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

[tinm]

So when you speak to the various people in the New Mexico government, do they actually admit to you that they are in the pocket of the auto dealers? Or do they instead spew some BS about protecting consumers or other such nonsense? If it's the latter do you believe them? If not, why would you believe the reporters?

In your previous post you cited CBS and NYT as examples of Elon making himself available to major media and giving them good info and them screwing it up. On that we agree. But I don't think their screwing it up, or taking quotes out of context, or deliberately misinforming the public were necessarily at the behest of orders from above or from outside advertisers. You *assume* that. We agree to differ on that. I think it probably happens now and then but I don't think it's necessary to assume that that's the new normal, that it automatically routinely happens for this kind of journalistic malpractice to exist when it comes to Tesla.

As for New Mexico: some of the politicians have direct ties, as in they personally were auto dealers themselves, or members of their family or extended family are currently auto dealers. They openly admit it. And the politicians are all very familiar with this very old, established cartel/monopoly (the old line is "there's at least one dealer in every legisative district" and it's generally true and often they're the largest employer in the rural districts). It's a monopoly that rules from one end of the state to the other and whose entire industry's business model has been, over many decades, carefully enshrined as state law. Not very many industries manage to pull that off. The television news media tend to present auto dealers as saints. One station has created a whole series of essentially infomercials about how swell Bob Toyota and Fred Ford are. It's amazing. The data exists to show who's received money from "Car of New Mexico" (the name of the auto dealer lobby check-writing entity), year after year, it's all plain to see. And elected officials do spew the auto dealer BS talking points all the time (that's usually the easiest tell). And of course nobody in the Tesla community believes it. I think the public, indifferent to the Tesla fight still, don't care one way or the other.

And sure, reporters could be lying. My intuition tells me I kinda doubt they are though. Usually they just simply aren't Tesla fans and don't buy into the hype and sometimes fall into being influenced by the TSLAQ crowd which I attribute to laziness: here you got this army of trolls and bots and Wall St shorts spewing noise all day long for free. It's like the reporters are fracking for information and in TSLAQ they've struck a rich vein and it winds up fueling confirmation bias, which, I'd argue, is the core driver of the TSLAQ crowd.

 

[Webeevdrivers]

800 in just Vancouver or all of Canada? Quebec and BC have some serious incentives right now

No. Just Vancouver in BC. I agree. I think Quebec is probably doing well as well. I wouldn’t be surprised if Canada is sucking up 15 percent of production right now. Just a guess though. Lots more on the roads though and we are 500 km from Vancouver.

 

[Buckminster]

GF3 video

These fake videos are getting really good. It can't be easy overlaying images of buildings on mud - must be a Spielberg team.

 

[Right_Said_Fred]

Thinking that the FUD in the media will go away once Tesla starts advertising is delusional. Remember how people said that the FUD, sell ratings and lowered SP targets on Wall Street were caused by the fact that Tesla was refusing to raise more money (from which Wall Street could skim off 10%). Last month they raised $2,7 billion. How did that work out?

 

[dww12]

In your previous post you cited CBS and NYT as examples of Elon making himself available to major media and giving them good info and them screwing it up. On that we agree. But I don't think their screwing it up, or taking quotes out of context, or deliberately misinforming the public were necessarily at the behest of orders from above or from outside advertisers. You *assume* that. We agree to differ on that. I think it probably happens now and then but I don't think it's necessary to assume that that's the new normal, that it automatically routinely happens for this kind of journalistic malpractice to exist when it comes to Tesla.

As for New Mexico: some of the politicians have direct ties, as in they personally were auto dealers themselves, or members of their family or extended family are currently auto dealers. They openly admit it. And the politicians are all very familiar with this very old, established cartel/monopoly (the old line is "there's at least one dealer in every legisative district" and it's generally true and often they're the largest employer in the rural districts). It's a monopoly that rules from one end of the state to the other and whose entire industry's business model has been, over many decades, carefully enshrined as state law. Not very many industries manage to pull that off. The television news media tend to present auto dealers as saints. One station has created a whole series of essentially infomercials about how swell Bob Toyota and Fred Ford are. It's amazing. The data exists to show who's received money from "Car of New Mexico" (the name of the auto dealer lobby check-writing entity), year after year, it's all plain to see. And elected officials do spew the auto dealer BS talking points all the time (that's usually the easiest tell). And of course nobody in the Tesla community believes it. I think the public, indifferent to the Tesla fight still, don't care one way or the other.

And sure, reporters could be lying. My intuition tells me I kinda doubt they are though. Usually they just simply aren't Tesla fans and don't buy into the hype and sometimes fall into being influenced by the TSLAQ crowd which I attribute to laziness: here you got this army of trolls and bots and Wall St shorts spewing noise all day long for free. It's like the reporters are fracking for information and in TSLAQ they've struck a rich vein and it winds up fueling confirmation bias, which, I'd argue, is the core driver of the TSLAQ crowd.

So you can see where local politicians can be influnced by dealers because that is where they get their money, and everyone in the town knows someone with a job there, but reporters are somehow immune to this?

BTW 60min/NYT were not the worst examples, Joe Rogan was. The interview and Elon’s points were so compelling Joe bought the most expensive car Tesla makes and can’t stop talking about it now. What did Wall St. and the media report on? Do I even need to say it, because 99% of the planet has seen it.

 

[jerry33]

Thinking that the FUD in the media will go away once Tesla starts advertising is delusional. Remember how people said that much of the FUD, sell ratings and lowered SP targets on Wall Street were caused by the fact that Tesla was refusing to raise more money. Last month they raised $2,7 billion. How did that work out?

Yeah, it won't go away. It's remotely possible that there will be more positive articles to counter the FUD if Tesla starts advertising, but it's not something I would bet on.

 

[Fact Checking]

But I don't think their screwing it up, or taking quotes out of context, or deliberately misinforming the public were necessarily at the behest of orders from above or from outside advertisers.

You are using the logical fallacy of Reductio ad Absurdum:

Reductio ad Absurdum​

Few are arguing that anti-Tesla media bias comes in the form of advertisers "ordering" journalists to smear Tesla, or to treat Volkswagen favorably.

Corruption and media bias is rarely as transactional and rarely as naively transparent as you pretend it to be.

Instead look at the research articles I linked to: if "incentives", "motives" and "financial self interest" meet, negative media coverage of car safety recalls of carmakers that are advertising with them suddenly becomes "significantly lower":

And because you wanted direct evidence, here's two scientific studies done on the link between advertisement spending and favorable media coverage:

"Advertising Spending and Media Bias: Evidence from News Coverage of Car Safety Recalls"

https://www.eui.eu/Documents/DepartmentsCentres/Economics/Seminarsevents/Durante-paper.pdf

"Consistent with the predictions of our theoretical model, we find that recalls involving a given manufacturer receive significantly less coverage on newspapers in which that manufacturer advertised more over the previous two years."
​

I.e. media outlets will cover car safety recalls "significantly less", which might fail to inform their readers and might get them into accidents and might harm them (!), if only the affected car company advertised with them for the last two years...

Different studies came to a similar conclusion:

"Does Advertising Spending Influence Media Coverage of the Advertiser?"

https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/60fe/78db913870798674fa38ee59df23aaef2605.pdf

"Controlling for firm heterogeneity, endogeneity, and the simultaneity of advertising and coverage,the authors find that, overall, (1) there is evidence of a strong positive influence of advertising on coverage, (2) publishers that depend more on a specific industry for their advertising revenues are prone to a higher degree of influence from their corporate advertisers than others, (3) peer pressures from competing publishers affect coverage decisions, (4) larger and more innovative companies are at an advantage for obtaining coverage for their products, and (5) the effects of corporate advertising influence exist in both Europe and the United States. These findings raise concerns about the independence of editorial content and coverage of magazines."​

So considering the negative Tesla headlines in evidence at pretty much every major publisher (tracked by CleanTechnica's PravDuh effort), while traditional carmakers receive more favorable treatment because they do advertise, will you admit to the obvious conclusion that the media is net biased against Tesla, for the reasons outlined in numerous studies that examined the link of corruption between advertising revenue and coverage?

The study's findings are unambiguous: the supposedly click-bait hungry, if-it-bleeds-it-leads mass media suddenly loses interest in negative stories that involve their own advertisers...

I.e. these studies are directly contradicting your claims.

 

[CyberDutchie]

OT

Sorry if this already has been posted, but I found this video from Real Engineering “the challenge of building a self-driving car” very enlightening:

Addressed the competitive landscape very well and concludes that Tesla is in a very good position.

 

[Fact Checking]

This is the type of insurance scam that Tesla Insurance would probably be much less exposed to:

Tesla dashcam saves Model 3 owner from potential insurance scam​

Does anyone know what percentage of underwriting costs is estimated to be the result of fraud? My guess would be 5-10% at most.

 

[elasalle]

Amusing story. In a recent email with our Tesla rep in Vancouver he explained they are taking 800 orders per week and I assume delivering as many. That’s like 100 cars per day. Pretty amazing for one province. To get the car we would want us 4 to 8 weeks. LR RWD white on white, sport rims, etc. He’s a good rep and keeps us up to date.

Also got an update text from our Nissan rep. We have a Leaf SL Eplus on order. Delivery now expected January 2020. Looks crazy right. 8 month waiting list for our Eplus but only 4 to 8 weeks for a model 3. But here’s the thing. Our dealership is only allowed 18 Leafs per month. Last year they sold close to 250 for the year. My point is it’s the kind of thing that could be spun easy. I can get a Tesla in 4 weeks but because of superior demand it takes 8 months to get a Leaf Eplus.

Just sayin. Things are not always as they first appear.

This follows Adam Jonas's new logic.
Reality is that only Tesla (& specifically M3) is the only EV that is mass produced.

 

[Dan Detweiler]

How did you manage that?

Actually it is a buy order for tomorrow.

Dan

 

[elasalle]

Cars are arriving in Sweden again after a two month hiatus. 96 Model 3s was registered(probably pre-registrations done by Tesla) at car.info.

In April 2019, Plug-In Electric Car Sales In Sweden Increased 44%
the market is currently led by the Tesla Model 3, which with 446 new registrations in April (1,451 YTD

(must be recent price cuts and Greta Thunberg spreading Climate Crisis awareness ...)

 

[kbM3]

Jerome — The Man, The Myth, The Tesla Super-Engineer — #CleanTechnica Interview | CleanTechnica

 

[Freder Reeve]

Yeah, it won't go away. It's remotely possible that there will be more positive articles to counter the FUD if Tesla starts advertising, but it's not something I would bet on.

another thing, 100% saturation of public interfaces with a 1-sided viewpoint has conditioned some people to hate tesla to the point where we see vandalism regularly. Might be nice to de-program some of that with a little educationally engaging advertising in the space where the anti-tesla sentiment is fostered.

 

[Silent Ludicrosy]

Maybe Elon can hook Greta Thunberg up with a Tesla and some solar panels for the work she’s doing for the climate crisis.

 

[Webeevdrivers]

This follows Adam Jonas's new logic.
Reality is that only Tesla (& specifically M3) is the only EV that is mass produced.

I would agree. Although I have had difficulty finding current Nissan Leaf production numbers. They could easily sell twice as many as they are in Canada. Is it lack of batteries? When we recently put our order in for our Leaf Eplus we wanted to take one more test drive. They didn’t have an Eplus but we were able to take a standard 40 KW model for a quick drive. Another sales rep had two couples coming in behind us to test drive the same car. He mumbled they need two more demonstrators to keep up and said if they had double the leafs coming in they could sell every one. My guess is some kind of production constraint.

Off topic, the sales people are definetly more EV knowledgeable than when we bought our first leaf almost 3.5 years ago.

Anyway it woukd be interesting to see what production numbers are. Still a fraction of what model 3 is.

 

[EinSV]

Jerome — The Man, The Myth, The Tesla Super-Engineer — #CleanTechnica Interview | CleanTechnica

Thanks for posting this. I thought this paragraph on Semi was interesting:

A rather big bombshell was that he wasn’t aware of many large companies that hadn’t pre-ordered trucks, demonstrating strong interest in the product. Additionally, whereas he hasn’t been in touch much with car customers in recent years, he’s in very close contact with the potential Semi customers, and they continuously work together to develop what I assume will be the best semi truck product on the market. He called it a “journey together.”​

Also, this was interesting color on the continuous manufacturing improvements:

Regarding the various model production lines, Jerome noted what we basically gathered ourselves on the factory tour — the company is constantly updating, changing, improving the production process. He said he had something like 15 projects in his head — per line.​

 

[hacer]

... The data exists to show who's received money from "Car of New Mexico" (the name of the auto dealer lobby check-writing entity), year after year, it's all plain to see. And elected officials do spew the auto dealer BS talking points all the time (that's usually the easiest tell). And of course nobody in the Tesla community believes it.

So the answer is yes, the politicians lie about their influence and no, you don't believe their lies because, in part, there are laws about reporting political contributions that allow you to see the money flows.

...And sure, reporters could be lying. My intuition tells me I kinda doubt they are though. Usually they just simply aren't Tesla fans and don't buy into the hype and sometimes fall into being influenced by the TSLAQ crowd which I attribute to laziness: here you got this army of trolls and bots and Wall St shorts spewing noise all day long for free. It's like the reporters are fracking for information and in TSLAQ they've struck a rich vein and it winds up fueling confirmation bias, which, I'd argue, is the core driver of the TSLAQ crowd.

I don't think you need to be a "fan" who "buy into the hype" in order to not have a negative bias about Tesla. I think it's hard for most people who have significant experience driving a Tesla not to be a fan, but that definitely doesn't mean they will "buy into the hype". There is plenty of Tesla hype that should be taken with some grains of salt. Not being a fan, and not personally experiencing Tesla vehicles will make it a bit harder to grasp the reality of Tesla but it doesn't have to lead to a negative bias.

You think the reporters you've spoken to are personally biased against Tesla and/or unable to distinguish facts from fiction. You also think other reporters that you haven't spoken to personally are similarly motivated. But you don't think this bias could have been influenced by their managers, or those managers influenced by the company owners who in turn aren't influenced by the people they get their money from. I guess that's because only politicians are influenced by money. That seems pretty naive.

 

[bdy0627]

It is important to bear in mind that we lost $700 million in the first quarter this year, which is over $200 million per month. Investors nonetheless were supportive of our efforts and agreed to give us $2.4 billion (our net proceeds) to show that we can be financially sustainable.

That is a lot of money, but actually only gives us approximately ten months at the first-quarter burn rate to achieve break[/QUOTE]
I actually really like the wording in the first paragraph. He did a great job there. The last sentence was the problem.

 

[Navin]

Here is my prediction for tomorrow.

Either that chimp Adam Jonas or that egghead from Goldman will downgrade Tesla by just a few dollars. Doing so will: 1) continue the short parade on the stock and 2) allow for the bear narrative to continue. Just my thoughts.