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

[ammulder]

OK, so the Tesla energy solar wall solar panel stuff on the call today, how does that impact the ability of hopes to use car as back up power or to power the grid? My guess is it is not part of the plan. Anyone have thoughts on this?

You would need to hang your charge unit off your PowerWall not off your existing circuit breaker... seems quite doable if the PowerWall has/will have supporting hardware built in. I guess the question is whether they care to go that way. If everyone who gets solar gets a PowerWall, then V2G only helps if an outage exceeds the capacity of your PowerWall(s) plus whatever solar generated during the outage. Plus, depending on lifetime available charge cycles, it's not clear you want to use your Nickel vehicular battery over your Iron PowerWall battery.

The window of advantage seems to get smaller and smaller for V2G... unless it turns out to be more profitable to timeshift the energy with autobidder and a VPP -- and that adding the car's battery lets you take more advantage of that without meaningfully impacting the remaining range as charge cycles accumulate.

 

[willow_hiller]

OK, so the Tesla energy solar wall solar panel stuff on the call today, how does that impact the ability of hopes to use car as back up power or to power the grid? My guess is it is not part of the plan. Anyone have thoughts on this?

From all of Elon's comments on virtual power plants, I wouldn't count on vehicle-to-grid anytime soon. Especially after the Texas snow storm, it seems like Tesla's main motivation in bundling Solar+Powerwall is to use home battery storage to stabilize the grid.

A grid connected vehicle definitely has a lot of value to an individual homeowner, but it offers less reliability to the grid when it can literally disconnect and drive off at will. Imagine if a grid-destabilizing natural disaster happened, and just when the grid operators need the extra capacity from the Tesla VPP, half of the vehicles in the network disconnect and drive away.

I think this is why Powerwall will always be Tesla's preferred solution. Bolted to the wall, reliable grid buffer with the click of a button.

 

[LiveLong&Profit]

OK, so the Tesla energy solar wall solar panel stuff on the call today, how does that impact the ability of hopes to use car as back up power or to power the grid? My guess is it is not part of the plan. Anyone have thoughts on this?

Doesn't seem to be a strategic priority for Tesla. It doesn't open a new market frontier, like massive VPP. It doesn't solve problems or offer nice profit like utility grid batteries. It has a very nice use case, namely disaster avoidance for the owners family, granted. Perhaps Tesla could recoup the cost for extra circuits and safety measures by making it an upgrade option. Long cycle iron-based chemistries would help too. But still, my guess would be 5+ years.

Edit: willow-hiller stated it very well.

 

[Artful Dodger]

[Elon]: "Irresponsible journalists should be ashamed of themselves." Right on!

It is simply irresponsible to post stunts like this which prioritize views over public safety.

The CR autopilot safety defeat video demonstrates and incites illegal behavior from thrill-seekers, all the
while paying lipservice to safety. So much wrong. Reprehensible conduct, and should be taken down by Youtube. Shame on CR.

Double-shame for failing to even acknowledge that Autopilot was in no way responsible for, or even engaged, in the accident in Woodlands, TX.

I told u guys; Elon subcribes to my feed...

Cheers!

 

[Big Time]

And yet.....despite all those delays you mentioned(and we can question if they're actually delays later), as someone pointed out about something I talked about weeks ago, Tesla's P/E is now down to the 700's after this ER. Even if they barely ship 2-3k new S's in Q2, combined with the expanded production of the 3/Y especially in China and further gross margin expansion, Tesla's P/E will drop to around 500 on Q2 Earnings.

Now imagine what's going to happen to Tesla's P/E in Q3 when S/X are both in volume production again and there's further expansion in MIC Y.

I like the sound of that. Can you go more into P/E and how you use it to judge companies?
I agree with you. I’m a sound/lighting guy so if I was in that room I would be feeling odd at a few of the moments. More critical of the presentation than the info!

 

[StealthP3D]

Maybe you should hang on to this question for a while and ask it AFTER the product is released !?
People do not often calculate take-rate on future products that have not been released yet, ... just sayin'

True dat. And we won't have to use that pesky $10K value of a product that is not fully complete...

A better question might be, "How much money is Tesla leaving on the table for every FSD pre-sale of an incomplete product at only $10K?"

That's my take on why they raised the price so drastically. Why sell something now for $X when we can sell it in a year or two for $4X?

 

[Mo City]

From all of Elon's comments on virtual power plants, I wouldn't count on vehicle-to-grid anytime soon. Especially after the Texas snow storm, it seems like Tesla's main motivation in bundling Solar+Powerwall is to use home battery storage to stabilize the grid.

A grid connected vehicle definitely has a lot of value to an individual homeowner, but it offers less reliability to the grid when it can literally disconnect and drive off at will. Imagine if a grid-destabilizing natural disaster happened, and just when the grid operators need the extra capacity from the Tesla VPP, half of the vehicles in the network disconnect and drive away.

I think this is why Powerwall will always be Tesla's preferred solution. Bolted to the wall, reliable grid buffer with the click of a button.

The vehicle-to-grid pipe dream just refuses to die.

It should.

 

[pz1975]

Whoah! Check this guy out. He's chalking out 100 x 100 mile region in Nevada on his solar bicycle to say exactly what Elon said today. That's all the solar we need to power the USA. (Although I thought Elon said for the planet). Anyway, still digesting this fact... then got an idea.

Mapping a 100 mile x 100 mile Solar Farm | Voltaic Systems Blog

blog.voltaicsystems.com

And this is 100 x 100 mi on the map, about (100 crow mi from Phx to Tucson).

View attachment 657278

This is from Tesla's Powerwall talk in 2015 showing the 100 x 100 mile square in Texas needed to provide all the electricity necessary for the US. There is a smaller black dot in the middle showing the size of the batteries needed for storage (for overnight and cloudy days).

 

[StarFoxisDown!]

I like the sound of that. Can you go more into P/E and how you use it to judge companies?
I agree with you. I’m a sound/lighting guy so if I was in that room I would be feeling odd at a few of the moments. More critical of the presentation than the info!

Well I mean I'm not really a believer in P/E for a growth company. I find it to be naïve way of determining value. Forward P/E is better, but still not really representative of a company's value.

But Wall St loves to say Tesla is overvalued and they continually point to TTM(Trailing Twelve Month) P/E. For a mature company, TTM P/E is more appropriate. The business has matured and is no longer focused on growth and thus actually trying to maximize earnings. The reason it's naïve for a growth company is that said growth company will quickly outpace the P/E when things like operational leverage or a key part of the business reaches mass scale. A growth company, if the stock priced stayed the same price, can very quickly go from being expensive to very cheap in the matter of a couple quarters. Most smart investors see the trend beforehand and buy in well before those events take place.

Any smart investor is going to look at what Tesla managed to achieve in Q1 and then do the math to figure out that when 3/Y production in China reaches it's full scale (at least for now) and when S/X is back to full production, that the P/E is going to plummet for the stock(if it stayed at this price). Then they're going to do the math and say "Well if Tesla can do $2 EPS Non GAAP from just Fremont and China with no FSD/subscription revenue, then they can easily double, if not triple EPS by end of 2022 when Giga Texas and Giga Berlin are in full production"

 

[Artful Dodger]

Later than many of us were hoping, perhaps unrealistically.

More likely its sandbagging. Ausin and Berlin go into volume production in 2022, with some early production at the end of this year. Drew sounded much more confident.

 

[MP3Mike]

Doesn't seem to be a strategic priority for Tesla. It doesn't open a new market frontier, like massive VPP. It doesn't solve problems or offer nice profit like utility grid batteries. It has a very nice use case, namely disaster avoidance for the owners family, granted.

Actually VPP does solve problems that even utility grid storage doesn't. It reduces required upgrades to the infrastructure, which Elon covered on the call. (Larger transmission lines/substations/etc.)

 

[StealthP3D]

No it doesn't. You hedge against inflation with TIPS, or if you're feeling frisky then swaps, maybe of the x-currency type. Investing in crypto doesn't hedge against anything, there's no correlation to any other type of trading.

TIPS would be an extremely poor hedge against the kind of inflation Tesla is exposed to.

My money is with the Master of Coin! Probably the biggest benefit to holding some Crypto is the flexibility it gives Tesla in smoothing out the numbers each quarter. It's one more tool in their toolbox. The market hates unpredictability and values predictability. Over time this can be a very useful tool.

 

[Knightshade]

OK, so the Tesla energy solar wall solar panel stuff on the call today, how does that impact the ability of hopes to use car as back up power or to power the grid? My guess is it is not part of the plan. Anyone have thoughts on this?

Elon has repeatedly said V2G doesn't make much sense compared to stationary storage.

Why do people keep not believing him?

Interesting to hear that Elon expects S/X production rates to go up to 2000 and maybe even 2400 per week. With a few weeks downtime that would be 100,000 to 120,000 cars per year, more than ever before. They might get there some time next year. But if they want to keep selling that many cars for several years in a row, I expect that the many internal changes they are now focussing on will also have to be followed by a more distinct exterior refresh.

Record previous is 101,312 Model S and X vehicles in 2017- I'd guess they're gonna do what they did previous, run this version for a few years then do a facelift.

 

[StealthP3D]

Elon - "demand is best we have ever seen"

There goes the advertising argument . . .

Not so fast! With sales growth like we saw last quarter, how do you know Tesla didn't have a covert advertising operation going on?

/s

 

[lafrisbee]

Whoah! Check this guy out. He's chalking out 100 x 100 mile region in Nevada on his solar bicycle to say exactly what Elon said today. That's all the solar we need to power the USA. (Although I thought Elon said for the planet). Anyway, still digesting this fact... then got an idea.

Mapping a 100 mile x 100 mile Solar Farm | Voltaic Systems Blog

blog.voltaicsystems.com

And this is 100 x 100 mi on the map, about (100 crow mi from Phx to Tucson).

View attachment 657278

That looks like more FUD! The four corner dots make the square look more than 2x than it is....

 

[willow_hiller]

Brief aside, did anyone else notice the capital V in "Tesla Vision" on page 8 of the slide deck? Maybe new product name for the AI?

"We believe that a vision-only system is ultimately all that is needed for full autonomy. Our AI-based software architecture has been increasingly reliant on cameras, to the point where radar is becoming unnecessary earlier than expected. As a result, our FSD team is fully focused on evolving to a vision-based autonomous system and we are nearly ready to switch the US market to Tesla Vision."

 

[MP3Mike]

My money is with the Master of Coin! Probably the biggest benefit to holding some Crypto is the flexibility it gives Tesla in smoothing out the numbers each quarter. It's one more tool in their toolbox. The market hates unpredictability and values predictability. Over time this can be a very useful tool.

It also gives a lot of flexibility in currency exchange. They could have bought the Bitcoin with USD, but then they need more Euros they can just sell it directly into Euros and don't have to do a currency exchange.

 

[Tyler34]

Brief aside, did anyone else notice the capital V in "Tesla Vision" on page 8 of the slide deck? Maybe new product name for the AI?

"We believe that a vision-only system is ultimately all that is needed for full autonomy. Our AI-based software architecture has been increasingly reliant on cameras, to the point where radar is becoming unnecessary earlier than expected. As a result, our FSD team is fully focused on evolving to a vision-based autonomous system and we are nearly ready to switch the US market to Tesla Vision."

Seems like a good way to tell us we have to pay for the upgrade from FSD to Tesla Vision

 

[Artful Dodger]

When the time finally comes, Zach is going to make a great CEO (at least 4 speaking on CCs)

Cheers!

 

[StealthP3D]

Steering wheel in that recent crash was deformed - ie someone WAS in driving seat.

How do they know it wasn't from the heavy weight they put on the steering wheel to fool the computer?

Dang, this whole "there was no driver at impact" thing was such a transparent lie and yet people still fell for it. When will people learn?