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

[bkp_duke]

The most comprehensive description of Teslas superior automotive position.
With all that information, the only thing I noticed, was they reference Teslas early mover advantage, included patents. Since Tesla encourages people to use their patents, it doesn’t provide them any advantage, but it does say they want to advance the world to sustainable transportation.

It's not as clear cut as anyone can use their patents.

In order to use Tesla patents, another company must enter into a cross-license agreement to share their patents with Tesla, freely.

Also, this was YEARS ago. When no one took Tesla up on it, they stopped sharing access to newer things (new motor designs, new battery designs, gigacastings, etc.).

 

[bkp_duke]

Here's a good video from Munro Live looking into HW4. It may give some upgrade from HW3 insight.

TL;DW - HW3 to HW4 upgrades are not happening. Form factor, wiring harness configuration, etc. are too different to retrofit.

 

[UncaNed]

I am buying used next time. Mine is down $50k.

I felt a little bad, so I went out on the highway, put my Model X in Plaid, and stomped it. Sure made me feel a lot better real fast!

 

[Artful Dodger]

I definitely think Elons dream of everyone giving up car ownership for a flawless robotaxi servcie instead...

Elon said nothing of the kind (perhaps you dreamed that). The vision for Robotaxi is to provide safe, reliable. low-cost alternative transportation in urban areas for the currently underserved part of the population. Totally different market than EVERYONE. Rich people aren't giving up their privately-owned cars.

 

[UltradoomY]

Gotta take a disagree on this one.

"It is estimated that 83% of the U.S. population lives in urban areas, up from 64% in 1950. By 2050, 89% of the U.S. population and 68% of the world population is projected to live in urban areas."

U.S. Cities Factsheet

Large, densely populated, and bustling with activity, cities are cultural and economic centers, providing employment, leisure, and educational opportunities. Energy and resources flow in and out of cities to support their population and infrastructure. However, there is increasing attention on...

css.umich.edu

That's not to say they won't also own private vehicles, but may opt to leave them at home for daily transit.

I predict San Francisco will be the first metropolis to ban non-automated private vehicles from city streets. Can't wait!

I read through this study that you linked and I would be very curious to see it with updated info for after the pandemic.

The study was completed in 2021 but most of the data shown is 2017-2019.

Just anecdotal data from me but the influx of people moving out of City centers into the suburbs has been staggering the past 2 years.
We see a TON of out of state movers relocating here to Florida and they mostly come from urban cities either located in the north east or out west.

Not sure how this applies to the Robotaxi idea but I would think there is still plenty of opportunity for the fleet. Just don't know if I agree with the info on the study.

 

[2daMoon]

No, it wouldn't. The target audience for Robotaxi is people who can not otherwise afford a car.

It seems to me that "having no desire" to own, store, and maintain a car in an urban environ will net more Robotaxi users than just the "can't afford" crowd will.

Robotaxi will reduce the need for ownership by providing private use of a vehicle, on demand, in a setting where the burden of ownership is easily outweighed by the service-provider taking that role.

The additional benefit of the parking/garage space being freed up for other uses will further encourage Robotaxi use. As transitioning of those spaces to green space, business, and residential use will be very attractive. It will become easy for most urban car owners to justify taking a Robotaxi instead.

 

[madodel]

Cathie Woods remains a big supporter of Tesla saying that for any competitor to take share from Tesla they will have to cut prices to where they lose money on every EV sold. Tesla has such an advantage with innovation in building cars and lower costs from economies of scale.

 

[Gigapress]

The evidence is that the competition is growing their relevant market share faster than Tesla however you want to cut it. Before you say that the relevant competition is the entire vehicle market, note that the access gate to that vehicle market is cell supply, where Tesla's share is sliding. Yes loads of other vehicle companies may go bust en route, but those cells will still get to market in someone's vehicles.

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Extrapolation of the current battery trend will probably end up being wrong because Tesla is the only company making good profits selling BEVs. Everyone else is subsidizing their BEV sales with ICEVs, hybrids, government assistance or investor capital. In fact it looks like BYD might be the only competitor not losing money on their BEV program, and we don’t even know that with certainty because they don’t disclose that information.

This strategy can’t be sustained at scale unless the margins improve massively, but at the same time Tesla still has plenty of cost left to remove in the coming years and will be able to undercut everyone. It also will mean that Tesla can afford to offer better contract terms to battery suppliers and miners and refiners to edge out competitors.

 

[AndrewZ]

It seems to me that "having no desire" to own, store, and maintain a car in an urban environ will net more Robotaxi users than just the "can't afford" crowd will.

Robotaxi will reduce the need for ownership by providing private use of a vehicle, on demand, in a setting where the burden of ownership is easily outweighed by the service-provider taking that role.

The additional benefit of the parking/garage space being freed up for other uses will further encourage Robotaxi use. As transitioning of those spaces to green space, business, and residential use will be very attractive. It will become easy for most urban car owners to justify taking a Robotaxi instead.

I'd imagine parking/garage spaces would largely need to be converted into autonomous EV charging stations, one of the other components necessary for realistically having this operating in an urban environment. And then we need to think about traffic congestion, another hot topic Elon has speculated about when you have autonomous vehicles zipping around everywhere to people rather than sitting parked ready to go.

There are so many things that need to happen, I don't think there's a chance in heck it'll be here within 7 years but would love to be proven wrong.

 

[Gigapress]

I think one thing many Tesla bulls don't take into account is converting the M3 to the Highland version this year. That is going to introduce M3 downtime which will end up decreasing M3 production numbers and sales for the year, and this might be why Tesla is only officially guiding for 1.8 million cars in 2023.

Sure they might do more, but I would not expect it because Tesla knows more than we do, and they have guided for 1.8 million.

Right. 1.8 million is definitely possible if there’s a multi-month production outage for any reason.

We’ll probably have a better idea after Investor Day.

 

[M|S|M MYP]

And the say Elon pumps $TSLA stock....

 

[petit_bateau]

Extrapolation of the current battery trend will probably end up being wrong because Tesla is the only company making good profits selling BEVs. Everyone else is subsidizing their BEV sales with ICEVs, hybrids, government assistance or investor capital. In fact it looks like BYD might be the only competitor not losing money on their BEV program, and we don’t even know that with certainty because they don’t disclose that information.

This strategy can’t be sustained at scale unless the margins improve massively, but at the same time Tesla still has plenty of cost left to remove in the coming years and will be able to undercut everyone. It also will mean that Tesla can afford to offer better contract terms to battery suppliers and miners and refiners to edge out competitors.

It doesn't really matter whether the auto makers are losing money and go bust.

What really matters is whether the cell manufacturers are making money, and that seems to be the case. Provided they still make money and keep on growing at these rates, the batteries will find a home in cars some way or another. Probably via the auto makers that somehow stay on top of the churning waters.

 

[Cosmacelf]

Hmmm ...... it would be nice if it were so .... In many ways 2019 was the high point and that is even more obvious when one looks at the corresponding volumes in cell take :

%BEV

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%EV
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The irony is that my base case assumes Tesla turns the trend around, hence the 2023 number in the base case.

But equally, that is not the trend that the factual data is demonstrating.

What BEV was getting 75% of the market in 2014? And 80% in 2013? Golf carts?

 

[SOULPEDL]

CNBC host on the squawk today called Tesla's Wed event "Analyst's Day". A slip or intentional?

 

[Max Plaid]

Hmmm ...... it would be nice if it were so .... In many ways 2019 was the high point and that is even more obvious when one looks at the corresponding volumes in cell take :

%BEV

View attachment 911940

%EV
View attachment 911941

The irony is that my base case assumes Tesla turns the trend around, hence the 2023 number in the base case.

But equally, that is not the trend that the factual data is demonstrating.

You write some informative posts, but please stop with this false narrative that Tesla's market-share is declining, from 22Q4 Shareholder Deck -> market share continues to increase, in the US from ~2% end 2022 to ~3.5% end 2023

 

[insaneoctane]

Since the SEC has zero interest in reigning in the MM/Hedgie's practice of heavily (at times) manipulating the stock, why doesn't Tesla come up with a clever solution to at least discourage it? I understand that splitting the stock via divided causes consternation among the manipulators. Why not commit to a technical split/reverse split randomly once a quarter? If it was 1:1.1 or something small and then reversed randomly within a few months, wouldn't that incentivize the jerks to take their ball and go bother some other company?

 

[oldTAVguy]

We must remember...

https://twitter.com/x/status/1630093111602081794

But they will thankfully give Tesla a 7 year head start. /s

 

[kbM3]

Do you know what the data collection is actually used for and where the concept originated? Mobileye + AWS were collecting data from a claimed 70million cars around the world as of the middle of 2022. NVIDIA has hardware in who knows how many vehicles. I think the big auto firms are mostly using various implementations of tech from Mobileye and NVIDIA, not their own in-house stuff. For example, Mercedes Drive Pilot is actually an implementation of NVIDIA's Drive Orin.

Tesla is currently using NVIDIA H100s for the actual neural net training. This is not Tesla versus just the OEMs, it's Tesla's vertically-integrated approach versus the OEMs + Mobileye, NVIDIA, and whoever else.

MobilEye? Tesla can send a campaign to their fleet to get disagreements between what the driver does and what shadow mode predicted, or to collect rare edge cases like occluded stop signs. And then they can retrieve 8 HD video clips (for 360 degree coverage) back from the vehicle. That’s what’s valuable.

As far as I’m aware, MobilEye is not anywhere close to having that kind of data engine. Do you have evidence they do? Can MobilEye even send an OTA command or update to cars with no OTA?

 

[Chunky Jr.]

CNBC host on the squawk today called Tesla's Wed event "Analyst's Day". A slip or intentional?

Hanlan's Razor : "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity."

 

[AndrewZ]

MobilEye? Tesla can send a campaign to their fleet to get disagreements between what the driver does and what shadow mode predicted, or to collect rare edge cases like occluded stop signs. And then they can retrieve 8 HD video clips (for 360 degree coverage) back from the vehicle. That’s what’s valuable.

As far as I’m aware, MobilEye is not anywhere close to having that kind of data engine. Do you have evidence they do? Can MobilEye even send an OTA command or update to cars with no OTA?

Mobileye’s Self-Driving Secret? 200PB of Data

www.intc.com