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

[Buddyroe]

Buddyroe either can't understand that 400k reservation was for all model 3 variants and most likely towards the SR one or he's a troll and just trying to stir things up. Either way, from that one comment he's shown he's worthy of the ignore list

Yea, I'm a troll who owns a Tesla, and has been a member of TMC for 5 years. SMH.

Why are some people SO affected by a thought or opinion they they don't necessarily agree with? It's no different than the Fox News type people I come across all the time. Nothing I posted wasn't factual. Now, my thoughts and worry about it might be. But, as many have done, make your case as to why my thoughts are wrong. Trust me - I want very BADLY to feel confident again.

 

[mongo]

Looks like Elon's game to lose. If he and SEC don't come to an agreement, she'll rule on the contempt order, and I think we all know how that will go...

 

[Buddyroe]

DId you follow the (non fake) news?

1. Tesla has still not yet release the Model 3 Standard Range. Many of the reservation holders are waiting for the $35K version. It's been repeated thousands of times in the media and you're still asking the question?
2. Tesla does not yet offer Model 3 leasing options. Many are waiting for that too?
3. Who said "no one wants one"? Who's this guy? Because the Model 3 is still outselling all other medium-size premium cars, as far as I know.

But again, why do you insist on considering the missed *delivery* goal as a demand issue when it's best described as a delivery issue?

Good points. Thank you.

However, will Tesla ever actually deliver the $35k version? And what will be the GM on it if they do (do we even have a clue yet)?

 

[EVNow]

Whose sales were down 31% from last quarter besides Tesla? Flat? Hell, I'd have jumped through hoops for flat. You're trying to make me feel better?

Not trying to make you feel better - but - checkout ALL other EVs. EG : Bolt Q4 : 6,200 and Q1 : 4,300. If you don't understand seasonality, read up.

Monthly Plug-In EV Sales Scorecard

 

[oneday]

Looks like Elon's game to lose. If he and SEC don't come to an agreement, she'll rule on the contempt order, and I think we all know how that will go...

View attachment 394091

No matter the way the wind was blowing in the court room, or what the consensus outcome, that last sentence really puts a pit in my stomach.

 

[UnknownSoldier]

Hindsight is sooo easy. Ofcouse everyone can say they should have sold at 300+ (or 350 or 370) and gotten back in at 250-260. You would have made a bundle. It’s such an easy thing to say with today’s knowledge. But what if SP had broken out of the trading range and was hovering at 500 now? Would you not call yourself a sucker after having sold at 300+?

Hindsight is 20/20 but making the same mistake repeatedly is avoidable failure.
If one strategy is not working, changing strategies is the smart thing to do.
The purpose of investing is to make money. If the world is saved, then that's a happy by-product of all these shenanigans. But in the end, I am depending on myself for my retirement. Elon isn't sharing his wealth with me so I would be a fool to give him money with no expectations of a return on my investment.

 

[avoigt]

By the way: The German numbers are very interesting - right now the cheapest Porsche in Germany is about as cheap/expensive as the Model 3 in Germany (58k Euro for the cheapest Porsche / 54k Euro for the cheapest Tesla). The fact that they sell about the same amount of cars in the past 2 months is staggering:

Feb: Porsche 1456 / Tesla 1092 (Model 3 only half a month)
Mar: Porsche 2723 / Tesla 2367

To be frank, this is a huge achievement. So I hope @hobbes and @avoigt are not too disappointed. I don't expect this to go forward in April but I do expect a very slow and steady increase in Model 3 also in Germany.

Germans are conservative, slow moving and very risk averse. They will start to buy Tesla cars but it will take time.

Frankly I did expect more but the challenges with deliveries do explain it.

Over time I hope and am actually very confident that more and more new orders will come it and prove all FUDers wrong.

In terms of comparing Model 3 to Porsche look at this chart and search for Porsche

 

[MikeC]

Hindsight is sooo easy. Ofcouse everyone can say they should have sold at 300+ (or 350 or 370) and gotten back in at 250-260. You would have made a bundle. It’s such an easy thing to say with today’s knowledge. But what if SP had broken out of the trading range and was hovering at 500 now? Would you not call yourself a sucker after having sold at 300+?

Hindsight bias - Wikipedia

 

[SW2Fiddler]

What if Tesla owners put up little signs in car windows for the rest of us to see on the road that read something like "RealS3XY.com" and maybe a "Heart My Tesla" image of a red heart

Y!U2?

Howzat?

As you can see
I my 3
In 2020
You will see Y




burma shave
​

 

[azaz]

But again, why do you insist on considering the missed *delivery* goal as a demand issue when it's best described as a delivery issue?

In my opinion a major part of the miss this quarter was lower than expected US demand. we know for a fact that there were roughly 11000 Model 3s alone in inventory as of ~February 18 in the US. Keep in mind they basically only produced EU models in January+February so many of these were cars produced 2+ months ago that still hadn't sold. 5200 were 2018 models and 5500 were 2019 3s. Tesla themselves said they basically only delivered ~30k cars through 11 weeks. That's not enough demand from the US alone to support ~360k a year.

Further we know through the price cuts + chaotic retail strategy + deep discounts offered that in Q1 for whatever flukey reason they had more trouble with demand than expected.

 

[shrspeedblade]

Yea, I'm a troll who owns a Tesla, and has been a member of TMC for 5 years. SMH.

Why are some people SO affected by a thought or opinion they they don't necessarily agree with? It's no different than the Fox News type people I come across all the time. Nothing I posted wasn't factual. Now, my thoughts and worry about it might be. But, as many have done, make your case as to why my thoughts are wrong. Trust me - I want very BADLY to feel confident again.

Because you can't be the only one with this concern after the Q1 numbers (I do to a lesser degree) an important question to ask yourself dispassionately:

If someone had projected a dip in sales for 6 months after the full tax credit expired but before the SR was released would you have been surprised?

That's an entirely logical position, especially since Tesla slowed deliveries in Q2 2018 and then got every car they could through the pipeline in the 2nd half of 2018- they "did the right thing by their customers as loyalty follows loyalty". This only compounds when you factor in Q1 is usually the slowest for sales in the auto industry, Tesla included. Now factory all the macro impacts (Govt. shutdown, natural disasters, trade war intensifying) would the logical conclusion have been a possible dip in sales?

Perhaps we should be pleasantly surprised. For all those factors a 10 year old automaker is doing surprising well.

I say practice cautious, well thought out optimism. This is hard with the constant negative drumbeat about Tesla everyday which is part of the point. Wall Street/Big Oil/Big Auto/Shorts are trying to generate a self fulfilling prophecy. There's a lot on the line here. Remember, a lot of these people will knowingly and willfully leave the world in a mess for our grandchildren to boost this quarter's bottom line.

 

[Fact Checking]

This is incorrect. We know what Tesla is using/doing right down to the very details. They are using modified Inception GoogleNet networks for perception and classical controls for driving policy. They don't use any kind of GAN nor do they have any special proprietary secrets that isn't industry standard because we have a very good view of what they are doing through community hackers.

Lastly the industry standard methods that Tesla uses and others uses does not do the above. Those are GANs (Generative Adversarial Networks) which is quite different from a CNN (Convulutional Neural Network).

Thanks for the correction - I didn't want to suggest that Tesla's NNs are GANs - Tesla doesn't really need to generate any visual output, they want to generate a very narrow data stream of identified objects.

I.e. I wanted to suggest that Tesla's neural networks, as they increase in size, are able to recognize and place objects in the 3D world just based on 2D data.

I'm basing that on the distance labels and bounding boxes visible here:

My guess was that they have training data labeled with distances, a bounding box and object type attributes ("Car", "Minivan", "Truck", "Bicycle", etc.), which stream of identified objects a secondary (non-NN) classical software turns into relative velocity and a 3D representation of the surrounding world.

 

[avoigt]

Not sure if you've seen @avoigt information on this. He has the data from BAFA on how many requests have been submitted in March for the EV subsidy.
The Model 3 numbers make sense but Model S is suspect. First of all, the S barely qualifies for the subsidy (not sure what the latest status is after the back and forth with the "fake" entry price). Second, all last year there were 1900 S+X sold in Germany and now this data shows over 2K from S alone in 1 month. Maybe the data is cumulative all time total? If not it would be super weird how the Model S suddenly shoots up like this.

I am not a big fan of the German incentive registration data from bafa and may not further report on it.

Th reason is its a two step approach and the data does not really give you a good interpretation point or even information about correlation of registration.

After you bought the car you do a first application at bafa like a registration for that incentive. After a few weeks you get the approval and than you have about 9 months time to apply for the funding.

If you buy a BEV and you do not do the application for bafa in the coming 8.9 months nothing happened and you still get your money if you did it at last day in November.

IOW although people tend to be happy to get something back from government they are also lazy and everybody hates admin work and may push this for later. the first 2k you get from Tesla anyway without paper work so we talk just about the other 2 k here.

Many people therefore will do the car registration asap because otherwise they don't get the car delivered but the bafa registration they may do months later.

 

[EVNow]

OT :

They are not doing stereoscopic vision the usual way, instead their networks recognize 3D perspective patterns in 2D frames and to turn them into distance and perhaps object attitude (object movement vector) attributes. So their networks can, in essence, do things like:

Doesn't address my original question. How do they get samples of edge cases from their data set.

Lets say the edge case is a zig zag lane marker and the NN doesn't recognize them now. How do you find more such examples in a huge data set.

 

[capster]

Help.... My computer screen seems to have flipped upside down... The MMD is going the wrong direction?

Do shorts have an equivalent to "Buy on the rumor, sell on the news"?

 

[KarenRei]

Do shorts have an equivalent to "Buy on the rumor, sell on the news"?

Shorts are pretty baffled by this price action

It's clear that this is not the work of retail investors.

 

[Fact Checking]

Shorts are pretty baffled by this price action

What kind of reactions are you seeing from them?

 

[mongo]

No matter the way the wind was blowing in the court room, or what the consensus outcome, that last sentence really puts a pit in my stomach.

Why? 'If he is found in contempt'... It seems clear that the burden for contempt was not met. Further, if he were in contempt, the judge would not allow him to skate on being so. Judge would both find him in contempt now and make them clarify the decree..

 

[Buddyroe]

Not trying to make you feel better - but - checkout ALL other EVs. EG : Bolt Q4 : 6,200 and Q1 : 4,300. If you don't understand seasonality, read up.

Monthly Plug-In EV Sales Scorecard

Is there actually a different industry for EVs? I thought it was just one big thing called the car industry.

If Tesla dominates the EV market by selling 90% of all EVs, and the EV market is 1% of overall car sales, can Tesla make money?

Do you realize that EV sales in the U.S. by companies not named Tesla were in the neighborhood of 10k for Q1? I guess I'm not as much worried about Tesla as I am EVs in general. The big companies (oil, dealers, traditional car companies) are working hard to beat Tesla and I'm afraid they're being pretty effective. I spent the beginning of the week in Baltimore and talked with several people about their thoughts on Tesla/EVs. Everyone had the same answer - "they catch on fire too often" / "80 miles is not enough range for me" / "who will service my car when Tesla goes bankrupt?".

I wanted to try to educate them all - but I'm starting to feel like I'm in the show Walking Dead and I'm trying to kill all the walkers one at a time!

 

[Causalien]

Looks like we'll be closing that gap soonish.