Even worse, I was driving around the other day and saw entire parking lots full of inventory at this weird thing called a dealership, maybe GM and Ford are going under since they have all this inventory sitting there?

Most cars at dealerships don't have "dead" written on the windshield. I'm not sure what that means, but it doesn't sound that great.

shrug, someone made a poor choice when assigned the task of triaging the product returns. Should've used a database or some other sort of private index, this publicity looks bad.

> Tsla was always storing cars at 761 but not this many

Production is up, ergo returns are up.

The count of units returned is useless without normalizing it against the units produced. Of course, even with that it's likely a bad score for Tesla. There have been many public reports of poor quality product leaving the factory because of Tesla's challenges scaling up production. These returns are just the inevitable outcome from those earlier reports.

> Production is up, ergo returns are up.

Production is down actually from Q4 2018.

http://ir.tesla.com/news-releases/news-release-details/tesla...

> Production in Q4 grew to 86,555 vehicles

http://ir.tesla.com/news-releases/news-release-details/tesla...

> In the first quarter, we produced approximately 77,100 total vehicles

Production is up year over year, no?

We don't know what timeframe the tweet author is talking about. Did he mean there weren't many Tesla's there last quarter or a long time ago?

> Production is up year over year, no?

I mean, that's expected for a growth company. What's unexpected for a "growth" company is a sudden halt in growth.

Why would production drop by roughly 10% and deliveries drop by 30% in one quarter? I think most people were expecting a drop of some kind due to the loss of the $7500 tax credit, but 30% drop is far larger of a drop than almost anyone ever expected.

Note that Tesla also dropped the price of all M3 by $2000. So Tesla also has lower-margins in Q1 2019 than Q4 2018. Lower-margins AND lower-volume is a pretty bad sign.

Unforeseen logistics issues when delivering to a multitude of countries.

It's not a bad sign, they have the best selling EV in the world and expect to be profitable from here on out.

If they they aren't profitable the next 3 quarters then I'd be worried.

> Unforeseen logistics issues when delivering to a multitude of countries.

Why did PRODUCTION drop? What happened to US demand? The M3 sold 61,000 Units Q4 2018 in the USA alone. Why would expanding to China + Europe lower both production and deliveries?

Why would Tesla only make 51,000 M3 cars when trying to satisfy China + US + Europe?

Note what Tesla said: > At the end of the first quarter, approximately 10,600 vehicles were in transit to customers globally.

Okay, so lets say all of those vehicles in transit were delivered in Q1. That means Tesla "would have" delivered 70,000 cars (total, S+X+3), which is still a 20% drop from the 90,000 (S+X+3) delivered in Q4.

>Production is up year over year, no?

Ok, sure. Now what happens to y-o-y growth when q-o-q growth is stagnant?

Stagnant is an understatement. It dropped 30%

US car sales have been down for the first three months of the year [1], not to mention that Ford has got out of the car-market almost all-together in the States and I suspect GM is going to do the same pretty soon, too. All things considered the next few years are going to be pretty challenging for everyone involved in the auto market, from suppliers to manufacturers to dealerships.

[1] https://www.autoblog.com/2019/04/02/auto-sales-decline-march...

Ford just announced a head-on competitor to Tesla, based on the Mustang:

https://www.theverge.com/platform/amp/2019/4/2/18292752/ford...

They’re clearly staying in the car market.

Instead, they realized that gas guzzling midrange sedans don’t sell anymore, and killed those off. That lets them focus on smaller and larger vehicles, which is where the demand is.

Ah yes, ships in 2020, a full 7 years behind Model S and with no available specs to compare.

Let's read all about the Model Y specs...

Hey, you're almost half way too understanding why dealerships are quite a good arrangement for auto manufacturers.

If dealerships were a good arrangement for manufacturers, dealerships wouldn't have to turn to legislation to ensure their own continued existence. I mean, how much do you think it bugs the shit out of the German auto manufacturers that they spend an unfathomable amount of time and energy making world class cars, only to have their customers have to deal with a car salesman in order to actually buy one.

In the UK, and I think the EU generally, anyone including the manufacturer can sell to the public.

When Daewoo entered the UK market they made a big deal about not having franchise dealerships or commissioned salespeople. After a few years, the Daewoo owned showrooms were replaced with traditional dealerships.

Companies outside of traditional franchises haven’t cropped up selling brand new cars. New car sales happen through dealerships. Online sales, through specialists like jamjar.com, never took off.

None of this says franchised dealerships are perfect nor that they’re the same between the UK and US. However, in a place without restrictions on who sells new cars there has been no significant change in the model.

Thanks for the data point. I guess the model that always comes to mind for me is Apple. At some point they realized that they needed to control as much of the retail portion of the customer relationship as possible in order to successfully sell highly differentiated, but expensive products (Macs). Even their high-profile retail partners (like Best Buy) have Apple designed areas in their showroom. If I were BMW, Mercedes, or Audi, who all sell highly differentiated and expensive products, I would want a similar relationship with my customers.

Also, FWIW, Daewoo is basically a non-entity in the US auto market. I'm not sure how they fared in the UK and EU, but if it's similar, that may be a confounding factor with that particular answer. And, generally, I think the dealership model arose originally because the auto industry is immensely capital intensive before you start talking about having inventory sitting on a lot in every minor city in the world. And the auto industry was more speculative, so the manufacturers were happy to let someone else front the capital for carrying finished inventory. But the auto industry is established and capital is plentiful these days.

I don't think GM or Ford are claiming they are selling the cars faster than they can make them...

Looks like that entire account is dedicated to attacking Tesla. Can we believe it?

You don't believe those cars are? I don't get it. What's to believe or not?

I don’t know if I should believe the analysis. I don’t know if the video being presented is representative or being selectively chosen to tell a story.

>I don’t know if I should believe the analysis.

What "analysis" is necessary? There are threads of people going around the country, taking photographs of parking and car lots filled to the brim with Teslas. How do you explain it? The cars are made-to-order, I'm assured.

Furthermore, I don't understand "can't believe an account that attacks Tesla". What do you believe is more likely:

1. A random person wakes up one day (maybe an Big Oil shill!) and says, 'I think I'm just gonna randomly hate on Tesla, make a bunch of stuff up, and risk my livelihood on the lies'.

2. An investor starts doing due diligence and finds a lot of holes in the Tesla story, then dedicates their online presence to spreading that message.

1 is possible, but I'll bet 2 is far more likely. So many people are going to get a rude awakening if this thing goes down. If I recall correctly, HN loved Theranos too; only after the fraud was revealed did people claim it was obvious.

Have you observed the internet at all? If the internet were a country, hating would be the national sport. Does that mean this particular guy must be a hater? No, of course not. But there are tons of them out there. A twitter account is pretty mild compared to, for example, the guy who makes a hobby out of filing safety complaints with the NHTSA about random Tesla crashes he sees online.

I see no possible comparison to Theranos. HN was skeptical from the start and called out the fraud early. Theranos never had a product. Tesla may have its faults, but there’s no question that they’ve built and sold hundreds of thousands of cars.

> Tesla may have its faults, but there’s no question that they’ve built and sold hundreds of thousands of cars.

Whoever said cars could not be created? That argument ignores the nuance of everything regarding manufacture quality and scale w/computer-vision driven robots, full self-driving, the autonomous taxi Tesla network, etc.

As opposed to the hundreds astroturfing and greenwahing them? In a war of ideas, give everyone ammo. The truth is never exclusive to one view.

That doesn’t answer my question at all.

Exceptional non-answer

Should it matter? You can analyze this disparate piece of evidence independently of the agenda. In fact, you might even say that by putting the cards on the table, at least this source is transparent about which stance of the topic it is taking, giving you opportunity to take care when evaluating single pieces of evidence.. this is possibly better than sources which purport to be fair and balanced and go to greater lengths to obfuscate ways they are tacitly pushing an agenda.

I don’t agree with the concept of forming a high-level conclusion about the general nature of a source of information, and then using that to argue that you should not separately carefully analyze disparate pieces of content from that source.

Most of us don’t have the time to perform our own analysis from scratch. So, yes, it matters a great deal.

If you have the time to make ad hoc Hacker News comments in the weeds about the credibility of a link from a comment from a niche post, then you obviously have enough time to evaluate disparate pieces of evidence instead of trying to discredit them by applying blanket heuristic judgements based on seeming one-sidedness from a glance.

Nobody is saying you need so much spare time to rigorously analyze every source. That would be a disingenuous false dilemma. Instead, just apply slightly more effort than your stated dismissive heuristic.

Who’s trying to discredit them? I just asked if their claims can be believed. I thought “can I trust this random Twitter account” would be a completely standard question, attacked on the basis of “duh, of course you can’t, why would you even ask?” rather than because how dare I impugn the reputation of poor whatshisface instead of spending a couple of hours combing through the evidence for myself.

If Tesla loses consumer confidence would be a shame. Interesting balance between maintaining existing product vs building new products. I am waiting until Tesla is more reliable before purchasing

"Please RT" is the number one sign someone has an agenda.

You linked a short seller twitter account.