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

[SageBrush]

At the same time SOME (by no means all) apple computers (the ones we called pizza-box-style, cant remember the model), could get a motherboard update in about 20-30 seconds top. You could train a small child to do it.

Are you thinking of the Mac LC ?
I don't think it was ever confirmed by Apple but 'LC' was viewed as meaning 'low cost.'
I thought it was great because I could carry it to work every day and easily hook it up to the monitor I had in my office. It was my first mobile computer, close to 30 years ago and on student salary.

 

[Green Pete]

Can someone with hardware knowledge speculate if Tesla can use the he 2.0 and 2.5 computers they take out as additionally processing power in their development of FSD. I doubt that they are running this stuff on aws or gcloud. This seems like the kind of tech that stays on prem.

 

[Beltsbear]

regarding board-swap FSD upgrade costs to Tesla...
I imagine these can vary massively depending how skilled they get/how easy they make it.

Years ago I was a PC/Apple Mac hardware engineer. Back then, changing a typical PC motherboard would takes hours. literally hours of unplugging connectors, undoing screws, labeling stuff, disassembling bits, and then reversing it all.
At the same time SOME (by no means all) apple computers (the ones we called pizza-box-style, cant remember the model), could get a motherboard update in about 20-30 seconds top. You could train a small child to do it.

Hopefully Tesla were sensible when designing the hardware, and its an easy swap. The costs of this sort of thing really can have an order-of-magnitude variance.

I did the same for decades and multiple generations of systems. No PC system would take hours to change a board. And no Mac could be changed in 20 seconds. Maybe two minutes if you really worked at it,five minutes would be normal.

The Tesla computer has liquid cooling so that adds a complication. And it is in a position that is hard to get too, so an hour would be expected, though if you had a team, you could probably do a group of cars quickly.

 

[canoemore]

I wonder if Elon will mention the 2020 Roadster on the earnings call. I know it's not particularly relevant to the financial health or performance of the company, but it's still supposed to come out this year, isn't it? And I know I'm still pretty excited to see what it's like in it's final form...

 

[Fact Checking]

Can someone with hardware knowledge speculate if Tesla can use the he 2.0 and 2.5 computers they take out as additionally processing power in their development of FSD. I doubt that they are running this stuff on aws or gcloud. This seems like the kind of tech that stays on prem.

Unlikely, it's just not worth the bother as the Project Dojo CPU will possibly be 100x faster than old HW2 nVidia boards.

I believe they are using a GPU cluster for training currently.

They could stockpile some of the HW2 boards as repair parts, for non-FSD customers, but they likely won't need more than 1,000 boards - and even then it's not necessarily a good idea to use used ones.

 

[Fact Checking]

I wonder if Elon will mention the 2020 Roadster on the earnings call. I know it's not particularly relevant to the financial health or performance of the company, but it's still supposed to come out this year, isn't it? And I know I'm still pretty excited to see what it's like in it's final form...

I think the Roadster 2020 became the Plaid Model S, and the Roadster will be delayed to 2022 or so, as they want Plaid sales to maximize Fremont utilization.

Could be wrong though.

 

[Cherry Wine]

According to a CCP owned news outlet Bejing will be under a "soft lockdown" as of tomorrow:

Beijing to Suspend Inter-provincial Passenger Transport - Beijing News, Radio Television HK, & others : China_Flu​

This will impact travel of GF3 employees, at minimum - but might impact suppliers as well.

​

Comment on that thread states bus travel only, for what that’s worth.

I’m stuck on how to interpret the Chinese government response - are they being incredibly proactive so as to snuff this thing out ASAP, or is the situation much worse than is being disclosed? The measures being taken are relatively drastic in contrast to the statistics.

A meta comment, I do think discussion of coronavirus is, to an extent, very much germane to this thread. If the moderators disagree, perhaps we can set up a thread to discuss separately and keep comments on the subject in this thread reserved for major breaking news.

 

[Paracelsus]

It has been both interesting and disheartening to observe since the 2013 TSLA stock price run up the slow unveiling & transparency of the Shorts thesis that hanging on to ICE's, diesel, fracking, and even the environmental and human conflict & consequences surrounding the support of those industries is more important than the sustainable Planet vision that Tesla/Elon pursue if it can create short-term profits. And now that Tesla has matured and has finally reached a point in its evolution where it should control its own destiny, the Shorts now seem to be willing to literally 'Hope' for something far worse in their desperation...........that is to literally be hoping for a greater virus outbreak in China.........and all the human and economic consequences that will come with that outbreak upon innocent people if it helps to disrupt Tesla's short term stock price.

To be willing to even post FUD about this in hopes of creating fear over a very real event that innocent people are facing is immoral and unethical......and much more. Let's face it - these are not good people. They deserve the slow and agonizing financial crushing they will receive as TSLA share prices continue to ramp upwards in the weeks and months ahead for their capacity to put money before humanity and Planet. No life preserver needed.

I am sincerely hopeful for a quick and positive closure to this horrific outbreak in China - not because I am a Tesla Long. But because these are our Brothers and Sisters. Perhaps the Shorts spreading virus FUD should take a moment to think about their own brothers and sisters, and their children, and the world they want to leave their children. Would you trade them for money too?

 

[dw4ngg]

It has been both interesting and disheartening to observe since the 2013 TSLA stock price run up the slow unveiling & transparency of the Shorts thesis that hanging on to ICE's, diesel, fracking, and even the environmental and human conflict & consequences surrounding the support of those industries is more important than the sustainable Planet vision that Tesla/Elon pursue if it can create short-term profits. And now that Tesla has matured and has finally reached a point in its evolution where it should control its own destiny, the Shorts now seem to be willing to literally 'Hope' for something far worse in their desperation...........that is to literally be hoping for a greater virus outbreak in China.........and all the human and economic consequences that will come with that outbreak upon innocent people if it helps to disrupt Tesla's short term stock price.

To be willing to even post FUD about this in hopes of creating fear over a very real event that innocent people are facing is immoral and unethical......and much more. Let's face it - these are not good people. They deserve the slow and agonizing financial crushing they will receive as TSLA share prices continue to ramp upwards in the weeks and months ahead for their capacity to put money before humanity and Planet. No life preserver needed.

I am sincerely hopeful for a quick and positive closure to this horrific outbreak in China - not because I am a Tesla Long. But because these are our Brothers and Sisters. Perhaps the Shorts spreading virus FUD should take a moment to think about their own brothers and sisters, and their children, and the world they want to leave their children. Would you trade them for money too?

They’re sick in the head - tesla stock price should have no bearing on well wishes for humanity

 

[SageBrush]

It has been both interesting and disheartening to observe since the 2013 TSLA stock price run up the slow unveiling & transparency of the Shorts thesis that hanging on to ICE's, diesel, fracking, and even the environmental and human conflict & consequences surrounding the support of those industries is more important than the sustainable Planet vision that Tesla/Elon pursue if it can create short-term profits.

You can be sure that the shorts do not view themselves that way. I've read enough of their drivel to say that they view themselves as the child pointing out that the King has no clothes. That is to say, they are the voices of reality.

I think they are FOS and expect that AGW denialism runs strong in that crowd. But that is the really the overarching issue, isn't it ? How can you have a rational investment thesis while in denial about basic science that affects the entire planet now, and much more so in the future ? Imagine every time they read about public policy to advance clean energy production and clean transport. How do they plug that into their demand spreadsheet ? Answer: they do not, they ignore reality.

They are jerks throwing out FUD, but more to the point they are simply deluded. The only reason they still exist is because a not small fraction of the USA populace is also in denial. But time is not on their side.

 

[Unpilot]

It has been both interesting and disheartening to observe since the 2013 TSLA stock price run up the slow unveiling & transparency of the Shorts thesis that hanging on to ICE's, diesel, fracking, and even the environmental and human conflict & consequences surrounding the support of those industries is more important than the sustainable Planet vision that Tesla/Elon pursue if it can create short-term profits. And now that Tesla has matured and has finally reached a point in its evolution where it should control its own destiny, the Shorts now seem to be willing to literally 'Hope' for something far worse in their desperation...........that is to literally be hoping for a greater virus outbreak in China.........and all the human and economic consequences that will come with that outbreak upon innocent people if it helps to disrupt Tesla's short term stock price.

To be willing to even post FUD about this in hopes of creating fear over a very real event that innocent people are facing is immoral and unethical......and much more. Let's face it - these are not good people. They deserve the slow and agonizing financial crushing they will receive as TSLA share prices continue to ramp upwards in the weeks and months ahead for their capacity to put money before humanity and Planet. No life preserver needed.

I am sincerely hopeful for a quick and positive closure to this horrific outbreak in China - not because I am a Tesla Long. But because these are our Brothers and Sisters. Perhaps the Shorts spreading virus FUD should take a moment to think about their own brothers and sisters, and their children, and the world they want to leave their children. Would you trade them for money too?

I don't look at much on twitter but I assume this is were this rot is showing up?

 

[MC3OZ]

That'd be an interesting idea, although there's some unique challenges from the US perspective.

The EU move from Type 2 DC-Mid to Type 2 CCS only affected Superchargers - for AC charging, European Teslas used the same Type 2 standard as everyone else.

Moving from the proprietary Tesla connector to either Type 1 CCS or Type 2 CCS for cars would cause major problems with the fleet of installed AC chargers, including at destination charging. You'd need to provide an adapter from the proprietary connector to either J1772 or Type 2 for those cars. Additionally, if you used Type 2 CCS, you'd still need to provide a J1772 adapter (just J1772 to Type 2, instead of J1772 to proprietary connector) for charging at unbranded public charging. (And, if you shipped Type 2 native Wall Connectors, you'd need to offer Type 2 to proprietary connector adapters for the existing fleet, or offer retrofits to Type 2 CCS (which isn't even practical on current Model S/X, unless you convert them to Type 2 DC-Mid, at which point you need three cables for a while on Superchargers).)

(I agree that the world standardizing on Type 2 CCS would be helpful, but I see the costs to Tesla being rather high to do it.)



There is, AFAIK, some headroom to go higher voltage in the existing connector. Going for something like 118 cells in series would get you a maximum voltage of 495.6 (within the 500 V limits), and would increase charge power by ~23% over today with no increase in current...

In the EU and Australia we have Type 2 CCS which is really Type 2 with 2 extra DC Pins...

My simplistic understanding is the current Tesla Supercharger is Type 2 with 2 extra DC Pins and is fully compatible with Type 2 as is Type 2 CCS.

Hence, I wonder if they can't simply combine the 2 in the one package, Tesla Type 2 CSS, with 4 DC Pins...

If it an be done, the only remaining question is if the DC line to the battery is a Y cable with 2 out of 4 DC pins active at anytime or if it is duplicate cables and 4 pins can be active on newer V3 Superchargers...

Obviously this solution means cars with the new port can use existing Superchargers and Type 2 chargers with no issues.

There is now one standard for the EU, UK, Australia, NZ and a few other countries, China remains the main country with a different standard.

The US may decide to adopt Type 2 CCS as the new standard or it may happen anyway and the standard may lag real world use.

For Superchargers themselves they can be upgrade to 2 cables as per Australia, the UK and I assume EU.

In terms of retrofitting older cars and eventually having one standard, we know Model 3 can have a Type 2 CCS port, we know it is possible to have an adaptor for Type 2 CCS on some Model S/X cars..... But leaving a few stalls with cables for the older charging standard is no big deal....

I am interested to see if you think this approach would work, or if I have overlooked something important that means it is not viable.

 

[SageBrush]

My simplistic understanding is the current Tesla Supercharger is Type 2 with 2 extra DC Pins and is fully compatible with Type 2 as is Type 2 CCS.

Are you talking about the EU Tesla plug presently being used ?

The US Tesla plug is quite a bit different: it is J1772 with extra DC pins
I also have this vague notion that the protocol and pin signalling setup is quite a bit different
Moving to CCS in N. America would either orphan an ocean of J1772 EVSE or require two ports per car.

 

[Cherry Wine]

It has been both interesting and disheartening to observe since the 2013 TSLA stock price run up the slow unveiling & transparency of the Shorts thesis that hanging on to ICE's, diesel, fracking, and even the environmental and human conflict & consequences surrounding the support of those industries is more important than the sustainable Planet vision that Tesla/Elon pursue if it can create short-term profits. And now that Tesla has matured and has finally reached a point in its evolution where it should control its own destiny, the Shorts now seem to be willing to literally 'Hope' for something far worse in their desperation...........that is to literally be hoping for a greater virus outbreak in China.........and all the human and economic consequences that will come with that outbreak upon innocent people if it helps to disrupt Tesla's short term stock price.

To be willing to even post FUD about this in hopes of creating fear over a very real event that innocent people are facing is immoral and unethical......and much more. Let's face it - these are not good people. They deserve the slow and agonizing financial crushing they will receive as TSLA share prices continue to ramp upwards in the weeks and months ahead for their capacity to put money before humanity and Planet. No life preserver needed.

I am sincerely hopeful for a quick and positive closure to this horrific outbreak in China - not because I am a Tesla Long. But because these are our Brothers and Sisters. Perhaps the Shorts spreading virus FUD should take a moment to think about their own brothers and sisters, and their children, and the world they want to leave their children. Would you trade them for money too?

Very well said. As a parent to two small children, I am all too aware of what is at stake with events of this nature -- and let me tell you, it's far more precious than the amount of money in my bank account. Anyone that lacks the empathy to care about the human toll involved in this situation will get no sympathy from me when they get their due.

I don't look at much on twitter but I assume this is were this rot is showing up?

I don't think it is specific to Twitter but is prevalent on social media in general, though Twitter in particular seems to have become a testing ground for bad actors to learn how to foment FUD through seeded disinformation. (This is not specific to Tesla, but has been observed repeatedly both in events of local and worldwide significance.)

 

[EVNow]

I think it's fairly safe to say that the worst case per customer FSD retrofit cost is below $1,000:

• Elon said 20 minutes work time, anecdotes said 30 minutes to 3 hours depending on the VIN and model. A conservative assumption would be 2 hours work with $200 cost (labor+overhead).
• Cost of the board is lower than the nVidia board - which I'd estimate at $500 max.

This makes for about $700, which we can conservatively round up to $1,000.

Number of U.S. customers with HW2 FSD is estimated at around 50,000 - so the total worst-case FCF impact should be $50m - potentially much lower, because the service technicians are already employed and can do upgrades from Q1 "idle time", and the board cost might be lower than $500.

FCF should be stronger than this - maybe significantly stronger, so I don't think FSD retrofits will impact Q1 positive cash flow one way or another, unless Tesla decides to smooth the wave and fill inventory in this exact quarter, or there's force majeure.

(@EVNow and @FrankSG might disagree with these very coarse guesses. )

Yes, 1k per upgrade is a decent estimate. I assumed $400M revenue and $100M COGS for FSD over 2 quarters.

As for as FCF, @KarenRei, it depends on how Tesla staffs upgrades. If they do it slowly using free time of existing service folks, the cash flow is only affected by cost of the board itself ~ 50M, over 2 quarters. If they use special temp service folks or lots of overtime, it would be higher.

BTW, my assumption that upgrades will be done over 2 quarters seems to be holding up. We see no rush to upgrade - hardly any one getting calls to upgrade. My service requests to upgrade were cancelled with no explanation.

 

[avoigt]

Wasn't Porsche insinuating that the EPA numbers don't accurately reflect the Taycan? They hired some independent company to try to claim better numbers than the EPA.

really laughable to talk about competition anymore. Tesla is going to keep moving the goal posts on everyone for most of this decade.

They did in a desperate appearing case hiring a small engineering company from Stuttgart who came up (surprise) with better results while they said they don't dispute the EPA measurement. Also they tried a test drive in CA to somehow make a longer range which they did but of course that does not tell you anything.

Pouch cell suppliers have promised to them more than they can hold and *well, if you don't like it you won't get cells at all.... guess what now you have a problem - we don't.'

Issues within Porsche R&D are more severe though as they don't understand vertical integration beside the BEV technology as such. They will learn.... I hope. Time is tight.

 

[MC3OZ]

Are you talking about the EU Tesla plug presently being used ?

The US Tesla plug is quite a bit different: it is J1772 with extra DC pins
I also have this vague notion that the protocol and pin signalling setup is quite a bit different
Moving to CCS in N. America would either orphan an ocean of J1772 EVSE or require two ports per car.

Yes, I think the EU plug is the way forward... however, I thought US destination chargers were type 2... hence the confusion... I can see now why it isn't easy...

As the current standard is J1772 with extra DC pins we are back to 2 cables... or 2 different standards.....

I guess they could do something like my idea in the US with Type 1 CSS....

But the best approach is to define the ideal standard and move towards that...

My interest was triggered by this post:- New Charge Port, Seats, Wireless Charger and more : teslamotors

While I can't give you specifics about the new charge port;

• I'm really charged -up- about this
  
  
• -North- american owners will really like this
  
  
• should be compatible with all 3 and Y
  

 

[madodel]

Are you talking about the EU Tesla plug presently being used ?

The US Tesla plug is quite a bit different: it is J1772 with extra DC pins
I also have this vague notion that the protocol and pin signalling setup is quite a bit different
Moving to CCS in N. America would either orphan an ocean of J1772 EVSE or require two ports per car.

If they have an adapter from CCS to Tesla and an adapter from Tesla to CCS then they don't need to change all the existing Superchargers or destination chargers immediately and we can use the newer CCS chargers that EA is installing. Win win for Tesla.

 

[lklundin]

@Sanny
However, the article has a “full frontal clothed” of Lawrence Fossi, aka, Montana Skeptic, in all his ?glory?

One more reason not to click it.

 

[Right_Said_Fred]

A meta comment, I do think discussion of coronavirus is, to an extent, very much germane to this thread. If the moderators disagree, perhaps we can set up a thread to discuss separately and keep comments on the subject in this thread reserved for major breaking news.

Discussing the corona crisis is not off limits. But keep it laser focussed on what it means for Tesla. For example: information about the Spanish flu and the bubonic plague is way too far OT, information about possible travel restrictions for GF3 workers is not.