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

[hacer]

They say everything is bigger in America - but a 34 inch squirrel, seriously ?! Or does FSD react to small squirrels but not small children? Color me confused...

The squirrel will not sit motionless. Under normal circumstances small children will also not remain motionless in the road. Lying Dan O'Douchebag's test requires that the "child" be very tiny and completely stationary.

 

[hobbes]

Kal Penn, Bloomberg, & Panasonic are filming a new series at the Tesla Giga Nevada

Kal Penn, Bloomberg, and Panasonic are filming a new series at the Tesla Gigafactory in Sparks, Nevada. The series will be

www.teslarati.com

 

[bkp_duke]

It doesn't seem to be so clear yet (but not sure if the below is just for ranges or any home appliance): What the Inflation Reduction Act Could Mean for Your Next Appliance Purchase

Will You Qualify for a Rebate if You Buy a New Electric Range?​

It depends on how much you earn and where you live. Your individual state will set the exact framework, but the guidelines in the legislation call for the rebate amount to be dependent on how your household income compares with the median household income (HHI) of a particular area to be determined by the state. For instance, it may pertain to your ZIP code, county, or the entire state. If you earn:

• Up to 80 percent of the median HHI in your area, you get up to 100 percent of the cost of the new appliance (or up to $840, whichever is less).
• More than 80 percent but less than 150 percent of the HHI in your area, you get 50 percent of the cost of the new appliance.
• Above 150 percent of the median HHI in your area, you do not qualify for a rebate.

Typical. Those of us that would most like to be at the forefront of something like this will probably be excluded.

Screw them, I'll just keep using my inefficient systems until they break, and then I'll replace em. No one apparently is giving me any motivation to do otherwise.

 

[TheTalkingMule]

Typical. Those of us that would most like to be at the forefront of something like this will probably be excluded.

Screw them, I'll just keep using my inefficient systems until they break, and then I'll replace em. No one apparently is giving me any motivation to do otherwise.

What's keeping you from being at the forefront of something like this?

 

[Tronguy]

My actual advice is to ignore the entire issue. You paid for FSD. You have FSD as it exists today. FSD Beta is simply out of reach in NYC, and you shouldn't worry about it. Eventually, some day, FSD Beta will be good enough to be given to everybody in the US who has FSD and you will get it. There's no point in worrying about it until then. It will just annoy you.

My only point in responding was to point out that the system is *not* telling you that you are a bad driver, merely that the way you drive is correlated with drivers who get in more accidents. Statistical inference is great, but it will always get some individuals wrong.

I've been restraining myself about getting the FSD-b, but may as well stick in my two cents.

In the 10.12 forums, a user reported back a conversation with a Tesla employee regarding getting the Beta a week or so ago. The employee said:

1. They take into account the region where the possible beta tester lives.
2. They take into account the safety score.
3. How often one used FSD counted.

This opened my eyes a bit. I've had the beta since the last glut of users were invited in in May-June and was wondering why. I had, shall we say, an interesting relationship with the software.

I happen to live in Central NJ. It's congested in here: Ask anybody. In fall, I turned on the request and, slowly, over time, changed my driving habits and got better scores. Further, whatever Tesla was using for scoring, there's no question that the algorithms were changing over time. At one point, if a car in front of me, 100 to 150 yards up slowed down for a right turn from one slightly major local road onto one not so major, an FCW would pop up. One starts looking at cars 'way up there to see what they were doing, which is, frankly, insane. Turning from a side road onto a major local road with three lanes of traffic? One had to wait five or ten minutes, because the act of accelerating into a decent gap would ding one for aggressive driving, or high G turns.

Worse: One is driving as close to cautiously as one can on a three-lane major surface road, coming up on a light. Some maniac NJ driver would zip past one, change lanes (with room!) and get in front and stop, and the FCW alert would go off. On three separate months one or two of those would be sufficient to drive a near-99 score down into the 95 range for the day, or worse.

We don't want to talk about red lights too much: Brake to stop because there's room, and it would hit one for excessive braking. Trying to get through on a yellow could risk one's life.

And the epitome of all this was a two-lane on-ramp onto a six-lane interstate with heavy, jammed traffic, and one had to get over three lanes in order to go straight. Do this by hand and it'd be aggressive driving alerts all over. Let FSD do it and one wouldn't get the hit.. do you know just how dangerous it is to let FSD try and sidle into a gap? When it would suddenly decide to stop in traffic with a turn signal on and wait for cars to move? Sheesh.

One day, two or three of these things happened in a row and I just lost it. Turned off everything when I got home, removed the FSD-b request and, for the next couple of days, drove the car sans auto-anything, like it was meant to be driven. It was exhilarating, a heck of a lot safer, and my blood pressure dropped, lots.

Eventually turned the FSD back on and just used it for lanekeeping and TACC. Still relaxed.

And then there was the first quarter earnings call. Musk asked (well, begged, actually) for people to request getting into the FSD-b. Well, I wanted the full FSD, too, and would like to help.

But this time, swore not to look at the Safety Score. Just drive the darn car, and don't take those crazy risks. Ignore the FCWs, agressive driving alerts, and all that. Let the safety score do what it wanted.

Average was 93 after a month or two of this - and that means that some days (I would check, maybe, once every week or other) there were scores in the 60's. Fine.

And, lo and behold, in late May, got invited in. What?

Note that I said above that the Tesla guy had said something about, "regions". I believe it. First, Tesla's not blind, they know what NYC is like. Second, with respect to the Safety Score, I have a really hard time believing that anybody punting around in NYC, Manhattan in particular, could have any kind of a good score. It's not really the driver: It's the environment. I think that the current 10.12.2 release was considered good enough by Tesla so it could handle places like NJ; they wanted NJ drivers (and probably other congested locales) where they could get information and feedback on the Big Leagues of congested driving. I suspect that denizens of NYC were left out. And those NHTSA guys.. They're based in DC, right? Have any of you actually tried driving in DC? Not as bad as NYC, but not for the faint of heart, either.

And so: I had a relatively lousy score at 93, but they looked, I guess, considered the area, and popped the score up by some handicap. In I went. It's been interesting.

When one gets FSD-b, one also acquires a little "vid-cam" icon on the screen. Every time the car does something stupid, one is encouraged to hit that little cam icon, purportedly to send a clip of the erring car off to Tesla. I kid you not: On a 20-mile commute, I hit that darned icon 10-20 times on local roads, 5 times or so on limited access highways. Once in a great while, say, once every couple-three weeks, I'll manage to get 10 miles without hitting that thing. More normally, it's once every two or three miles. 80% of the time it's idiot things like getting into a left turn lane when one wants to go straight; or jerking its way around a left turn to the point where one almost has whiplash. The other 20 percent is mostly about scaring the heck out of other drivers, but there's that one or two percent that would result in bent metal, if one let the car do its thing. Today, as it happens, it did one of its rare Bad Ones: It tried to change lanes into a car that was directly to the left: That's not supposed to happen. These are rare. One time, the car had, no kidding, a dad pushing a stroller bore-sighted on a left turn when the light went green.

When FSD-b is behaving, it's nice: It'll change lanes, stay with traffic, go around stopped lawn service trucks (and across the yellow stripes), and mostly handles traffic fairly well. But one has to keep a solid grip on the wheel at all times because, well, it does its misbehaving at random, and one doesn't know when the next random event is going to happen.

The nice parts and the YouTube videos make FSD-b sound like something one would really want.. But it's all about the testing, not the ease of use. Be careful what you wish for: You might get it.

No question: Those that have FSD-b are testers. They're there to provide feedback to Tesla, not to play YouTube joyriders. The hope is that it'll eventually improve enough so that Tesla will allow NYC into the fold, but that's not today. Be careful what you wish for: Testing definitely raises one's blood pressure.

 

[bkp_duke]

What's keeping you from being at the forefront of something like this?

I'm not going to do it and spend the money without the incentive. My green upgrades have to pencil out financially. For now, HVAC and natural gas stove will stay. Both are only 6 years old, and they are a minor CO2 footprint for our family, given we are net exporters of solar, even with two EVs.

 

[damonbrodie]

...We have no real way to know until the shares make a move or they don't. So, I suggest you may benefit if you tame the manic-depressive mood ...

On the other hand, your perpetual handwringing is focused on the normal volatility or noise which is basically nothing more than white noise.

Amen!

 

[Discoducky]

The squirrel will not sit motionless. Under normal circumstances small children will also not remain motionless in the road. Lying Dan O'Douchebag's test requires that the "child" be very tiny and completely stationary.

Exactly, the system creates structure from motion, so any movement will fundamentally increase the systems confidence that the object is of enough significance to alter its vector.

If the system can detect a squirrel in motion, that is groundbreaking as the aptina lens and Sony sensor see very few pixels height at 20 feet. Maybe it is the length of the squirrel body and tail that is triggering it. I'll test it! My kids have a few stuffies that could get dirty

What most don't understand is that every detected object has a percent confidence associated with it's attributes. Nothing is 100%.

 

[MP3Mike]

If the system can detect a squirrel in motion, that is groundbreaking as the aptina lens and Sony sensor see very few pixels height at 20 feet. Maybe it is the length of the squirrel body and tail that is triggering it. I'll test it! My kids have a few stuffies that could get dirty

Thanks for doing all of this testing. It would be interesting if you can test a moving "short" dummy as well, to see if movement helps. (It would be interesting if you had one that was like a bobble head in that it just sort of wiggled in place.)

 

[Right_Said_Fred]

I've been restraining myself about getting the FSD-b, but may as well stick in my two cents.

In the 10.12 forums, a user reported back a conversation with a Tesla employee regarding getting the Beta a week or so ago. The employee said:

1. They take into account the region where the possible beta tester lives.
2. They take into account the safety score.
3. How often one used FSD counted.

This opened my eyes a bit. I've had the beta since the last glut of users were invited in in May-June and was wondering why. I had, shall we say, an interesting relationship with the software.

I happen to live in Central NJ. It's congested in here: Ask anybody. In fall, I turned on the request and, slowly, over time, changed my driving habits and got better scores. Further, whatever Tesla was using for scoring, there's no question that the algorithms were changing over time. At one point, if a car in front of me, 100 to 150 yards up slowed down for a right turn from one slightly major local road onto one not so major, an FCW would pop up. One starts looking at cars 'way up there to see what they were doing, which is, frankly, insane. Turning from a side road onto a major local road with three lanes of traffic? One had to wait five or ten minutes, because the act of accelerating into a decent gap would ding one for aggressive driving, or high G turns.

Worse: One is driving as close to cautiously as one can on a three-lane major surface road, coming up on a light. Some maniac NJ driver would zip past one, change lanes (with room!) and get in front and stop, and the FCW alert would go off. On three separate months one or two of those would be sufficient to drive a near-99 score down into the 95 range for the day, or worse.

We don't want to talk about red lights too much: Brake to stop because there's room, and it would hit one for excessive braking. Trying to get through on a yellow could risk one's life.

And the epitome of all this was a two-lane on-ramp onto a six-lane interstate with heavy, jammed traffic, and one had to get over three lanes in order to go straight. Do this by hand and it'd be aggressive driving alerts all over. Let FSD do it and one wouldn't get the hit.. do you know just how dangerous it is to let FSD try and sidle into a gap? When it would suddenly decide to stop in traffic with a turn signal on and wait for cars to move? Sheesh.

One day, two or three of these things happened in a row and I just lost it. Turned off everything when I got home, removed the FSD-b request and, for the next couple of days, drove the car sans auto-anything, like it was meant to be driven. It was exhilarating, a heck of a lot safer, and my blood pressure dropped, lots.

Eventually turned the FSD back on and just used it for lanekeeping and TACC. Still relaxed.

And then there was the first quarter earnings call. Musk asked (well, begged, actually) for people to request getting into the FSD-b. Well, I wanted the full FSD, too, and would like to help.

But this time, swore not to look at the Safety Score. Just drive the darn car, and don't take those crazy risks. Ignore the FCWs, agressive driving alerts, and all that. Let the safety score do what it wanted.

Average was 93 after a month or two of this - and that means that some days (I would check, maybe, once every week or other) there were scores in the 60's. Fine.

And, lo and behold, in late May, got invited in. What?

Note that I said above that the Tesla guy had said something about, "regions". I believe it. First, Tesla's not blind, they know what NYC is like. Second, with respect to the Safety Score, I have a really hard time believing that anybody punting around in NYC, Manhattan in particular, could have any kind of a good score. It's not really the driver: It's the environment. I think that the current 10.12.2 release was considered good enough by Tesla so it could handle places like NJ; they wanted NJ drivers (and probably other congested locales) where they could get information and feedback on the Big Leagues of congested driving. I suspect that denizens of NYC were left out. And those NHTSA guys.. They're based in DC, right? Have any of you actually tried driving in DC? Not as bad as NYC, but not for the faint of heart, either.

And so: I had a relatively lousy score at 93, but they looked, I guess, considered the area, and popped the score up by some handicap. In I went. It's been interesting.

When one gets FSD-b, one also acquires a little "vid-cam" icon on the screen. Every time the car does something stupid, one is encouraged to hit that little cam icon, purportedly to send a clip of the erring car off to Tesla. I kid you not: On a 20-mile commute, I hit that darned icon 10-20 times on local roads, 5 times or so on limited access highways. Once in a great while, say, once every couple-three weeks, I'll manage to get 10 miles without hitting that thing. More normally, it's once every two or three miles. 80% of the time it's idiot things like getting into a left turn lane when one wants to go straight; or jerking its way around a left turn to the point where one almost has whiplash. The other 20 percent is mostly about scaring the heck out of other drivers, but there's that one or two percent that would result in bent metal, if one let the car do its thing. Today, as it happens, it did one of its rare Bad Ones: It tried to change lanes into a car that was directly to the left: That's not supposed to happen. These are rare. One time, the car had, no kidding, a dad pushing a stroller bore-sighted on a left turn when the light went green.

When FSD-b is behaving, it's nice: It'll change lanes, stay with traffic, go around stopped lawn service trucks (and across the yellow stripes), and mostly handles traffic fairly well. But one has to keep a solid grip on the wheel at all times because, well, it does its misbehaving at random, and one doesn't know when the next random event is going to happen.

The nice parts and the YouTube videos make FSD-b sound like something one would really want.. But it's all about the testing, not the ease of use. Be careful what you wish for: You might get it.

No question: Those that have FSD-b are testers. They're there to provide feedback to Tesla, not to play YouTube joyriders. The hope is that it'll eventually improve enough so that Tesla will allow NYC into the fold, but that's not today. Be careful what you wish for: Testing definitely raises one's blood pressure.

You put so much effort in this write-up that I won’t delete it, but it really doesn’t belong in the investor section. And the same goes for many more of today’s posts on FSD.

The Dan O’Dowd story also had its spot in the limelight, much more than it deserves. It’s time to move on and dial down the FSD discussion.

 

[Thekiwi]

Toyota Motor Corp. suspended operations at its Sichuan plant in China because of a power shortage, the Kyodo News reported on Tuesday.
The local authority has ordered the automaker to suspend operations, the report said.

Volkswagen AG also has a plant in Sichuan. The automaker’s China spokesperson said its factory in Chengdu is affected by power shortages.

CATL’s factory in Yibin, Sichuan Province, stopped production due to power brownouts, and the duration of power brownouts rationing lasted from August 15 to August 20.

Foxconn is suspending operations at a factory in the city of Chengdu from August 15 to 20 under government order.

Source: Google for Sichuan automaker, foxconn
Nothing on Tesla

This is the most important emerging news flow to follow currently. There are a lot of parts suppliers in this region for many companies that are impacted by the shutdown, for instance the Apple hardware supply chain is getting impacted already by this.

So potentially there may be parts for Tesla Shanghai that might be paused currently. Hopefully Tesla Shanghai was able to build a sizable buffer of parts during the recent extended downtime for line upgrades that covers any current potential supplier shortfalls.

 

[jw934]

Aug 17 will be the day of record for the split, and we may see more buying to shed synthetic shares (from naked shorting) between now and then.

Through naked shorting, some market makers created short positions that are not associated with any legitimate shares, and they need to buy shares in order to position themselves to deliver additional shares to the buyers of that original shorting activity when the split occurs.

@Papafox , I would also like to thank you for all that you do.

For those that joined Tesla community in the past 2 years, here are the numbers showing what happened during the 2020 5-1 split - an unbelievable squeeze of > 20% in just a few days, due to naked shorts covering their position.
Many hypothesized that squeeze could have gone much higher if Tesla did not do that $5B capital raise and provided the shares to the shorts.

Date	Open	High	Low	Close*	Volume
Sep 01, 2020	502.14	502.49	470.51	475.05	89,841,100
Aug 31, 2020	444.61	500.14	440.11	498.32	118,374,400
Aug 31, 2020	5:1 Stock Split
Aug 28, 2020	459.02	463.70	437.30	442.68	100,406,000
Aug 27, 2020	436.09	459.12	428.50	447.75	118,465,000
Aug 26, 2020	412.00	433.20	410.73	430.63	71,197,000
Aug 25, 2020	394.98	405.59	393.60	404.67	53,294,500
Aug 24, 2020	425.26	425.80	385.50	402.84	100,318,000
Aug 21, 2020	408.95: Day of Record	419.10	405.01	410.00	107,448,000
Aug 20, 2020	372.14	404.40	371.41	400.37	103,059,000
Aug 19, 2020	373.00	382.20	368.24	375.71	61,026,500

Let's hope we see more buying from them (and others) towards the 3-1 Split Day.

[Edit: with the smaller short volume this time around and Elon having sold shares due to Twitter and the lesson learned, make a squeeze to the same degree less likely to happen. But of course the typical smaller rise due to the split event is still the general expectation]

 

[growler23]

Still with the same income restrictions?

I think so? I am looking at the text of the bill, and it does seem to describe income eligibility, with tiers based on what your income percentile is compared to your local area. Rebates appear to be capped at 50% of project cost for incomes 80%-150% of the local area average, and 100% of project cost for incomes < 80% of the local area average in the section I am perusing (SEC. 50122. HIGH-EFFICIENCY ELECTRIC HOME REBATE PROGRAM).
Pretty wordy but I think that is what it's saying. Feel free to parse as I am not certain given the length of the verbiage, found a link here:

https://www.congress.gov/bill/117th-congress/house-bill/5376/text

 

[M|S|M MYP]

Buckle up boys and girls...the class clown of 1/2 star analysts has reiterated his sell rating:

 

[OrthoSurg]

I cannot in good conscience advise you to give up the potential appreciation that AAPL will probably experience when they release their Apple car with beautifully rounded corners in exchange for that scrappy little carmaker from Fremont that bought a factory too big for their britches just to pretend like they were a real automaker.

Are you crazy??

Besides, you would be giving up 1700 shares of a wonderful company with an investment grade rating for only a bit over 300 shares of a fraudulent, over-priced company that reputable agencies rate as junk. And, don't forget, that has a CEO that sexually assaults his employees and who cultures a highly divisive and racially charged factory atmosphere.

/s

Did it, got paid 6000$ to sell my AAPL at $175 in 1 month. It’s in gods hands now.

 

[madodel]

The squirrel will not sit motionless. Under normal circumstances small children will also not remain motionless in the road. Lying Dan O'Douchebag's test requires that the "child" be very tiny and completely stationary.

And dress like a traffic cone.

 

[printf42]

I won't get in to the definition of hacking and the modern interpretation of hacking but you are technically correct. I guess I would use a different term for what GJ and Dan are doing.

Funny we are talking about this though, I was literally at a Mexican restaurant for lunch today, local news playing in the background, and the commercial came on TV. It was so bad, literally looked like someone put a little doll in the road and purposely ran it over. No in car video at all. I think it will only increase the visibility of Tesla kind of like all the EV Superbowl ads did. Thank you Dan for the free advertising.

The conversation for average joe after seeing the ad:
Joe: Those Tesla drivers are all rich jerks who don’t care to run down your children.
John: No it says the car was driving itself and it won’t stop for children.
Joe: What? Teslas can drive themselves?
John: No not yet, at this point the driver is still…
Joe: That must cost a fortune, I heard those Silicon Valley companies had such cars cost half a million.
John: No it cost 12k, but not ready yet, once it is, you can earn 100k/yr by…
Joe: What are you talking about? No wonder why those cars are getting more expensive everyday, let me look into it, must be some opportunities there…

 

[Paul_SF]

Buckle up boys and girls...the class clown of 1/2 star analysts has reiterated his sell rating:

View attachment 841699

What will it take to stop posting and mentioning all the clowns in this thread? A ban or what?

 

[Singuy]

Buckle up boys and girls...the class clown of 1/2 star analysts has reiterated his sell rating:

View attachment 841699

I agree, this is not sustainable. The FSD beta program is too safe per safety statistics and not from anecdotal evidence. NHTSA needs to figure out a way to have more people on it to reduce injury and fatalities. It is almost irresponsible for NHTSA to sit on the sideline and watch FSD Beta testers having such high injury free miles while the rest of the car drivers getting injured daily.

 

[redan]

Hmmm.... Maybe this is what he'll use some of his Twitter-earmarked proceeds for if he can get out of buying Twitter. What's crazy is it's hard to know for sure these days whether he's joking or not.

https://twitter.com/x/status/1559691922725281800