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

[jerry33]

Diversification question... Are others investing in these other EV startups? Nikola, Lucid, Rivian? I was thinking through the option and feel that with as much of a "Hail Mary" that Tesla had to pull off, after hearing Elon constantly talk about the incredible difficulty and uncertainty of survival as recently as 3 years ago and decided... no way. IMO the likelihood of another car company surviving seems profoundly low. For real products that are actually manufactured and available to buy, Tesla's "competition" is more likely to come from an incumbent automaker than gets off their ass vs a startup IMO. At the end of my thought experiment I always just decide to buy more Tesla.

It's even harder for an incumbent for a variety of reasons that have already been discussed at length.

 

[ZachF]

I personally think Elon is sandbagging. He’s been sandbagging a lot lately. If they are going to go with a new structurally redesign for Berlin and they are super close to getting the production right with the new battery cells then to me it would seem silly not to put these in the Berlin made model Ys. Do you think they would invest in 2170 cells in Berlin at this point?

I agree, I think Elon is learning to put buffers in his estimates.

Lately, the actual timelines for products seem to be better than forecast (with the notable exception of self-driving, and COVID-related stuff).

People thought the timelines for the Model Y and Shanghai ramping up were pretty ridiculous and figured it's Elon time, but it turns out they weren't.

 

[Cape Coddess]

Diversification question... Are others investing in these other EV startups? Nikola, Lucid, Rivian? I was thinking through the option and feel that with as much of a "Hail Mary" that Tesla had to pull off, after hearing Elon constantly talk about the incredible difficulty and uncertainty of survival as recently as 3 years ago and decided... no way. IMO the likelihood of another car company surviving seems profoundly low. For real products that are actually manufactured and available to buy, Tesla's "competition" is more likely to come from an incumbent automaker than gets off their ass vs a startup IMO. At the end of my thought experiment I always just decide to buy more Tesla.

I became interested in BYD back in the day. I decided to buy it through Berkshire Hathaway B when they bought in in 2008 I think it was. So my position in BYD is very diluted, but this purchase was not a mistake, as brk.b split 50 for 1 about a year after my purchase.

 

[zecar]

I personally think Elon is sandbagging. He’s been sandbagging a lot lately. If they are going to go with a new structurally redesign for Berlin and they are super close to getting the production right with the new battery cells then to me it would seem silly not to put these in the Berlin made model Ys. Do you think they would invest in 2170 cells in Berlin at this point?

This is the tricky question, isn't it? Berlin begins hiring thousands of people next year. What the heck are they building? China was straightforward. Berlin is confusing.

The plan may have multiple paths, including Berlin starting production with CATL batteries and then adding 4680. But that seems messy. Messy and a huge industrial plant don't go together. So we are missing information here. The hidden plan is upside, but there is certainly execution risk here too. Musk appears to be "throwing the ball" well ahead of the target and that target is racing to be in the right place at the right time.

If they figure out the process why couldn’t they install these lines in Berlin?

They will, but timing is the problem

 

[ZachF]

What do you guys think? Today, tomorrow, or Monday for P&D?

 

[lascavarian]

Diversification question... Are others investing in these other EV startups? Nikola, Lucid, Rivian? I was thinking through the option and feel that with as much of a "Hail Mary" that Tesla had to pull off, after hearing Elon constantly talk about the incredible difficulty and uncertainty of survival as recently as 3 years ago and decided... no way.

It would seem hard not to align with the dominant disrupter (Tesla) with the possible exception of an autonomous driving play based on something other than mountains of “driving data”. And that would be... And that autonomous driving play would have to have a HW platform from which to scale up.... Crickets.

 

[Tslynk67]

Curiously pleased to see just three cars delivered so far today in Norway

PM very nice on really low volume...

 

[Tslynk67]

What do you guys think? Today, tomorrow, or Monday for P&D?

History favours before main market on Friday. But that’s no guarantee...

 

[vikings123]

What do you guys think? Today, tomorrow, or Monday for P&D?

Friday Pre Market is my bet. Q2 P&D numbers came out Pre Market on Jul 2nd.

 

[mongo]

Tl;dt; tabless cells don't mind only being cooled from the bottom.

I'll take a guess that they will eliminate the welded wire to the cells and glue the anode and cathode to a metal plate with a material that is both electrically and thermally conductive. Then cool that plate. The glued connection would stay intact due to the rigidity of the pack and steel cells. The epoxy between the cell is air entrained to reduce mass and insulate each cell to prevent thermal runaway cascading cell to cell. The epoxy could even have some positive properties built in if exposed to high heat.

The material science in such a system would be state of the art. But the manufacturing could be simple.

@scaesare
Included by reference:

They can't have a common bottom heat plate that is also the electrical conductor. That would result in a 1S pack and also prevent the pack from being isolated from the chassis. A thin insulator will not majorly impact performance as it's effect can be negated by a greater temperature differential (just like the current side cooled cells).

The small bond wires are a critical safety feature to limit current in a single cell during a fault.

While cooling from the bottom favors the anode/ copper electrode (assuming a classical negative can and positive top), this is not a huge deal since the cathode and anode have a huge surface area to transfer heat and low layer to layer thermal resistance.
Cross section: Anode, Separator (wetted with electrolyte) , Cathode
...ASCSASCSAS...
http://blogs.cuit.columbia.edu/yanggroup/files/2018/08/1-39.pdf
A typical separator has a thermal transfer coefficient of 0.19W/(m*K) whereas the cathode and anode layers (including active coatings) have much better values of 2.0 and 1.06. Combined with their thicknesses (S:24, C:82, A:106 um), this results in a total value of 3.47W/(mm^2*K). Even better, recall that the cathode is sandwiched on both sides, so we double this value to 6.94W/(mm^2*K). (Even better, the anode and cathode values are edge to edge and we are only going half that distance, but let's be conservative)

Put simply, for every 7W of heat a square millimeter of cathode generates, its temperature will only rise one degree Celsius above the anode temperature.
To put it in perspective: Say charging is 90% efficient and all loss is heat (tabbed are going to much better than this). A 2170 is around 4.8Ah at 4.2V or 17.3Wh. At a 4 C rate that is less than 8 watts of heat for the entire cell. Thus, the temperature delta between adjacent anode and cathode layers is less than one degree. The area scales with cell diameter resulting in the flat charge time vs diameter plot.

Where tabbed cells run into issues is that the anode also needs to transfer heat through the separator (or along itself) to the tab or can edge and the sandwich effect does not exist (all heat moves in the same direction for a region) so this temperature rise happens multiple times.

 

[Bobfitz1]

Diversification question... Are others investing in these other EV startups? Nikola, Lucid, Rivian? I was thinking through the option and feel that with as much of a "Hail Mary" that Tesla had to pull off, after hearing Elon constantly talk about the incredible difficulty and uncertainty of survival as recently as 3 years ago and decided... no way. IMO the likelihood of another car company surviving seems profoundly low. For real products that are actually manufactured and available to buy, Tesla's "competition" is more likely to come from an incumbent automaker than gets off their ass vs a startup IMO. At the end of my thought experiment I always just decide to buy more Tesla.

Judgements of risk vs potential reward greatly influence SP for startups. Now that Tesla is set to dominate EV production for years to come the risk/reward has changed from when Tesla was getting established. IMO the risk of new EV startups failing has not changed greatly but the reward of succeeding in a big way is less.

 

[hoang51]

FYI, NASDAQ Level II (Book by Price) shows a very large sell at $440 in pre-market.

 

[ProfTournesol]

FYI, NASDAQ Level II (Book by Price) shows a very large sell at $440 in pre-market.

They'll try to keep it under control

 

[lascavarian]

Interesting article on how public utility commissions in the US are influenced.

I love my electricity company's app – but the FBI says the nuclear industry bribed politicians $60m to kill it

 

[vikings123]

FYI, NASDAQ Level II (Book by Price) shows a very large sell at $440 in pre-market.

View attachment 594068

That is not a large enough order for TSLA.

 

[HG Wells]

FYI, NASDAQ Level II (Book by Price) shows a very large sell at $440 in pre-market.

View attachment 594068

Do you think I put that sell order in too low ?

 

[kbM3]

Battery experts opinions on Battery Day.

https://www.energy-storage.news/blogs/experts-react-to-tesla-battery-day-the-key-technology-takeaways

Overall very positive.

 

[OrthoSurg]

Judgements of risk vs potential reward greatly influence SP for startups. Now that Tesla is set to dominate EV production for years to come the risk/reward has changed from when Tesla was getting established. IMO the risk of new EV startups failing has not changed greatly but the reward of succeeding in a big way is less.

Tesla is probably in its history where Apple was when they release the first gen iPhone. Took couple years for others to catch up for smartphones and get a sizeable share of the market.

 

[TheTalkingMule]

They'll try to keep it under control

Not doing a very good job of it so far.

 

[elasalle]

History favours before main market on Friday. But that’s no guarantee...

Ya Fri morning, time to mess with Option MM's. I think EM likey