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

[Silent Ludicrosy]

View attachment 365547
This looks evil

What does it mean?

 

[riverFox]

Any guesses as to when the interior refresh happens for the S/X?

 

[Wnuk]

Now that I think about this price decrease some, doesn’t it just get us back to the ASP price was when the 3 was first released? Well, at least on the AWD. Wasn’t AWD $4,000 when first released then shortly after increased to like $5,500? Don’t recall exact numbers but I’m sure it was something very close to this

 

[dailo]

They probably saved a good amount of money not having to pay overtime and shutting down the line during the holidays

 

[reddit_tl]

analyzing the $2000 cut is going to drive everyone crazy until they forget about it. One thing I'm sure of, everyone will either 1) forget about it or 2) remember it as an example of something we should have just forgotten about.

Maybe it means less revenue, maybe larger addressable market (so maybe not less rev.), maybe lower demand (but EU China, so prob not), maybe a million other things. It does create uncertainty, though! But certainly, it's not that big of a worry.

While it is not necessary to worry about it, it is good to hear people chatting about it and come to a better understanding.

It is definitely a balancing act from the management.

 

[Johnny Ma]

While it is not necessary to worry about it, it is good to hear people chatting about it and come to a better understanding.

It is definitely a balancing act from the management.

Oh I don't mean to discourage anyone from chatting about it. I like reading the discussion, too. Something fun about trying to figure out what's going on. Just mean to say that, in my opinion, the $2000 cut will not have much of an impact in the long run or even on 2019 performance. Seems like for every possible negative reason for it there's an equal an opposite positive reason as well. Maybe the tax incentive is simply working as planned, which would be wonderful news

 

[Curt Renz]

analyzing the $2000 cut is going to drive everyone crazy until they forget about it. One thing I'm sure of, everyone will either 1) forget about it or 2) remember it as an example of something we should have just forgotten about.

Maybe it means less revenue, maybe larger addressable market (so maybe not less rev.), maybe lower demand (but EU China, so prob not), maybe a million other things. It does create uncertainty, though! But certainly, it's not that big of a worry.

I suspect that specific dollar amount was chosen so that those who beat the deadline will still feel they took advantage of a bargain, yet those who order this year may say it appears they did not miss out on much. Those who have waited should soon be rewarded with a wider choice of configurations. Meanwhile, ever growing production efficiencies may greatly increase volume, while keeping profit margins at least where they were.

 

[Ulmo]

Here's a fresh, very juicy and very exciting rumor
...
He also noted that someone successfully got an mcu to mcu2 replacement done, but they were told not to do it anymore. All it required was a pin out change.
...

I hope it's not true, otherwise this is further and continued confirmation that Tesla doesn't want to get easy money and easy customer satisfaction by putting a bit more resources into offering customer upgrades for a profit (whether offered by them or certified third parties). That would be consistent with making the cars better over time, keeping their quality, and less waste long term. A trailer park dweller with a $1,000 Model X isn't going to take as good care of their un-upgradable car as a slum dweller with their $4,000 Model X of the same year that had been upgraded back when it was worth $35,000 by the then-current owner, and so on, and the cars and the materials they were built out of would last longer. However, perhaps there are early bugs that Tesla cannot profitably fix when cars get that old, so they're using a planned obsolescence method.

 

[eloder]

GM sold 200,000 electric vehicles in U.S. by 2018, triggering tax-credit phaseout: source | Reuters

Not sure if this was posted yet, but GM triggered their EV tax credit phase-out. It doesn't appear like they did the Tesla strategy of triggering the phase-out near the start of a quarter, so there's only three months' worth of additional full credits available.

Not sure if it really matters though given how tiny Bolt sales are compared to Model 3.

 

[sparcs]

Is there going to be some Apple fallout that hits TSLA tomorrow? probably will affect the overall market.

 

[Ulmo]

They probably saved a good amount of money not having to pay overtime and shutting down the line during the holidays

Not to mention the % of employees who actually want to have a good Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Years basically totally dropping their respect for their employer and product if they wouldn't get it. While that's not necessarily 100% of customers, I guarantee it is not 0%. A little overtime is a lot cheaper than angry employees unconsciously (and therefore extremely effectively) sabotaging the products.

 

[Fact Checking]

If they have managed to squeeze out 2k per vehicle in COGS or manufacturing costs in the past three months. Well I’ll eat a shoe.

That's the wrong comparison to make:

• The $2k price reduction is valid for Q1'19, not Q3'18. If they make say 75k Model 3's, that's already 40% more than in Q3.
• It only affects U.S. sales. If 50% of sales are non-U.S. then the ASP effect is at most -$1k effective.
• $2k is about 3-4% of the Q1 ASP, and it's more than possible that a 40% increase in mass manufacturing ramp-up improves margins by more than 3-4%.

So even if $2k is a complete loss of income and doesn't increase sales (which is highly unlikely), Q3->Q1 production efficiency improvements will more than make up for it.

The $2k price reduction is very likely a non-issue, but it plays into the bear/short narrative, so they are running with it.

 

[Ulmo]

Not really. Modern deep learning techniques handles the scale and angle issues very well.
The street sign under glare issue is however a 'maybe' concern because if the glare is so strong to overwhelm the CCD. There is physically no way to see the sign. Then again, the algorithm may just handle it like a human does: look for unlit lights or just slow down as a caution.
The edge cases will be endless and Elon and others all acknowledge this. That doesn't mean the software will not be extremely useful.

Memory of where stuff was last time should help. In USA, street signs have shapes that define their meaning, so you need no specific light for almost all signs, only their shape. Ditto their color when shape is obstructed (bushes, other cars).

 

[reddit_tl]

Tim from Apple claims that iPhone's china market is hit strongly because of economic downturn. While it certainly has some truth to it, from the numbers I saw, apple's decline in china is mainly due to competition from chinese android phones.
if the economy of china is the main driver, should we expect similar sluggish demand for tesla? I think China was probably responsible for the Model S and X not getting to 100K. This macro condition is worth noting to project 2019 tesla performances.

 

[Ulmo]

What does it mean?
View attachment 365583

That you can wake up later than I can to get to work. (I'm going to drive most of 280 tomorrow at 4:40 AM.)

 

[Fact Checking]

I hope it's not true, otherwise this is further and continued confirmation that Tesla doesn't want to get easy money and easy customer satisfaction by putting a bit more resources into offering customer upgrades for a profit (whether offered by them or certified third parties).

I expect them to eventually offer older hw upgrades as well, but they'll first concentrate on the newer fleet.

Deploying a self manufactured chip is crazy risky already, they should start as simple as possible.

 

[JRP3]

Chinese Model 3
Kelvin Yang on Twitter

 

[Ulmo]

there's a lot of conflicting information on what's going on in december 2018. At times they've been high, but they've also outputted far lower from some reports.

Even if they outputted 24k for december, that doesn't exactly sell a great story. Once you subtract out that assumption of 6k a week December high, then it significantly lowers the average for October and November. Basically making those months even less productive on average. That isn't a great story either that they were basically making a little over 4k a week for the first two months of the quarter on average.

The whole thing indicates ongoing production problems for Q4. The hope is that they are at least outputting 5k entering the current quarter, but i'm skeptical they will run january 2019 at 6k a week for the full month. I hope they surprise me.

You think the holidays had less impact than most of us?

 

[Cherry Wine]

Oh I don't mean to discourage anyone from chatting about it. I like reading the discussion, too. Something fun about trying to figure out what's going on. Just mean to say that, in my opinion, the $2000 cut will not have much of an impact in the long run or even on 2019 performance. Seems like for every possible negative reason for it there's an equal an opposite positive reason as well. Maybe the tax incentive is simply working as planned, which would be wonderful news

Like many things Tesla, the price reduction is a rorschach test!

 

[M3Rider]

Memory of where stuff was last time should help. In USA, street signs have shapes that define their meaning, so you need no specific light for almost all signs, only their shape. Ditto their color when shape is obstructed (bushes, other cars).

I was actually talking about traffic lights. Here, just pulled this from the old thread. I made this pic from my M3 being the first car at the stop line. I saw that light was red before reaching the line, but could not see it from the stop position. Needed to turn left. I think I ended up checking the lights at the opposite direction to see when they change. The red light is on on this picture.

Also, traffic light malfunctions. Sometimes all 3 lights are on. I saw this happen, but it may not happen in generic time-limited testing. Bunch of these unorthodox scenarios including obstructions etc. need to be thought through and tested specifically to ensure the results are as expected.