I imagine you still need to enter a contract with them which will spell out exactly what they mean by good faith.

Anybody could use all of their patents in good faith (e.g. if they wanted to sue Tesla over their own patents, Tesla could revoke their right to use the Tesla patents). At least that's how I understood it.

The press release did say "all our patents are belong to you" didn't it? Did they keep some for themselves after all?

They may have a fair bit of know-how which they've kept secret instead f patenting, of course. But all their patents should be freely available.

Which they've opened up for free.

No you won't. Weight does have an impact, but it's not even nearly proportional. Wind drag doesn't care about weight.

I get much more than 590 miles on mine. Diesel, of course. But the biggest difference is I can refill from empty to full in a few minutes rather than an hour.

That being said, how often do you drive more than 200 miles in a single day? Well, I frequently do, but I'm an exception. For the vast majority of people during 360 days of the year, it's more than enough. Those few days of the year where you need more range, your trip will take a few hours longer because of supercharging along the way, or you can swap cars with your neighbour who would be more than happy to drive a Model S for a few weeks.

To be fair, torque in the Model S does decrease at higher rpm. Power = torque x rpm, and the inverter can only deliver so many kW. It does deliver full torque from standstill.

Then you would be wondering how far Gutierrez would have come if his last name had been Musk.

Seriously, you think "Elon Musk" is a great name and a recipe for success? How much would you have bet on that before he became famous?

By the same logic, I suppose Walt Disney had it easy with his last name, and Obama was born to be president with such a last name. Really, why am I even responding to such bollocks?

He just talks people into buying the stocks that his (real) bosses are trying to get rid of, and selling the stocks they want to get into. I once made a list of stocks he recommended and looked at that list a couple of months later. Not a pretty picture. Maybe he just had a bad day then, but I doubt it.

Also, the way he talks doesn't exactly inspire confidence. He talks like he's in a bar telling his friends how great he is and how much he knows. You can tell what kind of people he is aiming for as his audience. Fools and their money... But hey, I guess that's precisely what makes him so popular in the US.

They could. But it's kind of hard to issue dividends while doubling capacity in one year, developing new models and constructing a battery plant that will double world production of lithium batteries, all at the same time. It's amazing that they're so close to break even at all.

They've already opened up all their patents for free.

Waiting time for the model S is around 4 months if I'm not mistaken. Definitely not more than a year.

The model X is a different matter of course. No way you're getting one in 2015 if you order today.

That money is going into R&D. At Tesla.

They are "losing" money because they are pooring all their profits into R&D and expansion. Next year, they plan to produce twice as many cars as this year. Kind of hard to grow that quickly while paying dividends. If they decided to just keep selling Teslas at the current rate without doing any new development, they would be very profitable.

What makes you think they are giving away tens of thousands of dollars on each cars? The way I understood it, they could actually be profitable if they weren't pooring all their profit into R&D and increasing capacity at an insane rate.