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

[2daMoon]

Musings of an unemployed HODLer...

The performance of TSLA on weekends is disappointing. I suppose there is something to be said for how the weekend SP movement has at least been consistent over time.

In retirement, the occasional glance at the ticker does help narrow down which of the seven Saturdays of the week that today is.

There is also Chick-Fil-A, which can be used to further determine if any particular Saturday is actually a Sunday, should I bother to traipse off to a nearby town that has one.

 

[Singuy]

Amazing how this double top/head and shouder thing is like a clairvoyant.

Bitcoin and crypto markets crash on US crackdown reports

The drop appears to coincide with reports that the US Treasury is planning to tackle financial institutions for money laundering carried out through digital assets.

www.google.com

 

[Singuy]

China and US agrees to cooperate on climate change issues after talks.

U.S.-China Joint Statement Addressing the Climate Crisis - United States Department of State

U.S. Special Presidential Envoy for Climate John Kerry and China Special Envoy for Climate Change Xie Zhenhua met in Shanghai to discuss aspects of the climate crisis. Read their joint statement.

www.state.gov

 

[SarahsDad]

Interesting article over on Clean Technica by David Havasi, an early Tesla marketing employee. He talks about planting "seeds" of interest in Tesla through one-on-one interactions. THIS is why they don't need traditional advertising.

Me & “Old Blue”: How the Original Tesla Roadster Helped Me Serve “The Mission” Well Beyond Its Production Run - CleanTechnica

Me & “Old Blue”: How the Original Tesla Roadster Helped Me Serve “The Mission” Well Beyond Its Production Run

cleantechnica.com

 

[T@oo]

Weekend off Topic. Kinda. VID maily about Asteroid mining but with interesting remarks about SpaceX, Starlink and Musk.

My take: Starlink in combination with solar energy and battery storage will bring all ingredients needed to third world countries to leapfrog a century of industrial and infrastructure development. AI and the solved vision problem will reduced simple labor freeing human minds to create new exciting things. Education systems around the world are not prepared to deliver the amount of talents needed (physicians, chemists, engineers, biologists, ...).

Exciting times ahead.

 

[T@oo]

What is taking Tesla so long to deliver the S/X refresh? Weekend rant incoming.

IIRC, Feb was supposed the month of the first deliveries. So what happend? A missing piece here or there, sure. But wouldn‘t Elon move heaven and hell to get a missing trim piece and would it take 2 month at least? Guess not. So it has to be something more substantial. So what could it be? Did they figure their Kato Road roadmap is progressing faster than planned and a delay of S/X refresh could bring 4680 right now instead of late 2021 with Plaid+? What else is worth / could cause a few month of delay?

 

[jbcarioca]

Newsthink - today:

Cindy is far more effective than my dry academic pleas, or those of all the others...
Now we need a 'Cindy' who describes the Tesla China approach also.
Next it would be good to demonstrate the Tesla plant expansion approaches in Nevada, China, and Germany. Those, too, have been done with highly skilled Direct Marketing approaches.
Of course most of us know Tesla is very adept at cultural-specific promotion.
When thinking about other Elon-led enterprises we also can observe SpaceX mostly making the analogous customer-centric promotional techniques, as are both of the most-developed SpaceX companies, Starlink and The Boring Company.

Overall we are living in an era when 'Rent Seekers' can be foiled with creativity even when frontal attacks fail. Despite demonstrated personal animosity both Mr. Musk and Mr. Bezos have used similar techniques. The key difference is that Mr. Musk has not sought sector dominance, although he's pretty much achieved it more than once.

 

[22522]

Yep and here's the law in WA State: WAC 204-10-022:

I do not think it will be an issue. There is also this:

(8) Frame: A motor vehicle must be equipped with a frame. If an existing frame from a recognized manufacturer is not used and a special frame is fabricated, it must be constructed of wall box or continuous section tubing, wall channel, or unitized construction capable of supporting the vehicle, its load, and the torque produced by the power source under all conditions of operation. The structural strength of the frame must be certified by the builder as meeting the applicable standards set under 49 C.F.R. 571 Parts 201, 214, 216, and 220 through 224, and the SAE Standards. Such certification must be made by either:
(a) Certification provided on the vehicle in the form of a label which has been affixed in accordance with FMVSS outlining the portions of the FMVSS which have been met;

 

[S3XY]

This is my plan too. Fly to Giga Texas and drive home to the East Coast.

I was thinking this myself but I think there's an issue with sales tax reciprocity. Unfortunately I don't recall where I heard that.

 

[Knightshade]

So many laws like this aiming for phase out in 2030 and beyond.

Doesn't it seem rather optimistic to presume there will be gas-powered vehicles for sale in 2030 on which to apply such measures?

Not really.

There's not going to be nearly enough batteries in 2030 to replace 80 million cars a year currently sold.

EVs are 100% the future of cars, but even the most optimistic projections based on fundamentals of scaling and plans for new factories doesn't have EVs being significantly more than HALF the total car market as early as 2030.... (and many models have it more like 35-40%)

I think Elons most recent, most optimistic (basically perfect execution) predictions late last year were ~30 million EVs in 7 years (with ~20 million of those being from Tesla). You'd need nearly a tripling AGAIN from that to get to # of cars currently sold annually.


(disclaimer- there's also a faction that thinks new car sales will be drastically cut, I've seen suggestions of almost in half, when cheap RTs are a thing, but IMHO while I agree that will have SOME impact on new car sales (a lot more on USED car sales to my mind, since the first thing RTs will replace is second/third household cars not primary vehicles) that stacks so many speculations and assumptions on top of each other it's not something you'd want to base regulation/legislation on just yet)

 

[aubreymcfato]

Ugly incident with Autopilot (apparently): two dead after a collision on a tree. Allegedly, no one was in the driver seat.

‘No one was driving the car’: 2 men dead after fiery Tesla crash near The Woodlands, officials say

Two men are dead after a Tesla ran into a tree in Spring.

www.click2houston.com

 

[JRP3]

Allegedly, no one was in the driver seat.

Tesla really needs to shut down the car if no one is in the seat until true FSD is ready.

 

[Unpilot]

Ugly incident with Autopilot (apparently): two dead after a collision on a tree. Allegedly, no one was in the driver seat.

https://www.click2houston.com/news/...=social&utm_campaign=snd&utm_content=kprc2[/U

There is no fix for stupid.

 

[aubreymcfato]

There is no fix for stupid.

Yes.
But there are some minor adjustments: as @JRP3 said you could shut down the car with no driver.

 

[woodisgood]

There is no fix for stupid.

But stupid must be planned for, as attorneys will advise.

 

[StealthP3D]

After having tried about different about 20 tiny variations of a touch or swipe that would each fail by either bringing up the rear view camera or rotate the visualization of the car I cannot rule out that it does not work on my screen. But I can say with absolute certainty that the user experience is bad.

Now, is there a way to calibrate the (Model 3) touch screen?

Tesla needs to fix this. I spend about half my time in places that have zero chance of getting a cell signal which means I can't use voice commands in those areas. While I can generally bring up the tire pressure screen with four or five tries at swiping, most of the time I just cause the visualization of the car to do do 360's like it's on a sheet of ice. It seems like Tesla made the swipeable area about 2 pixels tall. I've taken to leaving the TPMS card there as long as I don't need the odometer card. The good thing is the TPMS card is persistent between drives. It will remain there until you swipe it away. Maybe one of you with a Twitter account can tweet Elon about this oversight. The swipeable area to switch cards needs to be made a bit bigger and the area used to rotate the car visualization should be made smaller.

 

[Unpilot]

Yes.
But there are some minor adjustments: as @JRP3 said you could shut down the car with no driver.

Understand...however such gross misuse of AP until FSD is complete will continue to happen...because ...you cant fix stupid.
Someone determined to act in such a stupid way .......will find a way to continue to act stupid.

 

[AudubonB]

There is no fix for stupid.

There is for those two.

 

[SOULPEDL]

I first posted this here in 2013, but it deserves a repeat: Tesla vs. "Rent Seekers"

Excerpts:

...Rent seekers are individuals or organizations that have succeeded with existing business models and look to the government and regulators as their first line of defense against innovative competition. They use government regulation and lawsuits to keep out new entrants with more innovative business models. They use every argument from public safety to lack of quality or loss of jobs to lobby against the new entrants. Rent seekers spend money to increase their share of an existing market instead of creating new products or markets. The key idea is that rent seeking behavior creates nothing of value.

These barriers to new innovative entrants are called economic rent. Examples of economic rent include state automobile franchise laws, taxi medallion laws, limits on charter schools, auto, steel or sugar tariffs, patent trolls, bribery of government officials, corruption and regulatory capture. They’re all part of the same pattern – they add no value to the economy and prevent innovation from reaching the consumer...

...According to the Gallup Poll American consumers view car salesman as dead last in honesty and ethics. Yet when Tesla provided consumers with a direct sales alternative, the rent seekers – the National Auto Dealers Association turned its lobbyists loose on State Legislatures robbing consumers in North Carolina, New York and Texas of choice in the marketplace.

In these states it appears innovation be damned if it gets in the way of a rent seeker with a good lobbyist.

Much like Paypal, it’s likely that after forcing Tesla to win these state-by-state battles, the auto dealers will have found that they dealt themselves the losing hand...

So true. Gets under my skin a bit, such waste.

Besides opening up to allow Tesla Sales in each state, what should Dealerships be doing to survive? Put Teslas on the lot? ICE + EVs?
Some people can't wait 2-3 week for delivery so a walk in drive away offering could bring value. Something tells me the other manufacturers would lose sales fast and add pressure on the Dealership. If their world swallowed the medicine, is there any scenario with a flat or positive outcome?
I would be trying to work a deal with Tesla to stay relevant. However, maybe game theory would show things just accelerate towards failure by joining in.
There was an established Horse Carriage Co who converted to horseless; so how did they pull off this change? I forget who it was, but any lessons there? Did the dealers sell anything on 4 wheels or did they split into separate businesses? (Anyone here that old to remember?)

 

[lascavarian]

But stupid must be planned for, as attorneys will advise.

Seems like a garden variety speeding violation at its root. “Traveling at a high speed” and the word “cul-du-sac” do not mix well.