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

[SPadival]

S Padival on Twitter

"Inventory of Model 3 vehicles in NA remains exceptionally low, reaching about two weeks of supply at the end of Q1" - $TSLA Q1 report

“we think there are at least 10,000 unsold Model 3s out there” - shorts in @russ1mitchell's hit-piece @latimes

Same thing, morons. #RTFQR

 

[Causalien]

From my 2, cars sold, there is something that can be improved if TSLA started marketing. This has to do with perception and decades of brainwashing.

The spartan and spaceship interior reminds ppl of really cheap cars in the good old days. The simplistic look doesn't immediately bring about a futuristic feel as people has no reference to go back on to what can be considered an "iphone look" in cars. Decades of marketing push by automakers have trained people to equate cluttered interior and more "stuff" to luxury vehicles.

The front nose cone without a grill. Same thing as above. It's a style that needs getting used to. I find that the car is easier to be accepted if you walk your friend up from behind or the side and show them the interior first. Only show the front after having firmly established "why" the styling is done in a certain way to convey a futuristic feel.

 

[sundaymorning]

From my 2, cars sold, there is something that can be improved if TSLA started marketing. This has to do with perception and decades of brainwashing.

The spartan and spaceship interior reminds ppl of really cheap cars in the good old days. The simplistic look doesn't immediately bring about a futuristic feel as people has no reference to go back on to what can be considered an "iphone look" in cars. Decades of marketing push by automakers have trained people to equate cluttered interior and more "stuff" to luxury vehicles.

The front nose cone without a grill. Same thing as above. It's a style that needs getting used to. I find that the car is easier to be accepted if you walk your friend up from behind or the side and show them the interior first. Only show the front after having firmly established "why" the styling is done in a certain way to convey a futuristic feel.

I have lots of friends who fell in love with the front fascia, this is coming from California of course. Generally, I do agree that some form of advertisement is needed. Pound on climate change and how oil/gas is affecting the planet.

 

[Causalien]

I have lots of friends who fell in love with the front fascia, this is coming from California of course. Generally, I do agree that some form of advertisement is needed. Pound on climate change and how oil/gas is affecting the planet.

Ya, I sold to old school people who aren't tech chasers.

 

[K3jSe7Llp7]

Just like to say let's remember the mission. I'm relatively poor but my money is for tesla. When the sp drops I feel the more strongly my commitment to doing the right thing. I love you, supporters of the mission.

 

[Fact Checking]

If they're using dual chips, it will be to protect against hard failure of a chip dying / locking up / overheating / etc, not so much against random cosmic ray bit flipping or electromigration causing one chip to produce wrong output (as the output might still look valid, and then you don't know which chip to use).

Dual chips running the same workload redundantly and constantly checking that the output is identical is still useful in detecting errors: the chance of a random corruption happening on two chips at once, producing the same output, is vanishingly small.

Once corruption has been detected the car can enter safe mode (alert the driver, pull over, etc.) or reboot the chips: the NNs can be reloaded and the calculation can be restarted, possibly within a second. There's very little persistent state on the chips if the NNs are inference only.

But even if such events only get logged, it gives a good health check and a diagnostic log that allows faster iteration of not just the software but the hardware too.

I.e. simply being able to detect corruption is already immensely useful, both to vehicle safety and in being able to measure the processing reliability of the HW/SW.

 

[30seconds]

From my 2, cars sold, there is something that can be improved if TSLA started marketing. This has to do with perception and decades of brainwashing.

The spartan and spaceship interior reminds ppl of really cheap cars in the good old days. The simplistic look doesn't immediately bring about a futuristic feel as people has no reference to go back on to what can be considered an "iphone look" in cars. Decades of marketing push by automakers have trained people to equate cluttered interior and more "stuff" to luxury vehicles.

The front nose cone without a grill. Same thing as above. It's a style that needs getting used to. I find that the car is easier to be accepted if you walk your friend up from behind or the side and show them the interior first. Only show the front after having firmly established "why" the styling is done in a certain way to convey a futuristic feel.

Going to have to disagree based on the number of people telling me how modern and clean the interior is.

Plus actual use of a Tesla vs the Germans - the interior of the Tesla is way more functional. It doesn’t fight you with the complexity of a thousand buttons placed randomly about the cabin with little integration with your phone other than CarPlay.

Finally there is no greater luxury feature than Autopilot.

 

[Cobos]

If Tesla suddenly has a €2000-8000 bonus for all sold EU(note Norwegian deliveries doesn’t count right?!) cars, they should redirect efforts there now and add more options very soon. Get more from the deal and kill competition before it gets started, maybe they will get even more credits this way. Only offer P3D and AWD to China until GF3 opens, introduce all options for EU and do a 50/50 US/EU mix for SR+... Norway can do LR, AWD, P3D for now...

As mentioned in my posts now many pages back. Norway IS included, so for this count we are a EU country.

 

[lklundin]

Debunked many times. It's 8kwh of energy, most of it in the form of heat, less than 1 kwh is actually electricity used.

This source says 4.5 kWh of electricity spent just to refine one (UK) gallon of petrol,

Using SI-units, that estimate is very close to 1 kWh / L, i.e. 1 MWh / m^3.

 

[Cherry Wine]

You really think it will close below 270 this week? I guess it only need close below 270 + 7.25 for you to be profitable. It's def a possibility, but I would be very nervous with that call. The weekly 200 MA is at 275, and in spite of the horrible last week, it still closed approx there. But anything is possible.

Then again I never sell covered calls. Rather, I buy calls/leaps on big dips and sell them after the rips, and occasionally buy puts. I don't like the undefined risk that comes with selling calls and puts. I could do spreads to define the risk, but it's just one more level of complexity beyond shares, and then options. I want to keep it relatively simple. I've done fairly well, lowering my initial cost basis from 250 to 200 or so, while also increasing my position via the profits.

I added shares and calls last week at 267 and today at 271. Will add more if we test 250-260 again. But I concede there is no one strategy. Different strokes for diff folks! GLTY

If it closes above $277+ I’ll roll the calls up and out another week. It won’t keep going up forever. ;-)

 

[Artful Dodger]

And the Boring Company works on fast, efficient TBMs. About the diameter of a FH payload stage...

Yup, also why Hyperloop pods will need to work with tubes evacuated to 600 Pascals (Mars avg surface pressure).

 

[Toumal]

I made 2 sales in the 2 weeks since I took possession of the car. None of these are through the online blog or "influencer" route. Just pure, in-your-face sales.

You are obviously wrong because as we all know now, there is no demand. Everyone is buying clean Diesel these days. They are cheaper to run and work on racetracks, unlike Tesla.

*Snortgiggle*

 

[Fact Checking]

Those FSD computer comments by Elon have been widely misinterpreted.

What he said, exactly, was:

Elon Musk on Twitter

"Retrofits will start when our software is able to take meaningful advantage of the Tesla FSD computer, which is an order of magnitude more capable. For now, it’s slightly disadvantageous to have Tesla FSD computer, as our software is more refined for HW2."​

My guess:

Right now the FSD computer is probably only ~4% utilized and power draw is probably slightly higher than that of HW 2.5. Maybe calculation performance of the existing networks is slightly slower as well.

The HW 2.5 GPU is maybe 90% utilized during peak load.

Once they have the new, much larger networks, the FSD computer will probably be ~80% utilized during peak loads. The HW 2.5 simply won't be able to run those networks at all: it requires ~1800% of the current computing capacity, which is simply not there. Performance would drop from the required 100 fps processing to maybe 5 fps processing speed.

Elon is completely right that networks that fit on HW 2.5 can be run on HW 3 as well but it's "slightly" slower or slightly less power efficient.

But with the new networks there will be no contest.

My processing power utilization guesses were pretty close, Elon just shared the actual FSD computer and HW 2.5 utilization percentages, which are 5%/10% and 80%:

Elon Musk on Twitter

"The Tesla Full Self-Driving Computer now in production is at about 5% compute load for these tasks or 10% with full fail-over redundancy"

Elon Musk on Twitter

"[The compute load on AP 2.5 cars is] ~80%"​

I.e. HW 2.5 is near the end of its capacity, while the FSD computer can still run ~10x more complex neural networks.

Elon also confirmed that the larger neural networks that can only run on the FSD computer will be coming later this year, and that the board switch can be done via mobile service:

Elon Musk on Twitter

"When it does matter later this year, Tesla will switch the computers for you."

Elon Musk on Twitter

"Mobile can do it no problem"​

Feedback from the latest iteration of Navigate on Autopilot:

"Tesla’s Navigate on Autopilot performs amazingly with automatic lane changes"
​

And that's all still on HW 2.5!

In two weeks, on April 22, Tesla is going to host the 'Autonomy Investor Day'. If they are going to demonstrate full-sized neural networks running on the FSD computer then we might see 'magic':

 

[schonelucht]

When did Tesla enter this agreement? February 25. Geez I wonder why Tesla filed 3 CT orders with the SEC that day granting confidentiality to some material information...

Check again : they are all extensions for confidentiality on material submitted in 2018 or earlier. Nothing to do with the pooling agreement.

 

[CorneliusXX]

Is this just speculation or do we know Tesla is stockpiling battery packs? That would go a long way towards meeting some goals in China.

I've been skeptical about Giga Shanghai helping out to the tune of 3,000 Model 3's per week by Q4. So much has to go perfectly, and even Fremont has trouble sustaining 6,000 M3 per week. Seems like it's expecting too much for Giga Shanghai to be halfway there in such a short time frame. Having a few thousand packs ready for installation would be huge!

The progress on the building gives me hope, however. It's been amazing.

This has to be speculation. Stockpiling resources for that long is such an inefficient use of capital.

If they were going to stockpile battery packs I'd expect the to start only a couple of months before production is expected to ramp to create a small buffer. They would obviously be planning increased production of batteries to coincide with the increased production of vehicles.

 

[SebastianR]

OT:

Going to have to disagree based on the number of people telling me how modern and clean the interior is.

Plus actual use of a Tesla vs the Germans - the interior of the Tesla is way more functional. It doesn’t fight you with the complexity of a thousand buttons placed randomly about the cabin with little integration with your phone other than CarPlay.

Finally there is no greater luxury feature than Autopilot.

Fully agree.

These discussions are similar to the iPhone / Blackberry discussions way back when: The absence of physical keyboards made the iPhone a "toy for the rich" (sounds familiar?), not a serious business machine ("not a real car"), the lack of a swapable battery made the iPhone unusable for the poweruser ("can't refuel in 5 minutes")

Look at reviews like this: iPhone vs. N95-3: Battle Royale

On topic: Norway still having deliveries >50 cars a day over the past week. We are now having more Teslas in Norway in the month of April than in 3 out of the last 6 months, so there are solid deliveries. And the first 118 Teslas for the month of April have been delivered to Denmark (Nrpla.de - Find dit køretøj hurtigt) so that's more than in the month of February and the boom & bust seems not quite as dramatic as it once was.

 

[Prunesquallor]

Tesla, TSLA & the Investment World: the 2019 Investors' Roundtable

In above linked post, there's an error in the second example. It should read:

Does FCA have any other options? Well, they could try to lower their darn emissions, but Reference 1 Figure 3.8 shows they have made essentially zero progress since 2011. But suppose miraculously they got half-way to their target (105 g/km). Then their best option would end up only paying the EU €330.2 M, still paying Tesla €318.5 M bounty for the 70,000 ZEVs (€4550 additional Tesla profit per ZEV) and saving €318.5 M by pooling.

 

[RobStark]

EV Sales: France March 2019

 

[Fact Checking]

Check again : they are all extensions for confidentiality on material submitted in 2018 or earlier. Nothing to do with the pooling agreement.

Would the pooling agreement have to be filed as an 8-K at all?

Since they are not filing ZEV sales as separate 8-K's either I suspect they are no required to do it?

 

[KarenRei]

Dual chips running the same workload redundantly and constantly checking that the output is identical is still useful in detecting errors: the chance of a random corruption happening on two chips at once, producing the same output, is vanishingly small.

Once corruption has been detected the car can enter safe mode (alert the driver, pull over, etc.) or reboot the chips: the NNs can be reloaded and the calculation can be restarted, possibly within a second. There's very little persistent state on the chips if the NNs are inference only.

But even if such events only get logged, it gives a good health check and a diagnostic log that allows faster iteration of not just the software but the hardware too.

I.e. simply being able to detect corruption is already immensely useful, both to vehicle safety and in being able to measure the processing reliability of the HW/SW.

I've been staying out of this conversation, but I just want to note is that what Elon said the chips do is health checks, not voting. E.g. you periodically run tests to look for flipped bits or processor errors, and if one core fails its health test, you disable it. The cores don't run the same input all the time and compare the output to make sure it matches; they run different input, hence HW3 gets its capability halved (20x -> 10x) if a core is disabled.

Also: since this is a neural net being simulated, the occasional minor error should not be catastrophic; it'll just "noise up" the system and decrease it's net effectiveness - the larger the neural net, the smaller the effect a malfunction will have.