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

[ZachF]

Yeah about that, how are they going to provide $0.07/kWh to semi truck charging. Looking forward to that actually panning out.

The price will probably be higher because of the recent inflation, but my guess is battery storage from the gigantic amounts of wind & solar in the interior which have very low prices during oversupply.

 

[wipster]

I had the chance for a semi last night but the Halloween whiskey ruined it.

Kinda reminded me of one of my favorite albums!

 

[RobDickinson]

Good to know this thread is razor focused on the business side of tesla...

 

[wipster]

Reuters put out an article last night and the headline was Cybertruck was delayed to the end of 2023. There was no new information, except in the article they literally quotes Tesla that initial production was set to start in mid 2023.

Now Reuters changed the headline to "EXCLUSIVE Tesla's Cybertruck to start mass production at end of 2023", except the smart Yahoo reporters probably glimpsed the old headline and didn't read the content and of course they didn't read the new Reuters headline.

Journalism at its finest.

Exclusive: Tesla's Cybertruck to start mass production at end of 2023

Tesla aims to start mass production of its Cybertruck at the end of 2023, two years after the initial target for the long-awaited pickup truck Chief Executive Elon Musk unveiled in 2019, two people with knowledge of the plans told Reuters.

www.reuters.com

Ha! Said "two people with knowledge of the plan"

As you stated, journalism at it's finest. It's probably little changed from what we already knew, production will start early in the 3rd quarter, with mass production ramping up towards the end of the year. The Reuters ear hears what it wants to hear...

 

[wipster]

Good to know this thread is razor focused on the business side of tesla...

After the Twitter garbage I've been reading over the last few days, I think some friendly levity in this forum is appropriate.

 

[FSDtester#1]

Good to know this thread is razor focused on the business side of tesla...

Hmm, I think you meant laser focused .... and I agree, all posts should be that.

Edit: I think I have been out trolled. @RobDickinson , you are the master!

 

[Usain]

Kinda reminded me of one of my favorite albums!
View attachment 869986

Ohhhhhh yea. Oh yea. Everything. Everything. Everything gonna be alright this morning.

 

[Phobi]

https://twitter.com/x/status/1587556038768840712

“Bloomberg has confirmed with Drive Tesla that cars and drivers were provided by Tesla for the demonstration. The emails reviewed did not contain the names of any of the Tesla employees who attended.”

 

[Captkerosene]

Yeah about that, how are they going to provide $0.07/kWh to semi truck charging. Looking forward to that actually panning out.

Tony Seba has been saying solar and wind are cheaper than nat gas. (IIRC) This is the perfect opportunity to prove it. Megachargers will have geographic moats with strong brand loyalty and economies of scale. Whatever the price ends up being, I think we'll be the low cost producer.

 

[Boomer19]

Looks like I've learned something new, never too late for that. Apologies to @TheTalkingMule for (inadvertently) bypassing his privacy settings and revealing his last seen date.

maybe change to just “TheMule” if you’re done conversing here, wherever you are

 

[Boomer19]

Last Friday (Oct 28) morning I was on vacation and watched an extensive interview on CNBC with the SEC chair on various topics. During the live interview the newsflash popped up that there were Tesla employees helping Elon with the Twitter code review. A second CNBC interviewer interrupted and asked SEC on the legality of such actions in general. The response was that, (paraphrasing): In general, boards of companies have great latitude to make decisions on how they use their employees' efforts.

Can't find a YouTube link, but here is a screenshot that I think was from that interview.

View attachment 869818

but never question the legality of hosts of a supposed news outlet spreading false accusations and lies about a publicly traded company (or slandering its figurehead) during and outside trading hours, or inviting financial criminals on air to do the same

never question that

 

[RobDickinson]

https://twitter.com/x/status/1587556038768840712

“Bloomberg has confirmed with Drive Tesla that cars and drivers were provided by Tesla for the demonstration. The emails reviewed did not contain the names of any of the Tesla employees who attended.”

That story is somewhat confused as they are also talking about a car rented through Turo from killowats etc.

But hopefully Tesla was involved with some of it.

 

[KBF]

While we are OT,

Spoiler: Why post-apocalypse Earth still better than Mars

the earth after being clobbered by the large asteroid is still FAR more habitable than Mars is and will ever be.
It has crucial-for-life van Allen Belts (and it still would).
It has oxygen (and it still would) and an atmosphere that will hold in place (unlike Mars' will ever again no matter how much O2 or CO2 we pump into it).
It would still have the basic life substrate (microbial life) that took a couple billion years to lay down (and could only happen given the above).
Due to those factors alone, I cannot think of a global catastrophe (even nuclear war) that would leave Terra less hospitable to life than Mars.
If we want to build in a lifeless place to have a secondary colony (possibly a good idea indeed) the moon is a lot closer and the solar there is FANTASTIC compared to Mars. (For some reason I now think of the Dilbert cartoon where Dogbert is selling half price lottery tickets. Dilbert recognizes "those are a day old, they are no good anymore" and Dogbert points out "But it's a great deal. 1/2 price but only 0.000001% less chance of winning!").
Yes, keep building the rockets, great tech with many uses, maybe we'll mine the asteroid belt, but the Mars thing still makes no sense to me.
Just saying, while we are OT.

I believe your last paragraph is a key potential piece of TSLA's future dominance, if it maintains ties with SpaceX. In my opinion, mining asteroids is a major step towards the potential of an 'abundance society' (I'm using the term loosely). I don't know how necessary Optimus is to mining (maybe it only requires specialty robotics), but whoever is the first to be able to successfully mine asteroids solve a massive massive sustainability issue in manufacturing. If we could move 90% of mining off-planet, our environment would start recovering in a lot of areas.

The only company remotely close to doing this economically is SpaceX, and TSLA would likely be the first to benefit from the massive amounts of available metals (especially if Optimus is suited).

I'm not a mining expert (please contribute if you are!), but being able to reuse rockets, have huge payloads, and the use of AI navigation are key components. Doing it as cheaply as possible is essential - it has to be able to return enough materials to more than pay for the 'cost of the ticket'.

 

[Ogre]

https://twitter.com/x/status/1587556038768840712

“Bloomberg has confirmed with Drive Tesla that cars and drivers were provided by Tesla for the demonstration. The emails reviewed did not contain the names of any of the Tesla employees who attended.”

The linked article talks about possibly renting a car to make sure Tesla doesn't give them an altered version of the software.

If that is the case then this Model Y could have been rented to ensure that the software in the vehicle provided was not altered in any way to be different from the FSD Beta that is currently being used by over 160,000 testers in Canada and the US.

I've heard this hinted at previously, but it makes zero sense. If Tesla has a "Better Version" of FSD, it's absolutely in their best interest for it to be in the hands of everyone as quickly as possible. This isn't like juicing benchmarks on smartphones or graphics cards where you can juice the processor up to speeds which would cause them to overheat during prolonged use. It's also not like diesel gate where reducing performance to lower emissions makes any sense.

Nobody who had written these articles has ever really backed these comments with some kind of rational explanation of what kind of cheat Tesla would implement. It's just assumed that somehow Tesla can and would "Cheat" without any real basic for how it would work.

Here are my theories for what special hacks Tesla implements when DMV employees are driving the car:

• It refuses to run over small children.
• Absolutely won't randomly do doughnuts in intersections.
• Avoids running in "2 wheels on sidewalk" mode.
• The "Bumper Cars" Easter egg won't activate.
• The usual pass and brake check behavior is disabled.
• The point score for pedestrians and cyclists struck is hidden.

Anyone have any other thoughts on what hacks Tesla uses to fool DMV and NHTSA drivers?

 

[Thekiwi]

Anyone worried about GigaShanghai closing or being production limited in a potential lockdown this quarter (a legitimate concern), should take comfort in the fact that assuming Fremont/Berlin/Austin aren‘t impacted (from parts supply out of china), then at some point a coupel of weeks from now Shanghai would likely have already produced enough cars in the quarter that combined with full quarter production expectations from the other factories, tesla would have a production number for the quarter to exceed last quarters delivery number, even with the unlikely scenario of GigaShanghai in complete shutdown for the rest of the quarter.

Math of a hypothetical Shanghai shutdown from mid-November :

Fremont Q4: ~150k units
Berlin/Austin Q4: ~55k units
Shanghai (6.5 weeks): ~140k units
Nevada Q4: ~0.05k units

Total: ~345k units

 

[Words of HABIT]

Oh, you mean that 'M' in MAANG. I initially thought you had replaced Facebook with Microsoft (as it should be).

Today alone, market capital lost by MAANG +MS was $180.6B.
Today's Market Cap: MS -$29.5B

@sroh, good point, not sure why Microsoft was never part of FAANG. I thought it was because FAANG represented the up and coming hot new tech companies while Microsoft was old school, however Apple IPOed before Microsoft and is almost as old. Ask Cramer.

 

[Thekiwi]

The linked article talks about possibly renting a car to make sure Tesla doesn't give them an altered version of the software.



I've heard this hinted at previously, but it makes zero sense. If Tesla has a "Better Version" of FSD, it's absolutely in their best interest for it to be in the hands of everyone as quickly as possible. This isn't like juicing benchmarks on smartphones or graphics cards where you can juice the processor up to speeds which would cause them to overheat during prolonged use. It's also not like diesel gate where reducing performance to lower emissions makes any sense.

Nobody who had written these articles has ever really backed these comments with some kind of rational explanation of what kind of cheat Tesla would implement. It's just assumed that somehow Tesla can and would "Cheat" without any real basic for how it would work.

Here are my theories for what special hacks Tesla implements when DMV employees are driving the car:

• It refuses to run over small children.
• Absolutely won't randomly do doughnuts in intersections.
• Avoids running in "2 wheels on sidewalk" mode.
• The "Bumper Cars" Easter egg won't activate.
• The usual pass and brake check behavior is disabled.
• The point score for pedestrians and cyclists struck is hidden.

Anyone have any other thoughts on what hacks Tesla uses to fool DMV and NHTSA drivers?

If i had to guess in this hypothetical It would be set to a “conservative” mode rather than “aggressive” mode.

Conservative mode would lead to much longer wait times at intersections (waits for bigger gaps before entering traffic, more time given for potential pedestrians crossing etc), lower speeds (never exceeds speed limits), greater gaps for cyclists, obstacles (which may mean longer waits as it would refuse to cross centre line on a road while any oncoming traffic is visible etc)

Basically would choose extreme safety and a much slower experIence vs the current FSD Beta which strives for the middle ground of maintaining a normal human speed with the associated risk profile.

again jiust a hypothetical about what any self driving car company might do if they were trying to demo its system as safe for regulators.

 

[ZachF]

Kinda reminded me of one of my favorite albums!
View attachment 869986

Muddy Waters is awesome tho

 

[RobDickinson]

Could also route around unprotected lefts etc

 

[Bet TSLA]

The linked article talks about possibly renting a car to make sure Tesla doesn't give them an altered version of the software.



I've heard this hinted at previously, but it makes zero sense. If Tesla has a "Better Version" of FSD, it's absolutely in their best interest for it to be in the hands of everyone as quickly as possible. This isn't like juicing benchmarks on smartphones or graphics cards where you can juice the processor up to speeds which would cause them to overheat during prolonged use. It's also not like diesel gate where reducing performance to lower emissions makes any sense.

Nobody who had written these articles has ever really backed these comments with some kind of rational explanation of what kind of cheat Tesla would implement. It's just assumed that somehow Tesla can and would "Cheat" without any real basic for how it would work.

Here are my theories for what special hacks Tesla implements when DMV employees are driving the car:

• It refuses to run over small children.
• Absolutely won't randomly do doughnuts in intersections.
• Avoids running in "2 wheels on sidewalk" mode.
• The "Bumper Cars" Easter egg won't activate.
• The usual pass and brake check behavior is disabled.
• The point score for pedestrians and cyclists struck is hidden.

Anyone have any other thoughts on what hacks Tesla uses to fool DMV and NHTSA drivers?

These people have no professional interest in how good Tesla FSD is. So long as it's not fully autonomous, all they care about it how it conforms to regulations. So they'll be looking at what warnings (that the driver is driving, not the car) are displayed where and when. They'll be interested in whether the car encourages people to disobey the rules of the road. They'll look for any sign that use of the software makes drivers dangerous in any way. They'll be looking for how it can be bypassed or gamed.

They'll also be looking for any hint that Tesla is allowing people think that the software makes the car drive itself. This would be any people in the population of those who might get into the car, so more than just drivers. What if a 5yo who doesn't read English gets into the car and thinks it can drive itself? How does Tesla prevent that poor child from being fooled?

Remember, it's similar people who got Tesla to make FSD Beta worse by coming to a full stop at stop signs all the time rather than driving like people do.

Edit: Note that all of these could be significantly different in "modified to make regulators happy" software.