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

[SPadival]

Can you please RT & like this tweet from Gali:

Gali on Twitter

RT for @business to correct/update this image with flamethrowers shooting out billions per $TSLA's Q3 & Q4 cashflow @danahull
@hannah_recht
#Pravduh

https://mobile.twitter.com/Gfilche/status/1092125750105440257/photo/1

 

[UncaNed]

I read through it.

Hardly a well written article on Tesla to me. Yes, it's relatively positive. But it misses a lot of important points. But its BI, so all is forgiven I guess.

One of us should start an honest, impartial Tesla news channel. Every instance of FUD could be clearly and thoroughly debunked, and we'd earn just as much space in GOOGLE news SERP as all the FUD news articles. Owners and stockholders could contribute posts as well as a few dollars to buy a very small but extremely efficient social media marketing department... It would be a great investment for stockholders, as well as everyone who just wants to contribute to Elon's vision.

 

[UncaNed]

These fools have been wrong about nearly 100% of everything they have ever said to date. Think about that for a second. It's hard to be wrong about everything. It takes quite a bit of effort to not luck into something to be right about. A new Tesla bull account started doing, "This day in $tslaq history" where he shows the tweets and how wrong they were. There's an infinite amount content for that. Every one of MBS 25000 tweets are wrong or just moronic misogyny or direct attacks on Elon including his family, girlfriends and physical appearance.

Link to "This day in $tslaq history" please?

 

[Intl Professor]

big words
be careful

It's all German to me.

 

[Krugerrand]

Here is my first response to a post that I have not read. Just want to remind everyone that one has the option to entirely skip any post that one does not feel qualified to read. Or for no reason at all.

What? Are you mad?

 

[Intl Professor]

I’ve often thought I was born a couple hundred years too late. No I’m sure of it. Sigh. (5’6”)

I am too, in a different direction.

 

[Krugerrand]

Since I only have one "funny" at this time for my standards (as in poodles) for avatars post that I made when I changed my avatar, I think I should have called it out explicitly as a joke.

Nuance takes time and effort to put across, more so if you aim for brevity and especially if you are communicating with an international audience.

In general I think that burden should fall on the writer, but I also think some of the folks (not you, Karen) here could be a little less quick to pigeonhole people (well, except for trolling shorts). They might even take a little time to look for the nuance rather than look for another opportunity to restate or imply some categorical position, since as often as not history will illuminate situations in which that position is deleterious or even consistently disastrous.

Tl;dr: Be excellent to each other. Party on!

Pfft! FYI, totally serious about cats.

 

[SPadival]

This is actually very interesting. Tesla said this about Supercharging v3 in their update letter:

"[Supercharger v3 will] significantly lower Tesla’s operational and capital expenditures."​

This was intriguing, as usually you can only save opex by investing into something new, i.e. more capex.

Fred asked Elon for a clarification, and Elon answered rather cryptically:

"We will [explain it] when [Supercharger v3] rolls out."​

My take:

• It's pretty clear that they mean both opex and capex reduction.
• Opex can be reduced by cutting peak electricity use and thus cutting "demand charges" - which are probably well over 50% of Supercharger opex at busy sites (!). With demand charges over $20/kW/month it is adding up: if V3 is 180 kW and they upgrade each stall to peak power then 40 stalls would draw 7.2 MW (!), which would cost $1.7m per year in demand charges alone. With 12,000 stalls that's +$518m per year opex (!). Clearly a significant growth limit.
• There's also Supercharger installation capex: a 7.2 MW link to the grid is not cheap, especially in fast growing urban areas that often have power capacity problems. Permits and eventual grid expansion takes months, sometimes years.
• If there's on-site battery storage, peak demand can be reduced to a fraction, by charging from the MegaPack during peak usage.
• But MegaPacks are still significant capex: with one MegaPack per 5 stalls they'd need 2,400 MegaPacks, which has a capex of ~$480m if each MegaPack costs ~$200k.
• But there's a trick perhaps: the MegaPacks are under-utilized most of the time, and their peak is usually not at the same time grid electricity demand is peaking. Could they earn money stabilizing the grid? Could they be sold to power utilities, while the Supercharger functionality is leased back, in exchange for them waiving demand charges?

Doing this would reduce both opex and capex.

This might also explain why Supercharger v3 was delayed: they were waiting for the Gigafactory to ramp up to 35 GWh/year.

Speculation only.

It’s now crystal clear that you are not Fred

https://mobile.twitter.com/FredericLambert

Fred Lambert
Replying to
@elonmusk
OK. I'm waiting patiently. I'm intrigued because I get how you could reduce operational or capital expenditures but not both at the same time. I guess that's why I don't run Tesla.

 

[Krugerrand]

Field or ice?

If you have to ask the question....welcome to my hockey ignore list.

 

[Oil4AsphaultOnly]

One of us should start an honest, impartial Tesla news channel. Every instance of FUD could be clearly and thoroughly debunked, and we'd earn just as much space in GOOGLE news SERP as all the FUD news articles. Owners and stockholders could contribute posts as well as a few dollars to buy a very small but extremely efficient social media marketing department... It would be a great investment for stockholders, as well as everyone who just wants to contribute to Elon's vision.

That's what Tesla Daily (podcast), teslanomics (youtube), and tesla-time-news (youtube) try to do.

 

[Intl Professor]

This is probably ancien chapeau to you AI officianados and OT, but this is readable to a dullard like me.

Foundations Built for a General Theory of Neural Networks | Quanta Magazine

My question as the village idiot in this field, could the laborious testing of networks for efficiency through experiment be assisted by AI itself? And a followup. Is this the first step in developing a general intelligence machine?

 

[SW2Fiddler]

Can you please RT & like this tweet from Gali:
Gali on Twitter
RT for @business to correct/update this image with flamethrowers shooting out billions per $TSLA's Q3 & Q4 cashflow @danahull
@hannah_recht
#Pravduh

Am I doing the irony thing correctly?

 

[Mobius484]

Yes.

 

[ZsoZso]

Mark B. Spiegel on Twitter

Mark BS is upset about people who switch from Mercedes A class to Tesla Model 3.
He is right, maybe they should switch to Mercedes AA class instead:

 

[brian45011]

All that complexity may not be necessary. Tesla could negotiate a no demand fee contract where they install battery storage per the agreement, where ever the utility wants it installed. Then give them ability to use that storage as needed. Think it about as not nit picking about a specific supercharger and more about the entire system. Both the utility and Tesla benefit from this method. Same goes for solar. Tesla doesn't have to add solar to every supercharger, they can work with the utilities to deploy the most effective and efficient solar+battery and negotiate the flat fees for charging accounting for all incentives and net metering. The utility gets to dumb a peaker or two and stablize the grid so transformers are not causing massive fires and billions in damage.

Regulated utilities in the US have well defined lanes they rigorously stay within, after learning over decades expensive lessons from even slight departures. Utilities simply do not have flexibility to cut profitable, private deals with any individual customer, even though the transaction(s) might be truly innovative and mutually beneficial to the bilateral parties. The scrutiny comes not just from the regulators, but also from rate-payer advocacy groups that intervene in the rate cases. And, it's not just retail consumer protection advocates such as TURN, UCAN, Public Citizen (etc.) ; but also, depending on what type of commercial and industrial customers have a significant presence in any given utility's monopoly service territory--trade associations and industry lobbyist firms.

Utility rate cases to recover the cost of, and a return on, new investments are often a two-step processes. In the first phase to determine if any particular investment is eligible for addition to the utility's rate base (and an equitable return on additions), the rate-payer intervenors are generally aligned against the utility. In the second phase, to determine how to allocate recovery of "the return of and on" among residential, commercial, and industrial customers it can become an intermural squabble among rate-payers, with the utility relatively indifferent.

Distributed solar generation with stationary storage sounds great in theory; but in practice, if there is a grid connection to provide reliability and back-up power--welcome to the neverland morass of utility regulation.

 

[Reciprocity]

Is everyone ready for super-bull Sunday? Audi's commercial is out.

Nice to see other companies spending advertising dollars on EVs. Should bring in plenty of new Tesla customers.

Green washing, Astro turfing. They would choke you where you sleep if meant a few bucks. They want nothing more then to never be forced to make a real EV. The car will never see the light if day, unless it's $150k.

 

[JRP3]

Am I doing the irony thing correctly?

Yes.

You're all starting to look alike to me.

 

[Buddyroe]

Bigger batteries lower the need for more SCs. When tech improvements allow another 100 miles range for the same or lower vehicle cost, many more trips can be made without charging.

Couldn't agree more. It's pretty simple...

100 miles of range, need a supercharger every 50 to 70 miles.
1500 miles of range, probably need zero superchargers.

Obviously, the more miles of range available, the less you need to charge. I am DYING to see range in the mid 400 range. Get anywhere in the 500's and it's lights out for sure for every ICEV car. The alternative is to put a supercharger at every populated interstate exit like there are gas stations. That way, we don't have to consider WHERE to charge, but only when (just like a gas car).

Of course, this all only applies to long distance traveling - the only area that an EV is currently inferior to an ICEV

 

[sundaymorning]

Did you just see Audi commercial? Tesla is so screwed.


In 2025

Which really means 2028, worse than Elon time.

 

[SPadival]

Am I doing the irony thing correctly?

<— No