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

[MarcusMaximus]

I'm using heuristics to loosely mean "software 1.0". Basically anything other than NN.

eg. Drive in the center of the lane is heuristics. But that needs to be upgraded to take care of special situations like cyclist or construction worked or huge truck on one side when the car should drive closer to the lane marking on the other side (or even cross over the center line).

Now, if and when NN takes over that part, you delete that heuristics code.

BTW, according to Karpathy there will be parts where heuristics will be much easier and better than NN. Like whether to drive on left or right side of the road.

Ah, ok. Sorry, I think the bit about heuristics people using neural networks confused me a bit.

 

[MarcusMaximus]

Everybody is complaining this thread is going off topic and the mods not doing enough. But way too many people just keep posting OT even after mods have called for a stop. I find this quite disrespectful.

I think oftentimes, it’s that people read through the posts in order and reply when they see something to reply to. So they come across the post to reply to before actually seeing the mod’s post(and, since all posts are then marked as read, they may never see the mod’s reply).

 

[hobbes]

Ah, my EU broker also has some weird derivatives like that. Probably a small risk, but if this Societe Generale corporation somehow goes bust, I think you also lose your options.

Also, it sounds like you won't be able to sell these options before expiry. You may be able to exercise them before expiry, but you may not. Definitely read the prospectus thoroughly before buying anything.

When I considered buying options on my German trading account, I disovered they only have derivatives called "Optionsscheine" which are not the same as options that is talked about here. Especially much less liquidity IIRC. Didn´t go into options trading, but if I would, I´d also consider doing it via an international broker like Interactive Brokers.

BTW Societe Generale is one of the largest French Banks and on the List of Global Systemically Important Banks, so very unlikely for the to go out of business IMHO.

 

[jerry33]

I think oftentimes, it’s that people read through the posts in order and reply when they see something to reply to. So they come across the post to reply to before actually seeing the mod’s post(and, since all posts are then marked as read, they may never see the mod’s reply).

I think it's more the order of the post. People start at their first unread message and read and reply, then they see the Mod's post but it's too late. If there was a way for Mod's to mark posts as (OT - do not reply or OT - reply in X thread), that would go a long way to solving the problem. The problem with other threads is that there are so many threads, I suspect that people only look at this thread plus the threads that are marked as being followed. Often the new spin off threads (the ones created by Mods spinning them off) are overlooked. It's hard enough just to keep up with this thread.

 

[kbM3]

I think oftentimes, it’s that people read through the posts in order and reply when they see something to reply to. So they come across the post to reply to before actually seeing the mod’s post(and, since all posts are then marked as read, they may never see the mod’s reply).

Actually it’s really quite simple. Don’t reply at all if the topic has nothing to do with Tesla.

 

[JRP3]

I think it's more the order of the post. People start at their first unread message and read and reply, then they see the Mod's post but it's too late.

I make a real effort to read all the posts before replying. I often find that my reply isn't needed.

 

[heltok]

Been driving a PHEV the last weeks. Experience has been pretty lackluster. Refusing to charge, need to flip plug 180deg for it to charge, fuse going off as car/cable could not set amp level. Etc etc. I assume these issues are less common for Teslas. Feels like acer laptop vs macbook pro in 2005. Feel the same when I see Mercedes new truck vs Tesla Semi. More intelligent clean design, better software integration, better vision, increasing market share, high profit margins, soon very high profit share for EVs.

 

[Doggydogworld]

Has there been any clarity as to whether the Q1 writeoff partially or completely compensated for the price cuts on S/X inventory that made up such a large part of Tesla's S/X deliveries this quarter?

Inventory write-down was relatively small. Written down cars sell at ~0% margin.

I have some mix estimates in the Near-Future Quarterly.... thread.

One of the nice things about higher volumes is that it means lower per-unit depreciation

As mentioned before, this saved <300 in Q2. ASP fell ~4k.

I'm not talking about $400. For the latter part of $Q1, the starting price on the Model 3 was $35k. Now (except off-menu in specific markets with minimal supply and long delivery times), the starting price is $39,9k.

To my knowledge they did not deliver a single SR in Q1. The few SRbuyers who held out and resisted upsell efforts took delivery in April.

I estimate they delivered 5k SR+ in Q1 vs. >35k SR/SR+ in Q2. There were so few SRs I just use SR+ prices for all of them when estimating ASP. The Q1 deliveries were all "37k" SR+ versions, Q2 started with a bunch of those then shifted to "39.9k including AP" versions. The actual "price increase" was about $500:

37k SR+ with 2.4k AP (80% take rate) = 39.4k
39.9k SR+ including AP

 

[Fred42]

I think it's more the order of the post. People start at their first unread message and read and reply, then they see the Mod's post but it's too late. If there was a way for Mod's to mark posts as (OT - do not reply or OT - reply in X thread), that would go a long way to solving the problem. The problem with other threads is that there are so many threads, I suspect that people only look at this thread plus the threads that are marked as being followed. Often the new spin off threads (the ones created by Mods spinning them off) are overlooked. It's hard enough just to keep up with this thread.

The other posts in this thread are often interesting and informative. Subjects that are uninteresting to me are easily skipped over. Most of the other threads are too boring to read and are therefore overlooked.

 

[Cosmacelf]

Karpathy talk... don't know if it has already been posted.

Andrej Karpathy | Multi-Task Learning in the Wilderness

This is a MUST LISTEN for anyone who wants to know about Tesla's NN. Has a lot of previously unknown information. Among other things, it explains quite well why we sometimes get new AP software that regresses past functionality. A specific task might not perform as well as it had in the past, but the average performance of all tasks is improved. Of course Tesla tries to minimize regressions.

Tesla's development server farm must be epic. Forget the manufacturing line, I would fly in for a tour of that server farm...

 

[Tslynk67]

I make a real effort to read all the posts before replying. I often find that my reply isn't needed.

I often reply to a post then read further and find the identical point from someone else posted before me. In that case, I'll go back and deleted my post if it's still in the 1 hour window.

 

[KarenRei]

Inventory write-down was relatively small

It was several/many thousands of dollars per S/X sold this quarter if it's all attributable to them, depending on how you break it down into buyback guarantees vs. written-down inventory.

Written down cars sell at ~0% margin.

Is this a general consensus here? How can that be guaranteed? Does every inventory vehicle have to have its pricing adjusted to exactly equal 0%? What if the person adds on an optional extra, like FSD?

As mentioned before, this saved <300 in Q2. ASP fell ~4k.

When you say ASP, are you talking about your model for ASP, including the M3 price increases?

I estimate they delivered 5k SR+ in Q1 vs. >35k SR/SR+ in Q2

Possible, although the SR/SR+ number for Q2 sounds high. There seem to have been very few delivered in Europe, and one presumes China is similar. And Tesla has talked about continuing strong LR sales in the US after the introduction of SR/SR+. Canada I expect to be SR-biased due to their tax credit's structure, but that's only one market.

There were so few SRs I just use SR+ prices for all of them when estimating ASP.

Probably right.

The Q1 deliveries were all "37k" SR+ versions, Q2 started with a bunch of those then shifted to "39.9k including AP" versions. The actual "price increase" was about $500

37k SR+ with 2.4k AP (80% take rate) = 39.4k
39.9k SR+ including AP

80% take rate on EAP? You have to be joking.

I was hearing anecdotes from people at Tesla stores of something like 25-30% EAP take rates on SR+.

 

[EVNow]

Tesla's development server farm must be epic. Forget the manufacturing line, I would fly in for a tour of that server farm...

I wonder whether they are using a 3rd party cloud - much faster to scale up than 1st party data centers.

At some point Karpathy refers briefly to compute budget, and that would imply 3rd party cloud.

 

[EVNow]

80% take rate on EAP? You have to be joking.

I was hearing anecdotes from people at Tesla stores of something like 25-30% EAP take rates on SR+.

It makes marginal difference whether it was 80% take rate or 25%. This is because only some 10% of Q1 mix was SR+ vs 35%+ in Q2. So, for 25% of the cars, $50k was replaced by $40k.

 

[Steve m]

Tesla's development server farm must be epic. Forget the manufacturing line, I would fly in for a tour of that server farm...

Wow just occured to me that the value of a large NN training farm may be worth as much potentially as Amazon's AWS business.

 

[mblakele]

I wonder whether they are using a 3rd party cloud - much faster to scale up than 1st party data centers.

At some point Karpathy refers briefly to compute budget, and that would imply 3rd party cloud.

I took that as referring to the car's compute budget, which could be further divided into CPU, GPU, etc. Even HW3 will have limits, and they are probably still targeting HW2 for public releases.

 

[tander]

Just search the web a bit, lots of articles about this. The most "vegan" thing you can eat is a pasture-fed cow.

Ordering the vegetarian meal? There's more animal blood on your hands

Look, this isn't the place to discuss this anyway, I'm going to stop now.

As with Tesla, do your own due diligence, don't just accept what's written by others, because they usually have a hidden agenda, vested interest, or have been bought-out by big food/pharma.

That kind of reminds me of the arguments that electric cars aren't green because they run on electricity generated by fossil fuels. Even if there was no such thing as renewable energy electric cars still make sense because they reduce pollution in cities, i.e. people are healthier even though the overall environment is not much.

Ah, my EU broker also has some weird derivatives like that. Probably a small risk, but if this Societe Generale corporation somehow goes bust, I think you also lose your options.

Also, it sounds like you won't be able to sell these options before expiry. You may be able to exercise them before expiry, but you may not. Definitely read the prospectus thoroughly before buying anything.

I decided against buying any of these things with my EU broker and opened an account with Interactive Brokers just for option trading. You might want to look into that. Account setup was fairly fast and easy for me, and I've been very happy with them.

And yeah like the others said, options are definitely more risky than shares. I personally have put a relatively small amount into options compared to the amount of TSLA shares I'm holding.

Do they have any long-term EU options? In the US the longest for TSLA is about two years.

 

[pnungesser]

The next ship to the EU, Triumph Ace, has cleared SF Bay and is headed to Panama.

 

[EVNow]

I took that as referring to the car's compute budget, which could be further divided into CPU, GPU, etc. Even HW3 will have limits, and they are probably still targeting HW2 for public releases.

Yes, there are two budgets. One is the total number of networks (I guess layers) they can have in the car. The second is training budget - which could also be a time constraint rather than $ - in which case could be either 1st party or 3rd.

BTW, it doesn't make sense to target HW2 for public release of City NOA. No point in constraining the NN to HW2 after spending all that effort on HW3.

This is what EM tweeted on Jul 7th.

Production fully switched over ~3 months ago. Functionality won’t diverge until Q4, as it’s limited by software validation. Will be later for Europe compared to rest of world due to regulatory constraints that were put in place years ago by big ICE companies.
​

So let's parse it.

"Functionality won’t diverge until Q4" = Same functionality for HW2 and HW3 until Q4. So same NN.
"as it’s limited by software validation" = The new NN for HW3 will finish validation in Q4 and then it will be pushed out to HW3 fleet. At that time we will start upgrading the HW2 fleet to HW3.

 

[TradingInvest]

It's not difficult to delay some payments from one quarter to the next. Seems to me

I wonder whether they are using a 3rd party cloud - much faster to scale up than 1st party data centers.

At some point Karpathy refers briefly to compute budget, and that would imply 3rd party cloud.

When Karpathy talks about compute budget, he usually refers to autopilot hardware computational bandwidth.