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

[larmor]

Well measured note from Jonas. Important to focus on the long term:

"We see Tesla’s incrementally negative outlook as a sign the company wants to err on the side of caution to ‘protect the House’ at a time of elevated macro, consumer and geopolitical risk. At various times in Tesla’s history the company’s strategy has swung from offensive to defensive. The current tone has clearly shifted to the latter. While the reset may hurt shares near term, we believe this may prove to be the right strategy for the company and its stakeholders over the long term."

Yes finally under promise. To pick apart the earnings call, lots of couching in terms of if there is a world ending macro spiral out of control and worst case scenario to get cybertruck production and volume in 18 months. Adding more compute power to FSD with AI cpu's-- seems to be the big miss by the market. Rising margins on stationary battery utility scale installations also seems to have missed the market's pity party.

 

[y_naught]

The Fed’s goal of 2% does not have, in the aggregate, the cost of items dropping.
Nor does 1%.
Nor even 0%.

An economy must be deflationary for that to occur and to the best my memory can recall, no nation in history ever has been able to navigate happily that event. And especially not the lower 90%+ of its population.

Tell that to everyone buying Teslas now vs a year ago! “In the aggregate” is the key phrase.

 

[ItsNotAboutTheMoney]

Things like this make me skeptical of Elon's recession worries. Also bear in mind that we should already be in a recession if Elon's prognostications last year/early this year came to pass, and we aren't. These are QoQ GDP growth projections. No recession in sight.

View attachment 983867

US automotive 12M sales rate declined in July and August. Tesla is having to cut margins to sell. Not good for a new vehicle release that is likely to lose money for a while.

But, I think that mainly saying "vehicle is difficult to manufacture, economy blah blah" is also a way to hide "we're struggling to make enough 4680 at low enough cost to make lots of Cybertrucks right now". With Ford and GM pulling back on pick-up plans, it's not like buyers have much alternative.

 

[SOULPEDL]

Seems I ordered the 2 variants of CT, but they are now indistinguishable. One used to say Dual-Motor, the other Tri-Motor. Now they are identical, even inside the Managed link. Are they coming out together now, delivered in order of RN#, our choice? Hey, if the Dual has more range maybe favor range. If range holds (wasn't there some kind of new synchronis disengagement mech?) Need the Pros/Cons from Tesla, including prices.

 

[Zaddy Daddy]

Some people look only for the positive news.
Others look ONLY for the negative.

May I suggest trying to at least find the middle?

And no, I don't need anyone to inform me about risk's to my investment.

What worse?

Posting false, but positive information.

Posting true, but negative / neutral information.

The VIN estimate of > 7,000 / wk is utterly false.

My post of "actually" it's lik 3,500 is truth (or close). And it's not even negative, it's already been well known.

 

[elasalle]

Here's how you do ad's

https://twitter.com/x/status/1715205423652065358

 

[Featsbeyond50]

Predictions on the low over the next 6 months?

I say 150. I don't think we will have another margin squeeze because interest rates are too high and the last squeeze was so recent, there hasn't been enough time to accumulate more victims. So, I don't think we will have new lows. At 150 we will have a very high PE of 40ish and I'm skeptical we can maintain a higher PE than that with the guidance provided yesterday.

Seems I ordered the 2 variants of CT, but they are now indistinguishable. One used to say Dual-Motor, the other Tri-Motor. Now they are identical, even inside the Managed link. Are they coming out together now, delivered in order of RN#, our choice? Hey, if the Dual has more range maybe favor range. If range holds (wasn't there some kind of new synchronis disengagement mech?) Need the Pros/Cons from Tesla, including prices.

View attachment 983880

Ditto. I plan to get both and put the dual on Turo. I have a hunch I can make a 1000 per week until the fad dies down. Then I'll either sell or let one of my kids have the extra CT.

I can't wait to see my neighbors reactions when I have two Cybertrucks parked out front.

 

[Usain]

Well measured note from Jonas. Important to focus on the long term:

"We see Tesla’s incrementally negative outlook as a sign the company wants to err on the side of caution to ‘protect the House’ at a time of elevated macro, consumer and geopolitical risk. At various times in Tesla’s history the company’s strategy has swung from offensive to defensive. The current tone has clearly shifted to the latter. While the reset may hurt shares near term, we believe this may prove to be the right strategy for the company and its stakeholders over the long term."

Jonas is right, of course.

GM is collapsing and Ford is not far behind. Stellantis isn't even pretending to transition to EVs. When the strike is finally over, they will be wanting to raise prices to make up for higher wage and benefit costs. They will probably raise prices and lower production.

Mark my words. January 1st is when it becomes clear just how screwed these companies are. With point of sale tax credits, the big three will have nothing to sell but ICE cars that cost a lot more than a Tesla.

 

[EQC_]

In 2020, there were no factories (just construction) at Austin nor Berlin. Shanghai was only just starting production on 3. It was also the first year for the Y.
So Tesla would wedge a new truck line into Fremont while dealing with C19 shutdowns?
2020 also saw Tesla raise $12 Billion through three share issuances. Risking 3/Y ramp and cash flows with another new product launch would have been very not conservative.

(Assuming the cell capacity existed somewhere).

Yes. Exactly my point. Lots of folks are blaming the Cybertruck design (and therefore Elon) for it being "late." But any earlier would have required huge trade-offs with decreases in production of other Teslas, loss of manufacturing efficiency, huge costs, and diversion away from Tesla's apparent production strategy.

 

[transpondster]

See, this sort of post is why I made an account. Many likes for this tweet which is obvious trash.

This is becoming obnoxious.

You see, if this source were correct (after posting > 5,000 per week estimates for all of Q3), then Tesla would have produced ~ 75k to 80k cars in Berlin.

@Troy estimates Berlin produced 45,000.

45k, not 75k

3500 per week, not 6000 / week. Not 5000 / week. Not even 4000 / week.

The cognitive dissonance is amazing.

I haven't checked if GigaBerlin had, but most (all?) auto plants in Europe have 2 weeks off for production during summer and 1(?) week Christmas period

 

[Troy]

I think the tweet is saying the uptick just happened. So this is possible. But basing the estimate entirely on VINs is not so reliable.

VIN data is very reliable. I started estimating Tesla's production 10 quarters ago and my average error rate is 1.2%. The largest error I made was 2.1%. There is no uptick at Giga Berlin. He is misreading the data.

This is not a good VIN chart. You have to zoom in a lot more to see all the details.

This is a good VIN chart. You can see the trend (the angle of the triangle), you can see the gaps they left unused, and you can make a detailed calculation.

 

[Dutchie]

It's completed and been brought into production. It's online. Dodger's transcript source had a typo:

"We recently completed a 10,000 GPU cluster of h100s. We think, probably bringing it into operation faster than anyone's ever bought that much compute per unit time into production"

Timestamped audio:

Ok thanks. It wasn't clear to me.

 

[Usain]

VIN data is very reliable. I started estimating Tesla's production 10 quarters ago and my average error rate is 1.2%. The largest error I made was 2.1%. There is no uptick at Giga Berlin. He is misreading the data.

This is not a good VIN chart. You have to zoom in a lot more to see all the details.

This is a good VIN chart. You can see the trend (the angle of the triangle), you can see the gaps they left unused, and you can make a detailed calculation.

I stand corrected. I knew about VIN gaps, which is why I thought relying on VINs was not so accurate.

I see that when plotted correctly, it's a useful tool. Thanks for teaching me something.

 

[CorneliusXX]

Picked up two 10k blocks of TSLA this AM - should be an interesting Q4.

That's a bit ambiguous, did you spend $20k or $4m?

 

[2daMoon]

Mark my words. January 1st is when it becomes clear just how screwed these companies are. With point of sale tax credits, the big three will have nothing to sell but ICE cars that cost a lot more than a Tesla.

But wait, there's more!

Each of those ICE cars sold will have some portion of their profit going toward paying Tesla (and others) for Credits, when the ICE OEM isn't producing enough EVs to avoid being fined.

 

[thx1139]

US automotive 12M sales rate declined in July and August. Tesla is having to cut margins to sell. Not good for a new vehicle release that is likely to lose money for a while.

But, I think that mainly saying "vehicle is difficult to manufacture, economy blah blah" is also a way to hide "we're struggling to make enough 4680 at low enough cost to make lots of Cybertrucks right now". With Ford and GM pulling back on pick-up plans, it's not like buyers have much alternative.

US new auto sales for the entire year are expected to be just under 15 million. So I dont know what you mean about US auto sales declining 12M in July and August.

 

[kbM3]

I guess I wonder why he felt the need to say it. NO new vehicle line, particularly one of a brand new product, is going to be profitable. Takes time to ramp, to work out the supply stream, sort out manufacturing and design issues. No reasonable person would expect that product to be profitable at start of production, any more than a new factory would. I would like to know if Berlin and Austin are now in the black.

I believe every single Tesla model became gross profitable by the 2nd quarter of production. In very stark contrast to other’s EV’s.

So Elon’s pessimistic view on the difficulty of getting CT to significant positive cash flow generation, would likely be using this kind of exceptional performance as the benchmark.

 

[kbM3]

This is a good topic to ponder! In the slide deck Tesla listed current factory capacities:

Fremont: 650K
Shanghai: 950K
Berlin: 375K
Austin: 375K
TOTAL: 2,350,000

Now, regarding Austin, 125K of that capacity is the 125K CT production, which Elon himself said will take about 18 months to ramp up to. So for 2024 we can expect the CT line to NOT hit that 125K number, we are more likely to only see about 60K CT's in 2024.

This means for next year, 2024, we are looking at a probable production number of 2,285,000. This would only be about 27% above 2023 expected production of 1.8 million.

Now for 2025, we really don't have any new capacity coming online that we know of. Mexico's buildout is delayed and Berlin seems stalled in it's ramp, so for 2025 we're likely only going to see a bit more production than 2024 due to the CT ramp being mature. We might see some more line improvements to existing factories which might equal slightly higher run rates, but nothing extraordinary. Maybe Berlin will gain some production as well?

I'm expecting 2025 production to be barely above 2024 production. Maybe 2,500,000 or so? 10% above 2024 production numbers. I just don't see many possible paths to gain lots of production in that timeframe given the current production capacities and buildouts.

So yeah, I'm expecting the growth rate to slow for a year or two, until Gen3 production comes online in either late 2025 or 2026, and especially until Giga Mexico is built and producing.

Elon said CT would take 18 months to ramp to a 250k annual rate. Not to the current 125k capacity.

 

[SmokyPeat]

Dry those tears, the pity party is over. Time to rally! You get a Cybertruck...., you get a Cybertruck...., EVERYBODY gets a Cybertruck!

 

[Usain]

Awesome. Bullet testing for Cybertruck. Wish they had saved it for the delivery event, but this is too cool for school.

https://twitter.com/x/status/1715409977932656892