According to this interview[0], a similar firm's CEO is saying it's not that simple, and their clearing firm stopped the trades due to the costs
> Our clearing firm gave us a call and said we're going to have to stop allowing new opening positions... there is a two-day settlement between if you buy the stock today, those brokerage firms that you bought that stock on have to fund that trade with the clearing central house called DTC for two whole days... our clearing firm simply cannot afford the cost to settle those trades. We cannot use customer funds to front that cost due to regulation.
I'm not an expert, but based on this link[0] from another comment section, a similar firm's CEO is saying the their clearing firm stopped the trades due to the costs
> Our clearing firm gave us a call and said we're going to have to stop allowing new opening positions...
> there is a two-day settlement between if you buy the stock today, those brokerage firms that you bought that stock on have to fund that trade with the clearing central house called DTC for two whole days...
> our clearing firm simply cannot afford the cost to settle those trades. We cannot use customer funds to front that cost due to regulation.
So the argument is that if they just froze trades (both buying and selling), then people who own many GME shares and want to sell would not be able to and there would be a subsequent backlash? Maybe? I am trying to compare the lesser of two evils here and it still seems like they made a poor choice.
Exactly, stopping buying prevents people from (potentially) making money by buying the stock low, whereas stopping selling (potentially) prevents people from losing money on the stock they already own, from the platform which they bought it.
I can't imagine the backlash if the completely froze the stocks while the market kept going.
But preventing buys on the broker with the most trades of these stocks directly leads to a price drop; this leads to loss for every current holder of the stock.
I keep seeing people saying "it's too late", but the order page literally says "All customers are eligible for the full $7,500 Federal Tax Credit if they take delivery by the end of the year."
They do account for electricity costs in the "gas savings":
"The average person drives between 10,000 and 15,000 miles and spends between $1,000 and $1,500 on gasoline per year. In comparison, the cost of electricity to power Model 3 over the same distance is up to three times lower. Over the six year average length of car ownership, that's between $4,300 and $6,400 in gasoline savings.
We've assumed a fuel economy of 28 miles per gallon for a comparable gasoline powered sedan, for example, the 2017 BMW 3 series. We've also assumed the national average of $0.13 per kilowatt-hour for electricity and $2.85 per gallon for premium gasoline over the next six years."
But the cars I plan to buy also don't use gasoline. Ex: Chevy Volt, or the Prius Prime.
I dunno, I find it dishonest. Any electric vehicle shopper knows that gasoline is a major cost-driver and reason to buy electric instead.
The Chevy Volt is currently $33,520. Then gets a $7500 Federal Credit (and unlike Tesla, Chevy hasn't run out yet. If your Tesla 3 is delivered in January 2019, you only get $3750 in credits). AND it mostly won't use gasoline (50-mile all-electric range == good enough to not use gasoline in over 99% of my expected drives)
Yes, it would! Fuel lasts about 30 days before it starts to oxidize. That basically starts to leave a gunk behind as the gasoline both oxidizes and slowly evaporates from the not-quite airtight tank. The fuel in the injectors evaporate and leave grime behind, clogging them, and this happens in many other places in the engine as well. The process starts after about 30 days, and by a year you're almost guaranteed to have fuel so rotten/sticky that the car doesn't start, or just barely generates power.
The Volt, BMW i3, and basically any other car with a range extender periodically run the engine in "maintenance mode", because it's good to circulate fluids, burn off some gas, and take some load off the battery for a while.
If you need to store a car for more than a month, you should top off and add a bottle of fuel stabilizer before driving home.
It appears that the Volt will detect the gasoline going bad (or at least, puts it on a timer and then assumes), and forcibly burn it off roughly once a year. Before doing so, it encourages you to use a bit of gas.
To be honest: this is the first link from a search engine. So its not an issue I've looked into very strongly. Nonetheless, it seems like GM has already figured out a procedure for "stale gas" issues.
That is a concern. I am a happy driver of a Chevy Volt, and in daily commuting only ever use battery. The practices I use to preserve gas in the tank for long-term storage are:
* Keep the tank full of gas: air space is prone to condensation
* Avoid ethanol-added gasoline, it's more hypro-philic
* Add a fuel stabilizer (like 1 fl oz per 5 gallon)
* live in California, it's really dry.
These are adapted from techniques for winter storage of cars.
I tried the steps you suggest, but on adding up the cost after a few weeks I found that, what with commuting from California to work, I was making a net loss.
Volt has 2 maintenance modes it automatically goes into
Engine Maintenance mode: haven't used the gas engine in some period (month?) so it uses the engine for a small period of time (less than my 12 mile commute) so get the engine oil moving.
Fuel maintenance mode: doesn't let average age of gas be over a year. i.e. I filled my tank August 30, 2017 from basically empty. On Aug 29, 2018 it went into fuel maintenance mode and even though I had a full battery, it would only use gas. I was probably around 1 gallon left, I filled it up, so expect around june 2019, it will go into fuel maintenance mode again unless I finish off the tank and fill it up again.
The Volt has something called "maintenance mode", which starts the engine about every 4-6 weeks, and does a process a little more involved every few months or so to burn gas that would go bad.
While I dislike them using the gas saving in the headline figure, I cannot criticize the way they came up with the gas saving figure, that's an extremely fair way to calculate it (almost too conservative).
And while it may be a bit hidden (After incentives & gas savings -> Gasoline savings) they even allow you to customize it a bit based on Miles/Year and gasoline price.
Washington state has cheap hydro also, as to a lesser extent do many of the other states in the west coast (California has lots of hydro, but they also need lots of electricity and even import from Washington).
Is electricity in Canada generally cheaper than in the states?
I bet it depends on region, distance to station, maint, etc. I moved an hour outside a major metro and my electricity prices increased 60%, but gasoline only 2-5% in the USA. Plenty of trucking, but not much hard infrastructure. Most neighbors still burn wood or truck in propane for heat, yet the average home value is quite high. Its an odd situation, and points out how many of these solutions miss even the suburban populations, much less the rural.
Quite sensibly. It seemed pretty shady to me to charge customers for a feature that wasn't delivered or legally approved or likely even finished.
I suspect they're finding the shipped hardware isn't enough to accomplish what they want with the necessary reliability. Elon has already hinted that shipped 3's will need a computer upgrade to support full self-driving. They are probably wisely backing off on guaranteeing full self-driving on hardware that hasn't been proven to succeed to specification.
Total speculation, but I'd bet a chocolate chip cookie that they'll find they need to make changes to the sensor array as well. (If I were designing this from scratch, I'd want a wide stereoscopic baseline between cameras for optical ranging. They have multiple cameras, but they are narrowly spaced, and may have fields of view that differ too much for stereoscopic fusion. I'd aim for "larger number of shittier/cheaper cameras.")
> It seemed pretty shady to me to charge customers for a feature that wasn't delivered or legally approved or likely even finished
It's still available for the Model X and Model S. The disclosure when you pay for it is very clear. They are not acting sketchy when they sell it to you. I'd guess it has more to do with not enough people ordering it, so removing the option streamlines fulfillment.
> I suspect they're finding the shipped hardware isn't enough to accomplish what they want with the necessary reliability.
Yeah they already admitted to this. Anyone who has paid for full self driving is getting a Hardware 3.0 (HW3) upgrade for free. They said full self driving will require HW3.
> Total speculation, but I'd bet a chocolate chip cookie that they'll find they need to make changes to the sensor array as well.
Yeah, as an owner I'm pretty worried that will be the case but I guess we will see. I doubt they will admit to this publicly though - they seem adamant that the sensors today should be sufficient.
> The disclosure when you pay for it is very clear.
IMO their marketing probably leads customers to be more optimistic about the expected payout of their $x,000 investment than is justified. Though that is not necessarily deliberate deception, they may be unrealistically optimistic themselves.
Misleading marketing or not, I'd say it's sketchy in the sense that it's an over-promise. If they eventually have to face a reality where their hardware doesn't it cut it, they might be on the hook for thousands of customers' respective thousands of dollars of pre-orders, which is a huge capital liability. Quite possibly 10 figures.
Full self driving capability is still available for purchase for existing long range battery Model 3 owners that didn't pay for full self driving capability up front. The cost is still $5k.
> Our clearing firm gave us a call and said we're going to have to stop allowing new opening positions... there is a two-day settlement between if you buy the stock today, those brokerage firms that you bought that stock on have to fund that trade with the clearing central house called DTC for two whole days... our clearing firm simply cannot afford the cost to settle those trades. We cannot use customer funds to front that cost due to regulation.
[0] https://finance.yahoo.com/video/heres-why-robinhood-restrict...