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Articles re Tesla—Fact or Fiction?
- Thread starter Robert.Boston
- Start date
Of course he makes the same points a lot of people here have made before. That first clip he showed was a guy on CNBC (cable/satellite) named Jim Cramer. He's been wrong so much you could probably make a good living doing the opposite of what he recommends. Jon Stewart of the Daily Show took him on a few years back and Cramer came on the show for an interview. It was very uncomfortable for Cramer. Jon Stewart may be a comedian, but he's also an excellent debater.
I can't find the interview with a link that works, but there is a Wikipedia article about it:
Jon Stewart–Jim Cramer conflict - Wikipedia
Ultimately they have direct access to a media platform and few of us do. The haters can affect the value of the stock short term, but the long term stock price is more driven by what the company is than what some dude spouting hot air says. Expect at the end of this quarter the pundits will be hair on fire about Tesla's imminent demise because they will be holding a lot of American deliveries back until early Q3 to hold off triggering the incentive phase out. Then when the incentive phase out is triggered (if early July it will be in full effect until the end of 2018 and in effect at a lower level through 2019), the pundits will again be hair on fire about Tesla no longer being competitive.
When Tesla is profitable for Q3, they will make excuses that it's a fluke. When they are profitable for Q4, the smarter of them will shut up, but the better BSers will figure some new excuse. By this time next year most of the critics will be discredited and those who took their own investment advice will likely be hurting.
Elon Musk knows he's bucking a very entrenched industry. The Model S was designed from the ground up to destroy as many beliefs about electric cars as possible. It is not just a great electric car, it's a great car. Period. Tesla built the supercharger network to shut up critics about one of the few technological issues they couldn't solve: range.
There are only a few issues left that Tesla has not destroyed. One is whether electric cars can be profitable. They are money losers for the established car companies and they don't want to change that. Another is the price of electric cars vs ICE. The Model 3 gets a lot closer to mainstream ICE prices, but it is still a bit more expensive. But ultimately the lower cost of ownership will win out.
The last issue is the perception that self driving cars are too dangerous, but that's something that isn't Tesla specific. The media tends to be hair on fire about any autonomous vehicle problem. They will probably hype the first accident of Cadillac's new self driving system. It was big news when the autonomous Uber killed someone a few months ago.
Ultimately time and reality will shut up the critics. When Tesla started there were a lot of memes about EVs basically being glorified golf carts, but you don't hear that anymore because there are too many PxxD videos out there of electric cars destroying very expensive ICE in drag races. People still go on a bit about the range, but the supercharger network makes it a tough sell.
If you don't have to sell your Tesla stock today, the actual price today is irrelevant. The key value is what it's worth the day you sell it.
@winfield100 and @EinSV both of you make good points. I forgot I had come across this several months ago:
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B...fl_title_13?ie=UTF8&psc=1&smid=A1FFYURXGC8VOU
We have some hard to reach windows. It may work on solar panels too, though a human would probably have to move it from one panel to the next.
Excellent info-- well worth watching.
A critical comment: Oil company advertising does not necessarily mean they are behind killing the Impact (GM EV1) or against Tesla. I am aware that we fall (gravitate towards?) conspiracy theories, but let's keep an open mind here-- they are not oil companies, they are energy companies, and will sell anything to make a profit-- my solar panels on my last house in 2002 were made by Sharp, but I could have had a set made by ARCO. What? Atlantic Richfield OIL Corp? Duh-- YES.
Not to take away from the fine video, but GM had good reason to drop the Impact (EV1) program. Read the book by Shnayerson, The Car That Could.
My sister is a petroleum Geologist and another friend is a retired petroleum Geophysicist. The oil companies know how addicted the world is to oil and as long as the decline in oil use is a moderate rate, they can compensate for it and still make money. Not all oil is equal. Some of it is very tar-like which requires extra energy and effort to refine. There are also wells that are marginal to produce. When the price of oil goes up, those marginal wells and heavier oil becomes profitable. Otherwise it could cost more to produce and refine than they can sell it for. Oil companies have complex plans to compensate for the market, both demand and price and can turn on a change in a matter of days.
If demand for oil goes down, it will make the marginal oil plays less profitable and they will just shut them down and they will sit idle. The oil companies make a good profit selling the oil that is cheaper to produce and refine. With known reserves already tapped, they can turn the marginal fields back on as the cheaper stuff runs out which is drastically cheaper than finding and developing new fields.
Essentially it will be 50 years or more before the oil business becomes unprofitable. The future isn't so great for those owning marginal production properties and those who work in exploration. The oil business already got hurt from laying off their exploration and development people in the 90s. When the oil boom of the last decade hit, they found themselves pulling people out of retirement to develop new oil projects because there weren't enough younger people with the skills. My friend who is retired took retirement from Marathon Oil after 30 years and got heavily headhunted by many smaller oil companies. He ended up working another 15 years and never had a full staff. On every project he was supposed to have a number of other oil professionals working with him, but they were never able to fill all the positions and about half the people they did hire were idiots.
If the oil companies shut in a lot of projects, then tap those as the cheaper oil runs out, they won't have anybody to search for new oil when the existing oil runs low. But the bean counters in corporate offices only want to hold things together long enough that they can retire and get a full pension until they die. After that, who cares?
But the oil companies know that even with an aggressive ramp to EVs, oil will be around a long time and the decline in demand will be slow. They can handle that for long enough that it isn't a concern to anyone who is really in the know.
The bulk of the resistance to EVs is in the car industry. EVs threaten to nullify their vast investments in ICE tech and it means a much more near term retooling if their entire business. If EVs become big, dealers' service departments will be affected hard and in less than 10 years. It will take a while for EVs to dominate the streets, even with an aggressive ramp, but dealers will feel the impact within a few years. If demand flips and nobody wants ICE anymore, that leaves used car lots choked with cars that might as well be Yugos for the level of interest from the public. That's what keeps car company executives up at night and why they are fighting EVs.
Can someone tell me if the latest settlement on the AP suit is exactly about what?
- is it about the 12-18 month delay in getting the AP functionality
- or is it about AP being unsafe?
Tesla agrees to settle class action over Autopilot billed as 'safer'
- is it about the 12-18 month delay in getting the AP functionality
- or is it about AP being unsafe?
Tesla agrees to settle class action over Autopilot billed as 'safer'
can someone with more knowledge on the issue clarify what this suit is all about? - thank you.
I believe there is a thick FUD going now stating this suit is about safety.
Here is another one, and this is exactly what Musk is talking about. It is not even sugar coating BS, but is out right lie. These outfits should be ashamed. TesalFUD.com should pick up and throw a light on them.
These two headlines were on the iPhone yahoo news feed for the last two days. We all know which one is true and which one is outright lie, not even close to reality. The click-bait was repeated by AP, Yahoo, WSJ, NYT, CNN and a few other outfits.
This is CRASS.
These two headlines were on the iPhone yahoo news feed for the last two days. We all know which one is true and which one is outright lie, not even close to reality. The click-bait was repeated by AP, Yahoo, WSJ, NYT, CNN and a few other outfits.
This is CRASS.
The “Tesla killers” are now coming to the press coverage of the storage business. On the plus side, maybe that’s a sign people are starting to take storage seriously.
Hint to the author: you may want to learn the difference between MW and MWh before your next article on the Tesla Storage Killers. For example, the Tesla Hornsdale (South Australia) battery is 129 MWh not 129 MW as the article states.
Rivals Rise Up to Threaten Tesla's Battery Business
Hint to the author: you may want to learn the difference between MW and MWh before your next article on the Tesla Storage Killers. For example, the Tesla Hornsdale (South Australia) battery is 129 MWh not 129 MW as the article states.
Rivals Rise Up to Threaten Tesla's Battery Business
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ValueAnalyst
Closed
This will prove difficult to FUD since Tesla already commands the leading market share right off the gate. Only battle left is profitability: 3Q18.
SW2Fiddler
We Are Cognitive Dissidents
The KNOWN, admitted spending of $10 million a year (as of 2016 - it is probably more now) on anti-EV efforts does not require a “conspiracy theory” to believe there’s influence on article spin, or extrapolate that some auto companies and some other old-oil interests are ‘investing’ similarly.
You are correct - they could be independently, non-conspiratorially, on the dark side!
Phil LeBeau on Twitter
Do you think this news item will be picked up by click-bait media ? It won't get much clicks, so they are not interested.
Do you think this news item will be picked up by click-bait media ? It won't get much clicks, so they are not interested.
Yes, this is the basics.
Here's one part of the problem for oil companies. The cheaper stuff is all owned by National Oil Companies, mostly Saudi Arabia. The cheaper stuff which used to be owned by Exxon and Chevron is gone... it was pumped and burnt.
So as electric cars destroy oil demand, they will find that the marginal oil plays are, basically, all the stock-market-listed oil companies.
This is where I disagree. The oilmen think this, and they're going to be blindsided.
Will it? Will it really? That's what they think, and they're wrong.
Point 1 -- oil has already been priced out of nearly every market except transportation. Sure, there's petrochemicals, but the business is tiny. There's asphalt, but it's zero-profit (they're just finding a way to dispose of waste). Nearly all the profit is from gasoline, diesel, and jet kerosene.
Point 2 -- EV growth is exponential, and doubles roughly every 2 years. Worldwide 2017 EV production: 1,227,117. Estimated 2031 production (7 doublings): 157 million. World vehicle production today: about 100 million, and it takes about 14 years to increase by 50%. So, come 2031, you should expect all new cars to be EV more or less.
At that point oil demand will drop very very fast; with an average car lifetime of about 12 years, about 1/12 of demand will disappear yearly. In practice, however, the highest-miles-per-year drivers will switch to EVs first, so the demand destruction will happen faster.
We've been discussing this model for a few years over in the "Shorting Oil" thread
Maximum 26 years for gasoline & road diesel demand. Airplanes and ships may take a bit longer, but the oil industry will be facing a financial bloodbath without road fuel income. It will be much smaller, and the part which is left will be the NOCs because they have the lowest production costs. The oil industry does not have 50 years, period. Financially speaking, it has a lot less than 26.
Fair point. The car company execs are fighting EVs. The oil company execs haven't even realized that they're in trouble yet.
That matches the financial statements, where the oil company execs are presenting ludicrous lowball estimates for EV adoption. I guess they really believe their own lowball estimates...
neroden nice analysis. Would your predictions/analyses change were you to incorporate the inclusion of electric busses as 80% of the bus fleet in just a few years?
Also should you reconsider given that the "oil" companies (energy companies) are into renewable energy with big money?
For example, you wrote: "The oil company execs haven't even realized that they're in trouble yet."
But in 2002 or 2003 I put up, on my roof, 12 solar panels 180 watts each, manufactured by Sharp.
I had my choice of Sharp or Arco as the brand name on the solar panels. Arco? That's Atlantic Richfield Corp. That was nearly 20 years ago.
Also should you reconsider given that the "oil" companies (energy companies) are into renewable energy with big money?
For example, you wrote: "The oil company execs haven't even realized that they're in trouble yet."
But in 2002 or 2003 I put up, on my roof, 12 solar panels 180 watts each, manufactured by Sharp.
I had my choice of Sharp or Arco as the brand name on the solar panels. Arco? That's Atlantic Richfield Corp. That was nearly 20 years ago.
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Yes, this is the basics.
Here's one part of the problem for oil companies. The cheaper stuff is all owned by National Oil Companies, mostly Saudi Arabia. The cheaper stuff which used to be owned by Exxon and Chevron is gone... it was pumped and burnt.
So as electric cars destroy oil demand, they will find that the marginal oil plays are, basically, all the stock-market-listed oil companies.
This is where I disagree. The oilmen think this, and they're going to be blindsided.
Will it? Will it really? That's what they think, and they're wrong.
Point 1 -- oil has already been priced out of nearly every market except transportation. Sure, there's petrochemicals, but the business is tiny. There's asphalt, but it's zero-profit (they're just finding a way to dispose of waste). Nearly all the profit is from gasoline, diesel, and jet kerosene.
Point 2 -- EV growth is exponential, and doubles roughly every 2 years. Worldwide 2017 EV production: 1,227,117. Estimated 2031 production (7 doublings): 157 million. World vehicle production today: about 100 million, and it takes about 14 years to increase by 50%. So, come 2031, you should expect all new cars to be EV more or less.
At that point oil demand will drop very very fast; with an average car lifetime of about 12 years, about 1/12 of demand will disappear yearly. In practice, however, the highest-miles-per-year drivers will switch to EVs first, so the demand destruction will happen faster.
We've been discussing this model for a few years over in the "Shorting Oil" thread
Maximum 26 years for gasoline & road diesel demand. Airplanes and ships may take a bit longer, but the oil industry will be facing a financial bloodbath without road fuel income. It will be much smaller, and the part which is left will be the NOCs because they have the lowest production costs. The oil industry does not have 50 years, period. Financially speaking, it has a lot less than 26.
Fair point. The car company execs are fighting EVs. The oil company execs haven't even realized that they're in trouble yet.
That matches the financial statements, where the oil company execs are presenting ludicrous lowball estimates for EV adoption. I guess they really believe their own lowball estimates...
I only have a minute...
The car companies are nervous because even if they have criticisms of specific things Tesla has done, anyone honest enough knows that Tesla has proven that an electric car can be superior to an ICE in most ways. They could console themselves that Teslas were expensive rich people toys until the Model 3 came out. Now it's becoming tougher to deny the truth. The only thing propping up ICE sales is that most consumers are still unaware of what EVs can do. A poll a year or so back showed around 2/3 of Americans knew little or nothing about EVs. In countries like Norway where there has been more of an effort to get EVs into the hands of the public, there is a lot more awareness, but in the US and probably a lot of other countries EVs exist in a vacuum where only car enthusiasts and people who have experienced them know the truth.
Once the Model 3 starts showing up in middle class neighborhoods around the world the public will learn the benefits. At that point I expect demand to shoot up, but the big stumbling block is battery production. There is only one car company on the planet with a large enough battery supply to mass produce EVs. Most European companies are starting to get serious about EV production, but most are talking about mass producing them sometime around 2025. It will take that long to get enough batteries.
I heard recently that Hyundai has had to suspend Ioniq EV production because they don't have enough batteries. We'll probably hear more of those stories as demand goes up and supply can't meet it.
Now the wild card in all this is whether autonomous cars will become a big thing by next decade. Lots of people are working on the problem and hardware is getting cheaper by the day. But as Tesla ran into when they tried to roll out AP2. The software for AP is tough to create. They just recently managed to get AP2 on par or a little better than AP1 and it's been 1 1/2 years.
All the FUD whenever there is an autonomous car accident makes the public more wary of the tech. Tony Seba lectures on how disruption always happens when new tech gets to 1/10 the cost of old tech, but I don't think he's looked at every case. When the pubic has a strong aversion to new tech, it can be crippled. An example is nuclear power. Per KWH it's been one of the cheapest ways to generate electricity for some time and at one time was much cheaper, but most of the world is averse to it. There are definite problems with the technology. For one when there is an accident, the results are horrible and politics has prevented anyone from dealing with the waste appropriately in many countries.
There are prototype nuclear reactors that are vastly safer than old tech reactors and ones that can actually consume waste from other reactors, but the NIMBY factor prevents any large scale reactors from being built.
If autonomous ride sharing actually happens in the near term, then in at least some higher density areas a number of people will switch to ride sharing and get rid of their cars. But I don't think car ownership will completely go away for a while. But for ride sharing to be vastly cheaper with autonomous cars on a large scale, it will require the ability to mass produce autonomous, electric cars, which isn't going to happen until the battery shortage is dealt with.
The major oil companies don't own many oil fields now. A fair bit of on shore oil is owned by independent companies and sold to the majors. The majors don't even sell gas refined in their own refineries at their own stations. Everything is pooled. For example all the gasoline sold in the Puget Sound region comes out of their own refineries. If I remember right all gas comes from either Tesco or BP refineries in the Puget Sound area with the sole exception being Chevron who sips gas in from California.
They own most of the offshore oil because it's so expensive to bring online only the majors have the money to do it. But they don't care much where the oil comes from or who they are buying it from. In a shrinking market a lot of state players will be the ones still selling oil when a lot of other oil is shut in, but the majors don't car. They will go on refining and selling gas like they always did.
Automotive is a major sector of oil consumption and the market will change when that's gone electric, but the oil companies survived and eventually thrived when electricity producers switched away from oil and started using cheaper fuels after the 1970s crunch. They might get hit harder and sooner than they think right now when battery supplies are there, but they have a good 10 years at minimum and probably longer. Battery plants are expensive and some governments might have to step in to help (but probably not in the US).
Ships are going to be a tough tech to get off oil. There are some ideas to make hybrid ships with sails, but fully electric ships are not practical except as short ranged curiosities or a few limited routes like some ferry routes. Aircraft will be the last. Batteries are heavy and with aircraft everything comes down to weight. Additionally the only way we know how to make a plane go faster than about 450 mph is with some kind of chemical reaction ie rockets or jet engines for which fossil fuels are still the most energy dense. That's the laws of Physics. Propellers get less efficient the faster you go to a point where they aren't biting the air at all anymore.
The Koch Brothers are trying to hurt EV adoption with one of their astroturf campaigns, but they generally hate any new ideas and spend their money fighting most of them. But most of the oil companies are mostly ignoring EVs.
@Vern Padgett said he found Arco brand solar panels a decade ago, but I would bet they sold off that division when they merged with BP. Most of the oil companies are thinking about other energy tech, though they may not be all that serious about it. BP is one of the more old school companies with bean counter management. It was bean counter thinking on the part of the BP manager in charge of the Deep Water Horizon that led to the blow out.
Look at their P&L sheets. They're heavily dependent on upstream profits -- which have been zero several quarters recently. Refinery margins are terrible already, but they're going to get worse. The demand shifts which are coming will require refinery retooling (less bunker fuel, less gasoline, more marine diesel, less land diesel, more jet kerosene) *and* expose refinery overcapacity, which means awful margins. The petrochemical business is the only stable profit-maker, and it's tiny.
10 years is fair. They'll certainly be going concerns for 10 years, probably 20. The thing is, investors will see the writing on the wall and start pulling capital out well before that....
They're already practical, just not the cheapest yet. As usual (same is true on land) they are better in stop-and-go use cases than in long cruising use cases; right now you lose a lot of cargo capacity on a fully electric ship, and it has a very high upfront cost, but there aren't any technical obstacles, so it's just a matter of battery prices coming down and energy density creeping up. Obviously submarines, ferries and river-haulers will be replaced first, and Pacific shipping last, but there's just no *obstacle*.
Like railroad locomotives, ships are typically already running electric motors with generators, and the generators are large, so the efficiency situation is comparable to running a diesel generator on land. On land, diesel generators are starting to be replaced with batteries. Right now this is only cost-effective for short runtimes, but it becomes cost-effective for longer and longer runtimes every year as batteries get cheaper.
Yeah, the gravimetric density issue is serious for aircraft. Apparently J B Straubel wanted to build electric aircraft and Musk said "the batteries aren't good enough yet, let's do cars instead". A while back he specified the gravimetric energy density at which electric aircraft would be viable, and I don't remember exactly what it was, but I would tend to trust his analysis.'
The tech is possible with ships, but as you point out, you lose cargo capacity and that's a serious problem. Back in the 50s someone made a nuclear powered freighter as the next new thing. They found that the space needed for the reactor was so much the ship had a tiny payload.
I've heard there already is a short haul ferry in Norway running electric. I think they do a battery swap every time it stops at its home dock and they put the other battery on charge.
In some places making more use of overhead wires for trains might be feasible, but there are a lot of places where there is no infrastructure for wires. A locomotive is going to need massive batteries to go any distance. However, they could put a battery car behind the locomotives. They did essentially do that with steam locomotives. The water and fuel were stored in the tender.
I've heard there already is a short haul ferry in Norway running electric. I think they do a battery swap every time it stops at its home dock and they put the other battery on charge.
In some places making more use of overhead wires for trains might be feasible, but there are a lot of places where there is no infrastructure for wires. A locomotive is going to need massive batteries to go any distance. However, they could put a battery car behind the locomotives. They did essentially do that with steam locomotives. The water and fuel were stored in the tender.
JRP3
Hyperactive Member
I think they slow charge the dock battery and then use that to quick charge the onboard battery. At least if it's the one I'm thinking of.
It accelerates the process, yes.
You're right. Some of them will diversify successfully, specifically the ones where the execs are already doing so. DONG (Danish Oil And Gas) has already successfully exited the entire petroleum industry. Total owns a controlling interest in SunPower and the CEO drives an EV; they are likely to diversify successfully.
Some won't. ExxonMobil and Chevron seem certain to stay with oil to the bitter end, until bankruptcy. Shell is trying but they keep backing the wrong horses. BP tried under Lord Browne, but Tony Hayward reversed it all and left BP stuck with oil. I don't really know about a bunch of the others.
This thing has been making the upvotes over at the r/teslamotors subreddit. I'm leaving it here in case you don't go there. I hope it comes in handy for some of you someday.
The War on Tesla, Musk, and the Fight for the Future
The War on Tesla, Musk, and the Fight for the Future
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