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Tesla, TSLA & the Investment World: the Perpetual Investors' Roundtable
- Thread starter AudubonB
- Start date
I loved our PHEV but it was a complex mechanism. Traded it at 60k miles before maintenance and inspections became an issue. Lost $ due to poor trade-in value in 2018.
With an L2 charger we could top it off twice a day pretty easy at home since it could charge in about 90 minutes or less. Many might not be able to do that but for us it was doable. Got a bit north of lifetime 65 mpg as a result as I remember even dragging all that dead weight of ICE, fuel tank, exhaust, radiator, fuel pump, etc around every electric mile driven.
As I have mentioned it’s main win was that it made it crystal clear that a far better solution was a BEV. Simple, safe, durable and great value considering TCO.
OK. That's a Toyota Rav 4 Hybrid plug-in. Weirdly enough, not obvious on Toyota's web site. 2021 version had 46 miles of range on the electric, which sounds vaguely about right for a Prius-type Synergy drive.
Thing ya gotta remember about the Prius and other Synergy drive cars, non-PHEV: That battery back there, as I said before, is a sump for dumping energy into when braking/going down-hill or for getting energy out of when accelerating; when not doing either of those things, Toyota runs the battery at around 80% of displayed max charge. That battery has about the equivalent, in terms of energy, of five tablespoons of gasoline.
The plug-in version of the Prius, which I looked at once or twice, roughly triples that battery size and, in the process, shrinks the storage area behind the back seat quite a bit: The spare tire area disappears, as does the storage under the rear cover, and it all comes up a couple of inches as well. Meaning that one can't stick three people's worth of luggage back there any more.
On top of that: If you're hauling a heavy beast like a Rav around, well, you're not going to get all that great mileage.
By comparison, the Tesla Model 3 or Y battery pack is a lot larger. Modern 3's and Y's get around 350 mile range on a full charge. Yeah, you pay more up front - but then your costs of running about the landscape are a lot less. If you've got solar, a heck of a lot less.
Finally: this household has both a M3 and a MY. If you want to drive something the size of a Rav 4, a Model Y's what you want, anyway.
Finally: The transmission (i.e., gears from motor to the wheels) on a Tesla are million-mile hardware. The battery pack is probably well over 200 k miles. There's not that much wear on a Tesla and an order of magnitude fewer moving parts. Less maintenance.
Look up the Cost of Ownership analyses on these cars and compare to any ICE. Unless the ICE is seriously dirt cheap, it'll be cheaper to drive the electric.
Captkerosene
Member
I consider it "more" nuanced ... like I said.
I'm not trying to beat up Andrej. He's an amazing character and I'm sure he works twice as hard as me and has a hundred extra IQ points.
I just don't think losing him is a bad thing. To me, the minute he said he was going on a sabbatical he was as good as gone. Do you think Elon was happy to have his head of AI on a walkabout for four months? We're delaying Bot for four months so Andrej can see the pyramids? Do you think that the guy with the top job working at the top AI company and for the best CEO in the world just quits so that he can catch up on his reading? Might as well have said he was taking time off to bond with his new pet lizard Horace. At a company like Tesla you better be on your game or you're gone. There are 120 people in his department - all remarkable and ambitious that want what he had. It's healthy for Tesla to have turnover every few years in these positions. If you don't, the rising stars with get impatient and go somewhere else where they have a chance to be the top guy with the big title and prestige. But, if you prefer, of course he "resigned," ... they're friends.
dhrivnak
Active Member
I have both a Model 3 and a RAV4 Prime. The RAV4 is doing well and unless we are towing on a long trip it stays in EV mode. I had a Volt before that and we treated it more like an EV rather than a gas car. The major problem with the RAV4 is Toyota can't make nearly enough of them and they are VERY hard to get. We can easily get over 1500 miles on a tank when staying home. On the highway it gets a respectable 40 MPG, even 30 MPG pulling our camper.
Still there, but oddly enough you have to go through the CUV page, rather than hybrid plug-in page. 2022 RAV4 Prime | Take charge of your path. They are now claiming 42 miles EV-only range. Available for about $42k. (depending on dealer markups).
The Volt architecture is/was sort of like the Prius system with two motor/generators and a planetary gearbox (or two). But better in details such as the use of clutches for various modes of operation. Details also differ between the gen 1 and gen 2 Volt. In both generations of Volt, the ICE is completely decoupled from the planetary via a clutch when not in use. IMHO GM really had the best PHEV architecture, especially with the gen 2 Volt. But of course, has given that up.
Our Volt is religiously plugged in. Well over 90% of its miles have been on electric.
The German PHEVs kinda do as you described with a conventional transmission, smallish battery pack, etc. One neighbor of mine had a BMW 530e and basically never bothered to plug it in. He admitted to me that purchasing it was basically a "carpool lane sticker" play. Interestingly, they replaced it about 1.5 years ago with a Model S Raven.
Both GM and Ford have basically given up on PHEVs and show no sign of reintroducing them. So this tax/spend bill really doesn't seem like it would help them very much. And the requirement that a vehicle would need at least a 7 kWh battery pack says it wouldn't help Toyota much with their "self charging" (sic) hybrids either.
Just when I thought I couldn’t be any more bullish than I am now, you just got me into the full bull zone.
My son bought a RAV4 Prine in February ( ordered previous October). Gets over 40 miles on all electric and is enough for him to go to work and back. When home he charges from solar / power wall so only uses gas on road trips. I think part of the reason plug in hybrids get a bad rap is that businesses were buying and employees not plugging in because they don’t pay for the gas. He would have liked a Tesla MY but out of his price range and he got $7500 rebate so could afford it.
As you drive < 4 miles per day you can do no better for the environment than keeping your ICE Rav 4. Apply the saved car payments to TSLA shares.
TheTalkingMule
Distributed Energy Enthusiast
I don't think this will surprise many on Wall Street, the next two quarters are pretty clear and have been dangling out there for a while.
I'm sure the "analyst" estimates are <$9 for 2022 EPS, but internally they're all at $11-17. That's what will be traded on and hopefully this FOMO takes us right up to a 100 PE on that earnings range before we're even close to the 3Q report.
Nolimits
Member
The Accountant
Active Member
As a sanity check, Gary Black has FCF for Q3&Q4 totaling $7.1b, while I have $9.2b.
Gary is usually (if not always) the most conservative forecaster putting out numbers for Tesla. So being north of Gary by $2.1b for 2nd Half seems right.
Even if the numbers are closer to Gary's than mine, the results are still extraordinary.
Captkerosene
Member
Yep. I was that "Good luck to Tesla longs" guy once. Ended up losing millions of dollars on a synthetic biology company. Thought that the stock was being manipulated and that posters negative on the company were shorts trying to push the share price down. I encouraged others to ignore negative narratives without rigorous examination. The "truth" was that many of those positive on the company were fools or sellers trying to exit their positions before the share price tanked. Oh, the lies they told. So, forgive me if I have negative feelings towards cheerleading.
So you couldn’t tell fact from fiction in the past and you still can’t do so today.
Good to know.
If you're ready to stop, just stop. That's what I did, and I ended up quitting a month before TSLA went from 1200 to 600 this year. I'm not fazed. I know I'll get it back and more.
There are other companies that do equivalent pieces of software. They tend to not publicise them in general press as the client set is ordinarily quite small - major (or minor) utilities and the like. That is why Tesla doesn't promote Autobidder much in manistream media. You want it to be selling on the QT, and you and your clients making big $$ on the QT, with no public ripples. Even doing proper due diligence to buy software like this generally involves getting snarled up in so many NDAs you can't speak to your mother for years. I'm not convinced there is anything particularly clever in Tesla's software. I've developed this stuff, and looked at other peoples' stuff., and there are lots of clever people out there. A lot of what does get to the outside media is badge-engineered versions of someone else's stuff .....
Examples - and you can figure out whether these are or are not badged:
If you haven't watched the VPP video, it is worth watching.
I'm not claiming Tesla necessarily has any software others don't, just that VPPs are a powerful concept.
The customer is in a 3-way relationship with Tesla and the Utility (Retailer), there are benefits for all 3 parties and has network effects which tend to breed loyalty.
The VPP can be part of a wider Tesla Ecosystem that the customer adopts, Cars, Solar, Powerwall,, home HVAC.
When the customer has a lot of Tesla products that work well together, they are more likely to buy more Tesla products.
In the Australian context when a Retailer has a lot of happy loyal customers who save them money, and the additional effort to manage the VPP via Tesla is minimal, an obvious thought is, let's use the VPP to try to get more customers. Most probably Tesla and the Retailer can do a deal to provide customers with Powerwalls at a discount rate.
The VPP will work better in some countries and regions than others, because rules and regulations vary.
While others might have a good VPP product, do they have the Cars, Solar, Powerwalls and other products? I know Octopus already works with Tesla. As the rules and regulations vary from region-to-region so does the quality of the software available. In part it depends on who is writing the software, and for what purpose.
Same for batteries, others might have software like Autobidder, but when a customer has purchased batteries from Tesla previously, and knows how to drive Autobidder, buying the next lot of batteries from Tesla is the simple decision. That may depend on price/availability, but software is part of the purchase and after sales experience.
Is your's on the high-side of volume production numbers as if the probability of a supplier issue, disease, or technical hurdle were zero? And maybe Gary factors in some risk that was briefly mentioned in the Earning's Call?
When it looks too good to be true, it reminds me of when I would save for something as a kid, extrapolate it out a few months in order to "save" for something cool with my earnings, only to find something didn't quite pan out as planned.
I also realize that Tesla over delivers each quarter and they've only slightly adjusted their guidance to "challenging" but still 50% growth. That "challenging" part to me says 50% is less likely, which I'd expect given China shutdown and 50% guidance before it happened. Hopefully they catch up this quarter so it's not so tight.
In the end, I'm humbled by how close everyone gets on Tesla with so many variables and Factories now. Credit Tesla drive and consistency for making you all look that good; I'd imagine forecasting for GM or Ford is not so easy.
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MartinAustin
Active Member
Living in Texas where it has been 104-ish for the daily high nearly all of July, that feature has been an almost critical advantage of the Tesla. Been using it a lot. It's also a great selling point to our ICE-driving friends who really don't know what it's like to get into a cool car on a boiling hot day. I don't know if any luxury ICE vehicles have this? If you have to run the engine it seems a no-go.
We even use it when the car is in our own garage, out of the sun. It's 90°F in the garage
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