Tesla Motors is in great shape. I've been following the company for a while and recently drove the Model S. Amazing car in almost every way. What struck me was that it's not an incremental improvement but really a radical (might I say disruptive) improvement in terms of ride quality (super quiet), handling (low center of gravity with skateboard powertrain), electronics (17" touchscreen), cargo space (heard of the frunk?), reliability (electric cars have far less moving parts), and store experience (Tesla retail stores are a way better customer experience than a typical car dealership). It's difficult to drive a Model S and NOT say that you've driven the future.
The Model S is so good that all they need to do is make it into a SUV (Model X) and they'll have the coolest high-end SUV (coming 2014).
Then, they just need to make the Model S smaller (GenIII Bluestar) and then they'll have the best small luxury sport sedan on the market (ie., BMW 3 series, Lexus IS, Audi A4 market). Elon Musk has said they're going after the BMW 3 Series market with the GenIII car, and he's determined to make a best car in that market. Just like the Model S is better than a BMW 5 Series in most regards, the GenIII will be better than the BMW 3 Series in most regards. I know it might be difficult for many people to accept that (especially since the BMW 3 Series is legendary) but Tesla's got all the right pieces and has proven they can do it with the Model S. Again, they just need to shrink the Model S and make it more affordable.
But GenIII is slated for 2015 at the earliest and it takes a while to dominate a car segment even after you have a stellar car. I expect Tesla to become increasingly competitive (in terms of # sales) to the BMW 3 series by 2020 and perhaps dominant by 2025 (if not earlier).
Elon Musk has repeatedly said that Tesla Motors is not a typical car company but rather a technology company that will innovate at a blistering pace. As long as they continue to do that, they'll be fine.
Great comment, thank you. I'd just like to add that the "frunk" isn't new -- I've been stashing my gym bag in my Porsche 911's frunk for years (it's a rear-engined car).
Edit: While I absolutely live the Model S, I can assure you that exceeding stalwarts of the 5-series category, like the BMW M5, will not be as easy to disrupt as the market the Model S aims for.
Does Porsche call it a "frunk" too? I can't stand that word, it's cute, but awful. Sounds like a word I might use to describe a particularly pungent cheese.
I think it's a bit of a shame that they're playing the game on the same terms as the other car companies. You're absolutely right that each model seems to target a particular "class" of cars.
I think a little more adventurous designs would have been great. For instance I think it would have been perfect if they made a Tesla land-yacht in the style of 70's cars. Big, heavy (lots of room for extra batteries), nice cushy suspension, lots of power, a super comfortable ride.
"classes" of cars exist for the same reason "classes" of computing exists, e.g. servers, desktops, laptops, tablets, cell phones, etc. You can produce a more compelling product if you pick a very clear target, and you cover more of the market if you pick a variety of very different targets. This is super important for car companies, who can only afford to develop a few cars at a time.
As for boat-cars, I'm sure there's a few folks out there who would love one, but Tesla is seriously underwater. They need to penetrate the largest/most profitable markets and capitalize. Then they can worry about tiny niche offerings.
I was always under the impression that Europeans love land yachts. (like those kids in Sweden that collect old US cars) It was just the crazy fuel prices that stopped them from buying them.
good point. There are some crazy narrow streets. The bus drivers are insane. Like half of a foot of clearance between the wheels and the curb on each side.
This is assuming BMW et all stop any innovation. But they won't. They will offer an electric vehicle the moment it becomes feasible (and I am sorry but 200 miles range is still an exciting and expensive toy).
BMW will surely innovate in some regards, no question. But the real issue is if they can keep up with Tesla and disrupt their own 3 Series market. BMW is likely not to release or innovate on a new product that will cannibalize their main source of income (3 series sales). They're probably incrementally try to improve the 3 Series. And they'll release sub-par electric cars like the i3 and i8 (http://www.bmw-i-usa.com/en_us/bmw-i3/) that won't hurt 3 Series sales.
What BMW doesn't see is that Tesla is gunning for the 3 Series market with the GenIII car. Tesla is confident they can make a substantially better car than the 3 series (or Lexus IS, Audi A4, etc) in most regards and make it priced competitively. I don't think BMW is taking Tesla seriously... they're more focused on existing competitors.
If Tesla succeeds in making a substantially better car than the 3 Series that's priced competitively, then everybody in that market (BMW 3 Series, Mercedes C, Lexus IS, Audi4, etc.) will be in catch up mode. And that will the story of the decade in the car industry... how a scrappy Silicon Valley startup did the impossible to the auto industry.
The fact that most of the time market leaders resist cannibalizing the main source of their income is well known. The reasons are complex and connected to the nature of large human organizations. And it is also why most truly disruptive innovation is driven by smaller companies.
This cannibalization argument is the same reason that Henry Ford only sold black cars.
Car companies didn't (actually, if you go back long enough ago, they did, but they're over it now) have to transform their company and manufacturing processes in radical ways when they began offering both types of fuel, any more than had to when they began offering multiple cylinder displacement options (2.0L, 454cc, etc.) Diesel and gas engines both require fuel systems, radiators, alternators, air intakes, exhaust pipes with mufflers, transmissions, etc. It is actually possible (although not always easy) to just replace one type of engine with the other in a user-owned car, so much more in the factory.
It is quite another thing to rip out everything involved in the motive function, except the axles, wheels, and tires. If BMW wait too long to start the process, they won't get the results to a BMW quality level for many years. They'll have to decide whether they want to saddle the brand image with crappy electrical cars or if they'd prefer to sell their crappy electrical cars with a low-prestige marque.
BMW has been making ActivE (all-electric 1 series) for a while now. They are not released to general public because, well, the technology is not good enough yet - and BMW is not under pressure of bankruptcy.
This is like saying that Sony can make an mp3 player, so the iPod isn't competitive in that market. Or that a 5GB iPod won't hold enough music, so it's just an expensive toy. Within 5-10 years the battery problem will improve, especially if there is demand. This is technology, not automotive development. We're not in Detroit anymore.
They're in a different class. Tesla is set up to do it right from the start at a much faster pace.
Tesla will be the Apple of anything that moves, trust me. It was clear to me when I saw the Roadster design and the roadmap, but I digress...
I really like a lot of what I hear about Ford's doings recently. For example, they will be introducing a very euro-esque 1.0L 3-cyl turbo engine for the Fiesta to the USA market. Not only do I like that move, but the engine has a lot of really neat, innovative design points.
I would argue that the example you picked is more of a gimmick than true innovation. Tesla also eliminated the gas cap, along with the gas tank, and the gas engine...
California emissions regulations[1] gave them a reason to reengineer the fuel filler parts, and they built something that's inexpensive, genuinely nicer to use, and can be used by more people. I appreciate that they improved part of my $24k Mustang without making me buy a $57k electric car I wouldn't really reap the benefits from anyways (I don't commute, most of my driving is a 200 mile highway trip).
Tesla's main innovation isn't electric cars, it's electric car fashion.
Main function of a car is to move a group of people from point A to point B. Tesla is getting good at it, provided point A and point B are not too far apart, and pint B has an electric charger available. And that is a pretty critical limitation so far.
Jumping on your slightly irrelevant analogies, it is like iPod 5 with a batter that can only hold charge for 30 minutes, and can only charged at Apple store.
No. It would be an iPod 5 that would work on your commute to and from work, quite a few places in between for groceries and errands, then pick up dinner, then back home where you would naturally charge things.
You don't have to charge your Tesla at the Tesla dealership. And, seriously, if you make dozens of unpredictable stops in your day, I'll grant you, an electric car might not be for you. But, I don't think I've ever made impromptu out-of-city trips with my gas combustion car. That's more a planning thing.
Its a bit presumptuous to say that Tesla is so different. Sure, they are attractive at the moment because of unique niche they are filling. If BMW, Mercedes, Audi, Lexus, Acura, etc all sold an all-electric vehicle with similar range, Tesla's differentiation becomes much less unique, and normal competitive factors come into play (scale, marketing, etc).
This is a trivial statement. It's an obvious truism that if other manufacturers produced vehicles like Tesla's, then Tesla's vehicles would no longer be unique. What other companies COULD produce is irrelevant - Tesla is making something drastically different from them. You don't agree that engineering an extremely novel product makes a company "different"?
I don't know whether Tesla can maintain their technical advantage once the market becomes more interesting to the larger manufacturers. Whatever advantage they have today is irrelevant.
The capabilities of the current crop of vehicles is still outside the typical driving expectations of the broader market (limited range, slow charging). Once the technology improves to affordably and effectively eliminate these issues, all of the manufacturers are going become very motivated. If Tesla can own the solutions to these problems as a barrier to entry, then they will be in better shape. I don't know if one small company can hold a dominating technical advantage over motivated, well-funded companies in this kind of space for very long.
I think it's a fallacy to ignore the holistic quality they're producing.
The top post in this thread has a good idea of it—they're producing not only a drastically different drivetrain technology-wise, but also a drastically improved ride, driving experience, and controlling every aspect of the car purchasing, driving, and servicing experience. (And with superchargers, also the refueling experience to a degree).
This is strikingly reminiscent of Apple's model. This is why I made the comparison, and I think it's highly valid. I don't mean to compare their product or level of innovation or even the amount of differentiation. I mean to compare the companies and their models. And I not only believe it's a successful model, I believe it's been proven and will continue to be proven.
If you break it down and look at individual parts in isolation, sure, you can see ways they could be beat. But that's the problem with this way of thinking—Tesla is not breaking it down. They see the whole picture, and that will lead to their success. That's the key.
It's a bit presumptious to say that Apple is any different. Sure they are attractive at the moment because of the unique niche they are filling. If Sony, HP, Dell, Acer, Gateway, Lenovo, etc all sold a laptop with similar specs, Apple's differentiation becomes much less unique, and normal competitive factors come into play (scale, marketing, etc).
BMW, Mercedes, Audi, Lexus, Porsche, etc. These companies/brands are producing great products. You can compare Chrysler to Gateway and get away with it maybe. But there are a lot of innovative car companies out there who are out in front of what people want -- and are actually making money doing it.
It doesn't take a startup to build the next big thing. Take Apple, for instance..
Tesla carries the banner for upper-scale electric vehicles. If you substitute the electric motor with a petrol engine, are they still so distinctive? If the big luxury/sporty brands entered the electric car market in full-force (several models, full advertising campaign) with cars of similar performance to Tesla, Tesla would struggle mightily to stand out.
BTW, I am rooting for Tesla. I would love a Model S.
Especially when established luxury-sport brands have track records, brand recognition, loyalty, and high perceived value. The major players aren't dominating because the market is stagnant, they are dominating because they are good at making luxury cars.
That depends on where (if) the luxury competition needs to catch up. Tesla's differentiator is the electric powertrain. If they can stay ahead of the competition through technology (not large LCD's, etc), then they may have a chance.
Some people say that Tesla is the "Apple of transportation", and that Tesla can achieve success as Apple has with their design and user experience. I don't see it, however. If that was so, their differentiation would be more about industrial design and experience, and not the technology. But, as I said previously, if you put a traditional engine in a Tesla, you have a quirky luxury car manufacturer with little advantage over the more established (and experienced) competition, but with non-trivial competitive disadvantages.
It's fast enough for most needs. If you're traveling across country, a 30 minute break every 5 hours might be just what the doctor ordered. If you break apart your eating times just right, you can have it coincide with eating times.
If charge time were reduced to 30 minutes in the general case for electric cars, I'd be much, much more likely to consider them a viable alternative to my current car. We just need the infrastructure. Honestly, I believe that the car that's going to win the transition race is going to be the one that acquires the infrastructure the most quickly, be it electric fast-charging stations, hydrogen refineries/pumping stations, electrically-charged gel stations, or whatever thing we end up thinking up.
How about the car that can use the infrastructure that already exists?
All this talk about new transportation fuels imho always sidesteps the fact that gasoline will never run out.
Petroleum will, but producing gasoline out of other sources is something that we already know how to do, and have done in industrial scale in the past. Fischer-Tropsch is cost-effective from coal at some point below $150 oil price. If you want to be carbon neutral, you just have to use a carbon feedstock that fills from the atmosphere, and a carbon neutral heat source.
A hydrogen economy is a complete hoax. If you want to make your fuel synthetically, hydrogen has practically no advantages over synthetic gasoline.
From what I understand, alternative gasolines tend to come from plants that we would otherwise be eating. I believe a more sustainable system would be one that doesn't use something we're already using for an area as vital as our food. Hydrogen, as an example, isn't something we ingest; and the output, so they claim, is water. Also, coal is probably the most bad-for-the-environment, dangerous and radioactive thing we as a human population work with on a regular basis; and I personally would rather we reduce our use of coal than encourage it as a fuel source.
Part of making fuel using the Fischer-Tropsch process is actually to turn the coal into CO, which is then used further on in the process. This step is extremely good for removing impurities. All the radioactive stuff is going to be in the ash.
However, using coal means that you are not carbon neutral. It's a lot better to use some process of sequestering CO2 from the atmosphere -- either through plants, or directly. The plant solutions differ from plant oil or ethanol-based fuel production in that the plants are not expected to add any energy to the mix. This makes the process a lot more lenient on what you can stuff in, and makes the drain on agriculture a lot less severe. Also, since the nutrients in the plants are going to be left behind at gasification, they can be reused as fertilizer.
Incomplete combustion is a much bigger problem for complex molecules like hydrocarbons. Even with catalytic converters, small-scale consumer engines throw out a lot of toxic crap besides pure CO2.
This kind of user behavior will be very expensive in terms of capacity requirement at the super chargers. If everybody comes in at lunch time and dinner time there will be at least 30 minutes of queue to get to a charger.
I figured someone would say this; and you're right, if everyone goes to lunch at the same time, then you've got a problem; but, ideally people will think of this ahead of time, and adapt their eating times by 10 or 15 minutes so people are eating not at noon, but instead between 11 and 2pm.
Considering 300 miles will take 4+ hours, 30 minutes for a refuel/bathroom/coffee break is hardly a deal-breaker. If you are not making a long trip, then keeping the car topped off in your garage should take care of most charging needs.
Musk has said he plans to blanket the country with Superchargers in the next few years, so that is just a matter of time. Remember that it took decades before we had gas stations all across the country.
Totally disagree. While not at gasoline car levels, Tesla has certainly passed the 'toy' mark in range. What's the range on a 5 series tank? 500 miles or so? 300 miles is more than enough to cover my daily needs at least. I imagine it is for most people, unless you fill up more than once every two days.
I would not take Tesla on my camping trip, or my ski trip, or my ~700 miles road trip. And I honestly do not want a car I cannot use outside of my commute.
There is an entire, large, class of people for whom 300 miles range is more than adequate to cover a regional trip, if there is a place to charge the car overnight (e.g. at the hotel parking). Anything further is a plane ride + car rental anyway, so it's not a big deal. Your use case differs. To think this matters to a statistically significant group of people is merely logical fallacy.
But that makes you the outlier in most American households. Lots of American families have a car for a specific purpose: minivan for the kids or a pickup for going to Tahoe.
There is no reason that the Tesla has to make a value proposition which assumes it wont be paired with a more utilitarian vehicle by buyers. And with the superchargers, you really can drive the SF-LA corridor, which in CA at least, is very very good.
For most people today, an all-electric car is a pricey second car that you can't use on longer trips. Nothing inherently wrong with that. Lots of families have a couple vehicles, one of which is an SUV/minivan and the other a car. It's not even exactly unheard of for one person to own a couple of vehicles (I do). The main issue today is price which does indeed tend to put Teslas in the same category as owning a BMW as a second vehicle.
I suspect the issue is as much the comparative inconvenience of refilling as the actual range.
In fact, 300 miles sounds perfectly adequate. Many cars won't go much further before they need more fuel. But if refilling involved more than spending 5 minutes at a petrol station (of which there are plenty, everywhere) it might start to sound a bit less reasonable...
I think part of the problem is also that many people underestimate the amount of time it takes to stop for gas. For city driving, you start with a full battery in the morning and never worry about stopping for gas (so the only place charge time matters is on the freeway).
The amount of time spent actually transferring liquid into the tank may only be 5 minutes. But then you need to add the time it takes for your card to authorize, the time it takes to go inside to use the restroom and buy snacks, etc. Then there's time it takes to get on and off the freeway (it always seems like there's a red light at the end of the off-ramp and another one to get out of the gas station). If you stop for fast food, that adds another 10 minutes (30 for a sit-down restaurant). Someone is sure to chime in that a gas car with three drivers and an empty container can drive 23.5 hours per day: I'm sure we've all done that at least once in college, but that mode of transport is much less appealing after one grows up.
My point is just that when all is said and done, the comparison is less like 5 minutes vs. 30 minutes and more like to 25-40 minutes vs. 40-50 minutes. The electric is still slower, but not 6 times slower, and you have an excuse to eat slightly less unhealthy food.
What I would enjoy is never having to stop for gas before commuting to work. Charge it overnight, and I am certain to have enough. No more driving on fumes because I forgot I was low and I don't have time to do it in the morning.
The sum of all the time spent at the pump will be greater than the times you spend at Superchargers for the occasional long distance trip.
I suppose my thinking is just that while most of the time it will be fine, you won't have to look that far or try that hard to find a journey that would need a recharge to complete. Visiting friends, let's say. Now, what are your options? You could visit the super charger, which could work, but that assumes there is one nearby! (There are currently all of six, and all in California as far as I can tell. Yes, there will be 150 in 2015, they say - but it is 2012.)
You could find a car charge point. They're also somewhat rare, though certainly more common than the super charger, and, currently, have inevitably lower throughput than a petrol station. So it may take longer to find a free one.
You could use a plug. Better hope you're visiting somebody who doesn't live in a flat, or who has nearby parking on the street! Also, now you're hitting up your hosts for the cost of your transport. And let's hope it's not a big get-together, and everybody else lives nearby :)
(Or, if you're staying at a hotel, expect to pay for the use of their electricity the same way you pay for the use of their phone and their drinks cabinet. If you're taking your children somewhere child-friendly, you should probably expect similar mistreatment. And so on.)
I am vaguely negative based on the current situation, and I don't really trust grand claims about the future. But should the outlook change, I will be sure to change my tune accordingly. I have no particular desire to spend more on transport than required, nor do I have any specific emotional attachment to the internal combustion engine.
I think the idea is that most people drive near where they live most of the time.
If it does turn out you need to drive out to the boonies you can rent a car for that on a case-by-case basis, much like how we don't all drive box trucks on the off chance that we might need to move a big TV back home someday. But in the meantime you'd still get the benefit with your normal car.
If you drive long distances more often though, then that obviously changes the decision for now... at this point a Tesla wouldn't be for you until there was more Supercharger infrastructure around the nation.
Honestly we already have something similar going on, at least where I live (in DC) I see those tiny little Smart cars every so often, but you can bet your ass that you don't hardly ever see them outside the Beltway, no one is dumb enough to risk their life in one of those little things on a long-distance trip out of, and back to, DC.
Well, you're right: It is 2012, and there are (at the time of writing) all of 6 supercharger stations, which can fill a battery at up to 120 kW. The current incarnation (heh) of the Tesla S battery limits the rate to about 80 kW for the first 50%, or so.
However, there are probably more places to plug in than you'd expect. For example, there are tons of RV parks all around the country, many of which have NEMA 14-50 sockets for grandma and grandpa to plug their big camper into. Those sockets can deliver about 10 kW. Then there are electric clothes dryers, found in many homes: They typically use a 240V, 30A circuit, which can deliver about 5 kW continuously.
That last option isn't really practical on the freeway, but how far do you plan to drive to hang out with friends for half an hour? Let's say you drive a couple hours and stay for the afternoon: Their dryer socket will refill almost half of a Tesla's battery for the grand sum of $5--that'll be enough to get you home (there are practical problems with the approach, but it's not a bad 0th-order approximation). Are your friends so worried about electricity that they wouldn't accept a 6-pack of their favorite brew in exchange for a power outlet?
Electric car owners who frequent online forums report that hotels are very reasonable about charging, and some even install free-to-use chargers as a value-add to attract customers. In the long term, if electric car adoption increases, hotels will obviously either need to add a surcharge or raise room rates. But, even if a hotel did sell electricity at a 100% markup, the customer's energy cost for driving a mile on electricity would still be less than half the cost on gasoline.
Certainly, electric cars won't work for all trips, and the infrastructure needed to move electrons from the grid to the car is missing in many places. On the other hand, equipment for 10 kW charging (that's a charge rate of about 30 miles per hour) can be installed almost anywhere in the continental United States for between a few hundred and couple thousand dollars (and in many places it already exists). For new construction, before landscaping is installed and where a right-size breaker panel can be installed in the first place, the cost of installing 240V, 50A service in the garage is almost inconsequential.
Aside from long trips to the next town, I've not had a day with more than 200 miles driven in years. And the most frequent long trip was about 180 miles.
I wonder if car companies are going to be looking at lessons from the tech world specifically Apple and Microsoft and think: Ok maybe these guys ARE the new apple of car companies ... We don't want to be the microsoft of car companies so let's innovate instead of dying. I know innovation isn't exactly at the heart of the car companies but these guys can't be living in a total vacuum. Every single publication in the world is likening Tesla to Apple. The significance and parallels can't be lost on them. I would be really surprised if BMW & Lexus & Audi don't come out with their own competitive answer. Unless it's already too late?
One thing in that list I'm pretty sure they won't deliver is superior reliability.
You can argue the tech has some reliability advantages, but I'm guessing it will take a decade or so to match the incumbents in all-around reliability, seeing as that's the hardest thing to get right as a newcomer.
Still, can't wait to play around with the cool tech!
The sheer moving part reduction going from a full IC engine to an AC induction motor is crazy. You're looking at maybe a hundred moving parts, minimum, down to one. And that's just in the prime mover itself, let alone the entire power train.
In the mean time, while waiting for them to release more affordable vehicles, they can increase the number of Supercharger stations, further work on future innovation - and then they will see hockey-stick growth.
I agree 100%, which is why I doubled down on TSLA a couple of weeks ago. I've told a few people to buy, but they don't seem to want to listen. It seems obvious to me...
Great news! Here's hoping they're able to place superchargers across the country within a year as planned.
As much as one part of me wants to see Elon Musk succeed just to prove Romney wrong for calling Tesla a loser, it's more important to see Tesla do well for the benefits we may reap from companies like this trying to make better solutions and provide excellent competition to the status quo. That being said, I'm feeling pumped and want to shout out Sarah Lane's dorky-but-apt response to Romney:
"Romney just called Tesla a loser company? ENGAGE LASERS, SILICON VALLEY!"
I would argue it is possible to believe both that Tesla is a great company and that Romney was generally right in that many of the green investments have indeed been losers (Solyndra, A123, Beacon Power, Abound Solar, ...).
Lest we forget, Romney is/was a pretty great investor and entrepreneur himself, just like Elon Musk. It's unfortunate that Romney included Tesla in his list of green losers - he did start this fight - but Tesla is the exception that proves the rule. The government has not come close to making money on its green energy bets, and will not even if Tesla is a massive success. It has lost $535M on Solyndra, $249M on A123, and $400M on Abound Solar. Even if Tesla is profitable enough to pay back its $465M loan, this is a very poor risk-adjusted return. Many of the other companies in the green energy portfolio are reportedly quite sick as well; we shall see what happens to the 26 that received loan guarantees in five years.
The dismal history of Russian and Chinese state-owned enterprises should be sufficient to give us pause, but the reasons that people oppose government funding of companies like this are several fold:
1. The government has the power to regulate or tax
competitors into submission. Regulators have strong
political incentives to begin colluding with
funded companies at the expense of the consumer to show
that the investment was a "success". This can be done
without fingerprints by doing things like holding
competitors to a higher bar when applying for permits.
2. Unlike the funds pledged by an LP, tax dollars are
extracted coercively (via threat of police action for
failing to pay the IRS). Arguably such acts should be
kept to a bare minimum.
3. The federal government is notoriously poor at being on
the cutting edge of technology; it is unlikely that they
will make better investment decisions than professional
investors.
One can go further, but it is striking to see how companies like Uber or AirBnB run into political roadblocks, while other companies receive $500M loans. The government is not just any old company or investor, the government has guns and can compel action in a way that others cannot. As such it is very powerful to have as a investor and very dangerous to have as a competitor. Too dangerous.
> The government is not just any old company or investor, the government has guns and can compel action in a way that others cannot. As such it is very powerful to have as a investor and very dangerous to have as a competitor. Too dangerous.
I get what you're saying but I really wish people would quit bandying about the "government has guns" line. I'm one of the zillions working in the USG and I can tell you that the left hand doesn't hardly even know what the left finger is doing most of the time, let alone the right hand (and this is often by design, to avoid exactly what you're talking about).
If you want to discuss hypotheticals of gov't gone astray then that's fine but then we could also discuss those hypothetical meteors that might hit your corporate HQ (hope you've been doing your disaster recovery planning).
Or we could quit acting like starting a business in the U.S. is really just like starting a business in a country run by a junta, or that investing in civilian-run businesses that further a societal and national goal is just like establishing a command economy.
Whether the USG is a collection of well minded do-gooders, an inept bureaucracy that can't tell one hand from another, a literal collection of antichrists, or absolutely none of the above: the USG has guns.
So do the militiamen in Montana, so what exactly is your point?
The bobbies patrolling the streets in the U.K. are unarmed but people still seem to respect the rule of law over there, companies can still be seized, etc.
In fact there are probably even a few Western democracies without so much as a military that still could pass laws to nationalize a business.
"Guns" are the least of your problems with government from a day-to-day point of view.
The "gun" narrative, in addition to being literally true, also has the rhetorical advantage of emotionally short-circuiting many people of a particular ideological bent. While you fume about being explicitly associated with the violent force that implicitly enables your everyday actions, you're unable to reply in a fashion that will convince the majority of people who don't have irrational ideas about guns.
(I don't necessarily mean "you" literally, but surely we've seen enough guns-r-bad silliness online to know that it exists.)
From our point of view guns are the core of the problem. An individual can decide not to buy something if they don't like it. Apple can tell Google to piss off when they don't like the terms of a deal. But you can't tell the government to go and pound sand if you don't like the opinion of a regulator.
They have the power to send in the SWAT teams and not vice versa. Try fighting USG on anything of substance and police will quickly appear, and with them guns, and then your choice is to die, to be imprisoned, or to submit.
The Buckyballs owner just had to submit. CPSC put him out of business:
mpyne, because you are within the federal government you don't see its bad side. Most of your work is just office work. Your agency is not about to be banned by another agency. The worst thing that can happen is that the budget is not substantially increased.
Things are a sight more dangerous for non-government businesses in the US today, at least those which are in politically unfavored categories (like Keystone XL) rather than politically favored ones (like the green energy companies).
While once in a while it so happens that political favor coincides with technological merit, as in the case of Tesla, most of the time innovation means pissing people off. Innovation and consensus are antonyms. Innovation is not democratic, committees don't make breakthroughs, and it'd be nice to not have to deal with a regulator waving a gun in one's face when your disruption disrupts their assumptions.
Or we could quit acting like starting a business in the
U.S. is really just like starting a business in a country
run by a junta
The US is obviously a much better place to start a business than a Latin American dictatorship. However, the question is whether it's a more stable environment than, say, Singapore. Here are a few links that I know weigh heavily on the minds of people who think like me; you might believe we should weigh them less, but these are governmental decisions that arguably do increase the unpredictability of doing business in the US.
In a long document filed Sunday evening, Chrysler asked a
judge to approve a sale of most of its assets and some of
its liabilities for $2 billion to an entity formed by Fiat,
the United Auto Workers’ retirement trust and the United
States and Canadian governments.
But in Monday’s objection, a group of debt holders advised
by the law firm White & Case criticized the proposal as too
rushed, arguing that it was unreasonable to rule on the
merits of the sale on “15 hours’ notice.”
Moreover, they said the sale was really a reorganization
plan in disguise — one that flouts the basic rules about
which creditors get priority under the federal bankruptcy
code. The proposed sale attempts to put social goals ahead
of bankruptcy law, and should not be approved, the
objection said.
The Keystone XL extension was proposed in 2008.[6] The
application was filed in September 2008 and the National
Energy Board of Canada started hearings in September 2009.
[16] On March 11, 2010 the Canadian National Energy Board
approved the project.[2][3][17] The South Dakota Public
Utilities Commission granted a permit on February 19, 2010.
[18]
On July 21, 2010, the Environmental Protection Agency said
the draft environmental impact study for Keystone XL was
inadequate and should be revised...
The Environmental Protection Agency revoked the permit for
one of the nation’s largest mountaintop-removal coal mining
projects on Thursday, saying the mine would have done
unacceptable damage to rivers, wildlife and communities in
West Virginia. It was the first time the agency had
rescinded a valid clean water permit for a coal mine...
Environmentalists welcomed Thursday’s decision. But the
mining company and politicians in West Virginia expressed
fury, saying the action was an unprecedented federal
intrusion, an economic catastrophe for the state and a
dangerous precedent for all regulated industries.
Did MIMvista ever make it into the AppStore?
Mobile MIM was available at the launch of the App Store.
The app was free and included sample patients for people to
try it out for themselves.
Why did MIMvista remove the app from the store? (or was it
forced out?)
In August of 2008, we submitted our first 510(k). ... To
be honest, this dramatically new direction for our
company, and the speed at which it occurred, left us ill-
prepared for the scope of the regulatory process that would
unfold. Within only a few weeks of submitting, we were
contacted by the FDA and told that our app could not be on
the app store (despite the fact that it was both free and
labeled as “not intended for diagnostic use”) because it
served as marketing for a device that was not cleared for
marketing. We promptly removed it.
Then, over the next few months, we discovered that our
proposed device raised more questions than we had
anticipated. In order to make their determination, the FDA
wanted more information than we had provided. The process
stalled out as we reviewed what we would have to do next.
This 510(k) was declared not substantially equivalent (NSE)
because of insufficient data.
The Consumer Product Safety Commission on Wednesday sued
the maker of the popular magnetic desk toy Buckyballs to
stop the sale of the product because of the risks posed to
children...
Responding to a request for comment, the company sent a
press release headlined, "CPSC: Thank you for trying to
drive a $50 million New York-based consumer product company
out of business." Buckyballs and Buckycubes are Maxfield &
Oberton's sole products; 2.5 million sets have been sold
since 2009.
One can go on in this vein. These stories did happen. You may or may not agree that they are happening at an increasing rate; you may or may not agree that this increase is statistically significant. But the perception is indeed that the US is becoming a much more unpredictable place to do business.
If these businesses were "safe" bets, there would be no need for the government to step in - the capital markets would queue up to provide.
Government loans and subsidies like this only make sense exactly when they are for high risk ventures where what they provide may be very unlikely to provide a good direct return on the initial investment itself, but where the potential societal benefits in the long term can be great (e.g. improved environment, or kickstarting an entirely new market).
I've heard two lines of reasoning used to justify those and similar expenses:
1. The government, which can be considered as a sovereign corporation, has a moral obligation to run at a loss because certain ventures are "inherently unprofitable"
2. If Tesla is a big success, the tax revenues from the increased capital in the market (directly from Tesla itself but also all the things it influences) will pay for the losses in the loans to other companies.
I don't particularly fancy Argument 1, but do you think Argument 2 holds any water? If Tesla pays back their loan and the others you mentioned are total washes, it's "only" about $1bn, what do you think about how hard is it realistically to make that back? Tesla already has a multi-billion dollar market cap and is looking to grow.
Well, so, I'm an empiricist on this. Absolutely one can point to companies like Tesla (or defense contractors in an earlier time) which received a ton of government money and by any objective measure did push technology forward.
But one can also point to companies like Google which received only $25M in venture funding and certainly went on to create ridiculous amounts of wealth by any measure. And I believe this is the ecosystem argument you're getting at, if I'm not mistaken?
So now it becomes a quantitative question. Economics is notoriously resistant to controlled experiments, but I think that in the main the experience of the 20th century has showed us that you want to have most wealth allocated by the market. If you look at all Eastern Bloc nations, the Soviet Union, North Korea, pre-Deng China, pre-reform Vietnam, and so on down the list...and then compare them to West Germany, South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore, you've got a pretty good case for less government intervention in the market.
The few countries that do government/tech investments reasonably well are pretty small countries like Singapore run by technically savvy guys, and there too the government is keenly aware of the fact that it needs to treat companies well or they will leave.
So, for what it's worth, regarding this point:
the tax revenues from the increased capital in the market
(directly from Tesla itself but also all the things it
influences)
Basically if the idea is that government involvement can create a favorable ecosystem, I think that an even more favorable ecosystem is one where the government just hangs back and lets the market punch it out ("laissez-nous faire"). Some companies will die and won't get bailouts. Some companies will look like they're on the ropes and then make an incredible comeback. But no company will be able to call in the government, the guy with the gun. Then it's not a fair fight anymore, and (extending the analogy) you scramble to get out of the ring/country because you can't win.
Put it this way: when the ref has bet $500M on your competitor, there is no point in playing.
Your Easter Bloc examples are a pretty good case against planned economies under oppressive dictatorial regimes, not against government grants to provide incentives for the market to move in certain directions.
> Then it's not a fair fight anymore
That's missing the point. Government interventions of the type in this thread are aimed at providing a fighting chance for the guy that doesn't have the money for a gym or a trainer, to see if his unorthodox ideas of how to fight will actually prove to be worth anything.
There might very well be arguments against these types of interventions, but it will have to be a different argument than against what we usually consider bailouts.
Bailouts for failed businesses employing well established existing technology is an entirely different beast.
Very nicely put. While I agree on almost all accounts, I think it's worth noting that while market forces are in general efficient allocations of capital, it may be possible to identify particular areas of research or technology that the market, for some reason or another, in not incentivized to pursue. The best historical example of this is the Manhattan project. Sure, given enough time, defense entrepreneurs would eventually research and develop the same technology, and maybe at a much lower cost. However, the time-value of obtaining the bomb first could arguably justify the enormous expenditure (something around $20 billion in today's dollars). Now, like I said, this is mostly playing devil's advocate -- as an economics student, I tend to agree with you for most investments. However, I do think that out of all potential investments, green energy has the best case for justifying spending these billions of dollars.
Put another way, if we could pay $50 billion to develop a renewable, clean energy source right now, then it would probably be worth it -- even if it would take Elon Musk only 10 years to do it and for $50 million.
I don't think Romney was necessarily giving his honest opinion on Tesla. He was running for president and environmentalists = hippie communists, so of course he's going to publicly hate on Tesla.
Comparing strategic DOE loans in energy to Stalin and Mao is going a bit far, btw.
Hmmm. Russian state-owned enterprises did not end with Stalin, and Chinese state-owned enterprises did not end with Mao. Many of them continue through to the present day and are not setting the world on fire.
I should note that I agree that Romney probably did not know much about Tesla besides the name. But most politicians don't know much about technology. Last I looked, I believe we have only one scientist in the entire House of Representatives (Rush Holt, D-NJ?).
> But most politicians don't know much about technology. Last I looked, I believe we have only one scientist in the entire House of Representatives (Rush Holt, D-NJ?).
I wish everyone who thought, "I wish people in office were more like me" actually ran for office. That's the best way to get people like you in office. Age requirement for the House is only 25.
Approx 700k people in most congressional districts.
I've actually ran in and won an election at the local level back when I lived in massachusetts. So I'm familiar with the process. Are you? How do you get your message out to that many people without money? How do you beat an established incumbent with a ton of relationships and a warchest? Knocking on doors doesn't do it at that level.
If you're feeling idealistic, get involved yourself next cycle. I usually do. Find a candidate you like and volunteer for them, you'll accomplish a little good and learn a lot about what campaigns do, make some connections in the process. It generally involves cold-calling households and knocking on doors.
It would probably physically kill me to run for office, actually, heh. I wish I could do it. I hate that I'm a complete hypocrite on this, but my actual goal is to make career politicians obsolete, and that's not something a single person can do anyways.
But to answer your questions, you don't. You lose the first round. The first round is about becoming a credible threat as a nobody. You spend that first round, however, building up relationships: it's about no longer being a political nobody. Then you maintain those relationships for the next few years until it's time to campaign again, and then you leverage them into money and votes.
Besides, I don't actually want people like me in office. I'm a philosopher who doesn't like Plato; why would I endorse a philosopher king.
I don't really think you can evaluate government loans the same way you would as a private investor. The federal government has defacto senior equity in every company that is incorporated and/or operates in the US. As a private investor the only upside you get from a loan is the interest. It's not even entirely fair to use a VC type model here as the government will also reap rewards from companies that indirectly benefit from these investments.
Your points regarding state-owned companies is more a case against equity investment and a defense of the loan model. The US government isn't going to go to extreme measures to recoup a billion dollars and because it doesn't have any additional equity there's no other real incentive to prop up the companies that it has loaned money to. The free market is an extremely powerful system that is capable of remarkable things but it's not perfect and there are problems that the free market won't address on it's own (climate change being a poster boy example).
I don't really think you can evaluate government loans the
same way you would as a private investor.
So, there are different ways to isolate a core philosophical disagreement but I think this may be one of them. In a different context you will hear people say that "the government is not a household" because the USG can print money. OK, so call that one point of view.
Another point of view looks at the largest and most successful companies (like Apple, Google, et alia) and compares them to the smallest countries (like Iceland). Interestingly, you can do the math to see that Iceland gets about $5.6B of tax revenue with a population of 320,000, while Apple makes $156B with an employee base of about 73,000. This indicates that Apple is about 120X more efficient in terms of dollars generated per person; indeed, significantly more so in that tax payments are more on the involuntary side while Apple purchases are more on the voluntary side.
You can extend the same kind of analysis to Fortune 500 companies and many small countries. This is a very interesting exercise because no one disputes that the Fortune 500 companies can be evaluated by private investors, or that the countries have flags, fiscal policies, and the like. And yet the former outperform the latter by a lot on metrics like this.
So, that's the point of view that says that governments should be evaluated in the same way you'd evaluate companies. One not-so-bad way to think of it is that a citizen is buying a huge package of goods from the government, like cable bundling on steroids, and can only switch service providers by moving.
But, in any case, because we disagree on that point we'll probably also disagree on others. For example, the senior equity thing...are you stating the USG can exercise eminent domain and/or nationalize a company at will? I agree that in practice they have done this, but I at least don't believe this is a good thing.
Anyway, yeah, that's the crux of it: one group does not believe governments should be judged like companies, another group believes they should. Hopefully you can at least see our point of view even if you don't decide to convert :)
I'm almost certain you're not arguing that "dollars generated per person" is the only valid measure of the success of a government as compared to the success of a large corporation. So how do you factor in all the other measures of success in such an evaluation?
Trivially, corporations are amoral entities that have the ability, and sometimes the obligation, to jettison lines of business that lose money or simply don't contribute enough profit, whereas governments often have the legal or moral obligation to maintain or expand "lines of business" whose purpose does not coincide with the generation of cash. Civilization necessitates at least some pursuits that will never make a profit, and governments are the major organizational entities (yes, there are some others) that are often left to such pursuits.
It continues to shock me how many people believe that profit-seeking or optimizing production is "immoral". I have nothing much to say about it, since this position is fundamentally irreconcilable with the core ideas of capitalism, which I use as a framework to view all sorts of different aspects of life that become problematic if we believe that people are somehow duped into spending their money or time at a utility loss to themselves.
I'm almost certain you're not arguing that "dollars
generated per person" is the only valid measure of the
success of a government
Sure, it isn't the only measure of success, but if this number is very low then that is (I would argue) a measure of failure. "Dollars generated per person" = tax-revenues per person is very similar to GDP-per-capita. And a high GDP-per-capita means you can spend on healthcare, earthquake proof buildings, and all kinds of standard-of-living improving stuff.
So how do you factor in all the other measures of success
in such an evaluation?
I think that many -- not all -- are downstream of dollars generated per person. The more dollars per person, the more money for science, for public works, for roads and bridges, for charity, for whatever you want. You can't buy love, but you can buy most of the lower level items in Maslow's hierarchy, no?
Trivially, corporations are amoral entities that have the
ability, and sometimes the obligation, to jettison lines of
business that lose money or simply don't contribute enough
profit, whereas governments often have the legal or moral
obligation to maintain or expand "lines of business" whose
purpose does not coincide with the generation of cash.
Civilization necessitates at least some pursuits that will
never make a profit, and governments are the major
organizational entities (yes, there are some others) that
are often left to such pursuits.
Sure. But I guess my claim is that in order to pursue those other "lines of business", governments must still post a profit (more tax/fees than expenditures). The alternate school of thought (promoted by Cheney and Krugman alike) says that deficits don't matter and that governments cannot go bankrupt.
[I might also quibble with your use of the term "amoral" to describe businesses and "moral" to describe governments, as most of the millions of people dead in the 20th century were killed by governments. You have to kind of go back to the East India Company to find something comparable for businesses (and even that was a public/private hybrid). Anyway, digression, my apologies.]
I'm trying to be very careful to avoid responding to things you're not actually saying. This would be more fun to discuss over some beers.
Trying to tiptoe away from Godwin, I'll agree the use of moral/amoral is worth the quibble. Certainly it's people who have morals, and institutions that have, at best, ethics or principles. I'm not trying to argue that governments are moral, although they do take on responsibilities that corporations cannot or would not, and that such responsibilities can create something like a moral obligation -- operating on an axis that does not include a profit factor -- without imbuing the institution with "morals" per se.
Cool, yeah, beer is awesome. Appreciate the discussion.
Another way to express what I'm saying is this:
Individuals do lots of things that aren't directly for profit, like open source or art or helping out a friend. But over the long term they need to create more wealth (apples, chairs, computers, etc.) than they consume.
Groups of various kinds (companies, etc.) do lots of things that aren't for profit, like throwing birthday parties for their members or having their people sponsor charity runs for research. Yet they too need to have wealth creation exceed wealth consumption to survive in the long run.
Municipalities and local governments -- ditto. Municipalities provide services in exchange for property taxes, and they can/do go bankrupt. We're seeing that happen to CA cities now.
Now, a federal government is definitely special in some key ways: it can order guys with guns to your house and coordinates national defense. But you can still model this as a municipality that is competing with other national governments for your tax dollars. Immigration is in part about getting a better deal from country A and moving from country B.
This is not how we've been raised to think about government. Many on the broad political right are sort of emotional about the federal government's defense efforts; many on the broad political left are sort of emotional about the federal government's non-defense efforts. And in our current world it is kind of unpatriotic to just think of them as a service provider: "are they keeping the peace at low cost? are they pursuing the right strategy for long term health?".
There are macroeconomic arguments as well about whether the "government is or should be modeled as a company", but really you do get at a good point in that the idea that government is just a service provider cuts against the grain of American thought, both left and right.
However, it is an interesting line of analysis that is gaining in currency. See for example KP's "USA Inc.", which looks at the USA as if it was a company:
While physical proximity will always mean banding together for common defense (so long as we are corporeal beings!), I'd argue that the internet makes migration-to-a-better-service-provider a much more feasible option. Facebook facilitates transnationalism: your friends are sometimes nearby, sometimes on other continents, but they often aren't your neighbors. Skype and all these telecommuting tools allow you to work remotely as well.
Moving doesn't have the same cost that it used to. Making the cost of migration plummet could be very important.
I certainly understand where you're coming from but obviously disagree at least partially.
There is a difference between saying that the government should invest in and fund all companies and saying that there are cases where the free market will not act in the national best interest on it's own and the government can. The underlying issue here is that oil is subsidized in the US. It's not just the tax benefits to oil companies, it's all the military spending required to maintain undisrupted oil flow from the most unstable regions in the world. We've gotten to the point where we can't just stop cold turkey; so you've got to invest some money to clean up a mess made in the past. I'd love to get to the point where all our energy choices were on a level playing field so the free market could do the work but that just doesn't seem plausible today.
It's cliche at this point, but the space program and DARPA/ARPA investments led to a lot of the technology that enabled the formation and/or success of companies like Apple and Google.
This is off topic but with regard to your some of your other points, it's completely true that the federal government doesn't have to treat it's debt the same way a household does. That doesn't mean it should spend as much as it wants, but it does mean that it can spend a little more than it brings in forever. By senior equity I meant that the government's claims to profits(taxes) are senior to other equity holders.
> So, that's the point of view that says that governments should be evaluated in the same way you'd evaluate companies.
If governments should be evaluated in the same way you'd evaluate companies, then companies should be evaluated in the same way you'd evaluate governments. Otherwise you're putting down a double standard.
In regard to loan value it is overly simple to only look at the value to government in getting loan repayment back. Think of the tax revenues they got from the employees, the industries built to support these companies etc. So even when Solyendra didnt pay back the loan the govt has probably seen a fair wack of money come back in other routes to offset the loan loss. And if Tesla succeeds they will see many billions flowing back in taxes from the company itself, employees and the industries that work with tesla. Much more than any amount loaned.
Regarding the clean energy investments, I think we will both see qualitative aspects of this differently. I don't think you dispute that $90B was spent on green energy, and there were several very high profile busts; similarly I don't dispute that most of those companies are still going concerns, or many of the points in that link.
Just for future reference, what's the benchmark for calling Romney's prediction accurate? Do they have to liquidate or is it enough that they fail to be able to continue to independently deliver cars to the market?
I'd love it if Tesla would succeed sheerly because their product seems so slick, but I agree with Romney that the government is a lousy institution to be picking companies that "should" get half-billion dollar loans/guarantees.
Governments for the most part can take long term(ish) views on things, whereas other investors might be more bullish about seeing a return a lot quicker, for better or for worse. Even traditional bank based investment wouldn't have worked, so it's unlikely something like Tesla would be able to get off the ground and get running.
If Tesla does succeed the US Government gets a nice feather in the cap as well, if it goes horrifyingly wrong then, well, there's already a couple of trillion in the hole, what's another half a billion between friends.
I'd say it doesn't necessarily indicate failure in part of the system, just a significantly different set of priorities for investors and the global economy. Investors seem in general more interested in quick returns (there's exceptions, Amazon for instance), rather than putting money in for a slow burn and contributing toward a company.
This isn't necessarily just down to investors being money machines, but in part due to the fact that the global economy is improving but still massively fragile, even if that $500m was split 5 ways, you'd have to convince an investor that $100m in a business that could go belly up is a safe bet, even though the economy could rapidly go wrong and ruin luxury items like electric cars.
Plus lets be honest, if you play it on the investment game there's every risk people will buy in, get cold feet and dump the stock pretty quick, ruining confidence in the business and creating a negative public perception.
I will tack on at the end, I'm not an economist so I could be way, way off base.
Lawyers and governments haven't strangled those bootstrapping methods - scammers have.
Selling a few shares at a time to individuals is a really expensive and time consuming way of raising money, so the only reason to do it is if you can't raise money from larger investors. Now, sometimes there's a non-shady reason for this, but more often than not the reason is that small-scale investors can't afford the same level of due diligence to detect scams and can't afford to take legal action if the whole thing implodes. (We saw this with the Perma-Pave ponzi recently - it took one of the larger investors investigating, finding evidence it was a ponzi, and suing for anything to happen. The smaller investors were stuck flailing around amongst misinformation from people involved in the scam.)
What's the "long term view" on Tesla? What's the benefit of them selling electric cars vs. Toyota or GM? The latter have clearly shown their capability to do so. Tesla just thinks a different approach to the market is superior. They'll be proven right or wrong in the next few years. That's well within the time horizon for an investor to make a reasonable decision: Who's more likely to make a profit with their electric car plans? Toyota, GM or Tesla? This is the kind of thing markets are good at. If the government wants more electric cars, just subsidize everyone's cars (which they're doing, of course). Don't try to be a super-VC.
I'd say partially it's new and sexy, but I imagine the suggested long term is it could help show America as a leader in green tech which should help attract outside investment into other green tech ventures, helping to kickstart a new economic driver.
What Tesla is doing is creating an entire new venture from scratch from nothing, for them to hit profitability and make any solid return is likely to take a decade. VCs are unlikely to dump $500m for a 10 year wait, sure they'll know within a few years whether it was a good investment, but it's not likely to be viewed as a safe bet.
So the difference in "sexy" between Ford making a few hundred thousand electric cars and Tesla making a few hundred thousand electric cars is worth risking half a billion dollars of the taxpayers' money?
Note, not American so my interest in American tax dollars is pretty slim. But, in general yes it's worth the risk.
America, like most countries, is looking for a new industry to keep the economy moving on up. Manufacturing used to do it, then that shifted away, then the financial sector was the keeping the economy ticking over and that went a bit awry, now there needs to be a next thing. Investing in Tesla is a chancy risk (although I imagine the US.gov has taken steps to minimise the risk), but if it pays off and helps develop a new economic motivation industry with green tech it could help as a job creation strategy and also attract investment from outside the country.
Tesla looks and sounds sexy, they're a new darling with no baggage, they've got this guy involved who's daring and reasonably well liked with huge ideas, the cars themselves are gorgeous. That's much more exciting than Ford making electric cars.
$500m sounds like a hell of a lot of money when it's out there, but the US spent $700b on the military in 2011. Compared to that $500m on Tesla is not a huge amount. Without being glib, $500m is a rounding error on the military spend, if Tesla strapped some rockets and bullet proofing it could slip into the budget.
Ford did not receive any "bailout" funds, either as equity or debt.
"As the only one of the U.S. Big Three that didn't accept the offer of a federal-government bailout in 2009, Ford [relied] instead on its own huge bet on its future financed by private capital and led by CEO Alan Mulally"
I'm confused by the criteria described at the bottom of the page:
In order to be financially eligible for an ATVM loan, an applicant must be financially viable without the receipt of additional federal funding for the proposed project.
Would Tesla really have been financially viable without this loan?
Well, they are not the same thing but: the govt. did invest in creating the ARPANET, and the DOE still counts as one of the largest customers of supercomputers.
If the Govt. invests in new tech. areas that the private sector is unwilling/unsure of investing for the purpose of pushing the industry ahead, I don't really see anything wrong with that.
That's not the same thing, and just my point. The government didn't give Intel, Microsoft or Netscape $200M (or whatever the inflation-adjusted figure would be).
The government has dozens of ways to structure incentives without making half billion dollar investments in particular companies.
Telecom reform in 1996, for example, was a huge boon for the internet and related industries, and it didn't require picking one specific company over another.
It is important to remember that if you think that, your beef should be with the government not the company that accepted it. I think to many people have taken their own disapproval of such programs to be a legitimate criticism if Tesla.
Yeah, I think some people don't realize how easy it is to have a week where more money is coming in than going out, even if the company is failing.
Not that I think Tesla is failing. But having a bunch of orders/payments come through in one week that you aren't buying much stuff can easily happen. (Specifics depend on cash versus accrual accounting.)
While I'm a huge fan of Elon Musk, and I even think Tesla is pretty cool, I'm a little underwhelmed. Every one of my ventures could be cash flow positive if I got a half BILLION dollar loan from the taxpayers and then was able to sell my product with a $8k tax credit stapled to the side of each unit.
Do you have any idea whatsoever how hard it is to have a successful venture in the automotive industry?
You really should watch the Bloomberg Risk Takers documentary on Elon. I'm against handouts as much as anyone (it's a loan though), but try making a comment like this afterward.
The difficulties he went thru to keep Tesla afloat were outrageous. By this time he been dumping his fortune into both this and SpaceX and was essentially at the point of personal bankruptcy (ie. was friends/associates time to keep moving, no one was willing to continue investing). Note in the article the sentence "Last month, Mercedes’ parent company Daimler also invested $50 million for a 10 percent stake in Tesla." Do yourself a favor and learn what Tesla actually did to make this happen. Yes, you may have heard they retrofitted Smart Cars with the Tesla power train, but how they did that is a breathtaking example of innovation and teamwork for a company at the brink of death.
In short, this loan saved the company. This article we're discussing right now would not exist. Tesla Motors would be another footnote in history that people could point to - "automotive startups are a losing proposition, do not invest". Would you rather the government bet on a guy like Elon who's actually putting his all into carrying out on a promise to change the game, or industry stalwarts who pissed away good will by incompetence and greed?
Well, they've already built an interstate highway system and the US state dept and military are already going to bat for us worldwide ensuring access to oil.
But yeah. THIS is the real case of the government getting too involved in the market.
Government doesn't bet than society as a whole loses out.
Ideally your government should be attempting to maximize everyone's utility (read:society). Private corporations are attempting to maximize their utility (In the case of modern economies: money).
Having an organization giving money to projects that are a net monetary loss, but provide a social benefit is the core reason why we have a government in the first place.
I disagree. The core function of government is to provide a social order. Police enforce rule of law, and legislatures write the law. Military protects our sovereignty against outsiders, and citizens pay taxes for these benefits. While military and police spending fit your description (they are not necessarily profitable but provide a social benefit), I argue that social order is the primary function of government.
In the U.S.'s case, our government happens to do much more than this, but this is not the core of why government exists.
Governments have been involved in 'public works' for at least the last 10,000 years. Without it you end up with a weaker society with a weaker military which is then easy pray to invaders.
It may have started out as roads, bridges, defensive structures, and irrigation systems. But the CDC is well within that domain.
I agree that the CDC is a legitimate example of something that only government can afford to offer. But we can have a government without the CDC. We can have government without welfare or social security. We can take many things away from government and still call it a government. Taking this to its extreme, if we remove the social order provided by police or the sovereign protection provided by military, laws and borders become meaningless and our government becomes anarchy.
This is not to day that we should or shouldn't take these things away (or add more, for that matter), but that the core of government's purpose is social order for its citizens.
You can have minimal governments, and going in that direction often seems like the right choice. Like most people I would be happy to cut 50% of all government spending, the problem is we don't want to cut the same 50%.
Take the US government remove the Air-force and you still have a functional government. In fact, we would still have the largest and most powerful Air force due to the Navy. But, that does not mean the Air force is worthless or even that taken in it's entirety it's a waste of money. And a lot of people want the Airforce which in a democracy means a great deal.
The real question is not how you can make a smaller government, but how you can have a better society and those are not always the same thing.
Agreed. The size of military and police forces are a completely different matter. It seems that many people have strong emotional reactions to military and/or public works spending, and I want to steer clear of that here.
Your argument is flawed and this can be demonstrated with countless examples. For example, it is difficult to have social order when your elderly and your poor are dying on the streets. This is why we have welfare and social security.
OK. Let's look at my argument. I posit that the core purpose of government is social order. I also imply that this is primarily provided through rule of law (police and legislatures) and sovereignty (military protection).
You state that it is difficult to have social order without welfare and social security, because the poor and elderly would be dying on the streets. This example doesn't dispute my core argument that government provides social order. In fact, it supports it, showing that social order is necessary and provided through government.
Remember, I argue that the core function of government is social order (which you seem to agree with), and that the primary means of providing this order is through police and military. I agree that there are other secondary means of providing social order (welfare and social security), but they can all be linked to the primary means of social order.
Here is an example: Let's say that we do not have any form of welfare or social security (America didn't for nearly half of its existence). When times get particularly tough, the poor may start stealing more in order to survive (notwithstanding the impact of food banks, churches, and other charitable organizations). If theft goes up, the government's primary means of providing social order is strained, because police must protect against more thieves.
Here is how I support my claim that police and military are the primary means of providing social order. Can our government exist without welfare? It has. Can it exist without the public school system? It has. A government that ONLY created and enforced rules is still a government. A government stops being a government if it cannot create and enforce laws, even if it provides all of these other things, will quickly fall into anarchy. Why pay taxes if there is no threat of imprisonment?
This might be an interesting argument from the point of view of pure philosophy or ideology, but it is a pointless argument when discussing practical politics. It does not matter which is the primary means of providing social order.
It is particularly pointless because "being a government" is not an interesting measure outside of the realms of philosophy and ideology. There are very many governments that would have done the world a great service by ceasing to "be a government".
Personally, I'd argue that a government that provides no welfare are often a net negative - many of the early nation states saw enormous societal harm resulting from law enforcement and military being used as a bulwark against the effects of the lack of working welfare systems.
E.g. I'm from Norway. A large proportion of the Norwegian emigrants who settled in the US (like the Irish) came during periods of extreme poverty and often starvation in Norway (Norway didn't become wealthy really until oil finds in the 60's, and until at least the 20's it was really a quite poor country). Poor people could get forcibly put to work in poor-houses, as they were in many other countries. Yet the state at the time used the police to restrict emigration:
You needed permission, or you could get thrown in jail for trying to leave. It was seen as essential in order to provide social order. As it was in many other countries.
> Here is how I support my claim that police and military are the primary means of providing social order. Can our government exist without welfare? It has. Can it exist without the public school system?
Can it exist without government run police? Many governments have historically largely deferred policing to volunteers (UK for example, where volunteers still have a role in policing). Without military? There are examples of that too - the modern nation state with standing armies is a relatively new invention and prior to that at least some societies had what amounted to functioning governments without military or police - Iceland, for example, which had a functioning parliament and established laws and court system for hundreds of years before it got a government run police and military.
While the nature of a government that is not a monopoly provider of violence and force is by necessity very different, that does not mean they can not exist.
Horrible idea. Especially in industries that are capital intensive (i.e. high starting costs), the markets heavily favor the existing players, who have a vested interest in preserving the status quo. In such markets, if you want innovation then you need government assistance for startups.
So you're arguing that the search engine space, or new computer manufacturers, or rocket ships did better before venture capital and startups got involved?
While this would be a good option in the spirit of the free market, many parts of the transportation industry are subsidized already making the play-field unfair to begin with.
Define "highest quality". I'd say "of most utility to the largest number of people." By that metric, the market picks the highest quality of winner pretty much by definition.
Exceptions I can think of are cases where individuals don't have enough info to decide (eg, a product will cause cancer, but the company can get rich before consumers find out) and Tragedy of the Commons issues (eg, every individual has incentive to pollute and only collectively do we have incentive to prevent it).
You might argue that the pollution exception applies here, but I'd still want the market involved. For instance, "the government will award $LargeAmountOfMoney to the first company who sells X vehicles meeting the following efficiency requirements..."
> By that metric, the market picks the highest quality of winner pretty much by definition.
I dunno, Windows and Internet Explorer has been the "winner" for the past few decades ;-) By the metric you mention ("of most utility to the largest number of people."), yes, they are "high quality". By many other metrics, they are not the highest quality products.
Jokes aside, I absolutely want the market involved as well. I think the market is fairly efficient, but it has it's downsides (e.g., the great patent wars - I'd hardly call that market efficiency).
I don't think the government has all the answers - but I don't think the market does either.
>> I think the market is fairly efficient, but it has it's downsides (e.g., the great patent wars - I'd hardly call that market efficiency).
I agree, but since patents are government-granted monopolies, that's really an example of government intervention rather than market freedom
>> I don't think the government has all the answers - but I don't think the market does either.
Agreed. By itself, the market can be ruthless. One proper role of government, in my view, is to ensure fair play.
Another is to provide incentives, when necessary, for research and infrastructure needed by society at large. ARPANET is a good example: a government initiative carried out by private contractors which never would have been undertaken by entrepeneurs.
BTW, Windows has been the market winner for good reason: more usable and universal than Linux, and cheaper than Mac. It's not my favorite, but there you go. IE has ridden Windows' coattails; few Mac users and no Linux users have ever used it.
I am okay with governments betting on winners as long as these were similar to the Ansari X Prize. Any government interventions should be there to stimulate and reward competition and not to decide winners and losers.
That's rather disingenuous. Musk is selling an innovative product worth tens of thousands of dollars to individual consumers. Considering the engineering that had to go into making the Model S a reality, I would consider this very impressive. Moreover, there is no reason to think that Tesla will not continue to increase in profitability with each passing week.
Great question! The answer is a resounding no! Also, just because you're profitable doesn't mean you have a positive cash flow!
Profit is what's called Net Income (for argument's sake, let's do EBIT--Earnings Before Income Taxes). Cash flow is simply your delta in cash from one period to the next.
Lots of things go into net income, but essentially it's revenue minus costs. Because of GAAP (Generally Accepted Accounting Practices--only in the US), you recognize revenue when it is earned not when it is collected. So, let's say you buy a car and you pay $5,000 down on a $30,000 car. The car company records revenue of $30,000. In their balance sheet, they also add $5,000 to cash, and $25,000 to what's called Accounts Receivable. Their cash flow is now $5,000.
Let's further say that they owe payroll, to the tune of $10,000 for that month. And you were the only poor bastard that bought a car from them that month. They have to pay $10,000 in cash for payroll, and that also gets logged as an expense. So, their profit shows a $20,000 net profit, but they have -$5,000 in cash flow.
You can extend the example to make it positive for a company that's not profitable, if you'd like.
Being operationally cash flow positive means that on a day to day basis your bank balance is increasing. Being profitable means that all of the money comes in in greater than your total costs.
So for example, if you look at HP's write down, they were operationally cash flow positive for the quarter but are 'writing off' 8+ billion dollars. So they "lost" over $8B this quarter. Aka not profitable during the quarter.
So the milestones you look for as a company are that you are cash flow positive for the day (all of todays costs covered by revenue), cash flow positive for the quarter (net increase in cash on and over the quarter) and cash flow positive for the year (net cash increase for the year), and finally profitable (total income exceeded all costs, both tangible and intangible (like depreciation)).
So to put it simply, cash flow is like a differential of profit? So you can have a profit of -1M$, but as long as the next month you get more (like -0.8M$), you're cash flow positive (+0.2M$), right?
I'm having trouble parsing the examples given in this thread; the above sounds like what I more-less understood from them.
Nope, no differential. It's more like profit = cash flow (i.e. profit on day-to-day things) + profit/loss on investments/loans (e.g. taking out a loan, paying off a loan, but also cases where you own the same thing as before, but value it higher or lower now for some reason).
So e.g. during the housing bubble, some companies were cash flow negative (i.e. losing money on their day-to-day business), but they recorded a profit for the quarter because the buildings they owned were worth more at the end of it than they had been at the start.
Let's say one month the only business you do is when I write you an IOU for $40k and your expenses are $30k. You have made $10k in profit (since the IOU is worth $40k), but you are cash-flow negative, since you have $30k less cash in the bank.
No, not at all. To put it simply, profit is cash flow over a long period.
A business might have customers on a monthly plan, paying $2000 over their entire lifetime. If it costs $1000 in sales and set-up expenses to get a customer, they are profitable. But the expenses have to be paid up front, whereas the income will trickle in over a long period.
This means that even profitable companies might need to take loans or raise financing if they need to pay for expenses now, but the income from those sales arrives in months or years down the line. A cash-flow positive company doesn't have the risk of running out of money while waiting for the profits to come in.
No, cash flow and profit are both differentials of net value. But they are both noisy.
Ideally, profit abstracts away all the messy details of cash flow. If you buy a new robot, that's not a loss, that's an investment, so your profit shouldn't change (until the robot starts depreciating). So profit (not cashflow) is a better metric. On the other hand, you don't know that the robot will really be useful, so maybe cashflow is better.
cash flow positive just means you had more money coming in that going out. Profit is calculated on an accrual basis, not a cash flow basis. For instance, if I sell you a car, I can recognize the revenue from that before you give me the cash. The debt you owe me is now an asset. On the other hand, there are things like depreciation of assets which count as expenses even though no cash changes hands right now. These are just a couple of examples on how cash flow and profit are not the same, but to get the full gist of it, you need to cover basically what gets covered in an intro accounting course.
Considering what he's up against in the industry, I'd say what he's done is fairly remarkable. My concern would be that if at any point one of the big three see Tesla as a threat they will put efforts into creating an electric car that undercuts Tesla's offerings and catapults Tesla into a high end niche oblivion. That said, if it comes to that, I will see that as a different means to the same end of reducing our gas guzzling obsession in America, and I can only see that as a positive.
I think you would be surprised I think Tesla's strategy has three stages.
1) Niche high cost vehicle sold in low volumes(Roadster)
2) Medium cost luxury vehicle sold in medium volumes(Model S)
3) Low cost high volume vehicle sold in high volumes. (Model ???)
Obviously this is a gross over simplification but I imagine that part of the engineering that is going on at TESLA is figuring out how to build 3 cheaper and at a higher quality then anybody else.
I am aware of their strategy, I just worry that the big automakers with their massive distribution and infrastructures already in place could easily come in and be 10 steps ahead of Tesla and provide a vehicle that isn't as sexy but has the same appeal to the electric car market. I could be overestimating their ability to innovate after so many years of sitting on the same old tired technology, but something tells me that they'd be willing to step up if it means they are going to be completely left in the dust of a tiny (by comparison) company.
> I just worry that the big automakers with their massive distribution and infrastructures already in place could easily come in and be 10 steps ahead of Tesla and provide a vehicle that isn't as sexy but has the same appeal to the electric car market.
I really doubt this. This is the classic innovators dilemma. The investments in electric don't look good enough yet for the car companies to go "all in". Their entire supply chain is built around making and selling cars that run on gas engines. Tesla isn't beholden to any kind of entrenched thinking and thus can build up an advantage here that is going to take the big car companies a while to catch up to once electric cars go mainstream. (http://dl.dropbox.com/u/120/Screenshots/innovators_dilemma_c...)
"the big automakers ... could easily come in and be 10 steps ahead of Tesla and provide a vehicle that isn't as sexy but has the same appeal to the electric car market"
Aren't they already trying to do that? Chevy's Volt, Nissan's Leaf, Ford apparently makes a fully PEV Focus now, as does Honda with a version of the Fit, and Toyota's gotta be working on the Prius...
What Tesla has done is made an electric car and marketed it as more luxurious and different from what's on the market. The Leaf is for hippies, the Volt is nowhere to be seen. The Tesla on the other hand is sexy.
A bigger concern is how Tesla will expand from this market. For most manufacturers, the high-end cars are not the major money-makers, and the quantities they move are just too small (Lexus sells over 8 IS/GS for each LS they sell). We'll see if they manage to expand from the niche they're in.
The Tesla on the other hand is sexy. A bigger concern is how Tesla will expand from this market.
The Nissan Leaf just isn't a good deal. If Tesla can beat range anxiety in a package that costs $20k or less, then they'll have a winner. Sexy still sells with econobox cars. (Fiat 500?)
> with their massive distribution and infrastructures
That is a disadvantage. Along with their size that represents massive costs and massive inertia.
The actual threat from incumbents is regulation(lobbying for) and legal. Both of which they can afford due to massive size and have established the "infrastructure" for.
Well, Ford and Toyota are buying electric drivetrains from Tesla to put into their electric vehicles. The big automakers are easily able to match Tesla just by buying Tesla's parts, which Tesla is more than willing to sell them.
The simple answer is they'll make a Model S but smaller, but that might be dependent on battery tech improving so they can fit the batteries into the reduced space. FWIW the Model S is at a reasonably decent price for what it is, and I don't think they're too worried about going mass market until the market is ready in terms of infrastructure, acceptance etc.
Many in the industry are still headed down the fuel cell route. It is quite possible that route will eclipse the Tesla route. The benefits available to the fuel cell route include truly quick refueling and a lack of range anxiety. Fuel cell stacks how come a long way, they just aren't sexy.
All of those never made it as far as Tesla has, for a lot of reasons, but failed mostly the Big Three's stranglehold on the market. In the Bricklin's case I would point to the parts/supplies cartel at the time.
Elon has a good opportunity in today's market with the decline of the Big Three's influence.
Elon Musk doesn't regard Fisker as a serious competitor. He said something like: "Fisker is headed up by a car designer, not an engineer. The reason we haven't had electric cars isn't because they looked bad" (or words to that effect).
Well most banks give out loans without the consent of their members on a per loan basis. Taxes are similar, people agree to pay taxes but they don't have a say on a per loan basis of what is done with those funds.
This is good news, but being cash flow positive over a week is not really an impressive achievement. It's easy enough to game this milestone by rescheduling payments, if they chose to do that.
Even if they didn't, it's such a short time frame it's hard to measure anything because there's so much noise. Will they announce full profitability over a 24 hour period in Elon's next tweet? One hour?
That said, I'm impressed with the early reviews of the car, if not by the massive amount of cash that Tesla lost in the past year.
I have a significant fraction of my net worth invested in TSLA and have done so since the IPO. I believe TSLA will become a $50 billion dollar company over the forthcoming decade as it rides 2 cost trends and global GDP growth. Elon Musk does too - his renumeration package has TSLA pegged at a possible ~ $43 billion (http://seekingalpha.com/article/786711-a-43-billion-tesla-mu...).
I add to my position every month when vol. gets high - so please don't buy it :)
Fundamentally what people must understand is that electric cars have reached ICE parity in cost, use and ease of maintenance. Furthermore they either have, or will surpass, ICE vehicles in all categories over the coming decades on a total cost of ownership calculation. Finally by the end of the decade the lump sum cost of a comparable middle class electric vehicle at the dealer (or website) will be lower than an equivalent ICE vehicle on the day that you buy it.
> In the talk, which is about 45 minutes long, Karim also points to the confluence of broadband penetration, Flash 7, digital cameras and phones, and cheap bandwidth as environmental factors for YouTube’s birth on February 14, 2005. Then he plays the company’s very first video. Uploaded April 23, 2005, it shows Karim himself standing in front of elephants at the zoo. “The cool thing about these guys it they have really, really, really long trunks,” he says. That’s about it.
Gas prices will increase over the next 2 decades whilst battery costs will fall, squeezing ICE vehicles out the affordability range of most Americans.
Back in 1900 electric vehicles died because battery tech was not cost competitive with ICE vehicles, and rightly so, they sucked. In 2012, ICE vehicles began to die, because they were no longer competitive with electric vehicles.
I've followed your comments for a while, I think you have some interesting insights.
But you are aware that betting big on Tesla like this is a very big risk, right? It's got a potentially very big payoff (and probably an expected value above 1), but there is still uncertainty. Tesla stock is valued a lot higher than the company's assets, so there is still big potential for a major loss, for instance if the established car companies are able to get their act together in time or if some other, unexpected event happens.
I myself have about 15% of my (relatively small) net worth in Tesla, so I am making the same bet you are, but I am curious if you've given the other scenario any thought.
I have covered and perfectly hedged costless collars (via options - +/- 10-20% depending on IV) on all my equity positions to protect myself against catastrophic risks (aka black swans) at little to no cost to myself.
Here are some examples of risks I have considered (many more but cbf): economic failure (GFC)/terrorist attacks on TSLA (9/11)/unexpected death of main principals (Elon Musk et al.)/catastrophic accounting fraud (Enron/MCI Worldcom)/financial failure (Solyndra)/bankruptcy (A123)/production fraud (Fisker/BYD).
I've run many possible outcomes both in my mind and in computer simulations of TSLA's future finances (programming rocks). I've completed DCF, Monte Carlo and worst-case scenarios (by far the most important) on TSLA's future finances - which although shaky under certain conditions - do not particularly worry me, since I'm hedged, moderately risk taking and a value investor who doesn't really give a shit what the market thinks. I've got a range of prices based on market outcomes and future EV demand telling me whether to buy or sell.
I don't use leverage, margin, or derivatives that aren't fully covered and hedged by my own cold hard cash no matter what the environmental situation - let's me sleep like a baby. I hate uncapped risk - hate, hate, hate it!
I'm impervious to volatility, time decay and catastrophic risk.
My worst case VAR is 20% on the TSLA position - aka loss of 20%. I have no problems with that - I'm actually used to mark-to-market drawdowns of 50-60% - so 20% is peanuts (my current CAGR for the last 4 years has been 35% - mostly because I'm the guy that buys in a crisis with a margin of safety significantly below fair value).
My nightmare scenario is actually TSLA gapping up 20%+ without me being there to lock in another costless spread.
I'm not impervious to nuclear war - but you can't hedge that shit.
I know risk, tech, finance and economics inside and out.
Concentration is for people like me who know what they are doing. For everyone else - there's Mastercard.. I mean index funds :D
That sounds amazing. Could you explain how you set up your hedge, and why it doesn't cost you anything? I'm just starting to learn about option strategies.
Basic strategy (there are others): I own stocks in 100 chunk blocks. I then buy the exact same amount of -15-20% puts to cover my downside risk and simultaneously sell the same amount of ~+10-20% calls and use their premium to make the insurance free.
My portfolio value, if hedged perfectly and fully backed with cash is now locked to +/- ~20% (depending on IV) at little to no cost.
TSLA Puts seem to be priced with higher IV than Calls at the same distance for both near and far expiries (Calls at 120% vs. Puts at 80% of spot). I see Puts at strike $27 priced at 200% to 166% of the Calls at strike $41.
Yeh that's why I said ~15-20% - it varies with IV, I just take a different spread than exactly +/- 20%. Fundamentally I don't want to be exposed to black swan downside, and black swan upside is statistically rare - so I don't mind losing that (things don't move up 30-40% in a month too often - manias/booms are slow - but they have moved down 30-40% crashes/panics -> bull markets are slow, bear markets are fast - and that is the asymmetry I'm exploiting to cap my risk without negatively effecting my return - selling covered calls is effectively free money most of the time, and buying puts covers my ass from Enron like events and the asymmetrical movement between booms/busts/disclosure negative information like bankruptcy).
Any innovation from regular car companies will be the result of intrapreneurship. Tesla was built to do things differently.
It will take a massive company-wide change in philosophy for these other car companies to compete with Tesla, but even then they will be dealing with an entire workforce that is used to the old way of doing things. They might not intentionally resist the change-it may just be an issue of being able to adapt to it.
While I'd been a Tesla fanboy in the past. I have serious doubts about the role it would play in Mankind's future.
Electric cars themselves require massive battery packs, most of which emanate toxic materials and/or require many toxic materials in its production and it's ability to be recycled is doubtful at best.
A better alternative would be having Public transit systems (alternately fuelled?) in place, so that fuel/road volume is used efficiently.
The Model S is so good that all they need to do is make it into a SUV (Model X) and they'll have the coolest high-end SUV (coming 2014).
Then, they just need to make the Model S smaller (GenIII Bluestar) and then they'll have the best small luxury sport sedan on the market (ie., BMW 3 series, Lexus IS, Audi A4 market). Elon Musk has said they're going after the BMW 3 Series market with the GenIII car, and he's determined to make a best car in that market. Just like the Model S is better than a BMW 5 Series in most regards, the GenIII will be better than the BMW 3 Series in most regards. I know it might be difficult for many people to accept that (especially since the BMW 3 Series is legendary) but Tesla's got all the right pieces and has proven they can do it with the Model S. Again, they just need to shrink the Model S and make it more affordable.
But GenIII is slated for 2015 at the earliest and it takes a while to dominate a car segment even after you have a stellar car. I expect Tesla to become increasingly competitive (in terms of # sales) to the BMW 3 series by 2020 and perhaps dominant by 2025 (if not earlier).
Elon Musk has repeatedly said that Tesla Motors is not a typical car company but rather a technology company that will innovate at a blistering pace. As long as they continue to do that, they'll be fine.