Whoopsy:

Nice improvement, net loss goes down from over $8000 per minute to just over $5000 per minute. Net loss for the quarter was 675.4 mil, with ~3.3 billion in cash, the cash pile will last just under 5 quarters. Inline with their burn rate of 3.4 billion a year last year. But that 3.3 billion number was inflated by the pre-sale of the new Roadster and their debt sale of 1.8 billion earlier. Take those out they will be left with just around a billion in cash.

Model 3 production are also up, slightly more than 500 cars a month now, totalling just over 1500 for the quarter (not sure what the analysts were smoking but they had predicted 4100 cars!?!?!?!), so at this rate, the back log of 400,000 orders will be cleared in 80 months, or 6 years and 8 months. Elon still have a ambitious target of making 2500 of these a week, 5 times the current rate of production, but that target was suppose to happen 6 months ago. So even if they make it, which they cannot, they would still be almost 9 moths behind schedule. 

And taking about behind schedule, Elon proclaimed Tesla would make 500,000 cars a year by the end of 2018, that's a bridge too far. Barring any surprises, they should ended up making perhaps 150,000 cars for 2018. 

 

We can revise the numbers another 3 months from now. Hopefully the cash burn will be under control by then.


In general agree with your analysis. But there are some incorrect points.

In the Q1 2017 report where the Model 3 plans were revealed more in detail they estimated a production pace of 5000/week by end of 2017. This target has now been moved to 5000/week by end of Q2 2018. So with this new plan a 6 month delay, not 9 months.

Other point is that the production volume for 2018 has NEVER been anything close to produce 500k vehicles during 2018, not even in the initial plan. This is a general misconceptions in media. What they said in Q1 2017 was that they "at some point during 2018" would reach a production capacity of 10.000 vehicles/week (which interpolate to 500k/year) and hence 2019 would be the year of 500k produced vehicles. So there have never ever been anything mentioned about 500k model 3 in 2018.

So all in all, the delay is about 6 months. The production line that is verified in Germany and now will be moved and installed in US by end of Q1 will for sure be an important milestone for production ramp. Only time will tell what will happen, but the outlook is really rather good.

Some really interesting news about Autopilot also. Think we will see some huge improvements in maximum 6 months and the Neural Nets that gather information continuously from all 150k vehicles on the road will soon show it's value. I know that the negatives think that Tesla is behind in AP, but I think they will be in for a surprise. If they get the Enhanced AP and FSD to deliver value customers would want to purchase the upgrade. That will be some 100% margin incomes because customers will pay for a software upgrade since the cars already have the hardware. Cars will for sure not be fully self driving, but the features added will trigger many to upgrade (if the features are proven to work of course).