Tesla Faces New Model 3 Delay As German Workers Threaten Strike; More Headaches For Musk Emerge

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In the latest potential setback for the on-time delivery of Tesla’s Model 3, I4U reports that Tesla is facing a potential strike at its new German subsidiary. Tesla acquired Grohmann, a specialized machine manufacturer, for about $150 million several months ago and now the German Trade Union IG Metall has warned that it is exploring a worker strike at Tesla Grohmann. A key supplier, the machines built at Tesla Grohmann are used to manufacture the Model 3. As a result, the Model 3 production start in July could face another imminent delay.

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Former GM Vice Chair Trashes Tesla: “Musk Is A Great Salesman But They’re Doomed. It’s Going To Fail”

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For those who may have missed it, GM’s former Vice Chairman Bob Lutz dropped a whole lot of reality on some unsuspecting Tesla cheerleaders on CNBC this morning.  A rather blunt Lutz shared his views, as have we on several occasions, that Tesla’s constant cash burn combined with a barrage of competitive models that are about to hit the market likely indicate that the company is “doomed.”  As for Tesla’s gravity-defying stock price, Lutz attributed the company’s soaring market cap solely to Musk being the “greatest salesman in the world” along with his being “aided and abetted by some analysts.”

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The Reverse Model T

Guest Post by Eric Peters

Elon Musk, Tesla’s CEO, touts his latest electric car as the second coming of the Model T – an odd comparison given the Model 3 is everything the T was not.

Henry Ford’s idea was to make cars that emphasized utility and practicality; that were basic and which could be stamped out (literally) in quantity at low cost, so that almost anyone could afford to buy one. Prior to the T, cars were largely hand-built, ornate and very expensive.

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STUPID IS AS STUPID DOES

If you prefer fake news, fake data, and a fake narrative about an improving economy and stock market headed to 30,000, don’t read this fact based, reality check article. The level of stupidity engulfing the country has reached epic proportions, as the mainstream fake news networks flog bullshit Russian conspiracy stories, knowing at least 50% of the non-thinking iGadget distracted public believes anything they hear on the boob tube.

This stupendous degree of utter stupidity goes to a new level of idiocy when it comes to the stock market. The rigged fleecing machine known as Wall Street has gone into hyper-drive since futures dropped by 700 points on the night of Trump’s election. An already extremely overvalued market, as measured by every historically accurate valuation metric, soared by 4,000 points from that futures low – over 20% – to an all-time high. Despite dozens of warning signs and the experience of two 40% to 50% crashes in the last fifteen years, lemming like investors are confident the future is so bright they gotta wear shades.

The current bull market is the 2nd longest in history at 8 years. In March of 2009, the S&P 500 bottomed at a fitting level for Wall Street of 666. In a shocking coincidence, it bottomed on the same day Bernanke & Geithner forced the FASB to rollover like mangy dogs and stop enforcing mark to market accounting. Amazingly, when Wall Street banks, along with Fannie and Freddie, could value their toxic assets at whatever they chose, profits surged. The market is now 240% higher.

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Musktopia Here We Come!

Guest Post by Jim Kunstler

It ought to be sign of just how delusional the nation is these days that Elon Musk of Tesla and Space X is taken seriously. Musk continues to dangle his fantasy of travel to Mars before a country that can barely get its shit together on Planet Earth, and the Tesla car represents one of the main reasons for it — namely, that we’ll do anything to preserve, maintain, and defend our addiction to incessant and pointless motoring (and nothing to devise a saner living arrangement).

Even people with Ivy League educations believe that the electric car is a “solution” to our basic economic quandary, which is to keep all the accessories and furnishings of suburbia running at all costs in the face of problems with fossil fuels, especially climate change. First, understand how the Tesla car and electric motoring are bound up in our culture of virtue signaling, the main motivational feature of political correctness. Virtue signaling is a status acquisition racket. In this case, you get social brownie points for indicating that you’re on-board with “clean energy,” you’re “green,” “an environmentalist,” “Earth –friendly.” Ordinary schmoes can drive a Prius for their brownie points. But the Tesla driver gets all that and much more: the envy of the Prius drivers!

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The Money Pit

Guest Post by Eric Peters

Tesla Motors just borrowed another half-billion. What was it the late great comic Sam Kinison used to say?

It never ends! Oh! Ohhhh!

Elon Musk’s electric car operation suffers from Lack of Profit. It is a problem for a business. Unless you have friends in government. Elon relies on these to fund his Iron Man fantasies, which encompass not only his electric cars – which are pretty and quick but preposterous as economic competition to internal combustion-powered cars – but also his very own privatized, for-his-profit NASA, SpaceX.

They make money in the same sense that the IRS has “customers.”

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The “Jobs Creator”

Guest Post by Eric Peters

The Russians never got to the Moon – because their Moon Rocket, the N1, had trouble getting off the launch pad in one piece. It’s the same problem Elon Musk’s Falcon 9 Space X rocket has been having.

It blew up on the pad back in September – taking a lot of taxpayer dollars with it.

And before it.

Space X is a money-loser. Tesla Motors is a money loser. Both are gaping black holes that suck up resources and spit out things that don’t work or cost too much.

Usually, both

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CARRIER AND THE SLIPPERY SLOPE

“Companies are not going to leave the United States anymore without consequences.” – Donald Trump

The reaction to Trump’s deal to keep 1,100 Carrier jobs in Indiana has ranged from outrage to adoration. There are so many layers to this Shakespearean drama that all points of views have some level of credence. I’m torn between the positive and negative aspects of this deal. If you’ve read Bastiat’s The Law and Hazlitt’s Economics in One Lesson, you understand the fallacies involved when government interferes in the free market. Politicians and their fanboys always concentrate on the seen aspects of government intervention, but purposely ignore the unseen consequences.

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Elon’s Space Pinto

Guest Post by Eric Peters

Elon Musk’s SpaceX rocket recently had trouble getting off the ground – well, in one piece – and it’s an awfully long way to Mars.space-pinto-lead

There’s also an awful lot of money involved.

Taxpayer money.

Hundreds of millions of dollars in government contracts. Which Musk hopes to wrangle for his Space Pinto – er, SpaceX rocket. It’s the ballistic version of his Tesla electric car.

Both seem to have issues with catching on fire.

And burning through cash.

Houston, we have a problem. 

Maybe that’s why SpaceX is shopping conspiracy theories that “someone” (hinted-at rival for government payload payola United Launch Alliance) deliberately monkey-wrenched the rocket – like Gary Seven, from the original Star Trek series, Assignment Earth. Or maybe sniped at it with a rifle from the roof of a building more than a mile away, Texas School Book Depository-style.

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Tesla All Fired Up…

Tesla is all fired up.Tesla fire Paris

Literally.

At a demo for media in Paris, a Model S went up in smoke. Caught fire, burned itself to a smoldering slag heap.

At a media event (see here). Where – one assumes – there were reporters on hand.

Not much reporting took place.

To find out about this auto da fe it was necessary to dig. It wasn’t brought to the attention of people.

This is curious.

I myself am a car journalist and have attended hundreds of media “reveals” and “ride and drives” for new cars. If at any of these, the new car being demo’d for us had erupted into flames right in front of us, like the Hindenburg at Lakehurst, it would have been a Hindenburg-esque PR nightmare for the car company that built the thing.Hindeburg

But Tesla gets away with building –  and selling – cars that are prone to automatic ignition, so to speak. This fire in Paris is not the first Tesla fire. There have been several reported and probably many more not reported.

The fact that this has happened several times suggests a design defect.

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Now Uncle is “Investing” in Tesla

Guest Post by Eric Peters

Elon Musk may be the ultimate crony capitalist – the PT Barnum of our time.Barnum lead

But to give PT his due, he was an honest con man.

He never used the government to make his marks hand over their money. People stepped right up without a bayonet in their backs.

Elon, on the other hand, depends entirely on the coercive power of government to line his pockets. Take that away and Musk goes away.

Unfortunately, he’s not going away. He’s going deeper.

Automotive News reports that Musk is not only fleecing taxpayers via multi-tiered subsidies for his electric turduckens. That’s old news.

Here’s the latest news:

The Michigan Department of Treasury has bought (with funds fleeced from taxpayers) 339,623 shares of Tesla stock – the proceeds of this “investment” (if there ever are any) to be used to fund the pensions of retired state workers.

Priceless.

The small termites helping feed the queen – so to speak.

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Public Roads as Tesla’s Private Test Track

Guest Post by Eric Peters

Logic – let alone reasonableness – is not one of government’s stronger suits. There are many examples of this, but here’s a newsie one: The use of public roads as test tracks for Tesla (and Google) self-driving car technology.Tesla Introduces Self-Driving Features With Software Upgrade

On the one hand, government rigidly persecutes “speeders” on the basis (so it is claimed) that driving faster than a number on a sign might increase the chances of having an accident. This being unsafe and hence “speeding” being illegal.

On the other, it gives the green light to Tesla racketeer Elon Musk to sell cars that encourage the driver to take not just both hands but also both eyes off the road – trusting in the infallibility of Tesla’s technology.

People have died as a result of this – which isn’t very safe.

With more to come, inevitably.

Inevitably, because technology – like the human beings who create it – is fallible. Things break, stop working. Or they don’t work exactly the way we were told they would.

Especially things controlled by a computer.

How reliable is your desktop PC? And it just sits on your desk. Do you like the idea of a PC being in charge of your car – your life –  at 70 MPH?

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Along For the Ride

Guest Post by Eric Peters

A guy was killed by his auto-piloted Tesla last week (new story here) and Uncle is looking into it. Of course he won’t do anything about it. Because “if it saves even one life” is very selectively applied. It applies only when whatever the danger happens to be is something Uncle wants to use as an excuse to impose yet another mandate.Tesla carsh 1

Never to rescind one.

See, for instance, air bags.

Or – lately – cars that drive themselves.

Uncle very much wants such cars and so is prepared to do nothing about their potential – and now actual – lethality.

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The Anti-Tesla Gets No Love

Guest Post by Eric Peters

It’s interesting that the car That Makes Sense – economically and functionally – gets almost no press while cars that don’t (like the Tesla and other electric cars) do.Elio lead

Elio Motors (company web site here) had a near-production-ready car on on display at the New York Auto Show last week. Company founder Paul Elio gave a presentation to reporters and took questions.

Bet you didn’t hear a thing about it.

This is downright Weird.

You’d think the media would be champing at the bit to let the public know that there is a car on the verge of production (with 41,000 of them already spoken for via cash-down reservations) that – according to Paul Elio – will cost well under $10,000 (under $8,000 is the target) and go well over 80 miles on a gallon of gasoline.

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