Being late isn’t the end of the world unless all eyes are on you to deliver. When asked to furnish information related to a fatal accident involving one of its vehicles, Tesla missed that deadline and asked for a one-week extension, despite having a couple months to get this info together.
Read more "Tesla’s late to deliver the one thing it should probably deliver on time"Elon Musk
How Tesla caused home prices to soar in this Nevada town
Rapidly rising prices aren’t good for everyone though.
“The potential losers in this situation are folks who live locally and work locally, but aren’t making the higher wages and may not be able to afford the higher prices,” said Blomquist.
Read more "How Tesla caused home prices to soar in this Nevada town"A Tesla Model S Caught Fire During a Test Drive in France
A Tesla Model S caught fire during a test drive in France on Monday.
The vehicle supposedly made a loud noise and sent a warning on the dashboard that there was a problem with charging, Electrek reports. The Tesla TSLA -1.87% employee then told the driver to pull the car over and had all passengers exit the vehicle.
Read more "A Tesla Model S Caught Fire During a Test Drive in France"Tesla And SolarCity: The Sting, Part Deux
Summary
ESG investors are gluttons for punishment: false environmental claims on top of dubious accounting.
SolarCity was ahead on “selling the payments” because their value prop was highly dubious. Maybe Tesla will soon learn.
The new Tesla will be neither an energy company nor green.
Tesla Is Worse Than Solyndra
Yet despite all the public celebration, both Solyndra and Tesla stand as warnings of the dangers in deputizing bureaucrats to play bankers and venture capitalists. In both loans, the government walked away laughably undercompensated for the risk it accepted in the startup companies. In fact, the Tesla deal was arguably far more costly for America than the Solyndra fiasco.
Solyndra exposed the first way the taxpayer could lose out. The traditional advantage of making a loan (as opposed to buying stock in a company) is that lenders often get paid something even when the borrowing company fails, because they hold collateral. Solyndra’s bankruptcy revealed the ephemeral value of the government’s collateral. Taxpayers have yet to recover a penny from the company.
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SolarCity Has a Big Problem On Its Hands
The slippery slope of a debt-filled company
SolarCity’s value quickly evaporates and even goes negative if we just discount the company’s cash flows at an appropriate discount rate. And I would argue that the assumptions that go into the current NPV calculation are too aggressive, and the 8% discount rate is also too low.
It looks like SolarCity is desperate for cash, and the only way investors are going to give it to them is by raising the cost. That’s a slippery slope for any solar company.
This is a growing problem for SolarCity, and will become a problem for Tesla Motors if it acquires the solar installer. Debt is fuel for SolarCity’s business, and the cost of fuel is going up big time.
Read more "SolarCity Has a Big Problem On Its Hands"Why NASA thinks the Tesla Autopilot is a bad idea
NASA has been studying the pyschological effects of automation for decades, and thus may have something to teach Tesla, notes Scientific American.
“News flash: cars in 2017 equal airplanes in 1983,” Stephen Casner—a research psychologist at NASA’s Human Systems Integration Division—told the magazine.
For the public at large, the name “Autopilot” seems to imply a similarity to the automated systems that help fly planes, although the capabilities of the Tesla system are much more limited.
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