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

[colettimj]

no telling what the spike is about, but little things like the WaWa announcement puts another small chink in the armor of Tesla is Thearnos bear case. In my 25+ years of being a professional investor and now managing my own money, it is hard to recall a company, making a real product that is the center of such controversy/

In case it wasn't posted here, below is a link to my post in the Tesla Supercharger network thread
Wawa plans to double number of its Tesla super-charging stations

 

[madodel]

Kinda OT but I hope elon's security has beefed up lately. I ran into him in a bar 2 years ago, and he was by himself for a few minutes. Hard to believe I know

Was he ok after you ran into him?

 

[Duffer]

I presume that the NHTSA "story" regarding Tesla "misleading" consumers about their cars safety ratings is designed to keep the SP below $240 tomorrow?

Well, between the battery lawsuit and the pending Safety Rating "investigation" the pundits should be able to hurt the SP and earn their paychecks for the next week or so.

 

[MP3Mike]

Actually, this is incorrect info.

The warranty on the battery for nearly all Model S's is 8-years, UNLIMITED miles.

The batteries on all of their cars are still under warranty, even as they approach 500,000 miles per car . . . .

While I mostly agree with you I know of one YouTuber that had a battery replaced via goodwill. But he wasn't a taxi driver.

He had an "original" Model S 60 that comes with the 8 year 125k mile battery warranty and he was past the 125k miles. They replaced his battery with a 75kWh one, and even unlocked the full capacity for free. (Really going above and beyond.) And he had really abused his battery a lot.

 

[Joe F]

Similarly, those seeking or touting a single overarching theory of brain functioning are generally early in their journey towards understanding what we know of the brain.

Great. Now I can't get the voice of Julia Child out of my head asking: "Would you like your brains braised, caramelized, or souffléd?"

 

[anon]

The media has finally picked up on the new lawsuit: Tesla hit by lawsuit claiming thousands of owners lost battery capacity after software update

 

[Solar Aussie]

Jeff Dahn's battery research group has published a new paper in Nature about a lab breakthrough which could potentially allow lithium metal anodes without requiring solid state batteries. Long cycle life and dendrite-free lithium morphology in anode-free lithium pouch cells enabled by a dual-salt liquid electrolyte
The primary motive for developing solid state batteries is because it was believed this was the only way to safely manufacture batteries with lithium metal anodes. A lithium metal anode is good because it significantly reduces the thickness of the anode, allowing a higher % of cathode in the cell and hence much higher energy densities. The downside of solid state batteries is that much of our existing battery tech and manufacturing processes have to be redesigned from scratch - and any of these redesigns could prove the bottleneck to commercialisation of solid state.
This breakthrough is very significant because it means we could potentially incorporate a lithium metal anode into existing liquid electrolyte battery tech, with current cell designs and current cathode tech (potentially this method just replaces the complex anode with a simple copper plate and requires a change of electrolyte).

This research is still just a lab result and only reached 90 charge–discharge cycles before the cell was degraded to 80% capacity - so a long way still from commercialisation. It is also unclear of the cost of the new lithium salts used in the electrolyte. Really this tech will have to get to 1,000 charge-discharge cycles before it can compete with Tesla's current next gen tech. However, this result was achieved with what looks like largely off the shelf NMC 5,3,2 pouch cells (just with only a copper sheet in place of an anode and the electrolyte added by Dahn's team in the lab). We don't have enough details, but I think there is a reasonable chance this tech is already closer to commercialisation than solid state batteries, and could render solid state obsolete.

The main issue with the cell design used in this study is that the dual lithium salts in the electrolyte were depleted through the charge cycles. However they also discovered some types of salts that were not depleted and I see a chance they can make huge improvements to the cycle life through much more testing of different salt combinations, together with optimising choice of cathode/other cell design choices etc.
In the paper they note: "Strategies to overcome this salt consumption may be applied to achieve further gains in lifetime, such as increasing electrolyte content and molarity, and pairing salts that are consumed with those that are not. Such continued success may ultimately shift the focus for enabling lithium-metal batteries from solid-state electrolytes back towards all-liquid electrolytes."

Very interesting

 

[Carl Raymond]

This affects the price at which Tesla can sell their vehicles and it follows that this affects Tesla's financials.

Yes, but only small fractionally. A large portion of the car buyer market are FUD immune. They read. They do their own research. They know enough science to easily spot when they are being bull-sugared. Tesla can only make so many cars, at this time. As long as a sufficient portion of car buyers are clear eyed, those cars will sell. Some are not just clear eyed, they are outraged by the BS to the point they buy a Tesla to prove a point. FUD rebound effect.

The share market is a different story. There, the product is available to, and price dictated by, all stock market participants and potential participants. FUD has a huge impact on TSLA. But only for a time.

Scale effects come into play as growth continues.
Battery costs continue to decline.
Other costs, such as wiring, decline.
Delivery costs decline, with production closer to market.
Profits, in billions, roll in.

More people experience first hand a drive in a Tesla, every day. Each is a potential stock market participant.

Sometimes I wonder why the FUD game is played. The best they can hope for is perhaps a 6 month delay on the inevitable TSLA breakout. But such is the value of ICE land and oil, trillions, that even that small delta is enough to motivate.

Loved the remainder of your post StealthP3D, BTW.

 

[sparcs]

George Hotz alias geohot thinks Tesla will win the race to level 5 autonomous driving:
Lex Fridman on Twitter

Also fun to watch the whole interiew, quite amazing guy.

Wasn't necessarily all positive though. He thinks Elon is wrong on the timeline for FSD. Robotaxi isn't coming soon and that it is further out than what Elon is predicting. Mentioned multiple times in the interview.

He also thought it's a pretty big mistake if Tesla doesn't implement a better method for driver monitoring like a camera. Essentially indicating that trusting humans to take over is a terrible idea.

 

[KarenRei]

Yes. The (unconfirmed) theory is that dendrites formed, lengthened, and eventually caused a short within the cell that initiated the fire. I am not enough of a battery expert to know if this is likely, but it seems plausible.

Name one real-world li-ion battery fire that's actually been traced to dendrites.

I can't find a single case. Overcharging causing overpressure? Check. Electrodes crimped? Check. Defective separator membranes? Check. Mechanical puncture of the cell? Check.

Dendrites? I've got nothing.

Lithium metal normally does not exist at all in li-ion batteries. It only forms if you charge faster than lithium can intercalate into the anode. The solution is to lower the charge rate to always be less than the intercalation rate**. It's not to limit the maximum amount of lithium (e.g. cell voltage, e.g. capacity) that can be intercalated.

I'm sure Tesla is going to walk into court, and their argument will be some variant of, "This guy's batteries were already degraded; the BMS just wasn't showing it. We fixed the BMS."

** Intercalation rates are low at low temperatures - hence, heavy charge throttling until the pack warms up. Also, Tesla limited maximum C-rates on older S/X cells after a given number of Supercharger sessions - again, when intercalation rates are too low, that's what you have to do.

 

[Todd Burch]

Name one real-world li-ion battery fire that's actually been traced to dendrites.

I can't find a single case. Overcharging causing overpressure? Check. Electrodes crimped? Check. Defective separator membranes? Check. Mechanical puncture of the cell? Check.

Dendrites? I've got nothing.

Lithium metal normally does not exit at all in li-ion batteries. It only forms if you charge faster than lithium can intercalate into the anode. The solution is to lower the charge rate to always be less than the intercalation rate**. It's not to limit the maximum amount of lithium (e.g. cell voltage, e.g. capacity) that can be intercalated.

I'm sure Tesla is going to walk into court, and their argument will be some variant of, "This guy's batteries were already degraded; the BMS just wasn't showing it. We fixed the BMS."

** Intercalation rates are low at low temperatures - hence, heavy charge throttling until the pack warms up. Also, Tesla limited maximum C-rates on older S/X cells after a given number of Supercharger sessions - again, when intercalation rates are too low, that's what you have to do.

Like I said, I don’t know enough about battery details to know. Shrug.

 

[ggr]

Mod: Yes, service is important. Important enough that it has its own thread:
Service and communication (out of main)
That's why we keep moving posts there. But, as has been pointed out many times, it's quite hard work for the moderators to move lots of posts around, so if they continue to be in the wrong place, we might have to resort to deleting them instead.

BTW, posts about how the moderators should or shouldn't move particular topics, or should or shouldn't ban particular people, is off-topic for this thread. You can, of course, create a different thread if you want. We're not going to.
-- ggr

 

[BornToFly]

This post was moved out of main, but is highly relevant here (especially considering the constant tangents that fills page after page). I'm copying it back here. Mods please don't move it again.

Mod: Request denied. There was a reason why I moved it. The original can be found here. In the half hour or so I was offline, another 4-5 replies appeared here. This is exactly why, as I thought I explained above, we moved it. If people want to see it, they can view the other thread. If they disagree or don't care, they don't have to read it or the replies.
Q. Is that mod-dude being heavy handed?
A. Yes.
--ggr.

P.S. - ggr, I noticed your post after copying this back here again. I won't keep this thread going, but I think this should stay. Thanks.

 

[Doggydogworld]

LIDAR's ability to image is dependent upon the visible light from the laser making a round trip from the car to the target and back again. Vision-based cameras only need to see the object through a one way trip of the light. In other words, the distance that lidar provides reliable returns degrades much faster than vision in inclement conditions ...

Traffic lights which emit their own photons? Sure. Otherwise, vision systems rely on photons that first travel through 10s of kms of atmosphere, several km of which can be occluded by the same fog/rain/etc. before bouncing off some object then traveling to the car's camera. LIDAR photons travel a much shorter distance.

Of course, the above is only true half the time. At night automotive vision systems mostly rely on headlight photons which travel the same round-trip that causes you grief. And headlights only point forward while main LIDARs see 360. Oh, and not all LIDARs use visible light.

The bigger issue with inclement weather is LIDAR's low resolution.

 

[dc_h]

And with much better news, production and upcoming announcements.
And thoughts on margins this quarter? Q2 margins improved, organically, by about 200 basis points. If they repeat that, they save 100 to 150 million. If pollution credits return to normal that’s another 200 million. They are not likely to further reduce inventory, so free cash flow would be q2 plus 100 million + 200 million -300 million or again about 600 million. Any expected other offsets? I would think 5.5 billion in the bank would be seen as positive by Wall Street.
Assumptions deliveries ~100,000 to 105,000. Energy about the same maybe up 100 million, hope to be wrong and see energy pass 500 million.

Apparently Ark picked up in my post and ran with it. They seem to think margins will improve by over 1000 basis points over the next year. If margins hit 22% on the 3, that’s over 300 million extra free cash. 25% about 500 million. They assume the margins will grow as production increases.

Sam Korus on Twitter

Worth retweeting and replying.

 

[BornToFly]

Down from the high? Or down from what you put into it?

Down about $700k from what I put in, $1.5M from the high. The biggest problem are the 2020 Jan 250 calls that are down $500k. DON'T BUY OPTIONS!!! When things were looking good I fed off the excitement here and bought lots of options. They went from looking good to really bad in a hurry.

 

[EVNow]

I looked into the "thousand brains" theory you referenced a couple of months ago and despite the bombastic claims, I found no peer reviewed article anywhere that would actually numerically examine how good this is at doing anything...

I posted a reply earlier - but here is the list of peer reviewed papers on numenta site.

Numenta Research Papers

ps : I didn't know this, but Jeff Hawkins is the guy who invented Palm Pilot.

 

[EVNow]

Down about $700k from what I put in, $1.5M from the high. The biggest problem are the 2020 Jan 250 calls that are down $500k. DON'T BUY OPTIONS!!! When things were looking good I fed off the excitement here and bought lots of options. They went from looking good to really bad in a hurry.

Same here.

 

[SO16]

Down about $700k from what I put in, $1.5M from the high. The biggest problem are the 2020 Jan 250 calls that are down $500k. DON'T BUY OPTIONS!!! When things were looking good I fed off the excitement here and bought lots of options. They went from looking good to really bad in a hurry.

Yeah....I only buy stocks outright, never on margin and never short. I like to know EXACTLY what I can lose. I can still sleep at night.

 

[Artful Dodger]

Wrt Tesla miles, it’s still billions of miles whether it’s to capture edge cases or count sheep on the hills.

As for Waymo, how do you *know* that Waymo will not scale as they improve their software and service? Lidar gets them up and running quickly, but nothing suggests they won’t use more ML and NNs to further integrate data from Lidar and maps with their vision system. Waymo is not relying exclusively on high res maps and Lidar.

Waymo *is* servicing a specific market today. A specific part of town is a market. Airport shuttles are a market. So are fixed bus routes. If a bag or can on the ground is intolerable, they wouldn’t be able to do what they’re doing now.

Waymo also ordered 80,000 more cars to expand their fleet over 100x, so their 1M miles a month will become 100M miles monthly. Acquiring enough miles is already in the works. They’ll reduce hw costs, and collect their billions of miles by using human supervision paid at least partly through fares.

Waymo critics can argue that their approach is only good for 1% or 5% or 20% today, but no one can say what it will be tomorrow. Remote monitoring or not, they have a real world application. The only debate is how much they can improve it.

Lol, your thesis went from "they certainly are" now to "you can't prove they won't" someday in a big hurray.

Exactly how much $$ do you have invested in Waymo?