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

[Intl Professor]

An Apple factory ?

Marijuana plantation? That'l smokeum.

 

[jerry33]

In the list of U.S. states, Texas is the third-largest market for Tesla. Only Washington and California have bigger sales, and they have huge tax rebates for BEVs. Texas has NO rebates for Tesla cars whatsoever and it's still Tesla's 3rd-largest market. Translation: the dealership new-car-sales monopoly law in Texas is causing NO significant problem for Tesla. Tesla doesn't care if that law is in place or not.

I don't agree with this part. From what I've seen, Tesla sales could have been at least double if that law wasn't there.

 

[LJS22]

Selling his CA houses makes much more sense now!

He can build a cyberRanch on 400 acres in south Texas for $20 million haha

 

[SMAlset]

Here's a key argument in the suit (bold text mine):

Although the County interprets its Third Order to mean otherwise, the County’s COVID-19 “Frequently Asked Questions” ostensibly authorizes both battery and electric vehicle manufacturing companies to operate. The relevant text provides:

My business installs distributed solar, storage, and/or electric vehicle charging systems – can it continue to operate?

Yes, this is permissible construction activity and must comply with the Construction Project Safety Protocols in Appendix B of the Order. Businesses may also operate to
manufacture distributed energy resource components, like solar panels.

Critically, this allowance for the “manufacture [of] distributed energy resource components” encompasses substantially all of Tesla’s manufacturing activities in Fremont. As defined by the Public Utility Commission (the state agency solely charged with regulating distributed energy), “distributed energy resource technology” includes both electric vehicles and batteries: “For purposes of this section, ‘distributed resources’ means distributed renewable generation resources, energy efficiency, energy storage, electric vehicles, and demand response technologies.”

I have to say I was shocked after reading the Federal Essential Businesses way back when and saw Automotive on it that any car manufacturer closed down, not just Tesla. I think the UAW was the reason the Big 3 Detroit plants finally did. They made some noise but pretty much even with the pushback against the Gov of Michigan I don’t recall hearing much more from them. And they are set to open...what on the 18th? I think their case load in Michigan is also much higher than the Bay areas. I’m really surprised when Tesla went to Newsom without a favorable ruling that the lawsuit didn’t happen back then. With lower rates here now I guess they stand a better chance of winning the lawsuit.

 

[jerry33]

County caves, stock goes up. If they’re smart they’ll wait til Tuesday so they have time to buy calls on Monday (last part was a joke...last thing we need is to add corruption to bumbling incompetence).

Isn't it more like adding bumbling incompetence to corruption?

 

[FrankSG]

Operating Income is a great measure of a company’s ability to execute. It differs from Net Income because it excludes interest exp, taxes, FX, restructuring charges, etc ; in other words, it excludes items that have nothing to due with the pure operations of the entity.
For the Trailing 12 Month results, Tesla’s Operating Income as a % of Sales was 3%. This is on par with its competitors despite having only 20% to 25% of the Sales of Ford, GM, FCA and about 10% of the Sales of VW.

View attachment 540050

As Tesla grows, it will continue to leverage its cost structure and will easily surpass its competitors on OpInc % of Sales.
In Q1 2020, it did just that:

View attachment 540051

Another reason why I think EBIT is such a great metric, is because it is so relatively easy to model and predict. Taxes a few years from now are especially hard to predict for a company in Tesla's position, that's rapidly growing in various jurisdictions.

 

[Navin]

This company is so much more than a stock to invest in. You literally cannot leave this company - u get hooked to the mission and drama. Even Curt couldn’t leave. He got FOMO and jumped back in a week. LOL.
cheers - cannot wait for the book to be written on all that we have been going thru over the last few years. think the climax chapter will be seeing a Tesla driving around mars by Elon’s new son. btw - wonder what he’s getting his motherboard tomorrow.

 

[Zaxxon]

I know we're still kinda tracking developments as they occur, but, can anyone opine on what effect on TSLA all this will have on Monday morning? Up or down? I can't decide either way yet.

 

[Steve m]

Selling his CA houses makes much more sense now!

One thing California uses to judge if a person is a resident of California's is where is their largest, nicest, most expensive house located.

 

[FrankSG]

A sudden 'glass of wine' inspired thought, and argument for re-opening,
Factories should be open LONG before any sort of shops re-open, due to this very simple difference:

With factories, you know the names and addresses of every person in the facility. WIth swipe cards, you are pretty sure exactly where they went. In many cases, employees sign or clock-in, so you have a definitive list of who was where, when, and who they are, and where they live.

With shops, random joes walk in and out all the time, as they see fit, coming from who-knows where, and heading off who knows where...

Which makes for easier contact tracing?

Malaysia has started to loosen restrictions as of last Monday.

One of the requirements is that businesses track every visitor by having them fill in a form with their name, phone number, temperature (tested on the spot), passport/ID number, etc.

 

[kbM3]

... a second wave is guaranteed and I estimate it to be around September. So if they can move the plant there within 3 months time, there's nothing that will be lost.

I wouldn't have said it before, but now that we have more data on how this virus behaves, safely opening the plant while following protocols that they implemented in Asia should be fine. As evidence shows from Asian countries that have almost eliminate the virus and has re-opened, the second wave infection point after reopening are not the factories, but night clubs, gyms and large festivals. For the most part, if you are young and healthy, you should be fine. If Tesla refrains from working their workers to exhaustion so their immunity system doesn't weaken, it should be fine.

What is actually intriguing to me is how the gov and health officials of the west are actually so far behind on how to react to this situation vs the east. Almost as if, the lessons learned and implemented there are not being reviewed by most of the western countries. You can see a clear distinction of infection and death rate between western countries that followed the Taiwan model vs those who did not.

There might not be a 2nd wave. New data is suggesting transmissibility does not substantially reduce in warmer weather. Good chance we just stay roughly at current level of infections and deaths as social distancing is relaxed and the re-tightened area by area as we fight for a new normal.

 

[Mike Smith]

Ted Cruz on Twitter

'Come to Texas! We would welcome Tesla HQ in Texas. We love jobs & Texans very much want to open up & get back to work (while still staying safe & following sound science). We make lots of cars & trucks in Texas, and we’d love more!! '

 

[Big Dog]

Selling his CA houses makes much more sense now!

I mentioned something similar days ago and received a bunch of dislikes....

 

[mblakele]

I thought I'd check in on how Japanese automakers are doing:

Mazda in talks for loans totaling $2.8 billion | NHK WORLD-JAPAN News

Japanese automaker Mazda Motor is in talks with banks for loans totaling around 300 billion yen, or about 2.8 billion dollars, as global demand for automobiles plunges amid the coronavirus pandemic.

Sources say Mazda is in negotiations with the government-affiliated Development Bank of Japan, as well as major private banks such as Sumitomo Mitsui Banking Corporation.

The automaker has been suffering from a slump in sales in the United States and other markets since last year.

It has also temporarily halted production lines in Japan and overseas since late March due to the pandemic.

Mazda says it is not in financial trouble at the moment. But the firm apparently aims to secure ample funds to cope with the drawn-out impact of the virus.

Toyota Motor has asked Japanese banks for a new credit line of 1 trillion yen, or about 9.3 billion dollars. Nissan Motor and Mitsubishi Motors are also in talks with banks for loans.​

 

[mblakele]

We may see some FUD falling out of this article. The paper it reports on tested Android Auto and Apple CarPlay, not Tesla; and the article doesn't mention Tesla even once — but it uses a photo of a Model S dashboard and MCU.

Motorists using touchscreens in cars are being distracted

[...]

To discover how badly touchscreens distract drivers, Neale Kinnear and his colleagues at the Transport Research Laboratory, a former British-government agency now run as an independent test facility, arranged a series of experiments. They recruited two groups of 20 drivers. One consisted of regular users of Google’s Android Auto, a popular “infotainment” app which lets drivers interact with their phone through a car’s touchscreen. The others were partisans of Android Auto’s main rival, Apple CarPlay.

Each participant completed three 15 minute journeys along a set virtual route using the laboratory’s sophisticated driving simulator. On one of these trips they had to carry out tasks using only the touchscreen. These tasks included navigating to a restaurant, playing a particular song on Spotify (a music service), changing radio channels, getting the system to read out a text message, and making a “hands-free” telephone call. On the second trip they had to do the same, but using only the car’s voice-activated controls instead. The third journey was a control, with no assigned tasks.

Whenever a red bar flashed on the windscreen the researchers measured how long it took a driver to react by pulling the indicator stalk to flash the car’s lights. As they expected, drivers using touch controls on the screen took longer to respond to the flashing bar than did those using voice controls. Though the difference might be less than a second, at motorway speeds this would result in an increased stopping distance of up to 25 metres.

[...]

The researchers calculated that reaction times to the red bar when the touchscreen was being employed were more than 50% longer than standard for some tasks. This was worse than the 46% impairment found in a previous simulator study looking at the effects of using a hand-held mobile phone while driving, which is banned in many countries.

[...]

The researchers believe voice-activation is a safer alternative that should be encouraged [...]​

If someone brings this up as "OMG Teslas are unsafe at any speed", you could point out that the article recommends voice control, which Teslas have. You could point out that the researchers didn't test any Teslas. And you could point out that Autopilot has a good chance of responding to a bad situation even if the driver misses it.

Here's the original paper:

Interacting with Android Auto and Apple CarPlay when driving

 

[Quesder]

One thing California uses to judge if a person is a resident of California's is where is their largest, nicest, most expensive house located.

The house, the compensation, the son, the new graduate highly talented employees ...
Ok everything makes senses now. The move of HQ is for sure and not reversible, no matter what Alemeda does now. When Elon tweets, he is done.
You know that he is going to get huge compensation in the coming years, and California has 13% income tax at top tier.
The new grads employees have no money to live in Palo Alto... a regular single family house costs $2M

To me it doesn’t make sense to move Tesla to Texas while keeping SpaceX in CA, so for sure SpaceX will go, too. Where? Near Huston, sounds good?

 

[2virgule5]

Interesting. Where are the HQ functions?

You mean marketing? It is subcontracted to Daimler, BMW, VW, GM, FCA & others at their respective HQ.

 

[TheGrimSweeper]

Ted Cruz on Twitter

'Come to Texas! We would welcome Tesla HQ in Texas. We love jobs & Texans very much want to open up & get back to work (while still staying safe & following sound science). We make lots of cars & trucks in Texas, and we’d love more!! '

This is great stuff for reaching the trump and pickup truck market

 

[AlMc]

Ok, it is Ok to have FOMO and come back TMC members who bailed on TSLA and EM after the last tweets. Don't miss the ride (and profit and being able to look you kids/grandkids in the face and say.. 'I supported' ) on investing in TSLA. It will continue to have some ups and downs.......But ask yourselves...'In 10 years will you look back and say...man, I should of/could of'

Be well ask and stay safe and healthy

<sermon/rant over>

 

[StealthP3D]

CNBC - today:

That was a nice 17-minute long advertisement for Tesla. Actually, it was far more effective than a 17-minute infomercial because viewers understand it was not paid for by Tesla to influence their thinking.