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

[Buckminster]

Yeah, but if you'd bothered to do your research (or use your common sense) you'd realize that that's impossible, because almost everyone goes to work and comes home at the same time. The self-driving cars are gonna do the same damn thing.

People have tried to push staggered shifts since the 1950s; it's never caught on.

Work-from-home is finally becoming a thing and it does help.

Self-driving cars do absolutely jack *sugar* for this problem. They are subject to the same rush hour problem as all other transportation.

Sorry about the rudeness, I get extremely impatient with dumbassery which was debunked before you were born. (Musk has committed some of this sort of dumbassery himself, on this specific topic. I'm just glad he has a record of being able to change his mind and reverse course quickly, because he'll have to.)

I think FSD could help rush hours to a reasonable degree:

1. Fewer accidents - fewer traffic jams
2. Fewer choke points - drop me off at the back entrance to avoid busy area (car park entrance)
3. People more likely to car share (cities could incentives / penalise) - algorithms match your requirement increasingly better with more sharing
4. People can work in the car which could assist working hour flexibility
5. People more likely to use public transport. No parking cost / hassle. AV from work to station, train into city then AV for last mile.

 

[MarcusMaximus]

Self-driving cars do absolutely jack *sugar* for this problem. They are subject to the same rush hour problem as all other transportation.

Actually, they’d make the problem slightly worse. You’d now have both the traffic going home *plus* the traffic from all the autonomous cars driving to pick people up.

 

[ReflexFunds]

Yeah, but if you'd bothered to do your research (or use your common sense) you'd realize that that's impossible, because almost everyone goes to work and comes home at the same time. The self-driving cars are gonna do the same damn thing.

People have tried to push staggered shifts since the 1950s; it's never caught on.

Work-from-home is finally becoming a thing and it does help.

Self-driving cars do absolutely jack *sugar* for this problem. They are subject to the same rush hour problem as all other transportation.

Sorry about the rudeness, I get extremely impatient with dumbassery which was debunked before you were born. (Musk has committed some of this sort of dumbassery himself, on this specific topic. I'm just glad he has a record of being able to change his mind and reverse course quickly, because he'll have to.)

Vehicle miles are actually much more spread out across the day than you would assume, and commuting only makes up c.30% of miles travelled.

There are also a number of ways to mitigate the peak hours issue through demand based pricing (heavily encouraging public transport where possible at peak hours) and enforced pool vehicles at peak hours. A lot of detailed studies have taken rush hours thoroughly into account and generally come out at 5-10x less vehicles required in a self driving fleet. I got to c.5x in my model for cities in the US.

 

[EVNow]

Work-from-home is finally becoming a thing and it does help.

Self-driving cars do absolutely jack *sugar* for this problem. They are subject to the same rush hour problem as all other transportation.

Prediction from the left coast : By the time FSD becomes available work-from-home / staggered commute will be the norm.

BTW, work-from-home / staggered commute is actually a continuum. We start WFH in the morning (say at 8 or 9) and commute to work when the traffic is better. Leave office early when traffic is still not as bad and continue work from home. This might happen x number of days a week, with the rest being just WFH days. BTW, this is what I do now. This is what 80%+ of my co-workers do now. One of the main drivers for this is geographically spread out teams. If most of the people I work with are anyway not in my city, it makes little difference whether I work from home or office.

Obviously there will be jobs that require commuting at fixed times - teachers, factory workers, hospital workers etc. But many of them already work in shifts and don't commute at peak hours. Rest of the people who can work from home and stagger commute will do so.

ps : I don't even consider robo taxis a near term possibility. We can come back to this issue in 2030 and see where we are.

Purely in terms of EV adoption, we are now at much lower % than I thought we'd be in 2010. I thought we'd be at 10% by now - not low single digits.

 

[brian45011]

Hmm. I suspect he's working on secret projects. I'd expect him to be heavily involved in the Maxwell acquisition, and they probably want to say absolutely nothing about that until it closes. They don't want to admit exactly what they're doing with battery development, and he probably knows in detail.

Lot's of speculation and rumors about the merits of the MXWL acquisition, but very little substantive information. Could be a defensive move to preempt other OEMs from access to MXWL's battery IP, an opportunity to diversify from reliance on PENA, or some other motive. The good thing is zero expenditure of cash since it's an all shares transaction. Much of MXWL's executive management team are relative newcomers, so they could be viewing it as an opportunity to ring the bell. (Shades of Klaus Grohmann?) JB would be an excellent CEO of Cambria Acquisition Corp (or its successor). I was not a fan of him being dropped as from the "key personnel" designation a year ago.

MXWl's dry electrode technology does not appear to be even at the pilot plant stage, let alone proven at scale in a production facility so competent technical management will be important.

Another interesting chapter in the march of technology unfolding

 

[neroden]

Well, that lets us out.

Not gonna argue with you there! This is certainly not a competently run country.

Rail works well in densely populated areas where the politicians let it.

Yeah. Where most of the population of the US lives.

(Many politicians vote against or poison pill transit lines because they believe it will cause undesirables (lower income) to purchase homes in their city.)

Yeah. And this is super annoying because it's factually wrong! It just doesn't do that!

It also doesn't work all that well areas where the population is spread out. You can't build enough railroad lines in places like DFW to be usable by more than a small fraction of the population.

Zoning strikes again. Ban tall buildings, you end up with sprawl. Unless there's nowhere to sprawl, in which case you just end up with sky-high prices.

But in fact, DFW's having a perhaps-surprising amount of success with rail, given the sprawly land usage, despite designing most of the routes poorly, and despite having terrible zoning restrictions everywhere.

 

[jerry33]

Vehicle miles are actually much more spread out across the day than you would assume, and commuting only makes up c.30% of miles travelled.

There are also a number of ways to mitigate the peak hours issue through demand based pricing (heavily encouraging public transport where possible at peak hours) and enforced pool vehicles at peak hours. A lot of detailed studies have taken rush hours thoroughly into account and generally come out at 5-10x less vehicles required in a self driving fleet. I got to c.5x in my model for cities in the US.

What this graph misses is the direction travelled. Traffic going against the main direction is almost always far below the prominent direction and so should have it's own graph (or lines) or shouldn't be included because it doesn't cause congestion.

 

[neroden]

Vehicle miles are actually much more spread out across the day than you would assume, and commuting only makes up c.30% of miles travelled.

There are also a number of ways to mitigate the peak hours issue through demand based pricing (heavily encouraging public transport where possible at peak hours) and enforced pool vehicles at peak hours. A lot of detailed studies have taken rush hours thoroughly into account and generally come out at 5-10x less vehicles required in a self driving fleet. I got to c.5x in my model for cities in the US.

See, I could buy that for FULL level 5 self-driving, but as I said in my other comment, that's so far in the future it doesn't matter right now.

It's like wave power. It's a great idea, but it is simply not going to be commercially ready soon enough to make a difference to the Great Energy Transition. We're going to use wind and solar and hydro, which are commercially ready.

 

[jerry33]

But in fact, DFW's having a perhaps-surprising amount of success with rail, given the sprawly land usage, despite designing most of the routes poorly, and despite having terrible zoning restrictions everywhere.

I guess this depends on your prior experience. When I lived in Vancouver, Denise never needed to drive at all because the transit works (and that was before they built the rail for the Expo). So that's my baseline.

 

[printf42]

Someone must have used the weird logic - "if a sales person sells just one EAP he has covered his salary" - instead of thinking how many sales persons do you actually need.

Ofcourse, there is the issue of do you staff for average needs, low point needs or congested needs. Even for established companies with low growth these are difficult questions.

Gallery is good, people can sit in the car and touch stuff. Salesman is not really good.

I myself doesn’t like it when a guy approach me and insists I need to leave my email and phone number on that iPad.

Also they tend to be not much more knowledgeable than me, I remember several times I have to break some news to the salesman, for example when they bought Tesla.com and about to drop “motors” from the company name, and when M3P were updated to have 3.2sec 0-60, but the guy still says 3.5

What I wish Tesla has is a demo mode that runs on the screen of showroom cars, when no one is touching the screen, start to play videos to highlight features and probably interactivity simulate how some features works. Like Apple runs on their showroom devices.

They only need 1-2 people who quietly stay out of the way and be available only when people want to ask questions.

 

[brian45011]

What do you mean? Tesla just secured an additional $500B line of credit with Deutsche Bank at LIBOR+1% through to 2023. That's likely enough right there to setup the first Model Y line at GF1.

And there's no indication that Tesla's credit is limited in any way. Last year's Moody credit rating didn't seem to affect DB's decision on March 1st, but the new loan came the day after Elon's private call with analysts on Feb 28.

DB is merely the administrative agent for a syndicate of bank creditors.

The Credit Agreement and prior amendments have excluded GF-1 assets from both the collateral pool and the borrowing base. We might see what, if anything, has changed when the most recent Credit Agreement amendment is filed as a heavily-redacted exhibit to the 1Q19 10Q.

 

[KarenRei]

People talking about all of the great things we'll do with Level 5 FSD always reminds me of the people talking about all of the great things we'll do with space elevators. Let's just gloss over that "we don't have a macroscopic material that's even close to strong enough to be useful for a space elevator" aspect and file it under "Not our problem, someone else is working on it, I'm sure they'll figure it out!"

Yes, Level 5 FSD would be great. But in the meantime, we have real issues to take care of.

 

[Carl Raymond]

Well, that lets us out.

Rail works well in densely populated areas where the politicians let it. (Many politicians vote against or poison pill transit lines because they believe it will cause undesirables (lower income) to purchase homes in their city.) It also doesn't work all that well areas where the population is spread out. You can't build enough railroad lines in places like DFW to be usable by more than a small fraction of the population.

We did a 13 stop 4 week tour in Europe last September. Apart from a few red buses in London (which are moving to electric), I can’t recall catching a fossil fueled anything while on the ground. We caught commuter trains, high speed trains, trams and rode bikes.

I sometimes wonder if the US dislike of public transport is related to lack of gun control and income disparity. On a US subway, it seems people don’t feel entirely safe. If that’s the case, the problem runs very deep.

 

[KarenRei]

Gallery is good, people can sit in the car and touch stuff. Salesman is not really good ... They only need 1-2 people who quietly stay out of the way and be available only when people want to ask questions.

I recommend that the staff of a Tesla Gallery consist of one human and one dog.

The human's job is to feed, clean up after, and generally nurture the dog.
The dog's job is to bite the human if they try to interact with a customer unprompted.

 

[Cherry Wine]

Interesting breakdown of Tesla’s web traffic as a potential metric for gauging sales:

Elon Musk and Tesla Going All-In on Online Sales: Let’s See What the Data Has to Say About It - Similarweb Blog

 

[ReflexFunds]

See, I could buy that for FULL level 5 self-driving, but as I said in my other comment, that's so far in the future it doesn't matter right now.

It's like wave power. It's a great idea, but it is simply not going to be commercially ready soon enough to make a difference to the Great Energy Transition. We're going to use wind and solar and hydro, which are commercially ready.

I agree that we should move forward aggressively with our current functioning clean energy solutions (solar, wind, batteries, EVs & hydro), and not wait around for better technology. We can and should transition the world to 100% clean energy (requires 2-3x current global electricity supply & all from renewable sources) within 10 years, profitably, while significantly bringing down the cost of energy for consumers. Unfortunately the world is still ignoring the pollution & global warming crisis and the media and politicians are not educating the population that we already have working solutions.

For the EV transition however, even in an extreme best case where Auto ICE OEMs and politicians fully embrace EVs and we get to 140m annual EV production by 2026 (this is possible I think if the huge TCOE advantage of a new EV can massively increase the size of the overall new car market), it will still take another 5-6 years before we have enough EVs to retire the existing ICE fleet.

Nobody knows when we will cross the threshold for L5 cars, largely because we don't know how difficult the problem is and we don't know how capable our algorithms are and what their bottlenecks will be, but also because neural network capability is non linear and can improve from worse than a human amateur to better than the human world champion over just a few days training. I personally think we are most likely to cross the safety threshold for L5 somewhere between 2 and 15 years (any of these years are equally likely in my view), and if it happens sooner rather than later it can meaningfully accelerate the transition to a 100% EV global fleet. Even if it takes a lot longer to get to a safety level for L5 to be legal in US, I think China could act much quicker to legalise and may not require the same safety multiple vs a human driver - China alone can make a large dent in CO2 emissions.

Given how critical the next 10-15 years are before global warming hits feedback loop thresholds and major damage becomes inevitable, anything that can potentially give us an extra edge in the battle is still extremely important to develop.

 

[jerry33]

We did a 13 stop 4 week tour in Europe last September. Apart from a few red buses in London (which are moving to electric), I can’t recall catching a fossil fueled anything while on the ground. We caught commuter trains, high speed trains, trams and rode bikes.

I sometimes wonder if the US dislike of public transport is related to lack of gun control and income disparity. On a US subway, it seems people don’t feel entirely safe. If that’s the case, the problem runs very deep.

The U.S. subways and the subway stations, at least in the pictures I've seen, are dirty and full of trash. It's no wonder people don't feel that safe. This could be solved, but no one wants to actually pay for the janitorial work. Dirty subways, bus, or train stations just seem unsafe because they are dirty and trashy.

And you're right. When I lived in Vancouver, I often left the car at work (company car) and bicycled from work to home. No way will I bicycle where I live now.

 

[Carl Raymond]

The U.S. subways and the subway stations, at least in the pictures I've seen, are dirty and full of trash. It's no wonder people don't feel that safe. This could be solved, but no one wants to actually pay for the janitorial work. Dirty subways, bus, or train stations just seem unsafe because they are dirty and trashy.

And you're right. When I lived in Vancouver, I often left the car at work (company car) and bicycled from work to home. No way will I bicycle where I live now.

Well that’s an attitude problem, more so than a janitorial problem. On the rare occasion I have seen people try to leave a train without their rubbish, I tap them on the shoulder and say “excuse me, you forgot this”, picking it up and handing it to them. Thus far, I’m still alive.

 

[aubreymcfato]

I agree that we should move forward aggressively with our current functioning clean energy solutions (solar, wind, batteries, EVs & hydro), and not wait around for better technology. We can and should transition the world to 100% clean energy (requires 2-3x current global electricity supply & all from renewable sources) within 10 years, profitably, while significantly bringing down the cost of energy for consumers. Unfortunately the world is still ignoring the pollution & global warming crisis and the media and politicians are not educating the population that we already have working solutions.

For the EV transition however, even in an extreme best case where Auto ICE OEMs and politicians fully embrace EVs and we get to 140m annual EV production by 2026 (this is possible I think if the huge TCOE advantage of a new EV can massively increase the size of the overall new car market), it will still take another 5-6 years before we have enough EVs to retire the existing ICE fleet.

Nobody knows when we will cross the threshold for L5 cars, largely because we don't know how difficult the problem is and we don't know how capable our algorithms are and what their bottlenecks will be, but also because neural network capability is non linear and can improve from worse than a human amateur to better than the human world champion over just a few days training. I personally think we are most likely to cross the safety threshold for L5 somewhere between 2 and 15 years (any of these years are equally likely in my view), and if it happens sooner rather than later it can meaningfully accelerate the transition to a 100% EV global fleet. Even if it takes a lot longer to get to a safety level for L5 to be legal in US, I think China could act much quicker to legalise and may not require the same safety multiple vs a human driver - China alone can make a large dent in CO2 emissions.

Given how critical the next 10-15 years are before global warming hits feedback loop thresholds and major damage becomes inevitable, anything that can potentially give us an extra edge in the battle is still extremely important to develop.

This is why I think EM should turn is focus on Tesla Energy and GF2, asap.
As soon as Tesla Auto is doing fine without him watching for a quarter or two.

 

[brian45011]

The U.S. subways and the subway stations, at least in the pictures I've seen, are dirty and full of trash. It's no wonder people don't feel that safe. This could be solved, but no one wants to actually pay for the janitorial work. Dirty subways, bus, or train stations just seem unsafe because they are dirty and trashy.

Both BART (SF metro area) and WMATA (DC metro area) are well maintained and patrolled rapid transit systems that facilitate commuting. Surface routes, particularly in center city SF between dusk and dawn, are a disgrace because of our society's decision that institutions in bygone eras called "poor houses" and "mental institutions" were an expensive and prejudicial anathema.