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

[Artful Dodger]

But I don't want to belabor the point about JB and shares sales. That was only an ancillary point to my larger argument:

You've MISSED the point: these are all sales of executed share options. That's how senior executives are paid in Silicon Valley. JB is NOT selling his core holdings. He's executing his options, and using the sales to pay his taxes and to fund his charities. JB is not divesting. And he's not doing anything different now (or in May) than he has been for a long time. The only difference is what Shortz are selling at the kool-aid stand. Don't buy it.

 

[Singuy]

It doesn't matter if everyone wants to or not. Just that enough people do. You gave the example of a high mortgage; lets follow that logic. We've seen that in areas with high amounts of tourism, AirBnB has flourished. As that happened, both monthly rent amounts *and* housing prices have shot through the roof. Of course, not everyone wants to rent out part of their house. The problem is that they're competing on buying those houses with tons of people who do. This has happened to the point that many metropolitan areas have started putting in strict limits on AirBnB's in order to lower the demand on housing for that purpose and, therefore, open up housing affordable to residents.

No, it's more like a house that's for sale goes to the highest bidder - and the highest bidder is the one who knows they can make extra money from Airbnb. If Tesla doesn't sell their cars at the market rate it's like selling houses at a below market price. We know what happens when homes are sold at undervalue - they get flipped by smart investors for excess profits.

Do we want Tesla to be selling their house for less than they can get? Probably not.

Well what they can do is have a business version and a consumer version. Software Lock the consumer version. Kind of like how cable internet is more expensive if used for business vs home. Or how a data center graphics card cost way more than a similar Titan card.

 

[Creekstalker]

Fairly flat in premarket (up $0.44) despite negative (but improving macros)

Off-topic: Wow do we ever need a separate market action thread! Nothing against the self-driving metrics/regulators discussion. It's interesting for sure, but we really need a place where it's easy to check on and discuss news and developments that are moving the stock in the near term. Market action would allow this with less sifting through a lot of longer-term speculation. Just my $.02.

 

[jerry33]

Well what they can do is have a business version and a consumer version. Software Lock the consumer version. Kind of like how cable internet is more expensive if used for business vs home.

You also get a bit more such as static IP address(es), better outage service, a more stable connection, etc. This comes at a price.

 

[jeewee3000]

Yeah, that's useful data, but what I meant is a bit different: for literally decades ABS (and airbags) was invented, available in some cars, but ABS was not mandatory by law.

How did Volvo and the other high end manufacturers treat the resulting liability, for example the fact that braking distance with ABS on ice increases 5-fold, which unarguably created some crashes which would not have happened without ABS - while also obviously massively reducing the average rate and severity of crashes? Or the fact that short, fragile elderly ladies being hit in the face by a deploying airbag designed for ~80 kg healthy males in an otherwise relatively low-energy and injury-free collision might seriously injure or even kill them by breaking their neck? Standard size for crash test dummies: 175 cm (5'9") tall and a mass of 77 kg (170 lb).

And note that ABS, once present in a car, was basically unconditional, the driver couldn't turn it off even if they expected icy conditions and knew about the limitations of ABS braking. So the liability of any injuries caused by ABS rested solely on the shoulders of the car manufacturer. What is the historic precedent for treating such risks?

Does this make it clearer?

I think the answer to your question is less complex than you imagine it to be.

Many times companies just "do things" and the regulators play catch up. ("They're like a dog chasing cars" - the Joker)

ABS was deemed safe, at least safer than non-ABS vehicles, so manufacturers added it to their product line and consumers voted with their wallets.

If you crash because your ABS extended your braking distance on icy roads, you are still responsible as a driver.

In Belgian law this is governed by art. 10.1.1° of the Traffic Code:

"Elke bestuurder moet zijn snelheid regelen zoals vereist wegens de aanwezigheid van andere weggebruikers, in ’t bijzonder de meest kwetsbaren, de weersomstandigheden, de plaatsgesteldheid, haar belemmering, de verkeersdichtheid, het zicht, de staat van de weg, de staat en de lading van zijn voertuig; zijn snelheid mag geen oorzaak zijn van ongevallen, noch het verkeer hinderen."

Roughly translated:
Every driver must adjust his speed as required by the presence of other road users, especially those most vulnerable, the weather conditions, the local situation, its hindrance, the traffic density, the visibility, the state of the road, the condition and the load of his vehicle; his speed must not be a cause of accidents, nor hinder traffic.

Whether your car has ABS or not is of the same level as how fast your car can brake/accelerate: it is the condition/status of your vehicle which you as a driver must know and adapt to.

In the U.S. there must be a legal equivalent to this that points to responsability of the driver itself, not the manufacturer.

So I don't think manufacturers have carried the liability for ABS.

A better question would be: at what point (and given what data) were manufacturers convinced to start putting ABS in their vehicles, even though it was not mandatory?


Anyway, ABS is an unfair analogy to FSD since the latter is the first of technologies that removes driver responsability whatsoever.

Therefore we can't learn from historic precedent. We are facing an entirely new problem legally.

This is why law is a very interesting subject, at least to us lawyers

 

[Singuy]

You also get a bit more such as static IP address(es), better outage service, a more stable connection, etc. This comes at a price.

Yes, you have access to the Tesla network, quicker repair service, and maybe a more robust power train if they choose to do so with higher quality and more durable seats. I mean they can charge double for some minor improvements.

Just having access to a payment and an automated ride hailing system like the Tesla network is probably good enough to call it the business version .

 

[Artful Dodger]

Pardon to interrupt the "what is safe FSD?" discussion.

Upper-BB is at 257.91 at the Open. Shortzes have got themselves a little air pocket this morning. Let's see what they can do today.

P.S. On-topic discussion for this thread would be "WHEN is safe FSD?" Jus' sayin'...

P.P.S. TSLA Volume was less than 0.5M shares in the 1st half-hour of trading. Shortzes like low volume days, makes their manipulations cheaper.

 

[humbaba]

The inverse speed to complexity relationship is probably something like this: the reason you are going so slow is that the number and variation of things that could happen is so high. If you could be 100% certain you weren't gonna have shopping carts pop out of nowhere or kids running around in a parking lot you could drive around at 30mph (or 70mph really). But you can't safely make that assumption. The speed is not the cause of the complexity, it is the symptom of the complex driving task.

Right, but higher complexity does not necessarily mean higher difficulty. In programming you can sometimes have a very complex task resolved by some simple code. Especially when dealing with a topic where a person's knowledge is deficient (and for autonomous vehicles its pretty safe to say that everyone here is knowledge deficient) it is important to be clear what the constraints really are.

A good gymnast makes what they do look amazing, but easy and effortless. If someone hasn't solved the higher speed issues (which are different from low speed issues) then even if they have solved the low speed issues they cannot accurately compare them.

I'm surprised I that I need to spell this out, but in a parking lot you don't have to solve for vehicles doing 100mph, roll overs, etc. On an interstate you still have to solve for pedestrians, stopped cars pulling out suddenly, etc. While a grocery cart may not be likely, the equivalent happens. Pedestrians are not supposed to be crossing interstates, but it happens. On a trip earlier this year an accident I saw was the result of a semi pulling into traffic from the shoulder and being rear ended by a pickup trick.

While the probability of these occurrences is a lot lower per mile or minute than in a parking lot you still have to solve for them. And instead of having seconds to respond you may have milliseconds. And not only is more difficult to detect and avoid in time, but the probability of severe injury or death is far higher. No amount of hand waving about "inversely proportional to speed" makes these problems go away.

 

[UncaNed]

Elon Musk tweeted about Graham's number the other day. (Elon Musk on Twitter)

But just this snippet from Wikipedia is quite revealing:

"Graham's number is.... so large that the observable universe is far too small to contain an ordinary digital representation of Graham's number, assuming that each digit occupies one Planck volume, possibly the smallest measurable space. But even the number of digits in this digital representation of Graham's number would itself be a number so large that its digital representation cannot be represented in the observable universe. Nor even can the number of digits of that number—and so forth, for a number of times far exceeding the total number of Planck volumes in the observable universe."
Graham's number - Wikipedia

That's really large folks! What business do mortals have tinkering with such numbers? They are meant for the realms of gods and angels and other immortals.

"quite revealing", you say? What, if anything, might it reveal about TSLA? Not complaining, just questing for meaning, eyes squinted aFry...

 

[humbaba]

Pardon to interrupt the "what is safe FSD?" discussion.

Upper-BB is at 257.91 at the Open. Shortzes have got themselves a little air pocket this morning. Let's see what they can do today.

View attachment 431156
Cheers!

P.S. On-topic discussion for this thread would be "WHEN is safe FSD?" Jus' sayin'...

Well, the problem with "when" is no one knows, not even Elon or his team. They have more and better information on making that estimate, but that doesn't mean they make good use of it. Which means that no one really knows when. And when people don't know, they argue.

 

[CyberDutchie]

If we define it that way, then:

• one accident per 500,000 miles has a "one mile safety probability" of 499,999/500,000 = 99.9998%
• one accident per 3 million miles has a "one mile safety probability" of 99.9999666, i.e. "four nines"

99.9999666 is “six nines”, not “four nines”. Count the nines.

 

[Unpilot]

Freaking low volume manipulaters

 

[jerry33]

Freaking low volume manipulaters

Well, I picked up a few shares anyway.

 

[Stars aligned]

I see, I misunderstood your comment - edited my original post to point this out.

You are right that accident/miles is not a percentage, but nevertheless we can normalize it by defining it as the "probability of no accidents per one mile driven" - which I think is how Elon used it.

If we define it that way, then:

• one accident per 500,000 miles has a "one mile safety probability" of 499,999/500,000 = 99.9998%
• one accident per 3 million miles has a "one mile safety probability" of 99.9999666, i.e. "four nines"

I.e. (N-1)/N, which is 1-1/N - or the 1/N calculation we used in prior comments.

Do you agree with this more precise definition?

Absolutely. And clearly, N with FSD must be Gn.
Why else would Elon have brought up Graham's number?

 

[Fact Checking]

Roughly translated:
Every driver must adjust his speed as required by the presence of other road users, especially those most vulnerable, the weather conditions, the local situation, its hindrance, the traffic density, the visibility, the state of the road, the condition and the load of his vehicle; his speed must not be a cause of accidents, nor hinder traffic.

Whether your car has ABS or not is of the same level as how fast your car can brake/accelerate: it is the condition/status of your vehicle which you as a driver must know and adapt to.

This law might be applied to ABS which is a "known vehicle property", but can it be applied to the airbag scenario I outlined:

Or the fact that short, fragile elderly ladies being hit in the face by a deploying airbag designed for ~80 kg healthy males in an otherwise relatively low-energy and injury-free collision might seriously injure or even kill them by breaking their neck? Standard size for crash test dummies: 175 cm (5'9") tall and a mass of 77 kg (170 lb).

?

The outcome of the airbag exploding into your face is not something you could have anticipated in advance, especially if it was marketed as a "safety feature".

There is very little the old lady can possibly do to avoid the negative scenario. It's a pure statistically driven benefits versus disadvantages trade-off, measured and decided by the vehicle manufacturer.

Before airbags were legislated to be mandatory did cars with airbags come with a "if you buy this vehicle the airbags might kill you in some circumstances" disclaimer that was legally enforceable against claims of injury/death?

I'm genuinely curious how the product liability angle was treated for airbags and ABS, because I think that gives us a good answer to how Tesla might approach FSD liability - which is I believe the primary gating factor to unlock driver-less FSD revenue.

 

[EVNow]

OT :

Right, but higher complexity does not necessarily mean higher difficulty.

IMO, lower speed is because of higher uncertainty. It has nothing to do with driving (or programming) difficulty or complexity.

In other words, it is more chaotic. Rules are absent or less strictly followed. To give another example - in India the roads are generally slower, because rules are not followed.

So, the question should be - is FSD more difficult when rules are absent or less strictly followed ?

BTW, parking lots / summon has a separate issue. There are no maps and established routing algorithms. So, Tesla may actually be trying to drive purely by sight ?

ps : City driving is different from parking lot driving. But it has different rules (more complex) compared to freeways. There are naturally some reusability involved with all three, but, all these 3 need to be solved separately.

 

[UncaNed]

FYI DONT' CLICK on this story:

"Tesla Pickup Truck Reliability Might Be A Major Concern"

This ludicrous Inside EV's story questioning Tesla pickup reliability's source is none other than SA.

 

[tschmidty]

This thread has become 99% off topic. Last 4 pages were nothing but robotaxi talk as always. Can we just rename this thread to 'All Robotaxi, all the time!'?

 

[Yonki]

So pretty much the only way forward for Tesla is to be scientifically safer by a factor of 5x-10x: "10 times safer" is probably much easier to argue in courts (and to regulators/policymakers) than "2 times safer".

One thing I haven’t seen discussed (could easily have missed it though) is how almost every FSD accident is likely to result in a “if a human was driving this wouldn’t have happened” lawsuit against Tesla. Statistics and number of 9s won’t matter* - for each serious (death/injury) accident, the prosecution will come up with a ~plausible scenario for how the FSD made a poor decision and the accident wouldn’t have happened (or have been as serious) if their client had been in control. This is what has me skeptical about FSD being a revenue generator in the near future. Even if FSD is preventing 100 accidents for every 1 it has, it won’t matter to that 1.

*except to reduce the absolute number of lawsuits, but that could take a lot more than 4 or 6 nines before the finances are in Tesla’s favor.

 

[JRP3]

Fairly flat in premarket (up $0.44) despite negative (but improving macros)

Off-topic: Wow do we ever need a separate market action thread! Nothing against the self-driving metrics/regulators discussion. It's interesting for sure, but we really need a place where it's easy to check on and discuss news and developments that are moving the stock in the near term. Market action would allow this with less sifting through a lot of longer-term speculation. Just my $.02.

It didn't work that way in the past. Market action thread became general discussion, regardless of how it was labeled.