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

[Car In Ray]

"I hate to say it but the state of CV and AI is pathetic when we consider the task ahead, and when we think about how we can ever go from here to there. The road ahead is long, uncertain and unclear. "


Wow I wonder how he really feels about FSD.

 

[MarcusMaximus]

He said he's taping the run himself so he can compare with official footage to determine if it is 'real' or stitched together from multiple attempts. Which is actually a good idea.

Not so sure. Splicing together multiple cuts is going to be hard/impossible anyway. They’d have to make sure every single car/object/cloud/etc lines up perfectly across multiple attempts. More likely, they’d just attempt it multiple times until they get one that works the whole way through(which appears to be what they did for the first FSD video).

 

[aubreymcfato]

I mean, someone could just have a strange behavior in front of the car, to "confuse" the car.
Nothing criminal, just to make the FSD demo look bad.
But maybe I'm just overreacting.

 

[MarcusMaximus]

"I hate to say it but the state of CV and AI is pathetic when we consider the task ahead, and when we think about how we can ever go from here to there. The road ahead is long, uncertain and unclear. "


Wow I wonder how he really feels about FSD.

That’s from 2012...

 

[AlexS]

I mean, someone could just have a strange behavior in front of the car, to "confuse" the car.
Nothing criminal, just to make the FSD demo look bad.
But maybe I'm just overreacting.

I wish some reporter to make an article of tslaq members encouraging each other to sabotage Tesla FSD presentation

 

[Curt Renz]

I wish some reporter to make an article of tslaq member encouraging each other to sabotage Tesla FSD presentation

Indeed, real news about bad people.

 

[Carl Raymond]

What do you expect from FSD? World peace?

Nah. I expect world peace to come from cheap 24/7 solar and energy independence.

So still on Musk’s ‘to do’ list.

 

[EVDRVN]

Once any Gov't signs off on Level 5 FSD, then insurance will be available to cover any edge risks, probably similar to the coverage that Uber/Lyft provides today.

Also, on a side note, the commercial value for companies not having to pay drivers will result in keeping FSD through heavy lobbying, even if there were setbacks from freak accidents. Much the same way as the cell phone companies lobbied to keep texting while driving legal.

Ubers' traditional insurance carrier is James River and perhaps owned by Uber. They are a real piece of work but what would you expect for a company with billions of pending litigation.

 

[Krugerrand]

Let's hope it's more than that - and not like over hyped MY reveal in which like TSLA story/impact analysis etc is repeated for most of the time.

Who over-hyped the MY reveal? Think about it for a second before you answer.

 

[sunhelm]

They added the following sentence to the latest deliveries report: "We count a produced but undelivered vehicle to be in transit if the related customer has placed an order or paid the full purchase price for such vehicle."

They also didn't state when in-transit cars would be delivered. Previously Tesla always said that "in-transit" cars would be delivered in the beginning of the next quarter. Now this part is missing.

Bears say that these changes are important because this way Tesla can count rejected, canceled orders as "in-transit". Also in certain cases Tesla might count excess inventory vehicles as "in-transit". Let's say that there is an excess inventory red LR M3 sitting in a Norwegian parking lot. If there is an order for this model / trim in the US they can count it as in-transit. Even if there is minimal chance that Tesla will ship the car back to the US to sell it and there is no current buyer for this trim in Norway.

You can decide yourself how sensible his argument. Personally I don't know, sounds like splitting hairs. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

2018 Q4 delivery report: Tesla Q4 2018 Vehicle Production & Deliveries, Also Announcing $2,000 Price Reduction in US | Tesla, Inc.
2019 Q1 delivery report: Tesla Q1 2019 Vehicle Production & Deliveries | Tesla, Inc.

Ok, thanks for that. It really sounds like splitting hairs. Reminds me of the shorts going nuts about the "factory gated" statement by Musk. Sciver's statement that an order is counted as in-transit is simply false. It has to be paired with an actual produced car and a customer. So an order without associating it to a completed car will not count. An inventory car not paired to a customer order also will not count.

Now on the argument that an inventory car in Norway is somehow paired to a US order and vice versa, I do not think it fits the definition because of the term "related customer". There would be no relation for a European homologated car to be paired with a US order. Again, I think shorts gonna short and distort.

 

[ReflexFunds]

But the article is not that bad: Insiders describe a world of chaos and waste at Panasonic's massive battery-making operation for Tesla

she describes hurdles like many production companies have. The good thing is that article brings out that there is double quality check for cells, which is very good news.

And problems she describes are quickly solvable, by additional training and explaining to personnel and probably some extra supervision.

I don't like giving Linette clicks, I wouldn't trust what she says, and I don't see why any employees/ex employees would talk to someone like her, but, some of this article was informative.

In particular the below suggests that scrap rates are responsible for c.3gWh of the current production shortfall vs capacity:

"Panasonic sends about 3 million battery cells over to Tesla a day, and the pressure is always on to beat previous goals."
"The winding phase is where much of the factory's scrap comes from — amounting to a fairly consistent half a million battery cells a day, said one current and one former employee. "​

The comment below also suggests to me that Panasonic is actually manufacturing Cathodes at GF1 and not just purchasing from Sumitomo. If this is correct, this is the first I've heard of cathode production on-site. I could be wrong though, I'm not an expert on cell manufacturing and this could relate to a different part of the process.

"On several occasions something has fallen into one of the 16-foot mixers — which contain a blend of chemicals including volatile lithium — inside of the plant"​

 

[Krugerrand]

Ah, so you’ll get it a bit earlier than 2 years barring some Elon-time shenanigans. I’m the full 2 out.

Perhaps late next year according to public timeline given. But I can wait however long it takes. I’m making due with my last ICE vehicle (not the van - it went to van heaven earlier this year) and it has plenty of life left in it.

 

[ReflexFunds]

Big carmakers are placing vast bets on battery power

This provides a good brief summary of where the EV business stands, but I didn't note new information. It's behind a paywall. I don't know if they give new users a few free articles.

I like the Economist generally, but it is disappointing here that the Economist follows Reuters lead as a respected financial news organisation that cannot distinguish between capex, R&D and COGs commitments for EVs/batteries.

 

[Antares Nebula]

Remember to progressively lock in some profits if you bought the dip for a short term trade. Especially calls. This low volume creep up looks awfully similar to the last 3 announcements ($35k Model3, Model Y reveal, Q1 production #s)

I sold my 275 weekly calls I bought for $1 yesterday today for 3.75. Still holding my long term monthly calls, which I will dispose of in increments. Yesterday was unreal. I was hoping before market open to buy a couple of more calls, but with that huge morning dip, I kinda backed the truck up. Freaked out when I saw it drop below 260, but glad I held!

 

[mblakele]

Big carmakers are placing vast bets on battery power

This provides a good brief summary of where the EV business stands, but I didn't note new information. It's behind a paywall. I don't know if they give new users a few free articles.

It marks a pivot by The Economist. Just a few weeks ago they were still pretending EVs weren’t important. Perhaps I’m overly cynical but I think this probably has something to do with it:

Fiat Chrysler (whose chairman, John Elkann, sits on the board of The Economist’s parent company) has just agreed to pay Tesla hundreds of millions of euros to count the Californian marque as part of its fleet, and thus avoid steep fines for exceeding average CO2-emissions standards for carmakers due to come into force in the European Union next year.
​

Anyway I learned something new:

Jaguar and Audi have already broken Tesla’s monopoly at the lucrative top end of the market
​

Hmm... here I thought Tesla was challenging traditional premium brands, and doing very well with the Model 3 that goes unmentioned in this article. Turns out Tesla won, became a monopoly, then lost the monopoly, and I missed the whole thing. Either that or this author suffers from the “separate market for EVs” fallacy.

 

[KarenRei]

View attachment 397504

Is he suggesting that maybe they are about to commit a crime intentionally causing an incident?

The best disinfectant is sunlight:

Nafnlaus on Twitter

*** Okay, not really, sunlight is actually a marginal disinfectant at best. But it makes for a nice saying!

 

[MP3Mike]

What if both are true? Panasonic is making ~35GWh/year of cells, but only ~24GWh/year of those cells meet the requirements to go over the wall to Tesla? That would only be a ~68% yield, which is probably not possible...

So if the article today is correct, that 500k cells are scrapped per day and 3M go to Tesla per day, that puts Panasonic at a ~86% yield. (Of course there would be the cells that Tesla rejects so the actual yield would be lower than that.)

That level of scrap cells would account for more than 700 LR battery packs per week...

So it would appear that scrap is a significant part of cell supply issue.

 

[KarenRei]

I sold my 275 weekly calls I bought for $1 yesterday today for 3.75. Still holding my long term monthly calls, which I will dispose of in increments. Yesterday was unreal. I was hoping before market open to buy a couple of more calls, but with that huge morning dip, I kinda backed the truck up. Freaked out when I saw it drop below 260, but glad I held!

I basically missed out on today. Nominally up a bit, but the gains are in things I really don't want to sell to offset liabilities. I'm optimized for only slow growth, and was planning to switch over to fast growth mode tomorrow. Sigh... Took too long.

Hopefully there will be a morning dip.

 

[KarenRei]

So if the article today is correct, that 500k cells are scrapped per day and 3M go to Tesla per day, that puts Panasonic at a ~86% yield. (Of course there would be the cells that Tesla rejects so the actual yield would be lower than that.)

That level of scrap cells would account for more than 700 LR battery packs per week...

So it would appear that scrap is a significant part of cell supply issue.

Scrap is great news (Linette seems to think it's the apocalypse, she's played this line of attack before). It's something you can improve over time which directly transforms into more product at no extra expense. It means huge potential margin improvement quarter-to-quarter. If they're still only at 84% yield, there's still a lot of money left to wring out of the system. Wonder what it was at the end of Q4, and how much it improved over Q1?

 

[EVNow]

Remember to progressively lock in some profits if you bought the dip for a short term trade. Especially calls. This low volume creep up looks awfully similar to the last 3 announcements ($35k Model3, Model Y reveal, Q1 production #s)

It's complicated this time because of the 24th ER. Not sure whether to close the calls before the 22nd event or wait and close before ER when the IV is the highest.