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Originally posted by Todd Williams:

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Originally posted by Opus1:


Musk is selling snake oil at the moment.

At the moment? I'm not sure he's ever done otherwise!



And to the comment that the oil industry has been broken?

I guess that's why the oil industry is going gang busters here in TX again. More jobs available than people to fill them and currently the biggest restriction on getting the product to market is a shortage of about 18,000 trucks to haul it from the field to the pipeline system! $350 a night hotels through out the Permian Basin in such fine venues as Odessa, Ft. Stockton, and even Pecos! Industry pay rates recovered and now equal to the peak at over $120 per barrel.

Broken indeed!

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Tesla - Model 3 Demand At Current Prices May Be Causing Inventory Problems

Sep. 18, 2018 1:26 PM ET

Motorhead has crunched some numbers on the US auto market in order to assess the Model 3’s addressable market at its current price of between $49,000 and $78,000.

This market in the US only amounted to 460,000 vehicles last year and makes Musk's goals of producing 6,000 Model 3s/week appear questionable.

Tesla's recent “liquidation sale” of Model 3s in Fremont was a sign that Tesla may have an inventory problem at hand.

Q3 positive free-cash flow and net profit goals may be at risk. Q4 could be horrible if Tesla has no choice but to begin sales of the $35,000 "variant" of the Model 3.

Tesla's recent "Model 3 Sellathon" event at its Fremont facilities over the weekend of September 8th to 9th could be a warning sign about how over-bloated Model 3 inventories are. Why would one need a "sellathon" if there's a 420,000-unit order backlog for the Model 3? Customers waiting for their pre-configured Model 3s are even getting emails from Tesla, enticing them with free super-charging deals if they accept a differently designed rear-wheel drive Model 3 before September-end (example here). And then there's Elon Musk's tweet on Saturday (below) telling people to hurry and refer friends to buy a Tesla by Sunday (he extended it via Twitter on Monday).

All of this sounds alarming when Tesla boasted that it still had a Model 3 order backlog of 420,000 units at the end of Q2. It points to either an over-bloated Model 3 inventory at current prices or to being behind in its stated goal of hitting Q3 Model 3 production of 50,000 to 55,000 units. My gut feeling is that there is a Model 3 inventory problem brewing at Tesla and this is underlined by the many photos on Twitter showing huge parking lots of Model 3s baking under the summer sun in Fremont, Nathrop, and Burbank. Over the weekend, this picture even emerged on @TeslaCharts, showing a batch of "hundreds" of Model 3s packed into an underground parking lot of an LA building.

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Corporate governance overrides shareholder power