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

[DurandalAI]

Semi-OT, but Tesla brand/valuation related.

The incident with the Tesla sentry mode catching the guys keying a car, that's excellent free advertising for Tesla. This video made the local news at least and had the anchors saying "what's Sentry mode etc.". Yes, it's a FREE thing we received after delivery. Cool right?

Also, anecdotal, but last night I was washing my 3 in my neighborhood (affluent part of KC suburbs). I had two neighbors stop to ask about the car. The first asked me how I liked it and mentioned she was considering one. The other literally said "Where did you get your car?". She had no idea what a Tesla was until recently and had no idea where to buy one.

People who think demand has peaked are very much wrong. If people still don't even know about the cars, or where to buy them, that's a huge pool of untapped customers.

Does anyone know of some informational flyers in PDF form that some Tesla fan has made that we can print out and say put our promo codes at the bottom? If not, does anybody in the graphics industry want to volunteer some time towards this effort? It would be great to hand out tri-fold fliers to interested parties. I guess an easy option would be printing up some custom cards from vistaprint or similar...

 

[Nocturnal]

Taken at face value, I don't think that's true. You've made statements before acknowledging that 50% range is certainly possible when making numerous short trips with cold soaks between them. Its the "I drove a long haul at speed and got <50% range" that I've seen you take issue with.

However, I believe this particular bit started with "OMG how will Canadians cope with an SR+ in the winter." The answer to that is, I think, pretty simple: the same way they will in warm weather or the same way they deal with the short range of bolts or leafs.

Sure, there should be a CCS adapter for Canada, I get that. But I'm not sure how many Canadians are planning on long drives in -40C blizzards in areas with poor super charging network. Certainly the indications of take rate suggest this isn't a pressing concern for a large number of buyers.

Those complaints are silly. Let's take the absolute worst possible case where the 220 range drops to 110. Ok, well, most people commute less than 40 miles a day.

Cold weather range issues are ONLY a problem on long road trips. Not everyone takes those, they don't always happen in winter, and plenty of people have multiple cars.

 

[bdy0627]

Someone let Tesla know the macro's are improving...thank you.

Trying but the shorts keep answering the phone and hanging up.

 

[Nocturnal]

Does anyone know of some informational flyers in PDF form that some Tesla fan has made that we can print out and say put our promo codes at the bottom? If not, does anybody in the graphics industry want to volunteer some time towards this effort? It would be great to hand out tri-fold fliers to interested parties. I guess an easy option would be printing up some custom cards from vistaprint or similar...

One of our local guys made up some wooden coins with his referral code and basic info. I need to do something like this myself. Too much info to dump on somebody casually.

 

[X Fan]

Miami Beach where I live is replete with Teslas

+1.....FL is second behind California. Previous to this year, not as many were seen in SW Florida but since new Store opened up in Naples numbers are much higher.

 

[EVNow]

OT :

so to retrofit existing cars they have to install all cameras inside the car and wiring the big computer in the trunk, hook up existing onboard computer, which might kill the car's 12v battery and void the cars warranty, at the same time rack up installation cost. With the danger of owner pulling the power plug rendering the whole investment useless.

Remember Waymo would be the owner - and people who would run it on Lyft/Uber wouldn't care about the stuff on top. Waymo wouldn't have to pay the "safety" drivers and drivers won't have to pay for the car. Ofcourse they have to train the drivers on how to use their FSD etc - just like they train their safety drivers now.

Ofcourse 100k cars and $10B is a very significant investment that I won't expect Waymo to make unless they think it is absolutely needed.

 

[jw934]

Harvard Business Review article "Tesla’s Strong Brand Gives It Unusual Expansion Potential"
Saying that if the auto insurance do well then there are more profit to be had by expanding to life insurance.

Interesting quote:
In 2017, Gerber baby food generated $900 million in life insurance premiums; that’s 75% the size of its core baby food business.

 

[CyberDutchie]

Interesting, thank you. Where are your numbers from? Is this relating to Tesla or a general rule of thumb you’ve heard in the industry?
I heard Tesla largely outsources data labelling, but I’d be interested to know where to and how many hours of manual labelling work per year they are paying for.

Your numbers imply c.400 images reviewed per person per hour with c.1.25 useful labelled images per hour.
I would have expected Tesla’s selective data collection/automatic filtering to result in much more than a 0.3% acceptance rate at the level of the human labellers.

The implied rate of work with Indian workers seems a bit high to me -- I would not think quality work could be expected at those rates unless there was an excellent workflow to support it. Interestingly, one of Karpathy's talks mentioned the need for an effective workflow and that Tesla had in-house developed a solution. I think it is doable to human process that many images with assistance but it would require a custom solution. Just tossing people at it would not scale well IMO.

One thing that I think is also relevant here is Karpathy's talk of autonomous labeling. He gave a specific example that Tesla had done. While autonomous labeling is necessary for labeling at scale, I don't think it can dispense with the need for competent human labelers as not everything is suitable for automatic labeling.

It’s anecdotal, can’t reveal a source for these numbers, but it’s not Tesla-hired workers, or related to labeling work that Tesla is doing.

We’re talking about scrubbing through video segments so imagine keeping just a few key frames from 100’s of frames of captured data.

 

[Remus]

OT :

Remember Waymo would be the owner - and people who would run it on Lyft/Uber wouldn't care about the stuff on top. Waymo wouldn't have to pay the "safety" drivers and drivers won't have to pay for the car. Ofcourse they have to train the drivers on how to use their FSD etc - just like they train their safety drivers now.

Ofcourse 100k cars and $10B is a very significant investment that I won't expect Waymo to make unless they think it is absolutely needed.

If waymo is the owner then they can't scale, given vast majority of the data collected are cases where existing system already handles pretty well, they can only collect pathetic amount of meaningful data from their pathetic little fleet.

Lyft uber driver would care if that is their personal car too.

 

[EVNow]

OT :

Lyft uber driver would care if that is their personal car too.

If they are interested, there are lot of options - like leasing the equipped cars out for a low monthly fee.

 

[wipster]

I just placed a limit order to buy MXWL at $3.00 as a test and ETrade accepted it. (It was not filled obviously).

I just bought a few shares via e*Trade, no problem.

 

[Remus]

OT :

If they are interested, there are lot of options - like leasing the equipped cars out for a low monthly fee.

fee?

waymo lyft Uber would need to give those drivers money for them to take that much risk with their personal car.

 

[M3Rider]

Harvard Business Review article "Tesla’s Strong Brand Gives It Unusual Expansion Potential"
Saying that if the auto insurance do well then there are more profit to be had by expanding to life insurance.

Interesting quote:
In 2017, Gerber baby food generated $900 million in life insurance premiums; that’s 75% the size of its core baby food business.

And once there are solar roofs, why not also insure homes, which no longer need roof replacements?

 

[EVNow]

OT :

fee?

waymo lyft Uber would need to give those drivers money for them to take that much risk with their personal car.

Not sure you saw my original post. I'm talking about Waymo giving their cars (i.e. like the ones they have now running in AZ) to Lyft/Uber drivers to drive. So, these would be Waymo's modified cars - not drivers' cars modified by Waymo.

 

[TradingInvest]

And once there are solar roofs, why not also insure homes, which no longer need roof replacements?

That's a good point. Roof damage is a major reason why home insurance is so costly. If Tesla is liable for solar roof damage anyway, it makes sense to take on home insurance. Do not sell solar roof to the areas that have frequent tornadoes or large hails.

 

[Pezpunk]

We get roofers at our door on AT LEAST a weekly basis, offering to “inspect” our roof and find damage from the recent “storm”, and have it fixed through insurance. The sheer number of people who apparently make a living off this is crazy.

 

[samppa]

Those complaints are silly. Let's take the absolute worst possible case where the 220 range drops to 110. Ok, well, most people commute less than 40 miles a day.

Cold weather range issues are ONLY a problem on long road trips. Not everyone takes those, they don't always happen in winter, and plenty of people have multiple cars.

Also range drop isn't that much on long trips. Once the car, motor and battery are all warm, it doesn't take so much energy to keep them warm. I've taken long road trips in -20C, and range was about 20% less than summer. Preheating while still plugged in helps a lot.

 

[Remus]

OT :


Not sure you saw my original post. I'm talking about Waymo giving their cars (i.e. like the ones they have now running in AZ) to Lyft/Uber drivers to drive. So, these would be Waymo's modified cars - not drivers' cars modified by Waymo.

Sorry I guess I sorta missed that, that does not sound so attractive either doe it? You still need to have a manufacture partner to modify the production line to produce those "special version" cars, a pretty big hurdle for scaling up.

Even then the upfront cost would be more than $30k per car on the conservative side. they definitely have to subsidize those leases to have takers. pretty iffy in my mind.

 

[TradingInvest]

Fracking had a major impact to oil price since mid 2014. Without this development, the transition to EV would have been much faster.

 

[EVNow]

OT :

Those complaints are silly. Let's take the absolute worst possible case where the 220 range drops to 110. Ok, well, most people commute less than 40 miles a day.

Cold weather range issues are ONLY a problem on long road trips. Not everyone takes those, they don't always happen in winter, and plenty of people have multiple cars.

Yes, talking about scenarios that fall outside 3N range is a red herring. Its not what most people think about - and those who do, won't buy EVs - because they probably have other issues as well. People have been driving EVs happily in Norway for years, so its not like people in cold countries haven't been using EVs.