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

[Singer3000]

I thought the exchange was interesting between Elon and the guy who asked why he couldn't just buy 10 Model 3s and make that his business. Elon seemed to miss the gist of the question.

At the IRRs Elon was putting out there for a Model 3 on the Tesla Network, it would be ridiculously dumb of ANYONE not to mortgage all their assets to do buy as many as they could. It's also far more efficient that way rather than sole owners for cleaning, service arrangements etc.. .

The logical consequence of this is that it would be ridiculously dumb of Tesla not to raise a few billion of cheap debt themselves to earn 100% of the Tesla Network revenue (less a small interest cost), rather than the mere 20-30% quoted. Tesla must be thinking this way and perhaps that's why there were such on the fly answers to questions about Tesla's cut from the platform, the insurance liability for Robotaxi accidents etc... and the slightly cryptic comment that when it comes to finance, "we'll do all the things you'd expect".

 

[Sean Wagner]

I alluded to that yes.
But that would require for instance two ICEVs to be recycled, likely while it still has economic life in it, and one BEV being added, before facturing regular new car (BEV demand). That's a huge strain on the environment. I will not contest that the net result would be lower emissions, but added urban congestion (where we need cleaner air the most) seems a real threat of economic activity and quality of life.

You bring up facts it's worth considering to sharpen the autonomous EV proposition. Here's a thought: noone said that future urban mobility requires vehicles built to standards that result in ancillary weights of 1500-2500kg per person. If autonomous bicycles were a thing, the Netherlands would be full of them...

 

[davecolene0606]

Advice.

Bite the bullet and watch the presentation at least twice.

Follow with first hand accounts of the test rides.

Get in ur HW 2.5 Tesla and drive with NoA.

Call me in the morning.

Fire Away!

 

[mongo]

Tesla's FSD competitors such as Waymo and Uber have safety drivers, but they decided to report the disengagements in California, either because they interpreted the regulations differently, or because they had different technologies that mandated disclosure, or because they voluntarily chose to report disengagements to gain publicity.

Tesla probably found that they weren't required to report disengagements, and decided they don't want to disclose them voluntarily either. Why warn the competition how far ahead they are?

Tesla probably receives several times more disengagement events than all the competitors together.

Nags are the key. Nags -> (E)AP, no reporting needed. No Nag/ driver attention confirmation -> FSD and reportable. Either Tesla was using internal camera for monitoring, or we should see a disengagement report for the test rides.

Still scratching my head how they freaken made this chip as a side project and suddenly become as competitive as Nvidia while blowing AMD's attempt out of the water. It's really crazy and I don't think these investors really understand what they were looking at.

Not a side project, a fully funded and staffed chip development specifically for one user/ application.

So if it's so simple, why is Nvidia dicking around with Volta tensor cores if they can just get a few guys and build ASIC?

I get that certain ASIC are simple, especially those used to mine bitcoins. But it's completely foolish for Nvidia, supposedly the leader in autonomous driving, lost their biggest costumer and maybe the autonomy leadership just because they didn't dedicate a few guys to do a side project like Tesla here?

Nvidia has many customers, thus their products need to be more generalized.
(Tesla NN chip was not a side project)

I don't understand this argument at all. It seems to me you could make just the opposite argument: real world testing is useless because it's slow and complicated to collect data and you are limited to the things you actually detect.

Real world testing is slow, real world edge case data collection is slow. Which is why you need a large fleet of data gatherers to collect the rare events.

The drivers provide the ability to tell the system it did not detect something via disengagement triggered reports.

Innovator's dilemma. You need a fleet to get the data to train the fleet. So you make a fleet of sensors that don't drive at all, collect the data, update the fleet capability and size, iterate untill FSD. With rate of improvement increasing as a function of fleet size and current SW capibility.

 

[Alphacrux]

I have mixed feelings about the presentation last night.
- Elon looked a bit nervous and sounded a bit desperate, like he was trying too hard to convince everyone how amazing FSD is going to be. This makes me worry that either demand has fallen off a cliff or there is a big battery bottleneck
- The presentation was really technical and geeky. I am not sure why they bothered with all that. Its loads of ammunition for half-wits to pick holes in it based on misunderstandings. A simple presentation of the car driving itself in all kinds of environments and Elon and the autopilot guys explaining how certain moves are possible would have been more spectacular and helped people believe what was coming
- Tesla Network sounds cool. Why not create it now but with drivers? Concentrate on a few cities with high density of teslas and then phase out the drivers when the time is right. That way the Tesla Network gets brand visibility and starts to grow a habit. Most people would choose a Tesla taxi drive over a regular Uber any day

Personally, I want to buy 10 Tesla Model 3s and get them set up and working (with drivers for now) in a city like Madrid. For a relatively small outlay, there is a massive opportunity to take over the city with robo-taxis. I would love to do that

Musk seemed “better than usual” to me.

Presentation was Geeky” to show investors why Tesla will win. What the secret sauce is that Tesla has that will require enormous time and effort to replicate- ie the moat.

Change of strategy- others here mentioned as well- revenue neutral to cash flow positive until massive profits roll in from the Tesla network.

Timing seems to be 2 days before q1 results because they will need to make forward looking statements in preparation to a capital raise.

Tesla recognizes quantum leap in revenue due to autonomous ride sharing as espoused by Ark

I personally was worried that TN would be level 4 not 5, but am impressed by dual redundancy already built into current cars- Ie dual power steering motors. Surprised by talk of removing wheel and pedals, but I believe him (ok, Elon time). And I still want a steering wheel

Reading the news coverage on this, I’m amazed at how people don’t believe him. Landing rockets was just a warm-up act and ppl are still calling him a :fraud”. Ridiculous! When does the wheel of opinion turn?

 

[replicant]

People also underestimate/forget the charging network.


It's not just the software, the NN, the chip, the camera's & radar and a car.

It's electric cars and an autonomous charging network to get to a network with such a low cost per mile.

Competitors can't even get access & handshake to a semi-decent 3rd party charging infrastructure; never mind autonomous, automatic pay infrastructure.

It really is game, set & match and the writing was on the wall for the past 3 years.

I don't think it matters that much because for autonomous fleets, the needs for charging stations will far exceed the current size of Tesla's charging network. It seems big for today's fleet but IMO it's insignificant for the ramp up of robotaxi. In other words, I Waymo had the capacity to put hundreds of thousands of AVs on the road today, it would also be able to install thousands of charging stations.

 

[Remus]

This theory probably needs to be tamed. FSD will not be availabel everywhere at once for regulatory reasons. So the amount of income from such is limited at first and gradual. And tesla cars will only increase in price at those places.

Also from the demo, it would seem that places like Italy will require longer training because the overall environment is just so different. Asia as well. I don't see fsd getting release in Vietnam for a long time.

So extreme positive income at 2020 when fsd is turned on is not possible. More like a gradual increase. The next 2 years is still basically just cash flow and manufacturing. And the biggest hype being the truck.

This is irrelevant in my opinion.

What's important is technology capability. Once they do have FSD safe enough for robotaxi service that insurance company is willing to write policy for Tesla, which I am not sure when, it's not that hard to get government approval in California. And once truly driverless taxi are running in one city, there will be large number of YouTube videos showing real people going places. Then the stock price will go to the moon.

The real problem is getting a safe FSD technology, that is the golden key.

 

[WarpedOne]

Simulation is infinitely flexible and limited only by the speed of your hardware. Seems clearly superior to me in many respects.

No, simulation is not only limited by the speed of the hardware.
It has one much more fundamental limitation: you can only simulate what you want to simulate i.e. you already know you need to be able to handle.

For that, you must first know what is out there, cue all those strange street markings. What ill mind could come up with such things without encountering them in the wild? You would be laughed out the room and kicked in the butt for not being serious.

So, after encountering a strange thing out in the wild, so you know it exists and you need to handle it, you can than simulate variations of it - again bounded by what you can imagine are plausible variations to simulate at all.

Or you can do what Tesla does: Hey fleet, listen up, please report everything that looks similar to this. You again gather real variations of that strange things, the ones you have to be able to handle.

 

[W84M3]

pre-market; LYFT +3%, TSLA -1%

It boggles the mind

 

[mongo]

The logical consequence of this is that it would be ridiculously dumb of Tesla not to raise a few billion of cheap debt themselves to earn 100% of the Tesla Network revenue (less a small interest cost), rather than the mere 20-30% quoted. Tesla must be thinking this way and perhaps that's why there were such on the fly answers to questions about Tesla's cut from the platform, the insurance liability for Robotaxi accidents etc... and the slightly cryptic comment that when it comes to finance, "we'll do all the things you'd expect".

That is why Elon said they would be revenue neutral while spinning up the TN fleet. Get as many cars out there as they can, then rake in the cash.

If someone else buys a bunch of Tesla's as a revenue soutce, that is good for Tesla also. At 20% GM, every 4 sales means one more Tesla owned car they can put out there (all else being equal $ wise untill fully market saturation).

 

[WarpedOne]

pre-market; LYFT +3%, TSLA -1%

It boggles the mind

It is called herd mentality, it is why TSLA will go from 1000 to 2000 in a heartbeat.
But only after much of that herd already jumped the cliff.

 

[davecolene0606]

Prediction

First regulatory approval: Dubai Q3 2020

Fire Away

 

[stretchsje]

pre-market; LYFT +3%, TSLA -1%

It boggles the mind

Model S fire in China spooking worries about a recall? Expectations ofoan S/X refresh? I can't imagine the FSD demo didn't impress, though maybe it could have been more revenue centric? I thought the revenue implecations we're clear and disruptive.

 

[KarenRei]

That is why Elon said they would be revenue neutral while spinning up the TN fleet. Get as many cars out there as they can, then rake in the cash.

If someone else buys a bunch of Tesla's as a revenue soutce, that is good for Tesla also. At 20% GM, every 4 sales means one more Tesla owned car they can put out there (all else being equal $ wise untill fully market saturation).

Then there's the lease situation. Tesla gets other people to eat the "new car depreciation" for them, then gets cheap robotaxis. Meanwhile, if "Elon-Time" turns out to be much longer than real-world time and Tesla needs the cash, they can always just sell the used cars. The lease basis accounts for some fairly aggressive depreciation, to Tesla's favour.

 

[CorneliusXX]

The mission = changing the WORLD to sustainable transport. Can’t do that if you don’t sell to everyone.

You need everyone using EVs, not owning them. Over time ownership of EVs will shift to those who can afford them and if they are worth a lot of money only people with a lot of money will own them

 

[elliott82]

The FSD video they released, altough impressive, wasn't very "steaky" to me. It was almost the same type of situations they showed on their 2016 video. It's quite baffling to me why they wouldn't show more complicated situations involving inner city driving, because that's where robotaxis will eventually be operating in. I have the feeling the presentation could have made a way bigger impact, if it would't have been so dry.

edit: by dry I mean, better show a few videos of the system negotiating complicated situations, elaborating on them and then do the technicals.

 

[Fact Checking]

pre-market; LYFT +3%, TSLA -1%

It boggles the mind

I suspect part of it was the possibility of Tesla releasing robo-taxis right now - this short term worry has been removed from the LYFT investment horizon now.

 

[Pras]

The FSD video they released, altough impressive, wasn't very "steaky" to me. It was almost the same type of situations they showed on their 2016 video. It's quite baffling to me why they wouldn't show more complicated situations involing inner city driving, because that's where robotaxis will eventually be operating in. I have the feeling the presentation could have made a way bigger impact, if it would't have been so dry.

Because the feature complete will happen later this year

 

[Fact Checking]

It was almost the same type of situations they showed on their 2016 video.

I believe this was intentional, to show that the current FSD milestones are a continuation of their 2017, 2018 and 2019 FSD efforts which they did a very early geo-mapped demo of in November 2016.

 

[elliott82]

Because the feature complete will happen later this year

yeah sure, but Gali's description of the ride sounded way more impressive than the video tbh.