General Discussion: 2018 Investor Roundtable

[theschnell]

What's that number now? We'd all love to know, if positive, Elon would certainly let us know... They seem to be moving through the list quickly, must be lots of folks holding out for the $35K version. Would love to see figures on Autopilot take rate, after all the publicity.

The number now is still far and away greater than they can produce anytime soon, and as we saw with S and X, demand grows as production grows and people see and experience the car in real life.

How is Tesla selling 100k S & X per year with gas under $2.50 per gallon? Must be a lot of rich EV enthusiasts. Or maybe more than just EV enthusiasts are buying them?

 

[Krugerrand]

At the same time saying : "don't do that then" isn't necessarily a good defense. I work in automation making stuff move that can easily kill. We can't just say to operators : "don't cross the yellow line", we must actively guard that they don't cross the line (and guard the guard as well). And if they still do cross the line despite being told not to, it is our fault if that harms them. Obviously there is a balance. You can't guard against everything. But at some point, some regulator is going to say : "but you could guard against this kind of misuse of your design". And if that happens after a major accident, it's too late. I am hoping Tesla is working on using the interior camera on the Model 3 as a high priority to help customers use Autopilot responsibly. That would be a major step forward.

At some point too stupid to live has to come into play.

I don’t believe in holding people’s hands. You tell your kid, don’t touch the stove it’s hot, knowing full well that the lesson will have to be learned. They touch the stove, get burned, and either are intelligent enough to learn or not and have to do it again until they get it.

By the time we reach adulthood, you know to listen when someone says don’t touch that, you know to read the instructions, you know you’re supposed to be responsible for your actions, or...too stupid to live.

 

[X Yes?]

The number now is still far and away greater than they can produce anytime soon, and as we saw with S and X, demand grows as production grows and people see and experience the car in real life.

Interesting. Why did they produce less "High margin" MS and MX than last quarter, with demand so stellar? Think they still found a few more "rich enthusiasts", albeit at a lower level.

 

[Krugerrand]

Hrmm...

GM will stop reporting monthly U.S. vehicle sales

If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em.

 

[dc_h]

The number now is still far and away greater than they can produce anytime soon, and as we saw with S and X, demand grows as production grows and people see and experience the car in real life.

How is Tesla selling 100k S & X per year with gas under $2.50 per gallon? Must be a lot of rich EV enthusiasts. Or maybe more than just EV enthusiasts are buying them?

Same argument with s and x ramp. Where did the orders go and here we are 6 years after s launch and still selling them as fast as they can make them and 3 years into X and still growing sales. I think 10,000 a week will be sustainable for years. Same for Y. Roadster will likely be closer to 1000 a month, even if they can sell more, to maintain brand exclusivity. I’m curious about semi market, is it 100,000 a year, 200,000? 13,000 semis a quarter at 200,000 a pop is 2.6 billion quarterly. 125,000 model 3’s end of 2019 and consistent 25,000 S and X is about 12 billion in quarterly revenue. Hopefully they can hit stride on the Y a lot faster and it seems like a car that could sell 20,000 a week globally, if they can make them and handle the logistics. That gets you to 100 billion in annual revenue from auto.

 

[X Yes?]

Also why is GM moving to quarterly sales reporting at this exact time, when gas price is skyrocketing in the Spring?

They are following Tela's lead on this. Maybe not disclosing sales and production figures regularly, is they key to high market capitalization..

 

[theschnell]

Regarding autopilot, the better it gets, the more dangerous it can be in that people will naturally trust it more and monitor it less. Even if it only messes up a tiny percentage of the time, that can be serious if driver is not paying attention at that moment because 99.5 percentage of the time it is fine on its own.

I don’t love gm’s camera on eyes solution, but it’s better than nothing. I think Tesla should consider some kind of similar validation system

 

[Krugerrand]

I honestly find surprising how people is reacting to this.

People are drama queens. Clearly. Oh, woe is me! *back of hand firmly pressed against forehead*

 

[EinSV]

Bloomberg's model is by definition backward-looking, as they admit it will never reflect current production but rather lags by a couple of weeks. With that said, I should have been clearer--I meant their estimate (made prior to today's disclosure by Tesla) of total production through 3/31 was off by only 1%.

As for the estimated production rate, I think it will be 'less inaccurate' than you insinuate. Right now it looks especially 'off' because Tesla put the pedal to the metal last week, producing at a rate not at all representative of what they had been doing prior. Their actual average production/week for Q1 was 750, and Bloomberg fairly accurately tracked that over the course of the quarter, I think. Bloomberg is now showing 1,279/week and I imagine as the ramp becomes more even, the Bloomberg estimate will more closely track actual production on an ongoing basis.

While I appreciate that Bloomberg (eventually) acknowledged their model is backward looking and will not reflect current production, IMO rather than using a method that is inherently inaccurate for current production they should stick to estimating historical production rates (over the past month, for example).

A model that, as designed, almost inevitably understates current production rates during a ramp IMO is as misleading as a model that, as designed, overstates current production. This negative bias is especially problematic since the Bloomberg tracker is cited all over the place as estimating current production, and the people citing it usually don't bother mentioning the built-in inaccuracy and negative bias.

We will see how Bloomberg's tracker does going forward. Between my post and yours they increased their estimate from 1190 to 1279. From what we have seen over the past few weeks (not just the past week) and Tesla's statement in the letter that it expects to produce another 2000 Model 3s in the next week, I believe Bloomberg's estimate is still well below Tesla's sustainable production rate. It is probably a decent estimate of what Tesla was producing two or three weeks ago instead. In the middle of an exponential ramp using a stale number as an estimate of current production is not very useful and IMO has misled many people, although I don't think that's Bloomberg's intention by any means.

 

[BETA1019]

The number now is still far and away greater than they can produce anytime soon, and as we saw with S and X, demand grows as production grows and people see and experience the car in real life.

How is Tesla selling 100k S & X per year with gas under $2.50 per gallon? Must be a lot of rich EV enthusiasts. Or maybe more than just EV enthusiasts are buying them?

Just adding on here...

Can we also remind ourselves that they don't even spend money marketing / advertising? They're anti-selling until they know they can ratchet up production on all fronts.

 

[Waiting4M3]

Interesting. Why did they produce less "High margin" MS and MX than last quarter, with demand so stellar? Think they still found a few more "rich enthusiasts", albeit at a lower level.

This is demonstrably false. Tesla produced 22,140 MS/X in Q4 2017, and 24,728 MS/X in Q1 2018. The Q1 # is exactly where Tesla has been for 2017.

From Q1 2018 delivery report:
"Q1 production .... 24,728 were Model S and Model X, and 9,766 were Model 3."

From Q4 delivery report:
"Q4 production totaled 24,565 vehicles, of which 2,425 were Model 3"

In case you want to keep digging further into 2017 to support your false narrative that MS/X production is down, here are rest of 2017, Tesla consistently produce ~25K MS/X per quarter. Q4 2017 was a blip down because they pulled people to ramp M3.

"Q3 production totaled 25,336 vehicles, with 260 of them being Model 3."
"Q2 production totaled 25,708 vehicles"
"Q1 production totaled 25,418 vehicles. This was also a new quarterly record for us."

 

[X Yes?]

People are drama queens. Clearly. Oh, woe is me! *back of hand firmly pressed against forehead*

Must be in the back of the mind of all people, using Autopilot. When the system does not alert or steers you straight into barriers, you might think to yourself: "maybe it's best to just pay attention and drive!"

 

[Reciprocity]

Must be in the back of the mind of all people, using Autopilot. When the system does not alert or steers you straight into barriers, you might think to yourself: "maybe it's best to just pay attention and drive!"

Im pretty sure you dont own a Tesla. Just a guess.

 

[X Yes?]

Im pretty sure you dont own a Tesla. Just a guess.

Yes, not an owner. Do you find your grip on the wheel gets a little tighter as you approach stopped vehicles in your lane or "gore points"?

 

[schonelucht]

As promised, I reworked my chart on VIN assignments now we have a week more data. The data range is from March 8th till today, 1 day shy of 4 weeks.

For each day, I graph the maximum VIN assigned that day (green), the minimum VIN assigned (red) and the average of all VINs assigned (blue). In addition I added the trend lines for each series.

The green line (maximum VIN assigned) tells us something about line speed : how fast do model 3s roll of the line. That rate over the given period is from 9400 to 15300, or just over 1500/week. The assumption is that each top VIN represents a car that goes through quality control exceptionally fast and needs no rework. Ie, that car is nearly immediatly after production complete available for customer assignment. R square is .9 or a good fit.

The blue line (average VIN assigned) tells us something about production speed where production includes regular quality control and rework. This rate is from 8000 to 12200 or 1100/week. R square is .85 or a reasonable good fit

The red line (lowest VIN assigned) tells us something about quality control issues. How slow is Tesla in reworking cars that don't pass quality control on the one hand. The spread of this line with the green line tells us if Tesla has sufficient capacity to rework cars as they roll of the line. This rate goes from 6300 to 8500 or just below 600/week. R square is .3 so not really a good fit.

My conclusion : the run up to 2000/week was recently enough that it doesn't yet show in the VIN assignment numbers. Rework and quality control is growing but because production rate is growing as well, it's too early to tell if this is sign of a significant backlog, especially with such a weak trendline.

 

[ggies07]

It is now hailing here in Dallas and if the damn ramp-up would have been on time, I would have had my car sold already!! Now I will probably have to pay for hail damage before I can sell it.... Suck a nut.

 

[Waiting4M3]

Must be in the back of the mind of all people, using Autopilot. When the system does not alert or steers you straight into barriers, you might think to yourself: "maybe it's best to just pay attention and drive!"

Im pretty sure you dont own a Tesla. Just a guess.

Yes, not an owner. Do you find your grip on the wheel gets a little tighter as you approach stopped vehicles in your lane or "gore points"?

I'm not an owner either. Here's my personal expectation. To me, the strain of driving has more to do with the tension I hold in my arms/shoulders and legs constantly engaging the steering wheel and gas pedal. I've driven some cars with adaptive cruise control, where you can relax your foot from switching between gas and brakes, it already makes a huge difference. Add the relaxed arms/shoulders would make it even better. Watching the road is no strain at all, maybe it's just me, I like to watch the traffic when I drive. If you pay attention you'll see trouble spot coming up from far away, and can anticipate when you need to engage your arms/legs more, and wouldn't be stressful at all. For example the 101 spot, if I can see that the lane line is not painted properly, I would turn AP off for a minute or 2 and navigate that myself.

 

[mongo]

It is now hailing here in Dallas and if the damn ramp-up would have been on time, I would have had my car sold already!! Now I will probably have to pay for hail damage before I can sell it.... Suck a nut.

Nah, just take the insurance payout and drive the golf ball.

 

[Waiting4M3]

Nah, just take the insurance payout and drive the golf ball.

Not joking, would be interested to see how the glass roof hold up in a hail.

 

[elasalle]

The Model 3 output increased exponentially, representing a fourfold increase over last quarter. This is the fastest growth of any automotive company in the modern era. If this rate of growth continues, it will exceed even that of Ford and the Model T. ... Interesting

Can anyone shed some light on how accurate this is? Whether big or small company, and regardless of design, and designed capacity .. do all have to go through the same tuning process?

Asking, because if this is correct. Then clearly regardless of all others coming in the rear view mirror, the advantage is gonna be with Tesla for a long time