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

[kengchang]

Although in many ways I agree with this (at teslas scale), it pains me to hit the agree button, as someone who is literally sat here fixing bugs in UI stuff that depend on screen resolution right now...

Tesla only has 2/3 different screen resolution. Not sure if S/X shares the same screen.

 

[Krugerrand]

I didn’t believe the full interior refresh rumors initially. Then even respectable Tesla reporters started to spread it as news, even with a target release date of September.

Why refute those rumors only now? I know for sure, people have been holding off purchases to wait for the interior refresh, and they might be disappointed now, even changing their mind on the car all-together.

Maybe refute now because it’s getting ridiculous or refute now because plans changed or refute now because someone asked him point blank, he saw the question and answered. I can go on.

 

[KarenRei]

IIRC, he said "feature complete" with monitoring by the driver for 2019. What "feature complete" covers is anyone's guess, but it's not Level 5.

It's bad enough that TSLAQ and Tesla-hostile reporters pretend that Tesla "promised level 5 self-driving by the end of the year". But the fact that many Tesla bulls do the same thing is inexcusable. We need to push back against this false history every single time it's raised. The target is that the software be feature-complete by the end of the year, and then self-driving as regulatory approval is granted, which Musk expects to see at least somewhere in 2020 (when in 2020 was unspecified), but broadly after a couple years, broad approval requiring Tesla to prove a sufficient level of safety over manual driving, while Tesla continues to improve the hardware and software to "chase the 9s".

Musk is a straight fool when it comes to AP/FSD. Just hopelessly wrong and all his worst attributes as CEO shine there

I agree that he annoys me with how he talks about it. How can he not have learned that every time he talks about appreciating cars or Tesla moving away from customer car sales that all he's achieving is scaring the market? For crying out loud, stop it. Talk about that once you've actually demonstrated some practical FSD, you're plausibly going to be getting regulatory approval in a meaningfully large market in the remotely near future, and a robotaxi customer market is starting to materialize.

Honestly, the whole concept of stopping selling consumer cars or hugely jacking up the price when robotaxis comes out makes no sense regardless. The cars cost the same to produce, and continue to earn solid margins. It makes much more sense to simply scale up production to track rates of robotaxi approval, which will vary greatly between markets. If you're worried about self-competition with your robotaxi programme, you either use legal or technical restrictions to prevent consumer cars from competing. Capital for scaleup will be no barrier if you have a legit robotaxi business; the bond markets will throw money at you. And Tesla can apparently build whole Gigafactories in China in just a year, so...

 

[N5329K]

I have to assume that I'm not the only one that get's really annoyed when my favorite websites do a re-design that doesn't even offer new functionality. Great. Your web devs got to bill a few hours, but now I can't find anything.

"Different" is not "better". I know many will disagree, but I feel that way about the phone-as-key scheme (with valet cards and less-than-fully-functional fob backups) as well as the function dump of some important car systems onto a central touchscreen. It recalls the early days of panel-mount GPS aviation receivers, when developers were quite sure that providing half a dozen ways to summon and activate an approach (some better than others, all requiring a slightly different sequence of button pushing, knob twisting and icon jabbing) ) was so much better than One Way That Just Worked. It was as though those Japanese alarm clock engineers (the ones that required elaborate steps to simply set an alarm) had found a new area to toil away in.
Robin

 

[Driver Dave]

Musk is a straight fool when it comes to AP/FSD. Just hopelessly wrong and all his worst attributes as CEO shine there

You could say this about making an electric car.

You could say this about a car that can change lanes and take exits.

You could say this about landing a rocket on a barge.


Things always sound foolish until they don't.

And you want to be in before that.

 

[Krugerrand]

Who is going to limit the wide lane algorithm to recognize that if it is over 15 feet it is not a lane and the car should not be centering. The car should track off the driver’s side lane line when the passenger side lane line falls outside the 15 ft window or disappears altogether.

The car currently jumps to the right at every highway entrance merging from the right.

This unexpected behavior at 70 mph rattles the hell out of people new to Tesla. They won’t buy the car or the stock until this is fixed.

No, it doesn’t do that every time. I’ve had the car hug the driver’s line when appropriate, hug the passenger line when appropriate, gradually center itself, quickly center itself, try to hug both lines and center itself all at once and simply give up.

Depends on the situation, the quality of road design, the markings or lack of markings, whether other cars are in the vicinity, if Mercury is in retrograde, etc.

The more I use AP/EAP, the better the car gets and the better I get at being able to identify when the car might get confused.

Anyone new to AP should just follow the instructions provided. Then they wouldn’t get rattled. Or hey, don’t use it. The car works pretty good just as a driver.

 

[Curt Renz]

ARK Invest will conduct its monthly webinar today at 1:30 pm EDT. Tesla is the overall top holding in their ETFs. It is usually discussed in either their main presentations or the Q&A portion during which we can submit questions.

Registration: https://register.gotowebinar.com/register/7119127061193927937?__hssc=84851910.7.1562598486635&__hstc=84851910.744419facd9b8a14f357aa4e584ee85b.1562598486635.1562598486635.1562598486635.1&__hsfp=4061745694&hsCtaTracking=3a654769-03e1-45b3-8ab8-531436197539|2100d6d6-5b8e-4a4f-9284-80050a7c220e

 

[StarFoxisDown!]

Gotta love wall st logic. NIO is up like 25% since Tesla released Q2 numbers

 

[Singuy]

Musk is a straight fool when it comes to AP/FSD. Just hopelessly wrong and all his worst attributes as CEO shine there

Well. He has said many things in the past that are straight foolish. But people forget just how far of an accomplishment and how close his prediction became true after being a few months late.

Part of me think he's a fool, part of me thinks he'll make me look like a fool. He has a better track record of making people look like fools more than looking like a fool..give him that much.

 

[Driver Dave]

Personally, I was never on the Model S/X refresh coming soon bandwagon anyways. The Raven upgrades are nice enough.

Totally.

Focus on Y, pickup truck, and roadster. Get the full line up rolling.

Then circle back and do the S and X, with a nice built up refresh demand ready to go.

 

[anthonyj]

Since when is the market rationally reacting to 'news'? It is just being used as a tool to move the SP in a desired direction.

The “news” is used to shake weak retail longs out and trick retail shorts to sell more shares to institutional investors. There is obvious accumulation at these levels

 

[ReflexFunds]

Gotta love wall st logic. NIO is up like 25% since Tesla released Q2 numbers

Nio's June numbers look like they will be awful too.
Seems like it is going to be just 621 ES8 sales in June, taking Q2 to 2834 down from 3989 in Q1 and 7980 in Q4.
They could just about scrape bottom end of Q2 guidance if they sell 400 of the new ES6.

So much for ES8 the Tesla China killer.

 

[X Fan]

errr... the tesla phone app wont even let me see that data for recent routes AFAIK? Lets not criticize something that this car does and a tesla does not...

Huh...Teslafi has all.....

btw: in case you missed it, the "joke" is the energy consumption.

 

[KarenRei]

Huh...Teslafi has all.....

btw: in case you missed it, the "joke" is the energy consumption.

Maybe the car had been hacked and was being used to mine bitcoin?

 

[Fred42]

https://www.automobilemag.com/news/...74BE453EDAD9A19B31E6DC7785DA4B182553A02CC9363

And dealer organizations tell legislators they should restrict Tesla stores 'to protect consumers.'

 

[anthonyj]

Musk is a straight fool when it comes to AP/FSD. Just hopelessly wrong and all his worst attributes as CEO shine there

I said the same thing when he said 90-100k in Q2. Looks like I was the fool. FSD doesn’t even matter. There is so much demand for these cars. So much. A few months ago I was begging for Tesla to advertise. Musk is right, they didn’t need it. I see Teslas all over, it’s getting tiring to count how many I see in an hours drive.

Even with the depressed SP, I’ve never been more bullish than now. I’m seeing something that the market doesn’t see, and it’s not an illusion.

 

[HG Wells]

"Different" is not "better". I know many will disagree, but I feel that way about the phone-as-key scheme (with valet cards and less-than-fully-functional fob backups) as well as the function dump of some important car systems onto a central touchscreen. It recalls the early days of panel-mount GPS aviation receivers, when developers were quite sure that providing half a dozen ways to summon and activate an approach (some better than others, all requiring a slightly different sequence of button pushing, knob twisting and icon jabbing) ) was so much better than One Way That Just Worked. It was as though those Japanese alarm clock engineers (the ones that required elaborate steps to simply set an alarm) had found a new area to toil away in.
Robin

You do realise that its an intelligence test ?
If you complete the problem in record time a transmat portal opens.
It's your choice to step through.

Just don't tell the passengers.

 

[X Fan]

The way AirBnB does it to allow hosts to verify a new guest is the following methods:

• There's a couple of automatic check-boxes that hosts can enable, for additional requirements guests must meet - such as extra government ID identification beyond the AirBnB authentication. So you can upgrade guests from "anyone with a credit card" to "anyone with a credit card and a government ID you can verify".
• Hosts can also select non-instantaneous booking and can and often do check the guests before renting their property to them for even a single night:
  • There's a reputation score for each guest,
  • photos of the guest are visible to hosts,
    
  • there's reviews by hosts made of guests which are visible to other hosts - for example how clean (or not so clean) the home was left after a visit,
  • hosts can also, if they so wish, interview the new guest online. They can freely reject guests that don't have a high enough visitor count yet, or which they feel uneasy about for any reason.

I've been a guest in numerous high value AirBNB properties and on occasion I've been interviewed thoroughly - and I've also been to AirBNB-only apartments with cheap IKEA furniture and an entry code given me over email so I'd never even meet the ower, and I believe this method works reasonably well. Yes, in principle you can scam yourself into a high value property which you can then wreck - but unless there's some criminal intent there's generally no point, and you'll wreck your reputation, and you'll also be liable for the damage. And note that homes are actually a lot more personal to most people than cars.

Likewise hosts can wreck their own reputation as well: for example if a reservation is cancelled it's basically a death sentence on AirBNB for future business.

So if Tesla Network starts out not as a taxi service, but as a car rental service where the car drives to you via FSD and where you can let it drive away once you are done using it, then I'd expect them to add a similar reputation mechanism. Owners who are uneasy about giving their personal cars to strangers can add heavy filters I suppose - which will lower their revenue but filters the guests.

I'd also expect there to be a cleanup service offered by Tesla Network as well, plus insurance for the occasional damage which always happens where there are people using things.

OT to a point....while in London this week.

UK newspapers ran a front page article on how gangs (probably UK mafia) are gaming the system (Knightsbridge area was called out) by leasing units with front pay but then subleasing to multiple people and at the same time stopping payment after first or second month. Apparently, presently UK's laws make it very costly and difficult to throw out tenants so gangs are able to work the system. Gang makes a fortune exploiting luxury flats of the rich

I hope Tesla's future system can obviate this issue.

 

[KarenRei]

I said the same thing when he said 90-100k in Q2. Looks like I was the fool. FSD doesn’t even matter. There is so much demand for these cars. So much. A few months ago I was begging for Tesla to advertise. Musk is right, they didn’t need it. I see Teslas all over, it’s getting tiring to count how many I see in an hours drive.

Even with the depressed SP, I’ve never been more bullish than now. I’m seeing something that the market doesn’t see, and it’s not an illusion.

Just needs to prove that they didn't throw away margins to achieve this, and that SG&A is under control relative to revenue. Deliveries was half the picture for this quarter. Let's get that other half in!

(I don't expect another jump to the upper $300s from just a good deliveries report, even if they were to eke out a surprise profit. Should take a couple consecutive profitable quarters for that. But a good enough Q2 report could have us seeing Sparta again soon. )

 

[X Fan]

Maybe the car had been hacked and was being used to mine bitcoin?

Dear KarenRei...welcome back. Missed your contributions!