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

[augkuo]

Not sure why you would say 25 years. Cars don't last forever and 12-15 is very reasonable relative to how long cars are typically on the road.

My 2010 roadster has almost 100k miles on it and is 12 years old. Battery had 185 miles (standard range 80% SOC) new, now charges to 160 miles.
Maybe in another 12 years the battery would be at 135 miles which would still have over 70% of the original battery capacity.

 

[Snerruc]

I can't quite put my finger on it, but something about the app layout is appealing.


View attachment 837218

App doesn’t work for me.

 

[scaesare]

My S is only at 101k but hitting 10 years (does have an 8 year battery with 80k though) still 245 range & 72.3 kWhr useable, seems to lose ~1kWhr / year?
Elon seemed very conservative and that was one of the few statements that could be used for FUD
I expect my S to last *forever ...I just replaced DC-DC fuses and put in a 12V Li battery & after it sat for 6 months and I couldn't get it to reset, it finally did!
I was getting worried doing hill climbs in my 3 that I may not have a car if something bad happened! ...3rd hill this year, eek Model 3 Hill Climb race Spin

makes me extra bullish now that I have my classic back! I'd think 20 years useable may be reasonable for some EV drivers. a little power drop & charge rate drop but totally useable, maybe not a trip car, the classic S charge rate never really was anyhow.

today price seems scammy, is this the dip Elon mentioned Yesterday?

At ~9.5 yrs and 165K miles old, my 85 (once replaced with a refurb one of similar capacity) is at about 235... about 11% degradation.

 

[elasalle]

Kardony having writer’s block writing about stock split
Nothing on CNBS yet

 

[Oveeus]

I think Elon has made it very clear that they won't build a GigaFactory in a country that doesn't already have a proven market for Tesla. So that means that they have to already have a presence there with stores, service centers, Superchargers, etc.

So if you want to figure out where they would put the next one look for a country that is importing a lot of Teslas and isn't really close to an existing GigaFactory... (I don't know maybe somewhere like Canada, UK/Australia, etc.)

The thing is, given how much the price of new cars are being sold in those countries, affordability is not really the issue. The problem is taxes. Pretty much any Latin American country has huge taxes on import cars.

Thus, I'm not well-versed in the taxation issue for Latin America, but I believe for the most part, Mercosur has some program in place and many of the more budget-friendly "normal" cars are made in Brazil to be exported to many Latin America countries that make up the Mercosur.

And I say no Model S3XY there to test it out because the size just isn't friendly because their parking spots are tiny. Sure, there are regular-size Sedan/SUVs there, but most drive much smaller cars.

With Austin, Berlin, Shanghai and Fremont, as far as the Northern hemisphere goes, we are decently well-covered given the supply of parts and cells.

However, any of those 4 factories don't work really well for anything south of the equator. Taxation is one thing... but shipping from of any of these factories are a challenge on its own.

That's why I think it's about time for the first Giga in the Southern hemisphere.

This is not an apple to apple comparison to Giga India... India has much more affordable cars or quasi-car options and its tax treatment won't do great other than India itself. Giga Latin America, OTOH, can service pretty much every country in Latin America.

 

[Mengy]

When does your shift change? I mean, when does the guy from the morning crew clock out, and when you come on shift?

Five years from now! Long live the longs!!!!


Have a good weekend all, hopefully next week is a positive one for us with the split now scheduled.

 

[Ogre]

The thing is, given how much the price of new cars are being sold in those countries, affordability is not really the issue. The problem is taxes. Pretty much any Latin American country has huge taxes on import cars.

This is the same chicken/ egg problem there is in India and Tesla refused to take their bait so far.

Everyone wants Tesla to build a factory in their country, but if they have a tax structure that makes it impossible for Tesla to import cars and get their foot in the door it means Tesla has to swallow a huge risk in order to enter the market. What happens if Tesla drops billions on a factory and there is no market?

 

[Oveeus]

This is the same chicken/ egg problem there is in India and Tesla refused to take their bait so far.

Everyone wants Tesla to build a factory in their country, but if they have a tax structure that makes it impossible for Tesla to import cars and get their foot in the door it means Tesla has to swallow a huge risk in order to enter the market. What happens if Tesla drops billions on a factory and there is no market?

I added by editing my previous post.

But basically this is different than Giga India. With Giga India, it doesn't really offer much incentive (tax-trety-wise) other than the India domestic market.

With Giga Latin... Tesla can serve the entire Latin America and not just the country the factory is located in.

 

[Artful Dodger]

My pet theory: In the future you buy and sell things with fractions of a $TSLA.

... or $Xoin.

Cheers!

 

[henchman24]

Seems like all the smoke around the next factory has really centered around Indonesia lately. Not a proven market at all for Tesla, but rich in resources and in a great area for export... and a right hand drive country that could produce for themselves, Japan, Australia, Singapore, and New Zealand in the area.... and for Ireland and the UK at the beginning of each quarter simplifying Shanghai production. As an added bonus, once Berlin can get its own battery supply chain going in Europe, those extra packs could be easily be to Indonesia until that factory got up and going.

After that, who really knows... Canada makes some sense, but anywhere eastern NA makes sense. Could make an argument for Mexico too.

 

[Gigapress]

2 million vehicle run rate by the end of the year is probably sandbagging.

Fremont already is doing 540k annualized and probably will be conservatively at least like 560k rate by December. Per the Q2 update, the official nominal capacity is 650k.

Shanghai’s made 71k in June which is 860k annualized. I think the July upgrades and continued general improvements should get Shanghai to at least 1M annualized by end of year.

Berlin and Austin are supposed to hit at least 5k per week each by EoY, so they’d have ~500k combined annualized rate.

This adds up to slightly over 2 million, but these were low side estimates. Fremont might be at the 650k nominal capacity by then, I think Shanghai probably will be doing more like 1.2M annualized and Berlin and Austin could be doing more than 5k per week. Berlin in particular appears to be on track for beating 5k/wk by EoY. If this happened then something like 2.2-2.5M annualized would be the expected range going into 2023.

 

[Captkerosene]

Dude….

Careful, ad hominem attacks or shunning are the only acceptable responses to unpopular opinions. Any kind of debate might give a voice to the offender or their unfashionable views.

 

[winfield100]

Oh, you are hard to please...
All week you complain that Tesla is underperforming its beta, i.e. less than 2x Nasdaq/macro gains.
Finally, today TSLA gets 3x the macro change (down 3x % value of macro), and you are complaining again.
What do you need, for TSLA to be 10x, down around 850 ?

/s

well, got 2 (more) shares @$861.6604 (presplit)

 

[Tommy O]

Careful, ad hominem attacks or shunning are the only acceptable responses to unpopular opinions. Any kind of debate might give a voice to the offender or their unfashionable views.

Clever wording. I guess all bad points must now be argued .

 

[Gigapress]

So this is the Motley Fool's (yeah, I know) guess as to why TSLA is down today:

"Tesla ended the quarter with more than $18 billion in cash, but automobile manufacturing is capital intensive and requires automakers to keep billions in reserve at any time. If Tesla is going to build new factories [to hit 20M vehicles in 2030], it is going to have to raise more cash.

At least some of that is likely to come from debt financing, but it does seem inevitable that at some point Tesla will tap equity markets again to fund its expansion plans. Secondary offerings, unlike stock splits, do impact the total ownership stake of a current investor and could be a reason for the stock's negative reaction to the meeting ...

If there was any doubt before, Tesla has reconfirmed it is focused on growth. That comes at a price, and investors are weighing the cost in Friday trading."

So we're back to the dilution FUD again. Seems MF hasn't noticed that Tesla is now a cash generating machine? Even with two just built nascent factories? And that, yes, debt is absolutely a viable option, regardless of what the rating agencies say (Tesla bonds on the open market had low interest rates). And finally, Elon actually said the opposite in that Tesla might be doing share buybacks in the future. Sheesh!

Anyhoo - buying opportunity!

Motley Fool’s argument basically implies that:

1) Tesla building a new factory wasn’t already expected by the market

2) The market expects that the factory will produce a negative return on investment and therefore TSLA equity is worth less than it was yesterday

 

[MC3OZ]

Motley Fool’s argument basically implies that:

1) Tesla building a new factory wasn’t already expected by the market

2) The market expects that the factory will produce a negative return on investment and therefore TSLA equity is worth less than it was yesterday

It would be strange if Tesla did debt financing of new factories, and a share buy back,

We have seen very large factories in Berlin and Austin built while paying down debt, with covid disruptions, supply-chain issues and raw materials inflation.

The fact that Tesla is considering a share buy back means they think excess cash will be piling up even while building new factories.

My explanation - Motley Fool must have tuned in briefly, and only caught one part of the meeting.

 

[larmor]

Confirmation of 10 to 12 more factories and stock split. Both known and now confirmed- but the proximity of the two is interesting…

 

[Gigapress]

For now.


For now, but the Laws of Physics do not dictate that oil (and natural gas) is the sole possible source of reduced hydrocarbon molecules.

I’m still projecting that cheap solar combined with Fischer-Tropsch synthesis (FTS) will wipe out the market competitiveness of the rest of the uses of oil & natural gas beyond fuel. FTS has been in industrial use for a century (mainly for Nazi WWII uses and then SASOL in South Africa since the 1950s), produces chemicals with higher purity than oil, and with much less pollution released from the factory. The only reason FTS hasn’t been the dominant choice this whole time is that using oil and natural gas has been less expensive than any FTS design could be, primarily due to the prohibitive cost of the electricity required. Past a certain price of electricity (hello cheap solar!) then FTS will dominate because this is a commodity market where the lowest bidder wins.


You know what else Elon wants? Really, really desperately wants? A colony on Mars. And the moons of Jupiter. And in colossal spacecraft each containing their own civilization headed for another distant solar system. There is no oil in any of these locations.

SpaceX publicly stated intentions of using Fischer-Tropsch to produce methane for fuel on Mars 6 years ago when Elon presented on the first proposed version of the Big Effing Rocket. Methane is not the only chemical product of that reaction, and if the Mars colony is going to have self-supplied steel, concrete, chemicals, fertilizer, plastics and hundreds of other products then it’s basically FTS or bust. (Someone here pointed out that using organic waste could also work but I think that’s a lot less efficient and the organic waste will be much more valuable as compost anyway because terraforming will require building topsoil from scratch.)

FTS on Earth using any form of CO2 capture will also benefit economically from greenhouse gas sequestration subsidies from governments because the FTS plants would be providing a positive externality to society that would not otherwise be priced by the free market. Oil is getting by on being subsidized despite producing quite a few negative externalities.

30 years from now, I strongly doubt much oil will be mined and refined, and I expect gas drilling will be performed primarily for the helium instead of the methane and propane.

Correction: SpaceX presentation from 2016 mentioned the atmospheric CO2 capture, water electrolysis to make H2, and the Sabatier Process for making methane. I remembered wrong; SpaceX has never mentioned Fischer-Tropsch synthesis.

However I maintain that a Martian city would almost certainly use some of that methane and hydrogen as feedstock for FTS because it’s the only known method I’m aware of for producing basic organic chemicals necessary for industrial civilization if there’s no oil. I just want to clear up that this is my inference, not something SpaceX has announced.

 

[TheTalkingMule]

2 million vehicle run rate by the end of the year is probably sandbagging.

Fremont already is doing 540k annualized and probably will be conservatively at least like 560k rate by December. Per the Q2 update, the official nominal capacity is 650k.

Shanghai’s 71k made in June is 860k annualized. I think the July upgrades and continued general improvements should get Shanghai to at least 1M annualized by end of year.

With Berlin and Austin supposed to hit at least 5k per week each by EoY, so they’d have ~500k combined annualized rate.

This adds up to slightly over 2 million, but these were low side estimates. Fremont might be at the 650k nominal capacity by then, I think Shanghai probably will be doing more like 1.2M annualized and Berlin and Austin could be doing more than 5k per week. Berlin in particular appears to be on track for beating 5k/wk by EoY. If this happened then something like 2.2-2.5M annualized would be the expected range going into 2023.

Chips tho. We can have all the capacity we like, if the parts ain't there.....

 

[printf42]

Ok we have another hit piece:

In complaints filed with the state Office of Administrative Hearings, California's Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) said Tesla misled prospective customers with advertising that overstated how well its advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) worked.

The DMV is seeking remedies that could include suspending Tesla's license to sell vehicles in California and requiring the company to make restitution to drivers.

Not going to link to the original article, but could someone who’s “familiar with the matter” tell what’s the likely and worst case outcome?