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

[damonbrodie]

Some people recently asked what Tesla is going to do with all its cash. Some proposed a stock buyback.

I think right now they are mostly accumulating a safety buffer of extra cash for insurance in case of an economic downturn. But once that buffer increases a bit more, I think they’ll reinvest profits into these things:

1. More factories.

2. Continued battery research (small piece, admittedly).

3. Solar and storage for as many Superchargers as possible, as has been the plan for about a decade (but still is only implemented in a few places).

4. Continued Supercharger rollout.

5. Self-funding for insurance and financing arms.

6. R&D and investment in mining so Tesla can increase access to raw battery materials and accelerate production.

Any or all of the above uses of cash would have positive returns on investment, advance the mission, and serve as a revenue multiplier, which is why a stock buyback, in my opinion, would not be the best use of money.

Tesla still has a LOT of things they can wisely spend a lot of their money on.

You left out pay a dividend. Isn't that a valid option?

 

[damonbrodie]

No one ever mentions optimus. Labor is the single biggest rate limiting step for Tesla to scale up to 20 million cars. Elon urges developers to build more houses because it's difficult to find people willing to work when housing prices explode next to every giga factory due to the amount of people needed to build products.

So more giga factories = empty boxes if there's a shortage to labor. Optimus is perhaps one of the top priorities that everyone thinks it's some kind of pet project.

Tesla Bots replacing significant numbers of humans in Tesla car factories seems to be a long way off. Tesla tried hard to have a fully robotic line when the Model 3 was launched, but found that incredibly difficult to achieve and so they backed off and have a more traditional build pipeline. I think the initial use cases for the bot will be a lot simpler tasks for the first several years after it is introduced.

 

[elasalle]

https://twitter.com/x/status/1530758395896074240

I'm guessing TMC has more of the $650 types ....

 

[Krugerrand]

I don’t want any automatic censoring. I don’t block anyone. I just know anyone with dark, stormy, alpha, bird, strong, or trolly mctrollface, in their name, is going to say something ridiculous. It’s good for a laugh sometimes.

My agreement is because I too don’t block anyone - and I know we both have reasons for that beyond it’s good for a laugh.

I also gave you an imaginary laughing vote because the trolly mctrollface comment was, you know, funny.

I also gave you an imaginary informative vote because I did not know you don’t block people so that was, you know, informative.

A helpful or disagree vote wasn’t on the table at all, but the love one was - briefly - just because my cat did something really awesome in the moment and I was feeling some love - briefly (like maybe 1/2 a second).

For the record, if I want to give a rating (disagree in this case, since it’s the one brought up for discussion) and don’t want to explain it, for any number of reasons, I’m not going to. That’s the gist of it and I don’t care what anyone thinks of that. Calling a cat lazy for not explaining a vote, just isn’t enough incentive. I move through life the way I want, not the way someone else wants me too. Additionally, I tend to respond more agreeably to positive reinforcement.

Change the forum rules, Master Of This Internet Universe, and then I’ll decide to follow the rule or not, stay or leave, etc…

*I do not require disagree votes to be explained to me. I’m intuitive enough to figure it out on my own why I got it, especially coming from a handful of people who give me disagrees regularly.*

 

[phoggy123]

Tesla Bots replacing significant numbers of humans in Tesla car factories seems to be a long way off. Tesla tried hard to have a fully robotic line when the Model 3 was launched, but found that incredibly difficult to achieve and so they backed off and have a more traditional build pipeline. I think the initial use cases for the bot will be a lot simpler tasks for the first several years after it is introduced.

Since nobody has seen Optimus, and what you are talking about is 4 years old, maybe we should wait until Aug for AI day 2 before calling declaring something years off. Driving a car with an infinite # of variables is way harder than building a walking robot that moves parts and materials and does repeatable jobs.

 

[petit_bateau]

No, that’s completely false. Here’s NHTSA’s ADAS reporting policy. I used to work in Quality for Boeing Commercial Airplanes and it’s pretty much the same with the FAA.

I'm not sure that bit is helping your case

 

[jabloomf1230]

Since nobody has seen Optimus, and what you are talking about is 4 years old, maybe we should wait until Aug for AI day 2 before calling declaring something years off. Driving a car with an infinite # of variables is way harder than building a walking robot that moves parts and materials and does repeatable jobs.

Harder from an engineering standpoint or harder from an ethical one? I'm still not convinced that robotaxis are a potentially big cash cow. However, eliminating all humans from manufacturing seems to be a corporate nirvana. But the societal dislocations might be calamitous.

There aren't many sci-fi movies that have rogue autonomous vehicles as their central theme but humanoid robots taking over the world seems to be a universal worry.

 

[Paul_SF]

I think some of you misunderstood my suggestion.

The disagrees will only make your account to put the poster on YOUR Ignore list. There’s something that will only affect your account and will make you not waste time with trolls and retards. But of course you can reverse the Ignore for some laughs, if that’s your thing.

 

[phoggy123]

Harder from an engineering standpoint or harder from an ethical one? I'm still not convinced that robotaxis are a potentially big cash cow. However, eliminating all humans from manufacturing seems to be a corporate nirvana. But the societal dislocations might be calamitous.

There aren't many sci-fi movies that have rogue autonomous vehicles as their central theme but humanoid robots taking over the world seems to be a universal worry.

I don't think the goal is to eliminate all humans at the onset and they would be wise to selectively chose the markets they start in...like their own factories. We will see more at AI day...hopefully

 

[petit_bateau]

If this report is true, the ID.3 is not doing well in China. No orders in May and only 6 units sold so far in 2022.
Can this be correct?

View attachment 810060

I drove past a VW dealership in rural Greece last weekend. The front of the dealer had huge ID3 banners. There were rather a large number in their yard, gathering dust, plus the ones in the showroom, clean.

Funny thing is I see an ever-increasing number of Teslas on the roads here. Mostly MYPs, some 3s, some S and X. This is way out of the area where there is Tesla Supercharger coverage (nearest one about 3-4 hours away). I talk about this with my friends (who are longstanding residents here) who have an interest in both investing and n EVs. We are all seeing and saying the same thing, which is that it is rare to see a non-Tesla BEV. So rare that we comment to each other about when we see an ID3 actually on the road, or another non-Tesla BEV. There just aren't that many ID3 being bought by real customers.

I drive east-west across Europe (about 2,000-miles) from UK to Greece and back from time to time. What I see here in Greece is a representative anecdote about the evidence I see on that entire road-trip transect.

There's a lot of "channel-stuffing" going on in VW-dealer-land imho. And it ain't working because they buyers want a Tesla.

 

[UkNorthampton]

I'm not sure that bit is helping your case

Perhaps before McDonnell Douglas merger? Or at least before its effects started to make a big impact

 

[Todd Burch]

You left out pay a dividend. Isn't that a valid option?

It’s an option. But it doesn’t advance the mission or improve revenue.

 

[JRP3]

I'm 100% team fast-charge, but I would not write off battery swapping as totally nuts.

I would as it requires extra production of batteries to be stored at various locations in enough volume to handle peak demand or close to it. That means the most expensive part of an EV needs to have duplicates sitting around unused most of the time. Plus the space and expense required to store them and the swapping machines. Also consider the advantages of Tesla's integrated structural pack, any EV with a quick swap pack is at a weight, cost, and structural disadvantage.

 

[StealthP3D]

If each one of the 100k FSD Beta drivers has averaged at least 2 miles on Beta and if Beta were truly more dangerous than human driving, we’d expect to have seen a crash by now. If it’s soooo dangerous, where are all the injuries and deaths?

Haven't you heard? There are, in fact, lots of FSD accidents, at a rate at least 250% that of non-FSD driving, but Tesla has programmed the software in the cars to reconfigure during an accident such that it reports FSD was not in use during the 10 minutes leading up to the crash. In the event the driver survives the accident, Tesla has programmed the front and rear motor controllers to create a powerful 3D magnetic resonance field centered around the driver's head that almost instantly erases any memory of having activated FSD in the first place. In most cases this all happens before the car comes to a complete stop.*

No one is any the wiser. Except for TSLAQ - they have that scammer Elon Musk figured out. He uses the same kind of magnetic resonance mind control on the auditor that signs off on Tesla's financials. It's all sooo obvious!

* Except in cases where the driver has severe iron deficiency anemia. This is due to the fact that the magnetic resonance field requires normal level of iron in the blood to be effective. However, since iron deficiency anemia is relatively uncommon, there are no known accidents in which the driver's memory was not successfully reconfigured.

/s

 

[nativewolf]

What about a partner swap instead of battery swap?

Hardly innovative and does not scale

 

[Krugerrand]

Tesla Bots replacing significant numbers of humans in Tesla car factories seems to be a long way off. Tesla tried hard to have a fully robotic line when the Model 3 was launched, but found that incredibly difficult to achieve and so they backed off and have a more traditional build pipeline. I think the initial use cases for the bot will be a lot simpler tasks for the first several years after it is introduced.

Define ‘a long way off’. Having a compelling EV that isn’t range bound and can be taken on long journeys realistically was considered a long way off, but it wasn’t really. It just took some people to put their mind to it.

I believe you are incorrectly characterizing what happened with ‘automation’ for Model 3 and how that outcome relates to Optimus.

Back in the day, Tesla discovered there was such a thing as over automation, particularly as it related to what humans could do vs what the current state of automation could do at the time.

Optimus is the human replacement - Hello new and improved Flufferbot.

 

[inconel]

V2 is up to 150kW per cabinet split into two pedestals. First to connect gets priority.
V3 is 1MW per cabinet to 4 pedestals, each up to 250kW (cabinet grid input is limited, but they can connect to Megapacks).
Urban SC are 72kW per pedestal.
Introducing V3 Supercharging
Tesla Supercharger - Wikipedia

The "first to connect gets priority" for V2 was true initially but nowadays it seems to me that both cars get half of the capacity no matter who arrives first. I have observed this fair sharing on V2 many times in the last few months.

 

[MartinAustin]

Tesla Bots replacing significant numbers of humans in Tesla car factories seems to be a long way off. Tesla tried hard to have a fully robotic line when the Model 3 was launched, but found that incredibly difficult to achieve and so they backed off and have a more traditional build pipeline. I think the initial use cases for the bot will be a lot simpler tasks for the first several years after it is introduced.

I think one of the first places they will try to do without human staff is storing customer cars out on the delivery lot and assisting with the process of getting them on to car transporters. Tesla will write a piece of software called the Delivery Yard Manager. This piece of software will monitor the entire lot and know all the VINs of all the cars on it. It can self-drive the cars from the assembly line onto this lot and knows where they're all parked. A separate piece of software will "assemble" a group of cars to go onto the transporter, and the DYM will self-drive them into the parking column where the human loader will drive them on to the transporter. (perhaps this loading process will become automatic under human supervision later)

Essentially you will see a bunch of cars moving around this lot with nobody in them.

At first the driving speed will be 5mph. Maybe later if needed, it can be increased.

This software can operate 365 days a year, 24hrs a day, rain or dry, snow on the ground or not (hopefully). Even on Memorial Day it'll be driving cars around, and on the morning following Memorial Day when the truck drivers show up to load the cars onto the transport, the required cars will all be ready.

 

[betstarship]

Weekend discussion:

Brain performance in FLOPS

The computing power needed to replicate the human brain's relevant activities has been estimated by various authors, with answers ranging from 1012 to 1028 FLOPS. Details Notes We have not investigated the brain's performance in FLOPS in detail, nor substantially reviewed the literature since...

aiimpacts.org

Tesla's Dojo supercomputer - sorting out fact from hype

Tesla's Dojo supercomputer was announced with fanfare - and a specific use case in mind. But how does it stack up against other high-performance computers? Will Dojo constitute a step forward for the HPC industry, and for Tesla's own automotive AI pursuits?

diginomica.com

"the fastest supercomputer today is clocked at 450 petaFLOPS, ten thousand times faster than the Playstation and Tesla claims Dojo will reach exascale: an exaFLOP is one quintillion (10^18) double-precision floating-point operations per second (FLOPs)."

 

[jerry33]

The "first to connect gets priority" for V2 was true initially but nowadays it seems to me that both cars get half of the capacity no matter who arrives first. I have observed this fair sharing on V2 many times in the last few months.

Correct. I liked it better the other way.