GeoHot is a smart guy and I'm grateful he helped me root my various phones over the years, but he isn't going to displace MBLY alone in his basement with Ubuntu and an Acura. I give him plenty of credit (as does Elon it would seem), but there are literally hundreds of geniuses making Tesla autopilot work already, and his contribution will be additive if and when it comes, I think.
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Short-Term TSLA Price Movements - 2015
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GeoHot is a smart guy and I'm grateful he helped me root my various phones over the years, but he isn't going to displace MBLY alone in his basement with Ubuntu and an Acura. I give him plenty of credit (as does Elon it would seem), but there are literally hundreds of geniuses making Tesla autopilot work already, and his contribution will be additive if and when it comes, I think.
Without going too off topic, you can see from the video that he has rigged a fly by wire system and brute force hacked the control loop - which is seriously elegant in its simplicity - and if I can see that, then so can Musk and probably any one of his researchers.
Just to explain that. He's rigged a bunch of cameras and a LIDAR and is capturing their inputs. He's has also ported into the servo controls for the power steering and brakes and probably the throttle too so that they can be controlled via an electronic joystick and he's capturing the outputs from the joystick while he's 'teaching the car' (by driving with the joystick instead of the normal controls). So basically he's driving the car on the road with the joystick while as far as the computer is concerned he's driving with the joystick in a 3D game simulation of the same road that is produced on the fly from the sensor data. This is a radical shortcut to computer generate replicas of the appropriate electronic joystick outputs to drive through scenes in the same or similar object class. Everything else I can see is just coding and debugging rigor that you can pay people to do.
Looking at his video output it appears that he has not got as far as incorporating the car in his digital model which Tesla clearly has, and I suspect he has mistaken Tesla's system for the Mobileye system absent Tesla's core technology of GPS maps.
In other words you're right but credit where credit is due. I didn't see it before I saw it so to speak.
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This is a bit interesting. It would have been very funny if this had been published before the close. Bots, and a handful of traders would likely have misread the headline. 
Just read the report.
If Fiat Chrysler purchased 1 million credits from Tesla in 2015, wouldn't that equal a few billion dollars?
Or does this mean Tesla's sold its credits to Fiat Chrysler for $216 each?
Is it possible Fiat Chrysler paid Tesla a lot more for its credits, and is paying the amount over time?
Fiat Chrysler buys Tesla, Toyota, Honda emissions credits - Yahoo Finance
Fiat Chrysler buys emissions credits from Tesla, Toyota, Honda
Just read the report.
If Fiat Chrysler purchased 1 million credits from Tesla in 2015, wouldn't that equal a few billion dollars?
Or does this mean Tesla's sold its credits to Fiat Chrysler for $216 each?
Is it possible Fiat Chrysler paid Tesla a lot more for its credits, and is paying the amount over time?
Fiat Chrysler buys Tesla, Toyota, Honda emissions credits - Yahoo Finance
Fiat Chrysler buys emissions credits from Tesla, Toyota, Honda
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jhm
Well-Known Member
Julian, we're on the same page.
Your fleet car example (70% utilization at 30 mph) implies 500 miles per day. From an oil demand perspective this is gets very interesting. Note that for conventional vehivles, 1 barrel per day of crude supplies enough for about 940 to 1000 miles per day. So when cars are driven about 35 to 40 miles per day, about 25 cars create demand for 1 b/d. This is how I get to 25 million EVs to destroy 1 mb/d of crude demand, a level of demand destruction sufficient to create an oil oversupply problem.
Now consider what a fleet car at 450 to 500 miles per day does. It takes just a fleet of 2 million fleet EVs to knock off 1 mb/d of crude demand.
I have not read the book, but I suspect this is the sort of argument Tony Seba is likely making. How long will it take for Tesla to start putting say 1 million fleet cars per year on the road? Maybe as early as 2022, 1 million fleet cars plus 1 to 2 million privately owned cars. Moreover the rest of the auto industry is, say, matching this. Now we are at a situation where oil demand goes into free fall as early as 2022.
This seems damn quick to me, but consider the demand issue with fleet cars. So long as the utilization is high, you simply put them on the road as quickly as you can build them. So many of the complexities of retailing cars to private owners are bypassed. If the price per mile is cheap enough, demand for fleet car miles is not much of a problem. The adoption curve could be staggering.
So I guess if you wanted to kill the oil industry in the shortest time possible, this is how you do it.
RobStark
Well-Known Member
A couple of points when it comes to collapsing the entire legacy auto industry by 2017.
GM and Ford are far better off today than in 2008 with much less over capacity as evidenced by their continuing to reduce sales to rental car companies. Fiat Chrysler Automobiles is not THAT much better off.
A 7% reduction in US auto sales did not make Toyota abandon Fremont and practically give it away to Tesla. High California cost of doing business made Toyota want to leave California. Toyota even moved their California USA headquarters to Plano Texas. Nobody wanted Fremont as an industrial property and the environmental cleanup cost to rezone the property from industrial to commercial or residential was equal to or greater than the value of the property itself. Giving it away to Tesla rather than have Toyota connected to an environmental cleanup site in Northern California for the next 20 years was a much better PR and business move.
Currently Toyota is busting at the seems and is producing at near full capacity and just starting to look at new plants. A 350k per year sales reduction out of 9.9M sales per year from Prius owners abandoning Toyota en masse is not going to cause Toyota to collapse nor is a 7% reduction in US or even Global demand for ICEv.
I think 1M US reservations for Model 3 is impossible but maybe 1M Global reservations by Model 3 Job 1 is remotely possible. That is from 90M plus global auto sales per year. Not anywhere near 7%.
GM and Ford are far better off today than in 2008 with much less over capacity as evidenced by their continuing to reduce sales to rental car companies. Fiat Chrysler Automobiles is not THAT much better off.
A 7% reduction in US auto sales did not make Toyota abandon Fremont and practically give it away to Tesla. High California cost of doing business made Toyota want to leave California. Toyota even moved their California USA headquarters to Plano Texas. Nobody wanted Fremont as an industrial property and the environmental cleanup cost to rezone the property from industrial to commercial or residential was equal to or greater than the value of the property itself. Giving it away to Tesla rather than have Toyota connected to an environmental cleanup site in Northern California for the next 20 years was a much better PR and business move.
Currently Toyota is busting at the seems and is producing at near full capacity and just starting to look at new plants. A 350k per year sales reduction out of 9.9M sales per year from Prius owners abandoning Toyota en masse is not going to cause Toyota to collapse nor is a 7% reduction in US or even Global demand for ICEv.
I think 1M US reservations for Model 3 is impossible but maybe 1M Global reservations by Model 3 Job 1 is remotely possible. That is from 90M plus global auto sales per year. Not anywhere near 7%.
Fascinating. From a certain point of view, maybe the Republican Right will have been right... They certainly will claim so. That hand-wringing and carbon taxes and big legislation and treaties failed where just technology and a free market succeeded.
We would look back and say "it was so obvious. We don't really want to own cars when easy, ubiquitous mobility-as-a-service is an option. EV's got cheap and fit the MaaS model really well. Solar got really cheap. Batteries got really cheap and obsoleted fossil fuels, freezing them in the ground on purely economic grounds. We didn't need to do much at all to save the earth."
Of course, supports for solar and EV's will have been critical.
But holy cow, Elon Musk will be sainted as the singular figure pushing all that to fruition. Goosebumps.
The big problem with this approach is that it relied on a crazy maverick that pushed beyond all reason that had both the luck and the means to make things happen. In the absence of Mr. Musk, will we be as far? In many ways, he did absolutely the wrong things as far as what reasonable and normal businesspeople would do. It is not good public policy to rely on a super maverick to show up and sacrifice himself to save the day. In the end, he does get a big payday and he did gets lots of help including government and taxpayer help, but still... this isn't good public policy.
Well yeah. That is why you would have to Saint him in hindsight. So one perspective would be that the free market took care of itself. The other perspective is that we got super lucky and just the right leader came about and did just the right thing. Great Man theory - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Jonathan Hewitt
Active Member
This is actually the belief more or less of the political group "RepublicEN." The idea that climate change IS real, that conservatives should actually "conserve" the environment, and they are confident that market-driven innovation can accelerate an energy revolution. They've been asking all the Republican candidates recently (short term thread related
) if they think the free market can solve the problem of climate change and it's very interesting how all the candidates respond. If you want to google the group don't let google correct the spelling or you won't find it.Not sure if I'm reading this accurately... did Wheeler Jason just purchase 45 million dollars worth of TSLA?
SEC Filings | Tesla Motors
SEC Filings | Tesla Motors
There is no such thing as good public policy when governments cease to represent the democratic will of the voters who elected them and instead buckle to the will of anti-consumer corporate protectionism at every turn, hence the loss of trust and respect for the institution of government.
Musk is clearly the right man for the job but he is effectively the genuinely democratically selected representative for a global financial markets, a workforce and a consumer base at a juncture in history and of technology that required with pressing need just exactly such a figure to emerge.
"In many ways, he did absolutely the wrong things as far as what reasonable and normal businesspeople would do." This is clearly nonsense judging by the relative fruits of business people that would fit your definition of reasonable and normal. None with very rare exception has earned anything like the wealth, power and respect earned by and accorded to Elon Musk.
Looks that way to me! Good catch. He probably knows something we don't, like how many cars they will deliver this quarter....
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Just saw this:
1/4th of the shares subject to the option become vested and exercisable 11/30/16 and 1/48th of the shares subject to the option shall become vested and exercisable each month thereafter.
Tony Seba has reached his conclusions without figuring out the mathematical impossibility of the Gasoline ICE competing with the AI EV.
Think of Model 3 like SpaceX vs ULA. Its cheaper and better but it's the new kid on the block vs powerful incumbents and is vulnerable to politics and teething trouble.
The Tesla AI EV is like the reusable rocket that costs $200K per SpaceX flight vs $400 Million for an equivalent ULA flight. Then nobody need waste any more time debating whether or not ULA isn't just out of date and taking the pi$$.
That is the kind of revolutionary change in price per mile with Tesla's AI EV. Private independent transport that cost gas money only and the cost of buying and owning a car is exactly $0.00, just unnecessary unless you really want to pay over the top for luxury of exclusive use. City apartment dwellers (i.e. most people) need not bother.
jhm
Well-Known Member
These are good points. It seems to me that the beautiful catastrophe scenario is not exactly what we're shooting for anyway. It's not really ideal to put a bunch of workers in the unemployment line just to get traditional automakers serious about sustainable transport. Far better would it be for managers and investors to catch a vision for really great EVs and transition efficiently to that business. But perhaps too many donkeys are at the helm and only a disaster will change things.
dc_h
Active Member
Correct on the options. Here is a link to his Tesla hiring package.
Teslas New CFO Jason Wheeler Gets $15 Million Equity Award - Bloomberg Business
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Sig 664 in NY for imminent delivery with pictures on plugshare. Merry Christmas Sig owners and Tesla Bulls?
Some Sig X owners have scheduled delivery dates in December 2015 - Page 2
here is a link to the plugshare pictures. It looks AWESOME.
http://a6b6a4d850da023e34c0-ffd458871468d7801be60d93d5d79b26.r30.cf2.rackcdn.com/111190.jpg
Teslas New CFO Jason Wheeler Gets $15 Million Equity Award - Bloomberg Business
- - - Updated - - -
Sig 664 in NY for imminent delivery with pictures on plugshare. Merry Christmas Sig owners and Tesla Bulls?
Some Sig X owners have scheduled delivery dates in December 2015 - Page 2
here is a link to the plugshare pictures. It looks AWESOME.
http://a6b6a4d850da023e34c0-ffd458871468d7801be60d93d5d79b26.r30.cf2.rackcdn.com/111190.jpg
jhm
Well-Known Member
This is a complement of my fleet EV oil displacement argument. It's one thing to say that a 2 million EV fleet with high utilization can offset demand for 1 mb/d. But this still leaves open the question of while an ICE fleet could better compete for those passenger miles. So your argument rules out that possibility. Autonomy is not the critical issue. That cuts the cost of having human drivers and is available to both EVs and ICEVs. What is decisive is the total per mile cost, and the better drivetrain wins. Even before full autonomy is available if Model 3 becomes the cab or Uber driver's car of choice, that would be confirmation of this theory. The limitation with human drivers is that added wages can make private ownership more economical even with lower utilization per vehicle. So autonomy removes that price barrier so that aggregate consumption of fleet miles can go up. This is helpful for EVs because the cost of batteries is upfront capex. The more quickly ylu can burn through the lifetime range of the battery the lower the cost of capital per mile. With ICEVs, the cost of fuel is just an operating cost so speeding up miles per year does not improve capital efficiency quite as much. Of course, once the cost of an EV is less that the cost of an ICEV, regardless of operation cost, then this capital efficiency issue won't matter. But so long as you are trying to offset high capex with lower opex, it will matter. Any any case, I think this is a second order effect. The key issues are the cost of powering the vehicle, servicing and maintenance costs, and longevity. The cost of the battery will simply keep falling until it hits whatever critical threshold is needed.
So putting this together, EVs should prove to be the most economic fleet vehicle. AI supports high utilization fleets. A high utilization AI EV fleet defeates more annual demand for oil per vehicle than private ownership. Thus, this sort of fleet has the potential to disrupt the oil market on an accelerated basis.
It means he was granted a ton of stock options. He will be quite rich in a few years.
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