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

[insaneoctane]

In my view that is one key reason why I do recommend TSLA and Tesla to my friends and family. Frankly it is rare to be able to do well by doing good. Equally I do recommend buy and hold, for that is the only way to be [in theory] calm.

Agreed. Normally "good guys finish last"

 

[replicant]

https://twitter.com/x/status/1652218410460401669

How is this/he significant? His LinkedIn doesn't tell us anything except he was an Embedded Software Engineer at Apple for about 4 years https://www.linkedin.com/in/rangaraj-srikanth-44811858/

 

[jerry33]

Do you have a source for that? I found the rate at 38.4 cents per gallon here:

Motor Fuels Taxes in a Changing Texas Transportation Scene

Since 1923 Texas has used motor fuels excise taxes to maintain roads and bridges. But while driving has changed drastically, the taxes we depend on to fund roads haven’t.

comptroller.texas.gov

The 38.4 cents includes Federal tax, only state tax should be considered. $0.20 is the State tax rate. 15,000 miles / 25 mpg * $0.20 = $120. (My number was from two years ago, my bad for not checking the new rates). $200 is still far more than $120.

 

[2daMoon]

Politicians only care about how much you contribute. If Elon contributes more than the dealer cartel, then the laws will change.

Except that many of the lawmakers own dealerships and are card-carrying members of the cartel. Another challenge to overcome.

An alternate approach would be to violate the law, get the case before a jury, and have the law nullified by the jury. This might take repeated attempts to achieve the goal, and some delicate maneuvering to get the charges stated in such a way it would be easy to make a mockery of the matter to the jurors.
(though it may not be possible to get the case before the jury, as the charge could be styled as failure to pay a fine or something administrative not related to the source law)

Otherwise, an unlikely ground-roots effort to repeatedly bring the bill up to change the law in Texas (every 2 years?) might be a never ending battle. (perhaps has been already)

I don't see this happening any time soon, so, unlikely to be a factor in making investment decisions.

If it were to happen, and become contagious to the other states with similar laws, that would be a big deal and I'd like to see that happen.

 

[EVMeister]

How is this/he significant? His LinkedIn doesn't tell us anything except he was an Embedded Software Engineer at Apple for about 4 years https://www.linkedin.com/in/rangaraj-srikanth-44811858/

The significant part of it for me was the motivation behind the move. It shows Tesla's mission is a very powerful draw for talent. There aren't many companies people work for where they state: "Words cannot express how pumped I am..." and also "I can confirm that this place moves fast, works hard, super cool and extremely talented". As a Tesla shareholder I found it uplifting to read the Tweet, if you didn't then maybe you need to question why you're a shareholder?

 

[Gigapress]

Hello??? Did anyone catch this?

Elon FINALLY talked about desalination in public on tonight’s interview with Bill Maher. He didn’t say much about it, but he shut down Bill Maher’s claim that we will run out of water and insisted that desalination is “absurdly cheap” and will solve it.

I was disappointed to see desal totally omitted from Master Plan Part 3, because 1) we will need it and 2) it will be a BIG driver of total global demand for electricity in the coming decades. This increases my conviction that MPP3 is a base case for the transition to sustainable energy that’s massively underselling the actual total addressable market for energy consumption.

If you don’t believe me, search my post history for “desalination” for some math on this topic. Because desal is already done at industrial scale, we already know the order of magnitude of energy required to desalinate water via methods like reverse osmosis and multistage flash distillation and the physics are well understood. In a future world of cheap, abundant clean energy I expect the much more energy-intensive flash distillation option to become dominant, because it’s really cheap and simple except for the energy cost, which is why almost all desal today is performed via reverse osmosis instead. Multistage flash distillation is basically just boiling water and condensing it repeatedly in a series of staged tanks until it’s pure enough.

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Image source

Freshwater scarcity is a huge problem we’re facing in many regions around the globe, and droughts are hitting the Middle East, North Africa, Australia, and the North American Southwest especially hard. This is going to continue getting worse and worse over time. Relying on increasingly unreliable precipitation and wishful thinking is not a viable strategy, and neither is sucking our aquifers dry until nothing’s left. Luckily, almost all of those countries facing the worst drought and heat stress also have have excellent solar resources, lots of barren and deserted land, and their own saltwater shorelines on oceans and seas which are also conveniently located near the biggest population centers. The H20 molecules are there in abundance but they’re mixed with impurities and downhill from where they’re needed. Both of these problems can be solved in brute force fashion with copious supply of energy. Right now, this is why only countries with extremely scarce freshwater and extremely abundant energy, such as the UAE, do substantial amounts of desalination. With where the cost of electricity from solar and batteries is headed, soon everywhere will have even cheaper energy than Emirati oil and gas is today.

MPP3 presented a path for replacing existing energy uses with renewables. It estimates that total human energy consumption maybe actually be cut in half due to the efficiency gains from electrification. For what MPP3 looks at, this is probably more or less correct, but again I assert that MPP3 is totally neglecting new future use cases for energy that will come from low-cost, guilt-free renewables. Depending on exactly how you want to estimate it, it’s plausible that desalination by itself would consume more energy than everything else in MPP3 combined, possibly even by a factor of 2-10x. It’s really hard to estimate precisely without making big assumptions but no matter what parameters I use the numbers are gigantic. Water just has a high specific heat, a high latent heat of vaporization, and is used in staggeringly large quantities by humans.

And now today Musk liked and replied to a desalination tweet.

https://twitter.com/x/status/1652240207385862144

3 kWh per m^3 of water is typical energy consumption for modern high-efficiency reverse osmosis plants. Any hypothetical new technologies couldn’t improve this by very much, considering that “For typical seawater at ambient temperature and 3.5% concentration by weight of dissolved salts, the universal thermodynamic limit (TL) to separate water from the solution (but at zero recovery) is 0.78 kWh per cubic meter, as given by the Gibbs equations12,13. However, the practical specific energy consumption for seawater desalination plants available hitherto may vary from 5- to 8-folds higher than the ideal limit.” (Source: Nature)

However, as I’ve argued before, in a future of cheap solar energy, there would probably be less focus on desalination energy efficiency in order to save cost in other areas.

Humans currently use 4 trillion cubic meters of freshwater globally each year, and the long term trend has been for this number to rise. Unless there is a dramatic disruption of the agriculture industry in terms of irrigation, indoor farming, or people’s willingness to eat less animal food from conventional animal farms, then we simply need a lot of water. Getting 1 trillion m^3 from desal would require at least 1 PWh (petawatt-hour) of energy input at maximum thermodynamic efficiency. Real-world efficiency including pumping and transportation consumption, especially if the desal market switches from osmosis to distillation to exploit cheap energy, can easily exceed this by 10x or maybe even 50x. “The range of specific energy consumption (SEC) for MSF [multistage flash distillation] plants is typically 20 kWh–25 kWh per cubic meter of freshwater produced” (source).

So, we can estimate that replacing a substantial fraction of current world water consumption with desal could burn on the order of 10-100 PWh of energy per year. In comparison, in the 2022 Impact Report Tesla estimated 84 PWh of total energy consumed in a sustainable energy economy based on the figure presented in MPP3 which did not include desal.

Furthermore, this is just accounting for possible human uses. Conceivably, I’m the future we might start to actively refill parched lakes and rivers. Does this sound far-fetched? Maybe, but this year Israel is already starting to do it to maintain water levels in the Sea of Galilee. It’s still experimental and the first such project in the world, but it’s actually in operation right now and scientists are collecting data on how it’s impacting the ecosystem in the lake.

What else might have been omitted from the Master Plan?

 

[Stretch2727]

The 38.4 cents includes Federal tax, only state tax should be considered. $0.20 is the State tax rate. 15,000 miles / 25 mpg * $0.20 = $120. (My number was from two years ago, my bad for not checking the new rates). $200 is still far more than $120.

I think many US states will use a flat rate for EV's to grab more money.

There is cost involved if you try to do it on a per mile basis for EV's and some owners will try game the system. Not sure there is an easy solution.

In NJ I think this day will come sooner rather than later. The gas tax is reviewed every year. As the total income from gas taxes declines they raise the rate to make up for the loss to keep the total income on track to support some formula for expected road infrastructure.

As EV catch on and gas sales drop there is going to be an upward spiral in the gas tax. So far no separate fee for EV's but I can see the outrage when all the ICE owners figure out they are the only ones funding the roads after some large gas tax increase. We also have no sales tax on EV's and a "sometimes "until the money runs out incentive so the adoption is pretty strong. 8% EV market share last year. At some point they are going to need to make up for the revenue loss.

 

[jerry33]

I think many US states will use a flat rate for EV's to grab more money.

There is cost involved if you try to do it on a per mile basis for EV's and some owners will try game the system. Not sure there is an easy solution.

In NJ I think this day will come sooner rather than later. The gas tax is reviewed every year. As the total income from gas taxes declines they raise the rate to make up for the loss to keep the total income on track to support some formula for expected road infrastructure.

As EV catch on and gas sales drop there is going to be an upward spiral in the gas tax. So far no separate fee for EV's but I can see the outrage when all the ICE owners figure out they are the only ones funding the roads after some large gas tax increase. We also have no sales tax on EV's and a "sometimes "until the money runs out incentive so the adoption is pretty strong. 8% EV market share last year. At some point they are going to need to make up for the revenue loss.

Paying a fair share is not an issue. Paying more than others is.

 

[AndrewZ]

Tesla moving a whack of S/X from Fremont over to Europe

Not much historical Euro data but this might be the first time they've ever been there in such numbers?

 

[navguy12]

How the F*CK does this happen in my state when we are supposed to be "pro business" and Abbott all up in Elon's butt. Maybe Elon should get off the GD Twitter and keep track of stuff like this. And yes I'm pissed. The F*CKING Tesla HQ is now in Texas.

$200 is way too much.

UNREAL.

https://twitter.com/x/status/1652108806673891330

Up here in Canada, I get into long “discussions” with the anti-EV crowd; one argument being how EVs aren’t paying into the maintenance of the road system because Evs don’t have to pay a road maintenance tax at the gas pump.

My answer is always the same: remove all “infrastructure“ taxes from all forms of energy and fund “infrastructure“ via general income tax.

Their retort is always “what about people that don’t own a car”? (Sidebar rant: suddenly caring for non car owners, much like suddenly caring for poor people when a carbon tax is discussed, seems to only happen when discussing EVs).

I always come back with: do non car owners eat? If they eat, then the food they bought was brought to them via a road network. And whatever business the non car owners are involved with requires a road system to distribute their goods (and indirectly, their services).

As for the Texas governor being “pro business“; this $200 EV fee has nothing to do with business, it’s strictly personal…but I’m sure you already know that.

 

[TesslaBull]

Consolidating replies to several things-


Ok. Except since the majority of states don't have annual inspections which verify your annual driven miles, what choice do they have but a flat fee?

Just let everyone self-report? That'd work about as well as the state consumption tax where you're supposed to report all the things you buy online without paying sales tax every year and 99% of people just put 0 and nobody ever follows up on it.

Your example for comparison assumes a 50mpg hybrid, which is...not what most people are driving... I do think it'd be reasonable to set the fee at roughly something like "average MPG of cars on the road, average # of miles driven annually, average price of gas over X period (TBD for X), and then times the gas tax rate (insert debate of using the state vs total rate here since the feds are losing $ too which is typically passed right back to the states so you need to make up for both)... rather than just picking a # out of a hat as seems to be done in some states. That does mean if you only drive 3k miles a year you're overpaying, and if you drive 25k a year you're underpaying- but again what's a practical, better, alternative?

FWIW my own state charges $130 for EVs... when I ran the math based on my Lexus I owned at the time, and the avg miles I was driving at the time, I found this was actually about $100/yr cheaper than if I kept the gas car. Today however I drive a ton fewer miles so I'm likely paying more. It's not a big enough difference either way to be ok with just letting the roads rot unfunded though.

Wow, I didn't realized this. Well, in that case, part of the solution is to simply make annual state inspections mandatory, as it should be! I don't want to share the road with people driving on completely bald, unsafe tires, brakes about to fail, and a bunch of lights not working properly. If left to their own devices, many, maybe most, people have no regard for their own safety, let alone others. Look at how many morons drive motorcycles without helmets unless the government makes them. I've never lived in a state that did not have any form of vehicle inspection.

Just had the inspection done on our Kia. $28. I feel good about paying that knowing that everyone else has to as well, and cannot legally drive with bald tires and dangerous brakes.

Manual annual inspections to include current mileage, and tax due based on miles driven. It could even be an upfront fee included in the registration based on an average, then a reduction or increase on renewal based on actual use.

I currently do not pay any yearly EV registration fee. If I do, it would probably be somewhat fair to me as we currently drive a lot.

If the plan is to match gas tax revenue, many will drastically underpay and many will drastically over pay if a flat fee is used.

If Super Frugal Frank drives 100 miles/year in his 2012 Nissan Leaf, he shouldn't pay a $200 road use tax.

I also get your point that a flat $200 fee isn't going to make or break anyone, but if the flat fee needs to be double that to produce enough tax revenue........

 

[Snerruc]

I'll adjust my position and agree that relative to TX current gasoline tax per gallon, the proposed tax seems too high. I verified via a couple sources that TX tax is $0.20/gallon for unleaded. It's probably double what it ought to be for parity with the current gasoline tax (see table below). Unfortunately, the flat tax nature of the EV tax seems like the only option. While taxing electricity seems like the analogous approach, electricity is used more for non-motive reasons and adding a usage tax to electricity certainly wouldn't be fair for all the other non-EV usage. So, not taxing at the pump means a flat tax is the simplest replacement of revenue. Any other approach seems overly complicated (ie mileage based). Sorry our governments are so hungry, but honestly we the people tolerate (and thus enable) it.

Considering that the biggest selling cars are pick up trucks and suvs, I think most of the guesstimates on fuel efficiency are way high. My son’sNavigator gets about 19-20 mpg on the road and about 12-15 around town. Don’t even ask about when he is pulling a 25 ft ski boat.

 

[MP3Mike]

I think many US states will use a flat rate for EV's to grab more money.

Yep. Oregon at least went as far as having the additional fee be based on the rated MPG of the vehicle for gas vehicles as well. (Otherwise you get high efficiency vehicles not paying their fair share.)

But the fee for EVs is too high: (Note these are for two years.)

You can opt to install a GPS based tracker and pay by mile instead of most of that fee, but that actually works out to be more expensive unless you really drive almost no miles in the state.

and cannot legally drive with bald tires and dangerous brakes.

I'm pretty sure that is true regardless of if the state has an inspection program or not. But it is just like everything else, there are shops that will pass vehicles that shouldn't be, and people will swap stuff on to pass and then take it off again. (Happens in Oregon where they will put on a not-cat exhaust system, but put the stock system back on every other year to pass the emissions inspection, and then swap back to the polluting noisy system.)

 

[navguy12]

Semi looks nice in blue. Take the pepsi logo off and I'd be willing to drive it bobtail as my daily driver (assuming I can charge it on 120v ).

The ”New Bern Transport Corp”.

 

[Christine69420]

Tesla moving a whack of S/X from Fremont over to Europe

View attachment 932979
Not much historical Euro data but this might be the first time they've ever been there in such numbers?

Well we just had a ship arrive from the US. As was said earlier this month Tesla had two ships packed with S/X underway to Europe and Asia which made the P&D numbers a bit out of whack. I guess the one for Europe just arrived.

And I speculate the new S/X have some improvements since my local is selling one TMS which has been there for a few weeks for a really nice price. Was there HW4 and what not that came for the S/X recently?

 

[GhostSkater]

sugardesign_1 on Instagram has nailed the Highland and Juniper exterior design based on recent leaked photos of new front headlights and bumper. Takes cues from the 2nd Gen Roadster. Notice that less is more, integrated fog lights within the headlights, no side air intake grills. Simpler, easier and more economical to manufacture and maintain. Together with impressive visual improvement IMHO, not to mention the countless other mechanical, electrical and interior changes that will surely form these new versions. This is how you make the worlds best selling car even better.

View attachment 932948

View attachment 932949

I have so many mixed feelings about the redesign

Don’t know how to explain exactly, but looks generic, or a video game car

I know it gets design cues from the Roadster, but the Roadster has a few more details that completely change the look, the air inlets for the tire air curtains for example

 

[Knightshade]

The 38.4 cents includes Federal tax, only state tax should be considered.

Why?

The federal tax ends up going... back to the states for roads...

Further- the guy AT THE PUMP pays it regardless of where it goes. So the EV owner SAVES the full 38.4 cents on each gallon he's not buying. If he had a gas car he'd be paying more than the EV registration tax out of his own pocket each year based on the #s I cited regardless of where the tax goes.

$0.20 is the State tax rate. 15,000 miles / 25 mpg * $0.20 = $120. (My number was from two years ago, my bad for not checking the new rates). $200 is still far more than $120.

$144 if you use the actual # of miles Texans actually drive on average per my source... but again removing the federal tax- that just gets sent back to states via highway funds and comes out of the drivers pocket either way- does not accurately judge the cost to the car owner.

So in short-- the $200 is less out of pocket for an EV owner than he'd otherwise spend in gas taxes each year.


Now- if the feds suddenly decide to tack on some federal EV annual cost to make up for THEIR lost gas taxes--- rather than just giving the states less money as their federal gas tax revenues shrink- that's a different story.... but right now, today, $200 is "cheaper" for the EV owner than if he had an average gas car in texas and drove an average # of miles and paid the full gas tax on that.

Paying a fair share is not an issue. Paying more than others is.

See above- you're not. You're paying less (vs an average gas car owner in texas anyway), it's just all going into the state bucket instead of being split state/fed.

Wow, I didn't realized this. Well, in that case, part of the solution is to simply make annual state inspections mandatory, as it should be! I don't want to share the road with people driving on completely bald, unsafe tires, brakes about to fail, and a bunch of lights not working properly.

FWIW- I agree entirely in principle with that.

But most states that don't have those inspections don't want them (it's not like they couldn't have required them if they did)-- and now you're adding ANOTHER set of costs to car owners to pay for the inspections (and to pay for all the bureaucracy that needs to be added to check up on the inspection stations, track the results, tie into car registrations to block you if you didn't get inspected, etc).

Flat fee based on a ballpark average gas tax cost is vastly simpler (and cheaper) for the state-- and doesn't burden car owners with needing to physically go get inspected each year, pay a fee for it, etc (though again, all things being equal it'd be better/safer if they did).


There is one sort-of compromise idea- require self-reporting of mileage annually when you renew your registration-- and require a true-up when the car is sold, with some sort of financial penalty if your #s are too far off from what your annual reporting had indicated. You could still get around this by selling out of state I guess (or if your car is junked you'd avoid the true-up) but I doubt the $ difference would be worth the trouble to most to try and cheat that-- and the added burden/cost for that system is a lot less than requiring vehicle inspections in the dozens of states without any such system today (the downside of course is you don't fix the idiots riding on bald tires problem....)

 

[FireMedic]

Just did a a 4400 mile road trip to starbase from Fremont. I have no real words to describe the joy this man (Elon) has brought to my life. Haters be damned.

I wish I had the time to expound on how SpaceX Tesla and Elon made a weeklong father/son road-trip so enjoyable. But; they say a picture is worth a thousand words. Here’s 3000 words real quick.

Can confirm. The future is bright.
View attachment 931173View attachment 931174View attachment 931176

Weird update on this road trip…sorry, OT weekend ramblings.

1 day after completion of a 6 day 4400 mile cannonball run from NorCal to starbase (and back thankfully) I was SC’ing near home while grabbing lunch; and returned to some all of the warning lights on. Mostly high voltage battery messages.

Tried all possible resets to no avail. Setup a tow through my Tesla insurance app and had the vehicle at my local service center within an hour on a flatbed.

They didn’t have a loaner so they sent me to sales to ask for an overnight demo vehicle (pro move imo) to get me home and they had a loaner returning soon, for me to pick up the next day. I had expressed interest in replacing my wife’s M3P with a model S; so they set me up for a (late ‘22) model S loaner and sent us home in a ‘23 Model X.

Before I’d even arrived the next day to swap the demo for our loaner I received a message from tesla service that they’d diagnosed the vehicle and would need to order a new HV pack. Service rep suggested ~4 weeks as likely turnaround. The battery failure was at 65xxx miles so is thankfully covered under warranty.

Both visits to the service center, it was bustling with new deliveries, people waiting for or setting up demo drives, and (presumably people waiting for service) walking around googling all the new models.

3 days later and they’re saying they already received the battery- so vehicle should be completed by Tuesday.
(BATT,100KWH,SX,REMANUFACTURED,RAVEN(1107679-
01-E)
And if they’re right and I get the car next Tuesday; that’s an 8 day turnaround. Pretty impressive.

So I should be thrilled, right? Well, no. This loaner (‘23 model S) is the most amazing car we’ve ever driven. What a car…now considering trading in wife’s 3P for a new LRS; 3 years free supercharging is pretty sweet.

Anyhow, a few take aways here

1) some people have exceptional service experiences and don’t share them. Before tesla we had all BMW, so that’s all I know…and they were always pretty terrible. Breakdowns are inconvenient challenges, but I can’t imagine expecting better service than I received.

2) new model SX are amazing and I recommend all investors go setup a demo drive; because these cars are truly next level. Ventilated seats FTW.

3) the new SX have track mode and we did a few launches…I swear, I was convinced, that these were plaid. I later confirmed they are not. The new LR S&X are going to dominate the luxury/performance EV segment. They are just too good! IMO plaid is unnecessary for anyone not planning to put a parachute on it.

Tesla service sucks
Tesla should cancel SX

 

[EVNow]

They could will certainly appreciate this concise, expert, and detailed solution that only someone of your unique insight may offer in order to make right this travesty!

Stop talking down.

 

[woodisgood]

In my view that is one key reason why I do recommend TSLA and Tesla to my friends and family. Frankly it is rare to be able to do well by doing good. Equally I do recommend buy and hold, for that is the only way to be [in theory] calm.

Yes, I agree and am usually itching to have the full conversation, but find nobody is really willing to invest the time into hearing about it. Most are looking for a buck as quickly as possible from their investments and even if they’d be attracted to something like this in principle, don’t believe it’s possible and I’m a dope for believing it is. *shrug*