Tesla, TSLA & the Investment World: the Perpetual Investors' Roundtable

[Cosmacelf]

You think that they spontaneously started generating new models of vehicles with no prior planning? That you can spontaneously whip new packs, new interiors, a new order site, and new federal approval for the new models into existence?

Yeah, seems unlikely. I don’t see how this standard model 3 order announcement could be a reaction to January or February orders. I could see them planning to do it in February in anticipation of a US sales cliff due Fed tax credit expiry, but that’s a move planned last year sometime.

Btw, I keep hearing that international deliveries are hitting logistical snags. Is this a big deal or something minor that is being worked out?

 

[Cosmacelf]

I think people here often overestimate "waiting lists". At the same time, I also think people tend to underestimate new orders. They've been driving Tesla in the US for the latter quarter, possibly even the latter half, of last year. It's really hard for your average person to sit around waiting years for a car. But there's always more people coming onto the "I want a new car" potential-customer pool.

That matches with what Elon said in the journalist conference call when asked about the reservation list.

 

[InDaClub]

Autopilot is great, and works as advertised. Full Self Driving has been sold as an option since 2016 and still does absolutely nothing.

This is nonsense.

You fail to understand the level of complexity involved in solving the FSD problem. The failure possibilities are endless. Consider how a traffic light in the UK is attached to a pole that is secured to the ground vs a traffic light in the US that is suspended from a wire while being blown around (moving) on a windy day.

 

[Artful Dodger]

Is your belief the notice holders received on November 30 stated that settlement of conversions during the Early Conversion period would be 100% cash?
Or that notice of the settlement method was not provided?

No, it is my belief that Dana Hull published no such evidence in her Bloomberg article on Dec 6. Further, no member on this forum has revealed any such notice, nor any other member of the financial press.

Is it your position that Tesla said one thing in public, both before and after the Dec 6 article, yet told something else to bondholders in private communications?

Or that only Dana Hull would report on such a story if it were true?

 

[Cosmacelf]

So what's the technological breakthrough between the P100D from December 2018 and a Long Range Performance Ludicrous from March 2019 that warrants such a price cut? And why is the price cut so wildly different in every country?

Rumor is that Tesla has renegotiated Panasonic cell supply at a 30% price cut. Anyone have a solid source for this? Might be disclosed in a 10Q at some point...

 

[Sean Wagner]

--- never mind, entirely skippable ---

 

[AudubonB]

Yeah but the Wilson speakers are not the best if you prefer music over novelty. Harbeth of UK make the best, most natural speakers. I am a pro violinist performing regularly, I'm submersed in live, acoustic music for hours daily. Wilson sound like big hifi, Harbeth are less expensive, have taken the hi-end industry awards, and Harbeth actually sounds like real music: https://generubinaudio.com/shop?olsPage=t/harbeth-speakers

MODERATOR -

Without yet having gone through the morning's posts, this had better be the VERY LAST post on audiophile equipment. All others will summarily be deleted.

***There isn't any good reason not to create a thread on this subject in the Off-Topic section. There very surely are cognoscenti with valuable information and opinions on it within the Tesla community.***

 

[Sudre]

I thought about it a bit and then grabbed a few screen shots of some store concentrations in the US and London. I think when Tesla was selling only $100K (ish) cars stores were probably required to get people in seats so they could realize the joy of driving a Tesla. Now that mass amounts of cars are going to be hitting the road I think the cars will be introducing people to Tesla more so than stores. Looking at the maps of the few chosen location I think several can easily be paired back in large cities.

Thinking back to Saturn, I did not know of the companies existence until 1994 when I started seeing the cars on the streets in large quantities. I didn't even know they had a single store in my area. More stores would not have helped me discover them.

With the price range of the Model 3 I don't think large concentrations of stores are going to be needed. It is my opinion that Galleries will be sufficient with test drives for people who schedule one. Right now there is an over abundance of places.

 

[sparcs]

Rumor is that Tesla has renegotiated Panasonic cell supply at a 30% price cut. Anyone have a solid source for this? Might be disclosed in a 10Q at some point...

I wonder if it's the whole cell supply. If 18650 included, it would guarantee that S and X stay on 18650 for a while (assuming rumor is true).

Considering the price drop on the S and X, it might be true.

 

[AudubonB]

[QUOTE="Fact Checking, post: 3441329, member: 82503"]Agreed.



"The first 90% of a large software project takes about as much time and money to complete as the second 90% of the project" is the conventional wisdom among people with software and high-tech development experience, which conventional wisdom has a lot of truth and hard lessons behind it, but neural networks have radically different emergent properties:

• A NN training dataset, once collected and labelled, defines the capabilities of the network - and a training dataset is growing monotonously, so capabilities are never 'lost'. With conventional software the speed and cost of development scales with project size: the larger the project, the harder it is to expand it. This is not true of neural networks - they only depend on the training data set and available (off-site) training computing capacity.
  
• Tesla is expanding their training dataset by collecting AP disengagement events from beta testers and from the wider owner fleet as well. This means that their ability to expand the training dataset scales with fleet size, which is growing super-linearly at the moment. Also the 'experience' from past disengagement events never goes away: it will be part of every single future neural network trained.
• If the training dataset is large enough neural networks can be 'tested' off site (on large clusters and in simulation environments) with a high degree of confidence. I estimate Tesla's labeled training dataset to potentially be in the 'hundreds of millions of images' order of magnitude, maybe even a billion images, which is unheard of sophistication in academic NN circles.
• Tesla's current bottleneck appears to be not NN quality but HW performance - see this comment of mine.

I.e. in a highly counter-intuitive fashion the typical learning curve of NNs is slow progress for some time, then almost miraculously a singularity event and "magic" happens: like AlphaGo which used deep learning to become a Go world champion (most complex major board game known, much more complex than chess), in just 3 days from first principles, by playing against itself and learning. Similarly OpenAI trained itself to beat the best Dota players, in just a few days.

While the "90% rule of software/hardware engineering" still applies to Tesla's NN training, deployment and in-car platform and infrastructure, it doesn't apply to the neural networks themselves. This is how Tesla was able to surpass AP1 quality early last year, introduce Navigate on Autopilot last fall and Elon's Model 3 has a development version that can do stop signs, traffic lights, left and right turns as well - that's an almost full Level 4 autonomy feature set.[/QUOTE]
Monotonously?
Monotonically?
Monotopically?
I'm trying to learn something about this topic, and this use of language is simultaneously intriguing and baffling. The more I delved into the variant meanings of those three words, the more it seemed to me any one would serve.

 

[Unpilot]

OT, but: Starship Hopper just had its internal access ports sealed up:

SpaceX BFS - Phase 1 Big Falcon Hopper (BFH) - Photos and Updates

.... meaning that AFAIK all of the internal work is done. The replacement fairing is still being built, and the engines haven't been mounted to the hopper, but they seem to be closing in on completion. Maybe a maiden flight in <1 month.

I can't believe I get to watch in real time what was only science fiction a few years ago!

 

[Cosmacelf]

I wonder if it's the whole cell supply. If 18650 included, it would guarantee that S and X stay on 18650 for a while (assuming rumor is true).

Considering the price drop on the S and X, it might be true.

I think this refers only to the 18650 supply contract since it was that particular contract that expired last year. I would guess that the gigafactory supply contract has at least a year or two to run before being renegotiated.

 

[Fred42]

This is TSLA's 'netflix' moment... Some time ago netflix made what appeared to be a weird and customer crushing decision, charge double for dvd mail in and streaming. Well it appears that streaming won, those who complained about not getting their dvd mail in service are having problems locating the dvd player, let alone finding the tv input button to switch to the dvd, get up from the sofa put the dvd in...

The closing gallery stores is confusing for us, but it is only a high end 'real' website, and i'm guessing data has shown that sales from such gallery stores do not match the costs of these stores. Really, now a days, if you know what you want, why even go to the mall or the store anyways. Amazon has shown us that we can get what we want even if we want it tomorrow without leaving the house...

So these current moves feel weird in the context of the past 20-30 years of shopping, but this transformation of online sales is on the pathway for the next decade....

Elon might have underestimated the impact of store closings on public perception that Tesla isn't going to make it. The effect on sales might compromise the success of his plan.
I was expecting that the Y reveal would be closer to start of production to limit the effect on sales of the 3 and X. But maybe the Y reveal will be sooner to generate optimism about the future.

 

[LST]

Just reviewed the numbers and it seems that the tracker estimates 0% of Model 3 deliveries in Belgium as Model 3, which is incorrect. That definitely made my guess wrong. But you are also wrong, Model 3 deliveries in Norway were 791. To recap here is where we stand

Norway : 791 (known) the Netherlands 472 (known) Belgium 150-200 (guess) Italy 80. UK 0 (known). Sweden 0 (known) Austria 100 (guess)

That leaves : Switzerland, I don't think deliveries started there yet. France I'd guess twice as many as in Belgium. Germany about as many as in the Netherlands, Spain about as many as in Italy.

Count it all up and I get to around 2500 ish. As explained above indeed a bit higher than I calculated due not be carefull enough analysing the raw numbers. 500 more or less Model 3's are not going to make or break the cash position which is the important thing to review.



Good point. Still. Do the price changes and then the chaotic allocations of compensations sounds like a plan that they had carefully planned? Maybe the misplan wasn't in Europe, but in China? Configurator opened a lot earlier there and it's a full week quicker to ship there so I could see management counting on a deliveries there starting early February? Maybe the whole trade relation thing threw everything off there. Idk to be honest. But we aren't seeing something that was orderly planned and executed here.

Anyway, it's not so important. The question is, does the company behave as it is low on cash or not?

I would be surprised if EU ( including the non EU Switzerland) deliveries would not surpass 5000 in Q1. Swiss deliveries started Feb 22, We got ours on Monday 25th. Look for my post with pics upthread. Tesla delivery folks are anxious to get the cars asap to customers, since the wharehouse has space for approx. 200 M3. And they keep em coming. My WAG for deliveries in CH as of now would be 250 to 300.

 

[anthonyj]

This is TSLA's 'netflix' moment... Some time ago netflix made what appeared to be a weird and customer crushing decision, charge double for dvd mail in and streaming. Well it appears that streaming won, those who complained about not getting their dvd mail in service are having problems locating the dvd player, let alone finding the tv input button to switch to the dvd, get up from the sofa put the dvd in...

The closing gallery stores is confusing for us, but it is only a high end 'real' website, and i'm guessing data has shown that sales from such gallery stores do not match the costs of these stores. Really, now a days, if you know what you want, why even go to the mall or the store anyways. Amazon has shown us that we can get what we want even if we want it tomorrow without leaving the house...

So these current moves feel weird in the context of the past 20-30 years of shopping, but this transformation of online sales is on the pathway for the next decade....

As long as Tesla still offers test drives, you may be right. I hope that they have some system to bring a test drive vehicle to you. I would never think about buying a car without a test drive.

 

[KarenRei]

I would be surprised if EU ( including the non EU Switzerland) deliveries would not surpass 5000 in Q1. Swiss deliveries started Feb 22, We got ours on Monday 25th. Look for my post with pics upthread. Tesla delivery folks are anxious to get the cars asap to customers, since the wharehouse has space for approx. 200 M3. And they keep em coming. My WAG for deliveries in CH as of now would be 250 to 300.

So you think that total EU deliveries in all of Q1 will be only 5 times what Norway achieved in half a month?

 

[LST]

No, i would be surprised if it would not be much higher, but i have no clue on how many ships are under way for EU in Q1..

 

[avoigt]

I would be surprised if EU ( including the non EU Switzerland) deliveries would not surpass 5000 in Q1. Swiss deliveries started Feb 22, We got ours on Monday 25th. Look for my post with pics upthread. Tesla delivery folks are anxious to get the cars asap to customers, since the wharehouse has space for approx. 200 M3. And they keep em coming. My WAG for deliveries in CH as of now would be 250 to 300.

Just for reference:

In Stuttgart at just one Delivery center from the about 7 we have in Germany they delivered Friday 50 and Saturday 60 3s. First delivery in Germany was at February 13th.

Make the math and you get an indication where we are at.

5k for Q1 for EU is in my opinion way too low....

 

[KarenRei]

As long as Tesla still offers test drives, you may be right. I hope that they have some system to bring a test drive vehicle to you. I would never think about buying a car without a test drive.

Even if they don't there's going to be a lot of people early on for whom the price reduction is far more important than the fact that if they want a test drive they might need to ask an owner or rent one on Turo. Who out there thinks, "I'd rather pay many thousands of dollars more for the vehicle than do a 1-day rental on Turo where I can drive wherever I want, however I want without a salesperson hassling me"?

The thing that boggles me is how many people keep forgetting that Tesla can change its policies at any point in the future. It can create any sort of test drive program it wants at any time it wants. It can open stores at any time it wants, wherever it wants. Etc, etc, etc. The question is not, "Is X suitable for Tesla from now until the End of Time?" It's "Is X suitable for Tesla now?"

Whether or not Tesla has a sort of test-drive programme in the near-term, that says nothing about whether they will introduce one later. "Later" meaning "After time has passed, and thus when margins are even higher".

 

[Webeevdrivers]

Those of us who live in BC (and other parts of Canada) just received news of the phase 2 build out of CCS/Chademo in the province (and the rest of Canada). This build out covers pretty much all the major North west, central and North East routes not covered by the already comprehensive Chademo/CCS network. I don’t think anyone expected the announcement until summer but it came out a few days ago. The existing network is already much more comprehensive than the Supercharger network. These new additions just blow it away.

There are many that we know that are and were delaying making the decision on buying a Tesla Model 3 decision until the availability of the Chademo/CCS adapter. Without it the decision is easy. Even if the Leaf or Bolt or whatever is not as much car and the same price. Being only able access a narrow strip thru the middle of the province compared to being able to travel anywhere without being tied to a very limited proprietary Tesla network is a no brainer for those of us who need unrestricted provincial travel. My wife and I so want to join the Tesla family but this latest development closes the door on that. 14 Supercharger locations via 150 plus CCS/Chademo locations by 2020 with already half in place.

The whole thing is very frustrating for us.