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

[Artful Dodger]

The Tesla Semi: Why Now? // The Road to Commercial Viability | The Limiting Factor w. Jordan Giesige (8 hrs ago)

Topics discussed:

• Introduction
• Powertrain Efficiency
• Energy Density
• Why Tesla Blew the 2018 Delivery Guidance
• The Original Master Plan
• Charging Infrastructure
• Summary // Why Now and What's Next?

Cheers!

 

[TrendTrader007]

To those of you who are long term holders: if the stock price trends lower after March 1st, will you buy more shares/options or will you do nothing since you’re already in too deep?

those who wanted to buy TSLA already had great buying opportunity earlier this year when stock was much lower. anyone still waiting to buy TSLA on another dip either does not believe that TSLA someday will be worth >10-20X current market cap or has some other external reasons for not buying TSLA
after a 75% drawdown over span of 15 months or so, rise in stock price could be equally spectacular. those waiting on sidelines may have a long time to wait for lower prices.
as far as options, i hope many who played options learned their lesson. very difficult to make money consistently with options. a trader could easily make 10 to 20X or more in a single options trade, only to lose it all in a single bad trade. those who have a time machine can make big money playing options and keep it. rest of us could be a single bad trade away from being wiped out
of course, exception will be really deep in the money long term call options or LEAPS. the lower the strike price and longer the duration, less is the risk but conversely, lower is the leverage and lower % appreciation of invested capital. so, numerous choices in following order of least risky to most risky:
TSLA as part of diversified portfolio
100% TSLA
TSLL
LEAPS
> 150% TSLA via margin
short to intermediate term call options
i'm sure there are several other ways to leverage TSLA that i am not aware of, much more sophisticated strategies to make or lose money
as far as market timing, volatility is certainly to trader's advantage as long as one has a very good time machine

 

[wipster]

My new town gets its electricity from a huge array of solar panels built on what had been ranchland. Elsewhere, an activist group is creating problems.

NPR - 8:41 pm EST:
An activist group is spreading misinformation to stop solar projects in rural America

So @Curt Renz , interesting info about people fighting solar panel projects, that really sucks. We have 3 projects in our local area and while I haven't read about interference yet, given the political landscape here I wouldn't put it past some people.

On another note, been reading a lot about the Thwaites Glacier in Antarctica, nicknamed the Doomsday Glacier because of what will almost inevitably happen when it breaks off in just a few years. That event is theorized to rise the global sea level by 2 ft. Would that affect your location in Florida and/or the ranchland utilized for solar panels?

 

[jerry33]

To those of you who are long term holders: if the stock price trends lower after March 1st, will you buy more shares/options or will you do nothing since you’re already in too deep?

It would have to go much lower than the recent low to be underwater. So, no I'm not in too deep.

 

[FastEddieB]

During other times there are a lot of ways to make money on options (either short or long term).

To be fair, there also a lot of ways to lose money on options (either short or long term).

In fact, due to the difficulty - or impossibility - of timing markets, I daresay there are a lot more losers than winners in the options game.

 

[Curt Renz]

So @Curt Renz , interesting info about people fighting solar panel projects, that really sucks. We have 3 projects in our local area and while I haven't read about interference yet, given the political landscape here I wouldn't put it past some people.

On another note, been reading a lot about the Thwaites Glacier in Antarctica, nicknamed the Doomsday Glacier because of what will almost inevitably happen when it breaks off in just a few years. That event is theorized to rise the global sea level by 2 ft. Would that affect your location in Florida and/or the ranchland utilized for solar panels?

Our town and solar array are 30 feet above sea level and 20 miles from the sea. The eye of Huricane Ian roared over us in September, yet our town was virtually unscathed. Mainly trees bent over that the HOA soon uprighted. We did not lose power from the solar array; all cables are underground. Our town's survival made all the national news, including "60 Minutes". Nearby towns nearer the sea were decimated or virtually destroyed. The last thing they need is a sea level rise.

 

[FireMedic]

I really enjoyed this write up, thought I’d pass it along. Substack just recommended this author to me so I’m not real sure about his/her reliability but the logic and math seem to be solid. Sorry no summary; I’m afraid I wouldn’t do it justice. 5-10 minute read about potential/present value for FSD/autonomy.

What's the Value of Tesla FSD? (incl. Excel Model)

Teslas are becoming robots, hidden in plain sight. It offers tremendous upside for the stock. Here is my Tesla FSD Valuation Model without robotaxis.

fallacyalarm.substack.com

 

[wipster]

Our town and solar array are 30 feet above sea level and 20 miles from the sea. The eye of Huricane Ian roared over us in September, yet our town was virtually unscathed. Mainly trees bent over that the HOA soon uprighted. We did not lose power from the solar array; all cables are underground. Our town's survival made all the national news, including "60 Minutes". Nearby towns nearer the sea were decimated or virtually destroyed. The last thing they need is a sea level rise.

Thanks for the info my friend! Saw the reports and especially the segment on 60 Minutes! You and your neighbors should feel proud as you're a great example of how to build neighborhoods in the future!

Yes, terrible devastation along the coast, the last thing they need is a sea level rise, but I fear this is just the start. Florida may soon become another island state.

 

[EVNow]

To be fair, there also a lot of ways to lose money on options (either short or long term).

In fact, due to the difficulty - or impossibility - of timing markets, I daresay there are a lot more losers than winners in the options game.

Ofcourse, as with any leverage, the risk is higher. Just like with TSLL.

 

[EVNow]

Google “firetruck crash -tesla”.

They don’t make national headlines because it’s doesn't get clicks if there’s no Tesla in it. I stopped at four.

Person Killed After Vehicle Slams Into Fire Truck Responding to Crash on Stevenson Expressway

A person was killed and multiple people were injured in a series of crashes on the Stevenson Expressway Sunday morning, authorities say.

www.nbcchicago.com

Crash involving fire truck leaves 1 dead in south Charlotte

Charlotte Fire was responding to a medical incident call when the crash occurred.

www.wcnc.com

SUV crashes into Dallas fire engine protecting emergency vehicles on I-30

Dallas County Sheriff's Office deputies are investigating after an SUV crashed into a fire engine that was on scene of another crash on I-30 early Saturday morning.

www.fox4news.com

Vehicle crashes into fire truck Downtown

MEMPHIS, Tenn. — Officers are working on a two-vehicle crash involving a Memphis Fire Department fire truck. The crash happened Monday morning on Danny Thomas and Union. According to reports,…

wreg.com

These are all in the last month. Enough of this Teslas crash into fire truck *sugar*. Everyone does it.

Thanks - but I'm looking for actual stats. So that we can authoritatively debunk FUD.

 

[jabloomf1230]

Thanks for the info my friend! Saw the reports and especially the segment on 60 Minutes! You and your neighbors should feel proud as you're a great example of how to build neighborhoods in the future!

Yes, terrible devastation along the coast, the last thing they need is a sea level rise, but I fear this is just the start. Florida may soon become another island state.

Or a vast underwater plain topped by the Britton Seamount.

 

[Singuy]

Nice, ability to add speech for every intervention!

https://twitter.com/x/status/1627508976819773440

 

[dhanson865]

FSD Beta v11.3 Release Notes

• Enabled FSD Beta on highway. This unifies the vision and planning stack on and off-highway and replaces the legacy highway stack, which is over four years old. The legacy highway stack still relies on several single-camera and single-frame networks, and was setup to handle simple lane-specific maneuvers. FSD Beta’s multi-camera video networks and next-gen planner, that allows for more complex agent interactions with less reliance on lanes, make way for adding more intelligent behaviors, smoother control and better decision making.
• Added voice drive-notes. After an intervention, you can now send Tesla an anonymous voice message describing your experience to help improve Autopilot.
• Expanded Automatic Emergency Braking (AEB) to handle vehicles that cross ego’s path. This includes cases where other vehicles run their red light or turn across ego’s path, stealing the right-of-way.
• Replay of previous collisions of this type suggests that 49% of the events would be mitigated by the new behavior. This improvement is now active in both manual driving and autopilot operation.
• Improved autopilot reaction time to red light runners and stop sign runners by 500ms, by increased reliance on object’s instantaneous kinematics along with trajectory estimates.
• Added a long-range highway lanes network to enable earlier response to blocked lanes and high curvature.
• Reduced goal pose prediction error for candidate trajectory neural network by 40% and reduced runtime by 3X. This was achieved by improving the dataset using heavier and more robust offline optimization, increasing the size of this improved dataset by 4X, and implementing a better architecture and feature space.
• Improved occupancy network detections by oversampling on 180K challenging videos including rain reflections, road debris, and high curvature.
• Improved recall for close-by cut-in cases by 20% by adding 40k autolabeled fleet clips of this scenario to the dataset. Also improved handling of cut-in cases by improved modeling of their motion into ego’s lane, leveraging the same for smoother lateral and longitudinal control for cut-in objects.
• Added “lane guidance module and perceptual loss to the Road Edges and Lines network, improving the absolute recall of lines by 6% and the absolute recall of road edges by 7%.
• Improved overall geometry and stability of lane predictions by updating the “lane guidance” module representation with information relevant to predicting crossing and oncoming lanes.
• Improved handling through high speed and high curvature scenarios by offsetting towards inner lane lines.
• Improved lane changes, including: earlier detection and handling for simultaneous lane changes, better gap selection when approaching deadlines, better integration between speed-based and nav-based lane change decisions and more differentiation between the FSD driving profiles with respect to speed lane changes.
• Improved longitudinal control response smoothness when following lead vehicles by better modeling the possible effect of lead vehicles’ brake lights on their future speed profiles.
• Improved detection of rare objects by 18% and reduced the depth error to large trucks by 9%, primarily from migrating to more densely supervised autolabeled datasets.
• Improved semantic detections for school busses by 12% and vehicles transitioning from stationary-to-driving by 15%. This was achieved by improving dataset label accuracy and increasing dataset size by 5%.
• Improved decision making at crosswalks by leveraging neural network based ego trajectory estimation in place of approximated kinematic models.
• Improved reliability and smoothness of merge control, by deprecating legacy merge region tasks in favor of merge topologies derived from vector lanes.
• Unlocked longer fleet telemetry clips (by up to 26%) by balancing compressed IPC buffers and optimized write scheduling across twin SOCs.

 

[Hiline]

The Tesla Semi: Why Now? // The Road to Commercial Viability | The Limiting Factor w. Jordan Giesige (8 hrs ago)

Topics discussed:

• Introduction
• Powertrain Efficiency
• Energy Density
• Why Tesla Blew the 2018 Delivery Guidance
• The Original Master Plan
• Charging Infrastructure
• Summary // Why Now and What's Next?

Cheers!

This is a good video. One other big reason Tesla started producing the Semis last year is due to the urgency applied on manufacturers and carriers by California laws: California Passes Nation’s First Electric Trucks Standard.

For the longest time, trucking companies tried to push back against changes to their operations, but this law passed in 2020 forced their hand. The freight industry must start the switch in the next several years, and Tesla is the only legitimate player on the market. Guess who these trucking companies are going to buy their EV trucks from?

It is no coincidence that the first Tesla Semis were delivered to California.

 

[Cosmacelf]

FSD Beta v11.3 Release Notes

• Enabled FSD Beta on highway. This unifies the vision and planning stack on and off-highway and replaces the legacy highway stack, which is over four years old. The legacy highway stack still relies on several single-camera and single-frame networks, and was setup to handle simple lane-specific maneuvers. FSD Beta’s multi-camera video networks and next-gen planner, that allows for more complex agent interactions with less reliance on lanes, make way for adding more intelligent behaviors, smoother control and better decision making.
• Added voice drive-notes. After an intervention, you can now send Tesla an anonymous voice message describing your experience to help improve Autopilot.
• Expanded Automatic Emergency Braking (AEB) to handle vehicles that cross ego’s path. This includes cases where other vehicles run their red light or turn across ego’s path, stealing the right-of-way.
• Replay of previous collisions of this type suggests that 49% of the events would be mitigated by the new behavior. This improvement is now active in both manual driving and autopilot operation.
• Improved autopilot reaction time to red light runners and stop sign runners by 500ms, by increased reliance on object’s instantaneous kinematics along with trajectory estimates.
• Added a long-range highway lanes network to enable earlier response to blocked lanes and high curvature.
• Reduced goal pose prediction error for candidate trajectory neural network by 40% and reduced runtime by 3X. This was achieved by improving the dataset using heavier and more robust offline optimization, increasing the size of this improved dataset by 4X, and implementing a better architecture and feature space.
• Improved occupancy network detections by oversampling on 180K challenging videos including rain reflections, road debris, and high curvature.
• Improved recall for close-by cut-in cases by 20% by adding 40k autolabeled fleet clips of this scenario to the dataset. Also improved handling of cut-in cases by improved modeling of their motion into ego’s lane, leveraging the same for smoother lateral and longitudinal control for cut-in objects.
• Added “lane guidance module and perceptual loss to the Road Edges and Lines network, improving the absolute recall of lines by 6% and the absolute recall of road edges by 7%.
• Improved overall geometry and stability of lane predictions by updating the “lane guidance” module representation with information relevant to predicting crossing and oncoming lanes.
• Improved handling through high speed and high curvature scenarios by offsetting towards inner lane lines.
• Improved lane changes, including: earlier detection and handling for simultaneous lane changes, better gap selection when approaching deadlines, better integration between speed-based and nav-based lane change decisions and more differentiation between the FSD driving profiles with respect to speed lane changes.
• Improved longitudinal control response smoothness when following lead vehicles by better modeling the possible effect of lead vehicles’ brake lights on their future speed profiles.
• Improved detection of rare objects by 18% and reduced the depth error to large trucks by 9%, primarily from migrating to more densely supervised autolabeled datasets.
• Improved semantic detections for school busses by 12% and vehicles transitioning from stationary-to-driving by 15%. This was achieved by improving dataset label accuracy and increasing dataset size by 5%.
• Improved decision making at crosswalks by leveraging neural network based ego trajectory estimation in place of approximated kinematic models.
• Improved reliability and smoothness of merge control, by deprecating legacy merge region tasks in favor of merge topologies derived from vector lanes.
• Unlocked longer fleet telemetry clips (by up to 26%) by balancing compressed IPC buffers and optimized write scheduling across twin SOCs.

Can’t wait! There’s quite a few things here which I suspect I will notice improvement on. So … 2 weeks?

 

[willow_hiller]

Can’t wait! There’s quite a few things here which I suspect I will notice improvement on. So … 2 weeks?

Might be sooner. A slightly out of the loop employee on Reddit said he's had it for the last 4 days and didn't realize it. He later proved himself by posting the missing third page of release notes:

https://www.reddit.com/r/teslamotors/comments/116ux0r/_/j98o3d0

 

[2daMoon]

The cheapest (not in a good way) Tesla I've ever seen. Reported to be nickels.

obnoxious youtube behind the spoiler

Spoiler: yt

I guess it belongs to Nickel-less Cage?

 

[Artful Dodger]

Can’t wait! There’s quite a few things here which I suspect I will notice improvement on. So … 2 weeks?

Its now been 9-mths since "single-stack" was first deployed to employees, running in shadow-mode: (May 23, 2022)

Sam Bennett on Twitter: "@greentheonly @ValueAnalyst1 @elonmusk @Tesla Well, Elon has been hyping up V11 aka one stack to rule them all as being a major step forward towards successful fsd deployment and ultimately robotaxi for quite awhile now. Wouldn’t you consider that software related?" / Twitter

green on Twitter: "@dukesfan94 @ValueAnalyst1 @elonmusk @Tesla it's now deployed in a "shadow mode" / Twitter​

​

Sam Bennett on Twitter: "@greentheonly @ValueAnalyst1 @elonmusk @Tesla No way? As of when?" / Twitter​

​

green on Twitter: "@dukesfan94 @ValueAnalyst1 @elonmusk @Tesla few days ago." / Twitter​

It just takes time to get things right. Better to get it right 1st, and ship 2nd, rather than the other way around (as NHTSA actions have shown).

Cheers!

 

[Cosmacelf]

Its now been 9-mths since "single-stack" was first deployed to employees, running in shadow-mode: (May 23, 2022)

Sam Bennett on Twitter: "@greentheonly @ValueAnalyst1 @elonmusk @Tesla Well, Elon has been hyping up V11 aka one stack to rule them all as being a major step forward towards successful fsd deployment and ultimately robotaxi for quite awhile now. Wouldn’t you consider that software related?" / Twitter

green on Twitter: "@dukesfan94 @ValueAnalyst1 @elonmusk @Tesla it's now deployed in a "shadow mode" / Twitter​

​

Sam Bennett on Twitter: "@greentheonly @ValueAnalyst1 @elonmusk @Tesla No way? As of when?" / Twitter​

​

green on Twitter: "@dukesfan94 @ValueAnalyst1 @elonmusk @Tesla few days ago." / Twitter​

It just takes time to get things right. Better to get it right 1st, and ship 2nd, rather than the other way around.

Cheers!

Actually this isn’t the last major architectural change by far. IMHO single stack for freeway and urban is just a stepping stone to the next major update where the neural net will be driving the car and doing all the planning. Right now most of all of that is in C code. The NN is mostly used for perception.

 

[Cosmacelf]

https://twitter.com/x/status/1627545974452244481