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

[Alexander Grea]

Yes, for Semi they have to just show the cost saving. Pickup could be a big volume too - besides they can always make a conventional pickup.

BTW, I have to say Tesla seems to be not bluffing about FSD. They certainly believe they can get to robotaxis soon. Otherwise insurance product doesn't make that much sense. It will come in stages - starting with the cars that can be "summoned" and "auto parked". The rider can drive the car for the trip with the help of EAP/FSD. They can do this for years until the rider is comfortable enough to let the car drive itself completely.

Correct about the Semi but I just can't see how they can show a cost advantage when manufacturing a truck in California compared to let's say BYD who will manufacture a truck in China with their own batteries.

In regards to Robotaxis at the investor event Gali, Gerber and Adam Jones all reported at least one disengagement. and it was about 20 miles ride. So conservatively Tesla's self driving is at about 1 disengagement per 100 mile in good conditions on their home turf where most of their fleet is located and testing is done. That kind of numbers are not even close to a finished product.

However, it does not mean that the driver assist is bad and they will keep on increasing their margins with the FSD sales.

 

[neroden]

I could see $140M being a part of the FCA deal, but certainly not the whole thing. It's my understanding their penalties would run into the billions and Elon doesn't strike me as the kind of fellow to bail out ICE manufacturers.

Maybe $140M is for the first partial year of compliance? When do we expect full transparency for this deal. 2Q19 earning call?

Never. Musk made it very clear in the earnings call that FCA had imposed confidentiality conditions which mean we will NEVER get full transparency for this deal! We'll see the cash flow when it happens, and we'll see the revenue recognized when it meets the contractual conditions, and we'll just have to live with that.

 

[bdy0627]

This bounce is being bought, not sold, by retail investors on robintrack.
Robintrack

 

[neroden]

Interesting data. I think capacitors would make more sense for surge capacity in the Powerwall/ Powerpack energy products then they would for Roadster.

People have complained about the momentary loss of power during the cutover from grid power to battery power during outages. Could this be eliminated with a fairly small number of ultracapacitors?

Powerwall is definitely in the position where "higher price, higher quality" is the way to go -- it seems to be perpetually cell-starved and has a very long waiting list, so working down to the mass market isn't practical right now.

 

[Remus]

I didn't ask about marketplace, I asked a technical question. Why advantage does Tesla have over Waymo solving unprotected left turns?

Thanks for at least addressing the question, but if it's trivial why did it take Waymo so long to come up with a semi-satisfactory solution? They have millions of instances of left turns - this isn't a corner case with airborne cars that you need a huge fleet to capture. Tesla has no data advantage here. The neural network doesn't make these driving decisions, so their chip doesn't help. Waymo knows the location, speed and (almost certainly) classification of every object, so why hadn't it been "trivial" for them?

Maybe all of Google's smart people are solving Go and StarCraft and winning ImageNet every other year. All that's left to work on the trillion dollar self-driving opportunity are interns?​

Gee, maybe stop your "smart people" nonsense? Apparently you have no freaking idea how smart people work. History is littered with examples of failure from groups of super smart people.

In the mid 80s IBM was the apparent leader of AI related stuff, most notably speech recognition. At that time nobody came even close. they even release a product on 1992. At that time IBM Watson research center was the meca for smart computer science people, Microsoft research was a distant second. Those days IBM attracted loads of top AI researchers which allowed them for numerous public stunts and launched many AI related products which later annihilated on the market due to half baked technical solutions.

You probably have no idea about the glory of IBM Watson research center. For decades, due to no funding pressure, handsome pay and academic freedom, Watson is *the* place to be for smart people. One opening attracts three to five hundreds resumes! In the grand hall of computer architecture IBM had its name engraved everywhere. Vast majority of research papers about computer architecture which were later adopted by the main stream are from IBM. Those smart people know all about computers, big and small. Unfortunately many of them worked on big ones, because those looked shiny. Ignoring the small one turned out to be a huge mistake.

And stop base your argument on your imagination.

Millions of left turns, huh? That's a quiet burb of Phoenix with hardly any traffic most of the time, how many of those million left turns have no cars in sight or only cars hundreds of yards way on 25mph speed limits? How many interesting cases left? How do you know how many cases are needed for effective training when you have no idea about the size or architecture of their NN?

It's one thing to doubt the progress speed of Tesla's FSD (I am a doubter too). It's complete non-sense to claim Waymo had significant advantage when you have no evidence. . And it's clear now 3D surrounding modeling by lidar is not needed anymore, whatever advantage they might have likely damaged by the needs to change the sensor suite down the road.

 

[VValleyEV]

The article quote is accurate.

There is some merit to raising capital,” Musk said on an earnings conference call on Wednesday, after being asked why he had not done so yet. “It’s probably about the right time.”

I listed to the call and heard that, and perhaps totally misunderstood. I really did think that Elon meant “now is about the right time to raise capital”, but I can see that he might have meant “to answer your question about why we haven’t raised capital, the problem with choosing when to raise capital is about choosing the right time”.

 

[Cloxxki]

Don't worry, they'll never get there.

Then it will be much more profitable to short them than go long anything else.
A bit too cultist for me to believe only one company you're invested in will remain the only one to accomplish something, in the future.

 

[Singuy]

My dad who read chinese news said people are having charging issues with their cars. I wonder if this is the "mechanical failure" that ride hailing service was complaining about. Investigation should be completed since we don't know if its the car or the power source.

 

[EVNow]

Correct about the Semi but I just can't see how they can show a cost advantage when manufacturing a truck in California compared to let's say BYD who will manufacture a truck in China with their own batteries.

Battery density. I don't know how much of the cost of the Semi is really labor and whether that is compensated by shipping costs.

In regards to Robotaxis at the investor event Gali, Gerber and Adam Jones all reported at least one disengagement. and it was about 20 miles ride. So conservatively Tesla's self driving is at about 1 disengagement per 100 mile in good conditions on their home turf where most of their fleet is located and testing is done. That kind of numbers are not even close to a finished product.

One year is a long time. Remember none of us have city NOA - so they hardly have much training data on that now. They only have the shadow mode data and that too with HW2/2.5. The new HW3 chip is only now coming on to the road.

 

[ruralectric]

Holy crap, people. I had a crazy work day and didn't check this thread for 16 hours...

...and you provided 350+ posts in that span, more than a post every 3 minutes.

It's Sunday. Nothing of merit happened today relating to Tesla's stock. The closest is the referral program boost, and that's not exactly market-moving.

Chill out. The poster who earlier today said it's impossible to keep up with reading--much less contributing to--this thread while having a life is correct. Try to self-moderate a bit. If you find yourself coming in for the 6th post of the day on a newsless Sunday, you are [part of] the problem.

14 pages to go to catch up so apologies if this post has been discussed to death downstream. However, there is a straight forward solution and it has been offered up here before. NSF (nasaspaceflight.com) uses a very simple model for thread creation for topics involving current events: an UPDATE thread and a DISCUSSION thread. Simple. If it's a news item, post a link or quote a source in the UPDATE thread and discuss in the DISCUSSION thread, perhaps with the inclusion of a link to the relevant UPDATE post.

The resulting UPDATE thread becomes an easy to read go-to source for the latest source info on the related topic, while still providing the forum for open discussion. The moderation is even-handed, and intervention uncommon, perhaps because there is a fair amount of civil "self-moderation", with members occasionally piping up to remind an errant poster. But when repeat offenses occur, a moderator calmly (no font change) posts a reminder, or (rarely) deletes a post or series posts, or possibly moves to the discussion if they care to take the time.

It is very similar to what we had here several years ago for the topic of "short term TSLA price movements", and I would happily make an annual contribution to TMC if we were to return to that model. As-is, I am able to glean out the news by skimming for links, but the current thread partitioning (or rather lack thereof) makes it difficult, especially if I need to step away for a few days.

BTW: NSF is my go-to source for all things SpaceX. Many of the posters work in the industry, including astronauts and SpaceX insiders. If you are interested in keeping up to date with SpaceX or commercial space in general I cannot recommend enough.

 

[EVNow]

The moment Waymo is at Level 5, all they need to do is communicate hardware requirements to car makers or aftermarket fitters and open their business for software installs. Smartest may be issuing their own hardware but that could be as simple as a SIM card. So how fast might Waymo be able to issue SIM cards? How low could costs be for a Waymo taxi? The car maker that can churn out the most and most affordable Waymo-ready cars will sell lots. And the taxi operator buying those will earn a multifold per car compared to a Model 3 on Tesla Network.

Where do I start ?

The mistake people make is thinking there is a "magical moment" when a solution hits L5. There is no such thing.

Last time I checked Lidars were a lot bigger and more expensive than a SIM card.

 

[Cloxxki]

The recent $375 drop to $235 of TSLA has been disheartening. So I run this simple TSLA risk analysis in my head:

1) Do I believe EVs will continue to escalate in production (at the expense of ICE) to become the most predominant form of auto transportation for both personal and commercial vehicles in their trillion $ worldwide market? In No, sell my TSLA. If Yes, go to 2.

2) Do I believe Tesla is the worldwide leader in premium EVs, and are they continuing to execute on their mission statement, learning from their mistakes, and growing YoY? If No, sell my TSLA. If Yes, go to 3.

3) Stay the course. Fight the FUD. The tide is changing. Be a part of the change to a brighter future.

Let's assume that after all the distractions, Tesla emerges as a respected car maker getting their market share and profit in a competitive market. Let's say, like a GM, BMW, etc. All of which will go HARD into BEVs during the 10 year horizon many on here offer.
What would a fair valuation be? Only growth and decent financials can justify valuation. Growth is the main issue Tesla faced, still faces and will forever face. The competition will grown, due to governmental mandate. They die or they join Tesla.

 

[neroden]

I listed to the call and heard that, and perhaps totally misunderstood. I really did think that Elon meant “now is about the right time to raise capital”, but I can see that he might have meant “to answer your question about why we haven’t raised capital, the problem with choosing when to raise capital is about choosing the right time”.

Yeah, I also had assumed Musk meant that now was the right time, but reading the text, I think the other interpretation is equally likely. And makes more sense in context.

 

[neroden]

Then it will be much more profitable to short them than go long anything else.

Yeah, but I don't short.

A bit too cultist for me to believe only one company you're invested in will remain the only one to accomplish something, in the future.

If you remember, I don't think Tesla will acheive level 5 either.

Also I think in the EV space, BYD is going to accomplish great things, and probably at least two other Chinese companies will.

 

[Alexander Grea]

Battery density. I don't know how much of the cost of the Semi is really labor and whether that is compensated by shipping costs.


One year is a long time. Remember none of us have city NOA - so they hardly have much training data on that now. They only have the shadow mode data and that too with HW2/2.5. The new HW3 chip is only now coming on to the road.

Waymo was at 0.64 disengagements per 1000 miles in 2015. Tesla is at best 10 disengagements per 1000 miles according to the investor day. And Waymo is still not done with the fully self driving product even in Phoenix. How could Tesla go from 10 disengagements per thousand miles to 0 in one year or even 2-4 years when Waymo has taken 4 years to go from 0.64 disengagements to 0.09 disengagements.

PS. I know that Waymo is geofenced. For customer sitting in a Robotaxi it is not important if it is geofenced or not.

 

[j6Lpi429@3j]

People have complained about the momentary loss of power during the cutover from grid power to battery power during outages.

Really? I thought this was sub-millisecond?

 

[neroden]

Let's assume that after all the distractions, Tesla emerges as a respected car maker getting their market share and profit in a competitive market. Let's say, like a GM, BMW, etc. All of which will go HARD into BEVs during the 10 year horizon many on here offer.
What would a fair valuation be?

If Model Y and the Semi get going, and nothing else, IMO ~$400/share. (Oh -- Tesla also has to straighten out its communications and service situation to justify that.)

Only growth and decent financials can justify valuation. Growth is the main issue Tesla faced, still faces and will forever face.

True.

The competition will grown, due to governmental mandate. They die or they join Tesla.

The non-Chinese competition will die. VW and Hyundai/Kia have a chance but they have a very hard path to follow, so I'm betting they die.

The Chinese competition will grow.

 

[j6Lpi429@3j]

For customer sitting in a Robotaxi it is not important if it is geofenced or not.

its absolutely incredibly important if *shock* they want to go somewhere that is not in a small area of phenonix arizona, yes.

I'll give due props to waymo once it works where I live, where it rains, we have no road markings and the odd horse in the road. Oh and frequent dead badgers.

 

[neroden]

Really? I thought this was sub-millisecond?

With Powerwall, it seems to be longer than that (though still well under a second). Yes, people have complained....

Powerpack may have faster response?

 

[Maitri982]

500k all vehicle types
7k 3 at Fremont, 2k S/X at Fremont, 2k 3 at GF3 = 11k.



500 million from Chinese banks for GF3?

Yes...so what seems lost in all the "TSLA needs to raise money now!!!" Talk is that they are telling us they did in fact do that already in March with some Chinese bank(s). They raised money to pay for GF3.