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

[DaSwede]

Interesting comment from Elon: the Optimus might become the cash-cow and make more money than the car business... Did I hear that right? Deffo a time to continue being a hodlr!

 

[Knightshade]

I’ll just, I heard “pre production” and that doesnt’ mean an early version of production. Could be a prototype of the production model.. I’d LOVE to see 4680 coming this QTR, and I’ll have to go back to the transcript but I thought that person said “this year”.

They definitely said this quarter for delivering 4680 to customers out of Austin.

Meanwhile Gordon and other negative nancies latest claim is that Tesla is only surviving because they are delaying paying bills.

https://twitter.com/x/status/1486471613126111234

Q has been telling that accounts receivable story for a good while now... every 6-12 months they spin a wheel someplace to change which type of accounting fraud they think they're seeing.

 

[Tyler34]

Meanwhile Gordon and other negative nancies latest claim is that Tesla is only surviving because they are delaying paying bills.

https://twitter.com/x/status/1486471613126111234

I dont even see where he got these numbers but I am pretty dense. Any accountants around to decipher this?

 

[Discoducky]

I doubt the labelers are working in the Bay Area.

They aren't (most likely Kenya or similar; and rest assured Tesla is paying a higher than living wage) and transitioning to auto-labeling with human oversight is ramping.

 

[Rarity]

I doubt the labelers are working in the Bay Area.

I believe that many are working in Buffalo.

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[Boomer19]

Can’t wait!.. does anyone have the actual performance data for what a 4680 pack delivers in range/Whr/Mile/changing efficiency?

i updated the post

drew said the 4680s are coming from
kato and then assembled into pack in austin.

4680 packs in vechcle deliveries hopefully this quarter

 

[Artful Dodger]

I doubt the labelers are working in the Bay Area.

That'd be helpful, but I think you're wrong on that. When Tesla moved their headquarters to Austin, they didn't close their office space in Palo Alto. In fact, they leased another 350K sq.ft from H.P.

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I suspect due to the sheer volume of data, the labelers need to be co-located with the training CPUs (bandwidth constraints).

This is just my WAG, but that's an awful lot of new office space for which we know of no other purpose. Does anyone know where the server farms are located for FSD training? Follow the Fiber...

Cheers!

 

[OrthoSurg]

I always like to ask people this question when this topic comes up.. If YOU bought a 55-70K Model Y, would you really like for it to go out and pickup passengers daily, doing it‘s FSD, possibly having people vomit in the car, bring their pets, dirty shoes, eating, drinking in the car? The list goes on. Is that really how you’d like your 55-70K asset to be used? I guess at some point it matters in just how much $$ am I going to get daily, weekly, monthly, but if its MY regular car I don’t really know what %% of owners in this luxury category are really going to want to do that with their car.

And not to mention the obvious which is, I really don’t think FSD is going to actually be capable of any of this in CY2022.. A) I don’t think the technology will be there, reliability, safely or on even a limited adoption scale and B) I don’t know that they are ready at all to get the regulatory approval from this almost anywhere in the USA at this point, buy EOY 2022. As always, we’ll see.

I think the bigger news of any real value is that CT is probably a mid-late 2023 story. There area a lot of entrants in the truck space doing actual deliveries and ramping deliveries now who are going to get that first mover advantage and traction before Tesla. from what Elon said, I don’t see CT trying to compete in that space, possibly due to price - the EV medium duty Truck space, but it’ll sure be interesting what that looks like in Mid 2023 when GM, Ford and possibly STLA are putting EV trucks on the road by EOY 2022 and early 2023.

Taxi drivers get people to vomit in their cars when they give a ride to late night customers coming home from bars, it will be the $75k Model Y owner to choose or not to expose his car to such « risk » for a night drive premium.

The Cybertruck will be so far from the offer of the F150 lightning, Rivian or any standard pick up that Tesla could start production in 2025 and the demand will be through the roof. The more people will see them on the road and the more people will be interested. This will create a new market segment of people who never drove pick up trucks so I don’t see the brands you mentioned as having an impact on Tesla sales with the new addressable market segment the CT will create on its own.

The 25k EV was the nail in the coffin for ICE vehicles once and for all of FSD was not a possibility but FSD robotaxis will also be a nail in the coffin for car ownership in big cities once and for all. However, there will still be a market in the suburbs for private car ownership if the territory is too wide to cover to have a vehicle available within 15-30mins in cas of an emergency (I have northern Canada in mind) but any region without density will push resident to still have private vehicle ownership.

I guess what analysts wanted to hear was that Cybertruck was started production tomorrow and the 25k Tesla was coming out of Shanghai this year for the stock to jump +10% but they will soon digest how incredible the margin numbers are at making EVs while traditional legacy automakers can’t have these margins after hundred of years of trying to optimize.

Let’s see what tomorrow brings us.

 

[scubastevo80]

That was an unusual and surprising conference call. It did NOT go anywhere near the way I expected it to.

- No CT until well into 2023?
- Not working on the $25K car at all right now?!!?
- FSD solved in late 2022??!?!? (I don't believe this....)
- 50% production growth in 2022 EVEN WITHOUT the two new factories??!??!

I was very disappointed in the product roadmap regarding the CT and Model "2", yet much of what was said is Super Bullish from an investor point of view.

I think I'm going to need some time to digest it a bit.

That makes two of us, but I'm trying to bifurcate my "car guy" opinion from my investing self. What I heard (inferred) was that Elon would sell nothing but the Model Y as robitaxis if that were the best use of capital and lowest cost of transportation, but as a car guy I'm wanting a cheaper personal form of transport ($25k car), a Model 3 plaid, and a Cybertruck that's being delivered soon.

Overall happy with the numbers, particularly the 50%+ growth for the foreseeable future, I just question when the backlog of 3 and Y buyers dry up and demand no longer outstrips supply. Tesla is all in on FSD and that certainly will have a meaningful impact of the business now and into the future.

 

[15Peter20]

Whoever had "Prototypes are easy, production is hard" on their card just got bingo

 

[Artful Dodger]

Love it. I'm of the opinion anything lower than 3/Y should be left to everyone else.

That's nonsense. Telsa has stated clearly they intend to reach 20M/yr auto production by 2030. They can not do that without entering all major auto segments.

Which by the way was EXACTLY what Elon said they'd do in the Secret Master Plan.

 

[Singuy]

That was an unusual and surprising conference call. It did NOT go anywhere near the way I expected it to.

- No CT until well into 2023?
- Not working on the $25K car at all right now?!!?
- FSD solved in late 2022??!?!? (I don't believe this....)
- 50% production growth in 2022 EVEN WITHOUT the two new factories??!??!

I was very disappointed in the product roadmap regarding the CT and Model "2", yet much of what was said is Super Bullish from an investor point of view.

I think I'm going to need some time to digest it a bit.

Roadmap was exactly as expected. I do like how Elon preface the delay with "we will produce less cars if we bring out new products". So bringing out the cybertruck will = lower margins, lower revenue, more pain. Like I said Tesla no longer bends over backwards trying to get products out when they don't need to.

As for no 25k car, good. I know the Chinese loves to hear that. No one likes cheaper products to dilute their brand. And those waiting for one may now pony up for a SR+ after they drop the prices. Even so, the average new car price is a SR+. 25k car was sooo 2019 before inflation.

 

[MartinAustin]

I always like to ask people this question when this topic comes up.. If YOU bought a 55-70K Model Y, would you really like for it to go out and pickup passengers daily, doing it‘s FSD, possibly having people vomit in the car, bring their pets, dirty shoes, eating, drinking in the car? The list goes on. Is that really how you’d like your 55-70K asset to be used? I guess at some point it matters in just how much $$ am I going to get daily, weekly, monthly, but if its MY regular car I don’t really know what %% of owners in this luxury category are really going to want to do that with their car.

And not to mention the obvious which is, I really don’t think FSD is going to actually be capable of any of this in CY2022.. A) I don’t think the technology will be there, reliability, safely or on even a limited adoption scale and B) I don’t know that they are ready at all to get the regulatory approval from this almost anywhere in the USA at this point, buy EOY 2022. As always, we’ll see.

I think the bigger news of any real value is that CT is probably a mid-late 2023 story. There area a lot of entrants in the truck space doing actual deliveries and ramping deliveries now who are going to get that first mover advantage and traction before Tesla. from what Elon said, I don’t see CT trying to compete in that space, possibly due to price - the EV medium duty Truck space, but it’ll sure be interesting what that looks like in Mid 2023 when GM, Ford and possibly STLA are putting EV trucks on the road by EOY 2022 and early 2023.

I did 7,500 rideshare rides in my $100,000 "luxury" Model S and had no problems cleaning it myself. There were only 3 "vomit" instances and all of it ended up outside the car. You can restrict your car from certain geo-fenced areas, or certain pickup zones, if you don't want it to pick up people who you think might vomit. You can also refrain from offering it for rides on Friday+Saturday evenings between 8pm and 4am the next morning. It's totally up to you. There are going to be a whole lot of people doing this if it will make money for them. The rider rating system will allow for people to get bad ratings if they leave food or other mess in the car. Riders will strive for a perfect 5.0 rating. They will want to leave absolutely no mess. If you own a ridesharing Tesla you can restrict your car to riders above a rating you control.

I don't think we heard that Cybertruck is a "mid-late 2023" story. And who are the "lot of entrants in the truck space doing actual deliveries and ramping deliveries now?" Only Rivian to my knowledge. (AFAIK there are no Hummer EV deliveries happening otherwise it would be all over Youtube doing off-road tricks.) Is there someone else?

I share your skepticism of believing Elon when he says "FSD this year, for sure, honest, no really I mean it this time." I'll believe it when I see it, but I know it's close. It seems close for 2022 because the beta is in 60,000 cars in January, with zero crashes so far, whereas there have been an average of 106 fatalities every day this year, via human-driven cars.

 

[Dutchie]

My takeaway is that Elon is much further ahead than we all are. While we look at production numbers, release of structural pack etc. He is thinking of robots running factories and doing household chore. FSD, which will be the largest profit machine in something like two/three years time etc. He isn’t thinking about cars and models at all anymore!

 

[Discoducky]

That's nonsense. Telsa has stated clearly they intend to reach 20M/yr auto production by 2030. They can not do that without entering all major auto segments.

Which by the way was EXACTLY what Elon said they'd do in the Secret Master Plan.

I'm thinking that Model Y demand, CT demand, FSD timeline have changed that substantially. Once you get FSD, can just make robotaxi's when demand slows for non-robotaxis.

So, robotaxis fills the gap that the $25k car did previously.

That might not be the answer folks want to hear though, but I'm really happy for my CT reservations with this in mind.

 

[nativewolf]

They aren't (most likely Kenya or similar; and rest assured Tesla is paying a higher than living wage) and transitioning to auto-labeling with human oversight is ramping.

Dude they work for an outsourcing company which pays only as much as they need to pay and probably...almost assuredly in India if they want 2000. Maybe china but china sucks for process outsourcing

 

[Artful Dodger]

In a few sentences, Elon gave an almost chilling vision of the impact of Optimus. What does an economy look like when there is no labor shortage? And when labor is really cheap…

Yes, but this is an almost verbatim, word-for-word repeat of comments Elon has made publicly before. There was no 'news' delivered. That's not a roadmap, that's a 'greatest hits' album. Except for 'FSD this year', which has now officially obtained 'Golden Oldie' status.

 

[Knightshade]

I don't think we heard that Cybertruck is a "mid-late 2023" story. And who are the "lot of entrants in the truck space doing actual deliveries and ramping deliveries now?" Only Rivian to my knowledge. (AFAIK there are no Hummer EV deliveries happening otherwise it would be all over Youtube doing off-road tricks.) Is there someone else?

Hummer EV is delivering to customers as of Dec 2021 (TINY volume initially of course)

I share your skepticism of believing Elon when he says "FSD this year, for sure, honest, no really I mean it this time." I'll believe it when I see it, but I know it's close. It seems close for 2022 because the beta is in 60,000 cars in January, with zero crashes so far, whereas there have been an average of 106 fatalities every day this year, via human-driven cars.

I'm guessing you haven't driven the beta? I have, for a while now.

With a human ready to intervene it's pretty cool. It works well a lot of the time. Sometimes I can take a half hour or longer trip without having to intervene at all, especially if it's very little traffic around.

But it's nowhere near ready for use without a human actively ready to intervene.

I've had it lane change into oncoming traffic. Twice. And not in the old 2020 version, but recently. . More than a few times it simply refuses to proceed at an intersection without you confirming it's ok....or takes several minutes to proceed creeping the whole time, sometimes into the oncoming traffic lanes for a bit before going.


That said- Elon claimed on the Lex podcast recently they're doing Yet Another Fundamental Rewrite That Will Change Everything And Make RTs Real in v11, and he mentioned it again on the call today.

We've heard that several times- eventually I guess it'll be true, but it hasn't been for any of the previous rewrites so far.

 

[tivoboy]

I did 7,500 rideshare rides in my $100,000 "luxury" Model S and had no problems cleaning it myself. There were only 3 "vomit" instances and all of it ended up outside the car. You can restrict your car from certain geo-fenced areas, or certain pickup zones, if you don't want it to pick up people who you think might vomit. You can also refrain from offering it for rides on Friday+Saturday evenings between 8pm and 4am the next morning. It's totally up to you. There are going to be a whole lot of people doing this if it will make money for them. The rider rating system will allow for people to get bad ratings if they leave food or other mess in the car. Riders will strive for a perfect 5.0 rating. They will want to leave absolutely no mess. If you own a ridesharing Tesla you can restrict your car to riders above a rating you control.

I don't think we heard that Cybertruck is a "mid-late 2023" story. And who are the "lot of entrants in the truck space doing actual deliveries and ramping deliveries now?" Only Rivian to my knowledge. (AFAIK there are no Hummer EV deliveries happening otherwise it would be all over Youtube doing off-road tricks.) Is there someone else?

I share your skepticism of believing Elon when he says "FSD this year, for sure, honest, no really I mean it this time." I'll believe it when I see it, but I know it's close. It seems close for 2022 because the beta is in 60,000 cars in January, with zero crashes so far, whereas there have been an average of 106 fatalities every day this year, via human-driven cars.

But, you were DRIVING the car… I do think a proctored vehicle is going to have less/fewer/even none (although apparently not the case) of these incidents. When someone thinks ”this is MY car because I ordered it and I’m in it now”, some people won’t be on their best behavior: I think I’m going to start a poll in the Model Y forum to see how many owners are willing to put their cars into this pool and at what $$ would they require It.

As for CT, 2022 has been removed from the website this month, I think that was a bit of a tell. Also, when asked about deliveries, Elon said something like :”there are several issues with CT that need to be worked out first”:.. meaning either stamping, changes to engineering (crab walking maybe?) planning on volume 4680? Not sure.. When I say Mid-Late 2023, thats just me GUESSING that if it’s not going to be 2022, and they wouldn’t say ‘early 2023‘ on the call, well maybe they are just saving their reveal to the next conference call. By EOY 2022 we’ll have F-150 and GM Hummer (jesus GOD why did they start with that as a model) and I think the GM Silverado is supposed to be “in production” with deliveries in 2023.. not sure where exactly STLA is with RAM EV at this point.

Side note: A few years ago, I picked up several ppl in my AMG S-Class just for kicks and giggles and to see all the mechanics of premium rideshare with Uber. It was fun, Market research. And YES, everyone of the people I picked up (10 rides, so not your large sample size) were very courteous and didn’t do anything disorderly. Most were on their phones, as you would expect from an Uber Premium/Luxury pickup. Most had probably no idea that I came from half a mile away from their Atherton address to pick them up. That is not the clientele that I see being the subscriber for a Tesla RoboTaxi user… but we’ll see.

 

[Discoducky]

Dude they work for an outsourcing company which pays only as much as they need to pay and probably...almost assuredly in India if they want 2000. Maybe china but china sucks for process outsourcing

I helped set up the labeling workforce when I was at Tesla and it could very well have expanded to India or other countries. I have good reason to believe they are still using the same company today.