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

[Doggydogworld]

Which info was "way way" off? The GF info or the ~80k Model 3's in Q1? I am sure I am missing something very obvious, but given the delivery numbers plus the 'in transit' numbers around the world, ~80k wasn't absurdly off, was it?

Tesla produced 63k Model 3s in Q1, not 80k.

How could the price possibly be that high? GF3 was suppose to be 1/3 the cost of GF and they will have China labor.

Fixed depreciation only contributes about $2000 to each US-built Model 3. Labor is similar, maybe a bit more. Even if you cut these costs in half it's only about $2k per car. And Shanghai labor rates are no longer all that cheap,

They could save a lot more over time with local parts sourcing. Of course Tesla already buys a lot of parts from China, but a local factory will enable them to eventually qualify more vendors. Once qualified, they can also use these parts in Fremont to lower COGS back in the home market. This is a long-term plan, though, don't expect a big impact in Q3

 

[ZachShahan]

warm up the bailout funds...
View attachment 411780

This is the article he's referring to: Skyrocketing Tesla Sales Force Mercedes Dealer In Norway To Face A Kodak Moment | CleanTechnica

 

[LJS22]

CNN Business: GM and Bechtel plan to build thousands of electric car charging stations across the US

First on CNN Business: GM and Bechtel plan to build thousands of electric car charging stations across the US - CNN


Well, well, GM. Decided you needed a charging network after all I see...

Everyone is going to push to make sure they are on the right side of history and the money. Ultimately the consumer will be forced to play catch up. However, I see a time in the future where the electric market becomes big enough to push gas prices down. This will be an interesting time in history as it could be a better short term buy to get a cheap ice car and pay gas prices that are lower than electricity kw pricing. We’ll see how regulations play out though.

Any chance Tesla could push 100,000 deliveries in Q2 or are we looking at 90,000-91,000 as the peak if everything goes perfect?

 

[MarcusMaximus]

This is the article he's referring to: Skyrocketing Tesla Sales Force Mercedes Dealer In Norway To Face A Kodak Moment | CleanTechnica

It took me like 5 minutes of reading and re-reading that headlong to figure out what it meant. Kept reading it as having something to do with a “Skyrocketing Tesla Sales Force”.

 

[Wooloomooloo]

Maddening excerpt:
“There's little argument that Tesla faces major survival challenges in the coming months, but downtrends rarely move in a straight line ...”

So their thesis seems to be not that the stock will rebound because the long-term financials are good, but that they will rebound for a short period before tanking permanently.

No, that's just your inference. They did not make a judgement either way.

What in blazes are these “major survival challenges” for a company with solid growth and dominance in a massively expanding market, holding cash reserves plus a new cash infusion to support maximum growth? Sure Q1 was a quarterly numbers reporting disaster, but I thought that investment professionals were supposed to look beyond the headlines , maybe to find that the Q1 numbers were not indicative of any change in the long-term story.

Musk said if the burn continues, they'll be screwed in 10 months. He knows they have challenges, everyone at Tesla knows they have challenges, the bond market reflects their challenges (never mind the shorts). If everything was so rosy and so obvious, the stock would be a slam dunk. It's not.

Instead we get the cryptic:

“... long-term relative strength has dropped into the most extreme oversold technical reading in the stock's public history“.

BUT WAIT, if the stock is “oversold” that means it is trading below the company’s fundamental value. So the “long-term relative strength” they are referring to is presumably the relative strength of long-term investors vs short sellers, not the actual “long-term strenght” of the company. Probably lots of folks will read “oversold” to mean something like “over-hyped” and sold above rather than below the real value, because they won’t even follow the link provided on the site.

So maybe a translation of that cryptic phrase is “short seller attack levels have hit new highs against to long-term investors”.

Sorry for the rant.

That's an extraordinarily negative take. OK, so sometimes even the most paranoid people are right, sometimes they really are out to get you, but in this case I think it was simply an objective analysis of the state of the market, not of the company.

I am sure that when you're as emotionally invested as some people here obviously are, then objectivity probably sounds like a criticism.

 

[urarthur]

How could the price possibly be that high? GF3 was suppose to be 1/3 the cost of GF and they will have China labor. Shouldn’t the SR be in the high 20s to low 30s? Also who wants to bet when they release the price thaey start taking pre orders.

My guess is it will kill current sales if priced below current prices. I believe production won't start before september. Once ramp up first phase completes, prices will drop. Until than healthy margins on early adopters.

 

[MarcusMaximus]

Everyone is going to push to make sure they are on the right side of history and the money. Ultimately the consumer will be forced to play catch up. However, I see a time in the future where the electric market becomes big enough to push gas prices down. This will be an interesting time in history as it could be a better short term buy to get a cheap ice car and pay gas prices that are lower than electricity kw pricing. We’ll see how regulations play out though.

Any chance Tesla could push 100,000 deliveries in Q2 or are we looking at 90,000-91,000 as the peak if everything goes perfect?

I would expect wild fluctuations in gas prices, as sales drop, causing prices to fall and then gas companies close refineries, causing them to skyrocket. Gas prices will eventually land somewhere astronomically high as virtually all supply disappears, but there’ll be a roller coaster in between.

 

[Tslynk67]

OT, sorry...

Elena Dimitrieva on Twitter

 

[Wooloomooloo]

Tesla produced 63k Model 3s in Q1, not 80k.

Oops, I was looking at he 77k Total Model X, S and 3. NVM

 

[MarcusMaximus]

Musk said if the burn continues, they'll be screwed in 10 months.

No. He. Did. Not. Stop repeating this. I’m pretty sure you know better.

 

[anon]

Tesla Ghent has begun it’s end of quarter delivery push: they have again moved every demo model out of the showroom to make place for cars to be delivered to customers, just as they did previous end-of-quarter (according to an FB post with pictures of the showroom). With the difference being that they start a couple of weeks earlier and already have a lot of cars present for delivery.

This may be to make way for Raven showroom cars - there have been a number of reports on the forum of Raven cars appearing in showrooms and test drives, so I think that Tesla may have been allocating early Raven production for this purpose to help with S/X sales. This would also explain some of the added delay in delivering any Ravens to customers.

 

[ItsNotAboutTheMoney]

Good news for validating transition to EVs.

A curious bit:
“Neither company plans to put money into this project, though. The two companies will create a separate corporation to build the charging network and other companies are being invited to invest in it. Neither GM nor Bechtel would name potential investors while discussions are still ongoing.”

All the chatter in that article is on the Bechtel side. Just seems like a data deal for GM.

 

[Wooloomooloo]

No. He. Did. Not. Stop repeating this. I’m pretty sure you know better.

No he didn't - but he heavily implied there were major cash burn issues and changes had to be made to address it.

He certainly said last year that Tesla was weeks away from failing, but people who said that here were laughed at and told to STFU. My point is that there is nothing wrong with acknowledging the obvious challenges the company faces... it's doesn't make you a traitor, or a short-thesis pusher or a war criminal. The intolerance of debate here is getting ridiculous.

It's all very well being a pedant when you hear generalizations you don't like, but then hitting the "like" button for generalizations that support your view. It's almost partisan at this point.

 

[VValleyEV]

Everyone is going to push to make sure they are on the right side of history and the money. Ultimately the consumer will be forced to play catch up. However, I see a time in the future where the electric market becomes big enough to push gas prices down. This will be an interesting time in history as it could be a better short term buy to get a cheap ice car and pay gas prices that are lower than electricity kw pricing. We’ll see how regulations play out though.

I don’t understand how transition from ICE to EV dominance would lower gas prices. By lowering demand? Sure a temporary fuel glut would lower prices temporarily, but production would be adjusted, and after that the lower production rate would seem more likely to raise rather than lower gas prices.

 

[Tslynk67]

You're kidding? That sentence doesn't mean there is a chance they will go bust in the next few months, my inference is that it means very important decisions (that Tesla needs to make), manufacturing and delivery as well as macro economic factors in the near term, will have an outsized effect on Tesla in the long term.

I really do get a sense of dread whenever TSLA watchers are utterly dismissive of any caution or outline of the challenges the company faces. It undermines anything else you express.

I'm not at all utterly dismissive of the threats and risks to Tesla (many of them self-administered), but I read that sentence exactly as it's written, not interpreted to mean pending decisions. All Tesla has to do is churn out and deliver the cars, preferably with gradually increasing volumes. They aren't facing survival challenges at all.

 

[VValleyEV]

Musk said if the burn continues, they'll be screwed in 10 months. He knows they have challenges, everyone at Tesla knows they have challenges, the bond market reflects their challenges (never mind the shorts). If everything was so rosy and so obvious, the stock would be a slam dunk. It's not.

No, he said that the new cash infusion would be eaten up if such a burn continues. The new cash infusion as I understand it is for accelerated growth, not survival, that they already had sufficient cash reserves necessary for survival before this latest cash raise. So by “screwed” in your description it would mean “cannot accelerate growth”, not “go bankrupt”. Or am I mistaken?

 

[kbM3]

Tesla is likely going to sell Model 3 SP+ with AP in the rumping up phase. that's $45,900 in US now and translates to 317K @ 6.9 USD/CNY. Bloomberg price range is very likely initially, but price will need to drop sharply to satisfy >500k/year demand.

SR+ is $39.9k including AP.

 

[MarcusMaximus]

No he didn't - but he heavily implied there were major cash burn issues and changes had to be made to address it.

He certainly said last year that Tesla was weeks away from failing, but people who said that here were laughed at and told to STFU. My point is that there is nothing wrong with acknowledging the obvious challenges the company faces... it's doesn't make you a traitor, or a short-thesis pusher or a war criminal. The intolerance of debate here is getting ridiculous.

It's all very well being a pedant when you hear generalizations you don't like, but then hitting the "like" button for generalizations that support your view. It's almost partisan at this point.

I’ll take no side in the rest of this debate(seems semantics to me). Just take issue any time I see him misquoted on that. It’s happened too often in a way that was really obviously malicious.

 

[EVNow]

OT :

I don’t understand how transition from ICE to EV dominance would lower gas prices. By lowering demand? Sure a temporary fuel glut would lower prices temporarily, but production would be adjusted, and after that the lower production rate would seem more likely to raise rather than lower gas prices.

Since several countries absolutely depend on oil income, unless the cartel agrees to cap production (and stick by the decision), the price will go down.

 

[gene]

OT, sorry...

Elena Dimitrieva on Twitter

VERY FUNNY! Test drive of a petrol car - Tesla Club Sweden