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

[EVNow]

They sell mainly/mostly/predominately ICE cars. Did you know this before you posted?

Not sure what you mean by predominantly ICE - they sell 50/50 BEV & PHEV.

 

[Discoducky]

Ah so, mea culpa. Thanks...

And to be clear, not only do I want them to succeed in BEVs, I hope they start breaking out the BEV PnLs as that would indicate they are serious and on a path to profitability.

 

[Discoducky]

Not sure what you mean by predominantly ICE - they sell 50/50 BEV & PHEV.

Source?

They ditched ICE in favor of PHEV and BEV as of march last year:

BYD Stops Production Of ICE-Only Cars, Focuses On PHEVs And EVs | Carscoops

BYD produced more "New Energy Vehicles" in March than any other automaker in China

www.carscoops.com

PHEV is ICE.

 

[EVNow]

I just don't know how they can say something like that. Model 3 and Y is not mainstream? First time I realized I am driving an odd ball car.

They are "luxury".

The funny thing is Tesla sells more luxury EVs than GM and others sell "mainstream" EVs.

 

[Ogre]

I think he's anti-subsidy across the board... I suspect he's not in favor of eliminating subsidies for individual players, and then arbitrarily allowing them for questionable vehicles (like lame 3KWh hybrids).

As such, I suspect he may consider strategies to allow the best-selling BEV to participate....

I suspect the reason he’s anti-subsidy is because he was concerned they won’t be applied equitably after the first seriously lopsided attempt to create this legislation.

Clearly he was right.

 

[EVNow]

Source?

Here ...

BYD NEV sales were historically 80% BEV. Starting around 2021 their PHEV sales began ramping at ridiculous rates, so they're now roughly 50/50.

 

[Dikkie Dik]

PHEV is ICE

Haha so strict

 

[StealthP3D]

We arent the normal consumer. The website is where all ordering occurs. One way or another every Tesla purchaser ends up on the website. I am just stating there is a risk someone looks at Tesla site for a sedan and chooses another brand because they can get with a $7500 tax credit.

It doesn't matter. Any EV eligible for the credit is going to be production limited anyway, maybe even the PHEV's too.

 

[Discoducky]

Caution: Electrek

But this is cool!

Tesla fan files trademark for the company to make electric motors for airplanes & boats [Updated]

Tesla is hinting at making electric motors for airplanes, boats, and more in a new trademark filing that went unnoticed.

electrek.co

 

[EVNow]

Source?

And here .. so, time to edit/correct your earlier post.

BYD plug-in car sales results:​

BEVs: 113,915 (up 147% year-over-year)​

PHEVs: 116,027 (up 164% year-over-year)​

Total: 229,942 (up 155% year-over-year)​

BYD Sold Almost 230,000 Plug-In Cars In November 2022

In November, BYD passenger plug-in car sales amounted to 229,942 (the third result above 200,000), which is 155% more than a year ago.

insideevs.com

 

[AndrewZ]

It may appear stupid if evaluating what POTUS said was factually correct... it technically was, as the IRA credit does indeed allow for an EV to qualify.

Problem is, it excludes the EV model that sells in larger numbers than most of the other manufactures sell put together, and puts 20 EV-mile hybris on equal footing, making the comment seem rather intellectually dishonest.

That's what it appears to me Maye was pointing out, which I don't think is stupid at all.

The Model Y isn’t excluded, all Tesla needs to do is drop the price back below $55k

Yknow back where it was just two years ago before $17k was added to the price and that people now apparently think should be subsidized by taxpayers after all the price hikes even though people in here talk about how it only costs $40k to make: Regardless of how this goes down, I don’t see that happening.

The surprise to me, and I’m sure some others, was the 7 seater getting an $80k limit. I expected the Y to be treated the same as the 3, they’re almost the same vehicle.

But I think this is all kinda moot and that Tesla is gearing up to release the cheaper Y AWD that will satisfy the MSRP and specifically use batteries that are built to satisfy the component and material requirements.

 

[EVNow]

Haha so strict

But quite misleading too ...

 

[TrendTrader007]

I know, I know, I know
TA is rubbish and technicians like yours truly end their lousy trading careers in tears
Still, for what it’s worth TSLA Seems to be finding support exactly at 10 year exponential, moving average
$111 current
Keeping my fingers crossed plus knocking on wood several times a day

Don’t let the Bears win

 

[Nocturnal]

The Model Y isn’t excluded, all Tesla needs to do is drop the price back below $55k

Yknow back where it was just two years ago before $17k was added to the price and that people now apparently think should be subsidized by taxpayers after all the price hikes even though people in here talk about how it only costs $40k to make: Regardless of how this goes down, I don’t see that happening.

The surprise to me, and I’m sure some others, was the 7 seater getting an $80k limit. I expected the Y to be treated the same as the 3, they’re almost the same vehicle.

That would be fine if the nearly identical other small SUVs like the ID4 had the same treatment, and they do not.

The Toyota Highlander and Camry are basically the same vehicle, but that Highlander hybrid will get $7500.

 

[Prunesquallor]

Some buying going on.

https://twitter.com/x/status/1610689798007840770

 

[Nakata]

Kicking ass in Europe.
All numbers are out now.

Wiki - Tesla Europe Registration Stats

This wiki belongs to the thread EU Market situation and outlook. Click HERE (CTRL-click to open in new tab) to add new data using a Google form. Any forum member can contribute. We encourage you to do so! Your entry will appear after the data is double-checked by other volunteers. If the data...

teslamotorsclub.com

https://twitter.com/x/status/1610686216252395522

 

[petit_bateau]

Those are interesting observations about the storage market. When I wrote
Tesla, TSLA & the Investment World: the Perpetual Investors' Roundtable I was surprised that only one of the three 100MWh systems was made by Tesla. I thought only Tesla was capable of building and selling these things, but apparently Huawei can too. The third one doesn’t state which hardware is used so I doubt it’s Tesla. Your post explains what’s going on here.

On the residential storage side, I’m waiting many years now to hear something from Tesla about my reservation of a solar roof+powerwall installation. My main reason for choosing Tesla is the assumption that a single vendor integrating solar, battery storage and car charging would provide the best solution.

The European grid is greening fast though. We’re in the middle of the winter and we get more and more periods with negative electricity prices. To to point where I start wondering if it still makes economic sense to install residential solar (We can only sell our surplus at market prices, i.e. practically zero when it’s sunny). I even question if it would ever be profitable to install a home battery. Home batteries still seem terribly expensive and of little capacity. 10kWh would only give us a couple of hours backup in the winter. Such a size can only be reasonably used to prevent paying high peak prices. Maybe it’s just better to go for a dynamic (hourly changing) electricity tariff and charge our cars when the electricity is very cheap.

As I expect you know I write a Daily Energy News thread. I've done it here on TMC for the past year but I've done it in other places for several prior years. In the last year it seems like practically every day there is a new domestic-scale battery unit from another vendor come to market, almost always LFP. It has become so prolific I no longer even bother to include them as news items.

Grid economics is a bit of a black art, and depends very much on who has what amount of regulatory capture in your local area/country/state/etc. They get to push through cost-allocation models and price-determination models and other administrativia that tilt the playing field entirely to their satisfaction.

It is the tilt on this playing field that determines to what extent, and in what manner, the domestic scale storage is relevant and attractive, and at what scale, and in what scenarios. There is no alternative but to sit down and run the numbers for your particular situation in order to make a decision. I call these "context-specific" decisions.

However the proliferation of domestic LFP product offerings is reaching the point that it is a bit like the introduction of home washing (laundry) machines into the appliance market. It doesn't really matter whether the coin-operated laundromat might have been more cost-effective, al of a sudden home landry appliances were everywhere and in every home. As volumes rose the economies of scale in manufacturing and distribution became such that price dropped and it no longer became relevant to bother with complex context-dependent economics. These days washing machines are so cheap it is a no-brainer, and we don't even think, we just buy one.

I can see that day coming in the domestic storage segment given the march of generic LFP clones and the emergence of a dominant design, primarily out of China.

(if you want to get a feel for your own system sizing, go look at the interview question I posed on the Daily Energy News thread just before Christmas. There is also enough info in that for a clever reader to figure out an approximation for the global total addressable storage market there as I was quite kind.)

======

Yesterday I posted up the example of a 220 MW/440 MW utility-scale storage system that has just gone live in China

China connects 220 MW/440 MWh battery to grid

Robestec has connected a 220 MW/440 MW battery storage system to the grid in Ningxia, China. It is reportedly China’s largest standalone energy storage station, and uses lithium iron phosphate (LFP) batteries from Hithium Energy Storage.

www.pv-magazine.com

Today here is another, this one is 400 MW/800 MWh . Also in China but different manufacturer, different developer, different client.

Note, neither are Tesla. Funny that.

Giant battery goes online in China

For years I used to keep a log of all these systems going live as a bottom-up database of info from us and our various competitors, and compare it with the top down analysis from other sources. These days I don't need to do that as it is no longer that relevant to my day job. But I know enough about the normal noise signal in the market to detect when an important qualitative change takes place. During the last year or so the Tesla Powerwall went from being a competitive product for the domestic segment to one where it is over twice the price, not available, not loved by its manufacturer, and no longer really competitive. But you wouldn't know that from listening to any Tesla quarterly investor presentation or reading any information that Tesla gives its shareholders. The utility-scale Tesla Megapack is by no means in that category as a product today, but then again three (or even two) years ago no-one would have thought that Tesla could so mis-manage the Powerpack's ramp as to complete give away the leader position. My concern is that as a shareholder in such a marketplace, unless one has a feel for what is going on through one's own industry knowledge, how would one recognise a developing problem ? At what point would one say "pity about the energy division, not quite sure what happened there".

=====

Thank you very much for your well-reasoned post. It's posts like yours that make TMC valuable to me.

I am not an energy storage expert by any means, but I'd like to point out things you state that, in my mind, seem to contradict your argument that TE is dead-in-the-water before it even gets started. Maybe this is not what you're saying, but it seems that way to me. Please clarify for me what I am missing.

Here are the key statements I want to focus on: (1)"The size of that rapidly growing mass market from year-to-year is a closely held secret, if indeed anyone knows all the puzzle pieces. I try to track it through different approaches, but it is nigh-on impossible to quantify."
(2) "Quantifying storage with an equivalent precision was tough. From the limited poor quality signals I could assess, until last year I thought Tesla had overwhelming dominance in the utility segment, but was less obviously dominant in the domestic segment, and there were signs that the commercial segment was a fizzle for everyone."

With regard to statement (1), I don't think you'll get any disagreement from anyone here that a complex market like energy storage is opaque and virtually unknowable. Frankly, I feel this way about all markets. From energy prices to government incentives to cultural/language differences to decades-long intervals of time, it is indeed hard to suss out exactly where the worldwide energy market is headed. Considering we are in the nascent stages of this new industry, I feel it is premature to say with any conviction that anyone, China, US or otherwise, has lost the race to dominance; ok, China may have got the holeshot, but there are plenty of laps to go. Tesla has recently stated that battery bottlenecks are a thing of the past, or are becoming a thing of the past due to increased manufacturing rates of cells (although awfully hard to say if it's true or not), so I am willing to wait a couple of years before concluding TE is dead-in-the-water. I'm surprised you have already concluded, given the opacity of the energy industry, that TE has already lost the game during the first inning.

Regarding statement (2), when you say, "until last year," I have to stop you right there. I mean, last year might have been the most disruptive year in world industry EVER, I don't see what trends you can reliable assume from one of the most tumultuous years on record for all industries as the world was shut down. Everything was tipped upside down and turned inside-out, there is no way anyone can look at one year and conclude a domestic or international segment was won or lost by anyone. We need to wait patiently for a few years to see how all this shakes out, in my humble opinion, unless you have something much more substantial to add other than your observations of the rocky period of 2021-2022.

I'm actually in the middle of Christensen's "Innovator's Dilemma" right now. I feel as if it's hard to apply his argument to making predictions of energy storage/TE because the entire industry is rather new. Like, in my mind, this is practically a brand new technology with nearly unlimited potential, growth that hasn't even begun to be tapped, and unknowable future ramifications. Ok, China might be in the lead, but that doesn't mean other players like Tesla won't find their own niche in a gigantic worldwide market over the next few decades. I'm trying to zoom out and take a bigger view of things, that's all. I really find it impossible to predict any outcomes in energy storage at this time.

I'm not saying you're wrong, you may indeed be 100% correct. I'm just saying that because of how opaque many of these issues are as you readily admit, and because we are still in the first inning of the game and Tesla doesn't even have cell production ramped up, it is a premature to say TE is a lost cause and will fizzle to zero. Another angle you may have not considered is that Elon is connected to the highest echelons of world government and finance--he's always chatting with heads-of-state; just last week he was pictured having what appeared to be an intimate discussion with French president Macron. Elon is connected to world markets and politics like few others are. In America, with SpaceX and Tesla, Elon's companies have practically national-security-level importance. I mean, SpaceX has special satellites for the US military, and is involved in who-knows-how-many other covert operations. Elon sees things you or I will never see.

Again, I thank you for your post. But I'm going to wait and see what happens to TE over the next decade before concluding it's a lost cause. The world is infitely complex and no one knows what the future holds. I'm certainly not betting against the guy who has revolutionized rocketry and made the EV industry practically from scratch.

Thank you to you, and other's for the thanks.

If any of you think this is the first innings in storage can I gently correct you. Back when I designed and operated oil and gas fields for a living I actually did the outline design for a battery/solar system and we installed it. Design was 1999 from memory, install 2000. That was to run a very remote welhead and stuff. It worked. Fast forward to 2005 and I had my own company designing and making this kit. And others had been in the game much longer, one of my employees had been doing it since 1973. I/we exited the storage side in 2015 if I get my dates right. So this (storage) industry has been going and growing for far longer than all the johnny-come-lately Tesla shareholders who've only just woken up to the implications and who are dreaming of the gold mine in the sunlit uplands from a state of innocence and wonder. The storage industry in all its various guises has been a long-fought campaign where the territory is fairly well known, and the positions and quality of the competing & complementary technologies and the various defence lines they hold are also well known. The energy sector as a whole has been very central to human progress for about the last two or three hundred years, and the basic principles haven't really changed much. You may find some stuff hard to predict, because for you this is new, but that is not necessarily a good reason to reject the long view from those of us who have been around a bit. To recap, in my opinion, TE has - as far as I can see - lost the game in domestic. For utility TE has a chance for a long term play but it will need to raise its game far far higher than is apparent at present if it is to be significant and material.

=========

For everybody who have decided that selling energy as a service is the way forwards to the pot of gold, rather than just making and selling product, can I suggest gently that you start with utility lesson #101: it is really all about politics, and all politics is local. Utilities are a very regulated area wordwide for good reason, and it is rare that a new-entrant gets to cherry pick only the good stuff with none of the bad stuff. Tesla will have to over time do a fair bit of that (simply to keep the Supercharger network operating) and there will be some very interesting opportunities, but it ought not to be front and centre of the investment hypothesis for at least a decade.

 

[AndrewZ]

That would be fine if the nearly identical other small SUVs like the ID4 had the same treatment, and they do not.

The Toyota Highlander and Camry are basically the same vehicle, but that Highlander hybrid will get $7500.

I think people at the IRS likely ran the numbers using all the different vehicle criteria options at their disposal, printed off reports, sat in a board room or Teams, and picked the option that would create the least burden on taxpayers while still generating incentive for manufacturers and mineral miners/refiners whose operations they want brought into our shores.

How many ID4s, Highlanders, and Camrys are produced using North American domestic or free trade materials?

Regardless of what happens, I don’t think they’re putting an $80k cap on this vehicle and allowing prices to remain high or potentially even increase further. Prices need to come down, it’s the Inflation Reduction Act. If these are the best selling EVs in America, it’s all the more important that their prices do not go up and create more headaches for consumers and the Fed.

 

[TrendTrader007]

Yes, if ever there is a single stock that is capable of giving investors mild case of PTSD. It’s got to be TSLA

 

[Chunky Jr.]

Caution: Electrek

But this is cool!

Tesla fan files trademark for the company to make electric motors for airplanes & boats [Updated]

Tesla is hinting at making electric motors for airplanes, boats, and more in a new trademark filing that went unnoticed.

electrek.co

I'm trying not to read too much into this since trademarks tend to be as broad as possible and they are making sure they cover all the bases