Wrt to the Jeffries note...
Actually, much of what is in the Jeffries note is positive. They basically say that Tesla is past the risk of failure and has built a decent short term moat. They don't believe that the coming EV competition is much of a threat in the shorter term... 3 to 5 years.
Strange that they make some basic mistakes. Like thinking the base Model 3 is 60 kWh and not 54 kWh. That plays into their cost difference, where they estimate it is $3,500. That means they estimate battery costs to be $175/kWh. The actual difference is 81 kWh versus 54 kWh, which is 27 kWh. At $160/kWh, that's $4,320. They likely have the overall battery costs at least 9% high... at just over $14.2k for the LR versus $13k assuming $160/kWh, which is only a 15% reduction from Model S/X pack costs. Guidance was around 30%, but say it is actually 25%, then its $142.5/kWh at the pack level. That would be $11.5k versus $14.2k which is then a pretty massive miss.
Interestingly, they don't believe competitors will really show up with volume until after 2020.
It is strange timing... before really knowing the Model 3 ramp, right before the Tesla semi announcement. The problem is they then use the Cummings concept truck... and Cummings is not the world leader in vehicular battery shipments, vehicular large BEV motor shipments, nor large inverter shipments. Basically, in all the important and most expensive parts of a battery electric vehicle where Tesla is the world leader, Cummins is not.
Jeffries credits Tesla with short term vertical integration and battery chemistry with NCA/graphite+Si, especially with the Gigafactory as a competitive advantage in short/medium term, but then takes it away in the longer term. They give too much credit to NMC 811... See this presentation from Umicore:
http://cii-resource.com/cet/AABE-03-17/Presentations/BTMT/Levasseur_Stephane.pdf
The most likely next gen battery chemistry is NMC 622, but that is locked behind NCA+Si in Wh/kg and still has higher cobalt usage which means higher costs, especially as cobalt increases in price.
They also still think that the Gigafactory 1 is a 35 GWh cell production, 50 GWh battery pack production facility at full capacity. That's incompetent.
The autonomous driving section of their report is a mess. There's almost too much wrong to comment on... do they really not understand the state of Mobileye's REM? Apparently they do not understand.
I'll have to follow up with more later....
