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Elon is telling the execs to work from the office. I think Elon has it backwards. I'd have the engineers in the office, and the execs and managers could pretend to WFH all they want!

April 1!

I think the Y is a better car overall than the Mach-E, but the gap isn't huge. When the Y was $40k, I would recommend the Y to everyone, but the Y's price has gone way up since. Personally I'd still buy the Y, but the price gap has gotten so big I can't really call the Y a better value than the...

I missed a chance to cash in some TSLA gains in the $900s, pay off my house. Unfortunately I think TSLA is headed to about the $600s. The market is flattening out this stock in anticipation of monetary tightening plus the easing of supply shortages across the auto industry, which will slow the...

It's popular to rant about how humans are bad drivers, but the reality is autonomous driving tech has a very high bar to get over. Humans are not bad drivers. Humans are amazingly good drivers. That humans can take in the dizzying chaos of a road, process it, and get from point A to point B with...

I finally got around to reading the transcript of the quarterly earnings call. Now I understand why the market was so unhappy. I was super annoyed with Elon's comments about self-driving. I mean, we've all heard about the benefits of autonomous driving, ad nauseum. This is the most hyped...

Oh yeah, if you can get out of SF for a day, you can make a trip to the Tesla factory :)

I think the 4 top things to see are San Francisco, LA, Big Sur, and Yosemite. You could fly to LA, drive up the coast through Big Sur to SF, and leave from SF. Yosemite is a bit out of the way. If you want to visit Yosemite, you can probably just make a round trip from SF (about 4 hours drive...

Automakers never publish profitability numbers by factory, but I wouldn't be surprised if at this moment, Jan 2022, the Tesla Fremont plant is the most profitable automobile factory in the world. It is by far the highest output plant, by revenue, in North America. Either that or Tesla Shanghai...

What's going on with the Cybertruck delays, and the Roadster and Semi delays, in a sense, is that the Model Y is such a hit. The Model Y is in such hot demand that Tesla basically cannot muster the raw resources to build new products right now. Every incremental battery cell, chip, tire, or roll...

It's Airstream, so it's gonna be $$$$. But this is a great idea. You can pair this with a Cybertruck or a Rivian with the big battery and you start to get a viable long range RV rig.

The $12k is only worth it if you can make money renting your car as a robotaxi. Not for a convenience feature. Except Tesla has made clear that FSD won't actually allow robotaxi operation. Nonsense to pay $12k for basically urban autopilot.

What we need to do to stop global warming is net zero emissions. But zero emission technology is not available at a sufficient scale for average middle class customers to adopt immediately. Changing this is Tesla's entire mission, for goodness sake. The fastest path to net zero is to accelerate...

carbon tax = $7 gasoline carbon tax = 2x heating bill for all those Midwest swing voters with nat gas furnaces Congress isn't gonna do it. Elon's a genius but he's no political genius, that's for sure.

Careful. As Tesla/Elon fans we don't want to go there.

We don't know that their plans actually changed. It may only be they announced what they were already secretly planning. No point in announcing what you're doing to all your competitors until after all your competitors already figure it out. Big companies know a lot more about what the...

I've seen a couple Rivians here in my neighborhood in San Jose.

Apparently a pair of Pfizer shots followed by a J&J booster gives (slightly) better immunity than three shots of Pfizer. https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.12.02.21267198v1.full.pdf https://www.cnn.com/2021/12/05/health/covid-vaccine-johnson-pfizer-booster-mix/index.html

This might be related to a flash part that wears out and then bricks the car. I think given the chip shortages they're gonna do this fix one-by-one on the older, higher risk cars rather than try to replace all of them at once.

At least some scientists think omicron evolved in animal rather than human hosts. COVID-19 has spread among many types of animals, but the original didn't spread readily among rodents. But omicron has some mutations that seem to help the virus infect rodents...

The best case scenario is that omicron really does produce milder disease, at least among vaccinated/recovered people. That could be part of COVID-19's evolution from a pandemic disease to a mild endemic disease. Worst case it is like delta with an even higher R0, and immunity from...

What an asshole. Elon Musk demanded that SpaceX workers in Los Angeles come to work on Thanksgiving weekend to speed up Raptor engine production. Did it at the last minute too, with a rude, manipulative mass e-mail. (Sadly, rumor has it that the other private rocket company is run by an even...

Ok dude, turn off right-wing media. The time you've wasted rotting your brain on right wing media and social media convincing yourself you don't need the shot is far larger than the time it would take to just get the shot.

The new variant B1.1.529 has been named "omicron", not "nu"

It only takes about 10% of the adult population getting COVID at the same time to overrun the hospital system. Even the "most vaccinated states" aren't 90% vaccinated. Even in New England there's enough people walking around with no immunity to allow a pretty substantial COVID wave.

Tanzania has the most COVID denialist response in the world. But the rest of the continent isn't far behind.

Here in the SF Bay Area, the Model Y has taken over the roads. I've never seen a new car proliferate this fast, except maybe for the Ford Explorer back in the early 90s. Not the Prius. Even the Model 3 didn't get this common this quickly.

The CDC's vaccine tracker continues to show an implausibly large number of partially vaccinated people. 226M with at least 1 dose but only 195M fully vaccinated. The odds that there's actually 31M partially vaxxed people walking around are very low. I bet the real number is around half that...

I'm looking forward to a Rivian versus Tesla grudge match. I really think this could be the 21st century's Ford vs. Chevy. (BTW Ford is way better than Chevy. Cool people drive Fords. Hillbillies drive Chevies.)

This is nonsense. I bet Ford thought about it but at this point any such plan is kaput. Rivian has raised like $22B at this point. It'll take them a decade to burn that even if they crash out. And their valuation is far to large for any traditional automaker to swallow given how little...

So ... was yesterday's dip in TSLA really about Elon's sale or was it from big institutions getting cash to buy that $100B or whatever of Rivian stock going public today?

There's a big 3 of next-gen battery companies in the US: SES (Boston area), Solid Power (Denver area), and QuantumScape (Silicon Valley). Solid Power is by far the furthest along on the production side, but their cell is the least impressive. QuantumScape's cell stack is the holy grail, but they...

Tesla customer service isn't *bad*, it's just *different*. If you know how to use it, your car doesn't have some weird unique problem, and you have realistic expectations it actually works really well. You go to the app into the service section and write a little description of your problem, and...

Elon's sale is not that much of TSLA's total float. So at worst I think this sale is just a short buying opportunity. I think Elon's actually been contemplating this sale for a while in order to fund the Mars stuff plus other ventures like Neuralink and Boring.

Mrs. Uujjj says that ivermectin for COVID patients is a good idea in places with a high rate of parasite infections. Some COVID treatments such as steroids can weaken the body's ability to fight off parasites. And if someone with severe COVID also gets a parasite, it can lead to much worse...

Something really wonderful is happening. Tesla sales are booming. And non-Tesla EV sales are also booming! Among industry watchers (e.g. Autoline.tv), there was a lot of concern that traditional automakers were introducing too many EVs. This was based on the experience of overpriced short-range...

We don't have to do anything like that. Nor should we. We have policy levers we can tweak to raise or lower birth rates. Lower birth rates by making it financially disadvantageous e.g. less generous leave, more costly daycare or housing. Or raise birth rates with the opposite, e.g. generous...

Mars has very little capacity to sustain life. I think even 1M people scattered across Mars colonies would face severe sustainability issues. After Mars the next nearest (sorta) habitable planet may be tens of light years away. We're thousands of years away from being able to move even 1% of the...

Nah, you gotta make hay when the sun is shining. Ya don't wait for the bubble to pop before ya IPO.

There were rumors of $80B. But I think $60B is more reasonable. I'm more bullish on Lucid than on Rivian but I'll buy a few shares anyway.

I think by the time the pandemic actually ends, probably in late 2022 or 2023, and we go back and count all the people we missed plus all the anti-vaxxers who haven't gotten COVID yet, we'll be looking at around 1M total deaths in the US.

Rivian's financials on the other hand, not gonna be so good. The Rivian trucks have a lot of hardware. I bet the $69000 Rivian actually costs more to build than the $169000 Lucid. And Rivian has twice the headcount as Lucid, so their OPEX will be much higher too. I mean, I'll probably buy some...

People are going to be surprised how good Lucid's financials look in Q4/Q1. There's not that much hardware in the Air. It seems to be a pretty easy-to-build car. At a $169000 price, there's a lot of profit margin for a car that was originally targeted at a sub-$60k price.

COVID cases in California ticking back up as the rainy season starts. The best case scenario is they rise for a couple weeks and then fall again on their own, with a rise in hospitalizations/deaths not far out of line with the onset of a bad flu season. The worst case scenario is a substantial...

What Tesla's engineers have achieved is nothing short of remarkable. If Tesla's partial self-driving package had been marketed honestly instead of being mislabeled as "full" self-driving, we'd be on here talking about how mind-blowing this is. It's Elon Musk's overhyping that's leaving the sour...

SeekingAlpha has a (badly rendered) transcript at QuantumScape Corporation (QS) CEO Jagdeep Singh on Q3 2021 Results - Earnings Call Transcript. Yeah I know we all hate SeekingAlpha but it's ok if you click just this once.

If you do the quick calculation, you see that the raw COVID death rate for unvaccinated in Maryland is ~6X that for the vaccinated. The ratio is even higher among adults, and higher still if you fully adjust for age.

This insulting, inappropriate behavior is not welcome here at TMC.

It is not yet worthy of the $10000 price tag.

Nah, it's actually grown in the Salinas area, Monterey County, which went Biden +40.