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That assumption, however optimistic, 'ain't gonna happen'. Why? Auto and other consumer durable finance, in North America and many other countries, almost always permits well over MSRP 100% financing. There are three major reasons; First, with poorer credit risk through captives, especially, there is a deeply entrenched 'get 'em done' culture that allows financing of total selling price including taxes and fees. Second, the same practices permit 100% financing of selling price for very, very high margin items including additional dealer margin, dealer installed options, credit life insurance, extended service contracts, etc. Third, the typical practice is to allow dealer markup fo a financing contract by as much as 300bp or more.
That means that so long as dealers exist so too will Finance and Insurance (F&I), the 'closers' in dealers. New vehicle sales per se usually are not profit makers. F&I, though is hugely profitable.
Collateral value of typical dealer financed vehicles is relevant, but not the principal issue.
[some will argue with this, but anybody who has ever been a dealer or F&I person knows it is true]
All of the items you state depend on the vehicle having a certain value of x at a certain time after the sale.
Since I’m not a subject matter expert, my “gut” tells me that there is a musical chairs scenario about to happen and someone, somewhere is underwriting a risk that will not have any value 36 months after Dec 2023.
I found this clearer: These conditions can cause the cathode inside the battery – which in the case of most lithium batteries is a lithium-containing oxide, usually lithium cobalt oxide – to decompose and release oxygen. (Graphene takes oxygen out of lithium battery fires - Materials Today)
The point being that the fact that you chose to intervene means something. The mothership then tries to identify why you did, even comparing the data to other similar interventions of others. If an area or situation has many disengagements, the NN must be trained to solve this case. If you are the outlier, then Tesla can assume there was no important reason. (For example you wanted to drive home faster)
And for Tesla to know or not know if FSD were to have done it correctly, so to speak, that's what shadow mode does. It's not because FSD is turned off that the car doesn't compare its NN output to what the driver is doing.
It's a quarterly "Triple Witching" options expiration day. Big options writers with the ability to temporarily manipulate share prices (hedge funds and market makers) may want to keep today's TSLA closing price near strike $300 where options' open interest and volume are heavy. When the share price shot above a few minutes ago, they appear to have taken action to cap it. The rest of this final hour could be interesting.
Buying interest appears to have thwarted potential manipulators, resulting in an almost flat TSLA close still above its 50-day SMA (simple moving average).
Good questions. In countries I personally know all have had gasoline suppliers and motor vehicles, although most have had camels, horses, donkeys and sometimes other beasts of burden. Even in places such as Yemen, Nepal and Mongolia there are plentiful motor vehicles. No matter how remote there are fossil fuel distribution and access, almost always even including avgas and aviation kerosine. The quality of those fuels is often poor but they always make it somehow. In such areas there sometimes is electricity too, nearly always powered by diesel fuel. One would think they'd use water, if they had it or solar. Those happen too, but less frequently.
Until you visit these horribly poor and uneducated places you'll wonder how they get gasoline, diesel fuel and aviation fuel. They always do...how is another topic entirely. The bugger question is how they get food.
PS You might never have experienced culture shock like you'd do if you were in an ancient gasoline car, masquerading as a taxi, and hearing Steppenwolf Monster from a portable boombox. That happened to me in late 1970's Yemen in an area that had no electricity. Toyota pickup trucks were common, even sometimes carrying camels. Of course the driver was chewing a huge cud of qat.
What is the average used car selling price in such places? Then, if and when the developed world supplies a dramatic increase of used cars, how will that affect the used car prices?
The 63 countries with less than 100 cars per 1000 people have a total of 184 million motor vehicles with 4+ wheels (link). This is only ~10% of the world's total fleet of ~1.8 billion vehicles. The top 20 countries account for ~80% of the total fleet at 1.35B, so we're talking about an overwhelming quantity of ICEVs being abandoned in a scenario of rapid BEV adoption. In total this is 4x more vehicles than the rest of the world currently has. That is a recipe for plunging prices.
The countries with the other 20% of the cars have an average GDP at purchasing power parity of $25k, whereas it's $40k for the top 20 nations that own 80% of the cars.
For those 63 countries with less than 100 cars per 1000 people, $6700 is the average annual gross domestic product per capita at purchasing power parity as estimated by the International Monetary Fund. Right now in the United States a 10-year-old Toyota Corolla sells for $15k on CarMax (link). Corollas are economy cars, which cost less than the average car, yet the used price in the USA is more than 2 years of average income in world's poorest countries. This is just one example from one developed economy, but it's enough to demonstrate the point. The populations in these areas simply do not have enough money to support used ICEV prices at today's levels if the supply dramatically increases. If rapid BEV adoption in the developed world leads to them offloading a billion or two old ICEVs over a period of just a few years, there is no freaking way that the rest of world will absorb it at the same price those vehicles fetch in the market today.
We saw the same with cell phones and textiles, as some examples. Smartphone adoption is 64% in Sub-Saharan Africa as of 2021 (link), which is a region with 1.1 billion people, of whom the vast majority live on less than $5k per year, so that means rich nations have offloaded at least about 700 million unwanted smartphones at rock bottom prices in the last 15 years. These phones had cost hundreds of dollars in the recent past. I think we can expect the same for unwanted combustion vehicles.
Also as others have pointed out, in the long run why would people continue to go through all the hassle of continually transporting liquid fuels the hard way instead of just bringing a few solar panels and other electrical equipment once? Most of these developing countries are in sunny climates, with cheap land and cheap labor, and the cost of the solar panel hardware continues to fall. With China cranking out giant volumes of cheap EVs like the Wulings, I think eventually these will make their way to developing countries.
Yes I did the math and currently Cruise and Waymo are nothing but money pits for their parent companies.
They will both continue to be money pits for their parent companies because
1. There are no demand for robotaxies today even in cities with robotaxies
2. They are not useful due to low numbers and limited routes/time of operation
3. As they expand to other cities, they will continue to lose massive amounts of money because the city they were in prior were not even close to being profitable.
4. I am not even talking about Tesla. I was saying how Tesla is working on trust and scalability while being profitable with their autonomous program without any L4s on the road. Other companies may go under BEFORE people find robotaxies acceptable as a useful tool in their lives. It only took uber over a decade and good saturation to be cash flow positive. Will GM allow Cruise to continue to suck their profits away for another decade in order to hit profitability?
I was making a point that all of these (NON TESLA) companies thinking robotaxis are the new gold rush is hitting nothing but a big bear trap.
The problem with other players are they see there is a gold rush, but they don’t know how to use shovels, so they can only stand in a nearby river with a bucket, with no means to get to other places.
Tesla instead send farmers all around the area and scoop up the land first. Then focuses on making shovels, dynamites, machineries, railroads and trains, once those are ready, people will know what a real gold rush looks like.
