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

[ggr]

semi-mod: All posts about Wind / Electric shipping discussion moved. --ggr

 

[SarahsDad]

Haven't seen this posted yet - excellent (but long) interview w Ross Gerber from two days ago. Very, very, very bullish.

 

[Singuy]

That was awesome! I skipped the bit about the Ferrari- who cares about that.
It was really great how all three at the end voted for Tesla as the car they would choose. Great advertisement for Tesla. This is why Elon does not need to pay for any advertising- the cars speak for themselves and recruit anyone who drives them to be their spokesperson for life!

Yeah I skipped the Ferrari bit too, good thing we did. It was a car you cannot buy..lol. I guess that's how Ferrari's advertisement work..build one off prototype cars and have people scream in them with excitement.

 

[ZachF]

If you take those 2017 production stats, and assume that the factory production increased/decreased the same percentage as sales did in it's owners' brand since 2017, you get 2020 production rates like this for the top factories (Except Tesla is 508k - 137k from China):


391,000 Peubla, MX (VW)
383,000 Smyrna,TN (Nissan)
370,000 Fremont, CA (Tesla)
368,000 Kansas City, MO (Ford)
351,000 Alliston, ON (Honda)
350,000 Aguascalientes, MX (Nissan)
345,000 Georgetown, KY (Toyota)
336,000 Silao, MX (GM)
335,000 West Point, GA (Hyundai)
334,000 Lafayette, IN (Toyota/Subaru)
333,000 Louisville, KY (Ford)
330,000 Princeton, IN (Toyota)
322,000 Kentucky Truck,KY (Ford)
320,000 Spartanburg, SC (BMW)
309,000 Marysville, OH (Honda)

This is an imperfect exercise, because some factories will undoubtedly decrease more or less than their brand average, but even in the total year Fremont should be near the top, and I think at the top by the end of this year when annualized production is probably in the ~450k range, especially since Nissan continues to do worse and worse.

(Again, note, these numbers are just a reasoning exercise, and not real)

 

[Chunky Jr.]

Tesla is going to make so much freaking money from their battery technology. Cars, storage, trucks, etc. In the near future, the easiest way to value the company could be $X/kWh of battery produced, where X is something like $500 or moe

 

[Knightshade]

If you take those 2017 production stats, and assume that the factory production increased/decreased the same percentage as sales did in it's owners' brand since 2017, you get 2020 production rates like this for the top factories (Except Tesla is 508k - 137k from China):

FWIW, 428,633 vehicles is the peak Fremont produced back before Tesla owned it....just to give an idea what Legacy makers got out of the plant

Gigagrunts battery numbers suggest they're gonna remain short of getting back to that until at least next year... (and will probably need more than just the GFN 14th panasonic line to get anywhere near the 600k some have suggested is possible there)

All of which reinforces the battery day message about how cell starvation is the enemy they need to do the most to fight at this point.

 

[Paul_SF]

Watching all the Giga/TeraFactories getting built in real time made me wonder how our planet and society will look when the time will come to be taken down, at the end of their lifespan. Amazing.

 

[ammulder]

That sounds logical, but the main differentiation between legacy manufacturers are the engines and body styles (also the areas that they sell cars to). I can't see it happening (unless all the legacy manufacturers merge into one company). Freeing up engine design engineers doesn't help with electrical design. Engineers are not pegs that can be moved from hole to hole.

Do you really choose between a Camry, Accord, and Altima based on the engine? I wouldn’t have thought so for most of the high-volume cars and SUVs. I guess it’s more of a thing for pickups and lower-volume models. But I would expect a vast swath of the market could move to shared engines and competing on design/interior instead.

And as for the engineers, I didn’t mean to suggest an engine engineer could design batteries. More, if I can be blunt, that an engine engineer’s salary could pay for a battery engineer, and the like.

 

[AudubonB]

"...It is important to understand that selling a stock short is not an investment in American enterprise. A short seller makes money when the stock price goes down and that money comes solely from investors who have purchased the company's stock. A successful short manipulation takes money from investment in American enterprise and diverts it to feed Wall Street's insatiable greed — the company that was attacked is worse off and the investing public has lost money. Frequently this profit is diverted to off–shore tax havens and no taxes are paid. This national disgrace is a parasite on the greatest capital market in the world."

And that truism is the essential reasoning behind the long-standing third line of my signature, infra ==>. Thank you for the entire set of paragraphs.

 

[ZeApelido]

Give 250k to a dude on Twitter? Uh ok

I already did this. Gave to some dude @elonmusk and he gave me some Tesla chairs.

 

[Criscmt]

How to have some content in my posts deleted?
I have attachments in my posts I would like to have deleted?
How can I reach the privileged ones (mods) who can help me with this?

 

[FrankSG]

Keep reporting these people when they're out of line. Twitter does take action.

 

[jerry33]

And as for the engineers, I didn’t mean to suggest an engine engineer could design batteries. More, if I can be blunt, that an engine engineer’s salary could pay for a battery engineer, and the like.

But there are only so many battery engineers to be found. They would have to be paid quite a bit to leave their current position--particularly if they work for a growing company with stock options that will likely increase many times in value.

 

[FrankSG]

I may be wrong, but I feel like the pages per day count on this forum have dropped. I take that as a sign that everyone just knows Tesla is going to succeed and the need to discuss it seems to have melted away. That might be the wrong take. But its funny how it's at the point where I don't really worry about the future of Tesla. Its a definite when now and not an if anymore.

This is pretty much exactly how I feel. And over the past few weeks I haven't cared as much whether Tesla will do 900k, 1M, or 1.1M units in 2020, and whether they will do 3M, 4M, or 5M in 2025. Tesla will grow, dominate, and save the planet, it's just a question of exactly how the S-curves of each product and factory will take shape.

There's also the fact that Tesla has shared less detailed information about the business over the past year than it did before. The new approach to investor relations of "less tell and more show" also makes me personally just want to sit back, relax, and trust the company more, and try to analyze every single detail less.

 

[ggr]

How to have some content in my posts deleted?
I have attachments in my posts I would like to have deleted?
How can I reach the privileged ones (mods) who can help me with this?

The proper way to get this done would be to click "report" on the post in question. For a long time the moderators didn't have the bandwidth to handle reports, but someone reset the queue, so we're able to process them again. In the meantime I PM'd you.

 

[Quesder]

Weird leak on investing.com regarding to Q3 revenue and profit. What do you guys think?
Reliable? Good? So so?


Tesla Earnings, Revenue Beat in Q3

Mod: Tesla has not released earnings; the article is at best just wrong, and at worst a scam. Don't click. --ggr

 

[RobStark]

Do you really choose between a Camry, Accord, and Altima based on the engine?

I did back in the day and I would today.

Today, if you put a gun to my head and forced me to buy a Japanese mainstream ICE midsize sedan, I would pick Toyota's proven naturally aspirated engines over the smaller turbocharged Honda engines. And I really don't like the base Accord's CVT(Continuously Variable Transmission).

And I don't like Nissan powertrain reliability nor their CVT.

 

[phantasms]

Weird leak on investing.com regarding to Q3 revenue and profit. What do you guys think?
Reliable? Good? So so?


Tesla Earnings, Revenue Beat in Q3

Wouldn’t they still be putting the report together at this point? I’m skeptical but this is what it says...

 

[OrthoSurg]

I don’t know if this is good news for TSLA but there is a recall on Kona EV Hyundai Kona Electric Recalled over Potential Fire Danger for fires.

1 year ago I convinced my friend to buy a Model 3 instead of à Kona EV. Now he is probably happy he did the right choice.

the closest small SUVcompetitor has to go through its first obstacle

 

[ammulder]

I did back in the day and I would today.

Today, if you put a gun to my head and forced me to buy a Japanese mainstream ICE midsize sedan, I would pick Toyota's proven naturally aspirated engines over the smaller turbocharged Honda engines. And I really don't like the base Accord's CVT(Continuously Variable Transmission).

And I don't like Nissan powertrain reliability nor their CVT.

OK, fair enough.

Let me give a specific example.

BMW 330i has a turbocharged 2L inline 4 making 255 HP... Honda Accord has a turbocharged 2L inline 4 making 252 HP. These engines are clearly different, but is the ultimate result different enough to justify having two completely different teams design and manufacture them? Could BMW not sell just as many 330i's with 3 fewer HP? Or would it not be worth it to Honda to use an engine shared with BMW if it saved meaningfully on cost? In terms of differentiating cars with the same engine, BMW could still use their "Sport and Manual shift modes, steering wheel-mounted paddle shifters and Launch Control" to give a sportier feel than an Accord, overall appearance and handling and etc. notwithstanding. They'd still be very different cars, and I'm not expecting people to really cross-shop a 3-series with an Accord (though, apparently, my assumptions aren't that reliable).

I mean, I'm sure I'm oversimplifying. But at the end of the day, if you need to cut costs from somewhere in order to fund a roadmap to the future, it's not like you can squeeze a whole lot more bucks out of every supplier of seats and bolts and brake pads. Why not accept that your powertrain will be a bit more vanilla, differentiate elsewhere in the product, and apply the savings to not missing the boat on EVs?

Heck, by your reckoning, this would even make a Nissan more attractive.