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

[Singuy]

I mean seriously...Google running out of money? Next year you'll see Geely delivering robotaxis for them to sell service at scale across many metro regions. That's the window I see for Tesla because people will discover the robotaxi business sucks. Just my hunch. I think robotaxi will be grossly crowded and lack profits. I also think Tesla will be frozen out of China due to security concerns. But Waymo won't run out of money on the way to robotaxi service. Cruise..no idea. Mobileye no idea. Waymo is doing real robotaxi rides now. Speed limit is basically highway driving speds. Door to Door. Still working at things but they seem to finally be scaling. Until Geely delivers cars they only need to do so much so fast. Once Geely starts deliveries...poof..no profits. 2024 My prediction we discover robotaxis will produce no profit.

Google is known to cut programs off if they don't produce the income they expected. Waymo is the biggest money loser Google has ever tolerated, however they are pushing Waymo to seek outside investors vs handing them free cash. This also means their shares are being given away to outside investors. If they showed so much promise and is this cash cow, you would think google would support them vs letting outsiders in on the action.

Anyways, Waymo looks to be rising 2-3 billion a year. Cash burn is probably double of cruise.

Alphabet's self-driving car company Waymo announces $2.5 billion investment round

Waymo previously raised $2.25 billion in its first external funding round last year.

www.cnbc.com

 

[Papafox]

bit of history,
1 week before Tesla officially did a cross country trip in a Tesla, a father daughter duo did a New York city to California. The dad was following supercharger activations and permits (my memory fades so apologies if vaguely incorrect) and took a chance that a link would be completed by the time they got to the charger (it was!)
here is map of extent of Superchargers back in 2013- 2014 ( only 9 years ago!), only S 85's could make the longer jumps
(see recreation of Broder run, Feb 2013)
article links to Wired article

View attachment 919050

First Cross-Country Tesla Trip Takes Less Than a Week, Costs $0

It turns out you can drive across the country in an electric vehicle using only Tesla's Supercharger stations to keep going. That assumes you really, really, want to go through South Dakota. But that's exactly what a father-daughter team did Saturday.

www.wired.com

Tesla's that recreated the Broder run Feb 16, 2013, only S 85's could do the jump from rest area superchargers in Delaware to NYC
(a young couple heard about it and joined for a lark )(few S 60's in photo)

By 2014 the supercharger network (plus assorted EV and RV chargers) had grown sufficiently to make a 50 state tour in a Tesla possible. Michael Fritts and Lita Elbertson took the 50 state first in 2014 with a Model S 85. What's the value of a long road trip if you can't bring the dog along, though? Papafox and Iceman the Tesla dog completed the 50 state tour in 2015 in a Model S 70D (I still own it), becoming the 2nd successful 50 state tour in an EV.

Note: To the best of my knowledge, nobody has been misguided enough so as to attempt a 50 state EV tour with a cat on board.

 

[JusRelax]

New behavior by FSD - when making a turn, if it needs to be in the far lane for an immediate second turn, it will move (safely) directly across multiple lanes to be able to make it in time.

Also, when waiting in the 'median', the car moved up more when a car was approaching so that the Tesla's rear end wouldn't be in the way of the oncoming vehicle.

EDIT: Actually, it sounds like the driver pushes the pedal to move the car forward out of the way of the oncoming vehicle. He didn't state that he did so, though.

This, IMO was a very impressive turn.

 

[MC3OZ]

My prediction we discover robotaxis will produce no profit.

To work out profit margins we need to consider income and expenses.

On the income side, in a competitive market, all operators will charge roughly the same amount per mile.

Fixed overheads possibly roughly the same, but fleet size determines the effective cost per mile of fixed overheads.

Then we come to the vehicle cost component, which impacts on cost per mile and fleet size.

It is a fairly safe assumption that the "all in" cost to produce a Gen3 Robotaxi is less than $25K, perhaps 20-30% less than $25K.

I doubt that the cost of a Robotaxi for a competitor is much less than $100K, certainly not less than $50K.

The competitors per vehicle cost is 2X-4X what Tesla is paying.

Let's assume electricity and insurance is roughly on par, even though I expect Tesla has a small advantage there.

For things like tires and cleaning I expect Tesla to have good solutions.

My hunch if every operator is charging roughly the same amount per mile, Tesla is making much higher profits than the competitors and will rapidly have a much larger fleet, which then results in a higher level of service. A Robotaxi turning up when you want one and where you want one is all important.

IMO fleet size, vehicle cost, and geographic spread of the service are important, because cost and convenience are important.

 

[AndrewZ]

New behavior by FSD - when making a turn, if it needs to be in the far lane for an immediate second turn, it will move (safely) directly across multiple lanes to be able to make it in time.

Also, when waiting in the 'median', the car moved up more when a car was approaching so that the Tesla's rear end wouldn't be in the way of the oncoming vehicle.

EDIT: Actually, it sounds like the driver pushes the pedal to move the car forward out of the way of the oncoming vehicle. He didn't state that he did so, though.

This, IMO was a very impressive turn.

This person is taking some big risks for the sake of making the performance look good and then is glossing over them

To me this looks like misapplication of the median logic implemented for Chuck's UPL, you can see it pop in briefly. There is no median, the vehicle should not be stopping in the lanes of oncoming traffic and people were clearly braking to avoid smashing into him (at least they weren't staring at their phones). But hey, no disengagements!

 

[Electroman]

Another hit story about FSD. However, this one has a lot of detail. Author has done his homework. This does not mean i agree with it.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/03/19/elon-musk-tesla-driving/

He did his homework? really?

That guy, Faiz Siddiqui, is a Elon Musk hating troll. His job is to write something negative about Tesla and Musk. He probably has authored around 50+ negative articles on Tesla and ZERO anything neutral or positive.

He keeps citing the removal of radar over and over again as a huge mistake by Elon. Now we know the radar tech they had at that time was pretty much useless to advance FSD. And then of course you can always get anonymous and ex-employees to reinforce any negative view point you want to throw at a company. There are 4 or 5 well known talking points these articles always regurgitate. Like the employee/Autopilot tester who was going overboard in his YouTube videos claiming FSD is a killer, and was rightly fired.

There is absolutely nothing that is new in that article that we don't know. He strings a list of unrelated and irrelevant items, dramatizes them giving a huge negative color, to paint a monster picture of Elon. Autopilot employees keystrokes are monitored - evil Musk is a control freak !! Turns out, they are measuring the effectiveness of manual labeling to see how to improve that process, especially when compared to AI based auto-labeling. You cant improve what you can't measure. !

That whole article is not just a hit piece, but it is also a $hit piece.

 

[Tony73]

Google is known to cut programs off if they don't produce the income they expected. Waymo is the biggest money loser Google has ever tolerated, however they are pushing Waymo to seek outside investors vs handing them free cash. This also means their shares are being given away to outside investors. If they showed so much promise and is this cash cow, you would think google would support them vs letting outsiders in on the action.

Anyways, Waymo looks to be rising 2-3 billion a year. Cash burn is probably double of cruise.

Alphabet's self-driving car company Waymo announces $2.5 billion investment round

Waymo previously raised $2.25 billion in its first external funding round last year.

www.cnbc.com

Great Point !
Waymo probably needs to raise $2 to $3 billion a year for the next decade to get to autonomy at scale. Their cash burn will get a lot worse before it gets better.

Tesla on the other hand only needs a million FSD subscribers to generate $2.5 billion a year in cash to pay for their robotaxi program which will be infinitely be cheaper to deploy and more profitable than anything waymo or cruise can do.

 

[Electroman]

This person is taking some big risks for the sake of making the performance look good and then is glossing over them

To me this looks like misapplication of the median logic implemented for Chuck's UPL, you can see it pop in briefly. There is no median, the vehicle should not be stopping in the lanes of oncoming traffic and people were clearly braking to avoid smashing into him (at least they weren't staring at their phones). But hey, no disengagements!

That was very impressive. That is exactly how most people would take a left turn on a busy street where it is not always possible to get traffic freeing up on both sides. Otherwise you will be waiting for ever.

So you go ahead when the traffic eases up on the near side, making sure there are no more than one or two cars still coming in on the far side. And then after a few seconds of wait on the median you proceed further. Now it is possible that your rear end might be jutting and obstructing traffic, but that is okay. This is not a highway. Every car on the street is expected to watch for slowing traffic, stopped traffic and sometimes cross traffic.

I am zipping on the left lane on a three lane (on one side) road and I see a car from a side street cross the three lanes but unable to complete the left turn on time because of variety of reasons. What do I do? I slow down or switch lanes if possible. That is expected of me.

Brilliant maneuver. I can't figure out if the driver actually gave it a push to inch further up.

 

[Artful Dodger]

Saudi's jerked the rug out from under Credit Suisse this morning:

Credit Suisse shares slide 24%, trading halted after Saudi backer rules out further assistance | CNBC.com

Sasha Yanshin dishes the dirt on Credit Suisse mismanagement which lead to their takeover by UBS:

Credit Suisse Just Got F*cked | Sasha Yanshin | Youtube (2 hrs ago)

 

[AndrewZ]

That was very impressive. That is exactly how most people would take a left turn on a busy street where it is not always possible to get traffic freeing up on both sides. If not then you will be waiting for ever.

So you go ahead when the traffic eases up on the near side, making sure there are no more than one or two cars still coming in on the far side. And then after a few seconds of wait on the median you proceed further. Now it is possible that your rear end might be jutting and obstructing traffic, but that is okay. This is not a highway. Every car on the street is expected to watch for slowing traffic, stopped traffic and sometimes cross traffic.

I am zipping on the left lane on a three lane (on one side) road and I see a car from a side street cross the three lanes but unable to complete the left turn on time because of variety of reasons. What do I do? I slow down or switch lanes if possible. That is expected of me.

Brilliant maneuver. I can't figure out if the driver actually gave it a push to inch further up.

Rumour has it the person who executed that turn flawlessly and without pause right before the Beta car had been waiting there for a fortnight

I don’t think it’s good behaviour and is not how I would do the turn as a human driver, hence why the guy was worried about being honked at. The vehicle perceived a median where there wasn't one, and it required an intervention to get it out of immediate traffic flow and then had vehicles swerving around it in the opposing left lane.

 

[generalenthu]

During the Oscars last week, a south Indian movie RRR won the award for the best song. To commemorate the occasion, about 100 Tesla owners got together and arranged their cars to spell out RRR and performed a customized lightshow set to the song.

Was open to all, but Tesla was at the center. Sounded wonderful, though I was nowhere near.

Looks like a bunch of other things like kids performing the dance etc., happened before the event.

 

[KBF]

Apologies if this has already been posted (I did a forum search and came up empty).

Tesla reinstates Park Assist distance measurements for cars without ultrasonic sensors (USS) with 2022.45.11

Tesla has finally implemented a vision-based solution to bring back Park Assist distance measurements to cars without ultrasonic sensors (USS). Tesla removed the sensors, and the ability to measure distances to nearby objects, last year. […]

driveteslacanada.ca

According to this article, park assist will be back shortly, and better than USS - 360° measurements would be awesome, IMO. Maybe Tesla wasn't stupid for going 100% Vision after all (though the delay between removing USS and this software development was not cool: in the end, though, it is definitely a #firstworldproblem...)

I've driven for most of my life without fancy parking measurements, and haven't scraped up any of my cars... It's nice, but... I'm also someone that prefers to look backwards rather than rely on rear cameras!

I guess we'll have to wait and see how well this solution works - I'm sure it will not please everyone.

 

[AndrewZ]

Rumour has it the person who executed that turn flawlessly and without pause right before the Beta car had been waiting there for a fortnight

I don’t think it’s good behaviour and is not how I would do the turn as a human driver, hence why the guy was worried about being honked at. The vehicle perceived a median where there wasn't one, and it required an intervention to get it out of immediate traffic flow and then had vehicles swerving around it in the opposing left lane.

Following up here before we get into the stock market open tomorrow, this FSD Beta tester has now posted a video of Downtown Chicago driving and dude is seriously living on the edge. The whole video is painful, but look at this behaviour and near collision starting @ 42:30

 

[Tommy O]

Following up here before we get into the stock market open tomorrow, this FSD Beta tester has now posted a video of Downtown Chicago driving and dude is seriously living on the edge. The whole video is painful, but look at this behaviour and near collision starting @ 42:30

Please just buy a tesla and at least do the $200/mo sub for FSD beta so we can stop getting these asinine reaction posts. There is a LOT to legitimately complain about, but it is the most aggravating thing in the universe for people who do not own the product to make complaints about it.

 

[SOULPEDL]

Following up here before we get into the stock market open tomorrow, this FSD Beta tester has now posted a video of Downtown Chicago driving and dude is seriously living on the edge. The whole video is painful, but look at this behaviour and near collision starting @ 42:30

Oh, let’s release Autopilot here first. /s
Or we could try it where lanes are wide and marked clearly, weather is good…

From now on, instead of calling this approach geofenced, let’s call it safer-placed and avoid that neg cashflow connotation associated with Engineering supervision or waiting until 2029 for AGI that can drive anywhere anytime.

 

[SOULPEDL]

Sasha Yanshin dishes the dirt on Credit Suisse mismanagement which lead to their takeover by UBS:

Credit Suisse Just Got F*cked | Sasha Yanshin | Youtube (2 hrs ago)

He doesn't mince words - lol.
Doesn't seem like interest rate adjustments are attacking the correct problem. Remember when we actually held certificates? What a concept.

 

[Baumisch]

Ark Invest used to tout that Tesla should have started the ride-hailing service with a driver and begin collecting revenue until full autonomy is possible. Tesla never did that either.

well you could argue the Texas Loop kinda does that - still not using FSDb for the tunnel part or any part :/

 

[AndrewZ]

Please just buy a tesla and at least do the $200/mo sub for FSD beta so we can stop getting these asinine reaction posts. There is a LOT to legitimately complain about, but it is the most aggravating thing in the universe for people who do not own the product to make complaints about it.

I’m not complaining, and one person’s experience of Beta in one location still does not provide perspective on the program as a whole because performance varies hugely based on location, driving environment, and a range of other factors. Having a complete picture of Beta, or at least a less incomplete picture, will always require observing the program beyond one narrow slice in a corner of one city in one state — especially if the goal is generalized robotaxis. We could expand that beyond one country.

That’s evidenced in this video as it sounds like he had not previously tried Beta in the downtown environment and its a totally different experience from his regular testing grounds 40-50mins away.

 

[Bet TSLA]

It does look like Tesla is finally pushing FSD Beta V11 (in the form of 11.3.2) to a wider population.

Looking at TeslaFi, I see it tracking 19000 vehicles. Of these, 5432 are running some version of FSD Beta. That's 28.6%.

At the moment 5246 are on 10.69.25, 10.69.25.1, and 10.69.25.2, mostly on the last of these. A few, 162 so far, have updated to 11.3.2. There are 428 that have the update pending. That's only 3.0% of those on FSD Beta updated so far, with another 7.9% pending.

So it's not a "wide release" yet, at even potentially being only barely over 10% of the potential customers, but maybe by morning we'll see it go wide. It does indicate to me that Tesla is willing to sample a bigger audience than its chosen few, and maybe 11.3.2 will really go wide rather than us waiting for 11.3.3.

Sadly, it's 2022.45.11, so not based off of the latest branch. Meaning that anybody who has updated to anything 2023.xxx is not going to be able to opt in at this point and get the latest FSD Beta. On TeslaFi, that's 64% of all the tracked vehicles.

Note that these numbers are from around 11:52PM PDT, and are subject to rapid change. But they haven't changed much in the last half hour.

 

[deshkart]

What is Tesla's Mystery Magnet?

The automaker is swearing off rare-earth elements—but experts are doubtful

spectrum.ieee.org

Source - Twitter.