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

[myt-e-s-l-a]

Must read in support of the view that Tesla drop in U.S. sales since January is real.

"Recently compiled data on new-car registrations from a large portion of the United States seems to offer further support for that view. "

Tesla Sales Slump as ’19 Starts Is Hinted At in State Data

 

[Silent Ludicrosy]

Elon's Flint presentation from Friday

That video left off the best part. At the end of the full video they let all the school admin introduce themselves. Most of them give a long title. Elon introduces himself as “Elon, engineer”
Go to 26:45
Elon Musk gives away hundreds of computers, some students will get to see SpaceX factory

 

[AudubonB]

My weekend OT contribution:



Maybe one of the small technological advantages the competition had over the Comet was that they were not selling passenger airplanes named after huge balls of fire seemingly falling out of the sky for no particular reason?

These are the 31 worst product name fails ever. The #8 made me LOL so hard!

MOD:
Sorry: that is not an OT contribution, it is an OTL* one.

Hey, everyone! FACT CHECKING doesn't know the difference between a comet and a meteor!

*out to lunch

 

[Fact Checking]

Hey, everyone! FACT CHECKING THE AVERAGE AIRPLANE PASSENGER doesn't know the difference between a comet and a meteor!

FTFY.

Also, the GIF I posted was actually tagged "comet", which I found amusing. Also, technically comets too can be huge balls of fire falling out of the sky for no apparent reason, as dinosaurs can confirm!

"Comet" was a nice name for a tank. For an airplane, not so much.

 

[Artful Dodger]

Agree because I seem to recall that the first ship did not load until late Jan or early Feb. And around 4k were seen on the dock.

Lol, Glovis Captian loaded in San Francisco on Jan 11. Recall is not total, but Tesla Carriers on googledocs provides a spreadsheet with all the shipping dates (departure/arrival).

Massive Tesla Model 3 shipment spotted ahead of first oversea deliveries

Glovis Captain departed SFO at 6 am on Jan 12, 2019 after being in port for 1.1 days:

Remember, Tesla has to BUILD all those cars before they can be transport to the port and loaded on the ship. Anecdotal reports say the 1st ship was a partial load. This could mean the production rampup was slower than planned, and the next ship (Glovis Cosmos) was inbound already, and the logistics train in the EU is idle until the 1st shipment arrives.

So no, not late Jan/early Feb. They were loading the 8th ship by then. And as @Fact Checking mentioned upthread, US deliveries counted in Jan/Feb likely came from in-transit cars or were inventory cars produced toward the end of 2018Q4.

 

[Papafox]

Thank god! I'm about to file for 2 more tax credits. I was legitimately appalled! Thanks for clarifying.

I received tax credits for Teslas in 2013, 2015, 2018. BTW, these are the only new cars I have ever purchased.

 

[Nuclear Fusion]

Just thought I’d give everyone some encouragement with this fact based analysis of Tesla’s financial position
And FYI, Inside Job & The Big Short demonstrated how useless the opinions of Ratings Agencies like Moody’s are (explained to a large extent by their conflict of interest)

No, Wall Street — Tesla Has No Cash Or Liquidity Problem (And A P.S. For Elon Musk) | CleanTechnica

 

[EVNow]

I received tax credits for Teslas in 2013, 2015, 2018. BTW, these are the only new cars I have ever purchased.

Yes, the leasing companies get tax credits for tens of thousands of cars per year.

 

[Thekiwi]

If we'd have been more organised, we could have setup a Shorty Air Force style surveillance. 24/7 shifts with tally devices to really count the cars. I'd have loved to given my personal time for this, but not so easy from Belgium...

I’ve always thought a simple webcam on the Fremont factory exit would be a no brainer for any hedge fund/insitutional owner.

 

[DaveT]

...what Tesla wanted in Q1 was a special type of demand: Tesla wanted to generate an unprecedented pulse of U.S. demand that punches through the negative Q1 seasonal and tax cliff patterns.

It seems though extreme and overly dramatic though if their main goal was to generate an unprecedented "pulse" of U.S. demand for Q1 that they would announce they are shutting all their retail stores (of course, only to take that back later) to make drastic price cuts possible.

 

[MarcusMaximus]

Also, technically comets too can be huge balls of fire falling out of the sky for no apparent reason, as dinosaurs can confirm!

I was always taught it was an asteroid that wiped out most of the dinosaurs. Looking it up, it sounds like there’s disagreement about which it was.

 

[Cosmacelf]

I’ve always thought a simple webcam on the Fremont factory exit would be a no brainer for any hedge fund/insitutional owner.

They can’t handle the truth!

Honestly, if you had accurate production numbers, then the FUD would be that Tesla is stockpiling too much inventory and is about to run out of cash because of it.

 

[Cosmacelf]

Just thought I’d give everyone some encouragement with this fact based analysis of Tesla’s financial position
And FYI, Inside Job & The Big Short demonstrated how useless the opinions of Ratings Agencies like Moody’s are (explained to a large extent by their conflict of interest)

No, Wall Street — Tesla Has No Cash Or Liquidity Problem (And A P.S. For Elon Musk) | CleanTechnica

That’s a great article/analysis. Also don’t forget that Elon was on the board of Solarcity, which was effectively bankrupted by a financial bear raid that caused all SCTY liquidity to dry up. Having lived through that and learned the lessons, there is no way he would let Tesla get similarly cash constricted.

 

[SebastianR]

So I am wondering about the change in Tesla service in moving away from scheduled service to "as needed".

I’m ashamed to admit that I currently still drive an Audi (waiting for LR non AWP and the towing hook to mount my road bike). But a car company that has “as needed” and no time scheduled money pit called mandatory service? That I’m looking forward to! I just paid north of 1000 bucks at my Audi dealer for a service appointment the car and the dealer were nagging me about...

If they weren't worried, why the push to get Model 3 SR out so soon? Why do it in such a rush that they had to change how they could afford to do it less than 2 weeks later? These are not the actions of a company seeing the market behave as they predicted.

I’m not here to convince you/anybody else that there is or isn’t a demand problem. I just want to point out that getting the 35k version to market is important for the Tesla mission and so even if they needed that version to fill the line it is a “mission compatible” move. I’m not happy about the store closure back and forth.

But the 35k Model 3 gives the clients a car they can stretch to buy.

AND it also gives the shivers to all ICE makers who - like VW - boldly claimed they can deliver EVs as good as Tesla cars but at half the price...

Edit: They also had to get the word out. People still think that Tesla has long delivery times. I see efficiency communication of Tesla with customers as one of the key challenges for Tesla right now. Not easy if you don’t advertise in the traditional media.

 

[Carl Raymond]

Well, it is being nimble. They quickly reversed a decision they figured wasn't good. Few companies do it - they will continue with the decision for a long time even after figuring out it is not working.

Ofcourse, the more thoughtful companies probably wouldn't have announced the layoffs in the first place.

Hard to plan for the totally unknown, so you plan for the worst and hope for the best.

Once they knew the order volume and options mix for the new SR, it was possible to review the plan.

Hyper criticism of Tesla is normal, even though they get it mostly right. Very little criticism of the legacy auto industry, who have all but missed the boat, a gross mistake.

 

[FTMagicSquare]

Lol, Glovis Captian loaded in San Francisco on Jan 11. Recall is not total, but Tesla Carriers on googledocs provides a spreadsheet with all the shipping dates (departure/arrival).

Glovis Captain departed SFO at 6 am on Jan 12, 2019 after being in port for 1.1 days:

View attachment 389733

Remember, Tesla has to BUILD all those cars before they can be transport to the port and loaded on the ship. Anecdotal reports say the 1st ship was a partial load. This could mean the production rampup was slower than planned, and the next ship (Glovis Cosmos) was inbound already, and the logistics train in the EU is idle until the 1st shipment arrives.

So no, not late Jan/early Feb. They were loading the 8th ship by then. And as @Fact Checking mentioned upthread, US deliveries counted in Jan/Feb likely came from in-transit cars or were produced near the end of 2018Q4.

I think that I saw it somewhere that the first two ships carrying 4400 cars, and in the first 4 days of Jan., factory was in vacation. So we have (930+140/day * 65(1/5/2019 -- 3/10/2019) - 4400)/14 ships ~= 4650 cars/ship. the 930/day production rate is from Bloomberg tracker, which is at 72028 cars this quarter(1/5/2019 -- 3/22/2019, 77 days), the 140/day number is my guess for s/x. But that assumes they don't produce ANY for NA in the first 77 days, which can not be true -- they will have to start produce NA config once inventory from 18Q4 run out, it did not make any logistic sense to totally dry out NA sales, and I seriously doubt that they will fully load the ship -- the ship can carry 4-6k did not mean it will carry 4-6k for a trip to China/EU. I would guess it will be still around 22k. So at 3/15/2019, we have EU/China shipping number as 35.2k(19.8k arrived and 15.4k on rout), and roughly 40.5k delivered/delivering to NA customers: 8k from 18Q4 leftover, 39.7k produced 19Q1) -- give or take a few hundreds, and the next 16 days will be NA config only, it is about 17.1k to be delivered, this can be cross-referenced by Sanjay Shah's email: 30k to be delivered at 3/15/2019 while my number is 32.5k, given the last two days production may not be physically possible to be delivered in 19Q1, it is very accurate.
For the 15.2k on rout to China/EU, 6600 arrived before 3/20/2019, so they should be delivered in 19Q1, and 4400 will arrive today in China and another 4400 will arrive tomorrow(half to EU and half to China). How many of those 8800 cars can make it to the hand of consumers in 7-8 days would be one of the uncertainties, my guess is somewhere between 4k -- 6k; another uncertainty would be how many of the 17.1k in NA will be delivered, the number should be somewhere between 10k -- 12k. So in most bullish case, we will have 6-10k in transit for 19Q1, 92.8k produced, 92.8k delivered.
All the above is under the assumption that Model 3 production is running on 930/day all through, and s/x production running at 140/day, which is kind of bearish for the s/x demand. The only problem I had is that the 56.8k car produced/delivered in NA seems a little bit high when new car sale falling off cliff in NA. If we bump the cars/ship number from 2200 to 3000, this number will drop to 45.6k while EU/China delivery up to 47.2k, bump from 2200 to 4000, NA delivery will be 31.6k while EU/China number to 61.2k. My bet would be on the low end of EU/China delivery with ~2500/ship and NA delivery is slightly higher than EU/China

 

[neroden]

The NY-Times guy is retweeting Mark B.S.

Login on Twitter

After this, the previous years of hit-pieces, I think we can officially say that the NY Times is part of TeslaQ...

Oh seriously? Looks like Neil Boudette is definitely into hit-piece dishonest-journalism territory. No longer giving him the benefit of the doubt between stupid or evil; nobody's stupid enough to take Mark B. S. seriously at this point.

 

[neroden]

Thank you. So that's 16 ships in Q1, and we have the Alpha Hat data for the first 10 ships:

Alpha Hat ship estimates:

Glovis Captain:    EU 1,500
Glovis Cosmos:     EU 2,500
Glovis Symphony:   CN 1,500
Grand Aurora:      EU 2,500
CSCC Europe:       EU 2,500
Morning Cindy:     CN 2,500
Emerald Ace:       CN 2,500
Glovis Courage:    EU 2,500
Golden Ray:        CN 2,500
Grand Venus:       EU 2,500

January estimate:     8,000

It's I think a reasonable hypothesis that:

• Those 1,500 ships were simply sent in with a partial load to not overload the delivery system in the EU and in CN, which never handled such large shipments before. The EU side in Zeebrugge was also a new 'beachhead' for Tesla's Model 3 push - a shipping route they never used before AFAIK.
  
• All the remaining ships in Alpha Hat's data were sent with 2,500 Tesla cars on them.

I'm seriously suspicious that AlphaHat is just using vague, rounded numbers here -- we already know that AlphaHat understimated the first shipment, because ew have accurate data which says 1400 Model 3 / 350 Model S&X. We have rumors of 4000 cars on Grand Venus as you note.

• I'd expect Tesla to have an actual fixed minimum contractual quota on the ships, with some opportunistic free space they might be able to purchase when available, and they sent the first two ships with a partial load intentionally - but the round 2,500 shipment sizes are suspiciously even sized: these ships are of different builds and have different capacities, and different other car makes are shipping cars on them as well.
  
• Alpha Hat has a very robust method to track vehicles, so I'd expect their 1.5k and 2.5k figures to be accurate, maybe fuzzed a bit. They'd be able to track per vehicle IMEIs as they 'disappear' near Pier 8 as they get loaded on a ship.

I flat out don't believe AlphaHat is using the same methodology to track cars loaded on ships as they are using to track US deliveries, and I think they're likely to be far off. The numbers are TOO round; they're guesses.

Production side estimate for amount shipped to Europe and China would be roughly 48,000 if most of Jan/Feb production went to Europe and China. Averaging 3000 per ship on 16 ships (some more, some less) would get that many to Europe. 2500 per ship minus 2000 is too low; it's about 8000 too low, or more than a week's production. I really don't think they would have switched back to US production that early.

 

[neroden]

Wasn’t Boudette the one that got caught intentionally driving around in circles over and over again to try to make his test Model S run out of batteries so he could claim to not be able to make it to the next Supercharger?

No, that was John Broder. Who was promoted to be Boudette's boss.

The New York Times is a discredited newspaper, unfortunately. Still has some good reporters. And it hasn't sunk to WSJ levels (WSJ has a history of outright lies, NYT is just doing "deliberate omisisons").

 

[SteveG3]

Wasn’t Boudette the one that got caught intentionally driving around in circles over and over again to try to make his test Model S run out of batteries so he could claim to not be able to make it to the next Supercharger?

No, that was John Broder, the guy that the NYT later promoted to their editorial board.

The woman who, as Public Editor for the NYT (basically an internal watchdog for journalistic integrity), determined that Broder's reporting was inaccurate and careless, Margaret Sullivan, is no longer Public Editor at the NY Times. How could she be? The NYT eliminated that internal watchdog position in the year's since that incident with John Broder.

-----

For years now, literally the overwhelming majority of mainstream media has tried to undermine public confidence in Tesla, Elon Musk and their products... even create distaste for them. This has been done by a flood of misinformation that Tesla/Elon responding to would only lead to a 100X volume of misrepresentation of that response in an unflattering way, mischaracterization of Tesla/Musk as unstable/infantile/distasteful & pointing blame at the messenger (the press) instead of dealing with their problems, and regurgitation of the false narratives Tesla/Elon were trying to respond to. We've already seen this repeated many, many times.

For years I've been saying this misinformation campaign will carry on for years. Unlike other misinformation gamesmanship, like, "Dem" "Republican" squabbling, there is not substantial portion of the mainstream media calling out the BS flood directed at Tesla. ie, Tesla has no major media "calling out" and countering the BS flung at it as the "Dems" and "Repubs" both do. Virtually every grossly distorted or plainly false narrative re Tesla has in effect a police escort to be shouted through the media's massive megaphones, so-called "left," "right," and "center." Just consider how Mark Speigel has been on CNBC, in the NY Times, etc. He calls himself a hedge fund manager, yet has less AUM ($10 million) than the Tesla holdings of a few of us here on TMC.

At the earliest, this might subside circa 2023 as I see it.

Elon/Tesla can't stop it.

We can't stop it.

The best we can do, is get the message at least as widely out there that the source of this attempt to deligitimize Elon/Tesla & the products IS NOT LEGITIMATE JOURNALISM.

We cannot get this to stop, but, we can substantially reduce it's effectiveness by raising awareness that the overwhelming majority of "coverage" of Tesla is privately funded commentary designed to persuade to the contrary of what the facts are. The sheer volume of "coverage" of every minute detail re Tesla is actually a barometer of how this is a campaign of bucking against reality/facts. When all you have is BS to try to promote your perceived interests, a little won't do... you try to flood the entire public perception of the topic with your BS. I'm sure even members of the public who are not aware of how misleading and false nearly all the reporting on Tesla they've seen is, have noticed that there is a comically disproportionate amount of media "coverage" of every minute detail re Tesla. That is, they've already noticed a striking phenomena that helps to demonstrate that there is a propaganda campaign directed toward misinforming them about Tesla/Musk/Tesla products.

consider this re the 2016 election,

"Steve Bannon to Michael Lewis: "The Democrats don't matter. The real opposition is the media. And the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with *sugar*." "

Brian Stelter on Twitter

The fossil fuel economy has used virtually all of mainstream media to flood the zone of public perception of Musk/Tesla & their products with "*sugar*." We can try refuting it until we are blue in the face, but, we do not have 1/10,000 the megaphone that this campaign does via mass media.

The best we can do via social media is get the point across it is not a competition of Tesla vs. ICE mfg products, but, rather,

like the proverb of "teaching a man to fish rather than giving him a fish," it is a question of whether the public just takes for granted the BS about Tesla the media has flooded us all with, or actually learns directly about what Tesla is offering and how it can improve our world. Never mind rebutting the million false narratives blasted out to virtually every human not living under a rock... get it well known to as close to as many people as possible that their perception of Tesla/Musk/Products has been polluted by a massive machine pumping out false narratives. This can be done with simple concise messaging.