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

[Tslynk67]

As a software guy, the fact that they are still making architectural changes in FSD leads me to believe that they are further away from releasing this than just fixing a few bugs here and there from the beta feedback. Some assumptions they originally made were wrong for one reason or another, and the underlying code needed to be changed. It could mean that they figured out a clever new way to do something, but either way, these are not the kind of changes you make if a wide release is imminent.

On the other hand, when you are able to make architectural changes at this stage, can see and accept they're necessary, and implement in a matter of days/weeks, that's frickin' agile as hell, I love it!

 

[Cherry Wine]

Yeah, the 17x $780's I sold the day before inclusion for $60 were up around $250 at one point. I was fully prepared to let them execute (above my pre-split $4000 sell price), but in the end, kept the shares and made a bit more on them

Nice you could add 1000 $TSLA - now you can sell even more contracts - I need to ensure I have $500k next June for my 20x $250 LEAPS which I want to exercise, plenty time still to sort that out and will normally be paid for by the 15x $700 strikes I have on the same date

Nice! I'm in a similar boat to you...I have another 2,200 shares worth of DITM calls to exercise between now and next March. Unfortunately it's keeping me from loading up at these levels - need all the capital I can get just to exercise those calls!

 

[LiveLong&Profit]

Cause we didn't waste all our monies buying an Island and a Mountain Meetup to celebrate 2025 richness per SP at that time

2025: We meet at a Vegas hotel.
2030: Round trip to a handful on undisclosed private islands/mountains resorts.
2035: Party on the newly built moon base.
2040: Party in the newly built and expanding Mars City.
2050: Party at the ring: The newly built space habitat, orbiting earth.
2060: We take a round trip: Earth, moon, Mars, Ring in a deluxe, custom spaceship.
2100:
A year-long celebration meetup/party on a fleet of star ships doing a wider solar-system tour, visiting settled planets and a sprawl of space habitats littered around.
Many of us are still alive and kicking after extensive geenering/rejuv-therapy - others have bequeathed their inheritance to a younger crowd.
Time will be well spent rejoicing about our good fortune and laughing about the time way back when we were actually excited to meet at an Earth hotel and Islands and Mountain resorts.
How quaint! How lacking in vision and ambition.

 

[lklundin]

Do you drive with radar, lidar? Just vision, right?

Of more relevance is that apart from radar+camera(s) the #Tesla FSD already uses a range of sensors. Per Karpathy's autonomy day presentation these include (and are not limited to): ultra-sonic parking sensors, wheel ticks, accelerometers, wheel steering angle, etc.

Apart from the car already using non-camera sensors, there should be a significant cost reduction to justify removing a sensor - compared to the increase in the risk of having an avoidable collision. Lidar seems expensive (and cumbersome) enough to not use it (because it is of limited help). But a radar is much cheaper and has already been designed into the car. As for the above examples, any sensor that is already deemed necessary for other purposes (e.g. the ultra-sonic parking sensors) should obviously be kept, since they offer no potential for reducing cost.

 

[Tslynk67]

I also love the idea of a Tesla ”Jeep”. I don’t know if an open cage is in the Tesla safety cards, but I promise I would buy one for the wife. I’d like an interior that could be hosed down too.

Your wife sounds, uhm, interesting!

 

[LiveLong&Profit]

Addressed this before:

The 50% annual growth number is an average over 10 years. The average will be far exceeded in early years of low volume and level off steeply towards the end.

Example scenario:
2020: 500K
2021: 1M (100% YOY)
2022: 1.8M (80%)
2023: 3M (67%)
2024: 5M (67%, assuming Model 2 deliveries commence in 2023 and ramp hard in 2024)
2025: 7.5M (50%)
2026: 10M (33%)
2027: 13M (30%)
2028: 16M (23%)
2029: 18M (13%)
2030: 20M (11%)
If anyone thinks Tesla will reach 20M in 2030 from only 13.3M the year prior, forget it.

In other words, being at 5M in 2025 does not necessarily mean Tesla is way ahead of Elon's schedule. IMO, it means they are behind.

Fremont, Shanghai, Berlin and Austin can easily exceed 5M in 2025 by themselves. No doubt in my mind Tesla breaks ground somewhere else in the world within 12 months. My wild guess is 6-7 more fully built out factories are needed for 20M. Three of these will be in China, U.S. and Europe. The real mystery is where the remaining 3-4 are located.

I like your scenario - seems sound.
A new country/location in 2021 would be *very* bullish.

Not sure how many factories they need to reach 20 million. Very hard to guesstimate. Lot of land in Austin.

Both the spatial (a factory like a CPU) and temporal efficiencies (faster than walking) of production Elon has has talked about optimizing on many occasions makes a huge difference re. wether they need only 5 meta-factories making 10 million each or they need 20-25 'normal' gigafactories instead, each making around 2 million units each.
(Making a wild assumption that 50 million vehicles is the undisclosed, long-term, steady state goal)

 

[ZeApelido]

Today I encountered someone on the street who then happened to hop into their Model Y. I asked him how he liked it, and he started complaining about the "cheapness". No actual details though other than the rims got scratched.

Uh huh.

Then he claimed it wobbled at high speeds on the highway.

Uh huh.

Then he claimed "real competition" was coming from... then next Polestar

And... the BMW i4.

Me during this conversation:

Turns out he works for Google on their automotive software at kept referring to the Polestar car as the "Google Car".

Wtf is in the water in Mountain View?

 

[Freder Reeve]

.. if I had a fleet of nano-drones scouting the road ahead of me

Reminds me of something i always wanted to see; perched, staying charged atop each supercharger, "chargee-McDroneface" ... ready to fly off and suction upon the glasstop of a passing tesla on the highway....and so on you get the idea.
side-note: also always wanted/needed a fleet of dragonfly drones to cloud around me while i jog, programmed to take out any approaching mosquitoes.

 

[ZeApelido]

9 will use a Birdseye view, a view of all cameras together, with also a time component where the system still knows what it saw in the previous Birdseye view. This makes it much more aware and better at judging situations.

Source?

 

[Tslynk67]

Nice! I'm in a similar boat to you...I have another 2,200 shares worth of DITM calls to exercise between now and next March. Unfortunately it's keeping me from loading up at these levels - need all the capital I can get just to exercise those calls!

You know, I hope, that you can sell covered calls underwritten by your LEAPS?

 

[ZeApelido]

As a software guy, the fact that they are still making architectural changes in FSD leads me to believe that they are further away from releasing this than just fixing a few bugs here and there from the beta feedback. Some assumptions they originally made were wrong for one reason or another, and the underlying code needed to be changed. It could mean that they figured out a clever new way to do something, but either way, these are not the kind of changes you make if a wide release is imminent.

They already knew these architectural changes were going to happen a year ago. The networks have not even moved over to "full" 3D as intended.

 

[Artful Dodger]

4. The car doing #2 above, without a driver.

@Artful Dodger Post #36,716 Apr 5, 2019:

• Quarter mile in < 10 sec @ 145 mph in 'Plaid' model
• Bonus feature: "FSD track mode":
  • enabled for geofenced + approved tracks
  • Cams watch 'Christmas Tree' lights for countdown
  • cuts the green light with < 50 ms reaction time
  • self-drives complete race including collision avoidance
  • interior camera monitors passengers for safety
  • auto-return to pit lane parking
  • basically its an electric rollercoaster ride

 

[LiveLong&Profit]

As a software guy, the fact that they are still making architectural changes in FSD leads me to believe that they are further away from releasing this than just fixing a few bugs here and there from the beta feedback. Some assumptions they originally made were wrong for one reason or another, and the underlying code needed to be changed. It could mean that they figured out a clever new way to do something, but either way, these are not the kind of changes you make if a wide release is imminent.

I fear you might be right.
I think there was a big rewrite around 2 years ago, going from still frames to video. That also took a while.
Oh well. This is a huge endeavor.

Elon is pushing as hard as possible - he is not holding back.
But, in a weird way, solving FSD in 2-4 years might actually be more lucrative than solving it in 6 months.
FSD is still, to many just another tech-nerd pipe dream. It might very well not work. Why bother?

When (if)Tesla solves FSD they will instantly have a huge, fluorescent target on their back.
Tesla pre-FSD is just dangerous and annoying to big oil. Tesla with FSD: this is now a mortal threat.

You think fudsters, big oil and even country actors are fighting Tesla hard now? Just wait for Tesla to solve FSD, and their campaign to delay or sabotage Tesla will reach a fever pitch.

The higher production capacity Tesla has when FSD is fully ready, the better.
That is why Elon is ramping factory capacity and battery production so hard: He cannot forecast the arrival of FSD with precision, but knows that whenever it does arrive Tesla will need to operate in plaid mode.

Of course, the huge downside to Tesla being 'late' on FSD is that competitors might come first. But, as has been discussed before, most of them, except comma.ai, are relying on lidar and maps, and that just takes longer to scale.

 

[Prunesquallor]

On the energy front, I do find it very interesting that Tesla seems to be the owner of the 100MW install in Texas recently mentioned Report: Tesla is secretly building a giant 100 MW battery in Texas.

I’ll tell you what. If Elon can crack the Texas energy market with MegaPacks, he will truly have gentrified Mordor.

The BS going on here avoiding responsibility for the power outage that killed 50 people is nauseating. The LNG providers are blaming the power providers. The power providers are blaming the LNG providers. The power providers are blaming other power providers. The general consensus is that everyone wants to believe this was a once-in-a-lifetime event, so there’s really no need to do anything.

I want Elon to start a revolution that relagates these losers to the dustbin of history. Giga Texas has given him a foothold that may allow him to help end this nonsense.

 

[Mike Smith]

From the 2020 Q3 earnings call: (Oct 21, 2020)



So, one year later, Elon says he is focused on building the Tesla autonomous network, and has no plans for Tesla to create an Uber or Lyft style service with human drivers. With TN, humans become fleet managers, with 10x leverage vs. a driver.

You gleaned from this that: "(Elon) has no plans for Tesla to create an Uber or Lyft style service with human drivers"

He didn't suggest this at all. He suggested they didn't have plans for a Turo style car rental program. That's totally different from a human driven ride hailing service. All he said was that they're focused on an autonomous robotaxi service, but this doesn't contradict at all what he said in 2019: that they would probably start with a human driven ride hailing service, and then switch to driverless when it is approved by regulators. As far as I know that's the last time he has spoken on the topic. It's probably also why ARK thinks it's happening.

Also, just so we're on the same page, I'm assuming the drivers will be the car owners, not employees of Tesla. The service would work in exactly the same way as a robotaxi network, just with the owner operating the vehicle. I don't see why you are against this - it gives you the opportunity to scale up the Tesla Network which needs to be done anyway, so why not start getting revenue now? It also has the added bonus of having the owner/driver there in case there are problems early on with either with the FSD or with the app/network. I think it would be most commonly used in situations where a Tesla driver would pick up someone who needed to go the same area the Tesla owner was going to anyway; ie a commute to work along a common route, basically car pooling.

 

[Big Time]

They use up the oil and they use up the trees
They use up the air and they use up the sea
Well how bout you friend? And how about me?
No I’m not all Used Up.
-Utah Phillips
Great tune.

 

[Artful Dodger]

You gleaned from this that: "(Elon) has no plans for Tesla to create an Uber or Lyft style service with human drivers"

No, I gleaned that from Elon's statement (made 1 year after his statement that you quoted):

"we're going to focus on enabling the robotaxi system"​

TL;DR "focus" in this case means not working to develop an Uber-like ride hailing service.

Believe what you want.

 

[Mo City]

I like your scenario - seems sound.
A new country/location in 2021 would be *very* bullish.

Not sure how many factories they need to reach 20 million. Very hard to guesstimate. Lot of land in Austin.

Both the spatial (a factory like a CPU) and temporal efficiencies (faster than walking) of production Elon has has talked about optimizing on many occasions makes a huge difference re. wether they need only 5 meta-factories making 10 million each or they need 20-25 'normal' gigafactories instead, each making around 2 million units each.
(Making a wild assumption that 50 million vehicles is the undisclosed, long-term, steady state goal)

50M will never happen, unless you think Tesla achieves well over a 50% worldwide market share. At some point (even if it doesn't happen in the next couple of years), robotaxis will arrive and car ownership will level off and gradually decline.

Piper Sandler believes global auto sales will peak ~2030 and decline from there. They are probably accurate within 1-2 years.

I'll eat my hat if Tesla builds more than 10-11 total GFs.

 

[JRP3]

Once we stop digging the hole deeper (by using too much fossil fuel) , then we should get started with carbon sequestration.

You and others may be interested this potential for carbon negative plastics using biomass What other tech stock to consider?

 

[JRP3]

They use up the oil and they use up the trees
They use up the air and they use up the sea
Well how bout you friend? And how about me?
No I’m not all Used Up.
-Utah Phillips
Great tune.

Dude, poetry...