Tesla ramps up sales, sets date for new model
Source: AFP
Tesla said Wednesday its 2015 sales were up 51 percent as the electric carmaker reaffirmed plans for its new model that aims at a wider market.
The California company led by Internet entrepreneur Elon Musk said it sold 25,202 Model S vehicles in the year, up from 16,689 in 2014.
Tesla, which is investing heavily in new vehicles and battery technology to drive the market for electric cars, reported a fourth quarter loss of $320 million on revenue of $1.2 billion.
The company said its Model 3 -- with an estimated price of $35,000 or around half that of its best-selling car -- would be unveiled on March 31, with production and deliveries to start in late 2017.
Read more: http://news.yahoo.com/tesla-ramps-sales-sets-date-model-224829478.html
I'm getting quite interested in seeing their Model 3 design next month.
Tesla's walking a financial tightrope right now, but I think they'll make it.
a kennedy
(29,673 posts)byronius
(7,395 posts)I've sworn to never buy another internal combustion engine.
Soon, a Tesla will be mine. Mine!
I hope they make it too. If the $35,000 car lives up to expectations I'll seriously consider it when I go to get a new car, possibly in 2018 or 2019.
NNadir
(33,525 posts)It's an outgrowth of the lie Americans tell themselves, that electricity comes from a wall socket powered by "green" stuff that isn't, in fact, "green."
The popularity of this particular car company, particularly on the left, is an indication that Americans, right and left, are increasingly reluctant to open science books or papers.
It's particularly amusing on the left, since all of this company's products up till now have been for billionaires and millionaires.
Zorro
(15,740 posts)Polluting gas guzzlers that ultimately provide the financial underpinnings for corrupt regimes around the world?
Horse and buggy with the heaping mounds of manure in the roads?
Palanquins hoisted on the shoulders of servants?
Electric propulsion certainly is more environmentally friendly, and Tesla aims to make a product for the greater masses.
Sorry if that makes you bitter.
NNadir
(33,525 posts)Your sneering response simply is, I regret to say, delusional. I suspect you are not very well read. You seem to have no clue about the world, its history or its future.
Let me tell you something: The history of the world and the future of the world is not tied up in some ignorant dream of driving to Walmart or some mall while pretending you're "green" in an $80,000 government subsidized car that will last a few years before becoming more electronic landfill.
I've been reading environmental papers in the primary scientific literature for several decades now, with the result that I have come to despise the entire car CULTure. There is, in fact, if you bother to look, no such thing as a "green car."
I couldn't care less if it makes you angry. It turns out that billions of people have lead entirely useful lives without ever depending on a fucking car of any kind, never mind a future ton scale heap of electronic waste.
This may come as surprise to you, but there are two billion people on this planet who lack basic sanitary facilities. Bourgeois assholes with their heads up their asses cheering for a few thousand electric cars made with huge fairly toxic batteries with price tags equal to the per capita income of 30 Cambodians are decidedly not relevant to the issues of a group known as humanity.
So yes, the purchasers and mobs of Tesla cheering trash talking myopics is in fact precisely, whether you know it or not, "Palanquins hoisted on the shoulders of servants..."
Maybe your deepest psyche, should you in fact have a "deepest psyche," is unintentionally calling out to you.
If in fact, I am bitter about something...and it is entirely true that I am...what I am bitter about is the fact that most people in this country don't give a shit for anything beyond their very, very, very myopic consumerist day dreams. It does, in fact, disgust me.
Have a nice weekend.
Zorro
(15,740 posts)You must be a lot of fun to be around, lecturing others about the evils of modern technology and consumerism from your electronic keyboard.
So put on your hair shirt and go save the world while I drive my Tesla. Loser.
Lizzie Poppet
(10,164 posts)Didn't you get the memo?
NNadir
(33,525 posts)Last edited Sun Feb 21, 2016, 10:57 AM - Edit history (1)
It's not Luddite to spend your time following the scientific literature on the rapid degradation of the environment. It is in fact, whether intellectual lightweights appreciate it or not, an ethical enterprise.
Ignorance and denial kills people today, and it destroys the future.
The fucking airheads driving around in their stupid ton scale piece of shit future electronic waste heaps may regard themselves as "winners" but the fact is that they are making all future generations "losers" on a grand scale of survival.
I have ethically appalled by the mentality of these profligate heavers of stupidity, ignorance and indifference. Thank you for validating my general impression that the moral depth of many Tesla worshiping nonsense mongers have the moral depth of peanuts, not that I wish to insult peanuts with the comparison.
Have fun motorizing around in you stupid, expensive, future waste heap, while you mindlessly eat the future of humanity.
In general, consumers who consume for the purpose of consuming and display are primitives.
Enjoy the rest of the weekend.
Zorro
(15,740 posts)And you hate cars. And electricity. And modern technology. I get it.
Yet you continue to avoid answering the question about what alternatives you prefer.
A stable, intelligent person would offer some reasonable suggestions; a misanthropic, self-righteous scold with no realistic solutions would fulminate against modern technological advances -- from a computer -- because the world is not yet a utopian paradise.
I bow to your clear moral and ethical superiority, and your impressive display of cognitive dissonance. Now go weave a basket.
You have a nice weekend too. I'm heading to the mall.
snooper2
(30,151 posts)rockfordfile
(8,704 posts)You didn't answer the question.
I thought about buying a Tesla a few years ago and I'm glad to see them doing good. The Tesla weren't available at the time.I bought Chevy Volt great car. I own some classic cars that are older than me.
We all know right that republicans are doing all they can against electric cars. Correct?
The more we have electric cars the better.
whatthehey
(3,660 posts)Since I have one and am neither a billionaire nor millionaire.
And it's powered by solar.
NNadir
(33,525 posts)whatthehey
(3,660 posts)I'm hardly an outlier. This is a (not pro-EV) power utility study showing 32% of EV owners use solar power (kind of a duh thing as the intersection of eco-interest and financial impetus is huge for both).
https://blog.opower.com/2014/07/this-is-what-tesla-owners-are-doing-while-you-sleep/
And this is the owners' forum income survey. Straight from the horse's mouth (and it's worth noting that income self-reporting ternds to be optimistic rather than the opposite) There's a whole bunch of people buying these cars without the income to have much of a chance of saving a million minimum. I'm far from the bottom of the income list here either
http://www.teslamotorsclub.com/showthread.php/7238-Model-S-Buyers-What-s-Your-Income
So either hundreds of Tesla owners were lying with the remarkable foresight to demonstrate a random DU poster is not posting bullshit well into the future....or you are just flat out wrong here. The latter is a bit more likely don't you think?
NNadir
(33,525 posts)First of all, whether or not they have an inflated view of their environmental impact a few hundred Tesla owners are meaningless and extremely trivial given that the output of the dangerous fossil fuel waste carbon dioxide has routinely reached over 30 billion tons a year.
How many stupid Tesla cars have been sold exactly?
I would not be surprised to learn that the carbon dioxide output of self-congratulating bourgeois Tesla owners praising themselves and one another on the internet easily outweighs and carbon dioxide saved by the stupid cars.
The "straight from the horse's mouth" stuff you post here rather supports than invalidates my claim that the car is for billionaires and millionaires. Your link shows that the overwhelming majority of self reporting Tesla owners make more than $100,000/year, and the majority, 74.24%, make over $140,000 per year.
If these people are not millionaires, members of the 1%, it is only because they have spent profligately, I would suspect spending their money in ways that help them avoid reality and keep lying to themselves.
To say that 32% of EV owners use solar power, is not to say that their stupid cars are really "solar powered." The capacity utilization of solar panels on this planet is typically on the order of less than 20%, in winter in most climates, less than 5%. The liars in the solar industry, a toxic industry, sell their wares by quoting peak power rather than average continuous power. Thus a "5000 Watt" solar installation might only produce less than 1000W of average continuous power.
A gallon of gasoline contains 1.3 X 108 Joules of energy. This means to provide the energy equivalent of a gallon of gasoline a fairly large home solar installation on a stupid McMansion would need to operate for 130,000 seconds or 36 hours to produce the energy equivalent of a single gallon of energy. Moreover there are the thermodynamic penalties of several energy conversions, electricity to chemical energy, chemical energy back to electrical energy, and electrical energy to mechanical energy involved, all of which have rather large efficiency problems owing to the 2nd law of thermodynamics, a law that cannot be repealed by idiots in Congress, either on the left or the right.
There are probably a billion better ways that that subsidy dedicated to stupid Tesla car owners could have been spent. Decent nutrition for school children who lack it is one way, providing clean water to the citizens of Flint, MI another...
The fact is that in this country, regrettably, most of the electricity is produced by burning dangerous fossil fuels, mostly coal and gas, but also some petroleum products. When this is done, the thermodynamic 2nd law penalty is even worse for idiotic electric cars.
There are places on this planet where electric cars are actually worse than gasoline cars in the number of people that die from car related air pollution: Electric Vehicles in China: Emissions and Health Impacts (Environ. Sci. Technol., 2012, 46 (4), pp 20182024)
Fuck that idiot billionaire Elon Musk. He is doing anything useful in this on going climate disaster - 2015 was the worst year ever observed for increases in carbon dioxide. He's merely distracting attention from it by giving equally clueless people an undeserved reason to pat themselves on the back. He's a clueless as a person declaring themselves to be "environmentalists" because every year they drive to the mall at Christmas to buy a Sierra Club Calendar.
I can't stand it when bourgeois people who lie to themselves assume that everyone on the planet is as clueless as they are. It would be nice if one or two of them took the time to open a science book and try to understand the contents.
Have a great weekend.
truthisfreedom
(23,148 posts)Find out the truth before spewing nonsense.
Javaman
(62,530 posts)olddots
(10,237 posts)less humans and more cup cake wars .
still_one
(92,219 posts)the technology becomes more cost effective. Battery prices are slowly coming down, and so are the prices of these cars.
Things that are beneficial about alternative fuel and hybrid vehicles, along with solar, wind, and other enterprises is that it starts to make us less dependent on fossil fuels. Every little bit helps, and that is good for the environment.
Eventually, these things will become more and more mainstream, not only at the personal automobile arena, but extending to mass transportation, and other forms of energy use.
We have to start somewhere. That is how progress is made
mopinko
(70,121 posts)seriously ready to buy a car and really wanted to get a look at one.
was hoping to check out their solar stuff, too. but no. not there. sigh.