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

[Sean Wagner]

Here is the funny thing: Friend of mine got a 2019 Honda Accord Hybrid. Despite having driven my Model 3. I was shocked and asked him what led to that decision. Initially he just mentioned apple carplay, always having liked honda, then lower initial cost and high 48mpg eroding the total cost of ownership argument, and him liking the quiet sound insulated cabin experience. Digging a bit deeper, the other reasons turned out to be the horrorstories he heard about service experience through my wife (2016 model 90d at dublin service center with a comedy of errors and struggles over the years), the extra effort they saw us go through charging on a roadtrip we went on together, the impression of dishonesty he got from going to tesla.com/model3 and having to click to see the actual purchase price instead of 'after savings' price, and probably all the FUD he ingested through his apple news feed.

What gets me is that he will even replace the other gas car rather with a honda electric car than go tesla,

Inertia is a powerful force, especially when added to individual preferences. See below.

...
Tesla will not succeed alone, we need other manufacturers. We need other manufacturers to come with better EVs than Tesla. Competition will spur innovation and reduce costs.

The crucial point being that better need not refer to tech specs. It can be catering to specific markets' predilections.

Thought .. can there be a product like "Insurance On Demand" ... this would disrupt the whole Car Insurance
You sign up for Tesla Insurance.
Tesla Auto detects who drives and auto-enrolls you for insurance when you drive, auto un enrolls as soon as you stop driving?

So if I don't drive for 2 weeks, I pay $0 for insurance ....

Tesla Autonomy will be able to sign you up just before a crash, of course.

Funny, I did the same thing when I drove the S2000. Awesome mechanical engineering at work.

Heh. Hehehe. And near endlessly repeatable, unlike the exotics. Steering was not communicative enough, though.

Repeatability is important when racing, which is where the Model 3P needs some work [ie. upgraded brakes]. Otherwise, I think it hews closer to the original spirit of Porsch-E than the Taycan.

 

[KarenRei]

Confirmation of the August M3 sales: Tesla Model 3 was August's third best-selling car

2082 (Model 3s alone!) is massive. That's "+2082 QoQ", since there were zero deliveries in May. No wonder they've been robbing the US supply to get an extra ship or two to Europe via Philly this quarter.

 

[Sean Wagner]

Germany is trending downward, though:.Matthias Schmidt on Twitter
Edit: important to read Alex Voigt's comment and the subsequent response.

I'll just repeat that building Gigafactory 4 presupposes success in the German market, I think.

 

[Reinhard]

28,000 for Europe is too optimistic. Q2 had 22,745 registrations, so my estimate is between 6% up (24,000) and 10% up (25,000) for this Q.

What do you think after the blowout UK numbers? 2000 cars in UK alone. Europe August vs May is now up over 40%.

 

[elasalle]

What do you think after the blowout UK numbers? 2000 cars in UK alone. Europe August vs May is now up over 40%.

time to Speed dial Anton. ***
No SR,SR+ yet in UK right.

 

[KarenRei]

Germany is trending downward, though:.Matthias Schmidt on Twitter
Edit: important to read Alex Voigt's comment and the subsequent response.

I'll just repeat that building Gigafactory 4 presupposes success in the German market, I think.

Matthías can say whatever he wants, but Germany is trending upwards QoQ.

 

[Tslynk67]

Germany is trending downward, though:.Matthias Schmidt on Twitter
Edit: important to read Alex Voigt's comment and the subsequent response.

I'll just repeat that building Gigafactory 4 presupposes success in the German market, I think.

I don't read too much into that - with NL deliveries being up and much of central Europe on vacation in august, I think we need to see the full quarter in order to make judgement, very hard to compare various months in the year, even the first, second and third months of each quarter corresponding to other quarters, certainly for a single country, don't mean anything.

 

[KarenRei]

Lol. In other UK news, Jo Johnson (brother of Boris) just resigned as a MP and minister, citing " ‘unresolvable tension’ between ‘family loyalty and the national interest’ " House of Lords also agreed to rule out the filibuster on the no-deal-brexit-blocking bill. I don't think the European markets will feel much better until it's more clear that there's legally no path Boris could use to implement a no-deal Brexit next month, but the bill's passage should increase optimism. Still no clarity on when elections will be; Labour keeps saying that they'll vote them down until there's legal certainty that there's no way Boris can implement no-deal on the 31st.

 

[samppa]

Service center here (Finland) said that basic sr will never come to europe.
Well never say never with Tesla.. but still think it's a long way away.

 

[Navin]

I think we are close to 10.0. I could have sworn a saw a lady that looked like Lora practicing get hit/run over by a car in a parking lot.

 

[mrdoubleb]

Lol. In other UK news, Jo Johnson (brother of Boris) just resigned as a MP and minister, citing " ‘unresolvable tension’ between ‘family loyalty and the national interest’ " House of Lords also agreed to rule out the filibuster on the no-deal-brexit-blocking bill. I don't think the European markets will feel much better until it's more clear that there's legally no path Boris could use to implement a no-deal Brexit next month, but the bill's passage should increase optimism. Still no clarity on when elections will be; Labour keeps saying that they'll vote them down until there's legal certainty that there's no way Boris can implement no-deal on the 31st.

Pardon my ignorance, but isn`t it so, that if the UK continues this political theater and can`t agree one way or the other, then, come November 1st, whether they like it or not, no-deal Brexit happens anyway? In other words, even if the PM fails to push this through, it will still happen if Parliament does not vote in favor of the existing deal.

 

[Sean Wagner]

...

Nifty table. Want to see considerably better Tesla sales in Germany.

I don't read too much into that - with NL deliveries being up and much of central Europe on vacation in august, I think we need to see the full quarter in order to make judgement, very hard to compare various months in the year, even the first, second and third months of each quarter corresponding to other quarters, certainly for a single country, don't mean anything.

Matthias does address these valid points in the comments.

Concerning GF4, if it can mix 3 & Y production early on, reaching breakeven will be significantly easier to achieve.

 

[avoigt]

Matthías can say whatever he wants, but Germany is trending upwards QoQ.

View attachment 450714

Agree.

Matthias is stating incentive applications filed as vehicle orders for Tesla which is misleading and completely wrong knowing that you can place that application up to 9 months after you got the car delivered and I know many who don't even know how to do the application and some may even forget to apply. Orders have not been release when he reported.

I made him aware and his reaction is, I don't care! So be careful with him reporting any numbers. Also be aware that Matthias was and maybe is a Tesla Bear. In the past he was spreading quite some FUD.

Finally he called a data correlation from two data points and everybody who ever calculate correlation knows that you can't do that in statistics. He handles data and if you do you should know or stay silent.

 

[Drax7]

Unfortunately, the market with regards to tesla only has all ready priced in an agreement with China. Just as the market has all ready priced in new GF3 in China to offset any tradewinds. The market has all ready priced in a poor performing high end EV by porsche and will continue to unreward tesla for excellence. The market has priced in reportedly driver in a crash blaming AP but actually looking down at their phone...
Market has all ready priced in millions of actual driving miles for data collection towards FSD, while giving enormous valuations to FSD vaporware in other ventures. Market has all ready priced in tesla making their own CPU/GPU and chipset for FSD, so even when it comes out of the shadow, the market will yawn. I could go on, but the market has all ready priced this in.

The market is always wrong in the short term

 

[KarenRei]

Pardon my ignorance, but isn`t it so, that if the UK continues this political theater and can`t agree one way or the other, then, come November 1st, whether they like it or not, no-deal Brexit happens anyway? In other words, even if the PM fails to push this through, it will still happen if Parliament does not vote in favor of the existing deal.

If a certain government action is mandated (such as requiring it to seek and accept an extension - the bill calls for it to extend to 31 jan if no specific deal has been accepted by parliament by the end of next month), then they legally have to act, rather than doing nothing. But you're right, the "do nothing" result would be no-deal.

The House of Lords debates the bill today. The bill goes back to the Commons for debate on Friday. There's a last chance for filibuster in the Commons - although given that it's already sailed through Commons, I can't see anything holding it up. The vote would be on Monday, likely followed by royal assent on the same day.

Nobody really trusts Boris, though, so there may still be fights after that. Then again, maybe not. I'm sure Boris would love going into the next election saying, "Hey, I tried to deliver, but I was hamstrung by parliament."

 

[mrdoubleb]

What do you think after the blowout UK numbers? 2000 cars in UK alone. Europe August vs May is now up over 40%.

Once again, I would caution against reading too much into the UK numbers for now.

In the table that @KarenRei linked above, yellow means it is an estimate. The UK is normally rather late in publishing the official numbers, (up to 2 quarters late actually), so what we do is estimate. There is a car importers` association site (SMMT) which lists registrations sooner, but does not break out Tesla - it is included in the "other" figure. @Troy & @hobbes (sounds like a cop show, lol) have put together an algorithm, that estimates how much Model S and Model X share is from this "other", based on the ratio of known actual Tesla registration from same month last year and their actual share of "other" at that time.

This worked very well in the past: as I recall we found we had 95%+ accuracy when we added in the actual data as it became available. However, we haven`t had official Model 3 numbers yet since deliveries started in the UK, so the math could be more off than usual right now as there is no official data to base it on. Even as the first few months` official data comes in later this year, the first shipments were probably impacted by unknown factors like RHD production capacity, pre-order numbers, take rate on the first models that were made available, etc.

So be careful with the "2000+ for the UK alone" comments.

 

[mrdoubleb]

It depends entirely on what's in the final bill. If a certain government action is mandated (such as requiring it to seek and accept an extension), then they legally have to act, rather than doing nothing. But you're right, the "do nothing" result would be no-deal.

Right, but any re-negotiation takes 2. Even if the UK were to seek another extension and new talks, as far as I know the EU has said it is not re-opening talks, they are done, period. Of course, that could be just posturing as well.

To tie it back to TSLA, the question is, if a no-deal has already been priced in by the markets or not. And even if the markets wouldn`t care anymore, will no-deal actually be "a big deal" economically and push the UK and maybe even the EU into a recession, or will it be a non-event?

 

[KarenRei]

Right, but any re-negotiation takes 2. Even if the UK were to seek another extension and new talks, as far as I know the EU has said it is not re-opening talks, they are done, period. Of course, that could be just posturing as well.

To tie it back to TSLA, the question is, if a no-deal has already been priced in by the markets or not. And even if the markets wouldn`t care anymore, will no-deal actually be "a big deal" economically and push the UK and maybe even the EU into a recession, or will it be a non-event?

Ignoring the broader economic impact, the pound swings significantly based on the market perception of the likelihood of a no-deal Brexit, which will affect the rate and ASP of new UK Tesla orders.

That steady decline from May through July was the increasingly failed attempts by May to strike a deal. Late July had a sharp drop after the election of Boris. We're finally seeing a rise due to the attempts to block a hard Brexit. Remember that the range of exchange rates here is an equivalent buying power impact to that of China's tax exemptions on Tesla.

But the broader market impact is an even bigger deal than the exchange rate.

The EU has more than indicated willingness to accept another extension. But the UK has to apply for it. The EU however has described negotiations with the UK about new deals as basically dead, as they've not been getting any new proposals from the UK.

 

[avoigt]

My comment about the Taycan:

Deeply disappointed and more worried about the German Auto industry than ever. See my CT article from last year.

The price in comparison to the value you get does not match and leaves a very tiny fraction of Porsche Enthusiast as addressable market including those who need a BEV for a race track. For all others you are better of with almost every Model Tesla does deliver and will deliver.

Real time range will be likely around 300 - 350 km and charging will disappoint most because it does not matter what a car can do in a perfect world scenario but in the world we are living in.

I ask myself if its purposely designed as a car that does not sell. For the mission to transform transportation in a sustainable future and reduce carbon footprint the Taycan does not make a difference at all as it will never be a mass product but a niche vehicle for some rich people to play with as a second or third car to show his buddies.

The Taycan may even be counterproductive to make people consider a BEV. The narrative they are too expensive is confirmed now and many will claim this to be a justification to buy a Diesel again.

Porsche had a window of opportunity but what we have seen is that the R&D department I had highest hopes with to be able to lift a decent BEV failed in my perspective.

I don't want to go deeper in the specs here and many of you did certainly already but Porsche is off my list now and my last hope is the ID from VW. Its hard to believe though with Audi and Porsche presenting mediocre products VW with all the technology transfer they have in the group will deliver.

I still hope they will though.

 

[Chocochip]

Tesla Model 3 was August's third best-selling car

Edit: didn't see this yet on CNBC headlines...

Don't hold your breath! This is advice!