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

[jerry33]

Bob Lutz -> GM -> Pontiac -> Aztek

I have always thought that the Aztec was one of the better looking SUVs. I really don't get why anyone thinks it's ugly.

 

[Prunesquallor]

Vincent on Twitter

"First batch of the Made in China Tesla Model 3 from Shanghai Gigafactory GF3"
"Oct 27th 2019"

View attachment 470603​

That's 10 cars by October 27, 2019.

Ooh, ooh! Let me play.
Shortzville Times: “Tesla China factory only manages to produce 10 cars in October. Closure imminent.”

 

[Fact Checking]

This has nothing to do with financials. They failed to even reach orbit consistently despite of years head start and ample funding.

Arguably reaching orbit is by far the most difficult step in rocketry. Reaching orbit is one giant leap of faith, the rest is iterative.

Blue Origin's "New Shepard" suborbital launch to 100 km altitude on a liquid hydrogen platform was perhaps 5% of the road to an orbital launch system ...

If you have a kid whom you spent ton of money on a private school hoping he does well academically. And he consistently get Cs from school won't you want to do something about it?

Around 2016 Bezos poached the almost entire SpaceX Raptor team over to Blue Origin to develop their methalox engine for New Glenn - and the new Raptor team at SpaceX still ran rings around them in every possible way...

So I don't think it's for lack of trying - but space is hard and while Bezos is a smart cookie who eventually struck gold with AWS, he's no Elon ...

 

[Singuy]

The others would be they want to make sure that V3 installations actually go as planned (e.g. smoothly and trouble-free) before committing to any large scale builder. Also large scale builders will want a substantial discount (often along with altered specs to further reduce the price), so perhaps they have contacted them and were declined.

Nah, Tesla has a very strong brand. I believe now with all the houses going green, luxury home builders would love to offer Tesla solar roofs. It'll most likely drive sales. Also luxury home sellers love the opportunity to upsell something like this for a premium so they can make the big fat margins. People pay a stupid amount of money for some premium door or premium appliances when houses are in the millions.

I actually have seen solar communities popping up in FL from new home builders.

 

[CorneliusXX]

When has Elon/Tesla ever made a deal that wasn’t beneficial to All involved?

Panasonic.

 

[EVNow]

View attachment 470503

Hmmm .

Account suspended.​

 

[kbM3]

By the time Q4 results were announced early Q1 data was in, and the big boys on Wall Street believed the data - unlike most of us.

This time there's:

• no big $7,500 step-down in the tax credit,
• nor a stock market crash affecting California Tesla customer net worth and buying power negatively,
• nor a government shutdown,
• nor an escalating China trade war,
• nor any "Delivery Hell" mishaps,
• and Tesla cash reserves are today also much higher than intra-quarter working capital requirements.

So while I won't say that "this time is different", it does look different.

Not advice.

Mathematically Q1 was only a $3750 step down in the tax credit. Psychologically, I agree with you, and probably most felt that $7500 was at risk, even though it wasn’t. I do believe the $1875 step down this coming Q1 will be a much, much smaller factor than last q1.

 

[ladysbff]

This has nothing to do with financials. They failed to even reach orbit consistently despite of years head start and ample funding.

If you have a kid whom you spent ton of money on a private school hoping he does well academically. And he consistently get Cs from school won't you want to do something about it?

I got to hang out in the New Shephard prototype once and I can tell you the seats in there are by far the most comfortable sitting apparatuses of all time. Unequivocally. It felt like floating.

So... Blue has definitely accomplished something with that head start and ample funding

 

[mongo]

Hmmm .

Account suspended.​

Might have been reported as a bot. That is a popular tactic with that crowd.

I got to hang out in the New Shephard prototype once and I can tell you the seats in there are by far the most comfortable sitting apparatuses of all time. Unequivocally. It felt like floating.

So... Blue has definitely accomplished something with that head start and ample funding

Apogee will do that. for a little while.

 

[Fact Checking]

Vincent on Twitter

"First batch of the Made in China Tesla Model 3 from Shanghai Gigafactory GF3"
"Oct 27th 2019"

View attachment 470603​

That's 10 cars by October 27, 2019.

BTW., I'm 80% certain that Tesla parked them out there ... not overly worried about the fact that drones that happen to fly in the neighborhood would film them.

 

[KarenRei]

Vincent on Twitter

"First batch of the Made in China Tesla Model 3 from Shanghai Gigafactory GF3"
"Oct 27th 2019"

View attachment 470603​

That's 10 cars by October 27, 2019.

Now let's calculate the depreciation on those cars.

 

[Intl Professor]

Knock, wood, we see—just then interrupted by a power outage likely caused by a local failure due to high winds—less danger of outages here in Sacramento due to our locally owned utility, SMUD. It is likely more diligent about maintenance and due to reliance a lot on hydro which is likely dispersed through Sierras though I have no idea about actual shape of any transmission lines. Also, we are very proud of our trees. If they go, we will fry like a forest and where we live we have to cut them down a lot, so even greater density on our block.

Because of the trees we are not likely to benefit from solar, which years ago Solarcity nixed. The garage is free of shade, but ridge line is east-west. I may ask them to take another look. Also, may try to get Homeowners' association to permit solar roof by Tesla as a demo for our re-roofing going forward. Nonetheless, I'm now seriously considering powerwall for backup purposes. Very seriously.

There's another thread for this, but no action there so possible I can get an answer here and relation to investing. Is this kid's idea potential competition for Tesla's roof?

https://www.popsci.com/technology/a...through-solar-array-based-fibonacci-sequence/

 

[Fact Checking]

Now let's calculate the amortization on those cars.

The thing is, they'll only have to depreciate them if they deliver them in Q4. Doing trial runs is part of capex.

So I think Tesla's plan here might be to make maybe 500-1,000 units by the end of Q4 but not deliver them just yet, with a day in December demonstrating over 1k/week extrapolated peak production rate, to be delivered in early Q1. Not much more than that, to not draw down operating cash flow and FCF too much. Then pedal to the metal starting January 1.

That would make sure that a full Q1 quarter of volume production would spread the fixed costs among thousands of units. They probably don't need the deliveries to meet Q4 guidance - while Q1 will be seasonally harder and Model Y production won't be ramping up yet.

 

[KarenRei]

The thing is, they'll only have to depreciate them if they deliver them in Q4. Doing trial runs is part of capex.

So I think Tesla's plan here might be to make maybe 1,000 units by the end of Q4 but not deliver them just yet, with a day in December demonstrating over 1k/week extrapolated peak production rate, to be delivered in early Q1.

That would make sure that a full Q1 quarter of volume production would spread the fixed costs among thousands of units. They probably don't need the deliveries to meet Q4 guidance.

Hard to say. I hope they make more than 1000 units at GF3 this quarter, delivered or not.

 

[aubreymcfato]

Mr. Beast, a Youtuber with more than 25M subscribers, lauched a tree-planting campaign with other prominent Youtubers.

The website is at:
https://teamtrees.org/
and with the Arbor Day Foundation they plan to harvest 20M$, to plant 20M tress. 1$ = 1 tree.

So please go there, watch the videos, like them, and donate.
I'm sure this board alone could plan thousands of trees with the gains of the last few days (It would be actually nice to have a TMC account for that, there is a leaderboard for donations)

PS: also, make sure to switch to Ecosia instead of Google, at least most of the time: in the end, you will end up planting more trees searching the web than directly donating.

 

[KarenRei]

Mr. Beast, a Youtuber with more than 25M subscribers, lauched a tree-planting campaign with other prominent Youtubers.

The website is at:
Help Us Plant 20 Million Trees - Join #TeamTrees
and with the Arbor Day Foundation they plan to harvest 20M$, to plant 20M tress. 1$ = 1 tree.

So please go there, watch the videos, like them, and donate.
I'm sure this board alone could plan thousands of trees with the gains of the last few days (It would be actually nice to have a TMC account for that, there is a leaderboard for donations)

PS: also, make sure to switch to Ecosia instead of Google, at least most of the time: in the end, you will end up planting more trees searching the web than directly donating.

Planting trees? Meh, who could ever support a thing like that?

*cough*

 

[Fact Checking]

Hard to say. I hope they make more than 1000 units at GF3 this quarter, delivered or not.

Every 1,000 units will draw about ~$30m of cash (at minimum marked as payables) - so they could probably afford to buffer a few thousand units since their Q4 FCF will probably be excellent - but I don't think it's going to be more than 2k-3k units. Workers still need to be hired and trained - current GF3 employee count is IMO clearly not even close to the required thousands of workers needed to run the factory, IMHO.

 

[KarenRei]

Planting trees? Meh, who could ever support a thing like that?

*cough*

(I'm on winter break now, though. And that's a great initiative that they've launched! )

 

[mongo]

There's another thread for this, but no action there so possible I can get an answer here and relation to investing. Is this kid's idea potential competition for Tesla's roof?

https://www.popsci.com/technology/a...through-solar-array-based-fibonacci-sequence/

No, the 'new' way used more area for the energy collection.
(If I recall the article correctly when I read it on Slashdot back in 2011).

You can't cheat physics, effective solar area is the cosine of the angle between the direction to the sun and the vector normal to the panel. The rule of thumb to set the elevation of the panel equal to your latitude falls out from that.

 

[BornToFly]

Are you in the early release program for FSD with HW3 hardware?

I paid for FSD and have HW3 hardware. I understand that they can solve multiple problems at once, but I have a hard time believing that they are 2 months away from self driving when the car can't figure out if there is really something in the lane or not when just driving in what is essentially adaptive cruise control. I want to be wrong for both the SP, and because I want the FSD features I paid for as soon as possible, but I'm in the crowd that thinks it is going to be a while....

It is true that phantom braking is happening less often, but I still can't trust the car. With NOTHING in front of me, it will brake for no reason and I have to over-ride by pushing the accelerator.