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

[engle]

Tesla is just using a few test mules equipped with lidar to validate the Tesla Vision 3d models. It's a good tool for doing that. Tesla has extensive lidar experience in-house (including Elon himself). They know what lidar is good for and what it's limitations are. And the limitations are numerous and fundamental.

I do not think it's unfortunate that UCSD researchers are working with Toyota instead of Tesla. Do you really think UCSD researchers have more advanced machine vision or autonomous driving ability than Tesla?

Of course not (did you read the article?), but they seem to have invented hardware sensors (two radars spaced apart) that work in adverse weather conditions. Perhaps Tesla already evaluated their tech and passed on it...

100% Off-topic: It's 11:40 PDT now my birthday ends in 20 minutes. Instead of waiting longer for a 3-motor CT, I'm going to pre-order a new Model X after I saw and recorded the Plaid at the Fremont Factory on Monday: (13,000 hits so far seems to be a lot of pent-up demand or curiosity which is bullish?).

I pre-ordered a Model S on my birthday in 2011 (and bought some stock which worked out pretty well lol) so I like to order my cars on my birthday out of lucky superstition unless it is after a reveal like Model X P90D.

I also have to order a Model Y for my son, who was going to get our 2018 Model 3 DM as a hand-me-down until some idiot insured by Tesla ran a red light in his brand new white Model 3 and sideswiped me last Saturday: (this only happens in Fremont, folks!)

Tesla San Jose Body Shop says they will need to weld in a section of the replaced frame. I'm not going to give him a car like that so will trade it back to Tesla let them sell it. The Y is far superior to the 3 anyway.

Good night from Fremont!

 

[Artful Dodger]

TSLA Pre-market: 4:02 AM EDT
695.00 +7.80 (+1.14%)

 

[jeewee3000]

We can be fanboys, but we don't have to drink the Kool-Aid and believe every word that comes out of Elon's mouth - Tesla will never use LIDAR (e.g. driving cross-country hands-free a few years ago, etc.) [...] Besides solving vision, they need to solve mud splashes, water, etc. obscuring the glass covering the sensors, not to mention snow blizzards and fog.

Karpathy's mouth. And he's the expert, not Elon. LIDAR sensors can be blocked just like camera sensors can. If cameras get blocked, the car will have to rely on its other cameras to bring it to a safe halt and then ask humans to clean it. (Mainly: the passengers. Lack of passengers -> the owner via the app).

Having LIDAR or not doesn't change the fact that s**t happens, accidents will happen and then the car has to inform the humans. Speaking of Kool-Aid on this topic only shows your lack of understanding of the NN vision stack versus LIDAR.

Like last time, the main audience will be Wall $treet analysts. This event is mostly designed to impress them and drive up $TSLA, which I'm 100% in favor of!

https://twitter.com/x/status/1420607874762518528

"Convincing the best AI talent to join Tesla is the sole goal" - Elon

The event is therefore NOT designed to drive up $TSLA stock price.

You seem to want to read too much between the lines and you distrust Elon but you still invest in his company? Weird. Not saying everything he says is gospel, far from it, but I don't doubt his intentions/honesty.

 

[petit_bateau]

Those kind of BEV comparisons would be more useful if they excluded all "golf cart" BEV's selling for less than, say $10K.

Standards are important. Just like we shouldn't think only electric vehicles compete with electric vehicles. Because the low cost "golf cart" BEV's in China are expanding the automotive market, not competing with Tesla. They wouldn't even be street legal here. Yet they make up what, around half of the statistics?

With the greatest of respect, I think the repeated comments like these say something about the mindset of a particular culture that reveals a blind spot in the adherents. It is most obvious in the USA, but not only there.

It is the unnecessarily large US-style vehicles that are more of a problem in energy terms than small vehicles. As a generality tools should be large enough to do the job, no larger. It doesn't take a huge pick-up to do the groceries. Most US pick-up owners have no farm, and definitely no hogs. This is not just a criticism of the US, I can say the same thing about the proliferation of man-vans in Europe etc, where most of the owners have never done a days work on tools in their lives. The same critique can be made of many motorhomes.

The small city-cars that are typified by the Wuling HongGuang Mini EV are an absolutely brilliant design response to the actual market need they are aimed at, i.e. get families inside a non-polluting car in a way that is much safer than being piled onto a moped, and yet is still affordable for the majority of the humans on this planet, and is environmentally affordable for the planet to remain suited for humans.

There are three design/manufacture ecologies forming and reaching scale in the EV-space: 1) the Tesla ecology; 2) the legacy-ICE manufacturers converting towards EV; and 3) the micro-car ecology primarily (but not exclusively) coming out of Chinese (and Indian) industrial conurbations. It is the last that is demonstrating the greatest design experimentation, the greatest capital frugality, and which potentially poses the greatest threat to Tesla. The French term for vehicles of this nature is ULV, ultra-legere-vehicule, and they are a perfectly valid vehicle class that is not intended for motorway use. Immediately above them are the motorway-capable class, of which the original Smart car is a good example (it was in fact originally intended as a ULV but they made design decisions to move it up one class, a very long story) and of which the original Mini was another good example.

Collectively those two classes (ULV & mini) will need to be addressed one day by a Tesla model 1 or else Tesla will remain vulnerable to market-entrants coming from below. As Christensen observed in "Innovator's Dilemma", those are the ones to be most feared.

It is a mistake to dismiss them, or to disrespect them.

 

[WarpedOne]

>> It is a mistake to dismiss them, or to disrespect them.

You think Model 1 / Robotaxi will cost $30.000 and seat 7?

 

[Artful Dodger]

TSLA Pre-Market Quotes Live​

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Data last updated Aug 02, 2021 05:30 AM ET.

Consolidated Last Sale	$697.00 +9.80 (+1.43%)
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[lascavarian]

It wouldn't surprise me to see legacy (or startup) automakers, at least ones still standing, using mega-castings in around 4-6 years.

Sandy Munro in his look at the Lightning, commented favorably on the size of the casting Ford was using. Perhaps he was referring to a different type of casting since I thought it was traditional body on frame design.

 

[Buckminster]

No 700 call wall next week as yet:

Could next week be the week?

 

[Artful Dodger]

No 700 call wall next week as yet:
View attachment 690945
Could next week be the week?

That's still Open-Interest data from end-of-day on Thursday last week.

Data from end-of-day on Friday last week won't be available until about 7 am ET (about 50 more min. from now).

Again, Max-Pain.com updates max pain and open interest only once per trading day, and not at all on weekends or trading holidays.

7 am. Eastern.

 

[RobStark]

Tesla Model 3 & Model Y Take #1 & #2 In World Record Month For Electric Vehicle Sales! - CleanTechnica

Sign up for daily news updates from CleanTechnica on email. Or follow us on Google News! Global plugin vehicle registrations were up an impressive 153% last month compared to June 2020, scoring a record 583,000 units (or 8.7% share of the overall auto market). Add this record performance to the...

cleantechnica.com

 

[Drezil]

LOL, then you hit a deer and your $60k car is totaled!

No. The main cost-savings is assembly costs.
If you damage your car you already get a mechanic that individually fixes your car & can just weld on stuff.
Elon stated that things are designed for this.

 

[Drezil]

Karpathy's mouth. And he's the expert, not Elon. LIDAR sensors can be blocked just like camera sensors can. If cameras get blocked, the car will have to rely on its other cameras to bring it to a safe halt and then ask humans to clean it. (Mainly: the passengers. Lack of passengers -> the owner via the app).

Having LIDAR or not doesn't change the fact that s**t happens, accidents will happen and then the car has to inform the humans. Speaking of Kool-Aid on this topic only shows your lack of understanding of the NN vision stack versus LIDAR.

https://twitter.com/x/status/1420607874762518528

"Convincing the best AI talent to join Tesla is the sole goal" - Elon

The event is therefore NOT designed to drive up $TSLA stock price.

You seem to want to read too much between the lines and you distrust Elon but you still invest in his company? Weird. Not saying everything he says is gospel, far from it, but I don't doubt his intentions/honesty.

That's why I prepared my options for a buy-the-rumor-sell-the-news thingie.

 

[jerry33]

Most commuters will prefer Robotaxis, answering emails, browsing the internet, or posting on TMC on their way to work.

This is questionable unless robotaxis are far more responsive and reliable than Uber or legacy taxis. Zero no-shows and within five minutes of ordering every single time would do it. A few times late to work and you'll get written up. "Sorry boss, the robotaxi didn't show up so I can't make it to work" isn't going to cut it, but it's a chance you always take with Uber and legacy taxis are lucky to arrive within 45 minutes of placing the order.

 

[nativewolf]

As I mentioned- that's exactly how the horse to car transition worked.

It took decades, not a few years....despite that one NYC parade photo folks like to trot out (despite the fact horses remained in common use 10+ years after the "after" photo)

Large, expensive, durable, physical goods that last for 10-20 years don't transition at the same speed as cell phones, which are cheap, small, (relatively) inexpensive, (relatively) disposable goods.

Especially when it'd be physically impossible to make enough EVs by 2030 to replace most, let alone all, ICE sales, and 20 years even if 100% of sales TODAY were EVs to replace all ICE on the road today.


Assuming continued great execution, Tesla will continue to grow massively for the rest of the decade and continue to sell as many EVs as they can make, faster than they can make em.... So will anybody else who actually manages to build a good EV.

But you'll still have no trouble finding a new ICE model for sale in 2025. Or 2030.

You might have a shot at that being hard to find by 2035 (which is the year many governments have discussed targeted sales of them- though they usually have a lot of escape-clause wording included in case battery output doesn't scale as fast as some hope)

And you'll still have no trouble still finding ICE vehicles on the road in 2040, even if they're mostly all several-years-old used ones by then.


There just ain't enough batteries coming in the next 5-9 years, or enough money for people who can't afford brand new cars, for that not to be true.

That is about my take as well. In 2030 you might barely notice EV sales impacting total vehicle sales, by 2035 at the margins but by 2040 I could see total automobile sales sliding and fast. By 2050 I think it is a given that sales are plummeting.

 

[MC3OZ]

This is questionable unless robotaxis are far more responsive and reliable than Uber or legacy taxis. Zero no-shows and within five minutes of ordering every single time would do it. A few times late to work and you'll get written up. "Sorry boss, the robotaxi didn't show up so I can't make it to work" isn't going to cut it, but it's a chance you always take with Uber and legacy taxis are lucky to arrive within 45 minutes of placing the order.

Service levels are mostly determined by fleet size and IMO smart AI similar to Autobidder, hopefully the car is close to arriving before the customer orders.

 

[Carl Raymond]

This is questionable unless robotaxis are far more responsive and reliable than Uber or legacy taxis. Zero no-shows and within five minutes of ordering every single time would do it. A few times late to work and you'll get written up. "Sorry boss, the robotaxi didn't show up so I can't make it to work" isn't going to cut it, but it's a chance you always take with Uber and legacy taxis are lucky to arrive within 45 minutes of placing the order.

I spent a weekend in Singapore once. Caught cabs a dozen times. The longest wait was about 45 seconds. Typically the process of locating a cab involved nothing more than looking in the direction of oncoming traffic and raising a hand. It‘s a different world when the majority of vehicles on the road are for hire. Way more convenient than fetching a private car from a parking station.

 

[StealthP3D]

I also have to order a Model Y for my son, who was going to get our 2018 Model 3 DM as a hand-me-down until some idiot insured by Tesla ran a red light in his brand new white Model 3 and sideswiped me last Saturday: (this only happens in Fremont, folks!)


Tesla San Jose Body Shop says they will need to weld in a section of the replaced frame. I'm not going to give him a car like that so will trade it back to Tesla let them sell it. The Y is far superior to the 3 anyway.

Good night from Fremont!

I want to thank all the Fremont Tesla owners out there who keep totaling new Teslas on easy streets with traffic control signals. Especially the super-talented ones that manage to take out another Tesla at the same time (two Tesla, one collision). Ignoring prominent traffic control signals and causing large metal objects equipped with the best early warning systems in the business to collide with one another may not be the best sign of intelligence but these are some of the highest margin sales with the lowest shipping costs of all so the extra effort is appreciated! Hopefully, Austin folks can one-up Fremont folks within a year or two!

Apparently, no one is getting seriously hurt so that's good press too. I'm saving the best award for the first Tesla driver responsible for a three Tesla collision, bonus points if it's between a S, 3, and X. Whoever manages a S, 3, X, Y four-way collision will break the Internet and create a very valuable Youtube channel.

I guess it's not surprising Tesla is struggling to keep up! Keep spreading the word, the traffic control signals are just suggestions, individual driver's are encouraged to be independent thinkers. This plays to one of human's greatest strengths - the ability to make decisions and take matters into their own hands without a machine muddling it up.

 

[DriveMe]

$700 this morning!

 

[lascavarian]

$700!

 

[Dancing Lemur]

I bet Tesla wanted to use the iOS app for direct payment (meaning charging your iTunes account) without incurring the 30% fee for something, like non-Tesla supercharging. That way, casual users wouldn’t have to enter credit card details somewhere separate (a web page) like they do now — you can’t enter your CC into the app, only your account on the Tesla web page AFAIK.

That would have made authorizing a supercharging session much simpler for a new, non-Tesla user, as it would be an in-app purchase like any other on your iPhone. Instead, they’ll have to launch a browser from the app, create an account and enter cc info, then go back to the app and log in. That’s a much worse UX for a first time user.

Maybe it’s not that specifically, but it sure sounds like Tesla wanted to skirt the 30% commission in some way. The Epic situation is really totally different, because there you’re paying for something that’s consumed on the iOS platform (a game), rather than a real good or service.

Clearly something is bugging Elon about Apple. As a fan of both, I wish they’d play nice.

A bit gauche to reply to my own post, but...Tesla‘s new app will have Tesla Shop access? That’s too coincidental not to be the catalyst For Elon’s anti-Apple tirade.

I bet it got rejected because of something outside the App Store rules (i.e. entering payment info).

Hopefully they work around it, and that’s the end of the story and Elon moves on to changing the world instead of trying to change Apple‘s App Store policies.

Tesla mobile app redesign previews new UI and integrated Tesla Shop access

An upcoming update for the Tesla App has recently been shared online, and it hints at some cool, new changes coming to the company’s mobile application. Among these updates are a new, redesigned UI, some quick animated transitions, and direct access to the Tesla Shop. The Tesla App redesign’s...

www.teslarati.com