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Tesla, TSLA & the Investment World: the Perpetual Investors' Roundtable
- Thread starter AudubonB
- Start date
SageBrush
REJECT Fascism
I'll expand on this one time, and then leave the shorts to wallow in the muck:
In a nutshell, the 'value' thesis of the shorts against Tesla is that absent regulatory support and due to the industrial cost advantages that ICE manufacturers presently enjoy over EVs, a demand cliff is inevitable. There are no lack on examples across the world that are pretty vivid displays of demand cliffs for *EVs when government support is withdrawn.
It is not a bad argument as these things go even though I disagree with it. The counter arguments (also, I hope rational) are that the shorts have been losing the whack-a-mole regulatory support game: for every political entity that drops support, a different one (or two) pops up, driven by the reality of AGW. Moreover, EVs are riding a tech innovation wave in battery production and cost. The best the short thesis can hope for is that EV cost does not drop below ICE before the regulatory support dries up and a demand cliff results. That was a pretty good position to take when batteries cost $1,000 a kWh; it is not even a tenable argument today at ~ $100/kWh today for Tesla and every indication that $50/kWh is on the near horizon.
The 'value investing' analysis that these shorts say they adhere to works well for static industries with mature tech and processes. It is beyond idiotic to apply it to an industry that is riding the battery development wave and supported (in spurts, but the trend is undeniable) by acknowledgement of AGW.
Mike Smith
Active Member
In my opinion, this is very unlikely. The U.S. standards body (TRA) chose to have a different type of metric tire (P-metric) for the sole purpose of preventing European tire manufacturers from shipping tires to U.S. based OEMs. Country standards bodies tend to protect the manufacturers in their own country (since the standards body consists mainly of representatives from those manufacturers).
SageBrush
REJECT Fascism
@Mike Smith
Gosh that was interesting (and a superb video to boot.) Thanks for posting !
Did you have a choice in tiles design ?
Gosh that was interesting (and a superb video to boot.) Thanks for posting !
Did you have a choice in tiles design ?
Highly unlikely since they have already selected Type 1 CCS as the standard, and you don't normally change standards. Especially after many companies have adopted them and produced products using them. Almost every non-Tesla DC fast-charger would have to be modified, not to mention every existing car and EVSE. Tesla could adopt the Type 1 CCS standard for NA vehicles, but they would have to produce additional adapters and add extra cables to their Superchargers to make that work. It would be easier to just make a Type 1 CCS to Tesla adapter and that would take car of most of the "problem".
Mike Smith
Active Member
I'm not the owner of the video or roof.
SageBrush
REJECT Fascism
Cliff notes version:
1. We are really good at making cars with diesel engines but that is yesterday's news and BK is inevitable if we stay the course.
1a. Hydrogen is BS
2. We don't know how to make profitable, competitive EVs but we hope our current financial and political standing is enough to buy cells cheap enough, and to learn the software side of things in time. I doubt it, but they are paying me a lot of money to have a go so join me or get out of my way.
3. And by the way, expect VW to get a lot smaller before it hopefully gets fat again.
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Yes, I did not understand some aspects of the US set up... so my post was wrong....
And the poster on Reddit more or less stated the new charging port is not CCS, at least in North America...
So Type 2 CCS makes sense for EU, UK, Australia etc, and will sync with what they already have for Model 3
For North America it is best to wait and see....
All we can be confident about is faster charging for new Model S/X, that seems very likely.
A mobile service tech told the model S is a quick & easy install, maybe an hour. He also said the model 3 is more difficult because theres coolant lines involved, so those have to be done at the service center.
I think you have it accurately. He is certainly not saying success is inevitable. He is saying it is very tight, there isn’t much time, and it will be very easy to lose out.
Not a customary CEO position, but as honestly put forward as he can speak without losing his job, because he does see the picture quite clearly.
If he were completely honest, he would say, “Taking our present position as a starting point, we have about a snowball‘s chance in hell of catching Tesla.“
Herbert Diess seems to be a very smart man, but he heads a company which can't turn on a dime and he knows it. But unlike every other auto company CEO he seems to be sounding the alarm and is determined to make sure his company survives through 2030, 2040, 2050, and beyond. Many other auto companies are not likely to pass these decade milestones intact, so I wish him good luck. Many have already noted that Tesla can't supply the entire world's demand for automobiles, we need at least some of the other companies to survive, transition to EV, and supply automobiles for generations to come.
Words of HABIT
Active Member
Seven days for a small simple two angle roof that would normally take only one day for conventional asphalt shingle replacement. Hoping over time they can streamline the installation process to get the costs down.
I wish him good luck too. And I agree with everyone including Musk who say that Tesla will need help replacing the world's population of ICE cars with EVs.
However Diess's speech really does underline the doubtful prospects of Tesla getting that help. If the intelligent CEO of a company with VW's resources so seriously doubts that his company can do it, who else can?
Luckily, Tesla is not going to wait around. Musk will raise the bar more and more until the others perform or admit failure. And meanwhile, Tesla is not only exponentially ramping the production of its vehicles, it is ramping the production of 'the machine that builds the machine', which Musk has said is the hardest part. Now the template has been proven and demonstrated in China.
Tesla has the China factory in production and ramping to greater production, and Germany may well be where China is now in 18 months. Will Tesla stop there? No, they certainly have new factories on the drawing boards right now.
From January 2019 to January 2020, just one year, we saw two new factories built or well in the works, starting from a single muddy building site. What will we see by January 2021? Herbert Diess probably has a better idea about that than most. That is why he is so worried.
I actually liked the Bloomberg tweet, but then read the article and unliked it. Hull is a troll. But that is a great cover.
I don't know why people on this forum keep giving VW undue credit. It is not a good company. Period. They are bad actors that have continually tried to do everything they can to fulfill their mission of employing Germans at all costs to any all others. The roots of the company were horrible, it did not change much for the better post WWII (only reason it survived was conflict with USSR), it bribes people all over the world and until a few years ago wrote that off on tax's, if you think Diesel gate was an aberration... I have a bridge to sell you connecting San Francisco to points north. Needs a bit of paint so I am selling cheap.
So Diess does not have his head up his ass completely- so what. If there is one automaker in the world that I'd like to see bankrupt in 10 years it would be VW. Good riddance.
A bigger question would be what happens to Toyota. Now they are worth talking about, massive compared to VW or GM or other traditional companies. The bedrock of the Japanese quest for engineering excellence. A Toyota will outlast virtually any VW product and is a much much better bang for the buck. Toyota had the lead on environmental efficiency and let it slip right away. Why? For Toyota investing a few billion in cash flow is like a wart on my finger, dont really notice it anymore.
In summary..hope VW is the next Nokia and that Diess just walks away in a couple of years.
Seriously, why are some here obsessed with VW?
Agree that faster will be needed to scale, however, it might be fair to compare installation time of conventional asphalt roof, along with installation of a new conventional rooftop solar system, with the associated hardware, electrical permits and inspections.
It’s also not clear how much additional work was involved with replacing the vents, pipes, and flashing, but if it wasn’t as bad as he makes it sound, standard crews can knock that out pretty quickly too.
My wife watched the video, and said, “Buy it.”
Tearing the roof of of my house (1700 sq.ft.) took about a week. So if they did both in seven days that's pretty fast. Although they didn't say, I'd guess most of the time was the removal and replacing any bad parts of the roof deck. (To be fair, my roof is slightly more complex than the one in the video.)
I think it's fairly safe to say that the worst case per customer FSD retrofit cost is below $1,000:
This makes for about $700, which we can conservatively round up to $1,000.
- Elon said 20 minutes work time, anecdotes said 30 minutes to 3 hours depending on the VIN and model. A conservative assumption would be 2 hours work with $200 cost (labor+overhead).
- Cost of the board is lower than the nVidia board - which I'd estimate at $500 max.
Number of U.S. customers with HW2 FSD is estimated at around 50,000 - so the total worst-case FCF impact should be $50m - potentially much lower, because the service technicians are already employed and can do upgrades from Q1 "idle time", and the board cost might be lower than $500.
FCF should be stronger than this - maybe significantly stronger, so I don't think FSD retrofits will impact Q1 positive cash flow one way or another, unless Tesla decides to smooth the wave and fill inventory in this exact quarter, or there's force majeure.
(@EVNow and @FrankSG might disagree with these very coarse guesses.
Lots of conjecture that there may be some extra cost to upgrade HW2/MCU1 vehicles (S/X early Feb 2018 or before) to HW3.
Unclear yet, but haven’t been able to verify that one of these beasts has been successfully updated. Therefore lots of folks think that MCU1/HW2 poses extra problems for the HW3 upgrade. If it is just logistics/scheduling where they do the easy ones first (MCU2/HW2), then no issue. If requires some more software to support HW3/MCU1 combination, may or may not be significant extra cost. If requires (or is cheaper than software extensions) upgrade of MCU1 to MCU2, could get more expensive.
If there are a lot of FSD AP1/AP2.x cars with MCU1 (any way to tell?), could be some extra cost. Any way to tell how many of the 50k are in this category?
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Singer3000
Member
The Wuhan Virus: How to Stay Safe
“the entire mainland could go on lockdown soon...The Chinese government will take very drastic actions over the next few weeks, and this will be a time of hardship for the Chinese people.”
If we get to this place, it’s impossible to see how Giga3 ramps up no matter the customer demand from people wanting to avoid public transport. And more generally, it’s very bad news indeed for global macro environment. This is without getting on to the “hyperbolic” discussion of what else it might mean, which seems to upset some people here.
“the entire mainland could go on lockdown soon...The Chinese government will take very drastic actions over the next few weeks, and this will be a time of hardship for the Chinese people.”
If we get to this place, it’s impossible to see how Giga3 ramps up no matter the customer demand from people wanting to avoid public transport. And more generally, it’s very bad news indeed for global macro environment. This is without getting on to the “hyperbolic” discussion of what else it might mean, which seems to upset some people here.
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