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

[dc_h]

I see the mood here has been shifting a bit with the current couple of weeks of SP rise.

Meh.

I’ll get out of my lounging pajamas and prick my ears when the SP is $350+ and rising like it is now forming that bull flag, Staten Island, gravy boat, butter dish or whatever it is the TA people need to see to be 99.999999% (is that enough 9’s??) sure we’re headed beyond $400. Until such time you can find me sipping some Sleepy Time tea, smoking a Havana and chomping on Quarter Pounders.

(Some of you lack a sense of humor.)

anthonyj has a new friend.

 

[sparcs]

Wow. That’s a great addendum. So obvious what’s going on here it’s both sad and funny.

Chanos is a clown times ten. He recently made the rounds via the usual FUD parade on June 6th saying Tesla vehicles are "poorly made".

Ten days later you have one of the most well known critics of Tesla who at least understands quality control in vehicles, Bob Lutz, say literally the opposite in a detailed article and even praising Elon.

Maybe the Chanos group think is starting to fall apart and that's why the share price is rising?

 

[dhrivnak]

If your fund has lost 60% of its value since founding you probably need a sense of humor.

But then my Tesla is down a sad 22%. And yes I was able to crack a little smile today.

 

[powertoold]

Clown Chanos says Teslas poorly made.

Bob Lutz car industry expert says Model 3 highest quality.

 

[BioSehnsucht]

Link ?

I'm going by this.

green on Twitter

There's a difference between enabling disabled code, which might correlate to FSD features, that happen to be present in the releases that are on vehicles today, and having the latest development builds where those features are further along in development. There might be a "dev mode" that lets you turn on these features on the public releases, but it can only enable what was built into that particular version. Ideally that disabled code probably shouldn't even be there to enable via a hack in the public releases, but sometimes removing vestigial functions entirely can be more trouble than it's worth (if it's shared with some other function/library).

There can even be many different development builds, in additional to multiple public releases (as we've seen occasionally different regions or vehicles getting a release first, then others getting a later release, or the differences between Early Access Program releases from normal public releases where a EAP feature might not exist in the newer public release and different EAP releases in use at the same time might have different features activated / available).

Also consider that often the public releases are weeks behind "now" as they get frozen and put through QA prior to release, so even in the best case scenario of hacked public release versus internal development builds you will be weeks behind (and realistically the code in the public releases will be wildly different as many of those development features won't have been approved to be merged into the master branch yet).

An example of how these workflows can look (there are many ways to structure these things) :

As you can see, it's not uncommon to have multiple features or even bugfixes being worked on at the same time, independently, and it's even common to build separate release branches with cherry picked code commits rather than simply taking whatever is the latest on the master branch and making it a release (which would be a nightmare). Notice in this example there are 'stable' branches (more than one in fact, corresponding to different planned releases) separate from the 'master branch'.

 

[Krugerrand]

anthonyj has a new friend.

That interpretation might be a bit optimistic.

 

[abasile]

Bob Lutz car industry expert says Model 3 highest quality.

Glad he changed his tune, but he’s still a stooge, so I’m not inclined to trumpet his praise.

 

[EVDRVN]

Glad he changed his tune, but he’s still a stooge, so I’m not inclined to trumpet his praise.

Prob brokered a deal with Musk and GM we will hear about down the road.

 

[Unpilot]

Rough week at work for me. Well long anyway...had a over night in Chattanooga TN. And as we waited for hotel van I saw 2 MX pull up to drop off some folks. Then on the way to hotel I saw a M3. Keep in mind this is in the middle of the country.

On the subject of SP... yeah I'm with that cat dude...wake me when we hit $420.

 

[powertoold]

Glad he changed his tune, but he’s still a stooge, so I’m not inclined to trumpet his praise.

Wasn't he the guy who said Tesla will never be able to mass produce Model 3? Maybe, he, knowing the complexities of car manufacturing, had little faith in Tesla pulling it off, and Elon himself said that the Model 3 was a bet the company endeavor and that there were really difficult bottlenecks to overcome, so Bob Lutz was probably right in his doubt because any other company would have failed.

 

[EVNow]

As you can see, it's not uncommon to have multiple features or even bugfixes being worked on at the same time, independently, and it's even common to build separate release branches with cherry picked code commits rather than simply taking whatever is the latest on the master branch and making it a release (which would be a nightmare). Notice in this example there are 'stable' branches (more than one in fact, corresponding to different planned releases) separate from the 'master branch'.

Yes, pretty common scenario.

In the released "stable" branches, they have put features that we saw in autonomy day. Those also happen to be the basic features needed for City NOA, which would be needed for FC. There has to be a good reason why we saw on autonomy day is same as the one in production - and why a much better version, if it exists, wasn't shown during the demo. The simplest explanation is dev on those features are over, so they have been merged into master branch and then released to production for use in shadow mode (or for whatever reason).

Yes, as I wrote the actual "dev" branches will be a few weeks more advanced. Conveniently, we know the production branch is 20th week's (sometime in May).

Bottomline, there is no evidence that there is a secret super-duper FSD software we haven't seen. Afterall during annual day, Musk said his City NOA needs interventions to complete his daily commute to office. If it rarely needed intervention (or just once or twice), he would have said so. He is talking about teaching the car not to run on grass / recognize the curb - that doesn't sound like a very advanced version.

I should also say, it is this kind of optimistic thinking that didn't prepare us for the Q1 shocker. All the evidence points to fairly basic stage of city NOA. Personally, I look forward to city NOA being similar to (or somewhat worse than) Cruise/Waymo when released after FC (hopefully sometime early next year).

 

[Mars ☰mperor]

Hmmm... the imported SR+ is gone from Model 3 order page in China
ie. the ¥ 377,000 version

Not sure if it will be back, probably not?

 

[c041v]

Good to see but Canada is the new Norway this quarter. > for now.

I did my part and finally pulled the trigger on a LR AWD in April. Sold my Audi S6 at a loss and have not looked back

 

[SPadival]

To be fair, Baby charts did warn his short followers that he is running a social media experiment. So it’s hard to feel pity for those who followed him off the cliff.

What’s next in the Babycharts arsenal? Ritualised animal sacrifice?

 

[PhaseWhite]

I would think so too - can't marge individual NNs.


We don't know that. It is possible there is only one set of NNs that is being cross compiled on all HW versions.

Otherwise - not sure how he shadow mode would work (or gathering data ?).

ps : Essentially, if we want to say there is a very different FSD dev branch that hasn't been merged with production branch, we need to reconcile that with the fact that hacked production branch has autonomy day demo features and show how shadow mode is supposed to work. Also, that would mean there is a separate development effort going on with the production branch (!) since the software is obviously improving. And, they have to retrofit all production branch changes into dev branch changes. I can assure you I've done all these crazy things

Occam's razor says, they are doing the simplest thing. Create dev branches for individual features and merge them back once dev is done.

You need to watch the FSD video more closely. It performs way better than the hacked attempt on AP 2.5 hardware. Anecdotes from people given rides at Autonomy day reported 1 or 0 interventions on that route. The display in the FSD was able to show cars in the opposite lane with the correct orientation. Something the current NN seems to struggle with (dancing cars)

We know Tesla had a huge NN in development from the discovery documented in the NN thread “AKNET v9”, as well as from the earnings call discussion where it was stated by Karpathy that they had much more accurate NN under development but that it didn’t perform on AP 2.x hardware.

 

[Zaxxon]

I feel like this is a near perfect encapsulation of Mr. Spiegel:

Mark B. Spiegel on Twitter

FINALLY got $NFLX (we're short) via a free 1-yr coupon from Fios, so now I can be in touch with the "cultural zeitgeist," lol. 1st conclusions:
"Roma": beautiful but boring; lost interest in 15 mins
"Birdbox": stupid; lost interest in 15 mins
"Highwaymen": excellent, but too long

 

[tander]

I feel like this is a near perfect encapsulation of Mr. Spiegel:

Mark B. Spiegel on Twitter

FINALLY got $NFLX (we're short) via a free 1-yr coupon from Fios, so now I can be in touch with the "cultural zeitgeist," lol. 1st conclusions:
"Roma": beautiful but boring; lost interest in 15 mins
"Birdbox": stupid; lost interest in 15 mins
"Highwaymen": excellent, but too long

Makes me wonder what percentage of Tesla owners/investors haven't tried Netflix and what percentage of Tesla long-term shorts haven't tried a Tesla?

 

[ZeApelido]

You may be right: https://www.mylife.com/stanley-spiegel/

Amazing. A New Yorker whose entire wealth is really poorly managing his parents' money.

Next thing you know he's our next President

 

[Singuy]

I feel like this is a near perfect encapsulation of Mr. Spiegel:

Mark B. Spiegel on Twitter

FINALLY got $NFLX (we're short) via a free 1-yr coupon from Fios, so now I can be in touch with the "cultural zeitgeist," lol. 1st conclusions:
"Roma": beautiful but boring; lost interest in 15 mins
"Birdbox": stupid; lost interest in 15 mins
"Highwaymen": excellent, but too long

This guy ever long anything? I honestly don't understand what's so great about shorting. Infinite losses and you have to pay interest. Best case you double your money. Out of all the 10 businesses I've invested in, zero of them went bankrupt. 4 have multibagged. Math is not on the short seller's side at all.

 

[larmor]

Sounds like fun--driving a BEV through flooded streets with water over the axles--must be a yuge TAM for that since no one is making special purpose, high water vehicles. Maybe the military will tender the first deposits?

Unfortunately, alot of infrastructure in the US is falling behind, and flooding in streets can actually happen in places where typically flooding did not occur...