2017 Investor Roundtable:General Discussion

[Buddyroe]

Chrysler shows concept Van with 350 KW charging capability.
Well at least Chrysler is moving in the right direction. Leaving Tesla in the dust (ha ha).


Chrysler Unveils Portal Electric Minivan - 100 kWh Battery & 250 Miles Of Range

LOL. I was thinking it looked very nice for a Chrysler! Though, it seems to be a complete stretch to call it a mini van.

Regardless, I really hope Tesla is designing a vehicle similar to this, but closer to the actual size of a mini-van. People that drive mini vans are the perfect target market for an electric car company - they want a utility vehicle with great gas mileage, and most importantly, obviously aren't trying to impress people with their vehicle. The mini van owners also carry a larger # of people so making more stops for bathroom breaks is needed when traveling (thus allowing for more frequent, short-duration charging sessions). I think the mini van crowd would be all over an actual-sized mini van that had 300+ miles of range. I can say for sure that I would be camping out to put a deposit on one!

 

[myusername]

Are you on the wrong side of the trade again?

i have one foot in reality and one foot in the stock.

 

[JBRR]

Have Tesla ever released delivery numbers after market open?

 

[Cattledog]

Donald Trump is a complete dumb ass troll... and now our president... you'd be wise to not react to his random thoughts on Twitter that are then blasted out by media:

GM fires back at Trump: Most of our Chevy Cruzes ARE built in the US

Yup, well, that's how the wall gets paid for.

 

[aznt1217]

The longer this takes, the more worried I get. Refreshed the press release link more than 200 times.

I doubt it would be today, it'll probably be tomorrow/wed. You have to remember New Years was observed 1/2 in the US. Timing operates by business days.

 

[racer26]

I doubt it would be today, it'll probably be tomorrow/wed. You have to remember New Years was observed 1/2 in the US. Timing operates by business days.

There is also a possibility they're saving it to release at the GF event tomorrow.

I hope not though. I hope it comes in the next 20 minutes.

 

[Green Pete]

I doubt it would be today, it'll probably be tomorrow/wed. You have to remember New Years was observed 1/2 in the US. Timing operates by business days.

I'm also wondering now if they won't release those numbers at the event as part of "this is what our automated line made, now we will build five more"

 

[techmaven]

I think the number of working Americans that make over $100k is approximately 10%... if so (or near that), then 10% of the number of working Americans is about 25 million... and 17% of that is 4.25m and if on average they bought a brand new car every 7 years... then that's 700k EV sales per year by the... then Tesla will have some fraction of that.

doing the same with 25-34 year olds... first thing... how many of these 25-34 year olds overlap in the $100k statistic?... i mean, greater than $100k is a pretty typical salary SV for plenty of 30+ year olds... so I won't try this one.

market of 100s of thousands per year isn't "HUGE" for the auto industry... it's something, but not huge... and it doesn't put Tesla Auto anywhere near the size of BMW or others if this market is filled with the M3.

Average time to buy a new car is far shorter than 7 years for that demographic. And I am guessing that Tesla's fraction of that is somewhere in the 60-90% range in the next 4 years or so.

The entire small luxury segment had about 600,000 sales in the U.S. last year: Small And Midsize Luxury Car Sales In America - December 2015 And 2015 Year End - GOOD CAR BAD CAR

The BMW 3 series was the volume leader at almost 100,000, the 4 series adds another 40k. Multiple hundreds of thousands would be blowing away the segment.

 

[Hawkeye]

Have Tesla ever released delivery numbers after market open?

Yep. It was January 2014. Jerome Guillen sp? Mentioned it during an auto show, maybe. It was around 10-11. This was when they were announcing delivery numbers during earnings release. TSLA stock was at all time high the past October around 180 and had dropped to 120s and has slowly moved to 130s right before announcement.

 

[SBenson]

Finally got around to guessing Q4 deliveries. I'll say 26,750.

Reasoning: Something like 31k VINs issued, wow. I don't think deliveries will outpace VINs this year, though because (i) Q3 had an unusual push for inventory deliveries which is typically reserved for Q4, (ii) no significant Q4 deals to push further inventory sales, (iii) chatter about some RHD deliveries being delayed to January (no idea how significant) and (iv) Euro numbers not coming in huge.

With the benefit of all the info gleaned over last couple of days and the benefit of information that Tesla didn't release the number yet, I turned quite bearish at this point. In-fact I sold a quite significant number of shares pre-market.

I think the VIN count is very misleading this time around. There is quite a lot of info here on TMC to say that Tesla built cars without pre-orders on them and sent them down as "inventory", with the hope that people walking into the stores will buy on the spot (similar to car dealerships). Nobody knows if a VIN results in a sale or not at this point.

 

[W84M3]

They've released the Q2 & Q3 production & deliveries on Sundays.. not exactly business times.

IMO 2 possibilities: Elon puts on a show in open market or it is bad and they wait for after hours.

 

[racer26]

Anybody have data on how well VINs issued correlated to cars produced in previous quarters?

 

[Kenriko]

If it was bad I would have expected them to release them over the weekend to let the news sink in so people don't make rash decisions.

 

[racer26]

If it was bad I would have expected them to release them over the weekend to let the news sink in so people don't make rash decisions.

I agree, but I could also see them trying to sink it AH tonight, to be drowned in GF event in the morning.

 

[racer26]

Anybody have data on how well VINs issued correlated to cars produced in previous quarters?

3Q16: Actual MS sales - 16,047; VIN tracking suggested 13-16k.
2Q16: Actual MS Sales - 9,764; VIN tracking suggests somewhere between 11-17k depending on how many outliers you throw out.
1Q16: Actual MS Sales - 12,851; VIN tracking suggested 11-13k

 

[JRP3]

Tesla closed their Missouri stores http://www.bizjournals.com/kansascity/news/2017/01/03/tesla-kansas-city-location-closed.html

 

[SebastianR]

3Q16: Actual MS sales - 16,047; VIN tracking suggested 13-16k.

Of course for a number of reasons (including the absence of the "everything must go!" sale) I would caution a lot against using Q3 as a straight-up example for Q4

 

[dennis]

With the benefit of all the info gleaned over last couple of days and the benefit of information that Tesla didn't release the number yet, I turned quite bearish at this point. In-fact I sold a quite significant number of shares pre-market.

I think the VIN count is very misleading this time around. There is quite a lot of info here on TMC to say that Tesla built cars without pre-orders on them and sent them down as "inventory", with the hope that people walking into the stores will buy on the spot (similar to car dealerships). Nobody knows if a VIN results in a sale or not at this point.

I agree with you that they built a lot of inventory cars. The counterpoint is that there are a number of California cars in the Q1 portion of the Model S delivery spreadsheet that were ordered in the first half of December that could easily been delivered in Q4. In fact I could only find one U.S. VIN ordered in December that was delivered in December. This breaks with the pattern of previous quarters when they were pushing to make the number.

One anecdote is that in late December a manager at one of the local stores told me "the new inventory program is going very well for us." Just a single data point however.

 

[Kenriko]

IIRC there were 5k cars in transit at the end of last quarter. So we're looking for an additional ~20k delivered cars between MS/MX ?

 

[racer26]

Tesla closed their Missouri stores http://www.bizjournals.com/kansascity/news/2017/01/03/tesla-kansas-city-location-closed.html

Not like they had much of a choice, really. Close the store, operate as a gallery only, or violate the law. Those were the choices.