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

[keydiver]

Tell her about the arrow that points to the side with the gas cap. Or better yet, get her a Tesla instead.
View attachment 421634

Her's is the Pearl White L3MUR in my avatar. But, you should have seen the fiasco the other day of me trying to show her how to unplug her Model 3 from the Schneider J1772 charger, without leaving the adapter stuck in the car's charging port. I'm actually rather tempted to swap it out for a Tesla wall charger, just to avoid future pain.

 

[ZachF]

• Firstly, it's very ineffective to burn crude oil for transportation energy, only ~20% of which gets transformed into kinetic energy. Even coal plants are well over 60% efficient at generating electricity from fossil coal.

Modern coal plants are close to 40% efficiency, average is about 35%. Modern CCGTs (NG and sometimes oil) get over 50% thermodynamic efficiency. All much better than the 20% a smaller ICE engine gets.

 

[Fact Checking]

Modern coal plants are close to 40% efficiency, average is about 35%. Modern CCGTs (NG and sometimes oil) get over 50% thermodynamic efficiency. All much better than the 20% a smaller ICE engine gets.

Thanks for the correction!

Note that ICE engine efficiency is usually quoted as a function of gasoline efficiency - which ignores the ~30% energy loss due to crude oil extraction, transportation and refining.

So a 20% efficient ICE engine is in reality only converting about 14% of the crude oil it consumes into kinetic energy.

Teslas will also reuse about 20% of the kinetic energy through regenerative braking, which improves the net environmental balance as well.

 

[Oil4AsphaultOnly]

Did the study include in the costs of gasoline the extraction, transportation and refining costs of crude oil as well, which process wastes another ~30% of the raw crude oil input?

Plus a 40 mpg gascar is NOT driven with an efficiency of 40 miles per gallon - this is especially true of luxury cars: 20-30 mpg on average is more typical in everyday driving - while EVs get much closer to their factory efficiency.

I.e. these studies tend to systematically overerestimate the efficiency of gascars.

It's the Union of Concerned Scientists, so they would've included extractions costs, but were probably conservative with it to make a compelling case. The problem is that Mr.T is in the middle of coal country. Here's the most recent study using 2017 data: New Data Show Electric Vehicles Continue to Get Cleaner

... and here's their study using 2015 data: Cleaner Cars from Cradle to Grave (2015)

The significance, was how much better the grid got in just 2 years. I'm sure the 2019 data will show that EV's currently ARE cleaner than hybrids, even with a coal-powered grid! But we don't have the data to prove that ... yet.

 

[Oil4AsphaultOnly]

My wife has almost resorted to the same bad parking at the pumps. She pulls in, forget which side the filler door is on, does a U-turn to a different pump, only to find that the pump is still on the wrong side of the car. Can't figure it out. "What am I doing wrong?" Blood sugar is crashing from not eating lunch....gives up, drives home, and I have to drive back to fill her car up for her.

Ha! I hadn't pumped gas in almost 2 years, so had completely forgotten that you're supposed to pull alongside the pump! Thanks for helping this old fogey see.

 

[Silent Ludicrosy]

Just got this email from Tesla

 

[Remus]

Per the AGM, Tesla is moving aggressively on Battery cell manufacturing and FSD.

Let's take a deep dive into just one of the recent job postings on Tesla.com to get a glimpse into plans for the near future:

Equipment Engineer - Battery Cell | Mfg | Fremont, CA | 16 April 2019

Title: Equipment Development Engineer
Location: Fremont, CA

The Role:

In addition to developing manufacturing processes and equipment, Process Development Engineers work with cross-functional teams throughout the entire product lifecycle. You will work closely with Design Engineering, Quality and Production to take battery design changes and new battery designs from initial concept through prototype development and into full production.

Responsibilities:

• Drive development of new/innovative/improved manufacturing process and automation equipment from proof of concept through to full scale production
• Build proof of concept equipment designs with minimal resources
• Write detailed, verified specifications for equipment suppliers to quote/build against
• Write detailed equipment acceptance tests
• Adept at the design review process for manufacturing equipment
• Familiar with DFMEA to drive robustness into equipment
• Drive acceptance testing at vendor and factory sites
• Manage external equipment integrators from equipment development through buyoff
• Create detailed Manufacturing Instructions to document new processes
• Ability to estimate CapEx and OpEx for equipment designs
• Experience with building robust equipment (low maintenance, etc.)
• Experience with one or more of:
  • Battery cell manufacturing
  • Roll to roll coating equipment
  • Continuous wet deposition equipment
  • Automated mechanical assembly
  • Power electronics
  • Industrial chemical process equipment
  • Industrial lasers
  • Long-term reliability testing equipment

Paging @mongo Sounds like a busy year, wot?

The successful Candidate should be a #PEng who meets these

Requirements:

• BS/MS Mechanical Engineering, Electrical Engineering, Manufacturing Engineering or equivalent
• Multiple new equipment installations
• Multiple new product startups
• 5+ years of manufacturing engineering or development experience
• ...

Follow the link above for the rest of the requirements I left out!

TL;dr Tesla is moving aggressively into battery cell manufacturing.

Cheers!

Well, this will cost money and maybe the reason Elon changed from profits every quarter to cash flow positive.

 

[kosarfan]

Just got this email from Tesla
View attachment 421646

I also got this email and scheduled a service appt to quote some body damage (dings and scuffs) after 2.5yrs and 82k Miles. Looks like another revenue stream!

 

[Papafox]

Earlier today, @Sancho challenged my contention that short-sellers were primarily behind the manipulations we've been seeing and Sancho suggested that hedge funds and other big sellers of call options were the more likely suspects. After viewing today's trading, where a huge number of in the money put options were ready to expire and they could have provided incentive for shorts to try a heavy push down to maximize their earnings, we didn't see such a push down. Rather, we saw trading that is more in line with the explanation made by Sancho.

Thus, I'll credit Sancho with the win today.

That said, next week is going to be an interesting experiment because there simply are not substantial numbers of call options expiring next Friday. Call option traders for the most part are placing their bets for time periods following Tesla's early July Production and Delivery Report and not sooner. There are, however, substantial numbers of 210-strike put options expiring on June 28 (30,000 at last count). Thus, we'll have a unique opportunity to see if the buyers of put options are going to exert any substantial influence on the stock price.

 

[jerry33]

No - they want someone else to pay for it. Not them. I bet most of us Tesla owners would be willing to pay $10 a month to cool the planet.

Provided the $10 was actually used for something other than executive compensation and administration (and the president doesn't abscond with the funds). The problem with giving money for a cause is that so little goes to the cause that you might as well keep it for all the good it does.

 

[Singuy]

People in this thread have been fantasizing about the future. Five years from now a very high percentage of sales will still be ICE.

OEMs will try to get the revenue they can from their existing assets. It's going to take a whole lot of investment and work and time for traditional OEMs to develop EVs that they can build at a cost low enough for them to make a profit. And Tesla isn't expanding as needed to cover the market share people hoped they would capture, and the VW Group seems to be the only other OEM that's really serious about trying to make EVs work, and they have a long road ahead of them. There will be OEM mergers and maybe some smaller ones will shut down (JLR) but government grants will keep others going.

Huge sales of ICE pick-ups will continue. About half of pick-ups are purchased by business and govt agencies. Price is paramount, and it will be years before the purchase price of EV pick-ups will be lower. And few people who buy a pick-up for personal driving want an EV.

Oil companies have bonds to pay. They will pump oil so long as it covers the variable cost and they can keep their doors open. Oil will be plentiful and cheap for years.

The US is flooded with gas stations. If many were to close, which won't happen anytime soon, there would still be more than enough for convenience.

People are accustomed to being able to drive wherever they want to go, which is not possible in any non-Tesla EV. GM, Ford and Fiat Chrysler are unwilling to fix this, and it's uneconomic for entrepreneurs to step in.

A great many people believe human-caused climate change is nonsense that exists only in the minds of liberals, which is reason for them to not buy an EV absent a compelling economic case (maybe). And many people only care about the here and now.

Autonomous ride sharing EVs might affect the picture several years from now when truly autonomous cars finally exist. (I believe that next year Teslas will have much-improved FSD. This driver assistance feature should help sell Teslas, but full autonomy is needed for autonomous ride sharing EVs.)

EV market share will increase each year, but not at the rate some people have projected.

We will soon find out during the Investor Battery Day. If Maxwell tech can drive battery drivetrain down to below ICE while increasing production by 10-16x, then the conversion will be fast and violent. Most people just wants to get to work safely and cheaply. The majority of car buyers are not looking into how green their car is, they only care about MPG and initial cost. The world we live in is trying to figure out if buying an EV is worth the EV tax(since EVs cost more generally so we need to figure out that break even period). But imagine a world when that tax is no longer there, but actually cost MORE to buy an ICE. Then it's game over.

 

[jerry33]

New Model 3 owner, here. I didn’t buy my Tesla because I was trying to “Save The Planet”. I bought it as an early adopter to support evolution of the technology to a more efficient mode of transportation. I’m under no illusion that I’m not creating pollution by getting an EV. Essentially, an EV shifts the source of pollution from the tailpipe to the power plant. An EV vs traditional car are pretty much of a wash when you consider the eco impacts of manufacturing, all the way back to the hole that the raw materials come from. But, electrical propulsion is significantly more energy efficient than an ICE. And while the bulk of the electrical energy used to charge the battery and thus drive the car comes from fossil fuel sources, electrical energy can be captured from any number of renewable sources. Studies I have read show EV’s creating up to a 25% improvement in the overall environment impact over traditional cars, largely through improvements in energy efficiency.

There's a bunch not right here. First power plants a far more efficient than any ICE vehicle so the pollution per kW delivered is lower. Second. Power plant emissions are not in your face the way ICE vehicle exhausts are. Third. Every gallon of gas or diesel burned adds $12 to $17 to healthcare costs. Fourth. The grid is constantly getting cleaner so BEVs get better with age. Fifth. Many of the "EVs pollute more" studies have been shown to be incorrect. Typically the use old data (energy from previous decades) and silly assumptions (e.g. An EV only lasts 100K miles before scrap compared to 400K miles for ICE).

 

[Artful Dodger]

OT - Weekend Bender: (spotted on twitter)

Dodge Ram Owner @RamLover69 3 hours ago

Replying to @Tesla

"LMFAO you put the steering wheel on the wrong side! My local Dodge dealer and I are dying laughing"​

Fixed that. He'll figure it out on his own.

 

[ZachF]

Thanks for the correction!

Note that ICE engine efficiency is usually quoted as a function of gasoline efficiency - which ignores the ~30% energy loss due to crude oil extraction, transportation and refining.

So a 20% efficient ICE engine is in reality only converting about 14% of the crude oil it consumes into kinetic energy.

Teslas will also reuse about 20% of the kinetic energy through regenerative braking, which improves the net environmental balance as well.

Just taking the oil and burning it in CCGT power plants to charge up EVs would cut oil usage by about half.

Automobile engines are incredibly inefficient.

 

[jerry33]

But to where you push the pollution? There is no “away” to throw anything. The ecology is a closed-loop system. That is just shoving the problem into someone else’s back yard

No, because the pollution per energy unit is less from power plants, so less pollution altogether. In addition, new energy plants forecast for the next few years are mainly solar. Few natural gas and no coal. This isn't because of legislation, it's because solar is quick and easy to erect, while gas and coal plants need to be started more than ten years in advance. So as the old plants go offline, they will be replaced by solar (and some wind).

 

[EVNow]

Provided the $10 was actually used for something other than executive compensation and administration (and the president doesn't abscond with the funds). The problem with giving money for a cause is that so little goes to the cause that you might as well keep it for all the good it does.

Well, it's a theoretical exercise. Even then people are not willing. I'm less inclined to give them a pass on this. People want "them" - oil companies and utilities to pay. They do not want to acknowledge that they are equally guilty / benefitted from all the polluting but cheap fuel.

 

[Christine69420]

Does anyone here any data or anecdotal evidence about how the drop in gasoline sales in Norway is affecting gas stations?

Gas stations are plentiful in Bjorn's videos. Every tiny town he passes seems to have one or more.

Since 9 out of 10 cars still needs fossil fuel the gas stations won't go away. I haven't heard about any station beeing closed because of electric cars. Gas stations still close from time to time like they always have.

I remeber reading about stations selling less gas in regions where EVs are most popular. Which would be in and around larger cities surrounded by toll stations. EVs pay no toll or up to 50% toll compared to fossils.

What is new is that many gas stations are installing charging stations. And Tesla often put their superchargers on or close to a gas station. It surprised me when I took my Tesla to southern Europe that most superchargers south of Scandinavia were installed in hotel parking lots.

 

[InDaClub]

It's the Union of Concerned Scientists, so they would've included extractions costs, but were probably conservative with it to make a compelling case. The problem is that Mr.T is in the middle of coal country. Here's the most recent study using 2017 data: New Data Show Electric Vehicles Continue to Get Cleaner

... and here's their study using 2015 data: Cleaner Cars from Cradle to Grave (2015)

The significance, was how much better the grid got in just 2 years. I'm sure the 2019 data will show that EV's currently ARE cleaner than hybrids, even with a coal-powered grid! But we don't have the data to prove that ... yet.

The human costs of a coal-powered grid are extremely high...

Coal's Deadly Dust

 

[Mike Smith]

I wanted to test whether Seeking Alpha will actually remove one of their many false Tesla articles if I point out the inaccuracies to them, so I picked one and emailed them the following. Let's see if they remove it.

https://seekingalpha.com/article/4271538-tesla-may-need-heavy-fleet-sales-meet-q2-guidance

The author states:

"Recently, Business Insider published leaked Tesla's production numbers. Business Insider says that weeks after CEO Elon Musk communicated in his internal email that the Company needs to produce 1,000 Model 3s per day, the Company has reached that milestone only once so far and has been averaging about 700 Model 3 cars per day."

There are two false claims here.

1) Business insider didn't publish the leaked information. They only reported that they saw it.

2) The leaked information didn't give Model 3 production numbers - it only showed the production rate of one part of production - they don't say which, but it may have been battery production for instance. They may have simply had batteries stockpiled and didn't need to make as many during this period. Business Insider explains this themselves, and clearly states that they don't actually know the production rate:

"Daily output rates for one part of the production process do not necessarily correspond with final production numbers on a given day because vehicles must go through other steps that may operate at different speeds."
Here is the article the author refers and links to :

Leaked documents suggest Tesla has not met a Model 3 production goal set by Elon Musk in recent weeks

 

[SteveG3]

I see zero chance anyone that wins the self driving race will order ICE cars for a commercial service. It is just simple economic self interest. All in cost per mile of an EV AV is 3-4x lower than an ICE AV. It is such a pointless handicap to massively increase your entire cost base for no reason.
I think the race is really between Tesla and the AI/Data first approach, Google and the hardware/lidar first approach and Baidu with potentially the most regulatory support. None of them have any reason to buy ICE cars for a commercial service. Even Cruise has enough independence to choose only EV.

Of course, Waymo etc wouldn’t pick an ICE fleet over an EV fleet for ride share as a service.

That’s not at all what I was suggesting. My point is that the ICE incumbents may end up being able to extend their aversion to switching to EVs for the tens of millions of cars they sell to consumers by the value added of FSD if they can develop it amongst themselves or by it from an outside provider. To most consumers the value added of their family being 10X more safe because of FSD will almost certainly outweigh waiting years due to a shortage of EV FSD vehicles.