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

[Singuy]

The other sad thing is it doesn't even accomplish the goal of supporting the stock price. When this language appears, there is often a climb into the report and then a strong selling of the news negating the climb. It would truly be better for Tesla to just get on with unwinding the damn wave.

Well tax credit cliff cluld be attributed to more of a wave this quarter. I have to say the wave is smaller vs last quarter.

 

[Carl Raymond]

Regarding the wave.

The chart has a typical y value.
The crest of the wave has a y plus ‘extra effort’ factor. The gain.
The trough of the wave has a y minus ‘phew, we deserve a break’ factor. The drop.

Discussion seems to assume that the gain is offset fully by the drop. I doubt this is true. When people are pushed they discover new ways to achieve. e.g. They might forge a better relationship with a trucking company. They might divide the team into specialist talents, learning who is best at what.

Going forward, these gains are maintained.

Having discovered what fast feels like, normal output, y, actually feels like a break.

Elon is not stupid. Awkward with people not equals failure to understand people. The wave is shaped a bit like a step.

 

[KSilver2000]

Yep. This particular practice *ticks customers off* -- it's the worst part of the "end of quarter rush", the worst part of the wave, and they need to cut it out -- but apparently this is not the quarter they're going to stop. It's customer disservice.

Anyone know how Tesla is communicating to customers who end up in this situation having to wait a week or two longer? I haven’t ordered a custom Tesla near the end of a quarter, so I don’t know.

 

[LN1_Casey]

Papafox just happened to be 2500 miles out of his way when driving by the Fremont factory logistics lot this afternoon.

*gigglesnort* Just like I 'just happened' to locate the only Tesla store in Paris during my latest trip.

 

[Electroman]

Huge loss from Q1 even though the narrative was sold to Tesla investors in 2016 that once the MOdel 3 is out, Tesla revenue will go through the roof. Elon continued to reiterated this throughout 2018, hence the "we will be profitable after q3". Q3 and Q4 were profitable and investors were reassured. Then a huge loss happened in Q1. Then Tesla raised capital, and then said the capital raised will be gone in 10 months if they don't cut spending(not exactly what he said but doesn't exactly give investor the confidence on that promise from 2016).

Tesla is a speculation stock. When the dream failed in a spectacular fashion like Q1, this stock will fall like a rock until confidence is regained. The market is not being irrational here. The evaluation given to Tesla right before the Model 3 have proved itself was pretty high.

I hate to admit - i agree with this assessment.

 

[neroden]

Anyone know how Tesla is communicating to customers who end up in this situation having to wait a week or two longer?

Rudely.

Pop over to the other forums here...

 

[Doggydogworld]

Anyone know how Tesla is communicating to customers who end up in this situation having to wait a week or two longer?

They give them the mushroom treatment, as usual. Tesla personnel must focus all attention on customers who will take delivery in Q2. No time to reply to anyone else, such as those wondering WTF is going on with the car they were promised.

Fortunately, Tesla customers are mostly enthusiasts who feel suffering adds meaning to the experience and proves they are worthy ​

I believe he also said except for quarters with large, one time payments, and cited Q1 as a possible example, at the time.

The bond repayment caveat only applies to the cash flow portion of his statement, it has no affect on profitability.

Didn't Tesla change the terms of free supercharging to exclude vehicles used in commercial enterprises? --or was that exclusion prospectively only, i.e. cars purchased before the change were grandfathered?

Yes. Existing cars were grandfathered, including the ones in Tesloop's fleet.​

 

[neroden]

Tesla internal and customer communications are really and truly appalling and I think they cut the valuation of the company in half.

 

[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.

Tesla May Need Heavy Fleet Sales To Meet Q2 Guidance - Tesla, Inc. (NASDAQ:TSLA) | Seeking Alpha

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

Update:

Haven't heard a thing since the immediate "we're looking into it" last Friday. The article remains unchanged.

 

[RobStark]

Apple buys self-driving car startup Drive.ai - Reuters

 

[Artful Dodger]

Every week, I read nothing but good news about the EV market and Tesla. Cities banning ICE vehicles, countries setting dates in the near future to ban ICE vehicles completely, crazy EV growth in the worlds largest car market (China), EV production issues and battery shortages for Tesla's competitors, tariff exemptions for Tesla with huge battery growth planned, best mid-luxury car, safest vehicles, AP3, growing demand, etc., etc. And yet, another down day and the SP is nowhere near 360 or even 300. What in the hell is wrong with the stock market?

You apparently don't read twitter.

 

[Bet TSLA]

Anyone know how Tesla is communicating to customers who end up in this situation having to wait a week or two longer? I haven’t ordered a custom Tesla near the end of a quarter, so I don’t know.

When they actually communicate, it looks like: "Sorry, it turns out your delivery won't happen in time. So we'll be selling your car to somebody else who can actually get it before the end of the month, and we'll build you a new one. You won't get it for a couple of weeks though. Perhaps you would like one of these similar vehicles instead, which we can get to you by the end of the month? Your choice." And maybe they throw in a sweetener as well.

Seems not unreasonable to me. The last S I bought was an inventory car that had been in the showroom and had a few hundred miles on it. They gave me a discount, but the main reason for getting it rather than a built to order one was that I could take delivery *now* rather than in a couple of months. I took delivery on the last day of 2017.

 

[acoste]

I also refuse to debate whether gravity causes us to be attracted to the Earth. And I refuse to debate whether the Earth goes around the sun.

Sane people don't debate things which have been overwhelmingly proven by decades of overwhelming evidence.

I'm happy to *provide evidence* and *discuss it*. But a debate over whether gravity is real is stupid. Humans are causing global warming and ocean acidification by burning fossils, and that's proven.

haha, you are touching a sensitive topic. Gravity has not been explained by the scientists yet. Calculations are based on empirical observations.

 

[Captkerosene]

The debate is over. There is nothing left to debate, except how do we deal with the fallout. That’s the only debate that matters, and why nobody is foolish enough to argue with you about established science fact.

Mod: anyway, if they try to debate it in this thread it will get deleted. -ggr.

I have no desire to argue about climate change. Merely was pointing out how arrogant people who say the issue is decided are.

The last poster edited the most important part of my post: "People don't hate Teslas, they hate Tesla owners." That was the point of my post. The car has become associated with liberal politics. Much the same way Harley was associated with the Hell's Angels. This is an INVESTMENT board and people can't stop posting about global warming armageddon, immigration and how much they hate Trump. Is it your goal to sell Teslas and make money or advance political agendas? Alienating half the population is not the way to grow the brand. Tesla is trying to cast a wide net and many posters on this board are hindering instead of helping their efforts. So when somebody keys a Tesla understand that it wasn't the car they wanted to hurt, it was the owner. Same way some people feel about a Ferrari. Now you know.

Personally, I love the cars and the investment thesis. Until a few weeks ago I had never really looked at the business. The logic of switching to electric cars is obvious after a short investigation. I think they'll have a five year stretch where they won't be able to produce all the cars the market demands.

Waiting for the next S refresh or maybe the "P" or Roadster. (Never thought I'd drive anything but a Mercedes S class or Ferrari again.)

 

[ClimateOptimst]

haha, you are touching a sensitive topic. Gravity has not been explained by the scientists yet. Calculations are based on empirical observations.

Science never proves anything 100% but accumulates evidence to support or refute testable hypotheses about the natural world. Generally speaking, once something is known to be "true" with 90, or 95, or 99% confidence it's accepted as fact, theories and laws coalesce about those facts and a working corpus of knowledge is developed on which future knowledge gains can be made. If we required that things be known with 99.999% confidence before they were considered true or providing actionable information, we'd still be stuck in the Dark Ages. Nonetheless, that 0.001% is a real thing, though those that disingenuously play it up are ultimately consigned to the dustbin of history or revealed to have an agenda of some sort.

 

[Mike Smith]

Already up $3 in Germany. The new Elon email removes the doubts about production that the BI article had created.

 

[mrdoubleb]

Not sure if this has been posted yet. Surprising MSM would publish something like this.
Tesla Beating Competitors Even With Its Hands Tied

 

[graphix25]

Thinking about how much Tesla struggles to ship only 100,000 cars in a 3 month period. So I was curious what I consider the gold standard in the auto industry Toyota looked like from a delivery network perspective. In 2016 Toyota delivered 2.5 million vehicles in the US or ~208,333 a month. With 1800 dealerships that is basically 116 cars a month per dealership on average and it starts to make sense why Tesla struggles so much. I don't have a good handle on how many delivery centers Tesla has in the US but I would suspect it's about 50 sites in the US and 150 globally. Tesla has a long way to go to build out a delivery network capable of delivery of 2-3 million cars a year. The logistics in delivery on the surface of 100,000 cars for 3 months globally seems like a simple, trivial problem. One has to have respect for the large traditional automakers who can delivery 500k to 1 million cars a month. China factory will help, so will having a factory in Europe to reduce shipping logistics. The big bottleneck will be truck and delivery center capacity. Seems like Tesla will get little help from partners and with no dealer network will have to make massive investments over the next 5 years to scale this business. Factories, transportation, delivery network make the charging network seem like child's play and ironically where the rest of the industry is so weak.

"Our 1,800 North American dealerships (1,500 in the U.S.) sold more than 2.8 million cars and trucks (nearly 2.5 million in the U.S.) in 2016 – and about 80 percent of all Toyota vehicles sold over the past 20 years are still on the road today.Jan 3, 2018"

 

[dww12]

Thinking about how much Tesla struggles to ship only 100,000 cars in a 3 month period. So I was curious what I consider the gold standard in the auto industry Toyota looked like from a delivery network perspective. In 2016 Toyota delivered 2.5 million vehicles in the US or ~208,333 a month. With 1800 dealerships that is basically 116 cars a month per dealership on average and it starts to make sense why Tesla struggles so much. I don't have a good handle on how many delivery centers Tesla has in the US but I would suspect it's about 50 sites in the US and 150 globally. Tesla has a long way to go to build out a delivery network capable of delivery of 2-3 million cars a year. The logistics in delivery on the surface of 100,000 cars for 3 months globally seems like a simple, trivial problem. One has to have respect for the large traditional automakers who can delivery 500k to 1 million cars a month. China factory will help, so will having a factory in Europe to reduce shipping logistics. The big bottleneck will be truck and delivery center capacity. Seems like Tesla will get little help from partners and with no dealer network will have to make massive investments over the next 5 years to scale this business. Factories, transportation, delivery network make the charging network seem like child's play and ironically where the rest of the industry is so weak.

"Our 1,800 North American dealerships (1,500 in the U.S.) sold more than 2.8 million cars and trucks (nearly 2.5 million in the U.S.) in 2016 – and about 80 percent of all Toyota vehicles sold over the past 20 years are still on the road today.Jan 3, 2018"

You don’t need a dealership. Last mile will be self delivered by the car. Those needing a “delivery experience” can still go to a service center but most won’t need or want it. Once Tesla is doing body panel change outs “in minutes” you won’t be as concerned if your new car comes with a scratch. Take a pic upon delivery, car drives to SC and gets a new panel, then drives back. That may be a few years off but so is 200k deliveries a month and so would be adding thosands of lots for delivery centers.

 

[mongo]

Thinking about how much Tesla struggles to ship only 100,000 cars in a 3 month period. So I was curious what I consider the gold standard in the auto industry Toyota looked like from a delivery network perspective. In 2016 Toyota delivered 2.5 million vehicles in the US or ~208,333 a month. With 1800 dealerships that is basically 116 cars a month per dealership on average and it starts to make sense why Tesla struggles so much. I don't have a good handle on how many delivery centers Tesla has in the US but I would suspect it's about 50 sites in the US and 150 globally. Tesla has a long way to go to build out a delivery network capable of delivery of 2-3 million cars a year. The logistics in delivery on the surface of 100,000 cars for 3 months globally seems like a simple, trivial problem. One has to have respect for the large traditional automakers who can delivery 500k to 1 million cars a month. China factory will help, so will having a factory in Europe to reduce shipping logistics. The big bottleneck will be truck and delivery center capacity. Seems like Tesla will get little help from partners and with no dealer network will have to make massive investments over the next 5 years to scale this business. Factories, transportation, delivery network make the charging network seem like child's play and ironically where the rest of the industry is so weak.

"Our 1,800 North American dealerships (1,500 in the U.S.) sold more than 2.8 million cars and trucks (nearly 2.5 million in the U.S.) in 2016 – and about 80 percent of all Toyota vehicles sold over the past 20 years are still on the road today.Jan 3, 2018"

Tesla is lean. At the end of Q1, Tesla only had 30 days of inventory. The low inventory makes it harder to get the right car to the early orderer.

There is also scale: Toyota has 4 US vehicle manufacturing plants spreading the logistics load (just under 2 million vehicles). Which implies 500k+ imported too. So roughly 6 Fremonts worth of capacity for 6x Tesla deliveries.