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

[Krugerrand]

When we are on call, we treat some horrific injuries and infections, usually at the worst possible hours....

Yes, you do. I have a perfectly functioning leg thanks to a fantastic ‘on call’ orthopedic surgeon. The break was rated an 11 on a scale of 1 to 10 and was fixed late at night. I at least had the good graces to break it on a Thursday.

I think you’re over-reacting to the service situation, but I understand your frustration. You’re just not talking to the right person or you’d have left happy as a clam.

Getting in touch with the right person is always key when dealing with a company or - to use your profession as an example - to be able to fully recover from a bad injury. I lucked out in that the best orthopedic surgeon available was the one on call that night. You - not so much.

Clarifying - you not so much was referencing your ‘luck’ in getting the right person.

 

[JRP3]

I think even Elon would disagree with you. As I pointed out, if cost wasn't a consideration, Elon wanted to put X and Y on their own platform.

Cost is always a consideration.

 

[Antares Nebula]

I think the markets have gone whacky tacky. Only traders with galactic size balls need trade tomorrow.

 

[jbcarioca]

For your viewing consideration, ugly and not so ugly airfoils:

The 13 all-time ugliest airplanes

Top 25 Most Beautiful Airplanes

For our purposes we might want to see the lowest-drag aircraft or the best lift to drag ratio. The firmer is normally optimal for high speed the latter fir low speed. I’ll look for those. Except for the Avanti, Citation X and Concorde the Flying list really is not oriented towards efficiency.

More interesting might be the list for cars.

 

[Unpilot]

Well, that's your opinion but you state it as fact. I think about things differently from you and I don't really like paying for people who want things for free. We have no idea where that nail came from and I can see this going either way. I like situations like this to be dealt with in a predictable way. I don't want to be treated overly generously because I'm tall and white or discriminated against for the same reason (or because I'm a short, fat dark-skinned woman with a limited budget). I like doing businesses with companies that have strong, fair and predictable policies that they actually adhere to and that have low mark-ups (made possible hopefully in part due to their strong but fair policies).

It makes perfect sense to me that Tesla implemented stronger and more clearly defined policies as their customer base grew larger. It was last year that people were "discovering" minor scratches, dents and scuffs in the paint and bodywork days (and in some cases weeks) after delivery and were adamant they did not occur after delivery. The reality is there is no way to tell. So Tesla implemented the "two-day rule" (or was it one or three days, I don't remember). I'm not sure exactly what the time-frame is because I look at the cars before signing the papers and that's good enough for me. Someone here probably paid closer attention than I did and can tell us exactly how long you have to claim pre-delivery damage. Is it 24 hours? And a nail in the tire probably follows under the same policy because it's impossible to tell when the damage happened, especially a week later.

My wifes LR RWD Model 3 lost one pound of air per week from the right front tire. I added a couple pounds every two weeks and kept looking for a small puncture but none could be found. Eventually, I rotated it to the back and it only lost one pound every month. Now it doesn't lose any. Had she picked up a nail during that timeframe, we might have assumed the nail was in there all along. The fact is, cars get scratches, dents and flats every day of the year. A longer "mulligan" period just means that we all pay for other peoples carelessness or bad luck. I would rather have a policy that pre-delivery damage must be noted at delivery. However, since some deliveries were happening before the sun had risen (or after it had set) it makes sense to let people take them home and look them over for a day or so. But to think Tesla should repair any damage discovered in the first week (or longer), just because the customer is convinced it was pre-existing damage is perhaps not the strongest policy.



While I agree with that, I don't think reasonable customers should have a problem with the rule that pre-delivery damage must be noted within the given timeframe. And what business wants to deal with unreasonable customers who are only happy if the business gives them freebies they are not entitled to under the companies fair and clearly stated policies. If you are accustomed to stealerships who bend the rules to "treat you right", just be aware that they are not coddling you because they like you or they are trying to give you an extra good deal, it's because they think they can overcharge you enough in the future to make up for whatever it costs them to give you a "mulligan". It's always rubbed me the wrong way. I just want to be treated in a fair and predictable manner.

Well I am tired and should go to bed...but....when I said a manager should look at the situation and have latitude I mean they should be a human. THIS is what set's Tesla apart in many ways. Of course the OP might be trying to game the system...but after buying 6/7 Tesla's I doubt it.

We had situation many years ago at my airline. A plane had to divert to a station which had inadequate facility's. The station manager followed "policy" and kept people on the plane for over 5 hours. It made national news....and not in a good way.
Of course they could have made a different decision ...but they followed policy.

My point is "we all don't have to pay for a longer mulligan" if each situation is followed based on it's merits.

I am well aware of "stealerships" and how they operate.

I take the OP description of event's at face value and think the whole situation could have been handled in a much more positive way.

 

[printf42]

The nhtsa is right though. Model 3 not safest, Sherman tank is

I doubt that, on the casualties per million miles driven matrices.

 

[KarenRei]

Wonder how a Model 3 would hold up if some kids were inside playing Beach Buggy Racer, and 3-5 minutes later the car was attacked by 30-50 feral hogs...

 

[Unpilot]

Wonder how a Model 3 would hold up if some kids were inside playing Beach Buggy Racer, and 3-5 minutes later the car was attacked by 30-50 feral hogs...

Stay on topic!

 

[AZRI11]

Wonder how a Model 3 would hold up if some kids were inside playing Beach Buggy Racer, and 3-5 minutes later the car was attacked by 30-50 feral hogs...

Feral hogs are the new killer bees. Off topic, sorry

 

[StealthP3D]

Of course the OP might be trying to game the system...but after buying 6/7 Tesla's I doubt it.

I didn't claim the OP was trying to "game the system", I thought I made that clear. The fact is, we don't know when the puncture occurred and even if it did occur before delivery, damage must be noted during the "grace" period to be covered by Tesla. Maybe the OP could find someone willing to bend the rules a bit but following a fair and clearly stated policy and enforcing it even-handedly is nothing to get bent out shape over. Personally, I might have made an exception had I worked there (but I might not have as I don't know all the details).

 

[humbaba]

It was hard to get started, but was an amazing interview once it started flowing. The most mindblowing conclusion, and I am still reeling from it comes 3/4 of the way into it.

He convinces Lex Fridman (and me) that it is impossible to convert a visual representation of the world into a human understandable map of objects and their trajectories and then derive the driving policy from it, to become a level 5 system. That's not how our brain works and once you come to this conclusion, your entire view of how FSD will come to pass will be turned on it's head. And it will seem obvious.

I won't spoil it here, but go watch the video. Terrific stuff. He does urge Elon to start driver monitoring, and I am ambivalent about it.

Spoiler: Ok, I'll spoil it

Humans look at some situations and though they don't see anything, they intuitively get cautious. Hotz talks about a bush, at an intersection, and we expect some car may jump from behind it and we know it's a possibility. A better known example is you'd want to brake for a ball, because a kid might be running after it.

I have a sharp left on my way home where I have to stop, lean forward, check traffic from the left, and make the left uncomfortably fast, because the cross traffic is high speed and i can see down only about 100 ft. I think that will be almost impossible for FSD because the side cameras are on the B pillar and they certainly can't lean forward. Or a mirror needs to go up at the intersection.

So the driving policy in situations like these cannot be physics based, but rather be informed by neural nets, and hence the FSD has to be an end to neural net. This is also a reason why Waymo's approach is a dead end.

Enough already. Did I tell you to go watch the video?

I reached essentially the same conclusion after watching one of Karpathy's talks. Its a different angle, but I think with a similar end result. In my case its about the dichotomy between predictable/repeatable results (procedural code) and probabilistic results (neural nets). When the inputs to your procedural code are probabilistic in nature then you will always be dealing with probabilistic outcomes. There's just no getting around it.

And once you accept that the driving decisions will be probabilistic in nature you start to wonder why all of the fuss with trying to do the rules procedurally. Especially given the problems with enumerating all of the rules. Its actually much simpler if your outputs become steering wheel angle and accelerator/decelerator settings -- albeit with a much bigger black box.

Another point again relates to computer vision. Ultimately, when trying to determine probable paths for other vehicles it might be tempting to add explicit heuristics. For example, is the blinker turned on. The problem is there is an implicit assumption that a blinker being turned on has predictive power for determining a probable path -- but you don't actually know that. Instead, they used their data engine to produce relevant data to feed the training. Maybe the blinker ended up being given a weight and maybe it was just ignored, who knows? Tesla is more concerned with a high probability of a correct prediction than exactly why the prediction has the high probability. A good research question, sure, but not relevant (in a practical way) if you hit the required probability benchmark.

(yeah, it can technically be significant why if you later on want to improve the benchmark and you might end up getting stuck with having to start over, or if every predictive failure was due to a related underlying flaw that makes score not actually reach the benchmark as had been anticipated, but in general it is not of concern and this is one of the strengths of using neural nets: you don't have to understand how/why the solution works in order for it to work.)

 

[Ocelot]

Sad day for me. I've been a Tesla Bull and supporter since I bought my first Model S in 2013. Since then I've invested half my retirement in the company, and purchased 6 Tesla vehicles. I've defended Tesla when people were critical of Tesla's customer service, and laughed at NADA when they said franchise dealerships protect customers. Well, I'm now on the bad end of a Tesla service issue. My order for my 6th Tesla, a Raven Model S with Ludicrous, kept getting delayed because of errors. Frustrated, I went to the store only to see the car I had ordered on the lot. I was told it was a new test drive vehicle. I eventually learned that the VIN had been assigned to me, but then somehow it ended up as a store vehicle, and I had been assigned a new VIN, which unfortunately had the wrong interior, so I was going to be delayed again. To avoid further delays, I agreed to take delivery of the test drive vehicle since it still had low miles (I was not given any discount because it had low miles). I noticed a few scratches and other things and sent the punch list to the Delivery specialist, who made notes and said it would be taken care of. I also noticed the right rear tire pressure was low on the drive home, but did not mention that in the first 24 hours because I assumed it was just inflated less than the other tires. I added air and thought it was fine. A week later, I had to add a little more air - not a lot, but some. Another week later, the same thing. At this point, I started thinking there must be a nail in the tire, even though the car had low miles, and with difficulty, found a well hidden nail deep in the tread. This obviously explains why the tire was low on the drive home - the car picked up a nail on the test drives before I purchased the car. This is the most logical explanation. Tesla is telling me that because of the location of the nail, the tire needs to be replaced, and I have to pay for it. I explained that the nail must have been there from the beginning because that tire was low when I drove home. But they say that since there was no mention of it immediately, they can't take my word for it. In other words, I, a physician who saves people for a living, and has spent over half a million dollars on Tesla vehicles, is potentially LYING about a nail in my $300 tire. Therefore, they can not replace it for free. This is in contrast to my experience with my local Porsche franchised dealer, who in 2012 replaced all the rotors and pads on my 6-month-old 911S that I had tracked 4 times and burned up the brakes, because they wanted to make sure I was a happy customer. My mind is BLOWN. I took this to the highest level at the Salt Lake Store, and got nowhere. I asked for a number for a supervisor in California, and I was told to send an email to customerescalations@Tesla. I will send the email, but holy cow am I disappointed and angry. If an electric Porsche 911 is ever made, you bet your a$$ I'm buying it if it doesn't suck.

P.S. - All this happened after I arrived at the airport on my day off to fly. First rule of aviation is don't fly if you are sick/distracted. There was no way I could climb into the cockpit and not think about all this, so I ended up having to just drive home. Thanks for ruining my day off as well.

Even if you have not been a super supporter, ...and it’s your first tesla....common sense says...replace the tire free of charge and move on. The fact that they probably know you there rubs salt into your wound...and I am not talking debridement with saline. The service center gets this done at cost. Worst case center is down a couple hundred bucks, best case you gain a customer for life.

It sucks when no one is empowered to make a decision.

I hope they apologize and replace the tire.

A dry cleaner ruined my shirt once. I brought it back. He asked me how much it cost...then promptly wrote me a cheque. He did not google the cost...or say anything else, despite it being a fairly pricey shirt. Now literally nearly a decade later, I go out of my way to support his business.

 

[Ocelot]

I didn't claim the OP was trying to "game the system", I thought I made that clear. The fact is, we don't know when the puncture occurred and even if it did occur before delivery, damage must be noted during the "grace" period to be covered by Tesla. Maybe the OP could find someone willing to bend the rules a bit but following a fair and clearly stated policy and enforcing it even-handedly is nothing to get bent out shape over. Personally, I might have made an exception had I worked there (but I might not have as I don't know all the details).

A customer drops 600k over 7 years, and you want to grab your policy binder, and say rules are rules? It is completely unfair to the customer, and is completely something that would leave most people feeling a bit bent out of shape. It’s simply poor management decision making.

 

[StealthP3D]

A customer drops 600k over 7 years, and you want to grab your policy binder, and say rules are rules? It is completely unfair to the customer, and is completely something that would leave most people feeling a bit bent out of shape. It’s simply poor management decision making.

Only someone who thinks the rules don't apply to them.

 

[TSLA Pilot]

Sad day for me. I've been a Tesla Bull and supporter since I bought my first Model S in 2013. Since then I've invested half my retirement in the company, and purchased 6 Tesla vehicles. I've defended Tesla when people were critical of Tesla's customer service, and laughed at NADA when they said franchise dealerships protect customers. Well, I'm now on the bad end of a Tesla service issue. My order for my 6th Tesla, a Raven Model S with Ludicrous, kept getting delayed because of errors. Frustrated, I went to the store only to see the car I had ordered on the lot. I was told it was a new test drive vehicle. I eventually learned that the VIN had been assigned to me, but then somehow it ended up as a store vehicle, and I had been assigned a new VIN, which unfortunately had the wrong interior, so I was going to be delayed again. To avoid further delays, I agreed to take delivery of the test drive vehicle since it still had low miles (I was not given any discount because it had low miles). I noticed a few scratches and other things and sent the punch list to the Delivery specialist, who made notes and said it would be taken care of. I also noticed the right rear tire pressure was low on the drive home, but did not mention that in the first 24 hours because I assumed it was just inflated less than the other tires. I added air and thought it was fine. A week later, I had to add a little more air - not a lot, but some. Another week later, the same thing. At this point, I started thinking there must be a nail in the tire, even though the car had low miles, and with difficulty, found a well hidden nail deep in the tread. This obviously explains why the tire was low on the drive home - the car picked up a nail on the test drives before I purchased the car. This is the most logical explanation. Tesla is telling me that because of the location of the nail, the tire needs to be replaced, and I have to pay for it. I explained that the nail must have been there from the beginning because that tire was low when I drove home. But they say that since there was no mention of it immediately, they can't take my word for it. In other words, I, a physician who saves people for a living, and has spent over half a million dollars on Tesla vehicles, is potentially LYING about a nail in my $300 tire. Therefore, they can not replace it for free. This is in contrast to my experience with my local Porsche franchised dealer, who in 2012 replaced all the rotors and pads on my 6-month-old 911S that I had tracked 4 times and burned up the brakes, because they wanted to make sure I was a happy customer. My mind is BLOWN. I took this to the highest level at the Salt Lake Store, and got nowhere. I asked for a number for a supervisor in California, and I was told to send an email to customerescalations@Tesla. I will send the email, but holy cow am I disappointed and angry. If an electric Porsche 911 is ever made, you bet your a$$ I'm buying it if it doesn't suck.

P.S. - All this happened after I arrived at the airport on my day off to fly. First rule of aviation is don't fly if you are sick/distracted. There was no way I could climb into the cockpit and not think about all this, so I ended up having to just drive home. Thanks for ruining my day off as well.

Just stunning how far Tesla Customer Service has fallen; I am in shock that they are becoming penny-wise and pound-foolish in an effort to save cash, when Elon SURELY must know better.

This is jaw-droppingly stupid.

ELON: FIX CUSTOMER SERVICE, which increases sales, which allows for a strong balance sheet!

Geesh, such idiocy.

 

[TheTalkingMule]

Why? They're supply constrained on their primary product line.

If you want the car, buy it. If you need a new tire, buy one. This idea that dbags should be treated like princesses just because Porsche does is silly.

That kind of crap eventually gets out of hand and you end up with the dealership "service" model we have now.

 

[TSLA Pilot]

I didn't claim the OP was trying to "game the system", I thought I made that clear. The fact is, we don't know when the puncture occurred and even if it did occur before delivery, damage must be noted during the "grace" period to be covered by Tesla. Maybe the OP could find someone willing to bend the rules a bit but following a fair and clearly stated policy and enforcing it even-handedly is nothing to get bent out shape over. Personally, I might have made an exception had I worked there (but I might not have as I don't know all the details).

With all due respect, if someone risked six-figures to purchase their first Tesla back in the EARLY days, and then has butt-load of referrals and repeat buys himself, I don't care if he drove his car over a curb "just because" and bent a wheel into a pretzel--he'll get a friggin' new tire and wheel for free as a courtesy/goodwill because that's what a smart person running Tesla (say, Elon Musk?) would want me to do, REGARDLESS OF SOME STUPID RULE . . . .

I cannot believe this is a topic of discussion.

ELON: The employees at the SLC Service Center need a "come to Jesus" meeting where a 2x4 to the forehead will be used on those to stupid to think on their own.

Geesh.

Fix Tesla Customer Service.

YESTERDAY!

 

[TSLA Pilot]

Only someone who thinks the rules don't apply to them.

Rules DO NOT APPLY at all times, in all circumstances.

Smart people know that.

(So how did you end up posting here?)

 

[CalX]

Tesla should address the cease-and-desist letter from NHTSA by changing messaging to "not the safest car in the world"

Maybe the messaging should be ”the NHTSA and automakers don't want you to know that Tesla scored the highest in the composite safety rating because that is just unfair advertising.“

 

[TSLA Pilot]

Back on topic: does anyone know the size of the AU and NZ markets for Tesla vs. other premium vehicles? Will a lot of sales in that market move the TSLA stock price needle?

I ask as it is EXTREMELY rare that a reviewer, who has access to dozens of brand new cars a year (all paid for and insured by others), drops six-figures to buy his own personal Tesla Model 3, BUT IT SPEAKS VOLUMES as to just how good the car really is: