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

[heltok]

I used to develop FSD. My take: A lot of what they are saying are super interesting and makes sense. It seems that they had some really intelligent talented experienced hard working engineers given freedom to do what they thought was the best solution. This is pretty rare as an engineer. I assume a lot of engineers around the world working on the same problem will think ”This is what I think we should have done” on various parts of the problem.

One detail I really liked that I haven’t seen commented on enough is what Karpathy said. First you do an initial attempt. Then you identify a problem. Then you add it to your unit tests. Imo this is the big differerence between a great engineering approach and what many other teams are doing. You create unit tests and make sure that every commit improves on unit tests and you make the unit tests tell what is a good solution.

 

[Artful Dodger]

TBH, this looks like a large volume propane release (low level fog, flame spread).

Good analysis. The color temperature of the cloud should also reveal if the explosion was propane. Anybody got a chemistry degree handy?

 

[Muaddid]

The feed literally cut 2 seconds after Elon said Tesla would be liable from an accident... Wonder who pulled the plug behind the stream but i would not really expect anything else anyway. Too late now anyway to deny that, just who us the state of the FSD !

 

[Big Blue 1011]

Because they can’t finance it. Tesla, for now, MUST sell or lease cars because they need the cash. After car owners start delivering tons of free cash to Tesla as part of the Tesla Network, then they can start financing their own cars...

I still don't understand why Tesla would then sell a car with a NPV of $200,000 for $35,000.

Or $25,000. I forget. Plus, my head hurts.

 

[NicoV]

Umm... so did he say that Tesla was not going to make any money until the robotaxi thing can start?
That's what I heard... Sounds like a change to the business model to me ...

Cash flow neutral he said.
Which means investing all the money they earn back into Tesla in order to grow as fast as possible.
And when they reach a decent size of robotaxi market share, they basically have a licensen to print money.
They even had a slide to calculate the yearly revenue of a robotaxi, just in case the financial analysts didn’t understand it.
I also saw Elon opening the door to a capital raise, the analysts will like that.

 

[Cloxxki]

The answer is Tesla is in complete control in this regard.

As a monopolist, yes. But if one company with many distractions can pull it off, another could as well. Say, Waymo or sometime gets their product to market half a year or a year later after having seemed defeated. Tesla has deleted the ordering page, all cars built are going into the network that's working a charm and is exceeding all expectations. They are buying back all their 2.5 cars at prices no Tesla fan can deny, they just get a Porsche or Audi in stead to then just drive themselves, like peasants. Rich peasants.
Then a year in, Waymo gets it act together and is offering packages to car makers, individuals and fleet managers. The industry happily buys licenses to produce and implement Waymo approved computer and sensor kits plugging into cars with the hardware controls in place for any kind of autonomy. Waymo prices the hardware at zero, takes a lower cut per ride or mile than Tesla. The hardware kits end up dirt cheap and convert dirt cheap econoboxes to compete with relatively costly Teslas. Now suddenly Tesla needs to become a premium company again, someone create value in a market that is all about price. What then?

 

[Carl Raymond]

Here's the CNBC clip on YouTube:

"Here's why some think the Tesla explosion video is suspect"

Is that camera moving?? Like the director was counting down...

 

[elasalle]

Are we done for the day ? Or how long is the break?
Electric Cars, Solar Panels & Clean Energy Storage | Tesla takes be back to same M3 ordering page.

 

[S3XY]

Please enjoy the drives!

- I don 't think we will see any of that...

Gali is there and he isn't exactly shy about talking Tesla. I'm sure shortly after his drive he'll put something out with details about it.

 

[Cloxxki]

Can’t see any reason why you wouldn’t be able to. I also don’t see personal ownership going away completely. Maybe to some degree in the cities but not elsewhere. You’ll just personally own a car that autonomously drives you around. More about safety than anything else.

Seems the narrative went from unachievable to too safe to allow manual driving any longer in a heart beat. I'm not convinced. And to my it's not FSD if it works only for certain countries or regions.

 

[NicoV]

very little data/info in the form of digestable by finance types

Incorrect: there was a sliding with the calculation how much a robomile would cost, and Elon said that they would charge 1 dollar/mile. That’s all the analysts need to remember from todays presentation.

 

[Remus]

Because they can’t finance it. Tesla, for now, MUST sell or lease cars because they need the cash. After car owners start delivering tons of free cash to Tesla as part of the Tesla Network, then they can start financing their own cars...

No, that is not the problem.

As long as they can run a 10 car fleet in San Jose for a week, banks will line up to provide funding.

 

[MarcusMaximus]

will be able to sell the software to just anyone at just any price. A sensor array is the easy bit and this can even be retrofitted to cars of any kind, even petrol fueled ones.

This snippet isn’t entirely true. For example, if you look at Tesla, they have a few specific mount points for the cameras. All their data comes from those particular mount points. The network is pretty certain to overfit to those common parameters. Any deviation from that(which is going to be unavoidable in arbitrary other cars) is going to make the network fail spectacularly. This is very likely a large component of why Elon says retrofitting AP2+ onto AP1 cars would be hard/impossible.

 

[Big Blue 1011]

The feed literally cut 2 seconds after Elon said Tesla would be liable from an accident... Wonder who pulled the plug behind the stream but i would not really expect anything else anyway. Too late now anyway to deny that, just who us the state of the FSD !

Don't worry about that. Just leave it to the lawyers. They'll deny everything.

 

[NicoV]

Now the big question is : who exactly was in the audience?

Adam Jonas
Gali
Tasha

And ????

Or, more precisely : who was in the audience that had the competence to digest any significant technological advantages that were presented and is at the same time responsible to give the ''OK buy more stock, massively!''?

Trip Chowdry
Seriously, tomorrow Trip will put out a gigantic stock upgrade, he was very impressed.

 

[Nocturnal]

Because they can’t finance it. Tesla, for now, MUST sell or lease cars because they need the cash. After car owners start delivering tons of free cash to Tesla as part of the Tesla Network, then they can start financing their own cars...

Perhaps, but once FSD is truly ready people will be begging them to borrow money.

 

[Tslynk67]

I missed a portion of the presentation. Was there anything about how they can collect edge/similar data from the fleet ? I know they said the car does some compute and then sends the filtered data ...

Yes

 

[Causalien]

As a monopolist, yes. But if one company with many distractions can pull it off, another could as well. Say, Waymo or sometime gets their product to market half a year or a year later after having seemed defeated. Tesla has deleted the ordering page, all cars built are going into the network that's working a charm and is exceeding all expectations. They are buying back all their 2.5 cars at prices no Tesla fan can deny, they just get a Porsche or Audi in stead to then just drive themselves, like peasants. Rich peasants.
Then a year in, Waymo gets it act together and is offering packages to car makers, individuals and fleet managers. The industry happily buys licenses to produce and implement Waymo approved computer and sensor kits plugging into cars with the hardware controls in place for any kind of autonomy. Waymo prices the hardware at zero, takes a lower cut per ride or mile than Tesla. The hardware kits end up dirt cheap and convert dirt cheap econoboxes to compete with relatively costly Teslas. Now suddenly Tesla needs to become a premium company again, someone create value in a market that is all about price. What then?

Buyout or merger. But assuming Lidar solution is wrong. No one will take Waymo taxi.

My guess is Waymo will find a way to properly deploy it. It only has to compete in jurisdictions that approves robotaxis. So the rollout speed can be controlled while google lobbies for the approval to slow down. They can have the legislature slowly control robo taxi rollout as they finish testing each geofenced area.

 

[BOBTHEJOCKEY]

No volume right now. Lot's of stuff today. Lot's of people are thinking really hard. Tomorrow should be an explosion. "YA RIGHT BOB You have been saying this for 5 years now" Sorry I was talking to myself there. Either I am CRAZY or the stupidity of Tesla shorts is fast approaching that of Trumpanzees. I said four years ago this stock would hit $1000 a share by 2020. I still am quite sure of that.

The market cap of Tesla right now is around 50 Billion. The market cap of Uber is 100 BILLION. Uber is going to have an IPO VERY SOON. Tesla at around $1000 a share would have a market cap of between 150 and 200 BILLION. IMO Uber is worthless and Tesla should be close to $1,000 a share now.

 

[Cloxxki]

The car would win hands down. Of course, you’d have to create a racing specific NN, but it wouldn’t be too hard

After a few years of development, Robocar without the 60kg novice lady driver in it was way slower than with her driving. Not to speak of the crashes.
For a car to driver itself faster (same mass and placement) as a pro racing driver in ever-changing conditions...decades away.