About Maarten Vinkhuyzen
Maarten Vinkhuyzen Grumpy old man. The best thing I did with my life was raising two kids. Only finished primary education, but when you don’t go to school, you have lots of time to read. I switched from accounting to software development and ended my career as system integrator and architect. My 2007 boss got two electric Lotus Elise cars to show policymakers the future direction of energy and transportation. And I have been looking to replace my diesel cars with electric vehicles ever since.
October 16th, 2018 | by Maarten Vinkhuyzen
The Paris Motor Show, "Mondial de Paris," started a day early with a pre-show symposium for a select public: "Tomorrow in Motion." Even a few journalists were invited, yours truly not among them. But the whole 5 hour happening was live on YouTube. Arriving early in the hotel near Paris and with pencil and paper in hand, the CleanTechnica delegation was ready for it. As a French organized mondial event, half of the presentations were in French. That means that I have no notion what they were about
September 30th, 2018 | by Maarten Vinkhuyzen
Jaguar I-Pace
In the class of luxury midsize SUV/CUV, we have now or will relatively soon have 5 new fully electric vehicles that are serious all-around usable cars. Oops, in the USA, half the cars are not called cars but trucks. These vehicles are the Jaguar I-Pace, Audi e-Tron, Mercedes EQC, Tesla Model Y, and BMW iX3 — placed in order of expected start date of sales
September 30th, 2018 | by Maarten Vinkhuyzen
Tesla is looking for two new independent directors. There are many very capable candidates outside the normal business circles. We want candidates that will stay true to Tesla's mission, and can even protect Musk from market pressures by keeping an eye on the future
September 30th, 2018 | by Maarten Vinkhuyzen
How often have you heard the complaint that all the electric cars on the market aside from Teslas are only compliance cars and that the carmakers have no intention to make enough of them to sell the cars in high numbers
September 29th, 2018 | by Maarten Vinkhuyzen
I wonder whether the SEC picked the wrong cherries from Elon Musk's deposition
September 29th, 2018 | by Maarten Vinkhuyzen
The Nissan LEAF is infamous for its battery problems. It started with the fast degrading 24kWh battery in the original 2010 Nissan LEAF. That battery was not up to the hot conditions of US Southwest states. It was replaced by a battery with a different chemistry, the 24kWh "lizard battery" in 2014. In 2015, the model year 2016 (MY2016) LEAF got a slightly larger 30kWh battery option. In the MY2018 Nissan LEAF, an even bigger 40kWh battery was offered
September 6th, 2018 | by Maarten Vinkhuyzen
Last weekend Herbert Diess, CEO of Volkswagen Group (VAG) and Volkswagen, shocked his managers. At a leadership summit, he proposed to alter the company-car rules. The 20,000 employees who have a company car like the bigger, thirstier, and more expensive models, but shouldn't they all be driving electric
September 3rd, 2018 | by Maarten Vinkhuyzen
I did something quite irresponsible lately. I made a prediction 6½ years in the future about Tesla's finances. The normal financial analyst horizon is a single quarter, and that is often too difficult
September 2nd, 2018 | by Maarten Vinkhuyzen
Tesla has a long history of in-sourcing production. It started with the idea of following the Apple model. That meant doing the design itself, finding factories which could make it, having no production itself — only design, marketing, and sales. That didn't work — nobody did know how to make an electric car
August 25th, 2018 | by Maarten Vinkhuyzen
While this letter was being prepared for publication, Elon Musk released the news that he decided not to follow through on his idea of taking Tesla private. That news made the goal of this letter obsolete. But the arguments in it are as valid today as they were yesterday, making it still worthy of publication
August 22nd, 2018 | by Maarten Vinkhuyzen
Before people start placing Linette Lopez on a pedestal, note that she is a "champion of Tesla FUD" only outside the realms of Seeking Alpha. It appears the Tesla writers on Seeking Alpha are in a competition about who can create the most outlandish theory about Tesla's finances, preferably completely devoid of reality, whereas Linette Lopez is more your run-of-the-mill yellow press reporter
August 15th, 2018 | by Maarten Vinkhuyzen
Since Tesla CEO & Chairman Elon Musk tweeted out a note that he was "considering" taking Tesla private, my mind has been racing through the pros and cons of such a change. Add me to the thousands or millions of others in this same boat. While we've hosted many an interesting discussion about the pros and cons, however, we haven't actually published an attempt at a comprehensive summary of these pros and cons
August 14th, 2018 | by Maarten Vinkhuyzen
Today's blog post from Tesla CEO & Chairman Elon Musk confirmed my WAG about the cost of going private. It is somewhere between $0 and $24 billion. For both amounts, Elon can get the funding secured. But for the amount of $???, it is a bit harder. Investors want to know how much they are going to invest, and how much influence they are going to get for that amount
August 13th, 2018 | by Maarten Vinkhuyzen
For 15 years, Tesla has been prisoner of The Secret Tesla Master Plan. It called for the development of a number of products and the acceleration of the world's transition to renewable energy. To achieve those goals, Tesla was forced to travel from milestone to milestone, with a pause to recuperate and then get back to the maximum speed its financial resources would allow
August 13th, 2018 | by Maarten Vinkhuyzen
While this article waited for the editor to come along and publish it, the world changed. Elon published on August 13, 2018, a new blog post explaining his actions on and before the 7th of August, when he tweeted about taking Tesla private at $420 and sent a letter to Tesla's employees.
I leave the original article as written, and add an addendum with the consequences of these new revelations
August 9th, 2018 | by Maarten Vinkhuyzen
First, the hottest question about Musk's idea to take Tesla private: Does he have the funding
August 9th, 2018 | by Maarten Vinkhuyzen
Last Wednesday, August 1, 2018, we got a ton of fresh information in the Tesla shareholder letter and conference call. The prediction of our financial model of the Tesla results, "Vijay’s SimTesla Game," was right within a few million, after correcting for the ignored restructuring costs. That's not because we got everything right, but because the mistakes cancelled each other out
July 31st, 2018 | by Maarten Vinkhuyzen
When you make a financial Model that pretends to show the development of Tesla's financials, you should dare to use it and show the results
July 30th, 2018 | by Maarten Vinkhuyzen
There will be again a lot of boneheaded questions at this week's Tesla earnings conference call for the results of Q2 2018. We have collected the most important questions we expect and put them into two categories
July 29th, 2018 | by Maarten Vinkhuyzen
Money manager Steve Eisman has a sterling reputation. He is one of the few who saw the 2008 financial collapse coming and reacted accordingly, making a lot of money for his clients. To do this, you have to know the market thoroughly and have access to a lot of information, researching large amounts of data
July 26th, 2018 | by Maarten Vinkhuyzen
Are you game? Can you beat Elon Musk? Can you understand his moves
May 30th, 2018 | by Maarten Vinkhuyzen
When driving past Amsterdam this morning, it occurred to me that all Tesla cars look the same. That is not good for an exclusive brand that aspires to sell hundreds of thousands of their cars
May 28th, 2018 | by Maarten Vinkhuyzen
"Tesla bankwuptcy" would perhaps be better termed "shorts losing their shirts"
May 27th, 2018 | by Maarten Vinkhuyzen
Business Insider decided to join the chorus of Tesla-bashing media. It did give the job to an excellent writer who had no idea what he was writing about, so it might have convinced others he was right who didn't quite know what they were reading about. We can’t all be experts, but a real "insider" would not write this misinformed and misleading piece
May 26th, 2018 | by Maarten Vinkhuyzen
Elon Musk confirmed on Twitter last night that 6 planeloads of equipment that Tesla just flew from Germany to California are indeed robots from Grohmann. Don't envision Westworld-like robots occupying all the seats in a jumbo jet, enjoying the latest movie. These are automated assembly systems for the Gigafactory to solve the last problems with battery module assembly. For over half a year, it is known that the biggest hurdle to ramping the Model 3 production is unexpected limitations of the battery assembly line
May 25th, 2018 | by Maarten Vinkhuyzen
Did you fall for this clickbait headline? You are not alone. Even the serious Dutch press thought it worthy to write about a car factory in California which performs normal scheduled upgrades/improvements on their production line while it is in development. When the local village paper in Fremont, California, mentions it because of the extra visitors to the shopping mall, that is understandable. But what crazy world do we live in that this is worldwide news? This has happened a number of times, by the way
May 24th, 2018 | by Maarten Vinkhuyzen
Renault and Nissan integration will be a difficult path. The financial markets prefer a simple single company with one set of shares and one top management structure and don't care much how the internal structure of the company is functioning
May 17th, 2018 | by Maarten Vinkhuyzen
How did Tesla get into this hopeless situation? The short answer: “It did not.”
The long answer is in 3 articles. The first one examined the problems 450,000 Tesla Model 3 reservations created. The second one gave a long look at the profitability of Tesla products. This third one finishes with the media madness about “Tesla Cash Burn.”
May 13th, 2018 | by Maarten Vinkhuyzen
What am I thinking? Calling Tesla a very profitable company? But I think it is secretly a potentially very profitable company. Or not so secretly if you really pay attention to Tesla's finances
May 13th, 2018 | by Maarten Vinkhuyzen
How did Tesla get into this hopeless situation?
The short answer: "It did not."
The long answer is in 3 coming articles. This first one examines the problems 450,000 Tesla Model 3 reservations created.
Then we have a long look at the profitability of Tesla products.
We finish with the media madness about "Tesla Cash Burn."
