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

[pz1975]

One of the bad guys in His Dark Materials also pulled up in a Model X.

I guess the moral is that if you drive a Tesla, you are a bad guy.

 

[CanadaEV]

One of the bad guys in His Dark Materials also pulled up in a Model X.

Must be a new strategy paid for by the shorts: only bad guys drive Teslas

 

[Beltsbear]

seems like that person should not be tweeting about that?

No, this is fine. These are things Tesla should have been posting due to the licensing terms on open source software they are using. They are late in doing this, but many companies are. Basically Tesla is giving back to the open source community.

 

[JustMe]

Kind of odd when the movie got paid by Coke and Ford. The Tesla served no purpose and just looked like a product placement. Seems like Ford paid a good chunk since most the cars are Ford.

Ford, Apple, Coke, pay mega millions to be noticed.

Tesla doesn’t, for 3 reasons:

1: Tesla is production constrained. Elon Musk likened it to running a hamburger stand where you had a long line of people waiting to buy your hamburgers. There’s no sense in waving a sign to passing cars TRY BOB’S BURGERS! You just have to focus on making great burgers as fast as you can.

2: Elon has disdain for advertising in general. Likens it to misleading people. He said Tesla might consider advertising at some point just to educate people about their cars. Didn’t seem to want to.

3: It lowers margins. Why bother paying millions for a Super Bowl ad when your customers are your personal sales force?

As to Teslas showing up in movies and TV shows and rap videos or whatever... Sounds like an artistic choice to me. But when it makes zero difference to the story what kind of computer Jeff Goldblum is using, why not sell that logo placement to the highest bidder.

 

[capster]

I guess the moral is that if you drive a Tesla, you are a bad guy.

Doesn’t seem to have hurt Mercedes sales to have their cars driven by bad guys in many movies over the years.

Might even remove a bit of the holier than thou image that some people complain (unfairly IMHO) Tesla owners sometimes have.

And, just wait for the Cybertruck and its movie derivatives to show up on film.

 

[Bobfitz1]

Is this part of the robotaxi pick-up software being tested? Like... when an empty car pulls up, it could invite you to get in.
(The wrong people could hear it and get in. All those problems need to be ironed out)

Will be interesting to see how it handles typical NYC taxi situation where two people are fighting for the same taxi!

 

[VValleyEV]

Another way of seeing that is that the S/X customers have paid all their supercharging in advance.

They cost a bit more than TM3 giving Tesla more profit per car - and most of the cars will still charge at home. So I guess it's not a big cost for Tesla.

My old TMX has free supercharging and I live 1/2 mile from a supercharger. Still charge at home since it's more convinient. And on trips I prefer destination charging to supercharging - and also pay to use my Chademo adapter where other chargers are more conviniently located even if they are not free of charge.

As another investor and Model S owner with “unlimited supercharging”, I will add my anecdotal data and investor opinion:

1. Anecdotal: I have had the car for 16 months, driven 14k miles, maybe 4k of that on road trips, and have used about $225 worth of “free” supercharging (using TeslaFi data). I suspect that $2k number to be a good estimate for the value of the “free supercharging” option, so that means I have used about 10% of it in the first year.

2. Investor: I was initially skeptical and worried about both sustainability and risk of supercharging overcrowding, but I am leaning toward this being an overall good deal for TSLA if confined to new purchases of the higher-end and lower volume S/X:

• I assume the $2k premium estimate is built into the accounting for the cars sold
• Attaching the feature to the owner/car combination rather than passing it along with resale keeps it within some limits
• I suspect S/X owners are less likely to be urban users without home charging capability, the volume of S/X sales is way lower than 3 and upcoming Y. So offering this on S/X is less of a concern for “tragedy of the commons” effect on urban superchargers.
• I can testify that this can be a very big incentive for purchase, especially for someone new to EVs. I feel a bit silly about it in retrospect, but the timing of my purchase was that I had 2 weeks left to use a referral to get free supercharging. Probably a lot of that was rationalization on my part, but it definitely tipped the scales for my purchase decision.
• My Model S is likely to be fine for many years, but I will be sorely tempted to trade it in for a newer model or maybe a CT, because of that early adopter syndrome in my generic makeup, which seems likely typical for S/X owners. It seems unlikely I will use up my “$2k worth” of supercharging.
• S/X models continue to have high margins compared to M3, at least for now, so seems a good bang for the buck to keep this financial incentive tool around while it stands up to analysis as a good thing for the bottom line.

 

[Cherry Wine]

#Gf4 #Gigafactory4
@Gf4Tesla


First resistance stirs


Today on Jan 12th about 40 protesters gathered at the station Fangschleuse to protest against #Gigafactory4.

#Gf4 #Gigafactory4 on Twitter

Talk about not being able to see the forest for the trees...

 

[Artful Dodger]

This means that the most probable structure of the payments is that they are tied to Tesla's EU deliveries, once the cars are registered in the EU.

Not just the EU, but also cars registered anywhere in the EAA (ie: Norway and Iceland count for CO2 credits). And obviously, Iceland will be YUUGE...

"As of I January 2008 it applies not only to the 27 EU Member States, but also to the other three members of the European Economic Area – Norway, Iceland and Liechtenstein."​

EU Emissions Trading System (EU ETS) - Climate Action - European Commission

I think this 'EEA' inclusion will be the model for the UK post-BREXIT.

Cheers!

 

[Chickenlittle]

Not sure GF3 will ever hit 10k (it's rather small) - seems to be designed for 6k. But apart from that, I like your notion

Is it complete?

 

[Beltsbear]

Not sure GF3 will ever hit 10k (it's rather small) - seems to be designed for 6k. But apart from that, I like your notion

The completed footprint for GF3 is similar to Freemont but far more organized. I have no doubts they can hit 10k when the building is feature complete.

 

[Artful Dodger]

I'm sure the Porsche-Piëch family had to pressure Diess into facing the financial realities of stranded assets.

Yeah, I think it precisely the other way around. Diess sees the future, while the octogenarian patriarch of the Piëch family is firmly vested in the past. I don't see the owners of VWAG changing their minds before slowly fading away. Diess is frustrated, but largely has his hands tied wrt the pace of Elektromobilität.

 

[VValleyEV]

It also makes the Model S/X a better deal, because they come with "Free unlimited Supercharging".

Hmm. I have a Model S with free unlimited supercharging, but I would be fine with them charging me for HVAC once I have reached my charging limit, over and above any “idle charge” for blocking the charger.

 

[Thekiwi]

Ford, Apple, Coke, pay mega millions to be noticed.

Tesla doesn’t, for 3 reasons:

1: Tesla is production constrained. Elon Musk likened it to running a hamburger stand where you had a long line of people waiting to buy your hamburgers. There’s no sense in waving a sign to passing cars TRY BOB’S BURGERS! You just have to focus on making great burgers as fast as you can.

2: Elon has disdain for advertising in general. Likens it to misleading people. He said Tesla might consider advertising at some point just to educate people about their cars. Didn’t seem to want to.

3: It lowers margins. Why bother paying millions for a Super Bowl ad when your customers are your personal sales force?

As to Teslas showing up in movies and TV shows and rap videos or whatever... Sounds like an artistic choice to me. But when it makes zero difference to the story what kind of computer Jeff Goldblum is using, why not sell that logo placement to the highest bidder.

FYI - some large mega cap companies no longer pay for product placement, and instead run entire video streaming networks where every character on the networks shows use the products, and then they charge viewers $5 a month to watch it.

 

[printf42]

Apparently, a lot of Tesla software has been uploaded in their Github repo:
green on Twitter

One comment I see in the chain I think that could be miss leading to people not familiar with the topic:

This implies Tesla use open source solutions for packages distribution and installation.
Means now you see the code and know how it works(it’s been known by hacking community for long and not a secret), if you also have the key(which is a secret Tesla will guard with life), and can fool a car you are Tesla servers, you can install your own code on the car.
This does not mean all Tesla code are open now.
So, no you cannot compile Tesla code on your own and install on other car.

 

[KarenRei]

Is it complete?

The completed footprint for GF3 is similar to Freemont but far more organized. I have no doubts they can hit 10k when the building is feature complete.

GF3 is smaller than Fremont. And reportedly more manual. And has no "Lathrop" for support, as far as we know (although they have a side wedge where they could build warehousing). And will be making its packs and motors, and potentially even cells on-site.

All of the reporting has been that it'll peak at 3k M3, 3k MY. E.g. 6k. And those numbers make sense given the footprint.

 

[lklundin]

A German maker of automotive cabling systems with over 3800 employees has declared bankruptcy,
Automobilzulieferer Schlemmer stellt Insolvenzantrag

Their HQ is about 15 km from where I work.

 

[winfield100]

OT
Random comment
Being doing Intrstate 95, Rt301 and Interstate 75, Maryland USA to near Naples, Florida since 2013,
1,040 miles each way, about 30-40 times.
Visited Gulf Coast Town Center Supercharger probably 10x just to gawk in Florida
2013 nobody or one or two ever there
Today, 6 Tesla there, S & 3. (8bays)
1-2 left, 3-4 arrived (Full!)
Chatted with a driver 10-15 minutes
Also, Wawa fuel station exit 95 in North Carolina, chatted with clerk, (6-8 bays Tesla supercharger there)
“Oh yes, we get lots of electric charging now”
Saw a bunch last few trips north & south
Ie: they are getting ubiquitous on the East coast

 

[Tyler34]

Doesn’t seem to have hurt Mercedes sales to have their cars driven by bad guys in many movies over the years.

Might even remove a bit of the holier than thou image that some people complain (unfairly IMHO) Tesla owners sometimes have.

And, just wait for the Cybertruck and its movie derivatives to show up on film.

The newest episode of The Good Place has a cybertruck on a billboard in bad Janet's void.

 

[Artful Dodger]

After review of his "dad" moves at the GF3/Shanghai Delivery Event, Elon has been practicing his rocket-assisted "dance" moves. Here's super-secret video leaked just last night, including Neuralink demo hardware. Watch to the end to see a RUD (Rapid Unscheduled Disassembly):

Cheers!

Paging @Unpilot What we got upcoming for the week, ol'son?