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

[KarenRei]

Are you saying Y is just 5 cm higher than 3 ?

No, you're reading too much into that. 5cm is just the amount of raising you can do on a Model 3 practically as a "freebie" - just some extra spacers in the suspension. There's some parts that need to be longer (I forget which ones) if you want to go higher than that. Said parts are surely among the ~24% of parts different between Model 3 and Model Y.

 

[Zaxxon]

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Can we not do this here? A few folks posting no-degradation graphs isn't any more helpful than me posting my yes-degradation-and-never-received-the-325-upgrade graph.

 

[MarcusMaximus]

You don't need to do that; satellites on the "dark side" can still produce power, so long as they're not in Earth's shadow. The higher their orbit, the less time they'll spend in Earth's shadow (although also the larger their spot beams on the surface are).

Space-based solar is one of those things that would be great (higher generation, no clouds, constant power day or night), but most people (myself included) have dismissed for decades, for the simple reason that launch costs have rendered it a non-starter. It's made way more sense just to build solar farms on Earth. But Starship actually renders space-based solar entirely plausible. It could be a massive gamechanger, yet most people seem not to realize that the game has changed.

There’s also the pesky problem of doing it without cooking animals/people. For any serious use, that’s a lot of energy. If you manage absolutely perfect tracking of the receivers on the ground, you need to have (moving) no-fly zones between the satellites and the ground point to make sure you don’t cook passing aircraft. If you screw up that tracking even once, you now have a moving death-beam going across the earth until you manage to stop it. Seems reasonable to hope but you have to be really careful in actually doing it.

 

[StealthP3D]

Do you have a source for this? That would be significantly better than the already-good Union of Concerned Scientists figures from 2015.

Yes, the enviro-friendliness of EV's keeps improving in lockstep with the electrical grid steadily moving to cleaner sources of generation. These improvements are completely separate and in addition to improved technologies that also reduce the carbon footprint (as batteries become more efficient and reduce reliance on rare earth metals and other ingredients with a high environmental footprint). 5 years is an eternity when looking at the rate of EV technological improvements and the carbon footprint of the lifecycle of an EV.

Meanwhile, gas burners just keep burning more and more oil as rings and valve seal sub-optimally and O2 sensors and air mass meters calibration drifts and becomes less accurate with time. Catalytic converters become less efficient, small exhaust leaks develop, etc, etc, etc.

Gas burning cars are rolling environmental disasters compared to EV's.

 

[Mike Smith]

Tesla under investigation on claim it throttled batteries to hide fire risk

NHTSA’s Office of Defects Investigation should post another bulletin stating that CNBC is lying - there is not an investigation. There is a petition to start an investigation. They're just evaluation a complaint to see if an investigation is needed.

This lie caused a significant stock movement. The SEC should investigate CNBC.

 

[ggies07]

Allowing this to be an free-flowing open Gonzo-thread makes it impossible for the casual or moderately interested Tesla fan to follow these individual topics. This is basically a subject-free IM thread that makes it impossible to have an investment conversation and erodes the quality and value of the actual on-topic threads by 50%.

Sorry for the OT(potentially against the rules??) rant post, but this discussion here could be much more structured and robust.

Totally get that and it was great for 2012-16/17, but now the stock goes no where when the company shows results. It's a buy and hold investment even more these days.....

 

[Right_Said_Fred]

Can we not do this here? A few folks posting no-degradation graphs isn't any more helpful than me posting my yes-degradation-and-never-received-the-325-upgrade graph.

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I agree, let’s stop posting personal anecdotes about batteries degrading and batteries not degrading. Or the thread will get cluttered with 2,000 posts on degraded (or limited) batteries and 798,000 posts on not degraded (or not limited) batteries.

 

[Curt Renz]

The difference between maxpain at 235 and 230 is just ~ $2M. I'm surprised so much effort is spent in bringing the SP to maxpain in the previous weeks.

That's a reasonable observation. However, it must be understood that options expire while the shares do not. The shares bought or shorted on Friday can be sold or covered on Monday. So the manipulators accept a calculated risk that they may profit more by shifting the options prices than they might lose in their trading of the shares.

 

[StealthP3D]

I don't think Musk cares nearly as much about climate change as he does getting to Mars.

I disagree with the implication here. It's apparent that Musk wants to fund his Mars colony with eventual profits from Tesla. His Mars plans are hugely expensive. i mean, a bare-bones Mars colony is hardly an appealing proposition for a billionaire (or anyone for that matter). There's no way he's going to fund his grand vision just with Space-X and satellite revenues.

The bottom line is Musk cares about eventually bringing Tesla to huge profitability in a big way. He is in no hurry to do it though if it will allow it to eventually become more profitable. Mars is not cheap!

 

[3Victoria]

Great, but some transparency is in order. At least when they took away auto-lowering with a stealth update, they eventually explained themselves and promised a fix. They way they handled this just seems like a ham-fisted way to manage their warranty liability against what's now a more-or-less meaningless battery warranty. But let's say that Tesla really is trying to be "a better company", then I would argue that there is a moral obligation to disclose if cars are at risk of spontaneously catching fire. Yeah, the stock will take a hit, but it will take more of a hit if someone dies in a house fire cause by their car.

What is Tesla's actual intention here? Who knows?

There was concern that certain packs might have a fire risk at higher charge levels. Tesla did an update to mitigate that risk to 'normal' or below. Range was affected but not below warranty levels in most cases. Real range depends on many things, reported range is a guesstimate. I hope that Tesla is still evaluating the situation, and will correct it at some point. Whether that is monetary or replacing the packs, or even necessary, is not known.

Many cars have received an OTA that increased performance and range -- should their owners send cheques to Tesla to compensate? After all, the cars' value increased.

What's good for the goose is good for the gander?

 

[KarenRei]

There’s also the pesky problem of doing it without cooking animals/people. For any serious use, that’s a lot of energy. If you manage absolutely perfect tracking of the receivers on the ground, you need to have (moving) no-fly zones between the satellites and the ground point to make sure you don’t cook passing aircraft. If you screw up that tracking even once, you now have a moving death-beam going across the earth until you manage to stop it. Seems reasonable to hope but you have to be really careful in actually doing it.

It seems virtually impossible to mess up tracking, and transmission can be stopped in a matter of milliseconds just by issuing a command, both automated and manually, and satellites can operate in a "dead man's switch" mode (have to keep receiving "stay on" updates in order to stay on), so I can't see it actually being a problem. A GEO-based solar system would require a receiver several kilometers in diameter - big but not impractically so.

And that's the worst case. A LEO or MEO-based solar system can use receivers just a couple hundred meters in diameter. And note that the further "off track" a LEO satellite gets, the weaker its beam. And you can use large numbers of individual satellites rather than singular massive arrays. Think "Starlink, but for power". Each one is not that powerful on its own; only collectively they are.

A downside to LEO/MEO (apart from a higher percentage of time a given satellite would spend in shadow) is you'd get more complaints about having a greater number of objects moving across the night sky. GEO largely doesn't have this problem; satellites are stationary and faint.

 

[MP3Mike]

Are you saying Y is just 5 cm higher than 3 ? I'd think it is more like 5 or 6 inches.

That makes a lot of difference for people who have knee issues or want a better view of the road. Ofcourse Y will have better cargo room too.

I don't know that the Model Y itself is much higher, but the seats were put on a 3-4" tall platform inside the car. So while the seating position is significantly higher, the vehicle isn't that much further off the ground.

 

[Wooloomooloo]

Can you explain what you mean by "burning" ?

It's an idiom, in this case you can infer an synonym of 'spending'.

Since Q1 '18, they have a cumulative $2.3B positive operational cash flow.

OK so we're going to go through the process of stating obvious things that have nothing to do with the topic at hand. Fair enough.

Yes they have, and this is a great indicator of the potential earnings for sure and is why Tesla is valued at $40bn and not $4bn. If it wasn't for the pesky capital expenditure, everything would be rosy.

None of that matters because I think you understand why I responded the way I did to the comparison with Amazon.

 

[JRP3]

as batteries become more efficient and reduce reliance on rare earth metals

To be clear the cells don't use any rare earth metals.

 

[TheTalkingMule]

I'm not sure how familiar you are with Tesla overall, but battery degradation is indeed real. It's not a major problem, but the degradation happens mostly in the first 75,000 miles, and then is very slow after that. For example, my 2014 (Dec 31) has 72,000 miles and the 90% charge is 220 miles (or 244 at 100%). So, in 72k miles, I've lost 21 miles of range.

In other words.....the vehicle you purchased is behaving precisely as it should?

I can live with that, but, if it loses another 20, it will soon be a local car only for us.

Why would that happen?

However, if we were in a battery swap pool, where the batteries are maintained and kept in great shape, I would think our lowest range would be 255 to 260 miles for the rest of the life of the car.

Rented mules are generally in worse shape that ones you own.

 

[ggr]

Can we not do this here? A few folks posting no-degradation graphs isn't any more helpful than me posting my yes-degradation-and-never-received-the-325-upgrade graph.

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Mod: agree. No more about battery degradation in this thread. --ggr

 

[scaesare]

1) They can't grow as fast as the other companies can change course.

Wait. What?

Please to be providing examples of these other companies that have changed course on a dime and have brought out compelling EV's selling in numbers greater than Tesla.

 

[EVNow]

No, you're reading too much into that. 5cm is just the amount of raising you can do on a Model 3 practically as a "freebie" - just some extra spacers in the suspension. There's some parts that need to be longer (I forget which ones) if you want to go higher than that. Said parts are surely among the ~24% of parts different between Model 3 and Model Y.

Ok - important point is that the height is a significant differentiator. After all what's the difference between BMW 3 series and X3.

 

[3Victoria]

It's an idiom, in this case you can infer an synonym of 'spending'.
....

"Burning" has a negative connotation, and has been used extensively by bears and some 'journalists' to imply Tesla is wasting money --- so I don't buy your 'synonym'. Please use terms appropriately. Thanks.

 

[scaesare]

You mean the company that has the highest executive turnover anyone has seen?

No we're talking about the one with the CEO at the helm for longer than any other.

The facts are that while there can be new pardigms in the market, the big players always adjust.

Kodak just called and would like to speak with you. Sears is on hold.