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

[Stretch2727]

I keep seeing this, and these arguments are incredibly short-sighted.

Does a car battery have MORE storage than a powerwall? Yes.

But the big GOTCHA with this is the following:
1) the Inverters in the car are NOT designed to run that power in the opposite direction for any significant load. This means:
-- a) Tesla will need to design new bidirectional inverters.
-- b) Those inverters will likely add some cost to the car, as they are not are simple as what Tesla has honed in on and produced now
2) you have to have a house setup designed to accept this power - you guys expecting Tesla to put a bunch of 240V connectors in and you string some massive cables back to your breaker box? Even the Tesla wall charger is not designed to accept the power required for something like this. And here is an example:

Our house has 4 x PW 2.0 in it, each one is on a 30A 240V circuit (120A 240V total). That's the BARE MINIMUM to run our electric oven and either one AC, or the two AC units alone (but not the oven), and then various other lower-power devices. To run that kind of power that 4 PW2s provide you would need at minimum a set of 1-gauge copper wires connecting from your entry point from the car to the house. THAT IS NOT small. It's a lot larger than the wires in your wall charger (4-gauge).


People here are looking at STORAGE CAPACITY (the size of the swimming pool) and completely forgetting POWER OUTPUT (the thickness of the hose).

For any meaningful power output, the inverters need to be beefed up, and you need a substantial mechanism to access that power (i.e. thick wires back to a bidirectional wall charger or a lot of big ports on the car).



If Tesla implements V2G/H I would expect it will be limited to something like 5-7kw output (i.e. one powerwall power output). It will be helpful for something like a disaster, but it's not going to replace powerwalls unless someone is willing to pay for a VERY beefy inverter + cabling setup.

Things like the Ford F150 aren't setup either to run a whole house. They are "partial home" backup solutions

Everything I wanted to say about this subject.

Also you still need a gateway/switch to disconnect the power back up for the grid. Ford's is $4000 not including installation. The installation is estimated. $3.5-$10K. Also, charger also needs to be beefier to handle the higher current. At best you get a partial home solution so the breaker panel needs to split the load as well.

Anyone that thinks this is simple should watch Tom M's video on this subject. It really lays out the complexity/cost of doing this.

I would be happy with a few 120V plugs in the car for critical things during a power outage. Simple.

 

[ZeApelido]

A few notes:

1) The optimus video absolutely was not CGI. The slow movement patterns and unsteadiness are classic remarks of a robot with a somewhat rudimentary balance control algorithm.

2) Someone who attended had a chance to speak with Tom Zhu and asked about Mexico factory - the product out will NOT be shipped to the U.S. and is for the Latin American market. I presume that to mean it's the compact seden over the van coming out of their.

3) Monterrey is almost 2,000' above sea level, so Tesla can ignore battery supply constraints and just roll the cars down the hill into the ocean w/o batteries.

 

[SageBrush]

That's because the whole system needs to be failsafe as battery back up is treated as increasing the ability of the system to transmit load.

So far as I understand these things, the issue is anti-islanding. A battery as a DC source is about the same as PV as a DC source

 

[KBF]

Not sure if this has been shared here yet:

CRTC approves Tesla’s Canadian Telecommunications licence application

The Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission has approved Tesla’s Basic International Telecommunications Services Licence.

driveteslacanada.ca

They specifically noted in their application that they weren't going to put up telecommunications infrastructure, so it puts a damper on Tesla Phone rumours. I also found this quote amusing:

"Of the dozens of applications currently in front of the CRTC, Tesla is the only BITS application with interventions. Of these interventions, three were negative, and the rest were positive. The negative interventions referred to Tesla as a “meme of a company” and Elon Musk as a “megalomaniac billionaire.” The CRTC noted however that these interveners were not able to substantiate their claims."

 

[oldTAVguy]

A few notes:

1) The optimus video absolutely was not CGI. The slow movement patterns and unsteadiness are classic remarks of a robot with a somewhat rudimentary balance control algorithm.

2) Someone who attended had a chance to speak with Tom Zhu and asked about Mexico factory - the product out will NOT be shipped to the U.S. and is for the Latin American market. I presume that to mean it's the compact seden over the van coming out of their.

3) Monterrey is almost 2,000' above sea level, so Tesla can ignore battery supply constraints and just roll the cars down the hill into the ocean w/o batteries.

Break this into three posts. That way I could give you: 1 - thumbs up, 2 - informative, and 3 - happy face.

 

[SageBrush]

Anyone that thinks this is simple should watch Tom M's video on this subject.

I watched a few minutes. Tom is too verbose for me. It is apparent from the get go though that he was upgrading his home for bi-directional, 240v AC at 80 Amps. That is much different than attaching a ~ 360v DC battery to a dual-mode PV inverter.

Depneding on the specifics, a homeowner may need a gateway. That is expensive today, but scale will bring the cost way down.

 

[Singuy]

As someone who has both EV's and Tesla Solar and Powerwalls, it is not just a question of having (a) a car with unidirectional flow, and (b) some sort of home charger that is also an inverter.

To be able to have powerwalls my house needed about $10K of electrical upgrades, plus approval by the city and approval by the utility.

That's because the whole system needs to be failsafe as battery back up is treated as increasing the ability of the system to transmit load.

So being able to use my Model 3 as additional powerwalls might be nice for me, but that is because I am already in on the $10k work plus $3k technology, all I would need is utility and city approval.

Basically, you can't just plug your house into an EV.

I am interested in Ford's system, but it is absolutely an additional cost. Plus, utilities do not, by the way, generally (or at all) allow you to charge batteries from the Grid. They do not allow, basically, rate arbitrage. I think there is an argument that they should.

But V2H is not, absent already having solar and powerwalls, a feature that really can be used assuming a car even had the feature.

Why are we still talking about this? If Ford had a powerwall to sell, they wouldn't add v2g either. Tesla will add it if they find it's a feature people want and it's causing sales. Before that, no free powerwall for you. Elon is making up excuses on stage but he is a business men who sell products you know.

 

[MC3OZ]

Another good video from Dave:-

Seems to me that one variant of the van could be a minivan for 6-8 passengers, coupled with a Robotaxi which seats 2-4, that is most of the rideshare/public transport market covered with 2 vehicles. probably no real need for a bigger bus.

The van would also be a normal work freight van. the main difference is fewer seats.

In conjunction with the Cybertruck that is most of the light commercial vehicle market covered.

Finally the van could be a compact camper van, a van is a very versatile vehicle shape,.

 

[Southpasfan]

I watched a few minutes. Tom is too verbose for me. It is apparent from the get go though that he was upgrading his home for bi-directional, 240v AC at 80 Amps. That is much different than attaching a ~ 360v DC battery to a dual-mode PV inverter.

Depneding on the specifics, a homeowner may need a gateway. That is expensive today, but scale will bring the cost way down.

Or to put it the most simple way. Let's say you want an old fashioned gas generator.

say, this one:

DUROMAX 13,000/10,500-Watt 500cc Push Button Start Gasoline Portable Home Power Backup Generator Transfer Switch Ready, CO Alert XP13000X - The Home Depot

Make sure you always have access to the power you need with this Duromax 13,000/10,500W Push Button Start Gasoline Portable Generator. Perfect for camping, RVs and jobsites, this generator can power lights

www.homedepot.com

You can see on the side of it you basically can plug something into it, you can see someone plugging in an RV to it.

That is a long, long way from using it to run your house during a power outage.

The poster upthread who mentioned not to confuse the size of the swimming pool (capacity) with the size of the hose (output) is right on.

Its true that the capacity of these EV batteries exceeds that of powerwalls for many installations.

The F150L and the Cybertruck will be fantastic for charging electric power tools on jobsites.

Using an EV as back up power to a whole house is complicated because the electrical system of a house is not set up to just accept another source of electricity (other than the grid). You can see the posters who have solar and PW systems posting on this.

We are not being negative, but there is a reason that this is not a use case which is easy to adopt. I just don't anticipate a large market for EVs as whole house back up options.

 

[Singuy]

Sometimes I feel like Tesla investors are the world most terrible businessmen. "Show the 25k car!" "We want V2G because the competition...." "Stop delaying the cybertruck". Musk must be face palming.

Musk: "how many ways do you want tesla to osbourne sales and go cash flow negative while not selling any more cars just for these products to come out?"

Investors: "Yes"

This is why so many are suckered into companies like Rivian/Lucid. Flashy products, terrible business model. Many Tesla investors doesn't care because they feel like the product is what give the stock value, not the business. Typical retail investor's mindset. "I love the product therefore I buy the stock". Yeah, Rivian is giving a car that cost 200k away for 85k, of course you love the product....

Tesla is spending all their effort to make sure the 25k car having a gross margin of over 20% before they start production. Retail investors: "What a disaster! Why even bother doing a hyped up investor day if they are not going to reveal any products?!@@"

 

[Webeevdrivers]

Note that the question was how many vehicles were needed TO REACH 20M. So basically the aspie answer Elon gave was

Tesla can theoretically reach 20M cars with ~10 models.
Tesla may or may not do significantly more than 10 models, but it's probably not needed for 20M.
In the short term Tesla will focus on making good cars and for that fewer models is better.
Elon thinks Apple's iPhone model more or less applies to cars.

If we do the math
SEXY=4
Semi, Cybertruck, Roadster= 3
Van, $25k, Robotaxi = 3
So that's 10. Elon thinks this is enough for 20M...

Buses will be disrupted by robotaxi. What other market segments are there? Short haul trucking?

I can’t see any kind of robotaxi happening for at least a decade. And certainly present progress suggests even longer. The rest seems doable.

 

[wipster]

<snip>
I think in the long term we ought to be thinking a lot bigger than even the “extreme size” Tesla presented us with Master Plan Part 3.

Agree completely my friend... when the Robots take over, they gonna want as much power as they can get!

But seriously, I think we are all ignoring a potentially huge power source that runs 24 hours a day and that's Tidal power. There's got to be an efficient and effective method to capture something that consistently rises and lowers twice a day, in some places as much as 17 meters!

I've often thought of ways we could dam certain inlets or bays, along with creating our own pools on places like the Pacific Coast on the Olympic Peninsula. With the ultra efficient generators they're currently using on the dams on the Columbia and Snake rivers among others), surely this could create substantial power, 24 hours a day, eliminating the need for battery usage.

But maybe I'm dreaming...

 

[Skryll]

Sure, if you go that route. But that defeats the point that everyone here was talking about. Going without a powerwall and using the car to power the home.

For me the use case is rather: Go with only one powerwall because your car has another 5 powerwalls worth of power to add if needed.

Instead we got 3 powerwalls and our teslas sit around idle and unhelpful once those are empty.

Or even 0 powerwalls and.our regular 10kW solar system plus a power gateway that allows us to go off-grid in case of a power outage, powering the home from solar instead of shutting the solar production down for safety of grid workers. Then if need be, feed back some of that power from the cars into the home while being off grid, or charge with unused extra solar coming in at day.

 

[Sparky4life]

For Investor day what I feel was missing wasnt stuff hidden in the details. For analysts having more plain metrics would have been helpful for summary purposes.

What is current production volume out of Giga Texas for Model Y? What is expectation by Q3, Q4, 2024.
Same for 4680 production.
Same for Giga Berlin production.
What is planned launch Quarter for CyberTruck? Production expectation for Q3, Q4, 2024.
What is Semi production volume? How many you expect to produce in 2023, 2024.
What is Megapack production out of Lathrop? Again quarter by quarter expectations.
What is Powerwall production? Again quarter by quarter expectations.
What is Solar installation volume? Again quarter by quarter expectations.
What is Solar roof production volume?

Etc. etc.

As for the $25K car. It is not a good idea to announce until right before production starts. Do all you can do to keep the car underwraps. Hide everything you can because the car lingering coming soon will introduce competition for the Model 3 and Model Y. Dont know if you can say that, but it is the smart thing to do. As for a Van I think they could have announced that sometime after CyberTruck launches we will make a CyberVan.

If I’m Tesla, I’d rather take the short term stock price hit than divulge off of this information to have it used against me when deviations inevitably happen.

As an investor with a multi year horizon, I say “carry on!”

 

[SageBrush]

This slide from yesterday shows average kWh delivered per post throughout the Supercharger network. It works out that for now demand charges average out to 62¢ a kWh at $15 a kW. And even though the capacity utilization is only ~ 5%, 1% of charging events include a wait time.

Supercharging is one tough nut.

 

[MP3Mike]

This slide from yesterday shows average kWh delivered per post throughout the Supercharger network. It works out that for now demand charges average out to 62¢ a kWh at $15 a kW. And even though the capacity utilization is only ~ 5%, 1% of charging events include a wait time.

Supercharging is one tough nut.

View attachment 913153

I thought the other slide showed that non-energy costs were down to $0.12/kWh. (Which would include site costs, maintenance, depreciation, and I assume demand charges.)

 

[heltok]

I can’t see any kind of robotaxi happening for at least a decade. And certainly present progress suggests even longer. The rest seems doable.

Just a little note. 10 years ago people believed that neural networks would never be a big thing. Then alexnet happened in 2012 and that took of the deep learning revolution. For the first time computers could label an image as a cat or a dog. Since then we have had machine translation, deepmind atari, alphazero, alphastar, dalle-2, GPT3, chatGPT etc. A lot can happen in the next 10 years... Look back a the first Tesla AI day 3 years ago:

Karpathy had to explain what a neural net was to the audience... And it was a big thing that a camera could estimate the distance to a car and not just pick out the lane lines from an image...

 

[SageBrush]

Which would include site costs, maintenance, depreciation, and I assume demand charges

Doesn't look like it to me

 

[SageBrush]

Why are we still talking about this?

I'm talking about it because I think V2H is a key enabler of the transition to a clean energy grid and electrified transport. And since that is Tesla's mission statement in a nutshell and yesterday's presentation was all about making the mission statement a reality, it is germane.

 

[insaneoctane]

Tesla has continually said manufacturing will be their long term competitive advantage and this event was mostly about manufacturing.

I've been basting in my thoughts post-event all day. I've had several apiphonies. The latest is the realization that the DNA that Tesla demonstrated last night is why the competition will all be fighting for a very distant second place. Tesla has found a way to not only efficiently design products, but also relentlessly improve those products. And while that alone is unique, impressive, and unlike the competition, the real superpower is they have demonstrated that because it's in their DNA.... they can scale it. Even if Ford or GM assembled a super "crack" team to lead them in the right direction, they can't scale it because the DNA of legacy auto won't allow it.. It's game over, but not everyone sees it yet. Today's discounted shares should be a wonderful gift to those with dry powder.