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Tesla, TSLA & the Investment World: the Perpetual Investors' Roundtable
- Thread starter AudubonB
- Start date
Happens all the time at automakers. Remember the 2010 RWD Acura RL and NSX with the V-10? Oh, you did not know it was canceled after the all the R&D work was done. GM, BMW, and Mercedes just canceled vehicles that was far along in the development. Unless you are car guy and read automotive news, one would never know. The R&D is cheap, the production tooling, that is where the cost is.
Doggydogworld
Active Member
Their earnings call language was unambiguous:
"We expect the energy storage deployments for 2024 to grow at least 75 percent higher from 2023."
I don't see how to interpret that as a year end run rate increase. Revenue recognition doesn't exactly match deployments on these big utility contracts, but Lathrop production must have increased this year for them to make such a clear statement.
The Chinese car companies are deploying it? I wouldn’t doubt it, things are probably pretty different over there and the car companies are mostly newer like Tesla.
The leap to taking any liability at full highway speeds is likely a big one, not sure I believe any current hardware is capable of that with the reduced reaction times required etc — that’s huge risk to take.
Indeed if it’s never ready for consumer use, then it will never be released.
But the big established companies would rather release features that do a limited set of things and make them foolproof, which is obviously hugely different from Tesla’s approach where tech is deployed that will attempt all sorts of crazy stuff and potentially critically fail while keeping liability on the driver.
But foolproof excludes consciously activating the system in areas where it’s not supposed to be used. And when we see FSD today struggling in parking lots or what have you, proponents are quick to emerge in the comments and defend it by saying parking lots etc aren’t supported yet. Mercedes’ system isn’t meant for city streets, seemingly no other carmaker wants a system like Level 2 FSD w/ Autosteer on City Streets.
Doggydogworld
Active Member
Yeah, 130 kph will definitely not be an OTA for current cars. It's based on next-gen hardware from NVIDIA, Mobileye, etc.
2daMoon
Mostly Harmless
What happened to German Engineering and the Autobahn speeds
How is this L3 I don't know? Don't point me to the architecture docs (, I have read them )
Under these conditions Tesla might be L5 +
Street/SPACs definitely scheming to creating the Nikola, Lordstown of FSDs
It was an example of traditional, fine German engineering and is Level 3 in that narrow context within the confines of that department at Mercedes HQ.
Once they take it out of the engineering division and actually put it in a car and turn it loose on the road, and well, ... no so much.
But, it was DESIGNED as a Level 3 system.
/s
The problem has been their net margins collapsed last quarter to 5.5%. This number was much much higher compared to industry historically (almost 19% in some articles I've seen). You can see GM/Ford has double digit gross margins too, but it was the operating/net which used to be substantially higher for Tesla. We will see how this trends moving forward as maybe it's just a blip, but it's hard for me to see massive net profits when prices have been cut so much and 0.99% offers are given compared to before.
Tesla Profit Margin 2010-2023 | TSLA
Current and historical gross margin, operating margin and net profit margin for Tesla (TSLA) over the last 10 years. Profit margin can be defined as the percentage of revenue that a company retains as income after the deduction of expenses. Tesla net profit margin as of December 31, 2023 is...
www.macrotrends.net
General Motors Profit Margin 2010-2023 | GM
Current and historical gross margin, operating margin and net profit margin for General Motors (GM) over the last 10 years. Profit margin can be defined as the percentage of revenue that a company retains as income after the deduction of expenses. General Motors net profit margin as of...
www.macrotrends.net
To not clutter the thread, looks like they are hiring back some that got fired with specific person named:
Tesla Rehires Some Supercharger Workers Weeks After Musk’s Cuts
(Bloomberg) -- Tesla Inc. has begun hiring back some of the almost 500 members of its Supercharging team that Chief Executive Officer Elon Musk dismissed late last month.Most Read from BloombergTrump Vows ‘Day One’ Executive Order Targeting Offshore WindChina to Start $138 Billion Bond Sale on...
"Chief among the personnel who have returned is Max de Zegher, the director of charging for North America, according to people with knowledge of the matter, who asked not to be identified because the information is private. De Zegher was one of the top managers after Rebecca Tinucci, the senior director Musk fired late last month along with virtually everyone else in the charging group."
It's not a matter of "wants".
No other carmaker is capable of producing a system like Level 2 FSD w/ Autosteer on City Streets.
2daMoon
Mostly Harmless
Perspective, use it, or lose it.
This is the perspective to view Germany from.
Much like the China numbers drop when they are exporting, Germany numbers can be affected when GigaB is exporting to other EU nations.
Ignore the short-term local numbers and focus on the overall.
i.e.: "Zoom out" is always the right thing to do to get the big picture.
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Mercedes’ Traffic Jam Assist is a Level 3 module within the system, calling the entire thing Level 3 is inaccurate and I’ve never seen it officially described that way.
The system has the ability to flip between Level 2 and Level 3 depending upon the conditions. If you’re barreling along on a highway at full speed then it’s Level 2, if you hit a traffic jam and the other requirements are met then it can flip into Level 3 until those conditions are no longer met — then it gives the driver a warning to take over because it’s about to move back to Level 2.
If Tesla did something like this with Autopilot, I'm pretty sure the reception from fans would be quite positive.
They could do it, nobody else wants to. Mobileye ended its partnership with Tesla back in the early AP1 days after the first Autopilot fatality because they felt Tesla was taking too much risk, and they described the public FSD program as a “brute force” method of development.
The system has the ability to flip between Level 2 and Level 3 depending upon the conditions. If you’re barreling along on a highway at full speed then it’s Level 2, if you hit a traffic jam and the other requirements are met then it can flip into Level 3 until those conditions are no longer met — then it gives the driver a warning to take over because it’s about to move back to Level 2.
If Tesla did something like this with Autopilot, I'm pretty sure the reception from fans would be quite positive.
NVIDIA and Mobileye have both posted videos of their systems attempting city driving, a lot of carmakers get their tech from those two. And other companies out there actually operate driverless robotaxis today.
They could do it, nobody else wants to. Mobileye ended its partnership with Tesla back in the early AP1 days after the first Autopilot fatality because they felt Tesla was taking too much risk, and they described the public FSD program as a “brute force” method of development.
No. They can't do it. They absolutely can not match Tesla's system. They don't have the training data.
2daMoon
Mostly Harmless
You didn't include a link to where this company spoke. Which, in itself, would be a sort of miracle. Usually people speak on the behalf of legal persons. If that is the case here, then a quote from that person is also missing.
As if the other OEMs won't?
No. They won't behave any differently in court than Tesla. They won't be handing out buckets of money to the survivors of the deceased without having crossed off a visit before the judge first, will they?
What is it exactly that Tesla "doesn't" or "someday they will" and what is it exactly that "those are actually doing" that Tesla can't?
There is a ton of vaguery (ought to be a word) in what you have written and it left a rather incoherent post in the wake.
Tesla settles factory worker's sexual harassment lawsuit
Tesla has settled a lawsuit by a former factory employee who says she was fired for complaining about severe sexual harassment, as the electric carmaker faces a series of other cases alleging workplace sex and race discrimination. U.S. District Judge William Orrick in San Francisco dismissed...
"Hardcore" litigation team didn't think they could win this one, apparently.
Mobileye has been running in a swath of makes/models for many years dude, they said they have 200 petabytes of driving data as of 2022:
Mobileye’s Self-Driving Secret? 200PB of Data | Mobileye Blog
Powerful computer vision tech and natural language models turn industry’s leading dataset into AV training gold mine.
Elon had previously claimed that Mobileye supporting so many different vehicles was slowing down their development, like they have too much data.
Who knows what NVIDIA does or doesn’t have, for all we know they could have data sharing agreements for providing H100s to companies like Tesla.
That is certainly part of it. My underlying logic is the present day adoptions demographics of BEV's, not hybrids. Much of the global acceleration of BEV's has been coming from Chinese growth, including ones like Volvo, Polestar and BMW iX3 although they are not directly a major factor.
In the rest of the world the shift is not visible in gross numbers, but is in the incentives numbers as I previously mentioned, and in the actual sales prices. Model mix has shifted in material ways, but at the moment that is rarely directly disclosed.
That shift is the one that affected Tesla more than any other, primarily because the Tesla Marketing,( including Positioning, Placement, Price and Promotion [this year mostly Advertising] changed so abruptly. The net effect of all the Marketing alterations was to shift what had been regarded as a premium and aspirational brand to one that was devoted to mass market commodity Placement and Positioning.
All of that coincided with the economic and cultural shift that essentially everyone sees. When combined all that sent shares spinning down, public perception shifting negative, all exacerbated by the emotional issues so widely dispersed by FUD and the Social Media Issue.
I have tried to avoid the comprehensive Marketing subject because so many people equate general Advertising with Marketing, and now even formerly tightly targeted social media has generic advertising growing exponentially much to the surprise of nearly everyone. For that we can credit (blame) Mark Zuckerberg, Larry Page and a handful of others but perhaps the first to do that was pinkfong of BabyShark fame:
Pinkfong Official Website
Pinkfong develops creative, animated content to provide stimulating and fun learning experiences to children worldwide.
www.pinkfong.com
That single event ended out fomenting the entire idea of ignoring segmentation but target a generation instead. Of course that has been common for decades, but not in social media. Social media without targeting si the motherlode for Meta and Alphabet which now generate substantial revenue without targeting other that at the grossest level.
Amazon, by contrast has shifted markets towards corporate products but continue highly segmented pricing and service strategies.
Tesla, unlike other companies with similar product classes including cars, large scale energy, and services for competitors has been adept in treating each class independently, a wise choice, and treating automotive as a carefully orchestrated Positioning exercise comparable to, say, Airstream, Gulfstream and LVMH but few others. Having discarded that approach, we end out with confusion and dismay.
My earlier post was trying to illustrate the conflicts and challenges that happened during the last years. Without question my unstated Giant Issue is China. As a tiny illustration, Brazilian imports of cars from China rose over 600% last year, and industrial/commercial BESS there is now nearly 100% Chinese.
Elon Musk is now taking the steps that might just fix all that, and he's quite correct, in my opinion, to be 'Hard Core' about it. The question is what happens in 2025.
That is part of the detail behind th overall issues I was trying to show.
All that is closely related to how to make a business success of Optimus and Robotaxi. neither will be like 'a walk in the park'.
Knightshade
Well-Known Member
This is factually untrue- multiple chinese car makers are running such systems on customer cars today
For example:
XPeng continues to challenge Tesla FSD with XNGP self-driving, now available throughout China
XPeng Motors announced a massive milestone for its XPeng navigation guided pilot (XNGP) ADAS feature that enables self-driving in several...
electrek.co
You've been corrected on this before- why do you keep posting misinformation about it?
Officially certify their system for driverless use.
Which is what Mercedes did within a very narrow ODD (traffic jams on highways) because they trust their system enough to be safe without an active human driver in that ODD.
Currently Tesla does not certify their system to ever be used without an active human driver. They aspirationaly want to- and have been aspirationaly wanting to for nearly 8 years now, but so far they don't trust it enough to actually do that.
cliff harris
Member
Unless you have a million connected vehicles with identical camera placements in the hands of people driving them every day, and the infrastructure to collect, sort, sift and train on that data, then no, you do not have the same capability for training AI based self-driving as Tesla. I am happy to be proven wrong by seeing the tech specs of any rivals with those capabilities, but I will not hold my breath. Show me the data centers, show me the sales figures. Most of Tesla's rivals cant even update maps for the satnav over the air yet, let alone harvest training data.
Its LAUGHABLE to compare what Tesla has with FSD 12 to anything made by Mercedes. <40mph on a highway during the day in good weather if a car is in front of you...
Most people would just call that cruise control, and certainly wouldn't pay a monthly subscription for it.
The idea that other car companies could do FSD12 but choose not to, sounds about as convincing as Boeing saying "we could totally re-use rockets like spacex, we just aren't in the mood'.
Its LAUGHABLE to compare what Tesla has with FSD 12 to anything made by Mercedes. <40mph on a highway during the day in good weather if a car is in front of you...
Most people would just call that cruise control, and certainly wouldn't pay a monthly subscription for it.
The idea that other car companies could do FSD12 but choose not to, sounds about as convincing as Boeing saying "we could totally re-use rockets like spacex, we just aren't in the mood'.
Mobileye does not have the data they need to create an end-to-end system that comes anywhere near what Tesla has. They have neither the quantity or quality of data required.Mobileye has been running in a swath of makes/models for many years dude, they said they have 200 petabytes of driving data as of 2022:
Mobileye’s Self-Driving Secret? 200PB of Data | Mobileye Blog
Powerful computer vision tech and natural language models turn industry’s leading dataset into AV training gold mine.www.mobileye.com
Elon had previously claimed that Mobileye supporting so many different vehicles was slowing down their development, like they have too much data.
Who knows what NVIDIA does or doesn’t have, for all we know they could have data sharing agreements for providing H100s to companies like Tesla.
I know what NVIDIA does not have. Like all the others, they do not have a huge fleet of cars with the onboard inference computers required to find and return specific high quality data.
To not clutter the thread, looks like they are hiring back some that got fired with specific person named:
Tesla Rehires Some Supercharger Workers Weeks After Musk’s Cuts
(Bloomberg) -- Tesla Inc. has begun hiring back some of the almost 500 members of its Supercharging team that Chief Executive Officer Elon Musk dismissed late last month.Most Read from BloombergTrump Vows ‘Day One’ Executive Order Targeting Offshore WindChina to Start $138 Billion Bond Sale on...finance.yahoo.com
"Chief among the personnel who have returned is Max de Zegher, the director of charging for North America, according to people with knowledge of the matter, who asked not to be identified because the information is private. De Zegher was one of the top managers after Rebecca Tinucci, the senior director Musk fired late last month along with virtually everyone else in the charging group."
This level of management is worth $56bn?
Reports are they hiring some of the team back. Oops.
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