Exploding The Myth Of Tesla Safety

Summary

  • Oh, those cherished Tesla myths: Supercharger superiority. Operating costs. Reliability.
  • Dare we challenge another? Yes, dare we do. Bubslug dives deep into the statistics to shatter the myth of Tesla safety.
  • No, his is not the final word. But the preliminary statistics on fatalities aren’t pretty, and Autopilot may make it even worse.
  • Meanwhile, Tesla is making deals like never before. Hurry on down to the Sales Center lot before September ends.
  • The Q3 deliveries will impress. The Q3 financial statements? Well, you can’t have everything.

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Tesla’s Next Broken Promise

The fantasy of a “lights out” plant—an automated plant so lacking in human presence that it could operate in the dark—has long been discussed in theoretical terms. In the 1980s Roger Smith, the late GM chief executive, pushed his manufacturing executives to begin to “robotize” assembly plants. Just as influential has been Toyota’s manufacturing system, which relies on low-tech principles such as just-in-time supply chain, standardized work procedures, and employee involvement in continuous improvement and efficiency to dramatically drive down manufacturing costs. GM developed its own version, the Global Manufacturing System, and for a time operated a collaboration on manufacturing methods with Toyota in the same building in Fremont that Tesla operates today.

State-of-the-art car factories rely on assembly-line workers as well as programmable machines. With a typical assembly line producing around 60 vehicles an hour or roughly 1,000 a day on two eight-hour work shifts, a line might, at the outside, be able to manufacture more than 250,000 vehicles a year. (Several North American automotive assembly plants operate on three shifts of six-and-a-half hours. The biggest produce more than 500,000 vehicles a year.) The two-shift total assumes production goes flawlessly. Factor in supplier parts shortages, machinery breakdowns, quality problems, labor issues and changes to vehicle design, and annual production drops to the more typical 100,000 to 150,000 vehicles per assembly line per year.

Those numbers show how hard a task Musk set for his company when he promised to ramp up production to 500,000 cars two years from now. The CEO may yet come up with some new surprise to keep his company in the game, but this deadline is destined to be missed.

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Tesla Shareholders File Lawsuit Over SolarCity Buyout

Tesla Motor Inc.’s proposed acquisition of American energy services provider SolarCity Corp. - worth $2.6 billion - has run into troubled waters and could be deferred.

On Monday, Sept. 19, the company revealed that SolarCity’s acquisition could potentially be delayed as Tesla shareholders had filed lawsuits. The four lawsuits against the automaker has been filed by four different shareholders over the imminent buyout and alleges that Tesla’s board members breached fiduciary duty as revealed in a Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filing.

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JOHN MCCAIN: THE BEST SENATOR TAXPAYER-SUBSIDIZED ELON MUSK CAN BUY

The Senior Senator from Arizona, Republican John McCain, is being investigated by an inspector general for the Department of Defense for inappropriate activities in promoting Elon Musk’s SpaceX over United Launch Alliance (ULA). Having had a long term political relationship with Musk, McCain supported the Congressional ban on the purchase or use of Russian-made RD-180 rocket engines, used by ULA. The Arizona senator used the Russian origin of the rockets as the basis for opposing them, while never raising issue with the other 99.6 percent of about $27 billion in goods imported from Russia.

SpaceX and ULA are the only two companies qualified to bid on the space launch contracts with the U.S. government, and quite conveniently, McCain pushed to ban the Russian-made RD-180 rockets to take ULA out of the bidding process, and by default have the contracts granted to SpaceX. McCain declared it a “big win for competition” when SpaceX won the contracts, but yet in reality he had helped them become the new sole providers of the launch services instead of ULA. Elon Musk’s investments in donating to Sen. McCain and the McCain Institute paid off handsomely in the form of billions in space launch contracts.

McCain has consistently supported SpaceX and Musk’s other companies, while SpaceX has supported legislation proposed by McCain. McCain’s S. 1376 bill titled National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2016, received the support of SpaceX, who paid the lobbying firm Squire, Patton and Boggs $90,000 to seek passage of the bill. Congress later passed a different version of legislation, S. 1356, that carried the same title. According to lobbying reports from theCenter For Responsive Politics, In 2015, SpaceX sent $350,000 on lobbying, in part, for legislation that Sen. McCain voted for, includingH.R. 1735, H.R. 2685, H.R. 719, S. 1356, And H.R. 2262. Sen. McCain has received a $5000 donation from SpaceX, while the McCain Institute has received donations from SpaceX and far-left political activist George Soros.

Musk is a “top business leader” according to Sen. McCain, and the senator invited him to speak at the Sedona Forum hosted by the McCain Institute. McCain tweeted about how it was “good to visit with” Musk at his Senate office in Washington D.C. McCain has consistently supported and praised Musk and the three companies he has built with more than $4.9 billion in government subsidies and billions more in contracts awarded from state governments as well the federal government.

While the companies have received about $4.9 billion in government funding, Musk’s enterprises have recently lost more than $3.5 billionin value. This loss in stock value was calculated at about half the value of Musk’s ownership in three companies. Despite the growing financial challenges the companies face, Sen. McCain has remained firmly in support of Musk and his business ventures.

McCain prefers SpaceX to win the government’s launch contracts, but their recent failure record compares quite unfavorably to the stellar launch record of ULA. Along with the spectacular failure of it’s unmanned CRS-7 rocket, which exploded last year, SpaceX also suffered its third disaster earlier this year when it failed to land its Falcon 9 rocket on a drone ship in the sea.

ULA offers the better products, but Sen. McCain is so blindly loyal to Elon Musk that he is attempting to exert his influence for force government launch contracts to be awarded to SpaceX instead. Clearly McCain is bought and paid for by Musk, and is putting his crony relationship with the founder of SpaceX above the public’s interest in having the space launch contracts awarded to the company most suited to winning the contracts. McCain is the best senator Elon Musk can buy.

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Bankruptcy Is A Serious Risk For Tesla Motors Inc Stock

Tesla needs tons of cash to run its operations and make new investments. Its near-term projected liquidity is under severe stress. And an addition of another cash strapped company will only compound the problem. While in the long term, a better than expected demand of Model 3 may ease the cash crunch, the near-term prognosis is not good. And  to get to the long-term survival in the short-term is important. The Altman Z-score shows Tesla runs a high risk of bankruptcy and the risk increases considerably. The most important task for Tesla now should be to shore up liquidity. After all, cash is always the king. Tesla stock is currently at best a speculative bet.

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SolarCity, a Vocal Critic of the Utility Industry, Joins It

As SolarCity, the rooftop solar system provider, has rapidly expanded its reach over the last few years, its executives have pushed hard against the utility industry, criticizing it as a hidebound monopoly standing in the way of change.

Now, SolarCity officials are trying a different tactic: moving into that business themselves.

On Monday, company executives announced a program aimed at cities, remote communities, campuses and military bases under which they will design and operate small, independent power networks called microgrids. While the move will not turn the company into, say, Con Edison overnight, it represents a step in that direction.

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The embarrassing truth about SpaceX

The impulse seems to be mainly driven by raw cultural aesthetics: a worship of individuals like Musk and Bezos as nimble innovators disrupting sclerotic government. All of which ignores both the dark side of unbound private sector visionaries and the practical reality that the government could attract exciting and innovative talent if, again, it was just willing to pay for it.

The biggest reason human beings have to go into space remains frivolous and impractical in the best and most glorious way: Because it’s there.

Shoving that reasoning into a private sector framework is always going to be an odd fit.

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