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Shares of Tesla Motors (TSLA +7.7%) power to a gain after the automaker's Q3 report doesn't...
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Monday, November 5, 2012, 12:53 PM ETShares of Tesla Motors (TSLA +7.7%) power to a gain after the automaker's Q3 report doesn't raise anything too alarming to investors. In a letter (.pdf) to shareholders, the company calls the quarter a "fundamental turning point" for the company as it shifts into a higher gear of production. New showrooms and an expanded supercharger network are also in the works.
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I live in NJ, didn't have power for a week, am in a county where there's gasoline rationing, and never waited on a line for gas. People panicked and waited in lines for no reason, rather than just conserving or car pooling. If you filled up before the power went out, you should have had enough gas to make it until today (everyone I know had off of work at least two days last week because there was no power, and there was no where to drive to, since trees and power lines blocked most of the roads anyway.)
A backup generator from Generac will run you about $5k to get installed into your home. According to the Tesla website, depending on the volts/amps (type of charger and power source), you can get enough of a charge to go between 5 and 31 miles each hour of charging. So in order to charge my Tesla, in the event of a power outage, I need to have had a $5,000 generator installed to convert the nat gas into electricity to charge my car, which will still take a few hours to charge, and gives me a somewhat limited range? Seems like just keeping a few 5 gallon cans of gas in the garage is a much more practical solution.
Trust me when I tell you that people in my area are furious at the amount of time its taken to get electric service back. People in my town, that I work with, are still without power at home. More than 250,000 customers of JCP&L just in NJ are without power still, a full week later. This storm is not a positive event for the future of electric cars. I know lots of people who have bought or are ordering generators to prevent this from happening again. But I doubt any of them will double down on their reliance on electricity by buying electric cars.
TSLA seems popular in San Francisco.
They've sold a few thousand cars, thats a long way from being sustainable.
Q3 report says that they had a record of 2,900 new reservations in the quarter, 30% more than the previous one. However, the total net reservations raised from 11,500 to only 13,200 due to much higher cancellations: if my math is not wrong, they had 1.200 cancellations in the same period, 41% of the new reservations.
Hope this is only due to the clean up they are doing of old reservations, otherwise I have to think that the early adopters' curve was not strong enough.