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

[Krugerrand]

What I am continuously frustrated at is how many car reviewers just take the car for a spin and talk about performance, handling, comfort.... but completely ignore comparative ranges and charge speeds. It's like, okay, if you only want a city car, fine, but most people actually want to be able to go a significant distance in real-world conditions, recharge quickly, and keep going. This latter aspect almost never gets reviewed. I don't know if reviewers just assume that it's the same for all EVs, or that EV drivers never go on road trips, or what.... but it's a huge problem.

It's not enough to just take the car for a spin around the block. Reviewers need to get this through their heads. Go on a half-day road trip in the car before you write up your review.

I actually think it’s even more appropriate and warranted for the reviewers to ‘live’ with the car for a week or two. It takes a bit of time for people to really be able to wrap their heads around not going to gas stations and coming out every morning to a full ‘tank’, and what happens when you go on a road trip, and how traffic jams are no longer stressful and, and, and...

 

[Fact Checking]

I want Tesla to improve and succeed.

I don’t believe you or your intentions and here’s why: you’ve never hit the helpful, informative, like or love button on any positive post on this forum. Ever. You’ve only ever hit dislike or the new disagree button on positive Tesla/TLSA posts.

When @adaptabl wrote that comment I felt a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of lie detectors shorted out in terror and were suddenly silenced.

 

[Carl Raymond]

I want Tesla to improve and succeed. I think they have the best technology in an EV at this time but are not that great at producing consistent quality products with good customer support. Those who refuse to acknowledge any problems are not helping Tesla improve. Are they better than a year ago? For sure. Do they have more work to do? For sure.

This change from Consumer Reports is a reflection of this. Recently even some of the largest Tesla fans published information on the poor service experiences.

Were CR evaluating service? I thought they were only evaluating the car.

 

[30seconds]

I wonder if this is a reflection of the due bill items we saw for many of the 2017 and first half 2018 deliveries.

 

[dc_h]

I am stunned at the amount of headlines re the 400K/500K tweet. Elon is a Genius but man what an idiot.

(Sorry Elon, really I still love you)

People are idiots, especially smart people!

 

[hacer]

The passenger cell in the Smart is indeed strong.

The problem is that there's very little crumple zone ahead of it to decelerate the people inside of it. That pesky "physics" thing means some high g-forces regardless of if the cage remains intact.

Plus the thing that actually will kill you in a modern car collision is the deceleration of your internal organs when they hit your skeleton. An all space-frame, no crumple design is going to increase those g forces and kill you. Your corpse might look good for a short while though.

 

[Curt Renz]

Today six car brands were removed from Consumer Reports recommended list due to reliability concerns. Yet CNBC and its reporter Phil LeBeau only mentioned Tesla.

6 Cars Lose CR's Recommendation Over Reliability Issues

I've queried LeBeau about this on Twitter with no response received: Curt Renz on Twitter

If not due to Tesla not being a CNBC sponsor, perhaps it's related to expressed concern by CNBC talent about Elon turning down interview requests. Yesterday the fact that ARK interviewed Elon appeared to ruffle their feathers.

 

[Intl Professor]

I agree that Tesla's brand value is huge. My frustration, however, is that Musk does not believe in brand marketing and so is not so keen to monetize the value of a brand. The irony here is that Musk is really good at creating brand value in spite of thinking so little of branding.

The real deal is real, that's enough. He does not have to brag about how smart he is. He just does. Many of us should stop worrying about ourselves, about our decision to be long on everything, including investing.

 

[Krugerrand]

The real deal is real, that's enough. He does not have to brag about how smart he is. He just does. Many of us should stop worrying about ourselves, about our decision to be long on everything, including investing.

May I add we should also stop worrying about every little thing others do as well, stop worrying that they aren’t perfect, behaving as we would have them etc...

 

[Artful Dodger]

Did you mean March?

March, May, what's the difference....

April

No, April would be the average. The difference is February.

 

[Papafox]

@Papafox How do you know those options expire in feb and not, say, in march? I read the article listed and didn't mention of the expiration date.

I put down Feb22 from memory and I thought it was contained in that article but apparently it isn't. If I can find a reference I will post, but otherwise it would be best not to repeat the claim unless we have data to back it up. Thanks for the heads up.

 

[Unpilot]

This whole CR debacle reminds me of that scene in Shallow Hall where he say's "did you see the toe?"

 

[trailhound]

On to more positive news...…

1,600 Tesla Model 3 to land at Shanghai port - China.org.cn

 

[MXWing]

I don’t believe you or your intentions and here’s why: you’ve never hit the helpful, informative, like or love button on any positive post on this forum. Ever. You’ve only ever hit dislike or the new disagree button on positive Tesla/TLSA posts.

All of your like or love button pushes have been on negative Tesla/TLSA posts and almost always on posts by pistets who are known shorts, trolling this forum or themselves never saying anything positive about Tesla/TSLA.

You’ve also never posted anything positive about Tesla/TSLA, only negative toned comments.

This guy is responsible for 25% or more of my disagrees.

Not that I care but just supporting your argument that @adaptabl would win the “least likely to be optimistic” at the negative nancy awards.

 

[EVNow]

The people filling out CR surveys are hardly a random sample of buyers in the automotive realm. That has always been my #1 problem with their methodology because it is anything but scientific and is almost geared for confirmation bias by design. And they won't own it- because being "the authority" is far better for generating subscriptions.

For an older brand like GM or Ford - I can understand if they claim their readers are fairly representative of the larger owner group. For Tesla, I really doubt it.

Basically their "survey" is no different than a survey on the foxnews.com on who won a Dem primary debate.

 

[AZRI11]

BTW, why would any average consumer subscribe to Consumer Reports?
The internet is full of free and excellent info.

I still do. I have never filled out that annual survey. Don't have any of the problems raised. This is all my fault, my Model 3 will never love me again

 

[AudubonB]

I wrote to my representative a couple of months ago complaining about the SEC, and got a call back from an aid telling me there was basically nothing he could do.

That's unfortunate indeed; it is, however, all the more reason to concentrate efforts on the OIG's office.

 

[TNEVol]

Is there anyway to check how often CR has not recommended the car with the highest satisfaction score? Maybe going back to the year 2000?

Maybe I'm wrong but it seems to me that some cars like Corvette always got extremely high satisfaction ratings even though it had dismal reliability. I think this also sometimes applies to the German cars. I am extremely satisfied with my Teslas but there have been minor reliability problems many of which I fixed with a reboot. Some people expect a new car to work perfectly and not do crazy things like a computer. I put up with unusual problems because Tesla eventually fixed them and.makes the product better.

 

[Todd Burch]

Falcon 9 nailed its landing tonight, however I mentioned in the SpaceX subforum that I would not recommend that rocket because I can see a few blemishes in its paint that will likely need retouching.

 

[Causalien]

Sigh... As much as I hate to do this. I've decided to pull my roadster reservation in preparation to biy a house. At least TSLA is out of the cash crunch.

That said, I am not faced with another potential buying point... Wow tsla, how long are you going play around with <$300 price point?