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

[tinm]

Speaking of layoffs, etc., late last week Tesla suddenly terminated a few people from its legislative/policy team, including the person who was leading the legislative effort here in New Mexico. As of right now us owners in New Mexico have no Tesla person assigned to work with us and legislators to get something going for the next legislative session, or any interim committee hearings between now and then. No idea if/when we will hear from Tesla officially on this. Bummed.

 

[Zaxxon]

Speaking of layoffs, etc., late last week Tesla suddenly terminated a few people from its legislative/policy team, including the person who was leading the legislative effort here in New Mexico. As of right now us owners in New Mexico have no Tesla person assigned to work with us and legislators to get something going for the next legislative session, or any interim committee hearings between now and then. No idea if/when we will hear from Tesla officially on this. Bummed.

Ugh.

 

[NicoV]

For anyone who's not understanding the "Raven" reference:

Tesla, TSLA & the Investment World: the 2019 Investors' Roundtable
Tesla, TSLA & the Investment World: the 2019 Investors' Roundtable

As a completely unrelated side topic, something just occurred to me. GM just hit their tax credit cliff - but said that they have no plans to compensate for it with a drop in price on the Bolt. They moved 4,316 Bolts this quarter. I'm sure that number is going to drop heavily next quarter. I wonder if that might shift another thousand or so sales Tesla's way...

Maybe that’s why Tesla is stockpiling it’s ZEV credits: Anticipation of lower sales of non-Tesla EVs (which are even less competitive after the tax credit expiration), forcing all competitors to compete for Tesla ZEV credits.

 

[jhm]

Of course. Now turn yourself in at the closest retraining center for doubting your master's... err government's benevolent actions.

We're from the Government, and we're here to help you Tweet.

 

[KarenRei]

Maybe that’s why Tesla is stockpiling it’s ZEV credits: Anticipation of lower sales of non-Tesla EVs (which are even less competitive after the tax credit expiration), forcing all competitors to compete for Tesla ZEV credits.

Hmm, the ZEV credit aspect didn't even occur to me. This comes at a time when California's ZEV credit requirements just significantly increased.

 

[MP3Mike]

As a completely unrelated side topic, something just occurred to me. GM just hit their tax credit cliff - but said that they have no plans to compensate for it with a drop in price on the Bolt. They moved 4,316 Bolts this quarter. I'm sure that number is going to drop heavily next quarter. I wonder if that might shift another thousand or so sales Tesla's way in the US...

Actually I don't think that is what they said. They said they wouldn't lower the MSRP. But they could increase the dealer incentives... (Which I thought I saw someone said they have done.)

 

[humbaba]

Actually I don't think that is what they said. They said they wouldn't lower the MSRP. But they could increase the dealer incentives... (Which I thought I saw someone said they have done.)

They may well do that, but if so that will come at significant cost as they are already ~$9k in the hole per bolt sold. At some point does it make any sense to continue? The dealerships aren't going to lose the money.

Someone might point out that the $9k figure is over two years out of date and that GM may have improved efficiencies since then. True, but a large part of the price tag comes from the drive train. Which is sourced from LG. Given their predatory pricing, if anything the figure may be higher.

1) GM stands to lose $9,000 per car on Chevy Bolt
2) Audi Hit With 10% Price Increase On LG Batteries Due To High Demand | CleanTechnica

 

[MP3Mike]

They may well do that, but if so that will come at significant cost as they are already ~$9k in the hole per bolt sold. At some point does it make any sense to continue? The dealerships aren't going to lose the money.

Their other choice is to stop selling the Bolt and buy ZEV credits from Tesla. Which I think would work out to about $7,250 per vehicle. (I think they get ~2.9 credits per Bolt and Tesla tends to sell the credits at 50 cents on the dollar, or $2,500 each.)

So they were close to breaking even when selling at a $9k loss. So now do they lose a little bit more money, do they pay the $5k per ZEV needed, or do they start funding Tesla?

My guess is that they will chose to lose more, but they will limit availability to approximately how many they need to sell to get just enough ZEV credits.

Edit: Did some research and it looks like the Bolt gets closer to 2.9 ZEVs/each, so I updated the data above.

 

[shootformoon]

I just quoted you but I want to thank all of you for the answers. Like I said I have about 25 % invested in the company. Assuming my daughter goes on to do a four years college course I will not need it for another five years as I can sell the other equities first.

I don't reply to this threat often but it is a pity that people need to question every post for trolls.

I think sometimes my disappointment is not so much financial. I really love the car, the technology and the company. and I just want them desperately to succeed. The world would be in such a better shape. I just cannot understand that people are against them. And when I see the company facing a challenge it bites a bit

I saw a post the other day about the deal from Fiat Chryler where someone said "If this goes on, Tesla will never go bankrupt" like if he was sad that it would not go bankrupt and rooting it for it go bankrupt! It is like hoping someone would die.

Heck, even my brother is a hater. He lives in Australia where he says that hardly nobody drives them because they love their V8's. He is always talking about that "expensive contraption" I am driving and cannot understand I paid so much money money for a car. Though we used to talk about cars all the time I now avoid talking about it with him.

These rooting for tsla's bankruptcy are exactly the people who rooted for the freedom of the tobacco companies to kill people.

Very soon, you can brag before your brother because V8, afterall, is so 20th century artifact.

 

[humbaba]

Their other choice is to stop selling the Bolt and buy ZEV credits from Tesla. Which I think would work out to about $9,750 per vehicle. (I think they get 3.9 credits per Bolt and Tesla tends to sell the credits at 50 cents on the dollar, or $2,500 each.)

So they were breaking even when selling at a $9k loss. So now do they lose a little bit of money, do they pay the $5k per ZEV needed, or do they start funding Tesla?

My guess is that they will chose to lose more, but they will limit availability to approximately how many they need to sell to get just enough ZEV credits.

Well, if LG only hit them up for 10% price hike then $10k loss vs $10k ZEV to Tesla? I can see your point. They'd probably rather lose even more money than buy a single red ZEV from Tesla.

But... that assumes they can sell enough Bolts to meet their needs. I freely admit, I have no idea how many ZEV they have and assume they have a number stockpiled, but... Bolt sales were already struggling and they may have to subsidize them by another 5-10k just to move them at the same rates when compared to the M3 because the Bolt is extremely uncompetitive. Last year the story went that Bolt sales tanking in the US were simply due to overseas focus. While the focus was true, they also tanked overseas.

Maybe I'm all wet, but I really think the Bolt will tank this year.

[edited to add: maybe the Bolt is making a comeback -- I hadn't seen their March numbers and that is a respectable increase and brings them back to par for Q1, YOY. But I wouldn't count on the rally surviving volume deliveries of the M3SR. And... I just remembered they faced their own rebate reduction which would have pulled demand forward so... yeah... I only see their sales numbers dropping.]

 

[j6Lpi429@3j]

I cant see this posted:
Cathie Wood on Twitter
Does $500million sound right?

 

[Webeevdrivers]

Actually I don't think that is what they said. They said they wouldn't lower the MSRP. But they could increase the dealer incentives... (Which I thought I saw someone said they have done.)

We are in small town BC. There are 15 Bolts on our local lot. A salesman called us to come look at one as we had been in last year when they were impossible to get. We are shopping so we went to look. I asked on a no trade deal what he could do and he said the price is the price essentially. I mentioned the base model three is cheaper and he made some comment to the effect that yes but Tesla would be out of business in a year. Where would I get service. Decent guy but the Bolt isn’t right for us.

 

[Nocturnal]

TSLA was a lot more exciting last year when it was going up every day.

Some stats show that it takes more electricity just to produce gas for an ICE car than an EV requires to run.

@JRP3

Sorry you disagree, but here is my source.
There is no exact calculation for how much electricity it takes to drill, transport and refine a gallon of gasoline, but the accepted amount is around 8 kWh. So, for 8 kWh, you can go around 22 miles (using the U.S. average; we know you can go over twice that if you drive a Toyota Prius). That means that a gasoline car uses just under 40 kWh to go 100 miles. An EV, on the other hand, uses around 30 kWh to go 100 miles (given 3.3 miles per kWh, which is on the low side for some cars). Even if the exact numbers need to be shifted a bit one way or the other, we're just comparing electricity use here – not the petroleum that needs to be factored in for the ICE vehicle. So, if we were able to magically use all the electricity that is currently spent to give us gas and shove it into automotive battery packs instead, we'd use less energy and no gasoline. So much for the long tailpipe argument. Nissan sometimes uses this argument when advertising the Leaf, but it's not a commonly used statistic. We wonder why.

How gas cars use more electricity to go 100 miles than EVs do

These rooting for tsla's bankruptcy are exactly the people who rooted for the freedom of the tobacco companies to kill people.

Very soon, you can brag before your brother because V8, afterall, is so 20th century artifact.

I gave 3 V8s a nice view of my P3D's taillights this past Friday at the drag strip. A modified Dodge ram (was actually fast), a built up Chevy Bel Air (or similar), and a newer challenger/charger.

 

[mekberg]

I cant see this posted:
Cathie Wood on Twitter
Does $500million sound right?

Lots of TSLAQ hate in the replies.

 

[humbaba]

Lots of TSLAQ hate in the replies.

Yeah. I think wanting a citation is fair, but the comments went well beyond being reasonable.

 

[BioSehnsucht]

Firstly, do we know it for a fact that they are using two chips for redundancy? Another approach would be to build redundancy and fail-over into the chip itself, which would increase the gate count and power consumption by far less than the +100% of a dual chip solution.

Secondly, Elon said 20x speed lately, which I'm interpreting as the actual effective performance increase.

On-chip redundancies are good for improving yield due to testable production defects, trying to detect runtime failures on-chip and then hope you have the right things being duplicated is more difficult. What if you get multiple errors on the chip, and both copies of the NN are affected? How do you decide which to use?

Actually, there is somewhat this problem with only 2 (and not 3 or some other odd number) of chips, too.

If they're using dual chips, it will be to protect against hard failure of a chip dying / locking up / overheating / etc, not so much against random cosmic ray bit flipping or electromigration causing one chip to produce wrong output (as the output might still look valid, and then you don't know which chip to use).

This is more redundancy along the lines of having dual steering motors or redundant braking boosters, etc, rather than 3+ computers having their output voted on as you would for spacecraft for example.

 

[lklundin]

I cant see this posted:
Cathie Wood on Twitter
Does $500million sound right?

Wood doesn't say 'in 2019', but other than that that tweet could serve as a litmus test for how well informed she is on Tesla.

I mean, the actual amount paid by FCA to Tesla should become known later and then we can see how close the tweet came. Btw, 500M $ is about 440M €.

 

[Unpilot]

Lots of TSLAQ hate in the replies.

I usually stop after the first few...it just gets worse.

 

[canoemore]

Of potential interest in the run-up to the event on the 22nd:

<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">Hm, another firmware, another (intentional? unintentional?) data leak. I wonder when the product will appear in real life... Will they send in the black model Xes if I actually say out loud the contents? </p>&mdash; green (@greentheonly) <a href="green on Twitter">April 8, 2019</a></blockquote>
<script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>

 

[canoemore]

Whoops. Meant to include this: