me know in the comments down below.
All right, next up,
we have something, again,
that's a little bit,
this is a little bit close to my heart,
to my business, I suppose.
And that was Elon decided to delete his own SpaceX
and Tesla's Facebook pages.
And this article on TechCrunch here
is the one that,
you know, they kind of put it as a political thing,
because there's this,
to me, it's ironic and funny,
but people want to delete Facebook,
assuming that that somehow gives them
their privacy back.
But he was being called out on Twitter
by some people.
"If you're the man, you'll do it."
And, so, he went and did it,
which is kind of mind-boggling to me.
You know, people here are commenting
about the amount of followers they had
and all that.
And, you know,
Elon had some additional comments on this.
He said, "It's not a political statement,
"and I didn't do this because someone dared me to do it.
"Just don't like Facebook.
"Gives me the willies.
"Sorry."
So, I guess that's an apology,
or maybe that's not an apology.
Depends how you want to take that.
Really, the reason this bothered me,
not that I give a crap whether Tesla or SpaceX
have Facebook pages,
but because this affects people at his company,
and this was seemingly done out of a rash
reaction to something,
to people calling him out on Twitter.
So, I guess, in general,
not a fan of billionaires' acting erratically
when they're called out on Twitter.
You know, there's many of those out there
that kind of do that.
So, to me, this was really strange and upsetting,
because it just seemed unnecessary,
and likely to hurt people at his own company,
for what reason, I have no clue.
I mean, maybe to create a news story
and distract from something else.
Yeah, it's really odd to me.
And then he followed up another response here,
that they've never advertised with Facebook.
They don't really advertise at all.
Remember, the Loveday campaign
was because they've never come up with an ad.
"None of my companies buy advertising or pay famous people
"to fake endorse."
By the way, I don't count as any of those people.
I know they've never paid me anything,
and I have no sponsorship from Tesla directly, of course.
As you see, they'll never do it,
as I don't think they should.
And then, "The product lives or dies with its own merits."
I think that's great.
I think that,
like, this statement is fine.
Deleting those pages,
because what happened immediately,
is the people that are responsible for that at the company,
recreated them,
and then literally dozens of other people were creating
fake versions of this,
to then fool other people,
and create a bigger problem.
So, in any event,
the delete Facebook thing,
these actions caused more confusion,
and probably more people to share information
with some bad actors,
that they maybe didn't intend to.
So, yeah, this, I think,
is my short for the week.
This was dumb.
I don't see the point in it.
And it was just upsetting.
So, yeah, anyways,
hopefully people at the company,
it wasn't as bad as maybe it seems from the outside.
But to me this was pretty shocking,
and really just erratic, weird behavior
that I hate to see from Elon,
because I think the mission of Tesla's so important,
that this stuff kind of is a distraction,
and annoying to me, anyways.
So, curious what you guys think.
Leave me a comment down below.
I don't know.
Did you delete Facebook?
Do you think that gives you privacy?
If so, why?
Do you care that he did this?
Or is this just another dumb little side note?
So, let me know.
I'm curious what you guys think about that.
All right, next up,
Model 3 reservations are now available in Canada.
My friend, Trevor Page,
I've got a little video clip of him
going through the configurator.
He explains it.
Let me pull up my notes
just to give you guys the short version of it.
It's for current owners only,
so current Tesla owners only.
It's only first production.
It's $45,600 CAD,
and then $63,100 CAD total,
which include the $1000 credit.
The question I have about this,
is why would they do it?
I think they would do it
to try to reduce the amount of cars
they're delivering this quarter,
so that way they can,
I mean, if they can push the tax credit,
hitting that 200,000th car delivered in North America,
or, I'm sorry, in the US,
to Q3,
that would be tremendous for all the folks
waiting on that base Model 3
and everything else.
I think that would be phenomenal.
But I don't really know
if this is gonna do it,
or if this is just a part of their growth strategy.
We really won't have more of a clue
until a little bit later on.
And my favorite place to check out info about that
is on insideevs.com.
They're not a sponsor.
We're not affiliated in any way.
I know those guys,
and we share data from time to time.
But that's usually where I look to
when I'm curious about this kind of thing.
So, make sure to check their site there.
And, also, I'll put a link to this video,
if you want to see Trevor walk through
the whole thing.
I think it's pretty cool if you've never seen it.
Also, if you're in Canada,
you know, this is all the Canadian dollars
and all those kind of things,
you can see kind of exactly how that works.
And, of course, subscribe to Trevor's channel,
'cause it's fantastic.
So, there you go.
All right, so that is all the news for today, everyone.
Thank you for joining me.
I'm gonna switch over to Crowdcast now
and do the Q&A.
And if you would like to join that,
again, remember to go to teslanomics.co/join.
And then next week you'll get an invite.
We do limit it,
so it doesn't get too out of hand.
It's already out of hand
with how many questions people ask.
And stay tuned for more of the highlights
from today's livestream,
as well as a Q&A later this week.
As well as, I have some really special videos.
I've been kind of laying low in March,
taking it a little bit easy.
April's gonna be a big month.
I'm planning a lot of big videos,
so stay tuned.
In fact, make sure to click that bell,
so you don't miss any videos
that may or may not be coming out this weekend.
All right, guys, so thanks for watching.
And I'm gonna switch over.