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

[avoigt]

But, apparently doesn't know you shouldn't hold the cards so everyone can see

Well, thats the bluff. You believe to have seen his cards as you believe to have seen the message in his mail....

 

[AcesDealt]

Has anyone taken a serious shot at delivery totals in q1 by region? Is 30k n.america, 20k europe, and 10k china plausible? Or is there just too little to go on..

 

[RobStark]

 

[S3XY]

Now, that creates some cognitive dissonance.

An early $TSLA ER is bullish and hints at good results, as was the argument of many when early Q3 results were announced.

But we were just told Q4 is less than Q3 and something unknown is to happen in Q1 to wipe out profits. That last part is worrying me in the sense that it can negatively affect the sentiment going into Q4 ER and after. Can something nice be said about Q1?

The awesome Model Y will be revealed and an avalanche of deposits will follow. Oh, and one more thing...

 

[dc_h]

Gas may get even cheaper if EV adoption increases, supply will increase and price goes down.

Free destination charging will not last as it hss a cost that must be paid by someone.

Solar is not free. The cost of the equipment most be included in that calculation.

I was thinking the same thing on destination chargers. Reminds me of early internet, just the techno nerd stuff I wanted, now all ads and minutiae. Tesla could offset destination charging by providing local partners solar panels to offset use. For 20k they could probably offset the avg destination charger cost. No reason to not charge anyhow, but the cost might be much lower than supercharging.

 

[Krugerrand]

Over the holidays my CA relatives with discretionary income told me they will not buy a Tesla 'because repairs take months.' As other posters have said, mainstream customers will not have the tolerance for perceived challenges that many previous customers had. Any campaign by Tesla to change their image should be preceded by fixing the problems.

A question. For areas where Tesla is not permitted to have a service center or additional SC's, like MI and upstate NY, could Tesla contract with a company, perhaps an existing retail chain, to provide this function, perhaps in addition to some other line of business? No vehicle sales. Is the obstacle a legal one (because of the contract does it run foul of the constraint on OEM's, or does it have to count as a 'dealer'?) or is the problem that it's inconsistent with vertical integration?

Funny, but when I go to buy a car my first thought isn’t about *repair timing*. In fact, in over 3 decades of buying cars, most used, I’ve not once not purchased because *repairs* might be of a period of time I consider long in the moment. I’ve considered repair *cost*.

What a very strange thought process. One might think they’re expecting to be in accidents on a weekly basis. I don’t get it, but then my expectation is that I’ll not be getting into an accident, or needing other repairs for my car. I’ve got a pretty good record going, so...

 

[Krugerrand]

I love this post but hate the facts. When I switched from my beloved P85D I was dismayed by the shoddy delivery mess. The car itself was amazing, although the badging has not yet appeared. Sadly, my car was damaged in an accident caused by an inept driver. I was a passenger seeing it in slow motion but helpless. That was on Sept 14 last year. The car has been in a body shop ever since, with multiple parts requiring multiple replacements because of Tesla errors and delays. they cannot get it right and even are very difficult to reach, Executive Escalation on this subject now ignored.

To my knowledge six reservations have not yet been made into orders because of this. One of those just bought an I-Pace instead. I remain a bull, but I am convinced that sad stories such as this are causing orders to be deferred and reservations cancelled. I remain hopeful that Tesla will fix this. If Tesla repeats this stupidity in Germany and/or Japan it might just be terminal. Right now I am a very worried bull. All of Tesla must know, but no actions seems to be being taken to fix the delivery/service/parts messes.

Someone just posted in the past week that they spoke to a service tep that major changes came down the pipeline Jan 1 and everyone is working their butts off.

 

[RobStark]

Funny, but when I go to buy a car my first thought isn’t about *repair timing*.

I have never considered buying a car where getting a fender might take months.

 

[Krugerrand]

Do you even realize all the things you accuse regular employees of is actually much more true for management of 99% of companies ? Esp. for blue collar worker who find it difficult to move from company to company … they just want a stable job that pays middle class wages and decent working conditions. So, they care a lot about the long term profitability of the company, instead of quarterly profits and big fat bonus that management cares about.

I agree. Fact: SOME people at companies don’t care about the health of the company; SOME are ambivalent; the rest care.

 

[dc_h]

Definitely we are speculating, but it seems we both have some decent perspective on what is actually happening. Clearly I agree with almost everything you have said. The only exception is the relative analogy between the Tesla and Toyota deals. I still think there is a clear analogy, but...

In the Tesla deal Panasonic was the more substantial partner and had manufacturing expertise plus access to capital, even though they were themselves in a bit of a sad state at the time. As time has passed both have vastly improved their outlooks but...

Now Toyota is cash rich and future-poor. They've made a few decisions that have put them, including the Toyota cohorts, at exceedingly large disadavantage.
Panasonic is still cash poor but prospect rich. We can easily imagine this is Japan-Inc but it really is not. Panasonic is really the only true Japanese battery supplier that can scale and has solid experience at scale. Thus, Toyota shovels money, Panasonic expands and makes supply deals to serve Honda, some Chinese (names still evolving?) and potentially a number of others, including public utilities and commercial storage. That serves Japanese interests pretty well since they can continue to hamper LG and Samsung. They know that the Chinese are developing so quickly that they need to scale Tesla-style now!

The preceding paragraph is entirely conjecture on my part but that is the basis for me suggesting that the deal was patterned after the GF-1 deal, in terms of degree of cooperation and prospects, but clearly not in pure financial terms.

I hope that makes sense. My direct Toyota information is pretty weak and fairly low-level.

Great to see, from a TSLA person, that Toyota is sticking with prismatic cells. Panasonic has apparently made at least 500% prodogains on cell production. I base on GF1 first lines, which I understand are higher than the Japan lines and the latest lines, which are at least 3 times as fast as the original GF lines. It will be interesting to see what happens on the chemistry side with Panasonic and partners ramping up and LG, Samsung and the Chinese all ramping and global production probably hitting a new S curve and more than doubling year over year for at least a few years.
It will be exciting to see peak fossil fuel models start changing more in 2020-2021 as peaker plants start shutting down faster than Obama era coal plants and the rest of the coal plants shutting down even faster. The USA may SR one more year of emissions increasing, but should that reversing in 2020, regardless of election outcomes.

 

[Etna]

Especially because to produce 1 liter of gasoline a refinery uses about 1 kWh of electricity...

Energy needs are so high for the Alberta tar sands, they even considered building small (50 MW) nuclear power plants for steam generation and injection. I know that sounds ridiculous.

 

[Mobius484]

I did a Washington to Alaska ferry trip with a car once. Passengers were only allowed below deck to access their vehicles (and walk their dogs) while we were in port. I imagine the rules depend on the specific carrier based on what safety measures are in place.

I have an even better idea for transporting cars to China. Use the boring company to drill a tunnel through the center of the earth. Drop on a model 3 in and it pops out on the other side using nothing more than gravity. I don’t know why Elon hasn’t hired me yet...

OT- having a hard time with the physics of this scenario, wouldn't the model three oscillate back and for and eventually end up at the center, and be crushed by gravity?

Have been wanting to take that ferry with Model S would be a great adventure someday.

Seems to me that the price increases for supercharging are happening at a good time. Tesla converts current supercharging network over next year to two to megapacks, and really beef up the solar, and network, then charge all these "tesla Killers" to charge on it, and then pop some starlink antennas on it and turn the whole network into a distributed grid service/telecommunications network. Our grid sucks and will be seeing so much change over next few years. the current footprint of the supercharger network is underestimated in my opinion.
I am sure this is what Larry E wants to do as far a telecom/data cloud services.....

 

[XHabjab]

An employee cares about his job not about what the company needs..

That's just not true. Tesla (and SpaceX too for that matter) have a vision of the future that I share at least in part. Not completely, but moreso than, say GM, Ford, BMW, et al. I am retired now but if still in the market, I would love to work at Tesla (or SpaceX). I wouldn't work at most of the other car companies. All my life, I have cared about my job as well as my company's interests. IMHO that is what made me enough of a valuable employee that I lasted 31 years before retiring.

 

[elasalle]

Energy needs are so high for the Alberta tar sands, they even considered building small (50 MW) nuclear power plants for steam generation and injection. I know that sounds ridiculous.

Let's not forget it took millions of years for a natural process to place the oil in the ground in the first place.
Harvesting the sun as it hit's the solar panel .. is like getting rid of that millions of years

Oil as we know it is a finite resource ... ~ cheers!!

 

[UnknownSoldier]

Today's reminder that they only built ~2,500 original Roadsters.
At least a few will be in museums someday.

 

[Krugerrand]

I have never considered buying a car where getting a fender might take months.

As I said, thought has never crossed my mind and I own a 3 without any hesitation. I live in the moment, not waiting for the shoe to drop. If I need a fender some day, I’ll cross that bridge at that time.

 

[Unpilot]

I have never considered buying a car where getting a fender might take months.

I've never considered a car that had meteorite protection.

 

[dhrivnak]

Today's reminder that they only built ~2,500 original Roadsters.
At least a few will be in museums someday.

The rest will be held by collectors . Of which I am fortunate to own one of these pieces of history.

 

[Zaxxon]

I did exactly that last week and at other times before, usually documented on the forums. Buy on relative dips and if it's trading shares sell when it reaches a certain level but always hold my core position for the long term.

Exactly. It's the relative dip piece that those miss when asking why folks didn't buy the last time the stock was at a particular level. If it's dropped over several weeks and a lot of news, I may not add more. But when something that's clearly not valid bad news brings a significant overnight drop, then I buy some trading shares. It's basically free money.

The awesome Model Y will be revealed and an avalanche of deposits will follow. Oh, and one more thing...

Forget the one more thing. The minute Y reservations are opened, I submit my deposit. I'm quite sure there are at minimum many tens of thousands of other 3 owners in the same boat.

 

[lklundin]

OT- having a hard time with the physics of this scenario, wouldn't the model three oscillate back and for and eventually end up at the center, and be crushed by gravity?

In a hypothetical hyperloop, built to withstand the pressure and temperature at the center of Earth and evacuated to a perfect vacuum, the hyperloop pod could travel from one side of the Earth to the other without any energy spent. To account for very small friction losses, the pod could be made to arrive at the bottom of some tunnel, and then energy equivalent to the friction losses would need to be spent to elevate the pod the last distance up to the surface.

The gravity in the mid point of this hyperloop would actually be zero (and thus not crushing), decreasing gradually from 1 g. This can be understood from thinking of Earth as consisting of two symmetric halves each pierced by their half of the hyperloop and each pulling with forces that cancel each other out when the pod passes the center (at very high speed, with a kinetic energy exactly equal to the energy it would take to elevate the resting pod from the center and back to the surface).

If the pod would not be grabbed when its speed reaches zero (at its ending station), it would fall back towards the other end. These falls back and forth would indeed oscillate and any friction losses would cause the magnitude of the falls to decrease. In this scenario, the pod would end up weightless at the center. Any perturbation of the pod away from the center would bring it into a (small) gravity field (proportional to its distance from the center), from which it would again oscillate back to the center.

This is all hypothetical until someone figures out how to build a hyperloop that can with stand the pressure and temperature at the center of the Earth - and completely evacuate the tunnel. It could maybe work better on Mars, which I think has a solid core...

There is actually a Wikipedia article that describes this,
Gravity train - Wikipedia

PS. The maximum speed reached by the pod, which is when it passes the center, must be less than Earth's escape velocity (since that is what it takes to completely leave Earth's gravitational pull), but it must be more or less of the same magnitude, so several km per second - unless I am too tired to think straight.