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

[22522]

The EV credit is only a portion of the entire bill and what we have found in it screams nothing short of collusion and corruption. I don’t have much hope for the rest of the bill passing the smell test.

I read/skimmed the entire bill. Elon was kind when he said tricky accounting.

I have worked for the largest corporations in the world.

They have a rule, "We will not sign any contract that we don't write."

Can't really sign a [2000 page] contract where the people penning it are trying to trick you.

Elon did us a favor by speaking up. Ranks with the most important things he has done to date (mission is not yet accomplished).

 

[Artful Dodger]

Now that the BBB/EV credit is dead (and I definitely think dead for good), don't be surprised when you start seeing legacy auto announce delays to their EV lineups and/or production goals for 2022/2023.

Legacy auto needed this EV credit to not lose their shirt on every EV made at a price point that competes with Tesla, who has no EV credit.

I think this delay has already started with Ford's announcement that they will "increase" production of their Mach-E. That's w/o any increase in bty supply, so of course they will have to "delay" introducing new EV models for "just a few years".

Model 2 will BURRY the ICE industry. Quad-CT will kick sand on it's grave.

Cheers!

 

[winfield100]

Hertz Begins Installing EV Chargers For Its First Tesla Model 3 Rentals - CleanTechnica

Sign up for daily news updates from CleanTechnica on email. Or follow us on Google News! Hertz has started installing EV chargers for some of its first Tesla Model 3 rentals, Drive Tesla Canada reports. Hertz is preparing for the rise in customers choosing an EV over an ICE vehicle ... [continued]

cleantechnica.com

TL; DR: "Hertz has started installing EV chargers for some of its first Tesla Model 3 rentals, Drive Tesla Canada reports. Hertz is preparing for the rise in customers choosing an EV over an ICE vehicle and is installing EV chargers at some of their rental lots. One such lot is at the Fort Myers International Airport where a recent permit, issued last week, showed that Hertz is building Tesla chargers for its new vehicles. The valuation of $50,000 shows that this will be a pretty large charging station."

@Tes La Ferrari
If this is allowed,
If you want to give them an honest nudge and would rent a Tesla in the future
you can sign up for email alerts to indicate potential future interest and get on mailing list

Tesla Car Rental | Hertz Rent a Car

www.hertz.com

 

[Radish11]

It’s becoming more and more clear that Ford and Tesla are really the only two legitimate players in the EV arena. GM will probably survive. Ford needs to sell its Rivian stake ASAP. Rivian is going to zero

 

[Discoducky]

It’s becoming more and more clear that Ford and Tesla are really the only two legitimate players in the EV arena. GM will probably survive. Ford needs to sell its Rivian stake ASAP. Rivian is going to zero

I wish Ford was innovating enough to be legit, heck, any company for that matter (yeah competition as we'll get to a sustainable future faster).

I'd assert that to be legit, they'll need to build their own OS (from the ground up; download and fork the latest Android base and security kernels), own the battery chemistry supply chain, with multi-year contracts, through the fully source BMS (remember the OS, yeah, it runs that too!), spin up an inverter and motor team that can out perform Tesla, make every ECU bootloader update compatible (this is the only way to do OTA) and have the vision to do this 9 years ago...

 

[JRP3]

Ford are only tens of thousands off triggering the phase out. 123k as at June 2020.

Nissan should be close to 200K as well I think, around 160K US sales.

 

[mickle]

Has anyone else noticed or considered the large difference in the number of truck loading docks on the factories in Shanghai vs Berlin vs Texas?

I did some very rough counts based on recent videos and came up with approximately:

Shanghai 120 (may have missed some in-between the buildings)
Berlin 139
Texas 47

There are a lot of "plugged up" loading docks in Texas, but this factory still has many less docks than the other two. Seems they are going to be doing things very differently there.

 

[cusetownusa]

Nissan should be close to 200K as well I think, around 160K US sales.

Does anyone know where to go to see how many EVs each manufacture has sold out of 200,000?. My google skills are letting me down. Curious how close Ford, etc are to the limit.

 

[Thekiwi]

You'll definitely see some opting now for lower trim options. I fully agree on that. But this is countered by the following :

- Price hikes from 2021 won't take full effects in earnings until mid 2022. The last price hikes of 2k in Q3 of this year won't even take effect until Q3 2022
- S/X full ramp
- Continued Shanghai production ramp
- Logistics savings due to Berlin/Austin
- Continued reduction of costs of good - mainly through riding battery costs down
- Better economies of scale due to larger parts orders - due to Berlin/Austin
- Higher adoption rate due to FSD progress and subscription.

So given all those elements, I don't really see ASP going down. ASP may be slightly down or stagnate in Q4 earnings even with more S/X ramp but that's just because you're getting a bunch of 3/Y deliveries that were orders from 6-8 months ago before the price hikes (People that were continually delaying deliveries for a year).

When ASP does start to drop materially, I think Tesla will have more than reduced costs by enough to continue to expand margins.

I dont disagree with all of your factors above that will be positive for ASP & margins In 2022. However the EV tax credit would have been in addition to all of those factors. So margins will be less than they would have otherwise been (Doesn’t mean they will fall from where they are now, just that they wont be as high in the future as they could have been).

 

[insaneoctane]

Nice

https://twitter.com/x/status/1472419195958992897

 

[Thekiwi]

Has anyone else noticed or considered the large difference in the number of truck loading docks on the factories in Shanghai vs Berlin vs Texas?

I did some very rough counts based on recent videos and came up with approximately:

Shanghai 120 (may have missed some in-between the buildings)
Berlin 139
Texas 47

There are a lot of "plugged up" loading docks in Texas, but this factory still has many less docks than the other two. Seems they are going to be doing things very differently there.

Did you take into account the internal road that runs down the center of the Austin factory? That has just one entrance and one exit but presumably provides the ability for Dozens/hundreds of trucks to unload at any one time.

 

[StarFoxisDown!]

I dont disagree with all of your factors above that will be positive for ASP & margins In 2022. However the EV tax credit would have been in addition to all of those factors. So margins will be less than they woudl have otherwise been (Doesn’t mean they will fall from where they are now, just that they wont be as high in the future as they could have been).

Lucky for us even the current margins aren’t really priced into the stock. Otherwise wall st EPS would be much higher than they are for 2022-2024.

Sure would have been nice though to see Tesla hit 40% gross margins ……..I still see 40% gross margins but that’s with much higher FSD take rate and also when subscription numbers have reached a certain threshold…neither of which will be hit in 2022 and maybe not in 2023

 

[Cattledog]

Has anyone else noticed or considered the large difference in the number of truck loading docks on the factories in Shanghai vs Berlin vs Texas?

I did some very rough counts based on recent videos and came up with approximately:

Shanghai 120 (may have missed some in-between the buildings)
Berlin 139
Texas 47

There are a lot of "plugged up" loading docks in Texas, but this factory still has many less docks than the other two. Seems they are going to be doing things very differently there.

Austin has an internal system. The key is to get the externally sourced materials as close as possible to where you need them on the assembly line. When you make big, fat manufacturing buildings it's hard to get all the material (raw or finished goods) to where they need to be if you unload only at the perimeter. Hence an internal delivery system 'tricks' the factory into thinking it's thinner than it really is.

I need that same system to trick my body into being thinner than it is...

 

[bballshinobi]

Do you really have a raised Churchill quote on the wall? To whom are you not surrendering?

Lol ours is “thou shall not surrender”.

Never surrender to life and Tesla bears

 

[MXWing]

The Lucid is a $139k sedan, even the Pure is more expensive than the base Model S.

Lucid does not sell bars targeting super cost conscious buyers. The B B B is not going to murder them at all.

Rivian was likely more worried about it with their SUV and truck priced right at the margin of the incentive amount. I suspect Rivian’s margins are in 100% their options and the incentive makes Rivian’s expensive options potentially extremely expensive.

Lucid cannot afford to NOT sell every single car it makes. They are not Jaguar, who can sell a bunch of ICE monstrosities to stay in business despite the complete failure of the iPace (remember that Tesla killer?).

Wealthy or not, everyone still loves a bargain.

If the $7,500 credit for Lucid matters for even 100 purchases, that would be the equivalent of 20% of their annual production.

I think we may see the EV credit revisited as part of a much smaller bill. The politicians are going to have choose to pass SOME things or pass NOTHING.

 

[Thekiwi]

Austin “Early 2022” opening party…

 

[ItsNotAboutTheMoney]

All but GM and Tesla still has access to the original $7500 credit.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but the BBB version of the EV credit would have murdered Lucid. The plan as written by UAW was excluding EV Sedans at a ridiculously low price threshold.

Knocks out trims or entire lines of S3XY. Lucid Air is a bystander casualty.

Cumulative sales end September 2021:

Federal EV Tax Credit Phase Out Tracker By Automaker | EVAdoption

evadoption.com

Plus sales data:
Toyota 173166 - over 40k plug-ins sold 2021 through September.
Nissan 161544 - 10k
Ford 141885 - 18855

They'd all have to play games with sales to stretch the current tax credit.

 

[Webeevdrivers]

Correct, Tesla cannot build saleable vehicles until the final approvals come through. They currently have a limited permit to validate assembly processes.

Thankyou.

 

[22522]

Austin has an internal system. The key is to get the externally sourced materials as close as possible to where you need them on the assembly line. When you make big, fat manufacturing buildings it's hard to get all the material (raw or finished goods) to where they need to be if you unload only at the perimeter. Hence an internal delivery system 'tricks' the factory into thinking it's thinner than it really is.

I need that same system to trick my body into being thinner than it is...

If I may add to this.
1) Putting the part on the car is the only value added assembly step.
2) Shuttling parts out of trucks and into storage locations and out of storage locations (with dynamic locations, no-less) and then to the assembly lines involves sizable investment of all sorts - before you even put the part on the car!
3) If the robot that is putting the part on the car can pull it off of the truck directly, huge investments can be avoided.

There is also an entire industry dedicated to feeding and orienting parts so that a robot can pick them up. Or using sophisticated 3D vision to get a robot to pick a part out of a bunch of randomly oriented parts delivered in a bushel basket.

The part being made in the supplier's factory is not made in random orientation. It is made in a specific orientation. If you can maintain that orientation through the transportation/delivery process the orientation problem comes pre-solved. Robot picks the part off a tray and puts it on the car.

Trucks start to look like beer trucks with side access. You do a lot of work specifying exactly how you want things delivered, and ask your suppliers to preserve orientation rather than play 52 card pick up every time they ship you something, but you end up way ahead.

If the trucks are electric, you can drive/index them through an enclosed space.

The speed, quality and cost of this approach is twice as good. [Just count the number of times you do not move a part. 2 or 3 to 1 less motion.]

This shows up as fundamentally lower COGS which gives the business room to maneuver. Can lower price to take share at will. Nobody else can follow. It lets you write your own ticket.

 

[Todd Burch]

This being an investment forum, what is the near term impact on TSLA of the failure of BBB to pass? Between that, EM selling, and shorts, will this create a triple threat buying opportunity for the first part of the upcoming week?

IMO it’s a positive on Tesla & TSLA but a negative for the EV movement in general. It basically ensures Tesla’s cost lead.