h/t michael hart – Elon Musk has announced job cuts in an effort to curb costs at his green car company.
Guest essay by Eric Worrall
Tesla to slash thousands of jobs in profitability drive
Tesla said it plans to cut 9% of its workforce as part of a restructuring intended to reduce costs and boost profitability.
The layoffs at Elon Musk’s electric car company come as it tries to increase production of its Model 3 sedan and turn a quarterly profit this year.Tesla said the more than 3,000 cuts would affect mostly salaried employees, excluding workers producing its cars.
Mr Musk said the job cuts were a “difficult decision”.
Tesla employed more than 37,000 people at the end of last year.
“Given that Tesla has never made an annual profit in the almost 15 years since we have existed, profit is obviously not what motivates us,” he wrote in an email to employees and posted on Twitter.
“What drives us is our mission to accelerate the world’s transition to sustainable, clean energy, but we will never achieve that mission unless we can eventually demonstrate that we can be sustainably profitable.”
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Read more: https://www.bbc.com/news/business-44458264
Elon Musks explanation that his business decisions are not primarily motivated by profit might come as a surprise to investors who were expecting a return on their capital. But I guess losing money every year for fifteen years is a bit of a hint.
What percent of the 9% cut didn’t show up to work for free when called upon to do so last year?
I have a tiny electric car (made by “Think,” the now-defuct spinoff of Ford’s electric car division) and a 1-ton diesel pickup. The EV’s fuel costs 2.7 cents a mile, compared to the diesel truck’s 22.5 cents a mile. The EV is almost identical in size and weight to a Scion iQ microcar. Its fuel cost per mile is 10 cents.
Taxes introduce a distortion. The lying, hypocritical, tax-drunk worthies of Washington State, who forever proclaim their eco-progressiveness, actually penalize EVs with a $150/year tax, ostensibly to recoup lost gas tax revenue. It adds 3.8 cents/mile to the EV’s fuel cost, bringing it to 6.5 cents/mile. A tax that used the same principle as petrol taxes — the lower the fuel economy, the more you pay — would charge the EV 0.5 cents/mile.
Either way, though, the EV is a lot cheaper than a petrol car: less than one-third the cost of running the truck, and two-thirds the cost of running the equivalent car. If taxed equitably, it would cost 1/7th what the truck does, and one-third what the equivalent car does.
To head a couple things off at the pass:
1. I am not one bit smug about the EV. I think the AGW hypothesis has been shown invalid. I bought the EV strictly out of curiosity, being a car nut.
2. I did not claim the $7,500 federal tax credit. No special privileges for me.
What fun is driving a tiny electric car unless you are in a parade with the Sahib Shriners.
Remember: I am a car nut and bought it strictly out of curiosity. I’m going to say some good things about it, but please trust that I’m not one of those virtue-mongers. God help me.
The EV is a fun little runabout to take on short jaunts into town for groceries. Electric motors are all about the torque, and this one seems to be optimized for 0-40 mph or so, although the car will go 70-75 mph on the highway too.
The downside with a Think is that, even though they do have airbags and a safety cage, it’s a plastic body and you’d really hate to hit a deer or one of the pickup trucks which comprise at least half the vehicles where I live. I figure they’d have to use a dental suction tool to remove what’s left of me.
Still, though, it’s fun to drive. Save the world? Not only no, but hell no. Fun though. And for a car that looks like it was the product of a drunken three-way between a Smart car (but a foot longer and a few inches taller), a Chunky candy bar, and an escaped rodeo bull, I’m continually amazed by how much stuff it can haul. 4x the cargo space of a Smart car.
I had it outfitted with steer horns and was going to offer to run around the next rodeo at halftime, but the horns blew off a couple weeks ago when I was driving it at 70 mph into a 35 mph wind on the Interstate. I guess it’ll have to be the Shriner parade, then.
p.s.: Elon Musk is a joke, and I don’t think Tesla is long for this world.
There is no doubt at all that electric cars have certain advantages over gasoline powered cars. (This is in stark contrast to the situation with respect to aircraft. I wish I could go a couple of days without reading an email containing a breathless report on the effort of some misguided fool to build an electric airplane that will, for sure, revolutionize something.) An awful lot of the complexity associated with an automobile’s drive train goes toward dealing with the limitations of its internal combustion engine. It’s been well refined over the last dozen decades, but the complexity is still there.
The question is whether the disadvantages that an electric car also no doubt has are greater than the advantages. For the vast majority of people, the answer to that question would seem to be yes, but that doesn’t mean that someone with a somewhat different set of values won’t judge it differently. Heck, if I had the money, time, and expertise, I might be tempted to take a junk car and convert it to electric, just to show people I could do it. It sounds like a fun project.
If I did that, I’d have to drive it around, just to show that I could. I do the bulk of the driving for my household, so most trips on most days are fewer than ten miles, which means the range wouldn’t be so important, even if it was limited by the battery powered, but oh so necessary, air conditioning. It might even be practical for that part of my driving. I’d hate to have it as my day-to-day car, though.
We used to live in Seattlestan, and then moved to 20 acres in a secure undisclosed location in the countryside in WA State. It is hard to overstate how many things there have been to do, so swapping out the EV’s defunct 12-volt battery + a few other odds and ends were on the low end of the priority list, especially when we have two other perfectly fine ICE vehicles and a brand new Arcticat 700cc gas-powered UTV with a plow blade for next winter. And a gun rack.
All of which is to say that the revitalized EV has been revitalized for only two weeks. But I had driven it enough in Seattlestan to have become quite familiar with not only the basics but its particular quirks. (Note: It’s my 17th motor vehicle; they all have their quirks however they are powered. The EV is the quirkiest, but well within the tolerable zone for a first-generation space shot.)
So, upon getting it going again, I was and still am quite curious about its performance characteristics. This is especially the case given that where we live has significantly greater topographical relief than our Seattlestan neighborhood did. I’ve made a point of testing it in the various permutations around here, and thus far the results have modestly exceeded my expectations, given that it’s a 1,200 foot climb from town to our Wingnut Gun Compound (13 firearms, 16,000+ rounds, beware tweekers!), and EVs really don’t like the uphill.
The car has A/C, but I have never used it. Give me a couple months, and there will be some days. I will be curious. The heater worked fantastically well in Seattlestan. Very far exceeded my expectations. But I am wondering if the A/C unit is even charged, given that the car is now 7 years old and I’ve never even turned it on.
I am not the battery car salesman, at least not the battery-only car salesman. At the national level, I might be the plug-in hybrid salesman due to the energy efficiency factor (roughly 2-1/2x at the current U.S. electricity generation mix.) But I think range and charge time is and will long remain a major sticking point for battery-only EVs, even when subsidies manage to equalize up-front capital costs.
That said, it’s a 12-mile roundtrip to town and back, and I can get five of those on a summertime battery charge, within the recommended 80% capacity band. This makes for quite a viable grocery-getter. I think I’ve fired up Carbon Bigfoot (the pickup) once or twice since getting the EV up here. That said, if someone in the area were to ask me whether they should get a battery-only car, my answer would be: “Make sure it’s not your only car.”
Trust me: I have drunk no one’s Kool-Aid except that which is sold by Kraft Foods, and it’s been a long time even then. You are not corresponding with a glassy-eyed eco-zombie, but rather someone who will give credit where credit it due, no more and no less. By the way, I need to order another sticker from the NRA to put on the electric car. We’re not all kumbaya artists.
Well thank goodness I am not a Shareholder for one.
I bet the non profit motivation was not in the Prospectus so is Musk in breach of any Law??
You have to love Socialism and its road to ruin. “My mission is to lose money until the company becomes an agency of the Department of Energy and a ward of the taxpayer” It is the expectation of the socialists in Government to pay Tesla Employees today on the future earnings of the as yet unborn citizens of this great county. As the future tax payments of all living citizens has already been spent. The subtle variation of that last sentence highlights the transition to Government owning all means of Production. Pass the Vodka Comrade