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

[Robertj]

It's not that hard to model.

Tesla would have to upfront the bank about $1300 for every $10K financed to buy down the loan rate from 7% to 1% assuming a 5 year term.

Or would they filter customers credit scores , gaurantee the debt then sell the debt on , that would lower the interest difference by a couple of % maybe to 3 or 4 % ?

 

[Electroman]

I am surprised to hear this from a long-term Tesla supporter.

FSD is a high priority because each EV with FSD would be capable of replacing 10 gasoline vehicles.
FSD can help increase demand for EVs.
Optimus is a high priority because it could reduce manufacturing costs and help scale car production down the road.
Every project's delay had valid reasons behind it.

Tesla said they will not stop until every gasoline car on the street is gone. I trust them.

Edit:
I will add my two cents to address your other points:

"The Semi being very SLOWLY introduced, a good 3 years late."

• If Tesla engineers have been sitting around doing nothing, then you have a valid point. You should know how hard Tesla engineers pushed themselves on all these projects. The Semi is a product that requires extreme reliability. They produced some, tested them in the real world, and are now redesigning some parts, including changing from a 2-axle drive to a 3-axle drive. If you think it took too long, try working on these projects and see how easy it is.
• Meanwhile, Tesla put in a crazy amount of effort to get the Cybertruck out. This will be a high-impact product.

"The Tesla Roadster 2 being some 4 years late (likely a good halo car)."

• This is a low-impact project but can take a lot of resources to make it perfect.

"The SuperCharger team being sacked with no explanation given. Especially after NACS became the standard, and has been Tesla’s crown jewel. But focus is gone before other manufacturers have modified their cars to use it."

• We don't know what Elon is planning. He did say they will continue to grow the Supercharger network and focus on 100% availability. Have Superchargers been a bottleneck? Someone who traveled 100k miles using Superchargers said he had never waited at a station. I never had to wait in line either.

"EV growth being walked back, significantly, way back."

• No, Elon said we are between two major growth waves. They are preparing for the next big wave.

"Model 3 losing the tax credit, resulting in a 20% price increase and likely a good part of the sales drop."

• Supply chains take a long time to plan. You should blame the government, not Tesla, for this.

"Dropped plans for a smaller value model."

• A cheaper model is coming earlier than planned.
• The Robotaxi could still be two models, one being a cheaper model.

"Strong walk-back on Tesla Solar."

• Running a business is like fighting a war; you have to deal with everything with limited resources. Solar industry itself is progressing well, even if Tesla completely pulled out of it, solar industry would continue to grow. On the other hand, Tesla put in a lot of effort to grow energy storage business.

"Mexico being slow-walked."

• At the moment, even the current lines are not fully utilized. Do you want them to add more production capacity right away?

"Twitter diversion, at a minimum a loss of focus."

• Elon said if we lose to the woke mind virus, we would lose everything—the Tesla mission, the SpaceX mission, the business, shareholder value—everything would be gone. I agree with him on this view. We are still not out of the woods yet.

It all rests on this: "Elon said"

Although I agree 100% with your last bullet.

 

[MartinAustin]

Why are you responding to it.

The troll team is loving the way they are getting actual investor posters engaged enough to post replies and dilute the actual Tesla Investment discussions on here.

While I'm here... our November 2023/HW4 Model YLR is currently installing the update w/ FSD 12.3.6 and (we hope) a free trial thereof.

Also w.r.t. the rear trunklid opening feature - despite being the world's most popular car, in some ways the Model Y is actually the oldest design in the entire Tesla product range. Example: it has stalks on the steering wheel. Every other Tesla has no stalks.

 

[Electroman]

Please don’t let this be a repeat of Twitter. While it didn’t fall apart, the jury is still out (or maybe it left) on its valuation.

Jury has already delivered its verdict - not only the cuts did not hamper the quality of the software, the rate of new capabilities being delivered have now increased quite a bit (it is like night and day now) and the performance is noticeably better too.

 

[alexxs88]

The methodology of the FSD tracker is deeply flawed. I put zero stock in it at all. I wouldn't want to be fooled in either direction from looking at the FSD tracker.

Why do you think the FSD tracker is flawed? (I also partially share this thought, but always curious to get another perspective)

But as a broader point, if Tesla is just about to turn the switch on a robotaxi moneymaking fleet, with 25B in the bank, what's the logic behind antagonizing and demoralizing a good part of your workforce, just as you need everyone at their top of their game for a succesul launch? Unless it's not close to being solved and they need those 25B as runway... Food for thought.

 

[SO16]

Please don’t let this be a repeat of Twitter. While it didn’t fall apart, the jury is still out (or maybe it left) on its valuation.

The company itself is running better than before and more lean. Valuation is an arbitrary number largely based on fickle sentiment.

 

[mickle]

Wow this is a big move!

For anyone unfamiliar - this means Tesla is absorbing the multi thousand dollar difference between the interest rate these cars are being financed at and the 0.99% rate Tesla is advertising.

They will pay for it with the profit from the Cyberhammers. Coincidence that they both came out at the same time?

 

[aubreymcfato]

The company itself is running better than before and more lean. Valuation is an arbitrary number largely based on fickle sentiment.

I used Twitter personally and professionally even before and, while software-side ive seen improvements, Elon antics drive a way a huge part of interesting people. The Blue check is now definetely worse, not useful at all. Before It was not perfect, but right now Is ridicolous. Bots and spam are way worse. On average, a worse Twitter to me.
I tho appreciate that you can find content that Is actively censored on Meta.

 

[Maarten]

The last few days, for the first time in many, many years, I have put some people on ignore here that I suspect of trolling.
And any post that is an answer to a post of any of them, I scroll past without reading one letter.
Requires a bit of discipline, but for now this seems to be working for me.

 

[CorneliusXX]

I'm not sure what you mean by "generalized" RoboTaxi? That could mean a lot of different levels of capability.

Are you saying there will be no Tesla RoboTaxi this decade?

I can remember when it seemed preposterous that a computer could beat a chess grandmaster. The problem was just too hard to solve. A computer could never beat a strong player. It was no match for human intuition, which is something we couldn't even understand, much less simulate. But after 10 years of research, IBM's Deep Blue beat reigning World Champion Gary Kasparaov, who is arguably the greatest player who ever lived.

Similarly, we are about 10 years into Tesla's autopilot/FSD efforts. And we don't even need to match the greatest driver who ever lived.

Automation has been a tough nut to crack. But it looks to me like Tesla has done it. The path seems clear now. I think just the opposite of @unk45. In my opinion there is zero chance that RoboTaxi is not delivered within this decade.

I agree with you that the end to end version of FSD seems like the probable solution for FSD but my confidence in when the combination of data, compute, and algo improvement will get us to the point of FSD is low - 3 years or 10 years and I wouldn't be surprised.

The phenomenal growth rates of compute and data generation can be mapped to give some idea of progress, and reading up on exponential growth also gives me some comfort the timeframe will be towards the shorter end - but ultimately it is a bit of a leap of faith on timings as what is trying to be achieved has never been done before. I also try to remind myself of what has happened in this space in a short period of time - e.g. ChatGPT was only released 18 months ago and it has had crazy improvement since then. Even FSD is showing far more rapid iteration over the last few months than it had done in the last few years.

This is where I also lean heavily on the opinions of people who have successfully created the future before like Elon.

Tesla was far easier to think about when the core growth was focused on the #vehicles and #cells being produced.

 

[cliff harris]

Only like 3% of the population uses Twitter regularly and even sees his Tweets. Elon is also horrible at Personal and Public Relations

One of the most followed people on the most famous and widely quoted social media sites on earth.
A HUGE part of PR is reach. People pay a LOT for reach. Average social media cost per thousand impressions is $6.
This recent post by elon (only yesterday) has so far got 49.5million views. It will be reported in the news, and quoted and reposted many more times, but lets conservatively stick with 50million views.
Thats $300,000 worth of PR for about 30 seconds work by Elon, and zero cost. Go back another 3 days and he has a spacex tweet with 85 million views.
Even assuming he only has a 50mill Tesla tweet once a month, thats $3.6million in free PR a year.

I think he is good at it.

 

[Thekiwi]

If you go to Tesla's website, you can choose your credit rating or pick "Promotion" as your Credit Rating to get the 0.99%. Excellent Credit (720+) gets you 6.49%, Fair (< 640) gets you 11.64%.

To me, this looks like a move of desperation and we'll all see in 2 months, but I think we'll get bad Q2 numbers. That anyone can get cheap teaser rates has the housing credit crisis written all over it again. It'll goose the numbers for the quarter, until the repo man comes from people who should have no business financing a car, let alone a new Tesla.

Also, a lot of these teaser rates tend to have a * or something like individual credit conditions apply, blah blah blah. I didn't do an actual order, but did not see that on the bottom or in fine print. If they're going to reject all the bad credit ones, you might as well not bother. We'll find out in 2 months at least.

I down voted this comment as i disagree that this is an “act of desperation”.

“Buying down” finance rates like this is common place in the auto industry from all vendors. I am happy to see Tesla finally offering this in the USA rather than simply discounting the price, after they had started trialing this in Europe recently.

This also has the effect of not lowering the valuation of cars already purchased, which has been an issue for fleet sales in the last 24 months as Tesla had previously slashed prices.

 

[Stretch2727]

Or would they filter customers credit scores , gaurantee the debt then sell the debt on , that would lower the interest difference by a couple of % maybe to 3 or 4 % ?

Exactly. Someone that would have had a 10% rate due to bad credit will have a buy down to 5-6% rate. As well the credit risk stays with the bank and is not with Tesla if the buyer defaults.

 

[SO16]

I used Twitter personally and professionally even before and, while software-side ive seen improvements, Elon antics drive a way a huge part of interesting people. The Blue check is now definetely worse, not useful at all. Before It was not perfect, but right now Is ridicolous. Bots and spam are way worse. On average, a worse Twitter to me.
I tho appreciate that you can find content that Is actively censored on Meta.

I appreciate community notes.

 

[Singuy]

I used Twitter personally and professionally even before and, while software-side ive seen improvements, Elon antics drive a way a huge part of interesting people. The Blue check is now definetely worse, not useful at all. Before It was not perfect, but right now Is ridicolous. Bots and spam are way worse. On average, a worse Twitter to me.
I tho appreciate that you can find content that Is actively censored on Meta.

First 10 response after any Elon post before we're about btc and doge 2damoon. Today, the first reply is usually someone disagreeing with Elon.

I honestly don't know what Twitter utopia you speak of from before as it was not usable as a platform for discussion on my end.

 

[Skipdd]

Thank you as this is the kind of content that makes this forum great! I highly value your feedback and know that when/if I disagree we can have a good balanced discussion and healthy back-n-forths.

First off, 12.3.6 is *only* E2E NNs on surface streets, not highways/freeways. You are experiencing legacy V11 heuristics and a not-great hand off when this takes place.

And I think this comment ("It is totally incapable of final entry and exit from urban building access.") will be satiated with summon/banish that should be in 12.4.

How would we (1) expand permitted contributors to the Exalted Few?, including those who Maarten overlooked?

I always have maintained this thread is not a democracy. A meritocracy, though? Hmmm.

By the way, @unk45 most certainly would be one of them.

Also, I'd love to know where this idea is in the mix as I skipped the last 18 pages.

Great insight as always. Agree with your last statement, with one important exception. If there is no mechanism for new posters to submit content, how does this forum attract and find the next @Gigapress ? And it’s just possible that an existing poster might occasionally have something very useful to say.

 

[GOVA]

No, I think you are reading the word "spinning" when it's actually SPLITTING.

It's Elon talking about FSD/robotaxies/Optimus. Analysts are not happy that Elon is putting more resources into AI(streaming for netflix) than cars (DVDs), splitting company resources. Eventually the car business will be old news and die off because they will be selling rides in the future and not cars.

You lost me there.

What will those sold rides be used on? I think Tesla cars mostly.

 

[Skipdd]

The topic is that Elon lies about progress of his companies. If there was a tunnel STARTED from NY to DC you can damn sure bet an Elon fanboi would be there from day one of staging to start a YouTube channel. Where is it? I haven't found any proof.

Depends on how you define “started.” They did work to get permission to proceed. Elon Musk receives go-ahead to start DC to NYC Hyperloop tunnel. They had permission in DC to begin digging a tunnel, and had the backing of the then Governor of Maryland, Larry Hogan. Appears they pulled the plug in 2021.

 

[Singuy]

You lost me there.

What will those sold rides be used on? I think Tesla cars mostly.

The analogy is, the car goes from DVDs (high associated costs of a way to send physical media to make chump change) and become Netflix datacenters. It's a new and more efficient way to distribute ride. One car can service the need of 20-30 families a day vs 1. Like how a DVD can only service one family vs a rack of server servicing a few thousand .

 

[sunwarriors]

I down voted this comment as i disagree that this is an “act of desperation”.

“Buying down” finance rates like this is common place in the auto industry from all vendors. I am happy to see Tesla finally offering this in the USA rather than simply discounting the price, after they had started trialing this in Europe recently.

This also has the effect of not lowering the valuation of cars already purchased, which has been an issue for fleet sales in the last 24 months as Tesla had previously slashed prices.

Since I can't edit my old post, there is actually fine print on the lower end of the 1st window so if they give it to only high credit people, it can help as you state similar to legacy automakers. There is still too much supply, too low demand across the EV markets though I feel:

"* Promotional rate valid on Model Y orders placed between May 10 to May 31, 2024 and is subject to credit approval. Taxes and fees listed are estimates only, subject to change, and may not be accurate to you, depending on factors like your registration location."