2017 Investor Roundtable:General Discussion

[GoTslaGo]

I think he is wrong. I think it is done with adhesive now. Foam tape.

Agree, from other (owner) videos, they show the front bracket with pre-applied adhesives. The Russian language one shows it the best, IMHO.

 

[vgrinshpun]

I think he is wrong. I think it is done with adhesive now. Foam tape.

Yes, OCDetailing video indicated that license plate holder has profiled brackets with adhesive tape which conform to specific spot on the bumper. Drilling holes was mentioned as after-market solution for those concerned with the performance of the adhesive tape.

 

[racer26]

So the ZEV credit balances are up.

Zero Emission Vehicle Credits

According to the transfers section, Tesla sold 51,776 credits between Aug 31, 2016 and Aug 31, 2017.

We know from the financials that they sold ~ $20M worth in 4Q16, $0 in 1Q17 and ~$100M worth in 2Q17 for a Total of $120M.

We also know from recent history the going rate for ZEV credits seems to be about $2500 per, or 50 cents on the dollar to the fine for not having them. 120M @ $2500 per = 48,000 credits.

This suggests 3Q17 has somewhere between about $0 and $10M worth of ZEV credit sales (the remaining ~4,000), unless Tesla sold off some of the 29,556 they had in stock as of Aug 31, 2017 in September. This provides a boundary case on ZEV credits of about $85M as the maximum 3Q17 could be if they sold all of them in September.

Additionally, we know that in the trailing 4 quarters, Tesla generated 77,802 ZEV credits.

 

[mmd]

Mmd:

Build a combi factory, batteries and cars.

Stupid to ship batteries half around the world.

Good luck convincing Panasonic to pony up another $200M AND personnel for a combi factory! Panasonic already has a (or few?) battery factory in China, and another few across the sea. Seeing their Nevada GF investment is still not producing any meaningful volume of cells, I doubt Panasonic will be in it. May be some Chinese battery maker will step in.

Speaking of Shanghai
Tesla opens new largest Supercharger station in the world
"<
We now learn that the automaker just brought online a single new station in Shanghai with 50 Superchargers – becoming the largest Supercharger station in the world.
>"
View attachment 255617View attachment 255615 View attachment 255616

Hmm, Colin Langan may turn out to be right. Another $8B needed just for Super chargers.
UBS predicts Tesla will need to spend $8 billion to expand its Supercharger network

 

[mongo]

Hmm, Colin Langan may turn out to be right. Another $8B needed just for Super chargers.
UBS predicts Tesla will need to spend $8 billion to expand its Supercharger network

" "The UBS Evidence Lab estimated that the average drive time to the nearest TSLA Supercharger is 31 minutes vs. the average drive time to the nearest gas station of only 4 minutes," he wrote. "

As was posted in MARCH (over half a year ago) when that article was posted, and the stock was 30% LOWER than it is now: It's ZERO minutes from my parking spot to a charger.

 

[racer26]

Also, essentially all of the other automakers have rising ZEV credit balances as well. Honda is the only large-ish one that declined YoY. I expect this will (in the short term) make it difficult for Tesla to find buyers for their ZEV credits. The smart ones, though, will scoop up the flood of ZEVs from Tesla for cheap during 2018 and 2019 as Model 3 starts flooding the market with credits, though, because in 2019-2021 the requirements step up fairly steeply, right at the same time as everyone is going to be wrestling over the limited battery supply and therefore be unable to earn them directly.

 

[mmd]

" "The UBS Evidence Lab estimated that the average drive time to the nearest TSLA Supercharger is 31 minutes vs. the average drive time to the nearest gas station of only 4 minutes," he wrote. "

As was posted in MARCH (over half a year ago) when that article was posted, and the stock was 30% LOWER than it is now: It's ZERO minutes from my parking spot to a charger.

I agree with your emoticon Yes, you are thoroughly confused.

First, UBS is talking about superchargers, not any charger.
Second, look up meaning of 'average'. Your single data point is of very little significance.
Third, stock going up or down is not relevant for this. Look up the history of dot com stocks.

 

[vgrinshpun]

" "The UBS Evidence Lab estimated that the average drive time to the nearest TSLA Supercharger is 31 minutes vs. the average drive time to the nearest gas station of only 4 minutes," he wrote. "

As was posted in MARCH (over half a year ago) when that article was posted, and the stock was 30% LOWER than it is now: It's ZERO minutes from my parking spot to a charger.

...and that charger is couple orders of magnitude cheaper than what Mr. Langan dreamed up. We need ROFL button.

 

[elasalle]

Good luck convincing Panasonic to pony up another $200M AND personnel for a combi factory! Panasonic already has a (or few?) battery factory in China, and another few across the sea. Seeing their Nevada GF investment is still not producing any meaningful volume of cells, I doubt Panasonic will be in it. May be some Chinese battery maker will step in.


Hmm, Colin Langan may turn out to be right. Another $8B needed just for Super chargers.
UBS predicts Tesla will need to spend $8 billion to expand its Supercharger network

SuperCharger Usage is no longer free .. ? So even if it needs to spend $8B, they have a revenue stream to fund it.

 

[Reciprocity]

Good luck convincing Panasonic to pony up another $200M AND personnel for a combi factory! Panasonic already has a (or few?) battery factory in China, and another few across the sea. Seeing their Nevada GF investment is still not producing any meaningful volume of cells, I doubt Panasonic will be in it. May be some Chinese battery maker will step in.


Hmm, Colin Langan may turn out to be right. Another $8B needed just for Super chargers.
UBS predicts Tesla will need to spend $8 billion to expand its Supercharger network

We can only hope. As others have noted, supercharge is about to become a profit center. A very captive one at that. More for the Semi then the cars but then again, that is really all they need as each Semi consumes about 34x as much electricity as the average Model 3.

 

[Ulmo]

What's the highest PowerWall 2 and/or PowerWall 2 Backup Gateway serial number seen by customers? I just finished my inspection with Tesla's SolarCity installation division and the County inspector, and when he was leaving, I asked about how many installs they do. He said it's about three PW systems per week. I'm guessing that's for an area with about half a million population and a quarter million homes, but I'm not sure what his district boundaries are and the current stats for homes in that area, but that's about 150 PowerWall systems per year per 250,000 homes install rate, or about 1,666 years to cover all of them. I'm sure they're going to continue to ramp up since 1,666 years is not exactly a 20 year implementation schedule like we're expecting as we convert our energy needs to 100% solar. Assuming within that 20 year period Tesla will get about 30% market share, then that's still 500 years, or 4% of the run rate they need to PowerWall every home in 20 years (in this area). Right now they're still getting the regulatory experience ramp up at the same time as the ramp up of installs. For instance, they barely got Gilroy approval within the last few months, and suddenly they had almost a few dozen installs there that were backlogged waiting for those details to be learned and figured out, and suddenly, they're able to install there.

I think we're still in early days of PowerWalls. Next year we should start to see more market penetration and they'll start to get used to the flow of installing. The year after that I think they can optimize, as well as start to see load programs via the utilities. To get to 25x the current run rate is about one and a half orders of magnitude, something that seems very doable within the next 3 years or so as everyone gets used to the product. As slow as PowerWall installs have been this year, 25x seems easily doable; that would be about 15 installs per day out of the local shop, which would require about 10 installation crews (which is about 5x to 10x what they have now). They'll probably be ramping up the number of install crews just as soon as Tesla starts to build electric utility vans on the Model X platform like Electrek recently announced; I'm guessing that could be coming in about another year, almost perfect timing for the ramp up of GigaFactory 1 Battery in Nevada.

They can use many of the prior SolarCity solar panel installation crews for the battery installation crews, and are doing exactly that.

All of this seems in hand within the next couple of years now. A 20 years timeframe for conversion to every home having its own battery (if appropriate) seems reasonable given this flow. That's my timeframe rule of thumb for civil energy conversion of the planet to solar, including USA as my primary example; so, around 2035 or so (given that solar started in ernest a few years ago).

 

[Yggdrasill]

Hmm, Colin Langan may turn out to be right. Another $8B needed just for Super chargers.
UBS predicts Tesla will need to spend $8 billion to expand its Supercharger network

Yeah, the argument was completely idiotic back in March, and it still is.

It's like saying that because the nearest Amazon store/warehouse is 1000 miles away and the nearest Walmart is 5 miles away, Amazon can never compete with Walmart. The argument completely disregards the business model.

 

[Yggdrasill]

Just to do some calculations on the amount of capex required for the Supercharger expansion:

Assumptions:
- 25,000 USD cost per supercharger stall
- 12,500 mile annual Tesla mileage
- 20% of mileage done on the Tesla superchargers
- 400 Wh/mile
- 70 kW per supercharger stall
- 10% utilization of the supercharger capacity

Okay, each user will need 12,500 miles x 0.4 kWh/mile x 0.2 = 1,000 kWh/year. And each supercharger can output 70 kW x 365 days/year x 24 hours/day x 0.1 = 61,300 kWh/year

That means each supercharger can support 61,300 kWh/year / 1,000 kWh/year/Tesla = 61.3 Teslas. And the capex per new Tesla is 25,000 USD / 61.3 Teslas = 407 USD/Tesla.

That means that at an annual production of 500k Teslas, Tesla needs to spend around 200 million USD per year on the supercharger network.

This is pretty conservatively calculated. I think the utilization will be higher, and the usage per Tesla will be lower.

 

[austinEV]

Also, essentially all of the other automakers have rising ZEV credit balances as well. Honda is the only large-ish one that declined YoY. I expect this will (in the short term) make it difficult for Tesla to find buyers for their ZEV credits. The smart ones, though, will scoop up the flood of ZEVs from Tesla for cheap during 2018 and 2019 as Model 3 starts flooding the market with credits, though, because in 2019-2021 the requirements step up fairly steeply, right at the same time as everyone is going to be wrestling over the limited battery supply and therefore be unable to earn them directly.

This is why Tesla needs to quit selling and really be ZEV opec. Say very publicly they are $3k each or don't bother us. We would rather they sit useless than allow the buyers to pollute for cheap.

 

[racer26]

This is why Tesla needs to quit selling and really be ZEV opec. Say very publicly they are $3k each or don't bother us. We would rather they sit useless than allow the buyers to pollute for cheap.

Can Tesla afford to take the moral high ground? I mean, ethically and to the mission, I agree - flooding the ZEV credit market with credits earned by Model 3 will break the ZEV credit system. It will start to have the unintended effect of more automakers choosing to be like Mazda and decide its cheaper to simply buy the credits they need rather than build EVs. 2019-2021, the natural laws of supply and demand will alter the price curve for the credits accordingly. The demand from the others will begin to skyrocket (because the CARB requirement rises quite steeply then, and I don't believe sufficient non-GF batteries will exist to satisfy the requirement), and Tesla effectively becomes the monopoly holder on ZEV credits. They need zero, and create (essentially) all of them.

On the other hand, its simple for CARB to instantly render those credits worthless by outlawing trading of the credits, and Tesla's stockpile of credits becomes instantly worth $0. Better to sell them for whatever you can get for them.

 

[kenliles]

Nissan to unveil several new electric vehicles this week

 

[Ulmo]

I can't find the post here that discussed this, but I found this a great listen for why NUMMI Toyota "team" principles and just doing things right didn't get implemented at GM fast enough to stop it from going bankrupt. This link was posted here someplace. Very good listen. I did have to put on my NPR filter (to filter out all the mood stuff and weird talking style of the editors).

561: NUMMI 2015

This reminds me of all the old baby boomer incapabilities that I grew up with during the same time period. It was a time in American history when we couldn't do anything. Every great idea we came up with got shot down. Only geeks hiding behind DARPA got anything done with the "Internet", and of course, that burst out to spite all those pieces of crap do nothings, but we still haven't recovered from that attitude of nonimprovement of that era. (As usual, I suspect USSR meddling to exacerbate the incapabilities of USA at the time, as now.)

It would be a great history to sit through a listen for people like Elon and just mull the mind for current ideas.

 

[generalenthu]

This is why Tesla needs to quit selling and really be ZEV opec. Say very publicly they are $3k each or don't bother us. We would rather they sit useless than allow the buyers to pollute for cheap.

Cash is cash. For Tesla, cash now is worth a lot more than cash later. Also, if there are not enough ZEVs to go around, I am sure every automaker will subcontract out their compliance cars to LG, more or less like Chevy did, to sell them at a loss. Doesn't do much good and economically suboptimal.

Having these marginal dollars give Tesla a little more capital is a better deal anyways, as we have seen that the capital efficiency with which Tesla operates is vastly more than any other auto maker, and it goes into the right technology.

 

[RobStark]

@Yggdrasill

What is happening with the Norwegian "Tesla Tax?"

 

[pGo]

Just to do some calculations on the amount of capex required for the Supercharger expansion:

Assumptions:
- 25,000 USD cost per supercharger stall
- 12,500 mile annual Tesla mileage
- 20% of mileage done on the Tesla superchargers
- 400 Wh/mile
- 70 kW per supercharger stall
- 10% utilization of the supercharger capacity

Okay, each user will need 12,500 miles x 0.4 kWh/mile x 0.2 = 1,000 kWh/year. And each supercharger can output 70 kW x 365 days/year x 24 hours/day x 0.1 = 61,300 kWh/year

That means each supercharger can support 61,300 kWh/year / 1,000 kWh/year/Tesla = 61.3 Teslas. And the capex per new Tesla is 25,000 USD / 61.3 Teslas = 407 USD/Tesla.

That means that at an annual production of 500k Teslas, Tesla needs to spend around 200 million USD per year on the supercharger network.

This is pretty conservatively calculated. I think the utilization will be higher, and the usage per Tesla will be lower.

20% utilization by each user every year is a bit toooo much. I would put that number to 10% or less.