Tesla, TSLA & the Investment World: the Perpetual Investors' Roundtable

[printf42]

Any speculation on how the super charger v3 will be unveiled? Will there be an streaming or just a blog post?

I remember we puzzled about why they say v3 is going to help lower both capex and opex, will we have a peak of the answer tonight?

 

[neroden]

A lot of people in Facebook seem to be buying AP and FSD with the new pricing. I wonder how much money Tesla needs to become profitable this quarter?

I don't know, but I'd guess they're going to bring in $130 million+ from people buying AP and FSD now (that it has more functionality).

 

[lklundin]

That one would be Tesla, I think.

But the SEC doesn't prosecute real violations of securities laws, only made-up BS.

OT.

Like the old Soviet-gulag "joke":
Q: How many years are you here for?
A: 25
Q: For what?
A: Some made-up BS.
Q: Impossible. They only give you 15 for that.

The expected lifetime in those camps was less than 15 years, so either way effectively a life sentence.

To digress even further: Back in the previous century I found multiple copies of Alexander Solschenizyn's works in the used books' section of the public library in Los Alamos, NM. I found that rather comforting.

 

[HG Wells]

How about some one (car maker) joining the supercharger network ?

 

[Artful Dodger]

I think the bottom was yesterday at $270. Shorts are trying hard but it feels like TSLA is slowly clawing back.

massive capping going on right now @ $276

 

[neroden]

You are reversing the meaning of nines. It is a guarantee of performance, not a guarantee of failure. 99.999% guarantees all but 5.26 minutes worth of a year's (continuous, non-stop) driving. Those remaining 5.26 minutes might be fine, but they are not guaranteed.

Flip it around, how many minutes is a typical driver "guaranteeing"? That is, what is the average failure rate for a human driver. If Tesla can really achieve five nines (which I doubt, except for limiting the circumstances) five nines is almost certainly better than any human driver.

I don't have the data to back it up, but if someone drove 60 hours a week, fifty weeks a year do you really think they would only make 1.8 minutes worth of mistakes? I think a reasonable person can accept that human drivers make errors far more frequently than that. The question is, when will Tesla be able to demonstrate 99.999% performance?

[edited to make more evident the part I was responding to in the quote]

I'vd said this before, but due to an extremely well-documented human bias, people will tolerate massively higher failure rates from humans than they will from robots. At least two orders of magnitude worse. Nobody really seems to know why, but it's a fact of human nature and we have to deal with it.

So, given two options:
-- A robot in charge, where 1 person dies for every 1,000,000 instances
-- A human in charge, where 100 people die for every 1,000,000 instances

People will collectively choose to have the human in charge. :shrug: It is what it is. Musk has made some statements indicating that he understands this.

My point is "better than a human driver" is irrelevant legislatively.

You can get around this psychology by only offering "driver assist" features, leaving the human clearly in charge.

 

[Tslynk67]

You know, when everyone starts complaining about margins, production issues, delivery concerns, stock worries, etc, etc, etc, maybe we should remember that Tesla could have chosen to go THIS direction. Thank God they chose to do the difficult thing to bring this technology to the masses.

Dan

The $12.5 Million Bugatti La Voiture Noire Is the World's Most Expensive New Car

God, that's ugly... as an aside the following link popped-up at the end of the article:

 

[homer214]

Looks like maybe, just maybe this will be a Green Day. Methinks the shorties protest too much.

 

[GOVA]

How about some one (car maker) joining the supercharger network ?

Unfortunately, ALL have their heads stuck deep into their other ends.

 

[jerry33]

How about some one (car maker) joining the supercharger network ?

Joining the Tesla SC network implies they believe Tesla is better than whatever they have (or don't have). I doubt any car manufacturer will do that except as a last resort.

 

[AudubonB]

You know, after the announcement about them prepping to build Superchargers in Iceland, the more I think about it, the more I think we're about to become a Tesla Nation (sales are currently low because you can't service them here, there's no Supercharger network, and people have had to import their own) - potentially one of Tesla's highest market penetrations in the world. We have:

• Norway-like EV incentives (a gas car costs ~40% more than an EV of the same base price)
• High per-capita income (not as high as Norway, but still high on a global scale)
• The fastest "competing" chargers in the country are only 50kW.
• Low speed limits mean that the time between stops is so long that most people would want to stop anyway after going through a Tesla's range. E.g. no inconvenience.
  
• Surprisingly long travel distances (the Ring Road takes about 15 hours nonstop to drive all the way around)
• Everyone wants to at least be able to drive the Ring Road; it's sort of a minimum requirement for owning a car here. And why PHEVs have been much better sellers than BEVs thusfar.
• Long "side trips" away from the Ring Road (Snæfellsnes, Vestfirðir, Austfirðir, etc) call for long ranges
• Winters not super-cold, but long and snowy. Very windy. Mountainous. Having a good range-buffer for adverse conditions is important here.
• AWD is very popular here
• Lots of apartment-dwellers in-town with no access to charging (boo!); those who own cars want to be able to minimize how often they have to stop at a fast-charger in town (aka, range), and how long they have to be there (Superchargers). 50kW and Leaf-like ranges don't cut it for most people.

Things Tesla could do to significantly improve their appeal to Iceland:

• Tow package
• Air suspension (more clearance when needed)
• Greater native ground clearance (snow, unpaved roads)
• True offroad vehicles (not "city SUVs")

I didn't see on that list the answer to: "And your vehicular hydrocarbons come from....where?"

 

[ZachF]

 

[StarFoxisDown!]

Seems like the model y event combined with the model 3 35k announcement has really taken the hype out of the EV onslaught that was supposed to be the Geneva auto show. Audi won't even talk price on their Q4 EV prototype and it already has worse specs in both range and acceleration........0 to 60 - 6 seconds lol. I thought i misread that at first lol

 

[Cobbler]

Let's pump some of that NIO money back into $TSLA

 

[wayner]

It's not about the harm. It's about the technological credibility of Elon Musks claims wrt FSD. @Fact Checking defended him by saying that there is not a single claim of Elon about the capabilities of their hardware that does not eventually come true.

I doubt this is true. I don't know if you specifically call it hardware but Teslas, at least the Tesla Model S, were supposed to have third party apps. That never happened,.

 

[mongo]

I'vd said this before, but due to an extremely well-documented human bias, people will tolerate massively higher failure rates from humans than they will from robots. At least two orders of magnitude worse. Nobody really seems to know why, but it's a fact of human nature and we have to deal with it.

I do. humans are known fallible. Robots run code. If a robot kills someone due to an error, and that error can be corrected with code, then the robot should have had that code to begin with, and the death would not have happened. If it cannot be fixed with code, then fixed mechanically, if not mechanically, then fixed by not having the robot.

Robots run on physics, they don't 'just screw up'. So there is traceable/ correctable/ should have been done culpability (back to fallible humans).

 

[printf42]

OT

So yes, I concur, first evidence was that FSD could be accomplished with the processing power of H2, then it became apparent that H3 was required, so everyone that bought FSD gets H3.

I think HW3 is not really required, it’s just easier.
I remember before they reveal HW3, Elon said there are two ways to make FSD work, an easy way and a hard way.

Now I believe the hard way means to make it work on HW2, which is very much possible but means a lot of performance optimization to extract every last bit of performance out of it without sacrificing too much of accuracy.

And the easy way is HW3, where it could run the network that works as is, at the cost of a new computer board, they save significant unnecessary engineering efforts. And could redirect those resources to speed up the actual feature development.

HW3 is the way to go, don’t waste your time on getting 2x better runtime performance to save some money, instead, use that time to develop a new feature that provides 10x more value.

 

[lklundin]

Yeah, I also hope FactChecking is correct.

Not to put on any pressure, but if any of you guys are wrong, then a bunch of us here are screwed. Regardless of the disclaimers.

 

[jerry33]

I doubt this is true. I don't know if you specifically call it hardware but Teslas, at least the Tesla Model S, were supposed to have third party apps. That never happened,.

When it was announced Apps weren't as prone to malware as they are now. Apple and Google spend a bundle on keeping the bad apps out, it would very hard for Tesla to commit those kind of resources.

 

[SpaceCash]

I doubt this is true. I don't know if you specifically call it hardware but Teslas, at least the Tesla Model S, were supposed to have third party apps. That never happened,.

Also 30-second battery replacement instead of charging