Short-Term TSLA Price Movements - 2015

[WarpedOne]

I don't want to underestimate the competition, but they sure look like the board of Motorola, Nokia and Ericsson laughing at the iPhone in the early 2000s and then, years late, gearing up to crush Cupertino in a battle they already lost. (And I am not even an Apple fan

There is just this minor difference that apple and the newcomer Samsung were able to produce millions of iPhones and tesla will still be production constraint for decades to come.

BMW, MB and Audi will still find buyers. What will happen is that there won't be so many buyers for their high end cars. Those will go to tesla.
So. BMW, MB and audi will turn into economy-car makers, to the likes of Renault, Citroen, Peugeot, Opel, VW etc. Their margins will shrink. Some will be able to make profit in this lower margin market and survive, some will not.
The most hurt will go to companies that do not know how to build cheap cars. Their pricy ones just won't find that many buyers anymore (porsche ...).

 

[ev-enthusiast]

fire and tesla in two consecutive sentences? Expect -5% today.

In case there is a Model S fire or an explosion in USA, Europe or China.
It could even be an accident of several Model S that crashed at full speed into a Model X test mule at Fremont factory in Californa that could badly hurt employees and lead to severe injuries.
Do you really think this would have a similar effect on SP like the last fires we have seen some time ago and that turned out to be freak events?
I mean these fires have been desastrous.
Could you imagine bots to be programmed to live scan internet ressources for this kind of information and automatically act on this information in order to try to take advantage of some milliseconds?

 

[WarpedOne]

Sorry, I was sure the sarcasm was obvious.

 

[FANGO]

Looks like China's dragging us down premarket......again. Didn't everyone get the memo? The stock is supposed to be at $465

 

[ev-enthusiast]

Sorry, I was sure the sarcasm was obvious.

Same here

And yes, as a sw-engineer I know what could be automated theoretically and I can imagine what is actually automated (diploma in AI, they got damn powerful during the last 5 yrs man!).

 

[jkliu47]

CBS reports fast-moving grass fire burning in Bay Area near Livermore, Tracey (google maps).
As far as I can see nowhere near any Tesla Motors building.

Its called the 'Tesla' fire because the fire started off Tesla Road (you can see it in the map). What an unfortunate coincidence.

The fire is about 20 miles inland NE of the Fremont plant, nowhere close to it.

 

[ev-enthusiast]

Is there a downgrade from strong buy to buy out by Vetr?

Update:
Was on Monday, sorry (link).

 

[jhm]

If BMW, Audi, et al, really wanted to make a Tesla killer, they should just design a conventional car that is so awesome that EV owners everywhere will sell their cars just to trade up. Apparently they've got plenty of expertise in this area and just need to apply Moore's law to ICE to make a 100 MPG four-door that can do 0 to 60 in 2.5s all under $100k. Their engineers must really be slacking off if they haven't nailed this already. Nobody's expecting them to make a great EV, just to make any kind of car that can compete with Tesla.

 

[CALGARYARSENAL]

The only way the competition can compete is VISUALLY. The Tesaztek, also known as the Model X, leaves a lot to be desired if you are a male purchaser. Other than that, Tesla has the market locked up. No, its not a X siting!

 

[JRP3]

So there seems to be a concern about weight and inefficiency. Note that I was talking a 10x improvement in energy density.

Which quite frankly shows a complete lack of understanding of battery technology. IF we double it from where we are today within 10 years that will be amazing, your 10x improvement will not happen in our lifetimes, and probably never.

 

[schonelucht]

No, I am not saying the big 3 Germans will not try and compete with Tesla, after all form "a thorn under their thumb" it is now beating up A8 and BMW 7 sales globally, which must hurt. But when they announce products 2-3 years out that barely beat or meet Tesla's current specs that is the correct term. "Oh, yeah, so that pesky little start up may have this high tech EV out, but we are totally going to destroy them with this brand new car [that we won't be able to produce for another 3 years]".

Yet sales and revenue for BMW, Audi and Mercedes are at an all time high. So, no, they are not hurting from Tesla. My speculation is that Tesla grew the expensive vehicle market more than it caused loss of sales at the traditional high end manufactures. Just from reading on the forums here, more people are upgrading from a Leaf or Volt to a Tesla then from a $100k+ ICE car. BMW, Daimler and Audi do not seem under pressure simply because they are not under pressure : their traditional ICE cars are selling better than ever.

I believe in the medium to longer term (model 3 time frame), Tesla competition will rather come from the lower-end car manufacturers.

- - - Updated - - -

Looks like China's dragging us down premarket......again. Didn't everyone get the memo? The stock is supposed to be at $465

Nah, underwriters got their share bonus. They can let the SP revert to the mean again.

 

[aznt1217]

Market is taking an absolute beating right now. Stay strong young Tesla investors.... the X cometh.

 

[Bet TSLA]

Which quite frankly shows a complete lack of understanding of battery technology. IF we double it from where we are today within 10 years that will be amazing, your 10x improvement will not happen in our lifetimes, and probably never.

It shows a complete lack of understanding to discuss an outlier "what if?" scenario? What a strange statement. That's a good portion of the discussion that goes on on these boards every day. Perhaps it doesn't do anything for you, but I find such discussions help me understand "what is".

 

[JRP3]

Except you're talking about what isn't, and will likely never be. Might as well discuss the effects of an asteroid hitting Fremont.

 

[Krugerrand]

It shows a complete lack of understanding to discuss an outlier "what if?" scenario?

It wasn't an 'outlier'. It was a 'let's pretend this might (but logically probably can't/won't) happen in the foreseeable future' scenario.

 

[Bobbyducati]

picked up some oct 2 $250 puts yesterday along with some $267.5 calls. unfortunately those puts looking good right now.... pretty solid faith the calls will be worth quite a bit as we get closer to oct.

 

[Bet TSLA]

Except you're talking about what isn't, and will likely never be.

And that would be your opinion. Poorly expressed I think, since what you call "never" is thirty years out at the present rate of battery improvement, which shows no sign of slowing down. My opinion is that battery technology is in the process of moving from a chemistry problem to a nanotech problem. That latter field sees much faster and larger improvements. And it's a fact that investment in battery research has gone way, way up in recent years. Remarkably, we have found that progress in an area of endeavor often responds well to the application of lots of money.

This discussion is off topic here. Not short term. I'm done with it.

 

[vankie]

A recent (June?) research note from Jefferies seems to confirm this hypothesis. They asked ~150 Tesla owners what cars they replaced / what they would've bought if they didn't get the Model S, and the answers were a surprisingly wide range of vehicles in various price bands. The biggest surprise to me was that 70% of the people surveyed had cars with ASPs below $60K prior to their Model S.

Yet sales and revenue for BMW, Audi and Mercedes are at an all time high. So, no, they are not hurting from Tesla. My speculation is that Tesla grew the expensive vehicle market more than it caused loss of sales at the traditional high end manufactures. Just from reading on the forums here, more people are upgrading from a Leaf or Volt to a Tesla then from a $100k+ ICE car. BMW, Daimler and Audi do not seem under pressure simply because they are not under pressure : their traditional ICE cars are selling better than ever.

 

[Hogfighter]

And that would be your opinion. Poorly expressed I think, since what you call "never" is thirty years out at the present rate of battery improvement, which shows no sign of slowing down. My opinion is that battery technology is in the process of moving from a chemistry problem to a nanotech problem. That latter field sees much faster and larger improvements. And it's a fact that investment in battery research has gone way, way up in recent years. Remarkably, we have found that progress in an area of endeavor often responds well to the application of lots of money.

There's a long term thread for long term discussions.

 

[Johan]

And that would be your opinion. Poorly expressed I think, since what you call "never" is thirty years out at the present rate of battery improvement, which shows no sign of slowing down. My opinion is that battery technology is in the process of moving from a chemistry problem to a nanotech problem. That latter field sees much faster and larger improvements. And it's a fact that investment in battery research has gone way, way up in recent years. Remarkably, we have found that progress in an area of endeavor often responds well to the application of lots of money.

This should be broken off into a separate thread.

Your mistake is thinking "bigger is always better". With car batteries it's not.

Let me give you a few an analogies:

It's no issue to create screens with even higher resolution than today's "retina screens" but they are of little use; the human eye doesn't have higher resolution.

With portable devices we're not seeing processing capacity increase at the same pace as 5-10 years ago. This is because for real life applications today's processors are for the most part adequate, and you'll see manufacturers putting a lot of emphasis on price, heat and battery consumption in these devices, not only processing speed.

My point is, like I wrote above, that for passenger cars a 1000-mile battery makes very little sense, even if it's not unlikely we'll be able to build batteries with that kind of capacity at a somewhat attainable price in the future. Please read my post above the U-shaped curve.