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

[JRP3]

Yeah, nothing about cycles in those write-ups. Just the pack replacements @ because Tesloop overcharges:

"High Voltage Battery: The Model S has had its high voltage battery replaced twice under warranty at 194,000 and 324,000 miles. Battery degradation over the course of the first 194,000 miles was ~6% with multiple supercharges a day to 95-100%, instead of the recommended 90-95%. Between 194,000 and 324,000 miles Tesloop experienced battery degradation of ~22%"
​

Certainly nothing in there to support any claim to a 3000 cycle life for the battery pack, which would be approx. 680K miles for a 90KWh pack S/X to 80% capacity.

Actually there is support for that claim:

High Voltage Battery Degradation: After 2 years of extreme utilization the current battery pack has lost 12.6% of its original capacity yielding range of approximately 214 miles when the charge limit is set to 95%. Tesloop has noticed that their 2016 Model X’s degradation has essentially plateaued after about 9 months.

Model X 90D “Deuxy” Achieves 300,000 Miles In Less Than Two Years

 

[kyzhk]

Yeah makes it seem like Tesla is sandbagging the range a bit

It's very much possible.

Competitor: We are releasing our 240 mile model now.
Tesla: OTA update unlock 420 miles on model s long range.

 

[Silent Ludicrosy]

What a week. And now I have to listen to the earnings call tomorrow? I'm exhausted.

And then the SEC reasonable pants agreement after that.

 

[tinm]

I am worried about the appalling service and sales communications, which seem almost baked into corporate culture, and are extremely alienating.
I am worried about the inability to provide geographically distributed service centers.
I am worried about their blase attitude toward basic software issues which customers care about, like getting the media player working.

Let's try a little first-principles thinking.

For starters:

• What thrilled me about watching the FSD webcast yesterday was the discovery that there are teams within Tesla that are obsessed with learning and good uninterrupted communications -- hooray!
• Elon is deeply involved with these teams -- excellent!
  
• The essence of Neural Nets is learning, based on massive ingests of data which is then fine-tuned and tweaked.
• These teams have brilliantly seeded nearly the entire multi-hundred-thousand-car Tesla fleet with the ability to tell the mothership what's going on out on the road -- massive competitive advantage.
  
• Tesla's FSD/AI teams obsess over the fleet sending back data on driver interventions, which arguably are failures of the car to do something right on its own while in autonomous mode
  
• By having teams of annotators who go in, study the videos of what the car was doing when a driver intervened, and essentially teach the neural net how to do it right on its own, the NN learns, you avoid those types of interventions in the future
  
• The result is a smarter, SAFER self-driving car, arguably leaps and bounds above any competitor for years to come

Okay, now imagine if Tesla approached its currently-so-so Company/Customer Communications (CCC) with the same level of obsession and passion. Imagine if Tesla realized that:

• Every http request on the Tesla website is a customer intervention.
  
• Every tap of a button in the Tesla app is a customer intervention.
• Every visit to a store is a customer intervention.
  
• Every order by a customer is a customer intervention.
• Every email, phone call, text, etc. from a customer to an order specialist is a customer intervention.
• Every call to the trucker asking when the car will be delivered is a customer intervention.
• Every call to Tesla Roadside Service is a customer intervention.
  
• Every repair situation is a customer intervention.
• Every time a customer calls a service center to find out the status of their car: it's a customer intervention.
  
• Every inquiry from a customer, from email, phone, text, in-person, whatever, all day long, 24/7/365: it's a customer intervention.
• Every time a customer hangs up in frustration after being on hold for 30, 60, 90 minutes and not getting anywhere, it's a customer intervention.
  
• Every time you try the VIP/executive "escalation" feature to get a response from Tesla, it's a customer intervention.
  
• Every customer intervention is just as important, just as valuable (arguably moreso) than a driver intervention.

Now think about Tesla's corporate culture as just another neural net. One that right now is very dumb and running on the equivalent of a Pentium chip from 1994 with 16MB RAM.

If you consider all the times a customer attempts to "intervene" with Tesla, especially when Tesla's been nonresponsive/noncommunicative, you realize how effed up the company still is from the customer experience perspective. Sure, lots of you out there have great, satisfied experiences. I get it. Especially if you live in California. Lots of other places, not so much. Some are downright horrible experiences.

Compare the standardized homogeneity of the FSD universe in Tesla cars with the heterogeneity of Tesla's corporate culture in terms of CCC. Compare what Tesla can and will achieve with the exact same constantly-improving neural net downloaded into its entire fleet of cars, with the random/uneven experiences customers have with Tesla company interactions around the country/world. Everything in the latter case depends on the initiative/dedication/training/attitude/skills of the individual Tesla person you interact with. Get a good one, great. Get a so-so one, awful. (Imagine if some Tesla cars were just stupid and never "learned". Imagine if the fleet had tons of such cars in it.) Problem is, in the customer experience world, you deal with multiple Tesla employees. Customer issues are handed off to multiple people. Maybe the first one you deal with is great. Next one you're handed off to, not so great. One after that, great. Then you're assigned a total dud. And the dud is the most important one in the chain, and you never get an email reply or phone call reply from them. Ever. (That's my general experience.) Poorly managed expectations. Frustrated, exasperated customers. Fail.

Imagine in FSD division of the company, they discovered the driver intervention-count stayed high, perpetually. Elon would freak out, wonder WTF they were doing wrong, maybe heads would roll. But imagine what the customer intervention count is with Tesla every day. Who's minding that count, Elon? Who's obsessing about getting it to zero? Or think of it this way, where is the "March of Nines" for customer experience? How do we get to 99.9999999% blissful customer experiences?

So, let's fix this puppy. Imagine applying some first-principle thinking Elon-style to CCC.

• Imagine every single Tesla owner, every one, including every would-be/wannabe future owner, those who are thinking about buying: they're all part of *the Tesla market*.
  
• Think of the Tesla Market as just another fleet.
  
• Tesla, you own this fleet too. But you're not doing much with it right now. Not efficiently anyway. Show it some love.
  
• Imagine every time there is a customer intervention, Tesla studies it just as obsessively as FSD driver interventions.
  
• Imagine every time there is a customer intervention, someone on this CCC "annotation team" studies why the customer intervened, and figures out how the company can avoid doing whatever it did that let to poorly managed expectations, unresponsiveness, 60+ minute on-hold experiences on the phone, etc., in the future, and feeds that back into the company DNA -- which one should think of as just another neural net, that is desperately eager to learn but is being starved of data.
  
• Imagine how many customer interventions happen every day.
• Imagine all the "annotations" Tesla would be faced with if they obsessed over them. Every day. It'd be a lot.
• But over time the onslaught would drop fast--why, I would bet exponentially.
  
• Imagine how fast they could cut down on the failures that triggered a customer intervention in the first place.
• The Tesla corporate culture "neural net" needs training now how to improve, by new management practices, standards of accountability, and new technologies and business practices installed wherever they're needed most, to streamline/improve communications and responsiveness and overall customer experience.
  
• The lack of accountability and the mismanaged expectations are what are triggering so much frustration on the customer side. Consider customer frustration or disappointment no different than a car operating under FSD having an accident.

There is a way to FIX the CCC problem at Tesla. So that the owner experience is as good, as brilliant, as game-changing, and as far out in the lead as the technology, the cars, and the software. THAT is what Tesla SHOULD BE. Tesla as a brand should mean EVERYTHING--products, ordering, service, app, the whole lifecycle of a customer, is way beyond every other automaker. You would have loyalty like you would not believe. Tesla's CCC experience is holding the company back from achieving this.

C'mon Tesla. You have to fix this. You have no choice. If you're betting the farm on a robotaxi future, face the reality: you have no robotaxi future if the customer experience of the robotaxi service sucks. And if you do nothing in the next 12-18 months, and launch the Tesla Network with today's CCC, the robotaxi service will suck, from a car-owner perspective and a passenger pespective. And you lose. We all lose.

Like Elon said yesterday about LIDAR: "Lame. Lame."

Don't be lame, Tesla.

 

[Unpilot]

I DEMAND a refund I bought my car a little over a year ago and it was the top millage dog...and then Tesla up's the game to 370 and leaves me as second fiddle!?!?

Fred were are you ...we need to chat!

 

[MP3Mike]

Ha! Motor Trend said they could have gone 400 miles! Good enough for me!

@neroden why did you disagree with this? They actually did say that.

As we pull into the Supercharger stall, our elapsed time from the Bay Area stood at 6 hours, 11 minutes, 359 miles. With 83 kWh used, we had 11 percent of the battery remaining—which equates to 41 more miles at the rate I was going. Right at 400 miles if you add it up.

Motor Trend drove 359 miles and said that they had 11% left.

If you calculate that out they would have been able to drive ~403 miles.

 

[Tenable]

Did they just kill ventilated seats again? Looks like they added cream but I don't see wording for ventilated seats any longer.

 

[S3XY]

People were wondering why the Autonomy Day was coming before the Q1 call.

As in, if autonomy was good news, why spoil it with the Q1 call which will probably sound bad?

We arguagly have our answer: the autonomy news sounds absoutely terrible from an investment perspective. Some smart person on the board perhaps said "Get this bad news out of the way before the Q1 earnings call".

Why have the autonomy day at all?
(1) Because Musk is a nut and insisted on it, perhaps?
(2) Because they want to kick down the overinflated valuations of Waymo, Uber, Lyft, etc., who are doing even worse on autonomy?
(3) To show off their state of the art hardware, which they aren't monetizing?

No. As someone stated earlier, the reason they presented the Investor's Autonomy Day was to convince investors that their autonomous technology and the Tesla Network plan are sound so they can do a cash raise to make it happen. They want to build a bunch of cars to use on the TN. It will take cash to do it. All of the presenters were very confident in what they have created thus far. This was definitely not a Friday evening bad news dump.

 

[davecolene0606]

Actually pretty sure that was with a customer car on NoA rather than a Manufacturer plated FSD demo car.

Not much difference in performance between the two on the highway. AP 2.x runs about 80% CPU load vs 5% for FSD Computer, so again not noticable to an end user.

Cheers!

Cheers!

 

[Prunesquallor]

...
Tesla just set the bar so high that other EV manufacturers are curled up in a shower crying.

I really do wonder what the hell automakers in the EU are going to do.

1) EU put together brutal and well-crafted CO2 emission penalties starting next year.

2) None of the automakers are close to meeting them (except maybe Toyota), and the paltry number of EVs some of them are expected to put out won’t help much. They started way too late.

3) No one will buy them anyway given the superiority of Teslas in the range of $40,000-$100,000

The penalties are in the billions, and they only get worse in later years. And their EVs aren’t going to get any better with respect to Tesla at this rate.

 

[MP3Mike]

Did they just kill ventilated seats again? Looks like they added cream but I don't see wording for ventilated seats any longer.

It sure looks like they did.

 

[Unpilot]

Nice write up about the refreshed MS

2019 Tesla Model S: 5 Important Updates You Should Know About - MotorTrend

 

[Tenable]

Did they just kill ventilated seats again? Looks like they added cream but I don't see wording for ventilated seats any longer.

It sure looks like they did.

Nice work team! Now we know how they really got that extra range. #TSLAQ

 

[Big Blue 1011]

No. As someone stated earlier, the reason they presented the Investor's Autonomy Day was to convince investors that their autonomous technology and the Tesla Network plan are sound so they can do a cash raise to make it happen. They want to build a bunch of cars to use on the TN. It will take cash to do it. All of the presenters were very confident in what they have created thus far. This was definitely not a Friday evening bad news dump.

Curious as to why it was originally scheduled to take place on Good Friday, when the market was closed.

 

[Artful Dodger]

Actually there is support for that claim:


Model X 90D “Deuxy” Achieves 300,000 Miles In Less Than Two Years

Yup, that's roughly 1350 cycles to 12.7% degradation over 2 years. So possible they'll get to 3000 before reaching 80% degradation, but far from optimal when they're supercharging 4x per day to 95%.

Their experience isn't going to be typical of the duty cycle seen by most Tesla's. Still the 3000 cycles claim by Elon yesterday is new, Tesla's previous esitmate was 1500 cycles in normal service.

Anyway this is too far down in the weeds, so I'll depart this discussion now.

Cheers!

 

[scaesare]

When I was watching the discussion about the chip Tesla built, I had flashbacks of trying to read some posts in this thread.

Elon...I mean @Fact Checking and our resident cyborg...er uh I mean @KarenRei and some others, I start to feel like Im watching this:

Right up there with the Rane PI-14!

 

[S3XY]

Karpathy vaguely said that they had some ways of dealing with that but didn't go into any detail. I would have liked to have heard more. (Like, hire some good drivers and check them...)

I think they need at least 2 professional drivers, say Kyle Busch and Danica Patrick. That way the NN can learn both the aggressive male and the courteous female driving habits. /s

 

[Remus]

I am really torn by this FSD stuff. On one hand karpathy's presentation is enjoyable and confidence inducing. On the other hand why Elon has to concentrate on robotaxi every where. Why don't you remind people there are money to be made along the way. First is the obvious one, Semi platooning. Second one is fully autonomous expressway driving, even only on serval designated highways such as i80. That's much easier than robotaxi in NYC. And shipping company would pay big money for that. Heck they can even have driverless sleeper buses running between San Fransisco and LA, built on semi power train. Or sell semi based RVs where the owner can go to sleep after driving it onto the highway.

 

[RobStark]

And now we all wait for the interior upgrade...…………..the waits continue lol

 

[Unpilot]

Or sell semi based RVs where the owner can go to sleep after driving it onto the highway.

YES YES YES I am in!!!