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

[MarcusMaximus]

I gave this a "like" because it literally made me laugh and I like laughing.

So, just for kicks, who gets to define bigotry and stupidity?

Dan

Weekend OT:
Whoever wants to? There’s no requirement(on the political left or much of anywhere else in the civilized world) that anyone be “tolerant” of others opinions, statements, or beliefs, so long as they refrain from violence or threats of violence.

The appeals for “tolerance” from the left refer to ingrained, unchangeable characteristics of people like skin color, gender and sexual orientation(religion is often included too, despite being a fluid choice, but it is by the right as well, so...). And are largely enforced by using free speech rights to criticize those showing intolerance.

There are, of course, calls from the fringe to ban things like “hate speech”, but that’s not terribly surprising. Free speech is an issue a lot of people have trouble with, roughly equally, on all sides of the political spectrum.

 

[electracity]

The best strategy would be to have three factories, US, EU and China, and all of them producing all mainstream cars (S, X, 3, Y). The GF1 can be used for Truck, Semi, Energy, and cell manufacturing.

Producing all cars in all markets would be extremely expensive. Model Y production is a big problem for Tesla. It appears what they will go for is entry level 3 (and a later entry level Y) made in China for export. Fremont will have one model 3 line for upscale cars and build out Y production.

Non of this is ideal but they are time and capital constrained. What they can control is to be as flexible as possible in 3/Y production planning to be able to shift production as demand shifts.

The whole gigafactory concept applied to autos has always been a joke. There are enough people and logistical support in low cost areas like Reno to allow huge auto factories. Employee and land costs are too high in places like the Bay area. Auto plants are typically distributed and medium size because that approach produces the best economics.

 

[RFernatt]

The first two sentences were good.

Then, in a time competitive space, your suggestion will not work.
... JFK said, "Man on the moon in this decade."
Was that wrong to say?...

Fair point, but I do see it as different. A national government with nearly unlimited resources setting an aspirational goal years into the future is one thing. The leader of of a commercial entity setting "3 months maybe, 6 months definitely" time frames is not an aspirational goal any longer, it's a forecast that is used for investment decisions and comparisons with competitors. If the forecast had been FSD in the next decade - no harm, no foul. The thing that's curious is that there doesn't seem to be any empirical learning in regard to communication, date setting, etc. It's like Dr. Jekyll, Mr. Hyde, you don't know which personality is in charge this week.

Not selling any stock, actually been buying recently, but it is an area where Tesla could use some work IMO.

 

[Drumheller]

Can I be a mod with delete rights, please? I'd like to trim this thread down to the 50 pages of useful posts it contains.

Thanks.

 

[Krugerrand]

Not a great news. You don't reorg team that's working great.

Or you reorganize a good team to make it an even gooder team. The difference between a division winning team and a Stanley Cup winning team.

 

[SO16]

Can I be a mod with delete rights, please? I'd like to trim this thread down to the 50 pages of useful posts it contains.

Thanks.

Add a “relevant” rating. Then others can filter out irrelevant posts if they want.

 

[pnungesser]

Another ship, Grand Phoenix, at Pier 80.

 

[Krugerrand]

Hmmph. Should have stopped rather than swerved; you can't tell which direction a bunny is going to run.

You just can’t give any credit, can you? The car did in fact practically come to a stop. It didn’t have to completely stop because the rabbit moved in the opposite direction. I bet the car would have finished braking if it had had to.

The car didn’t swerve violently and it didn’t swerve into traffic or even swerve into the ‘wrong’ lane to be potentially hit head on and it didn’t swerve beyond the shoulder of the road or even much onto the shoulder of the road and certainly not down a cliff AND it didn’t hit the damn rabbit.

How about this? How about that’s a really stupid rabbit for a) being in the middle of the road, b) being in the middle of the road at night!, c) being in the middle of the road at night without a flashlight!, and d) then changing direction without signaling.

 

[mongo]

Producing all cars in all markets would be extremely expensive. Model Y production is a big problem for Tesla. It appears what they will go for is entry level 3 (and a later entry level Y) made in China for export. Fremont will have one model 3 line for upscale cars and build out Y production.

Fremont will export higher trim levels, but GF3 will only export as far as the greater China region.

Shanghai Giga output is just for greater China, not North America. Affordable cars must be made on same continent as customers.

Twitter

The whole gigafactory concept applied to autos has always been a joke. There are enough people and logistical support in low cost areas like Reno to allow huge auto factories. Employee and land costs are too high in places like the Bay area. Auto plants are typically distributed and medium size because that approach produces the best economics.

Bay area is not conducive to large footprint manufacturing, that has no bearning on Gigafactory as a concept. Having suppliers usually means having separate plants. Building in house means you can put everything under one roof. Look at Ford, the Rouge site is 6 different plants on 600 acres. No advantage to spreading out your internal processes.

 

[AndyH]

If Panasonic is aiming for 35gwh at Giga1 this year then isn't that enough for 10k M3 per week + some storage by this years end?

Shanghai 3k and 2k S+X on top of that = 15k per week.

Run rate of 780k by early 2020 maybe.

 

[HG Wells]

The car didn’t swerve violently and it didn’t swerve into traffic or even swerve into the ‘wrong’ lane to be potentially hit head on and it didn’t swerve beyond the shoulder of the road or even much onto the shoulder of the road and certainly not down a cliff AND it didn’t hit the
damn rabbit.

DAMN RABBIT ?
How does the car determine what (if any) religion the rabbit is ?

 

[EVNow]

If Panasonic is aiming for 35gwh at Giga1 this year then isn't that enough for 10k M3 per week + some storage by this years end?

Shanghai 3k and 2k S+X on top of that = 15k per week.

Run rate of 780k by early 2020 maybe.

I don't think they can make 10k model 3 in Fremont. They have only talked about 7k + 3k coming from Shanghai.

They should anyway be concentrating on building Model Y and Semi. We have not seen any evidence for more than 400k demand with ASP of 50k.

 

[Maitri982]

1. I'm working in this industry, for what, 25 years now? Your attempt to school me on this very topic, is at best cute, at worst, offensive. So if you have any dignity, I wouldn't mind an apology.
   
   
2. I never actually said that, but thanks for putting words in my mouth.

Yes, it's a common misconception by outsiders that productivity increases linearly with the headcount, when, in fact, the opposite is true – as you correctly stated. BUT this is not the issue with the Tesla UI team, I can assure you, knowing people first hand that worked for and with them:

They are simply overworked und understaffed for the amount and scope of their work they have to deliver.

This is not general assembly where you can add a few hours of physical labour that you can sleep off the next day. Designers and engineers are productive for what, 4-6 hours net per day? Beyond that, they produce garbage and garbage only. Garbage that has to be fixed eventually. Letting them work 60h+ a week doesn't result in more amazing code or design, it results in more subpar work you can trash the other week.

Letting people work to a point where they fall asleep during mission-critical meetings – as I was told – is not a sign of great work ethics but rather of weak ass management.

There is no reason, no ****ing reason, why they shouldn't hire another 10-30 designers. There's a difference between being "spartanic" and "idiotic" and as things are right now, the Tesla UI team setup is clearly in the "idiotic" category – hence why design superstars like Andrew Kim are leaving.

Oh God, please tell me you're not in charge of … anything. This very thinking led to the demise of many, many enterprises during the dot.com-era. It's so outdated and obviously wrong, I'm actually dumbfounded.

But for starters: It's the "SOMEHOW" part that's the problem. UI- & UX-design is supposed to be holistically embedded in the very DNA of a company, bottom up – commanding "great design" top down simply won't cut it the long run. Now if your management orders to patch in feature X, Y, Z SOMEHOW it most likely will result in weak design decisions – and the name-giving "user" will notice.

See how properly design-driven companies like Google, Facebook and Apple are set up. They got it. You, obviously, don't.


I've been super transparent in that regard, feel free to look it up. Thanks for the allegation, though!

You have zero understanding of software development and your statements in this and your last post show that.

You also act like you have "sources" who told you things. Sure you do. You are here for one reason only, to make people doubt and sell Tesla.

Now study up and learn something about software business OK boy? Off to ignore you go.

 

[Maitri982]

Can I be a mod with delete rights, please? I'd like to trim this thread down to the 50 pages of useful posts it contains.

Thanks.

Ignore is a very useful feature...the reading of this forum without the polarizing people on both sides is much better.

If you think Musk/Tesla is above even the slightest criticism...off to ignore.

if you are here to spread FUD and scare Tesla longs. You may get a reply or two then off to ignore.

There's like 5-10 posters here who have something useful to say about Tesla as an investment. The rest is noise.

 

[EVNow]

Um...a tolerant personality would tend to care what other people think.

Buddyroe saw my one disagree on that post and went on a disagree spree on all my posts. Tolerance !

 

[Krugerrand]

DAMN RABBIT ?
How does the car determine what (if any) religion the rabbit is ?

I’m not sure how the car decides that (must ask Elon at the next ER call), but clearly the car decided the rabbit wasn’t too stupid to live. Go figure. Now that rabbit is free to populate the planet with more stupid rabbits.

 

[capster]

This worries me.

His approach is from the the first principle, one of science, and not engineering. That produces awesome proof of concept systems, but not great production-ready code.

I'm worried we'll get quicker delivery times, but end up with more brittle codebase; such that Tesla will end up paying technical debt for years to come.

Which would you choose?

1) A car codebase with 100% coverage of unit tests with access in the field only via the on-board diagnostics (OBD) port.

2) A code base with some sensible pre-launch tests, but not 100% coverage though the code is instrumented, the car does wireless reporting, driver instructions may be changed, and OTA updates are readily done.

Even if the second choice has fewer nines at launch, it will likely have a higher average number of them for the life of the vehicle. Maybe if I had made this point clear in an earlier post of mine, @Pezpunk wouldn’t have disagreed.

In my experience, the first approach is actually more prone to debt in addition to the inherent drag.

The second approach allows a much, much faster innovation cycle in addition to yielding more reliable cars.

Tl;dr; You can mix and balance technology affordances and development and testing protocols in various ways to manage technical risk. And, here’s another ace up Elon’s sleeve.

 

[Zhelko Dimic]

I am not arguing this is great news, but your argument does not hold water at all. Microsoft reorg the azure team (with layoffs) when their cloud business is growing at pretty high speed.

Team and business. Not the same. (One could argue Azure's success is driven by installed customer's base lock-in effect and smart business policies, rather than quality of the offer. I know I almost chose them, agains my will for a few $M/year spend. Because of how they were offering free builds and compute time, and ease of integration into our eco-system...)

But further, it's been tumultuous couple years on software self-driving side. I've hoped that team was settled by now, right people are in charge, and they have teams that works amazingly well together.

Elon feeling need to take control and shuffle things around, whether it turns out good or bad, tells me things are not great. They may be ok, good even, but not great. And that's disappointing, as software was one area to take comfort in, after pressure coming from production, cell capacity, margin and demand concerns. To anyone that has none of these concerns, good for you - you can't ease my concerns no matter what you say, until I see Tesla's results that debunk them.

 

[JRP3]

Totally agree with your statement. My respect for the office comes from its role as the head of one of three equally powerful branches. Same as the Speaker of the House or Chief Justice.

Dan

I don't respect titles, I respect people, when it's earned, which is what the founding fathers were going for by not setting up another monarchy.

 

[JRP3]

Buddyroe saw my one disagree on that post and went on a disagree spree on all my posts. Tolerance !

Did the same to me