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

[W84M3]

Sure, but nobody has to worry about access to healthcare, regardless of income. Higher education is almost free too.

Yes, I'm not arguing the obvious pro's; only saying there is no such thing as a free lunch.

The workforce does a substantial contribution to others e.g. my wife and I paid more than 140k EUR income taxes last year and we are in our early 30's.. and that's excluding tax on investments & consumption with money that has already been taxed around 55% before.

 

[KarenRei]

Paving started. I think it's a road (straight line and lined with flags), but it could be part of the outer foundation. New side buildings visible and look almost complete (at least one is workers' apartments)

 

[Frank Einstein]

Sure, but....

Civilisation is expensive and worth every penny. I pay 50% tax - I consider myself fortunate to be able to earn enough to be in this tax bracket. Living in a relatively cohesive, healthy, wealthy, and -- hopefully more often than not -- wise society is worth a lot of money to me.

 

[jerry33]

Yes, I'm not arguing the obvious pro's; only saying there is no such thing as a free lunch.

The workforce does a substantial contribution to others e.g. my wife and I paid more than 140k EUR income taxes last year and we are in our early 30's.. and that's excluding tax on investments & consumption with money that has already been taxed around 55% before.

Basically, this amounts to "pay me now or pay me and possibly go bankrupt or die due to lack of funds, or not be able to attend university without a staggering lifelong debt later". It really should be a no-brainer as to which method is preferable for the majority of people.

 

[Reciprocity]

I think Alpha Hat has an unassailable method for measuring deliveries. They use (probably fuzzy) geolocation of (probably hashed) IMEI numbers from cell phones. The thing is that all Tesla cars are themselves cell phones. This allows Alpha Hat to be able to do something like this: a new IMEI (#X) was first seen in Freemont California, but recently has been located near the Cleveland-Lyndhurst Ohio Tesla Service center. A different IMEI (#Y) that is often seen in Canton Ohio was observed briefly near the Lyndhurst Tesla service center, but is now back in Canton. Also that #X IMEI that first appeared in Freemont is now often located in Canton in close proximity to #Y. Conclusion: a customer in Canton OH, has taken delivery of a New Tesla vehicle. They know the car is new because they can date when it first came on-line in Freemont.

You really can't get any more solid than that.

Yes, I worked with a company that does exactly this for Marketing purposes. You can buy mailing lists from them. You can draw a circle on a map, or upload a list of locations (addresses) and anyone who goes to those locations is tracked back to their home with Unique Cell IDs. How they get the info I have no idea. But you can draw on a map, like a Store for example, and it will track everyone entering and exiting. You can filter out people who work there by filtering out anyone who was there more then 5 hours in a day more then 4 days in a week.

I know this tech to exist and I know it to work, but its probably more of a sampling rate still because they cannot know how every car is delivered. But its enough information, using historical data, to estimate deliveries very closely. Hard to know if its a 3 or a S/X, but that can also be gleaned with historical data.

 

[Tslynk67]

Yes, I'm not arguing the obvious pro's; only saying there is no such thing as a free lunch.

The workforce does a substantial contribution to others e.g. my wife and I paid more than 140k EUR income taxes last year and we are in our early 30's.. and that's excluding tax on investments & consumption with money that has already been taxed around 55% before.

Well either you've got a bad accountant or you're earning a really good wedge

I remember the I was a permanent employee, the vacation pay, 13th month and bonus payment, the taw deductions were painful.

 

[humbaba]

In the computing world, the term commonly used is "nines of reliability", and Musk has used that term around it.

If the car is running continuously for a year, 99%, or 2 nines, means that it'll be incapable of handling 3.65 days worth of a year's driving.

"Five nines", or 99.999% percent, a common threshold for reliability in computing, means that it'll be incapable of handling 5.26 minutes worth of a year's driving. Better, but what's the failure mode?

Honestly, I suspect that somewhere between 7 and 8 nines is where things need to be to make regulators happy. Six nines will probably beat many, but not most, human drivers.

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]

 

[Tslynk67]

Paving started. I think it's a road (straight line and lined with flags), but it could be part of the outer foundation. New side buildings visible and look almost complete (at least one is workers' apartments)

Great that we have subtitles, but he needs to lose the musak...

 

[zzziii]

https://twitter.com/TheTeslaShow/status/1103293933688283137
$35,000 Model 3 Conference Call Webcast | Tesla, Inc.

 

[Unpilot]

Note that the metric for "economic success of FSD" is even more favorable than the '99%' metric: FSD has to work much better than humans, on a significant percentage of routes that matter economically to a specific customer.

For example FSD working well on highways is already a big step forward, because it already covers around 50% of Vehicle Miles Traveled (VMT):

Note how big proportion of vehicle miles traveled highways are, compared to 'local' roads, yet they are just a small part of the road network.

Also note that highways are also the most dangerous ones in terms of traffic accident fatalities (due to the much higher speeds and quadratic kinetic energy), so Tesla starting with NoA also improved safety disproportionately.

Likewise, if for example a trucking company's fixed routes of travel are handled well by FSD then it's only those ~1,000 miles of routes that matter to them, out of trillions of miles of possible routes. If FSD works on those routes then then FSD will be 100% functional and 100% economically useful to them.

Tesla will also be able to concentrate their efforts on the AP disengagement events that a larger percentage of the Tesla fleet is reporting, so instead of going for a 99.999999% solution they can concentrate the effort for where it matters most.

So FSD is a statistical problem on a per customer basis, with an automated feedback channel of disengagement events to Tesla, which feedback loop I expect to drive FSD market penetration a lot faster than many would expect.

AI works ....FC is proof...no way a human output's so many fact filled post's

 

[Ratanpara]

Negativity around TSLA may be overblown, according to Bloomberg tracker, so far they produced 58733 Model 3,with all the trouble delivering cars around the world if Tesla delivers only 55 K Model 3 and 25K in transition by end of the quarter, still not a disaster scenario.

 

[ReflexFunds]

I said it then, and I'll say it again: it constantly baffled me why people were throwing that kind of money into NIO. That sort of market cap for a company that was a glorified IP-and-design shop with a no-name brand? Might as well throw your money in a furnace.

Amazing the number of people I ran into who didn't even realize that NIO wasn't even manufacturing its own cars yet had invested money in them.

I was previously wishing Nio well, as for all EV startups.

Nio obviously have a far inferior product to Tesla in terms of quality and safety and also have far less vertical integration. Their business model is also basically just trying to copy what Tesla does. They do not even have their own auto factory, but at least they are manufacturing their own battery packs and motors, more valuable IP in the long run than auto assembly i think.

But I've now lost all respect for Nio management after yesterday's call. They announced they are cancelling their plans to build their own factory (they now plan to outsource manufacturing indefinitely). They also announced a forecast 50% QoQ reduction in volume in Q1 and said Q2 will also be weak. They blamed this in part on people waiting to get news on China's new EV subsidy program (which doesn't make any sense as everyone expects the subsidies to be cut significantly).

Rather than properly addressing these significant issues, Nio spent the majority of their call attacking Tesla and spreading significantly incorrect numbers, almost without exception. In particular they said Model 3 range is only 300km (in reality LR is close to 700km on Nio's NEDC standard) and that Model Y will not be a competitor because it will cost over $60k (Elon's tweet implies $38.5k, and China pricing may be lower given significantly lower production costs).

Mentions on Nio call: Tesla 8, Model 3 13, Model Y 11, Model X 3.

 

[Tslynk67]

I was previously wishing Nio well, as for all EV startups.

Nio obviously have a far inferior product to Tesla in terms of quality and safety and also have far less vertical integration. Their is business model is also basically just trying to copy what Tesla does. They do not even have their own auto factory, but at least they are manufacturing their own battery packs and motors, more valuable IP in the long run than auto assembly i think.

But I've now lost all respect for Nio management after yesterday's call. They announced they are cancelling their plans to build their own factory (they now plan to outsource manufacturing indefinitely). They also announced a forecast 50% QoQ reduction in volume in Q1 and said Q2 will also be weak. They blamed this in part on people waiting to get news on China's new EV subsidy program (which doesn't make any sense as everyone expects the subsidies to be cut significantly).

Rather than properly addressing these significant issues, Nio spent the majority of their call attacking Tesla and spreading significantly incorrect numbers, almost without exception. In particular they said Model 3 range is only 300km (in reality LR is close to 700km on Nio's NEDC standard) and that Model Y will not be a competitor because it will cost over $60k.

In other words, they're scared shitless by M3SR and have had to re-evaluate everything in light of Elon going nuclear.

Which is the desired effect, methinks. However we want the ICE manufacturers to feel the bern, not the other EV's.

 

[mrdoubleb]

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?

Back of the napkin math time with free WAG included.

• 370k Model S/X/3 sold between Q4 2016 and end of Q4 2018 - these should be the eligible HW 2/2.5 cars
• I seem to recall AP take being around 80% historically, which leaves 20% to upgrade
• if a quarter of them upgrade, that`s 18.500 x $2k = $37m
• Assuming FSD take was quite low, maybe 10%? Leaves 90% to upgrade.
• If only 10% of them upgrade, that`s 33.300 x $3k = ~$100m

So we could be looking at $130-140m of extra income.

Unknowns:

• how many will actual upgrade
• over what time
• cost of HW3 upgrade (material + labor)

 

[Intl Professor]

Sure, but....

So? You shouldn't pay for what you get?

 

[Mars ☰mperor]

I can't speak for market perceptions, but I strongly disagree that "Musk's brand and Tesla's brand live and die together." Tesla lives and dies by how competitive its products are. Nobody's out there shopping for an EV and thinks, "Well, I think Competing Brand has a better EV, but I'm going with Tesla because of Elon". I actually find far more people who rule out Tesla because of Elon.

I love Elon's strategic approach. But he could drop dead tomorrow and Tesla would continue making and selling the best EVs on the market, and customers would keep buying them. If the person who follows isn't as strategic, then we might end up with an Apple-style situation where Apple started lagging on innovation after Jobs' death. But given Apple's share price, that's not exactly any sort of nightmare scenario to investors.

Won’t drop dead when he is this fit.

 

[Tslynk67]

Won’t drop dead when he is this fit.
View attachment 383581

Unless he's on 'roids...

 

[juanmedina]

Back of the napkin math time with free WAG included.

• 370k Model S/X/3 sold between Q4 2016 and end of Q4 2018 - these should be the eligible HW 2/2.5 cars
• I seem to recall AP take being around 80% historically, which leaves 20% to upgrade
• if a quarter of them upgrade, that`s 18.500 x $2k = $37m
• Assuming FSD take was quite low, maybe 10%? Leaves 90% to upgrade.
• If only 10% of them upgrade, that`s 33.300 x $3k = ~$100m

So we could be looking at $130-140m of extra income.

Unknowns:

• how many will actual upgrade
• over what time
• cost of HW3 upgrade (material + labor)

Cost of HW3 and labor will come later maybe Q3+

 

[VValleyEV]

Tesla can now potentially drop legal cases and lobbying efforts over direct sale rights in several states. This was potentially an extremely high annual cost, but I'd like to know if anyone has an estimate for the cost of all of these efforts? Tesla will still likely keep fighting for service centre rights in states where this isn't currently legal.

Except for the states that block service centers. Tesla does need service centers convenient to buyers, and at least two states will not allow them, citing the same franchise laws.

I hope that Tesla can now redirect its legal challenge resources to focus on removing restrictions for service centers. New Mexico is a good example.

 

[mrdoubleb]

Tesla Probably Can't Make Money in China, Morgan Stanley Says

What utter BS.

First, they keep beating that dead horse Chinese customs thing that ended up being an English language sticker they had to replace to Chinese. A blip on the radar that halted customs processing for like a day.

Second they use this as the example for inherent risk of US companies` risks doing business in China, ignoring that Model 3 production starts in 6 months in Shanghai.

Third they mix in some data privacy BS for autopilot data - not aware of any Chinese government concerns over that.

Finally, they talk about Chinese domestic EV startup rivals - the day after Nio just scaled back their plans.

Seriously...