Friday, May 16, 2014

"Elon Musk on the Flawed Premise of Tesla and the False Promise of Fuel Cells" (TSLA)

The stock has been looking up at the $193 level since it crashed on May 8th and the floor became the ceiling.
It closed yesterday at $188.59 and is down another $1.49 in early pre-market trade, $187.10 last.
From :
Tesla’s Chief Executive Elon Musk didn’t break news during an appearance at the World Energy Innovation Forum on Wednesday, but the outspoken serial entrepreneur delivered a few jabs to rival companies, technologies and business models.
The luxury electric vehicle maker hosted the two-day summit, a gathering of investors, entrepreneurs and policymakers in clean energy, at its assembly plant in Fremont, Calif.
Musk sat down for a discussion with Ira Ehrenpreis, chairman of the forum and general partner with Technology Ventures, an early investor in the company. The interview kicked off with a look back at Musk’s original business venture – he sold a video game at the age of 12 — and soon moved into Tesla’s inauspicious early days.
Musk was characteristically blunt throughout the interview, even when he was his own target.
On Tesla’s early missteps:
In the case of the (Tesla) Roadster … we used a highly modified version of the Lotus Elise chassis.
… We ended up changing everything on the car, something like 7 percent of the parts were in common. Why did we do that?
It’s like if you have a particular house in mind and instead of buying that house, you buy some other house and chop down everything except one wall in the basement.
… That was dumb.
Tesla was created on two false premises. One was that we could easily adapt the Lotus Elise chassis … and two that the [drivetrain] technology we licensed from AC Propulsion would work in a production environment. Those were both totally false.
We ended up having to redesign the whole car and the whole power train.
On a recent conversation with Google CEO Larry Page (which amounted to a humblebrag about Model S battery life):
Most people just charge their Model S’s at home, because it’s got 260 miles of range or thereabouts.
I was having a conversation about this yesterday with Larry Page. He was saying all the chargers at Google are filled with [Nissan] LEAFs and [Chevy] Volts.
I thought, ‘Geez, what are we doing wrong? Do we need to do more to sell Model S’s at Google?’
He said ‘No, there are lots of Model S’s at Google — but nobody bothers charging them at work.’
On the overhyping of fuel cell cars, a theme he has hit upon several times (but which hasn’t stopped others from trying.)
[The] current technology of lithium-ion [batteries, which power Tesla cars] is superior to what the theoretical best possible outcome is for fuel cells. And lithium-ion systems are getting a lot better.
Game over. Why are you doing fuel cells?...
...MORE