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

[Fact Checking]

2. Many (maybe not most?) people do not live in the same house for 30+ years for that net cost calculation to work out in reality.

The value of the solar roof will be reflected in an increased real estate value of the house, so even if they don't experience the gains first hand, they can profit from it when selling their home.

Also note that an aesthetically pleasing solar installation can increase the value of the home well beyond the cost of the solar roof.

 

[MarcusMaximus]

Did she have it set on drawing outside air rather than recycling inside air. The latter will give much better results in very hot weather.

I doubt she’d remember or have checked, most likely set to auto. Probably would have been a good thing for the service person to check on, though.

 

[izemize]

Here's a real Tesla Solar Roof quote and the price will shock you - Electrek

As I posted the other day. Now that we have numbers from Tesla, just reinforces my point.

I thought Tesla was comparing costs to comp when they mentioned cost parity. No way comp roof would cost $37,245. My roofers could do that same size roof for ~$5,500. Plus, 9.45kW PV for much less than $30k. No idea what the heck traditional premium roof would cost $20/sq ft as Tesla wrote in that quote for comparisons sake.

Plus, a couple things to note:
1. Solar tax credit starts getting cut each year starting 2020 until it becomes NO credit in 2022. (Unless folks in DC decide to do something about it). So, Tesla needs to really put resources into this project if they’re banking on that.
2. Many (maybe not most?) people do not live in the same house for 30+ years for that net cost calculation to work out in reality.

Also do you think that a power wall can last for 30 years? Or do you think that it would need a replacement at least once?

 

[Steve m]

Sure, but I say the $400 is less than the cost of the extra labor/towing charges necessary to move the car repeatedly and uninstall/reinstall the equipment. Not to mention the possibility of damaging things or creating rattles when tearing the car apart an extra two times. (And you might not even be allowed to use RORO ships if the car isn't drivable, which would be another whole issue increasing costs.)

There is also the issue that the SCs are already overloaded, so now you have to hire 1-10, or more, extra people at each service center to get the cars ready to deliver. Do they have enough bays to support that, or would they have to add a building or lease more land?

Maybe you could just hire 250 "mobile" techs to install them on the dock as they unload the ship so that it could be done in a day. (Figure at least an hour per car and a 10 hour work day with the ship carrying 2,500 cars.) But what do you do with those people the other 25 days of the month?

I can't see any way it would make things better.

Try this...

Collect about 20k of the previous generation ecus.

Test car with new ecu. That is just pluged in not bolted down. Swap new ecu for older ecu. Ship car. Swap old ecus just before delivery and bolt them in. Ship old ecus back to Fremont.

Swaping an ecu should be a 10 minute job. So for Norway doing 200 cars a day you need about 4 people for the entire country. Now $400 times 6 is $2400 that is a pretty good hourly wage.

 

[MarcusMaximus]

Here's a real Tesla Solar Roof quote and the price will shock you - Electrek

As I posted the other day. Now that we have numbers from Tesla, just reinforces my point.

I thought Tesla was comparing costs to comp when they mentioned cost parity. No way comp roof would cost $37,245. My roofers could do that same size roof for ~$5,500. Plus, 9.45kW PV for much less than $30k. No idea what the heck traditional premium roof would cost $20/sq ft as Tesla wrote in that quote for comparisons sake.

Plus, a couple things to note:
1. Solar tax credit starts getting cut each year starting 2020 until it becomes NO credit in 2022. (Unless folks in DC decide to do something about it). So, Tesla needs to really put resources into this project if they’re banking on that.
2. Many (maybe not most?) people do not live in the same house for 30+ years for that net cost calculation to work out in reality.

Did you read that article? That quote was for a v2 roof, before the recent cost savings.

 

[EVNow]

New topic I’d like some thoughts on. Based on Ihor’s chart on historical short borrow % and total shares shorted, there was a shortage of available shares to short in 2016 at 28-32M level.

Ihor Dusaniwsky (@ihors3) Tweeted:
@alex_avoigt @mthomasbenjamin @ValueAnalyst1 @KelvinYang7 Attached is a graph of $TSLA's stock borrow rate (offer rate) versus shares shorted since 2016 Ihor Dusaniwsky on Twitter

Ihor Dusaniwsky on Twitter

Currently we are at 46M shares shorted with anecdotes of 5-8 million more available to short. To me that’s a pretty stark difference in shares available to short between 2016 and today. 32M available then, 51M available now? Why the huge difference?

Factors could include new stock sold into the market by Tesla, more institutions offering shares for shorting now, shorting creating new shares that are also shorted.

Anybody smarter than I in the ways of the shorts want to weigh in on reasoning?

Interesting chart by Ihor. What I'd like to figure out is what led to high interest rates in '16 - is that because of SP rise / sudden increase in shares shorted ?

Looks like - it is mainly in response to demand for borrowing shares (that makes sense). But weirdly there is no interest rate hike as the borrowing has increased hugely - almost doubled - sine Feb '19.

 

[Fact Checking]

There are some breakthroughs that I think are achievable. They’re confidential, so I can’t talk about them on this call, but there’s one particular avenue that I am confident could be made to work that would be the most significant breakthrough in a while. But again, you’ve got to make it work in the lab. It doesn’t yet work in the lab now, but it’s promising in the lab.”

Elon could have been talking about Maxwell, but also about the very significant cobalt reduction they achieved in their cell chemistry in about that time frame.

A lot of the bears were certain Tesla will be limited by cobalt shortages, and the price of cobalt experienced a speculative bubble in 2017.

 

[Boomer19]

Interesting chart by Ihor. What I'd like to figure out is what led to high interest rates in '16 - is that because of SP rise / sudden increase in shares shorted ?

Looks like - it is mainly in response to demand for borrowing shares (that makes sense). But weirdly there is no interest rate hike as the borrowing has increased hugely - almost doubled - sine Feb '19.

View attachment 419262

share/loan recall in anticipation of record date for solar city proxy vote

 

[wipster]

Not wrong. Hopefully those layoffs in service will fix some of that. As an(other) anecdote: This last week we had a heat wave here, temps up over 100F. My wife was sitting in the car when parked and noticed the AC was blowing warm air, despite being set to 66F. Eventually had to leave the car. I called in about it, the woman on the phone said she checked the logs, didn't see any errors and asked if I had any other questions. GEE, THANKS.

Did they ask if you had the AC turned on? That happened to me with a certain Mercedes dealership in Yakima (who shall remain unnamed... although there was only one in Yakima). Idiots.

 

[Right_Said_Fred]

Here's a real Tesla Solar Roof quote and the price will shock you - Electrek

As I posted the other day. Now that we have numbers from Tesla, just reinforces my point.

I thought Tesla was comparing costs to comp when they mentioned cost parity. No way comp roof would cost $37,245. My roofers could do that same size roof for ~$5,500. Plus, 9.45kW PV for much less than $30k. No idea what the heck traditional premium roof would cost $20/sq ft as Tesla wrote in that quote for comparisons sake.

Plus, a couple things to note:
1. Solar tax credit starts getting cut each year starting 2020 until it becomes NO credit in 2022. (Unless folks in DC decide to do something about it). So, Tesla needs to really put resources into this project if they’re banking on that.
2. Many (maybe not most?) people do not live in the same house for 30+ years for that net cost calculation to work out in reality.

You should read this article. Very thorough and provides a good perspective on the costs of the solar roof compared to a regular roof:

Why Tesla's Solar Roof Is A Bargain, 53% Of The Price Of A Roof + Electricity — CleanTechnica Analysis | CleanTechnica

 

[Nocturnal]

A Model S is an 80-100,000+ car. Saving money is not the issue. It is being treated like someone matters. When I got my SIgnature X 3+ years ago I was always treated extremely well by Service. Now it's just another car to the people they have working there. I have no bad experiences, just not great ones any more. When Tesla actually figures this out and makes treating people always like they matter like Lexus does then they will truly not be able to keep up with sales. They have the product, they just need to treat people like they care.

I know money is not the primary motivator at all, but it's not like we are comparing a ford dealership oil change to a Mercedes dealership. We are comparing not having to visit the dealer with a Mercedes dealer. My couch is far nicer than any Mercedes waiting lounge. I'm positive on that.

I don't think Tesla is going to change that. BMW dealerships don't kiss your behind either, that's definitely a Mercedes (maybe Audi?) thing.

You should read this article. Very thorough and provides a good perspective on the costs of the solar roof compared to a regular roof:

Why Tesla's Solar Roof Is A Bargain, 53% Of The Price Of A Roof + Electricity — CleanTechnica Analysis | CleanTechnica

I'll need a new roof in 3 or so years. I really hope this is ready by then. ​

 

[Zaxxon]

more than 1,000 deliveries a day in North America alone this quarter.

https://electrek.co/2019/06/14/tesla-delivering-1000-cars-day-record-quarter/

Sometimes I wish that Fred would just sit down, take a breath, and think before writing. 1,000 cars/day isn't news. In fact, that's approximately what Tesla would have to have averaged every day for the entire quarter in order to hit the low end of their guidance. Let's look at this article:

Headline: Tesla is delivering 1,000 cars a day en route to record quarter
No, that's not en route to a record, or at least it's not news on 6/14 relating to a record.

Paragraph six is where Fred finally lets loose with the actual news--"Tesla has been delivering cars at a rate of approximately 1,000 a day in North America so far this month." Emphasis mine. That's the news. Therefore, worldwide Tesla is delivering well over 1,000 vehicles/day. That's how we see the potential to hit a record quarter.

I don't know whether Electrek has anyone edit articles before they're posted (prior experience noticing typos, math errors, etc leads me to believe no, but YMMV). Posting 30 minutes later and having the author and an editor read through a couple times before publishing would go a long way...

 

[Fact Checking]

Agree. For completeness : the Netherlands is currently running about 800 ahead from Q1 and Spain is 140 behind. I am expecting a surge from 20/6 onwards because that the start of short range deliveries.

Do you have any approximate estimates for total EU deliveries, if these tends continue? Higher than 20k possible?

I.e. do the trends still project your earlier impression that Q2 EU deliveries won't be that brilliant:

EU numbers are actually not that brilliant so far. We are looking at only 4000 or so total deliveries S/X/3 in May. S and X remain extremely weak with both around 500 cars each with no Raven cars available. Hopefully China is doing better. As last quarter everything will be decided in the final two weeks of the quarter.

?

 

[EVNow]

share/loan recall in anticipation of record date for solar city proxy vote

That's likely.

What about the raise after Mar '18 ? The int rate even stepped down in correlation with # of borrowed shares.

 

[green48]

US electric vehicle sales have grown YoY for 36 months straight... in the middle of a global auto recession, too.

Kevin Rooke on Twitter

 

[Fact Checking]

That's likely.

What about the raise after Mar '18 ? The int rate even stepped down in correlation with # of borrowed shares.

May 2018 had record shares shorted of about ~40m - the sharp increase in borrowing rates predicted the ceiling of short interest and preceded the short squeeze in June.

In 2019 the shortable shares pool appears to be maxed out at around ~50m shares.

Note that in 2019 there's not just production worries like in 2018, but also an actually realized contraction quarter in Q1. That has to be falsified convincingly for the SP to recover to 2018 levels. The fall below $180 was partly due to a crazy bear raid, but it was also made significantly easier by the weakened growth bull thesis which was hurt by Q1.

This is not unique to Tesla: Nvidia's market cap was halved by a bad quarter too - and while we bulls here on TMC are certain that Tesla's Q1 was a one-off, an investor with average information levels will have trouble realizing this among all the Tesla disinformation, plus predictions are always difficult to make, especially about the future.

 

[liuping]

I thought Tesla was comparing costs to comp when they mentioned cost parity. No way comp roof would cost $37,245. My roofers could do that same size roof for ~$5,500. Plus, 9.45kW PV for much less than $30k.

It really depends on materials. A slate roof of that size can easy cost over $30k.

And $30k for 9.45kw is lower than the average cost per watt for a solar installs in California (which in 2019 was $4.07/watt)

 

[JRP3]

They could temporarily install one to test the car and reuse for the next one.

If the board costs 1 grand add another 250 for the tariff multiply by 40,000 a quarter and you get 10 million a quarter.

Try this...

Collect about 20k of the previous generation ecus.

Test car with new ecu. That is just pluged in not bolted down. Swap new ecu for older ecu. Ship car. Swap old ecus just before delivery and bolt them in. Ship old ecus back to Fremont.

Swaping an ecu should be a 10 minute job. So for Norway doing 200 cars a day you need about 4 people for the entire country. Now $400 times 6 is $2400 that is a pretty good hourly wage.

From what I've seen it's much more than a ten minute job. Your idea is not practical.

 

[Mike Smith]

Shorts must realize by now that they're pissing into the wind. They're adding 1-2M shares every week yet TSLA keeps rising..

 

[KSilver2000]

Also do you think that a power wall can last for 30 years? Or do you think that it would need a replacement at least once?

Definitely you would need to replace at least once, twice using a 30-year cost calculation. Tesla only warranties the PW2 for 10 years.

Did you read that article? That quote was for a v2 roof, before the recent cost savings.

Yes, I do realize that. Thus why I mentioned they need to get this rolling out ASAP if they are taking tax credits into account (given how they’ve done with v2). I was also using known current prices for comparison sakes (60+% less than what Tesla quotes in that table). Yes, Tesla mentions v3 will be cheaper, but I doubt anywhere close to 50% less. v3 will be cheaper but traditional PVs get cheaper as well every year.

**My skepticism partly stems from the fact that I wasn’t pleased with the SC acquisition to begin with. Tesla cars are a new market entry with little competition. There’s a following, easy to understand. But solar is a crowded industry where the brand/technology does not matter too much IMO like toilet paper. Consumers care more how much it costs and how much electricity they’re generating.