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

[WattsHappening]

This could be the start of something big.

The actual app might be limited in reach, but it could lead the way to an App Store at some point, hopefully soon.

https://twitter.com/x/status/1688765083394994176

 

[betstarship]

Do not say app store, everyone. Just do not. Stop it.

 

[WattsHappening]

Do not say app store, everyone. Just do not. Stop it.

Explain please.

 

[Buckminster]

Threads of the day:
Mars and Off Planet Colonization - Pros and Cons Discussion Boring on Mars?
Future Tesla UI Integrations App store?
Next Tesla CEO/COO Vaibhav, Zach & Drew, oh yeah and George Hotz...
Investor Engineering Discussions End of the superconductor dream?

2 CTs in inventory with no buyers:

https://twitter.com/x/status/1688710899710984192

 

[EQC_]

Not surprisingly our resident expert of CNBS, Gordie the Clown, does not agree with our Accountant.

View attachment 963152

Can somebody send the below-linked highly informative thread to GJ, covering the short-seller attack on Solar City?

Elon Musk vs. Short sellers

First let me say that I don't have anything against short selling in general. People bet on stocks going up, they should be allowed to bet on stocks going down. Personally, I do both and I don't think it makes me a bad person. Short "squeezes" also do not benefit long term shareholders. If every...

teslamotorsclub.com

[[I don't remember all the details in the thread...but I remember reading this detailed post a few times a couple years ago, and found it quite eye-opening and informative.]]

Also, maybe somebody should ask GJ if he "coverd SCTY" the same way he "covers" TSLA -- with all sorts of half-truths and misleading nonsense, so obviously flawed that people wonder if he himself even believes his own words. Some light googling tells me GJ called Tesla a "Busted Growth Story" in August of 2020... and since then Tesla's auto deliveries are up by roughly 4x annually, and even with the current macro volatility, TSLA is also way up.

 

[betstarship]

Explain please.

The entire concept has been beaten to death since the Model S. For example:

Tesla said to be developing app store to rival Apple and Android

Tesla may already be working on own Apple-like app store that would enable owners to download and install apps to their electric car.

thedriven.io

 

[M|S|M MYP]

Not surprisingly our resident expert of CNBS, Gordie the Clown, does not agree with our Accountant.

View attachment 963152

At least he used the word effectively instead of essentially. Once a , always a . He knows the accounting at SolarCity? Is this another 'trust me bro, it's worth $20/share max' analysis by GLJ research that consists of Gordo and his mom?

 

[Buckminster]

Quarterly options expire in 5.5 weeks (15th Sep):

SP will likely be above 270 based on put wall (max pain currently $240).
FOMC (19th Sep) one week later could be good news if no more rate rises.
Highland, Cyberquad and Cybertruck event could follow days later.

My bear traps always look good on paper...

There could be some FUD following 12th Sep biography release.

 

[BioSehnsucht]

This could be the start of something big.

The actual app might be limited in reach, but it could lead the way to an App Store at some point, hopefully soon.

https://twitter.com/x/status/1688765083394994176

I'd be more interested in having TeslaFi (and similar) updated to use this model rather than the existing authentication scheme.

This cloud based access to car data is sort of the opposite of what is useful for an App Store, anyways - nothing is run on the car, and you're just accessing data about the car remotely. For an App Store, you'd need to have code run on the car, directly interacting with the user.

I guess in theory you could build an "app" that ran in the car's browser, which then talked to the car through the cloud instead of directly, but that's super dumb, and you'd not be able to do anything useful that you couldn't do already with a regular website in the browser ... probably everything you can get from this API you can more or less do with the existing one that TeslaFi and such use, so we're basically still at just doing what you can already do, better, but not somehow magically having an App Store pop up out of nowhere.

The only way this leads to an App Store is in the sense that perhaps Tesla is open to the idea of having 3rd party code anywhere near their vehicles at all (the existing sites that use the Tesla API are basically doing so under the table thanks to reverse engineering, without official support, and subject to suddently not working due to changes in the undocumented API, including closing it to non-official clients.

From an Investor standpoint, I put more value in some kind of "app store" that could take a cut of app purchases from owners, than in the nebulous "Tesla Network" or other FSD/ride hailing shenanigans for revenue generation by way of using the vehicles as Taxis and such. Plus, as an Owner, I'd rather have the app store, since I'd never rent out my car unless I eventually ended up with "leftover" cars from buying new ones (and even then I'd be more likely to give a car to a family member than to rent it out).

 

[hobbes]

TSMC is building a big factory in Dresden, Germany. Construction starting late 2024:

TSMC kündigt Chipfabrik in Dresden an

Chipkonzern TSMC kommt nach Ostdeutschland. Rund zehn Milliarden Euro will der Chipriese mit Bosch, Infineon und NXP gemeinsam in den Bau investieren. Was bisher bekannt ist.

www.wiwo.de

 

[StarFoxisDown!]

Quarterly options expire in 5.5 weeks (15th Sep):
View attachment 963185
SP will likely be above 270 based on put wall (max pain currently $240).
FOMC (19th Sep) one week later could be good news if no more rate rises.
Highland, Cyberquad and Cybertruck event could follow days later.

My bear traps always look good on paper...

There could be some FUD following 12th Sep biography release.

The upcoming CPI print on Thursday is going to dictate a lot. Quite a few, including the Fed, are expecting inflation to increase from a rate of 3.0 to 3.5. The Fed is hanging practically all of their remaining credibility on "inflation will go back up the moment we ease" and are pushing this narrative that there will be a rebound of inflation in the 2nd half of this year.

I expect the market to continue to sell off all week in anticipation of this "reignition" of inflation and then have an abrupt turnaround when the numbers come out that show the Fed is blowing smoke out of it's butt. Seems rather dumbfounding how some are ignoring what the PPI numbers are saying as leading indicators and ignoring rent/housing declines that happened in July.

All I hear is "But Energy prices went up!" And? Energy prices don't impact the overall CPI number nearly as much as used car prices (down big), rent, and housing.

 

[kbM3]

Barron’s article on Li Auto. It looks certain it is the Chinese who are the true threat to Tesla. Li Auto is posting very positive gross margins and overall profitability with extremely rapid growth.

21.8% gross margins and growing from 200k to 400k annual run rate in just half a year.

EDIT: I looked more at Li Auto and they seem to be mainly plug-in hybrid, so maybe it’s not as concerning as I thought!

Li Is More Profitable Than Tesla. Its Stock Is Tanking. — Barron's

Second-quarter results from Chinese electric vehicle maker Li Auto topped Wall Street’s expectations. Profit margins were higher than Tesla‘s. But Li’s (ticker: LI) American depositary receipts were down in morning trading Tuesday. Investors appeared to be taking profits after a sharp rally in...

apple.news

 

[NicoV]

I'd be more interested in having TeslaFi (and similar) updated to use this model rather than the existing authentication scheme.

“Standard Fleet also notes that it connects to Tesla through OAuth, so the company only receives an “access token” from the EV maker. This means that Standard Fleet does not access users’ Tesla passwords at all. ”

I don’t think there’s anything (technically) new at all here. Maybe just an official approval from Tesla, and maybe a Tesla REST endpoint that has official lifetime guarantees from Tesla, but from the description it doesn’t look that ”Standard fleet” has more features than what’s already available in TeslaFi (or other apps).

Most third party (and certainly TeslaFi) don’t really want to know your Tesla password and prefer that you provide them a ‘refresh token’, which is basically an OAuth token with all powers of an access token except for being able to change your password. Refresh tokens get invalid when you change your password.

Edit: see my post below for a clarification.

Just google how to get a Tesla refresh token: it’s basically logging in to the Tesla website and copying some binhex coded string from the output.

Once you have a valid refresh token, accessing the Tesla API is just a REST call using an OAuth bearer token, just like practically every other secure REST API.

I wrote my own utility to temporarily lower the charging speed of our cars in order not to exceed a certain max power over a moving window of 15 minutes, since part of our net tariffs are based on the max 15min power. I’m learning the Rust progamming language, and it was the first thing I wrote in Rust, so this is all really very simple, not rocket science at all.

 

[AndrewZ]

The upcoming CPI print on Thursday is going to dictate a lot. Quite a few, including the Fed, are expecting inflation to increase from a rate of 3.0 to 3.5. The Fed is hanging practically all of their remaining credibility on "inflation will go back up the moment we ease" and are pushing this narrative that there will be a rebound of inflation in the 2nd half of this year.

I expect the market to continue to sell off all week in anticipation of this "reignition" of inflation and then have an abrupt turnaround when the numbers come out that show the Fed is blowing smoke out of it's butt. Seems rather dumbfounding how some are ignoring what the PPI numbers are saying as leading indicators and ignoring rent/housing declines that happened in July.

All I hear is "But Energy prices went up!" And? Energy prices don't impact the overall CPI number nearly as much as used car prices (down big), rent, and housing.

The Fed isn't focusing on headline inflation as the tools at their disposal are not designed to impact things like gasoline or food demand, the Fed is focused on core inflation -- new and used cars are something they can affect through reducing demand with higher financing costs.

The difference here might be what the market is focusing on and perceiving, and the June YoY inflation stats have been widely heralded as proof that inflation has come down massively even though core inflation was still at 4.8% and mostly flat for a while. Now I won't be shocked to see the narrative shift away from focusing on YoY headline CPI because it no longer suits the story.

Energy as a whole was -16.7% YoY in June, gasoline prices were down -26.5%, those are the only reason headline CPI was 3% because most everything else was up significantly more incl. new cars @ 4.1% and shelter @ 7.8%. The YoY headline CPI umbers will assumedly move up as we get further away from the 2022 energy price spike and comparisons become less favorable.

 

[NicoV]

I don’t think there’s anything (technically) new at all here. Maybe just an official approval from Tesla, and maybe a Tesla REST endpoint that has official lifetime guarantees from Tesla, but from the description it doesn’t look that ”Standard fleet” has more features than what’s already available in TeslaFi (or other apps).

Looking a bit closer to the “Standard fleet” screenshots: it looks like a dedicated logon page for “Standard Fleet” hosted by auth.tesla.com (I missed that the first time I looked at it) so it will most likely return a refresh token that has explicit access to profile information and/or vehicle information and/or vehicle commands and tied to “Standard fleet”. Similar to e.g. apps that use FB/Google/MS and where you have to be explicit which information you share with such an app.
So the new thing is more granular control over what the app can do with your car. And that Tesla knows about the app and give you the opportunity to change what the app can do with your account/data from the Tesla portal. Currently you have to change your password to invalidate a refresh token, and this invalidates all refresh tokens for all apps you use.

 

[ItsNotAboutTheMoney]

From an Investor standpoint, I put more value in some kind of "app store" that could take a cut of app purchases from owners, ...

Cut of what? I see one significant potential app type and that is related to commercial operation.

But, honestly, that's only because Tesla doesn't integrate smartphones.

 

[Words of HABIT]

I expect the market to continue to sell off all week in anticipation of this "reignition" of inflation and then have an abrupt turnaround when the numbers come out that show the Fed is blowing smoke out of it's butt. Seems rather dumbfounding how some are ignoring what the PPI numbers are saying as leading indicators and ignoring rent/housing declines that happened in July.

@StarFoxisDown!, When you "expect the market to continue to sell off all week", note that yesterday, August 7th, was one of the best performing days for the Market all year. The rally did exclude a few key names such as Apple and Tesla (Tesla due to Zack retiring no doubt). Just erasing those gains from yesterday would have Market neutral.

That said, I do believe TSLA is in a holding pattern until volume production of Cybertruck begins. This is a great time to accumulate Tesla stock before they take over the North American pick-up truck market, same as they have done with the world wide small sedan market (Model 3) and world wide SUV market (Model Y).

I agree with you that interest rates will remain higher and for longer than the Market is expecting to fight inflation. This has not been fully priced into the Market. Companies with extensive debt (not Tesla) and companies that sell very expensive products (Tesla) will be more negatively impacted than most.

 

[MartinAustin]

Barron’s article on Li Auto. It looks certain it is the Chinese who are the true threat to Tesla

The only threat to Tesla that exists is if BEVs do not take off. If we do not transition to sustainable energy. That is Tesla's mission. It is not to be #1 in everything it does... not to have the highest profit margins... highest revenues... highest car sales... etc. etc.. it is simply to accelerate the transition. If they do not cause all the other manufacturers to come along, that is a fail. Mazda is an example. Complete fail at the moment, every one of their cars comes with a fossil-fuel-burning combustion engine in it. But most other manufacturers are following along and starting to produce BEVs.

Tesla has said many times they can't do it alone, they need the other manufacturers to produce BEVs simultaneously. It should not be deemed a "threat" if some other manufacturer is selling nore BEVs than Tesla. Ultimately, humanity benefits.

 

[BioSehnsucht]

Cut of what? I see one significant potential app type and that is related to commercial operation.

But, honestly, that's only because Tesla doesn't integrate smartphones.

The Fleet "app" isn't an app you'd get in an app store, which is something I was trying to point out and differentiate in my comment. The fleet app is basically a fleet oriented version of things like TeslaFi, but using a properly supported API and with proper built in OAuth flows and so forth.

Instead, an app store would have apps of the sorts you'd get on smart phones and tablets, which potentially are purchased through an app store or at least have pay to play mechanics in them. I.e. all those stupid games with mechanics in which you can only play so many turns in a day/hour/whatever, unless you buy more turns (usually "coins" and such), etc. Personally I think they're a terrible trend, as a gamer, but they are making someone money, so why shouldn't Tesla get a cut to let you play them on the car's big screen?

Personally I'd never play any of these types of games, but I wouldn't mind having for example, a Plex app, and perhaps Tailscale (so I can VPN the Plex app into my home network), etc. We could potentially get proper app versions of Netflix, Youtube, etc as well, instead of the jank HTML based ones we have.

 

[BioSehnsucht]

“Standard Fleet also notes that it connects to Tesla through OAuth, so the company only receives an “access token” from the EV maker. This means that Standard Fleet does not access users’ Tesla passwords at all. ”

I don’t think there’s anything (technically) new at all here. Maybe just an official approval from Tesla, and maybe a Tesla REST endpoint that has official lifetime guarantees from Tesla, but from the description it doesn’t look that ”Standard fleet” has more features than what’s already available in TeslaFi (or other apps).

Most third party (and certainly TeslaFi) don’t really want to know your Tesla password and prefer that you provide them a ‘refresh token’, which is basically an OAuth token with all powers of an access token except for being able to change your password. Refresh tokens get invalid when you change your password.

Edit: see my post below for a clarification.

Just google how to get a Tesla refresh token: it’s basically logging in to the Tesla website and copying some binhex coded string from the output.

Once you have a valid refresh token, accessing the Tesla API is just a REST call using an OAuth bearer token, just like practically every other secure REST API.

I wrote my own utility to temporarily lower the charging speed of our cars in order not to exceed a certain max power over a moving window of 15 minutes, since part of our net tariffs are based on the max 15min power. I’m learning the Rust progamming language, and it was the first thing I wrote in Rust, so this is all really very simple, not rocket science at all.

What I meant about OAuth was, that I'd like a proper OAuth flow with proper permissions management (i.e., I'd like to be able to grant only read-only access in a convenient fashion) and documented and supported API, versus the current method with TeslaFi and such where we have to basically do the OAuth ourselves and copy and paste the resulting token.

Think of things like when you connect your Google account to something, and Google comes up and says this app wants to connect to your account, here's all the things it can do, etc. I'd like to have that user friendliness and transparency, versus the archaic incantations we must currently use. The Standard Fleet service basically does this, and I'd like to see all the TeslaFi and similar sites transition to this officially supported API.