Original title: My dream: How does Musk make it come true?
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When Tesla finally achieved the "small goal" of producing 5,000 Model 3s per week, the outside world questioned whether this "explosive growth" could be sustained;
When Tesla signed an investment agreement to build a factory in Shanghai Lingang, it was controversial. "What should Tesla take to build a factory?" "Building a factory in China means localization, and the car must be cheap?"
When Tesla issued a "small goal" to achieve profitability in the third quarter, it was reported that some orders for Model 3 were cancelled. Musk responded: Where did the rumor come from?
Recently, Tesla has been busy clarifying the storm of "requesting suppliers to refund", and responded that "it is only to lower the price of unfinished projects to improve cash flow."
Tesla’s controversy has never stopped, and difficulties have been overcome one after another. With the attention of peers and fans all over the world, Tesla is developing with twists and turns. Musk said: "Being a business is like eating glass and staring at the abyss of death, if it looks attractive." This sentence is humorous, starting a business is not so easy, the dream is full, and the reality is always very skinny.
No matter how many arguments are sung against Tesla and how many voices are questioned, "Iron Man" Musk will always be confident. Throughout his life experience, from rocket to Mars, he has always been a crazy dreamer. When we are all in doubt, Musk has been telling us with actions: Dreams are to be realized!
Daimler saves Tesla.
In 2003, Tesla was founded in the United States. Five years later, Tesla released the first automobile product Roadster, which is a two-door sports car. It was not until 2012 that Tesla released its second car product-Model S, a four-door pure electric luxury coupe. The third car product is Model X, a luxury pure electric SUV, which was delivered in September 2015. Tesla’s affordable car Model 3 was first released in March 2016 or delivered in the first half of 2019.
Years of R&D and investment, and a lot of money burning, made Tesla face bankruptcy crisis many times in the development process, which can be described as a narrow escape.
In 2009, Tesla received a US$ 5 billion investment from Daimler. This is undoubtedly a breathing space for Tesla, which has difficulties in capital turnover. Why should Daimler contribute to Tesla as a venture capital company? When asked about the reason, Herbert Kohler of Daimler said: "Tesla has created a new era, and it has the power to let us participate in the electric vehicle industry." Roadster not only runs faster than, but also accelerates the development of electric vehicle industry.
The production of Roadster is not mass-produced by big machines, but "hand-made". Roadster’s control panel was sent to the British factory by the French manufacturer, and then sent to the United States after the control panel was installed on the car body. Roadster’s transmission is produced by Borgwarner, and its braking system and inner tube are produced by Siemens of Germany. In a word, Tesla concentrates the parts and semi-finished products produced by all countries in the world in California, where the power devices such as batteries and electric motors are assembled by hand, and finally the whole car is produced.
Tesla also received support from the US government. In June 2009, the energy department of the United States officially decided to provide Tesla with a low-interest loan of $465 million. Originally, since the Bush administration, in order to promote the development of electric vehicles and hybrid fuel vehicles, the US government has provided low-interest loans to such companies in China.
After Obama took office, such projects increased further, and the ATVM (Advanced Automobile Manufacturing Technology) project of the US Department of Energy invested $8 billion in automobile manufacturing. When it was first implemented in June 2009, the company accepted financing of 5.9 billion US dollars, and the car accepted 1.4 billion US dollars. Tesla was also listed in the list of support.
After that, the automobile company and Matsushita Electric, which have a high market share in the lithium battery industry, contributed 50 million dollars and 30 million dollars to Tesla respectively, and Tesla finally passed the darkest year.
What gives them greater support is the financial assistance of the US government on ATVM. They gave Tesla not only a huge sum of money, but also a strong long-term support, and the market’s expectations for Tesla unexpectedly rose.
On May 21st, 2010, accompanied by Arnold Schwarzenegger, Governor of California, Musk and Akio Toyoda announced their business cooperation on electric vehicles. This moment has turned a new page for both companies. Tesla received a grant of $500,000 from Toyota.
Since Tesla released the affordable and popular Model 3 in 2016, the optimism about Tesla’s transformation into a mass-market electric vehicle manufacturer has boosted the company’s market value, and surpassed Ford and General Motors for the first time last year, becoming the second car manufacturer in the world. Since the beginning of this year, due to the bottleneck of Model 3′ s capacity climbing, Tesla’s share price has fluctuated like a roller coaster, but it still rose by 10% compared with the end of last year, and the company’s total market value reached 58.2 billion US dollars.
Tesla’s "Small Target"
Tesla has a great dream to promote the transformation of the world to sustainable energy. By popularizing solar power generation and electric vehicles, we can get rid of dependence on petroleum energy, effectively cope with climate change and realize the sustainable development of energy.
Tesla’s dream is very big. In order to realize the big dream, many small goals have been set, some of which have been achieved and some are on the way to realization. Make a list for your reference.
1. Produce 5,000 Model 3 vehicles per week (the small goal has been achieved), and make a profit in Q3 (on the way to realization).
2.Model Y is tentatively scheduled to be released in March or Q2 next year, and the mass production time of Model Y (Semi Truck semi-trailer and new Roadster) will be two years later.
3. Continue to build new super charging stations around the world. At present, the number of charging piles in the world has reached 9,969. Most of the design work of the third generation super-filled pile with output power of 200 kW-250 kW has been completed and will be launched at the end of this year. The third-generation charging station will be highly integrated with solar panels and no longer need to be connected to the power grid. Musk said that this will "promote major changes in the charging infrastructure" and greatly accelerate the expansion of the charging network.
4. In the future, Tesla will launch the Space X optional package for it, and the performance parameters currently announced are the specifications of Roadster Basic Edition. Through the new Roadster, it is proved to the public that electric vehicles can surpass internal combustion engine sports cars in all aspects and completely smash the powerful aura established by internal combustion engine sports cars in the hearts of the general public.
Next year’s battery production capacity will increase substantially, exceeding the sum of other battery factories in the world. Tesla battery has both the highest energy density and the lowest cost. At present, some breakthroughs have been made in battery density and cost. If there is no significant fluctuation in material cost, the cost of Tesla batteries will be less than $100 /kWh by the end of this year. At the same time, the cost of battery Pack will be reduced to $100 /kWh in the next two years.
With the current technical reserve, Tesla has mastered the technical scheme of improving the battery performance by 30%-40% again, and it is expected that it can be improved by 30% in the next 2-3 years, and the energy density will be doubled by improving the lithium anode in the next 6-8 years.
6. Build a factory in China. (An investment agreement has been signed)
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Tesla is still carrying out the layout of the whole industrial chain, subverting the traditional automobile marketing model and profit model, and building a complete and closed ecology, including R&D, battery factory, direct store, super charging station, Network, etc. After the sale, it is the beginning of service, providing car owners with networking/cloud services, software upgrades, super charging station, Powerwall, big data, etc., and it is expected to realize the value of the whole life cycle in the future.
Whether Tesla’s dreams can be realized one by one will take time to verify.
Tesla doesn’t advertise.
Building a car is an industry with a long industrial chain and high technology and capital intensity. Tesla has been listed for 8 years, but it has not yet achieved annual profit. The debt crisis and production capacity cannot keep up, which has always been a problem facing Tesla. This will also be a problem that the new domestic car-making forces will face.
Compared with the new domestic car-making forces, Tesla has more than ten years of technical accumulation and exploration experience, which has not only been widely recognized by the market, but also made outstanding achievements in technology research and development. Therefore, the new domestic car-making forces often use Tesla as a benchmark to compare products and learn from their development ideas.
Tesla redefines automobile products, not only electric vehicles, but also intelligent, internet-based and technological products. Early domestic electric vehicle products, for the purpose of getting subsidies to reduce the terminal price, were only electrified in power, mostly electrified on traditional platforms, with a low level of intelligence, and mostly adopted some scientific and technological configurations. Tesla’s electrification is only the foundation. It continuously enhances the customer experience through Internet technology configuration and automated driving, and at the same time drives the application of intelligence and IOT in the automotive field, so it is full of science and technology.
Compared with the power loss of traditional fuel vehicles, electric vehicles are born with the advantage of large torque. The characteristics of speed-up and lightness are vividly displayed in Tesla. Tesla’s sense of speed is also a big advantage.
In addition, Tesla also has a certain sense of value. The price of Tesla is much higher than that of ordinary electric vehicles, and consumers with certain spending power can afford it. And Tesla as a scooter must have a fixed charging pile, so the owner who buys Tesla must have a fixed parking space. These are the necessary car maintenance costs for Tesla, and these costs are not affordable for ordinary consumers. So owning Tesla is also a status symbol.
Musk, the founder of Tesla, said: "Tesla, we don’t have any advertisements or celebrity endorsement fees. No, we don’t discount. If a celebrity comes to buy our car because they like it, it’s not that we give them a discount. Actually, I don’t like the concept of marketing. I think marketing is a very strange concept. I don’t like it. I think marketing seems to be about deceiving people to buy things. "
Tesla, which does not advertise, has attracted consumers all over the world. The sense of technology, speed and value has become the main driving force for consumers, and these are also places that other new car-making forces do not have or are difficult to surpass.
Someone joked that Tesla lost one car when he sold it. In fact, Tesla’s bicycle gross profit is still very high.
This misunderstanding may come from the wrong calculation method and the conclusion that the loss of each quarter is divided by the sales volume. Although there is nothing wrong with this calculation, it ignores some other investment factors, and does not take into account that Tesla has spent huge sums of money to build huge factories, expand sales stores and improve services and charging networks before Model 3 is on the road.
The rapid growth of the company’s losses is inevitable. No investors want to pay dividends when the company is still small. They want to maintain a tolerable loss and use all their funds to expand the scale.
So what is the profit of Tesla bicycles? Through Tesla’s quarterly report, you can find some data for reference. When the output of Model 3 is small, in other words, only Model S and Model X are calculated, the Non-GAPP gross profit of Tesla’s vehicle department is 25%, and the GAAP gross profit is 27.9%. When Model 3 started to load and it was well known that it was in trouble, Tesla’s gross profit dropped to 13.8% for non-GAAP and 18.3% for GAAP, and then rose to 18.8% for non-GAAP and 19.7% for GAAP.
Now, Tesla’s profits are mainly affected by two expenses, research and development and sales/management expenses. When the output comes up, the first cost will hardly increase. The second cost will increase with the increase of output to some extent, but it is not completely linear. The more impact on profits comes from the need to pay a large part of these expenses before the output comes up.
In short, in the next few years, these expenses will be covered by the gross profit of the automobile business, not to mention the photovoltaic and energy storage product lines that Tesla will start to increase in the second half of this year.
According to the latest financial report, Tesla’s global revenue growth in 2017 reached nearly 12 billion US dollars, with a growth rate of over 67%. Among them, the performance of China market is particularly outstanding, with a year-on-year increase of over 90% compared with 2016, making it the fastest growing market of Tesla in the world.
Some Tesla sales staff said in an interview that the awareness of new energy vehicles in China is constantly improving, and more and more car owners tend to choose models with strong sense of technology to show their attitude towards life. Tesla, with its high brand value and other advantages, is particularly strong in market acceptance and consumer support.
This is probably why Musk came to China as soon as he finished his "productivity hell". It turns out that China may be the place where Musk realized Tesla’s dream!
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