接上文：《经济学人》精读46：How Elon Musk does it （part 1)
Lightly Seared on the Reality Grill
Of the two goals, colonising Mars and contributing to the greening of the Earth, the second sounds more plausible, not least because it is widely shared. But SpaceX is in much better shape than Tesla. The firm is privately held (Mr Musk, who has a controlling stake, says it will remain so). In 2015 Google and Fidelity invested $1bn, and subsequent filings put the firm’s value at over $21bn.
SpaceX has a commitment to modular design, vertical integration and continual improvement not previously seen in the space business. The Falcon Heavy, for example, used 28 Merlin engines, all of them built from scratch at the company’s plant in California, all of them much more powerful than the Merlins that powered the first Falcon 9 in 2012.The firm’s achievements have established it as a satellite launcher and as a logistics company, with its reusable Dragon spacecraft providing supplies to the International Space Station. This business will expand when, probably sometime next year, the Dragon is certified to ferry astronauts up there, too.
“殖民火星”和 让世界变得更绿一点这两个目标听起来是第二个比较容易实现，但SpaceX的企业结构比较简单，就是Mr Musk控股最多。
SpaceX的不断改进，不断发展是这个行业里从来没发生过的，它的Falcon Heavy用的是最新的发动机，都是这家公司从零开始研发的！
The innovation is continuing—which is just as well, because within a few years it may face serious competition from Blue Origin, a rocket company owned by Mr Bezos which is likely to prove more sprightly, and more ambitious than those SpaceX has faced to date. Treating the Falcon rockets as cash cows, SpaceX is moving its development efforts on to an even larger (and possibly also cheaper) launcher, known as the BFR, and a constellation of thousands of communication satellites, an undertaking that would exploit its ability to get things into space cheaply so as to provide high-speed internet access all around the world. Morgan Stanley, an investment bank, reckons that could bring the company’s value up to $50bn—though it will require mastering a new manufacturing challenge and facing new competitors.
Tesla is already worth more than that: roughly $60bn. That is more or less the same value as GM, which makes 80 times as many cars. In 2004 Mr Musk took a big stake in Tesla, founded the year before, and became chairman; in 2008, when the company faced closure, he became CEO. It went public two years later and quickly became the world’s leading electric-car company; last year it produced over 100,000 vehicles. At the Model 3’s launch Mr Musk claimed that, by the end of 2017, it would be churning out 5,000 a week.
sprightly: full of life and energy -- used especially to describe an older person-- a sprightly old woman of 80
constellation: a group of people or things that are similar in some way
特斯拉现在的市值大概600亿美元，和通用公司差不多，但是通用每年生产的汽车量特斯拉的80倍...
It wasn’t. In fact it was nowhere near it. It made just under 2,500 Model 3s, half that promised week’s worth, in the entire fourth quarter of 2017. It now says it will hit 5,000 a week later this year; a previous claim that it would go on to 10,000 a week by the end of the year has been dropped. Meanwhile, it faces ever stiffer competition. The world’s established carmakers are getting into the electric game. Other new entrants include Alphabet, which owns Waymo, an autonomous-car firm that began as part of Google.
Given all this, many think Tesla’s valuation unsustainable. Mr Musk sometimes seems to see their point. “This market cap is higher than we have any right to deserve,” he said when speaking to an audience of state governors in July 2017, soon after the company’s valuation first topped that of Ford. To reassure shareholders of Mr Musk’s commitment, in January Tesla proposed a new pay plan that ties all his earnings to strict milestones for revenues, annual profits (of which, so far, it has made none at all) and market capitalisation. The last of these sets a target of $650bn by 2028. That is roughly the current value of the world’s largest ten carmakers combined.
stiff: difficult, strict, or severe-- stiff competition
特斯拉接下来将会面临着巨大的竞争，更多的企业进入电力汽车这块业务，其中最出名的就是Google 母公司的无人驾驶汽车，Waymo
所以连Mr Musk都承认现在的市值有点过高...
To accomplish such rapid growth—all but unheard of in a company its size—Tesla has to become more than just the successful mass-market car company it still isn’t. It has to become an industry in and of itself, providing better, battery-powered alternatives to the internal-combustion engine wherever it is found, from lawnmowers to juggernauts, and also selling battery-storage systems to consumers and utilities on a huge scale.
Why should anyone believe such hubris?One argument is that electric vehicles, designed and built the Tesla way, are both better and potentially much more profitable than the alternatives. A recent tear-down analysis by McKinsey, a consultancy, concluded that electric cars designed from scratch are much better (for example, on range and interior room) than those that are modified versions of petrol-fired cars and still made on existing production lines. And by keeping a great deal of its cars’ engineering in-house, as SpaceX does with its rockets, Tesla may stand to be much more profitable than its current competitors. Jeffrey Osborne of Cowen, an investment bank, calculates that 80% of the value of a Tesla is created in its manufacturing plant in Fremont, some three to four times the share for a typical passenger car.
juggernaut: a very large, heavy truck-- called alson juggernaut lorry
hubris: a great or foolish amount of pride or confidence
特斯拉这种生产电力汽车的模式，被认为比其他对手更有潜力，而且能有更大的利润。麦肯锡的研究分析表明，电力汽车研发从零开始比较好，比在原有的汽油汽车上改动来的更容易...
What is more, electric-car factories could be a lot more productive than those for internal-combustion engines; whereas a conventional car has about 2,000 components in its drive chain, a Model S has fewer than 20. Mr Musk says that these advantages mean he can create a “machine that makes machines” qualitatively better than anyone else’s.But the so-far-pitiful production of the Model 3 suggests that, at best, that machine is proving hard to bed in. It also means Tesla is not getting the revenues it based its spending plans on.
The “gigafactory”, a battery plant in which Tesla and Panasonic are investing $5bn, also has its problems. The investment is based on the idea that Tesla needs economies of scale in its battery business only achievable in a factory that is highly automated and utterly huge. Mr Musk says the gigafactory—near the town of Sparks, Nevada—will be, by footprint, the biggest building in the world.
传统汽车在驾驶链上有2000个零部件，而Model S 只有20个不到！
Mr Musk说他们的优势就是“我们有能制造这些部件的机器”， 但是从他们Model 3的产能来看，那个机器不太好用哦，还有那个他和松下一起投资的“电池工厂” 也有问题...
Romit Shah of Nomura/Instinet, a bank, estimates that in late 2014, when the gigafactory was announced, global battery demand for electric vehicles was about 12 gigawatt-hours a year. Nomura thinks the gigafactory alone will have 40GWh of capacity by the end of this year. In 2016 Tesla bought SolarCity, a solar-power and home-energy-storage firm that Mr Musk had helped two of his cousins set up, for $2.6bn. One of the reasons was to soak up some of this huge supply of batteries. (Another was that SolarCity was drowning in debt; the bail-out of the CEO’s side-gig was controversial, but Tesla shareholders ended up backing it by a large margin.) Storage, not cars, may be the biggest market for batteries long-term: it was not an accident that the company changed its name from Tesla Motors to just Tesla last year.
Getting the gigafactory up to its promised speed and scale is vital to Mr Musk’s plans. It has proved frustratingly difficult. A visit to Sparks late last year found J.B. Straubel, a co-founder of Tesla and now its chief technical officer, completely consumed with the automation efforts: “Ramping up such a complicated machine,” he says,“on this unprecedented timescale, has never been done before.” Last October Mr Musk tweeted that the project was in “Production hell, ~8th circle”.
"电池工厂“的产能实在过剩，但在2016年特斯拉还把Solar-city买了，一个原因是它巨大的电池供应量，另外一个原因这家公司也负债重重（是Mr Musk帮助他的两个表兄成立的公司）
能量存储应该是将来的一个巨大发展机会，所以这就是为什么特斯拉把名字从"特斯拉汽车”改成了“特斯拉”。
总结： Musk 在下一盘很大的棋，很佩服他的能力！
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Results
Lexile®Measure: 1300L - 1400L
Mean Sentence Length: 20.40
Mean Log Word Frequency: 3.27
Word Count: 1200
这篇文章的蓝思值是在1300-1400L， 专八阅读题的难度也就这个，是经济学人里比较难的，不太好读！
使用kindle断断续续地读《经济学人》三年，发现从一开始磕磕碰碰到现在比较顺畅地读完，进步很大，推荐购买！点击这里可以去亚马逊官网购买~
