mrraj

From the Bloomberg article :

"Chuck Gregorich, who sells fire pits and outdoor furniture, says turning a profit on Amazon is getting harder. One of his popular fire pits costs $200, of which Amazon takes $112 for its commission, warehouse storage, delivery and advertising. That leaves him with $88 to pay the manufacturer, ship the product in from China and cover his overhead."

I have a hard time sympathizing here. They farm out manufacturing to China and logistics/warehousing to Amazon, and then also lend brand to a marketplace they don't own. Assuming this is how FBA selling works on Amazon, it sounds like the low profits they make are just a byproduct of them not actually doing much work.

If they are using it for practical purpose, you can’t replace it with a Kei

Often people living on large properties and in rural areas have vehicles that never hit public roads, and Kei car class vehicles or their equivalent get used every single day. Just think about the logistics of living down a long road on 30 acres - getting the mail, taking garbage bins out, moving tools, water, animal feed, debris, etc. Large trucks don’t even fit through some gates and Polaris/atv/small vehicle is often the best solution.

I'd assume their dataset are professional couriers, <30, skewing male, which would be a high risk-taking pool. If that's the case wouldn't that make their conclusion conditional on being in that demographic? What if you're not?

Despite that, there are actually a few good examples of safety equipment causing more injury. Off the top of my head, striking combat sports have a similar opinion of headgear in sparring, it causes the participants to throw harder resulting in more head trauma. Similar sentiments with helmets & padding in football.

A bit apples and oranges with cycling as these are more example of mutually assured self destruction vs a car pulling out in front of you.

“Fortunately with an autonomous system there's no logistical overhead”

It might be too early to tell.

Those telehandlers and skidsteers are almost always rentals, so they get called off and picked up at the site. Moving heavy machinery is much more difficult than moving people, and all of your equipment is unique so it’s glued to that job site until it’s complete. Owning your own equipment presents its own set of challenges - you have to store it when it isn’t being utilized, keep excess capacity in case it becomes unavailable, fix/repair on your own, etc. All of the costs in the current installer model, while perhaps higher, are tightly coupled with the cash flows from the job portfolio. This might decouple the cash going out from the cash coming in, to say nothing of the fixed costs of having having hardware/software engineers on staff.

I really want this to succeed so please keep in mind this is just food for thought.

Mostly this is correct. Few exceptions -

Weather patterns on East coast can be unpredictable, much more so than central valley CA. torrential rain = mud leading to bogged down equipment, this can be the difference between a profitable job and unmitigated disaster for an installer.

Second, construction cycles in utility solar can be a bit wonky because of ITC tax credits, lots of turnkey providers looking to have construction starts in q4.

Interesting idea - having worked in the back office of a solar construction company for a number of years I can see a few challenges.

Install labor is relatively cheap but more importantly flexible - relative to the cost of the project install is low double digits %. If a job isn't running smoothly you cut your temps and move your main crew over to another site or send them home if they're local. I would wonder how this work fit in with an automated build/install solution.

Unless you have control at the GC level you're going to be start/stop with electricians cutting trenches in front of you, missing materials (tariffs/port strikes), permitting delays, etc, and you'll have expensive idling equipment that's tough to move.

I get that this is the problem you're trying to solve - but I'd definitely suggest going to enough bread and butter 2-10MW sites where this sort of thing is more common. Also keep in mind Central CA in summer is not Massachusetts in November, weather makes all this 10x worse.