2017 Investor Roundtable:General Discussion

[MartinAustin]

Perhaps also of note, is that today (June 22nd) is the five-year anniversary of the delivery of the Model S. We will now begin seeing 5yr-old Model S cars driving around! (in their sixth year of existence) Here is Tesla's video of that event, which was posted a month later.

 

[Runarbt]

Sorry, but it is unlikely. At market open the local time will be 9:30pm, so if anything is indeed slated to be signed, the representative who did the signing will most likely be dining and celebrating the deal with few toasts..

I guess I will have to put my trust in shorts, trying to subdue the event with fud and shoreting. :-D

 

[RobStark]

Tesla snubs J.D. Power for Initial Quality Study data

DETROIT -- How do the quality ratings for the 2017 Tesla Model S and Model X compare to competitors?

They don't, based off J.D. Power's 2017 U.S. Initial Quality Study that was released Wednesday. That's not because Tesla Inc. doesn't make quality vehicles, but because it doesn't allow J.D. Power access to its customer registration data for the survey.

 

[JBRR]

Chris Lattner just updated his Resume to include his time at Tesla - Interesting reading... • r/teslamotors

Work History

Tesla

VP Autopilot Software

January 30 - June 20, 2017

When I joined Tesla, it was in the midst of a hardware transition from "Hardware 1" Autopilot (based primarily on MobileEye for vision processing) to "Hardware 2", which uses an in-house designed TeslaVision stack. The team was facing many tough challenges given the nature of the transition. My primary contributions over these fast five months were:

• We evolved Autopilot for HW2 from its first early release (which had few features and was limited to 45mph on highways) to effectively parity with HW1, and surpassing it in some ways (e.g. silky smooth control).
• This required building and shipping numerous features for HW2, including: support for local roads, Parallel Autopark, High Speed Autosteer, Summon, Lane Departure Warning, Automatic Lane Change, Low Speed AEB, Full Speed Autosteer, Pedal Misapplication Mitigation, Auto High Beams, Side Collision Avoidance, Full Speed AEB, Perpendicular Parking, and 'silky smooth' performance.
• This was done by shipping a total of 7 major feature releases, as well as numerous minor releases to support factory, service, and other narrow markets.
• One of Tesla's huge advantages in the autonomous driving space is that it has thousands of cars already on the road. We built infrastructure to take advantage of this, allowing the collection of image and video data from this fleet, as well as building big data infrastructure in the cloud to process and use it.
• I defined and drove the feature roadmap, drove the technical architecture for future features, and managed the implementation for the next exciting features to come.
• I personally advocated and drove a major rewrite of the deep net architecture in the vision stack, leading to significantly better precision, recall, and inference performance.
• I effectively stopped regretted attrition from the team, and ended up growing it by over 50%. I personally interviewed most of the accepted candidates.
• Made massive improvments to internal infrastructure and processes that I cannot go into detail about.

In the end, Elon and I agreed that he and I did not work well together and that I should leave, so I did. ***

Overall I learned a lot, worked my butt off, met a lot of great people, and had a lot of fun. I'm still a firm believer in Tesla, its mission, and the exceptional Autopilot team: I wish them well.

----------------

***this line was later edited out.

 

[JBRR]

http://www.shanghai.gov.cn/shanghai/node27118/node27818/index.html

I suspect this is where the news would be posted first according to original article?

 

[Drumheller]

A thread about the agreement in China found on Reddit:

Tesla has reached an agreement with Shanghai Electric Group and Shanghai Lingang port to start manufacturing in China. • r/teslamotors

 

[ValueAnalyst]

FWIW -

The team of ~10 SA contributors, who bash Tesla and respond to every positive comment with a lengthy negative response, has started targeting Jeff Dahn's relationship with Tesla.

The following is a direct quote from who appears to be their leader:

"I would suggest VA read and listen to the Dahn interviews, in which he acknowledges that any (marginal) battery improvements he is able to suggest are several years down the road from implementation."

I have listened to Jeff Dahn's interviews, in which Jeff points to significant improvements that are being implemented in Tesla's products now.

It is not surprising that the FUD Montana Skeptic is trying to spread is the direct opposite of facts.

What is surprising, however, is that they are now targeting Jeff Dahn.

We may get a big announcement around batter tech soon.

 

[RobStark]

Dodge Demon Tires - Can't Drive Demon in Cold Weather

 

[davecolene0606]

Tesla snubs J.D. Power for Initial Quality Study data

DETROIT -- How do the quality ratings for the 2017 Tesla Model S and Model X compare to competitors?

They don't, based off J.D. Power's 2017 U.S. Initial Quality Study that was released Wednesday. That's not because Tesla Inc. doesn't make quality vehicles, but because it doesn't allow J.D. Power access to its customer registration data for the survey.

And...
Doesn't feel the paying the subscription fee either.

FireAway!

 

[Cattledog]

Bloomberg report on Shanghai agreement. Not a lot of extra detail yet. Perhaps we'll get a Tesla blog post today.

Tesla Reaches Pact With Shanghai for China Production

 

[Reciprocity]

As an atheist this concerns me...

Yes, but you're a very astheticly pleasing atheist.

 

[ValueAnalyst]

He said that he is very confident that they will be able to produce between 12 and 24 cars per minute. 12 per minute x 12 hours x 300 days equals just under 2.6 million cars per year.

Tesla implemented three shifts; why assume only 12 hours?!

 

[RobStark]

And...
Doesn't feel the paying the subscription fee either.

FireAway!

Companies have to pay a fee to get a detailed report not to be included in the rankings.

 

[mrdoubleb]

Yes, but you're a very astheticly pleasing atheist.

You guys need a room?

 

[ValueAnalyst]

I know, right? I'm tired of hearing "we will produce an electric car" without saying *how many* or *at what price*.

My guess is that a lot of these "will-produce" cars will never be produced, because price will not be anything close to that of a Model 3, autonomous features will not be anything close to that of a Model 3, range will not be anything close to that of a Model 3, and so on.

Maybe Audi may make a car that looks better, just priced $10k more, goes 50 miles per charge less, and can't drive itself until 2021.

Maybe Audi will sell 10 of these...

20, if they keep aggressively advertising two years in advance by trolling Elon.

 

[ValueAnalyst]

My top-down analysis, in another thread, based on the size of the world markets and reasonable guesses regarding Tesla's ability to capture marketshare long term, comes out out at $0.5T - $1.5T. Anything beyond that would assume either outlandish levels of marketshare which would likely cause antitrust investigations (if they could even get that high before Chinese competitors took market share), which seems unlikely; or moving in on a totally new business beyond energy generation, storage, and transporation, which seems too speculative.

Apple is $750B, and growing, without much antitrust attention.

Note that the size of the world market will grow ~35% in ten years. This alone means $1T+ Tesla market cap for similar size vs. global GDP.

Given that Tesla's TAM > Apple's, and its growth rate is multiple times of Apple's ever was, I expect your estimate to prove conservative.

 

[RobStark]

Apple is $750B, and growing, without much antitrust attention.

Market share invites antitrust action not market cap.

Apple is 34% US smart phone market share but about half that world wide.

In the 60's when GM crested past 60% US market share Congress started sniffing around.

Then GM began its long decline to below 17% US market share.

 

[Kenypowa]

Market share invites antitrust action not market cap.

Apple is 34% US smart phone market share but about half that world wide.

Actually iPhone market share world wide is 15% or less, but Apple profit in the smartphone industry exceeds 90% as others are losing money or breaking even with the exception of Samsung.

Source: iPhone Sales Flat in Q1 2017 as Chinese Phone Makers Increase Global Market Share

 

[ValueAnalyst]

 

[hiroshiy]

This site seems to have more detailed info re Shanghai deal?
Tesla Plans Shanghai Plant, Still to Decide on Local Partner for Joint Venture