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

[gabeincal]

Unexpected positive spike?

 

[Kuhz]

Hey. I can see my house from up here

 

[OrthoSurg]

Nobody has said that the $25k car would be produced in Germany/China and shipped to the US. It will be designed in Germany/China but manufactured where there is market for it.

My guess is that they will implement the new the new technology in new factories first than gradually transition the first production lines to the new technology and gradually reduce cost of all the vehicles and maintain acceptable margins.
I am expecting successive -$3,000 and -$4,000 cost reduction on all the models as far as the new technology is implemented instead of just popping out a new Giga Berlin made Model Y with the new technology that is 50% the price of the ones made in California.

 

[TheTalkingMule]

Here comes the pile-on before P&D. I'd like to see us at $520 prior to earnings, then $600 after earnings and an S&P inclusion announcement. Spikes to.......$720 maybe on the squeeze after inclusion?

 

[Blue horseshoe]

Hmm that's a sudden spike with decent volume but I'm not seeing any news and the markets look red

 

[OrthoSurg]

Her absolute best comment: "You can't really compare Elon to Jeff Bezos, who just sells toilet paper online"

LMAO!

She couldn’t be more right.

the 2 world richest men, Jack Ma and Jeff Bezos are online resellers, they are not producing anyth8ng new, just offering an effective transaction platform and delivery system. For sure it adds value and facility in our daily lives but it is not changing the fundamental technology increment in the world.

 

[zecar]

Nobody has said that the $25k car would be produced in Germany/China and shipped to the US. It will be designed in Germany/China but manufactured where there is market for it.

I think Tesla doesn't want to be hampered by trying to sell a lower end "world car" to the Chinese. They want that car solely focused on China market. Including going to an even lower price point if necessary. I expect the other $25K car will be big enough for the U.S. market.

Tesla is probably doing a lot of thinking about how they want to position against the many pretty good pretty inexpensive EVs coming to North America. That business could be a profitability nightmare for the participants. Tesla may be better off sitting out the initial mauling, especially with the battery commitment needed for semi and cybertruck.

 

[woodisgood]

Most of solar and alt energy is fairly green today (likely ahead of debate with Biden focus on renewables), TSLA was actually lagging.

 

[dc_h]

BTW, if you look at that flow chart I posted, the share of petroleum usage by agricultural, construction, and industrial equipment is larger than what air travel consumes.

Tesla tractors/excavators/bulldozers?

A normal company would license needed technology to Deere and Caterpillar. It will be interesting to see if Tesla does get into these segments, who Elon's first principles would reinvent the industry. I'd expect something like Boring company to speed up construction and clean up agriculture production. Reinventing food production for space travel should have significant impact on earth based production.

 

[JRP3]

A 13 yr-old car company

17

 

[Cosmacelf]

A normal company would license needed technology to Deere and Caterpillar. It will be interesting to see if Tesla does get into these segments, who Elon's first principles would reinvent the industry. I'd expect something like Boring company to speed up construction and clean up agriculture production. Reinventing food production for space travel should have significant impact on earth based production.

I don't agree. Powertrains for tractors are going to be quite different than powertrains for cars and trucks. Someone is going to have to engineer a proper tractor powertrain.

 

[scaesare]

17

Ah, I was thinking Roadster release yr (and got that off by a year as well).

Thanks, edited my post.

 

[CLK350]

For the record, since last September 22 Battery Day presentation was definitely information-dense, it may be useful to have all these 3 elements together. This is quite epochal, looking forward to the sequels, commentary, documentary or plain factual follow ups.

1/ Tesla official video

- and the

2/ excellent summary from reductionist - Moderators' Choice: Posts of Particular Merit

Notes from Battery day:
(everything I thought was significant in one post, to avoid clutter)

### General note: The presentation was extremely information dense, which in my opinion has caused the "nothing new" sentiment that some are expressing here, because there isn't one shiny thing as a takeaway. I hope this is useful in digesting the new info. ###

Presentation:

- Long Term: 10TWh global annual battery production needed for transition to sustainable transport, additional 10TWh/y for energy storage
- Current Tech: 135 Giga Nevada's, $2T investment, 2.8M people needed for this goal => drastic improvement in efficiency needed
- Plan to halve the cost per kWh (!)
- not dependent on a single innovation => no single point of failure

... <snip>

3/ Transcript at www.rev.com/blog/transcripts/tesla-2020-battery-day-transcript-september-22

Tesla 2020 Battery Day Transcript September 22

Rev › Blog › Transcripts › Technology Transcripts › Tesla 2020 Battery Day Transcript September 22

Al Prescott: (41:03)
Good afternoon, everyone. Welcome to Tesla’s 2020 Annual Meeting of Stockholders. We’re really excited that you could be here with us today. My name is Al Prescott. I’m Tesla’s vice president of legal.

Al Prescott: (41:15)
There’ll be two parts of today’s meeting. First, the former part of the meeting we’ll get out of the way, which we’ll cover the seven items that stockholders have been asked to vote on. After the voting, I’ll introduce Tesla’s co-founder and CEO, Elon Musk, who will give a presentation about the company update and year in review. And then following the conclusion of the stockholder meeting, we’ll start our separate Battery Day event.

<snip> ...

 

[S3XY]

Paywalled

Just like our southern border there are ways around the wall.

 

[jbcarioca]

From the short term perspective it is hard to imagine even Shanghai as being huge, after all they have not yet finished the factory nor is the Model Y being shipped. Generally auto producers are not rewarded in share price for anything much beyond couple of quarters. When there are three factories being built and the other three are undergoing major changes the future seems tentative to typical equity buyers.

When purportedly knowledgable people dismiss the Tesla revelations it is logical because they are totally "forward looking". Much of what is discussed does not yet exist anywhere are all. When viewing Tesla as an auto company the perspective clouds further because the last successful new auto company most of them know was Hyundai.

Despite that Tesla makes massive effort to hit quarterly records. Those may be critical, but it seems to me that the vast majority of the investors who have given TSLA a share price even Elon thinks might be too high are ones for which Battery Day, GF3, 4 and 5 are more relevant, as are new Chinese and German designs, Cybertruck and Semi. Even those popped rarely understand the role of TE, and Autobidder in particular.

Anyway, everyone, including me, obsesses over shipping schedules, sales in Slovenia and Iceland and counting vins. We'll not change those habits.

As investors we need to recognize that we expect AMZN-like long term and that is why we are in TSLA. In that context Battery Day, Design-Shanghai and Design-Berlin are the harbingers of value creation. The speed with which GF-3, GF-4, GF-5, colossal castings etc happen are the heralds of actual execution. In effect AMZN had AWS and TSLA has manufacturing. Neither of those will be understood by those who fail to study.

Finally, EPS is to be ignored by me. Those technology advances are my proof of value. I am a value investor, so I think TSLA remains undervalued. Just watch, there will be >35% YOY growth for at least the next decade.

 

[MP3Mike]

I am expecting successive -$3,000 and -$4,000 cost reduction on all the models as far as the new technology is implemented instead of just popping out a new Giga Berlin made Model Y with the new technology that is 50% the price of the ones made in California.

There isn't going to be a Model Y that costs half of the current Model Y.

 

[ABCTG]

Since we have so many investors here, many of whom are frighteningly undiversified outside of Tesla.... How do you move past the inevitably that during the pursuit of FSD, Tesla will have crashes and deaths. This will be true during beta, while the driver is still technically responsible and afterwards when the vehicle is responsible. Mathematically speaking, there will be crashes and deaths no matter how good FSD is because no matter how many "nines" they get, crashes and deaths will always be > zero. The media will unfortunately eat these stories up. Just wondering what this inevitably does to our portfolios?

With the high number of atrocious drivers in Southern California, FSD will be a saver of lives. That is the message that should come out of Tesla.
There are human drivers on the freeway who were barely able to get a drivers license, and have little or zero awareness of other vehicles around them, or have little driver sense, there are others who drive with a "death grip" on the steering wheel because they hate driving on the freeway, there are other drivers paying very little attention, and more who drive as if the freeway is a racetrack and have no regard for other humans, and cause horrific accidents that destroy lives. FSD will have more training and skill than most civilian human drivers. FSD will cause traffic to flow more smoothly, and it won't do all the weird things that humans do that cause traffic to slow down or stop. FSD will have full support from any and all transportation companies, and once it has regulator approval, there will be no turning back. So maybe FSD will result in some headline incident that the media latches on to, but maybe it will also prevent one of those awful 80 car pile ups in bad weather conditions.

 

[Robocop]

I had a buy order in for $411 which did not hit, y'all are welcome for the run up to $425!

 

[Bet TSLA]

Tesla was obviously going to announce the next order of magnitude scale of battery manufacturing. It's been clear for a couple of years that they would need to take on themselves implementing the scale needed. They presented the apparently competent plan that was expected. The upside had already been traded.

You seem to have trouble distinguishing between competent and mind-blowing. This is fairly common amongst the technologically ignorant. Oh, look, a technology improvement. One is just like another.

Competent would have been Tesla introducing one or two of the five collections of breakthroughs they introduced. But you just go on imagining that what you're looking at is "competence".

And no, none of this will "have been traded" until it is actually deployed. Wall St. doesn't believe anything that isn't actually being delivered. Being steeped in a tradition and actuality of fraudulence, they think that everyone is Trevon Milton. Given that they don't personally have any clue about the technology, they won't believe it until it's in customers' hands. So, only a small percentage of the promise of the new technology has already been traded.

 

[Robocop]

And no, none of this will "have been traded" until it is actually deployed. Wall St. doesn't believe anything that isn't actually being delivered. Being steeped in a tradition and actuality of fraudulence, they think that everyone is Trevon Milton. Given that they don't personally have any clue about the technology, they won't believe it until it's in customers' hands. So, only a small percentage of the promise of the new technology has already been traded.

When, not if, Tesla executes on all 5 fronts, so ~2023+. Tesla will be $1T for doing so. The price is essentially level post-battery day, Wall St doesn't understand what's coming at all. I hate to say 'free money', but here we are!