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

[gabeincal]

A very neat summary of our diversified portfolio from Twitter:

 

[MXWing]

So unless there's some advanced bluffing involved, we know they haven't gotten to 500K yet and it's a tight race. Either way would be interesting to see the price action once the numbers are out. I have a feeling that unless it's a substantial beat, it'll be the usual sell the news deal, just the question of how much sell... but this time there's the possible support from the fund managers looking to get in at a discount.

Throw out free FSD or Free Unlimited Supercharging for 3/Y and you won't have a single untitled Tesla in America.

Desperation level isn't there.

I think 500K is there, its just how much they can run up the score.

 

[MP3Mike]

The closing price proves that the market hates numerology as much as the moderators do.

Are you sure? We closed with 69 cents yesterday, and today AH trading ended down 69 cents...

 

[ggr]

I'll give you 2 funnies for that, but you'll have to do the second one...

Ha! I went back to do that, but it turns out that even moderators can't give ratings to their own posts. I guess that's good for @Zasheworth's ratings thread.

 

[wipster]

Ha! I went back to do that, but it turns out that even moderators can't give ratings to their own posts. I guess that's good for @Zasheworth's ratings thread.

I meant for you to give a funny to my reply since I can't do it myself... but I did give you another one on your reply to my reply...

And that's enough of that my friend!

 

[Sanny]

Motion sickness is usually caused by incongruence between the body's perception of motion and the eye's perception of non-motion, such as getting tossed around in a ship's cabin with no windows to look out.
What causes seasickness?

Virtual Reality that turns objects outside your car into dinosaurs should be fine, as long as the VR motion is congruent with the car's motion. In fact, it might reduce car sickness if the VR makes your car seem transparent, as if you are riding on a sled.

Yeah, it is much easier said than done with a precision and >90hrz refresh rate. A bit of discrepancy, a bit of a delay and viola - people turn green and bring hands to the mouth. I would not bet a penny on that idea and I guess no responsible vr developer would.

 

[Bet TSLA]

...recreate your friends or relatives so you could talk with and to them?

Or better yet, render friends and relatives completely superfluous since you can make your own from scratch. You know, without the panel gaps and scratches and other imperfections. Be careful what you wish for.

 

[PeterJA]

Yeah, it is much easier said than done with a precision and >90hrz refresh rate. A bit of discrepancy, a bit of a delay and viola - people turn green and bring hands to the mouth. I would not bet a penny on that idea and I guess no responsible vr developer would.

Makes sense. Maybe success of the idea depends on having enough computing power to eliminate discrepancies and delays. A few years away?

 

[wipster]

Or better yet, render friends and relatives completely superfluous since you can make your own from scratch. You know, without the panel gaps and scratches and other imperfections. Be careful what you wish for.

I must admit I have never had any friends with panel gaps... maybe between their front teeth but I never looked at their panels... ;-)

 

[mblakele]

No. It's an article called "Minding the Gap" on page 26 of the December 2020 issue of Car and Driver. I can't find it on their Web site. I don't feel like I should post a pic of the whole article, but here's a snippet with the Tesla related bit (see text on the top right, Model 3 measurements on the middle left, and the top couple automaker rankings on the lower left):

View attachment 622251

FWIW, a google search for ‘"Minding the Gap" "Car and Driver"’ (with those double-quotes) verified that the article exists. I was able to read it via my local public library and an app called Flipster, and it matches the image above.

Also discussed here (probably more on-topic): Fit and finish issues

 

[Sanny]

Makes sense. Maybe success of the idea depends on having enough computing power to eliminate discrepancies and delays. A few years away?

Why travel then?

 

[Ercan]

That would make no sense, the imbalance was towards lack of sellers so if you wanted to sell you would definitely have had your order filled. I think you need to place either an "at close" (limit or not) or "good till cancelled" order to get into the closing cross though.

I had the same issue. I had 2 limit orders below 695. One executed with 50 shares because I had it as GTC + EXT. The other one didn’t with 200 shares because it was only GTC. I was pretty disappointed that I forgot to change it to EXT.

 

[JustSaying]

Showing your age, sir. Most current interns would have no clue what Iron Maiden is. The band or the device.

Or Steely Dan?

 

[Words of HABIT]

Well I hope TSLA has not become boring with the S & P addition.

ARKK was way more volatile than TSLA today. Down more than 4%. Unusual for ARKK to move more than TSLA.

I would love a boring Tesla share price with small incremental gains such as today. Unlikely. Volatility will remain.

There is a lot of talk about ARK funds on this thread. ARK sells when TSLA goes up too fast to keep the %age of Tesla within the fund not to exceed pre-determined maximum levels. Also to consider is if ARK's other company picks on average go down, like today, ARK would still need to trim Tesla even if TSLA is flat or declines less than the average drop of their other company picks. For these reasons alone I will never be an ARK investor. Yes, ARK funds have done extremely well the last few years. TSLA has done several times better. I expect this trend to continue.

 

[amolina]

As people have said, this is likely for being ground truth. But let’s clarify this a bit. Currently Tesla are relying on neural networks, these are trained using pairs of input-output data. Input is camera images, output is BEV(birds eye view) grids etc. These output labels are created by humans aided by computer vision, ie the point cloud that karpathy showed in Autonomy day.

Tesla is using this Lidar data to create a test set to see how well the vision system is working and to add tests to their unit test set. After training on data from camera from normal cars, they make sure that the neural network, using camera data from the modified Y will output what the Lidar in the modified Y is saying it should predict. Another nice explanation here

Maybe it will turn out that the Lidar is measuring the distance to the vehicle in front to be 100m, while the neural network is predicting 90m. Then they will know this and can try to find ways to improve the neural network, for example by gathering more data, cleaning up old data, tweaking the network, finding a bug in the code etc. Maybe a few months later it now predicts 95m and they can say that their algorithm is getting better. So the ground truth is not used for training, it is used to test how good the trained system is.

In all state of the art Lidar based systems (Cruise, or Waymo,), Lidars are mostly used to solve localization problems. All driving cars have a database of point cloud (3d information previously generated by test cars) of the route where it is now driving, This point cloud data basically represents 3d information about trees, buildings, barriers etc. Driving cars are constantly comparing their real-time lidar data to the point cloud to understand where exactly they are driving on the road. By doing this, they can safely localize at all times on the road and offer higher safety.

TESLA and Mobileye are vision-based systems. I completely agree with your post here, that they are creating broader unit tests here. Very correctly said earlier.
The data currently collected would be aiding to the testing dataset. They will not be used to drive, but to only test the decision-making accuracy of the vision system.

I got exposed to LIDARs about a decade ago and used to mess around with its calibrations for autonomous driving as an engineer.

tl:dr It is insane to think that other systems needs LIDAR's to even just understand what part of the road they are driving on, They should not be allowed to be make decisions on unique situations.

 

[willow_hiller]

Text message sent to a fellow picking up a vehicle tomorrow. The phrasing makes it sound like the FSD trial is more of a celebratory act than a marketing ploy: https://www.reddit.com/r/teslamotor...eived_this_text_tonight_picking_up_tomorrow_3

"Tesla Update - Thank you for being a part of a historic year at Tesla.

As a thank you, we are now giving a free 3 month trial to experience Full-Self Driving, in addition to the 1 year of free Supercharging, to customers who take delivery of their Model 3 by 12/31/2020.

We are excited to see you soon."

 

[Prunesquallor]

I would love a boring Tesla share price with small incremental gains such as today. Unlikely. Volatility will remain.

There is a lot of talk about ARK funds on this thread. ARK sells when TSLA goes up too fast to keep the %age of Tesla within the fund not to exceed pre-determined maximum levels. Also to consider is if ARK's other company picks on average go down, like today, ARK would still need to trim Tesla even if TSLA is flat or declines less than the average drop of their other company picks. For these reasons alone I will never be an ARK investor. Yes, ARK funds have done extremely well the last few years. TSLA has done several times better. I expect this trend to continue.

Some ETFs (ARKG and ARKF) contain no TSLA.

 

[Stone_Watcher]

I would love a boring Tesla share price with small incremental gains such as today. Unlikely. Volatility will remain.

There is a lot of talk about ARK funds on this thread. ARK sells when TSLA goes up too fast to keep the %age of Tesla within the fund not to exceed pre-determined maximum levels. Also to consider is if ARK's other company picks on average go down, like today, ARK would still need to trim Tesla even if TSLA is flat or declines less than the average drop of their other company picks. For these reasons alone I will never be an ARK investor. Yes, ARK funds have done extremely well the last few years. TSLA has done several times better. I expect this trend to continue.

I hadn’t thought about that. Thank you.

 

[MartinAustin]

Elon's tweet about FSD being free for three months... has a critical sentence: "as long as you take delivery by midnight on Dec 31st."

He wants to avoid the problem that happens at the end of every Q4: wealthy Tesla buyers want to party on New Year's Eve and some of them leave town, or even the country, to celebrate. They think it's OK to collect their new Teslas on January 3rd or later. Meanwhile, Tesla had promised to deliver them before January 1st and bent over backwards to do so. It is even common for people to choose to pick up their Tesla a day or two after it arrives at the Delivery Center. I did it in 2013 because I had some work meetings on the day they were ready to deliver it to me. I actually have more personal experience with this, as I have volunteered at the Austin delivery center in previous end-of-year delivery events and there were unclaimed cars!!! Because people said they were going to show up and didn't, or they called into say they had forgotten and made other plans, or that they were just plain out of town. This issue happens at the end of every quarter, but is particularly bad at the end of Q4.

Anyhow, suffice it to say that Elon wants to make sure the massive effort they're going through to get cars to delivery centers by the end of Q4 is repaid by customers actually coming to get their cars - not going to watch fireworks somewhere. FSD is a nice idea because people might pay to upgrade their cars - win win.

It makes me wonder if Tesla have really hit their 500,000 delivery target for 2020. Or, if they already have, are they just wanting to hit the delivery number out of the park.

 

[SOULPEDL]

Man I don't get people sometimes. It's a 3 month FSD trial. It's not like these people are getting FSD permanently for free.

Enjoy this feverish pitch. Must have FSD. Say it!
And....Gotta have more Tesla. (in the voice of Walkens).