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

[dhanson865]

https://twitter.com/x/status/1515686490130743304

 

[AudubonB]

The Cyberlandr camper designed to mount on Cybertruck is still happening and they have a physical prototype now. They’ve been working with Munro & Associates for designing and industrializing this. Sneak peek in this video.

The North American recreational vehicle and camper market is tens of billions of dollars annually today. I expect this to be a significantly popular use case for Cybertruck because it’ll be such a big improvement on the entire experience for towing and driving dynamics, climate control, electric power for appliances, fuel savings, and the option for solar panels to recharge the battery while camping.

So far I'm on 6m39sec; I've just heard "...wind...from Michigan...and we've already worn out two tarps from shredding".
As I've related before, I have zero positive thoughts regarding Cyberlandr and that statement tells me that its team is so inept they even do not know how to tarp a load. Yet they plan to produce and sell a camper? I can make the run from Anchorage to Prudhoe Bay and back, in the winter, and not get a single crease on a tarp. This is really a bad, very telling discussion.

 

[Gigapress]

I think robotaxi adoption will vary widely based on mostly age.
So yes, most people above 50 will take a 'wait-and-see' approach.
My hunch is that the 20-50 group will be hard to predict - some will be early adopters, but most won't.

All the TMC anecdotes of Tesla-loving kids going back many years. leads me to believe that the now 10-20 year age group will simply *love* robotaxis. Over time that group just grows.
And maybe they can persuade their parents, uncles, aunts and even grandparents to try robotaxies.

I agree. 18-30 year olds lead most social changes of this kind.

As a demographic, young urban adults in the USA (and most similar countries in which Tesla operates) tend to:

• Party often
• Not have much money
• Have low car ownership rates
• Chase trends to conform with their peers
• Use Uber/Lyft more often than older people
• Love Tesla
• Trust software technology

This is the perfect demographic for early Tesla Network riders. They will appreciate a cheap Tesla ride to haul their broke, drunken asses to and from nightlife. They will post about it on TikTok to look cool, and it will spread fast. Especially on urban college campuses where the high concentration and dense social network of non-car-owning young people will make this spread as fast as Uber did in 2012-2013 on my college campus.

 

[AudubonB]

By the way, I've just last night finished a 900-mile run from Park City, UT rescuing my belovèd vintage LandCruiser (FJ62) from a 3 1/2-yr stay there, and was utterly pummeled by blizzard conditions not just through the Blue Mts (not completely unexpected), but also right down at 120' AMSL along the lower Columbia River which definitely is NOT expected in the 3rd week of April. Blasting rain combined with blasting snow at the same time, accompanied by strong lightning and strong winds.....bizarre!
And yes: my tarped load made it just fine

 

[Gigapress]

So far I'm on 6m39sec; I've just heard "...wind...from Michigan...and we've already worn out two tarps from shredding".
As I've related before, I have zero positive thoughts regarding Cyberlandr and that statement tells me that its team is so inept they even do not know how to tarp a load. Yet they plan to produce and sell a camper? I can make the run from Anchorage to Prudhoe Bay and back, in the winter, and not get a single crease on a tarp. This is really a bad, very telling discussion.

What other red flags did you see besides tarp failure?

 

[growler23]

Maybe grid storage needs a separate topic, as it can be a rabbit hole.

For Texas, they have a price cap on wholesale electricity of 900 c/kWh ($9/kWh) which they seem to hit every few years. If you truly had a system cost of $8 per kWh for grid storage, which is not the case for this technology, just one of these events during the lifetime of the battery would pay for it. If the battery is cheap enough, cycle life is not that important to find an economic use case. Taken to the extreme, there might even be a use case for single use batteries for those once per decade events if there is a sufficiently inexpensive battery chemistry.

To minimize system costs, you might want to combine an low cost / low cycle life battery with with an existing li ion grid battery that can provide inverters and grid connection to reduce system costs, so Tesla might have a role in bringing some of these newer chemistries to market.

This topic makes me think of the US Strategic Petroleum Reserve... I (we?) cannot WAIT until it transforms into the Strategic Energy Reserve, perhaps held in super-stable storage like these hibernating batteries. Could be massively distributed, a giant capacitor effectively to smooth out all energy prices / needs instead of the polluting, limited and awkward current Petroleum Reserve solution.
Yes, still want Tesla to look into that battery tech as an add-on to Tesla Energy. "We built the continent spanning charge network AND its massive battery backup. You're welcome!"
Cha-ching.

 

[Xd85]

one more 14-50 vs HWPC comment into the fray. For some reason I occasionally get a "mobile charger error- unable to charge" (u006 or something like that for my model S75D) and i'd have to reset gfci, unplug and replug UMC, or both. Frustrating when discovering in morning that scheduled charging didn't actually happen. Still occurs, but less often after replacing UMC. I retrofitted the other 14-50 circuit with HPWC, and no such errors.

 

[Mengy]

Isn't there a chance we lose everything? Isn't that why we're not supposed to put all of our eggs in one basket? There must be some risk putting everything in TSLA, or everyone would do it.

To quote a vey successful multi-billionaire investor:

“Diversification is protection against ignorance. It makes little sense if you know what you are doing.” - Warren Buffett

Many of us here know how likely Tesla is to become the largest company in the world by valuation. We've done the math, we've seen the numbers and trends. Sure there are always outlying chances of events which could ruin Tesla and burn it down, but such events would also likely ruin much of the market as well. Nothing in life is a certainty, but some things are extremely likely.

 

[jerry33]

By the way, I've just last night finished a 900-mile run from Park City, UT rescuing my belovèd vintage LandCruiser (FJ62) from a 3 1/2-yr stay there, and was utterly pummeled by blizzard conditions not just through the Blue Mts (not completely unexpected), but also right down at 120' AMSL along the lower Columbia River which definitely is NOT expected in the 3rd week of April. Blasting rain combined with blasting snow at the same time, accompanied by strong lightning and strong winds.....bizarre!
And yes: my tarped load made it just fine

No doubt you were driving with tarp side up rather than tarp side down.

 

[AudubonB]

1. Too busy and tired to get past 6m39s
2. Too tired, too tired and too tired to do anything about the giganumber of "NEMA 14-50" posts. But I will have the eraser out by dawn tomorrow.....

3. I.e.......

.....Endit.

 

[StealthP3D]

The decision to leave mobile chargers out makes more sense for big companies like Hertz who have other charging solutions. I still think it should included with the ability to “opt out” for a discount. The end result is the same, but it seems classier.

If you want to talk about making Tesla "classier", they should give a small jar of Grey Poupon to encourage people to opt out. That way, when a Bently pulls up next to a Tesla at a red light and the distinguished looking gentleman in the back seat says, "Pardon me, do you have any Grey Poupon?", you can say "Why yes, of course" and just hand them the whole jar as if there is plenty more where that came from.

See? Instant classiness!

 

[StealthP3D]

My WAG is 8.5M vehicles at $20K gross in 2027 => 170 B
(cont. production optimization and improvement, cont. extreme demand and pricing power, cont. ramp of current GFs plus one extra)
Assume 50 B for fixed costs and taxes - still 120 B left.

Given such extreme growth a 100 forward multiple seems fair.
So $12T or 12X in 5.5 years - not too shabby.

It baffles me why anyone would think Tesla would go from building two Gigafactories at a time to only adding one more in total in the next 4 years.

 

[StealthP3D]

When I bought my S in 2015, there was an instruction graphic on tesla.com showing electricians how to install a NEMA 14-50 upside down so the plug would hang properly. It was made obvious that the wall connector was unnecessary if you had the NEMA. What changed?

Maybe you forgot, but Tesla was still selling a Wall Connector with a plug-in pigtail back then.

 

[Discoducky]

It baffles me why anyone would think Tesla would go from building two Gigafactories at a time to only adding one more in total in the next 4 years.

Agreed, Tesla will be learning from current factories on how to improve future factories. Where to put the factories, how big, what machines/robots, what infrastructure is required to support the factories, how materials will flow...etc.

And the big one; what will be the bottlenecks to improving throughput to a sustainable energy future.

My expectation will be at least one announced this year and construction to start H1 2023

 

[wipster]

Good to see so many Washington St Teslarites on the board today!

What I'm interested in is Wednesday and Thursday SP wise. Great that the Tesla Shanghai folks may be going back to work on the same day as the 1st Quarter financial discussion... I'm sure there will be a fair amount of discussion of what effect the shutdown will have on Q2 and Year-end. I would also love for the date of the Shareholder meeting to be announced (hopefully in June) as well as the amount of the stock dividend... I'm kinda hoping for a 9 share dividend (effectively a 10 to 1 stock split). When the stock split was announced previously, it moved the SP significantly and even more after the actual split and I hope to see that come to pass. I'll still HODL but it's nice to look richer on the screen!

 

[insaneoctane]

It baffles me why anyone would think Tesla would go from building two Gigafactories at a time to only adding one more in total in the next 4 years.

I guess master plan III will guide this....

 

[Ogre]

As someone who has used a mobile charger in a 14-50 socket for his entire ownership, I'm still unclear what is better about the wall connector.

The wall charger is more expensive, and it's harder to take with you if you move (and obviously impossible to take with you for a road trip)- those are all cons compared to the mobile connector.

Yes it's marginally faster- but this is L2 charging...it's hours either way-- if you're doing it overnight as most do, who cares if it takes 4 hours or 6 hours? You're sleeping through it anyway.

Just using the mobile charger with an existing outlet is fine. It’s the most cost effective way.

I am installing a wall connector because it’s a cleaner setup and once I get it set up I can tuck my mobile charger in the under vault area and have it handy any time I’m on the road instead of having to tuck it away each time.

Definitely not a “need”, just a bit nicer. If you don’t have a 220v outlet, your cost to install the wall charger isn’t that much more than correctly installing the 220.

 

[Dutchie]

CNBC is turning around I see

Top Wall Street analysts like these stocks for the long-run amid market jitters

 

[LiveLong&Profit]

It baffles me why anyone would think Tesla would go from building two Gigafactories at a time to only adding one more in total in the next 4 years.

Fair point.

Implicit in my WAG is the assumption that EM prefers to max out existing locations.

My WAG is that the Austin alone can eventually do ~6M and Berlin and Shanghai ~4M each when fully ramped.
These number may seem wild, but I assume that the 3D 'packing' of the GFs and the speed of production just keeps churning over the years, making these factories truly unprecedented productivity-wise.
(I don't really count Nevada and Boston, and over time, Fremont loses importance - ½M barely counts getting to 20M)

Also, this scenario may require 1-2 more buildings on the Austin plot, 1 more building in Shanghai, and a huge buildout of Berlin.
So, in a way we agree: Tesla will need new factories, but not necessarily new locations for a while. The way I see it is that for each GF location we get a factory cluster of 1-n factories, depending on local conditions, but with the overarching goal of at least 4M units/year produced.

But only a medium ramp is assumed by 2027 because it takes a lot of time for the supply chain to ramp up to match, and especially for new mines to go though permitting.

So, short term (2027): 3 + 1 GF extra medium ramped locations will supply the the 8.5M in OP.
Longer term (2031-'32) 3 + 2 extra fully ramped locations yielding 4-6M each will surpass the 20M target set by EM.
(1-2 year late due to Elon time)

PS
Because ramping and localizing of the supply chain takes a while, I think a only 1 new location will be online in 2027 - that is the only one included in OP.
This is why there is a huge 'jump' from 8.5M to more than 20M only 4-5 years after. I assume that in 6 year the GF build and ramp up will be mastered to perfection. The limiting factor will be localized supply chain, especially raw materials. Getting new mines up and running takes 6-8 years even when fast-tracked.

 

[StealthP3D]

I think all three of your points are incorrect or a bit misleading.

1) The Tesla to J1772 adapter is very expensive and it is not included with your non-Tesla EV. The J1772 to Tesla adapter is cheap and you get one free with every Tesla. So if your goal is to install a universal charger in your garage, it's better to install a J1772 instead of the Tesla wall charger.

2) This is not true at all. There are plenty of high quality J1772 chargers at all price points. You will need to do some research to compare quality and features, but some are as good or better than Tesla's wall charger.

3) Again, there are plenty of J1772 wall chargers you can buy that charger as fast as the Tesla wall charger. But you almost certainly don't need over 40 amps anyway. That's plenty fast for L2. And the wiring gets expensive when you go over 40 amps.

My last point is that the Tesla wall charger does not have a plug for NEMA 14-50. Tesla used to offer this but now they only sell a hard-wired version. Having that NEMA 14-50 outlet is very convenient. It allows you to easily disconnect the charger or even take it with you when you move.

You might already have a NEMA 14-50 outlet. If you do, definitely get the third party J1772 charger because you won't need to hire an electrician.

I think your post is misleading starting with your closing statement:

Having a NEMA 14-50 outlet does not require you to hire an electrician if you don't buy a third party charger. You have two other options:

1) If you are going to use an inefficient wall outlet to charge from, you can just as easily charge from the Mobile Connector. Electrician not needed.
2) You don't need to hire an electrician to convert an outlet to a hard wired Wall Connector. It's super simple.

If you drive a Tesla, why would you install a J1772 charger that required you to add an adapter (two more points of resistance) to every amp that ever flows from your charge point into your car? It makes no sense. You would only need to buy the Tesla to J1772 adapter if you bought a non-Tesla and the adapter, should you need it only costs $160 and allows you avoid paying $700-$1000 or more for J1772 48 amp charge solution. Hint: Don't buy the $399 Emporia EV charger - it's not even UL certified. The Tesla Wall Connector is only $495 and accommodates wiring entry from any direction.

I suspect the biggest difference we have is you think legacy auto or other EV startups are going be making compelling EV's at compelling price points any day now and they will actually be widely available. While that would be nice in an ideal world, we live in the world we have, not in the one we want. I also see EV charging infrastructure as something that goes with the residence, not something you take with you when you move. Install it once, do it right and be done with it.