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

[Tony73]

And as we see, the US is getting less and less relevant as time goes on, and we are on the period the drama is through the roof to try to stay relevant

With the manufacturing shift to China on the last decades, it opened the door to irrelevance. If you don’t have manufacturing what do you have? Software is nice and necessary, but not without the rest

We just need the whole world to ignore more and more US drama

And Tesla will be fine, and even better with all the drama to the background and nobody paying attention anymore

If manufacturing was the be all and end all, Foxconn would have a higher market cap than Apple instead of 5% of apple’s market cap.
Sure there are industries like auto where manufacturing is still a core competency but there are many others where it is not and captures very little of the end value of the product.
Apple does not need to make phones to capture 85% of smartphone profits just like Nike does not need to make sneakers.
The shift of manufacturing to China is a good thing for China and the world. It has made China more relevant. It has not in any way made the US irrelevant.

Incidentally, contrary to the myth that the US makes nothing, US manufacturing output is at an all time high and second only to china.

Manufacturing Output by Country

www.macrotrends.net

 

[2daMoon]

I wonder who among the MMs buys the drinks when they nail the close at exactly 185.00?

 

[Bet TSLA]

If you are alleging that we can't trust follower counts on Twitter now, ummm really? Also the follower counts and associated rank distribution of top accounts is still almost exactly the same as in 2021, so that would imply that previous Twitter management also was lying about this. I really doubt it.

Well, I don't trust them. What I was asking was whether you do. The notable exception in follower count rank is Elon. There's already significant evidence from the released code that he's treated special.

Over the years I've learned to pay no attention to supposed Tesla "news" unless it was in SEC filings, court filings, Tesla published documents or talks, and similar. For Twitter, I don't see anything public I can trust to be true. Elon's statements regarding Twitter? Why would I believe any of them? His statements that I can determine the truth of are mostly false.

 

[StarFoxisDown!]

So latest version of FSD beta has now gone out to the entire fleet. Fastest rate of deployment from deployment from employees to all FSD users ever. The rate of FSD updates/bug fixes has become weekly (for the past 4-5 weeks straight now).

With US sales actually starting to grow now thanks to Austin production starting to hit mass production volume, the number of new FSD users will start to materially increase at a faster rate now every quarter over past quarters. The rate of data collection will start to accelerate which only speeds up the rate of improvement.

I'm still hoping Tesla decides to do away with the ability to buy FSD and switch every new order to the monthly subscription model. Maybe do announce that all existing/new orders and current Tesla owners have until the next month to buy/add to their order FSD outright or lose that option forever. Once the North American fleet grows large enough, which thanks to Austin will happen sooner rather later, FSD subscriptions will add a materially amount of profit/margin on a consistent, growing basis.

The moment that happens along, along with Energy hitting a big enough to take the load on revenue/earnings growth, the Tesla as an automaker really dies forever.

Now if someone just fast forward me to Q4 2023 so I can just not hear "margins destruction" for the next 6 months, I'd really appreciate it

 

[transpondster]

Just to pull this info out. M3LR Dual motor seems to be around 52990 Euros - so 5k cheaper for Fleet Single Motor?

M3LRs are now € 49 to 51k +1k for delivery, which we don't know if included or not in LR RWD mentioned price.

edit: Belgium seems to have higher prices, so maybe comparing to 53k is logical...

 

[Ogre]

I wonder who among the MMs buys the drinks when they nail the close at exactly 185.00?

They all buy drinks for their buddies running the SEC. That's how it works.

 

[mongo]

I'm still hoping Tesla decides to do away with the ability to buy FSD and switch every new order to the monthly subscription model. Maybe do announce that anyone has the next month to buy FSD outright or lose that option forever. Once the North American fleet grows large enough, which thanks to Austin will happen sooner rather later, FSD subscriptions will add a materially amount of profit/margin.

Excluding OG Cybertruck reservation holders, right?
Right???

 

[CorneliusXX]

No adult conscious black man would just ride along.

This implies you think Elon is inherently racist. You should justify that, otherwise people might think you are a BBC reporter.

 

[Max Plaid]

Lol, only if you order the Carbon Ceramic Brake Kit! (that €20K option should have some nice margins...)

Model S Plaid Carbon Ceramic Brake Kit - Tesla Shop shop.tesla.com › product › model-s-plaid-carbon-ceramic-brake-kit​

S PLAID ON TRACK + TESLA CARBON CERAMIC BRAKES = LAP RECORD !!!

Cheers to the Tartans among us!

One hour drive to the autobahns from here... although the stretch from north of Hamburg to Danish border is my favourite, which is quite a bit further - 300km and not too busy once you get out of Hamburg suburbs. Excellent Porsche-taunting territory!

 

[Max Plaid]

I'd like to nominate this as a post of merit.

Well it has more substance than a lot of the tripe posted in the last few days (you know who you are...)

 

[Hiline]

I will echo James Douma's comments on the price cuts and advertising question.



Linked to relevant timestamp. Whole interview is top-notch, as usual.

Let's unpack what Mr. Douma meant. Tesla has detailed, comprehensive data on everything that could possibly be relevant and measurable for making this decision. For example:

• Usage stats for the Tesla app and Tesla.com, such as page access requests, average time spent browsing, how often people play with the vehicle configurators and what different options they select, etc.
• What new refreshes or models are in the pipeline and when they intend to reveal them and begin production
• Foot traffic statistics at the showrooms
• Detailed geographic location data on all of these measures (except for the internet stuff for the minority of people using VPNs)
• How Supercharger and Service Center construction in an area subsequently affects demand
• Amount of inventory in every delivery center on the planet
• Test drive impressions and customer comments
• Surveys of employees at showrooms regarding customer questions and interests
• Initial quality complaints upon delivery
• Frequency of buying upsells like paint or FSD
• Mix of SR/LR/P variants
• Referral code usage
• Repeat purchase data for each customer or household
• Changes following posts on Twitter, major product reveal events on Youtube, etc.

I would be surprised if Tesla doesn't have at least one person (but probably a whole team) whose full-time job is to study this stuff and develop automated analysis tools to integrate all this data into insights. Like James, I personally trust Tesla to make the best decisions possible with this treasure trove of relevant information that no other OEM has due to lacking this degree of vertical integration and software prowess. Tesla would have to be incredibly incompetent at marketing and business analysis not to outperform all of us external analysts on strategizing this.

----------------------

Furthermore, Elon has said multiple times in the last few months that automotive demand has been weakening globally, for Tesla and the whole industry, and has said that higher rising interest rates are the main problem. We also can see signs of this in the growing inventory levels at dealerships of other OEMs. The credit market is almost certainly a major factor driving the recent price cuts.

Indeed, car sales for the whole industry remain significantly lower than the in years past. For instance, in the US, sales are depressed around 10-20% relative to 2020 and early 2021, which was already much lower than the peak years of 2017-2019. Tesla is selling into tough macros for automotive. Maybe this is due to lingering supply chain shortages, but maybe it's demand too.

Still, there's yet more nuance to these pricing and marketing decisions.

1) Tesla has also been saying they're finding that the sensitivity to price has been very high, which aligns with the expectations of fundamental microeconomic theory for expensive purchases that constitute a large portion of the average customer's overall household budget. Price cuts are the simplest and most effective way for Tesla to drive order flow in the short term. At Investor Day and the Q4 earnings call, they emphasized the dominant importance of price and affordability, and said that the primary limiting factor is affordability.




2) In line with the affordability consideration, gas price fluctuations appear to strongly influence short-term interest in buying Tesla cars as well as other EVs, hybrids and other eco vehicle options. Gas prices have fallen majorly since the peak in summer of 2022, which was when Tesla vehicle demand skyrocketed and the company hiked prices to record highs to stave of the stampede of orders pushing the backlogs to untenable lengths. Below is a chart I made with data from the US Energy Information Administration. Gas prices have returned to 2021 levels and so have Tesla's average vehicle prices, roughly speaking. Granted, correlation alone does not imply causation, and even if there is causation here it's probably not the only significant factor, but I'm confident the decline in fuel prices has played a meaningful role. I don't understand why this isn't getting more attention in the conversation these days.

View attachment 928412


3) Tesla's demand curve is not static because it's increasing over time. The positive feedback loop of Tesla's word of mouth sales force continually drives more interest in the products even if Tesla does absolutely nothing to advertise. The more Teslas Tesla sells, the more Teslas Tesla sells. This means that simple analysis like "Tesla needs to drop prices to sell more cars as production volume increases" is not necessarily true, at least until Tesla is saturating each market segment they currently serve. The customers are educating other future customers and providing social proof that the cars are good.


4) There's big-picture branding, marketing and competitive positioning considerations. Tesla's brand is partially built around *not* doing traditional advertising. Almost everyone bought one either because of independent research or someone telling them about it. I have seen multiple people's eyes light up with surprise and intrigue when I've told them that last year Tesla was the top-selling and most-profitable luxury car brand in America despite not paying for a single ad. That's the kind of fact that makes people think "hmm, there must be something special going on here and I want to know more". Everyone knows that ads are often misleading and deceptive, but winning on sales without them is a strong signal that can't be faked. This narrative is spoiled if Tesla starts paying for ads, and it would open up new possibilities for negative attacks on demand fears whenever Tesla increases the amount of advertising.

This lack of paid advertising also makes Tesla ownership kind of feel like being in a club of special people "in the know" who either are up-to-date on the latest technology and smart enough to recognize something good when they find it, or they have cool friends who explained it to them and gave test rides. Marketing primarily via cult proselytization actually is a viable strategy for a business like Tesla.



I think Tesla isn't too concerned about short-term cash flow. The mission is the focus and that mainly depends on mass production in the 2030s and beyond. Now that the company has no financial stress and a very well capitalized balance sheet, the priority needs to be targeting the brand positioning for the future. The mission demands optimization for the long game. A few billion dollars around the margins in the next few years is just a rounding error in comparison to the impact of improving performance in the 2030s and 40s.


5) Price cuts themselves generate attention for Tesla that's tantamount to advertising.

6) Expectations of imminent refreshes of Model 3 may be influencing short-term demand

7) I've saved the best for last: Tesla already has a massive social media presence, especially on Twitter, with Tesla's account having 20M followers and Elon's having 135M followers, and this lets them advertise for free. Tesla's social media presence is *elite* among major consumer brands and it's more than an order of magnitude ahead of other automotive OEMs.

Of the top 50 accounts on Twitter, almost all of them are famous individuals, not organizations. Elon's account is now #1, having recently passed Barack Obama's account. For the few organizations in the top 50, it's mainly sports teams/leagues, social networks, and top news media. Beyond these particular industries, Tesla is one of the most followed organizations of any kind on Twitter and is getting closer to this elite level with every passing year. In fact, I was unable to find any companies selling physical goods to consumers that have more Twitter presence than Tesla. This is especially remarkable considering how few customers Tesla actually has so far compared to companies like Walmart, Nike, Starbucks or McDonald's. Watch what happens as time goes on and Tesla really goes mainstream and is putting up Toyota-like sales numbers.

Tesla also probably benefits indirectly from SpaceX driving traffic and attention to Tesla's tweets. SpaceX has 29M followers.
View attachment 928399

Some of this, of course, depends on which social media platform each company prioritizes. For example, Apple has an order of magnitude more subscribers and views on Youtube than Tesla has. Many companies are more active on Facebook than Tesla is. Nevertheless, Twitter is the biggest platform for businesses to update the public on their products and services, and you only need traction on one platform anyway, because people will share compelling content on other platforms and in real life. Facebook, Google and Youtube get more advertising revenue but for direct engagement I'm pretty sure Twitter is #1. Tesla's account garners about 1-2M views on normal tweets and every few days exceeds 10M on more notable tweets like the Cybertruck crash test demo video from April Fool's Day. This is approximately the same view count as President Biden's tweets. In contrast, Mercedes-Benz rarely gets more than 100k views on a tweet at best.

So, Tesla already is advertising and educating consumers on the products. The question is actually whether Tesla should spend money on bribing other companies to promote the ads beyond what comes from subscribed followers and the organic interest generated by the Twitter & Youtube suggestion algorithms. I think competitors pay for ads fundamentally because they and their products are not intrinsically interesting enough per se, but Tesla does not have this limitation.

Tesla for sure has a lot of data on Tesla owners. Whom they can't collect data on is non-owners, and this is why I find it odd that Tesla is not trying to understand the target customers beyond their existing customers. Does Tesla even have a marketing department? If there is a team that collectively decides that Tesla's best marketing strategy is not to advertise at all, following meticulous analysis including customer research, I would believe that this is done deliberately. As far as we know, Tesla isn't doing any marketing just because Elon says so.

To address a couple of your other points:
1. Twitter following doesn't translate to target customers. There are plenty of potential buyers that don't care about Twitter, as many anecdotes would tell you, and we can assume that many of those Twitter followers are just interested in Elon Musk's political views and have no money for or interest in buying a Tesla vehicle.
2. Price sensitivity analysis needs to be constantly refreshed as confounding variables change. That price elasticity of demand was x back in 2019 doesn't mean it's going to be x today. Furthermore, price cuts are very expensive, compared to marketing, generally speaking. Experimenting with marketing is better use of money than experimenting with pricing. Using pricing as the only lever to influence demand is a costly endeavor.
3. The demand curve of everything shifts over time. That the more a product sells, the more interest there is in that product is a general rule that applies to all products of all kinds. This doesn't mean that companies should not do marketing. Do you think that when the iPhone was the clearly superior smartphone back in 2008-2009 Apple should not have advertised their product?
4. If Tesla has exhausted the well-off, well-informed customer pool, I'd argue that they should next target the well-off, less well-informed customers rather than the price-conscious, well-informed customers, because I doubt a $1-2k price cut would influence a price-conscious customer to go from not buy to buy when Tesla vehicles are priced into the premium vehicle segment - if anything, a minuscule price cut would raise expectations of further price cuts and would encourage would-be buyers to wait.

 

[thx1139]

Maybe Elon will put an unedited version out on Twitter?

You think he will get it?

 

[Gigapress]

And as we see, the US is getting less and less relevant as time goes on, and we are on the period the drama is through the roof to try to stay relevant

With the manufacturing shift to China on the last decades, it opened the door to irrelevance. If you don’t have manufacturing what do you have? Software is nice and necessary, but not without the rest

We just need the whole world to ignore more and more US drama

And Tesla will be fine, and even better with all the drama to the background and nobody paying attention anymore

The US definitely has lots of manufacturing and in fact is manufacturing more than ever, although it's lower as a percentage of overall US GDP and employment than in the past. Economies are much more than just manufacturing. Also, manufacturing and software are deeply interdependent nowadays, so it doesn't make sense to separate them as if one is more fundamental. Yin and Yang.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing_in_the_United_States

The United States also has:

• The largest GDP in the world (though China is growing faster), accounting for a quarter of the entire world economy

(wikipedia)

• The largest, best equipped military and a massive nuclear arsenal slightly behind Russia's
• The 3rd-largest population of any nation
• Silicon valley + An overwhelming dominance of the global software sector including AI
• The US$, the global reserve currency
• New York City, the most influential single city in the world (principle global financial center, UN headquarters, etc.)
• An extremely high concentration of elite research universities
• A permanent seat on the UN Security Council
• A population full of native English speakers (the most important 21st-century lingua franca for international business, politics and diplomacy)
• Exceptionally high net immigration of many of the world's most talented people
• 56 out of the 100 most highly valued public companies on the planet
  • Companies ranked by Market Cap - CompaniesMarketCap.com
• Abundant natural resources for agriculture, mining, forestry, energy production and tourism
• Most of the world's leading aerospace companies and factories
• An unusually high degree of ethnic diversity
  • (For a highly developed country not suffering from lack of national unity and perpetual sectarian violence resulting from that diversity, such as Afghanistan)
• The headquarters and most of the key employees of all of the Musk companies
• Alaska, which is becoming increasingly important for intercontinental aviation and eventually Arctic maritime trade as sea ice retreats further towards the pole

Ignoring our problems and drama that get excessive attention on the global stage is probably wise. We have a lot of stupid stuff happening here and sometimes we and our leaders do bad things that hurt ourselves and foreigners. After the collapse of the USSR, we've spent three decades living in a world with one superpower. With the rise of China we are entering a new era with a new bipolar global power structure, but the USA isn't going to stop being an influential outlier any time soon. Discounting US economic, social and political influence and anticipating imminent irrelevance is probably not wise, especially for investors in a global, US-based company that's also intertwined with a family of other US-based companies (SpaceX, Boring, Neuralink, X/Twitter).

 

[stealthyc]

With US sales actually starting to grow now thanks to Austin production starting to hit mass production volume, the number of new FSD users will start to materially increase at a faster rate now every quarter over past quarters. The rate of data collection will start to accelerate which only speeds up the rate of improvement.

It will certainly be interesting to see when the average person feels like it is "good enough" to spend money on (based on maybe driving in a friends car with it etc). Right now I would be pretty astonished to see the take rate increase much as overall it doesn't work well for the average driver. Clearly it can depend on where you live perhaps, but it's not really super usable for general city-driving other than as a novelty.

A lot of Youtubers definitely show "good" drives. For example I drive in the same city as DirtyTesla, and I could easily provide a route within blocks of where he drives in which the car cannot function correctly and will require intervention after intervention. These are not super weird back streets or anything, they are ones I travel for regular trips to stores and around town and so forth, and the car frankly just is not capable of driving in a sensible fashion yet. To be clear I am not trying to say FSD Beta is "bad" or anything, and it certainly improves over time, but while I enjoy watching it evolve, it is very far from being a hands-off drive-anywhere-around-town type experience.

I should add that I'm not trying to say someone like DirtyTesla is only intentionally showing good drives, just that a given route a block away from another can be the difference between apparent 100% success and 100% failure.

 

[Max Plaid]

This implies you think Elon is inherently racist. You should justify that, otherwise people might think you are a BBC reporter.

Anecdotally, I was at Brussels showroom/SC today for the seasonal tyre swap on my MXPl and saw some, how to put this, erm, non-white folks, one lady clearly an existing owner there for service another couple coming to see the cars. This was interesting for me as to date most Tesla people have been caucasians, mostly middle-aged, but trending younger over time. In addition a couple of Asian folks came to the showroom too. Do they think Elon is a racist? Or maybe they don't care... or perhaps they see through the media bias... or perhaps they're not in the Twitter bubble...

Additionally interesting to note that the customer service manager was heaping out the sales teal due to the crazy demand, and a transporter of MY was delivered while I was there - the wave unwindeth

While Wall Street and cretins drone about price-cut and margins, Tesla is stealthily taking over

Bonus, on the same street: the Lucid "coming in 2025" showroom is still there (place your bets...) and BYD has an "available immediately" sign in the showroom window...

 

[Max Plaid]

I will echo James Douma's comments on the price cuts and advertising question.



Linked to relevant timestamp. Whole interview is top-notch, as usual.

Let's unpack what Mr. Douma meant. Tesla has detailed, comprehensive data on everything that could possibly be relevant and measurable for making this decision. For example:

• Usage stats for the Tesla app and Tesla.com, such as page access requests, average time spent browsing, how often people play with the vehicle configurators and what different options they select, etc.
• What new refreshes or models are in the pipeline and when they intend to reveal them and begin production
• Foot traffic statistics at the showrooms
• Detailed geographic location data on all of these measures (except for the internet stuff for the minority of people using VPNs)
• How Supercharger and Service Center construction in an area subsequently affects demand
• Amount of inventory in every delivery center on the planet
• Test drive impressions and customer comments
• Surveys of employees at showrooms regarding customer questions and interests
• Initial quality complaints upon delivery
• Frequency of buying upsells like paint or FSD
• Mix of SR/LR/P variants
• Referral code usage
• Repeat purchase data for each customer or household
• Changes following posts on Twitter, major product reveal events on Youtube, etc.

I would be surprised if Tesla doesn't have at least one person (but probably a whole team) whose full-time job is to study this stuff and develop automated analysis tools to integrate all this data into insights. Like James, I personally trust Tesla to make the best decisions possible with this treasure trove of relevant information that no other OEM has due to lacking this degree of vertical integration and software prowess. Tesla would have to be incredibly incompetent at marketing and business analysis not to outperform all of us external analysts on strategizing this.

----------------------

Furthermore, Elon has said multiple times in the last few months that automotive demand has been weakening globally, for Tesla and the whole industry, and has said that higher rising interest rates are the main problem. We also can see signs of this in the growing inventory levels at dealerships of other OEMs. The credit market is almost certainly a major factor driving the recent price cuts.

Indeed, car sales for the whole industry remain significantly lower than the in years past. For instance, in the US, sales are depressed around 10-20% relative to 2020 and early 2021, which was already much lower than the peak years of 2017-2019. Tesla is selling into tough macros for automotive. Maybe this is due to lingering supply chain shortages, but maybe it's demand too.

Still, there's yet more nuance to these pricing and marketing decisions.

1) Tesla has also been saying they're finding that the sensitivity to price has been very high, which aligns with the expectations of fundamental microeconomic theory for expensive purchases that constitute a large portion of the average customer's overall household budget. Price cuts are the simplest and most effective way for Tesla to drive order flow in the short term. At Investor Day and the Q4 earnings call, they emphasized the dominant importance of price and affordability, and said that the primary limiting factor is affordability.




2) In line with the affordability consideration, gas price fluctuations appear to strongly influence short-term interest in buying Tesla cars as well as other EVs, hybrids and other eco vehicle options. Gas prices have fallen majorly since the peak in summer of 2022, which was when Tesla vehicle demand skyrocketed and the company hiked prices to record highs to stave of the stampede of orders pushing the backlogs to untenable lengths. Below is a chart I made with data from the US Energy Information Administration. Gas prices have returned to 2021 levels and so have Tesla's average vehicle prices, roughly speaking. Granted, correlation alone does not imply causation, and even if there is causation here it's probably not the only significant factor, but I'm confident the decline in fuel prices has played a meaningful role. I don't understand why this isn't getting more attention in the conversation these days.

View attachment 928412


3) Tesla's demand curve is not static because it's increasing over time. The positive feedback loop of Tesla's word of mouth sales force continually drives more interest in the products even if Tesla does absolutely nothing to advertise. The more Teslas Tesla sells, the more Teslas Tesla sells. This means that simple analysis like "Tesla needs to drop prices to sell more cars as production volume increases" is not necessarily true, at least until Tesla is saturating each market segment they currently serve. The customers are educating other future customers and providing social proof that the cars are good.


4) There's big-picture branding, marketing and competitive positioning considerations. Tesla's brand is partially built around *not* doing traditional advertising. Almost everyone bought one either because of independent research or someone telling them about it. I have seen multiple people's eyes light up with surprise and intrigue when I've told them that last year Tesla was the top-selling and most-profitable luxury car brand in America despite not paying for a single ad. That's the kind of fact that makes people think "hmm, there must be something special going on here and I want to know more". Everyone knows that ads are often misleading and deceptive, but winning on sales without them is a strong signal that can't be faked. This narrative is spoiled if Tesla starts paying for ads, and it would open up new possibilities for negative attacks on demand fears whenever Tesla increases the amount of advertising.

This lack of paid advertising also makes Tesla ownership kind of feel like being in a club of special people "in the know" who either are up-to-date on the latest technology and smart enough to recognize something good when they find it, or they have cool friends who explained it to them and gave test rides. Marketing primarily via cult proselytization actually is a viable strategy for a business like Tesla.



I think Tesla isn't too concerned about short-term cash flow. The mission is the focus and that mainly depends on mass production in the 2030s and beyond. Now that the company has no financial stress and a very well capitalized balance sheet, the priority needs to be targeting the brand positioning for the future. The mission demands optimization for the long game. A few billion dollars around the margins in the next few years is just a rounding error in comparison to the impact of improving performance in the 2030s and 40s.


5) Price cuts themselves generate attention for Tesla that's tantamount to advertising.

6) Expectations of imminent refreshes of Model 3 may be influencing short-term demand

7) I've saved the best for last: Tesla already has a massive social media presence, especially on Twitter, with Tesla's account having 20M followers and Elon's having 135M followers, and this lets them advertise for free. Tesla's social media presence is *elite* among major consumer brands and it's more than an order of magnitude ahead of other automotive OEMs.

Of the top 50 accounts on Twitter, almost all of them are famous individuals, not organizations. Elon's account is now #1, having recently passed Barack Obama's account. For the few organizations in the top 50, it's mainly sports teams/leagues, social networks, and top news media. Beyond these particular industries, Tesla is one of the most followed organizations of any kind on Twitter and is getting closer to this elite level with every passing year. In fact, I was unable to find any companies selling physical goods to consumers that have more Twitter presence than Tesla. This is especially remarkable considering how few customers Tesla actually has so far compared to companies like Walmart, Nike, Starbucks or McDonald's. Watch what happens as time goes on and Tesla really goes mainstream and is putting up Toyota-like sales numbers.

Tesla also probably benefits indirectly from SpaceX driving traffic and attention to Tesla's tweets. SpaceX has 29M followers.
View attachment 928399

Some of this, of course, depends on which social media platform each company prioritizes. For example, Apple has an order of magnitude more subscribers and views on Youtube than Tesla has. Many companies are more active on Facebook than Tesla is. Nevertheless, Twitter is the biggest platform for businesses to update the public on their products and services, and you only need traction on one platform anyway, because people will share compelling content on other platforms and in real life. Facebook, Google and Youtube get more advertising revenue but for direct engagement I'm pretty sure Twitter is #1. Tesla's account garners about 1-2M views on normal tweets and every few days exceeds 10M on more notable tweets like the Cybertruck crash test demo video from April Fool's Day. This is approximately the same view count as President Biden's tweets. In contrast, Mercedes-Benz rarely gets more than 100k views on a tweet at best.

So, Tesla already is advertising and educating consumers on the products. The question is actually whether Tesla should spend money on bribing other companies to promote the ads beyond what comes from subscribed followers and the organic interest generated by the Twitter & Youtube suggestion algorithms. I think competitors pay for ads fundamentally because they and their products are not intrinsically interesting enough per se, but Tesla does not have this limitation.

Gave you a "like" for the sheet enormity of that post

Anyone got some Cliff notes?

 

[unk45]

One hour drive to the autobahns from here... although the stretch from north of Hamburg to Danish border is my favourite, which is quite a bit further - 300km and not too busy once you get out of Hamburg suburbs. Excellent Porsche-taunting territory!

True, but… a Euro2200 invoice for continuing my speed after passing into the Netherlands makes me suggest it might be wise to drive from Amsterdam to Hamburg, not vice versa.
Still, a Model S100D makes the trip nicely without. Supercharging on the way. IMHO German Teslas still need more battery!

 

[StarFoxisDown!]

It will certainly be interesting to see when the average person feels like it is "good enough" to spend money on (based on maybe driving in a friends car with it etc). Right now I would be pretty astonished to see the take rate increase much as overall it doesn't work well for the average driver. Clearly it can depend on where you live perhaps, but it's not really super usable for general city-driving other than as a novelty.

A lot of Youtubers definitely show "good" drives. For example I drive in the same city as DirtyTesla, and I could easily provide a route within blocks of where he drives in which the car cannot function correctly and will require intervention after intervention. These are not super weird back streets or anything, they are ones I travel for regular trips to stores and around town and so forth, and the car frankly just is not capable of driving in a sensible fashion yet. To be clear I am not trying to say FSD Beta is "bad" or anything, and it certainly improves over time, but while I enjoy watching it evolve, it is very far from being a hands-off drive-anywhere-around-town type experience.

I should add that I'm not trying to say someone like DirtyTesla is only intentionally showing good drives, just that a given route a block away from another can be the difference between apparent 100% success and 100% failure.

I personally believe that getting FSD to single stack was a big hold up in terms of progress and will have big repercussions going forward. It terms of abilities, addressing corner cases, iteration/deployment frequency. And that's kinda what I was pointing out in my post. The rate of updates/deployments increased significantly once they got to single stack.

FSD today is by no means perfect or "good enough". But having said that, I don't think it needs to be perfect to justify charging $200/month. Until it does get much closer to perfect, I think Tesla should drop the monthly subscription rate to $149/month or even $99/month. Adoption rate would explode higher. When FSD does start to approach that level of perfection, rate the monthly subscription rate back up to $199/month or even $249/month. People that have already been paying for it will be hooked and will have a much harder time giving it up.

 

[Singuy]

I personally believe that getting FSD to single stack was a big hold up in terms of progress and will have big repercussions going forward. It terms of abilities, addressing corner cases, iteration/deployment frequency. And that's kinda what I was pointing out in my post. The rate of updates/deployments increased significantly once they got to single stack.

FSD today is by no means perfect or "good enough". But having said that, I don't think it needs to be perfect to justify charging $200/month. Until it does get much closer to perfect, I think Tesla should drop the monthly subscription rate to $149/month or even $99/month. Adoption rate would explode higher. When FSD does start to approach that level of perfection, rate the monthly subscription rate back up to $199/month or even $249/month. People that have already been paying for it will be hooked and will have a much harder time giving it up.

15k@6% interest is 290/month in monthly payment. I rather people buy FSD vs subscription. Honestly 149, 99, or whatever it cost per month unless it's 30 bucks IMO is a hard sell for a software to play around with as the utility of FSD is not yet there. This is why it's difficult for people to keep subscribing after that one frustrating drive, the initial newness wears off, or they find themselves barely using it as it's too much trouble than it's worth. Buying it up front = they are married to it in sickness and in health.

 

[stealthyc]

I personally believe that getting FSD to single stack was a big hold up in terms of progress and will have big repercussions going forward. It terms of abilities, addressing corner cases, iteration/deployment frequency. And that's kinda what I was pointing out in my post. The rate of updates/deployments increased significantly once they got to single stack.

FSD today is by no means perfect or "good enough". But having said that, I don't think it needs to be perfect to justify charging $200/month. Until it does get much closer to perfect, I think Tesla should drop the monthly subscription rate to $149/month or even $99/month. Adoption rate would explode higher. When FSD does start to approach that level of perfection, rate the monthly subscription rate back up to $199/month or even $249/month. People that have already been paying for it will be hooked and will have a much harder time giving it up.

Updates/deployments have varied quite a lot in frequency over time. Usually when there is a big release there is a flurry of updates and then there is a lull, sometimes weeks, sometimes months. There are also random times when they do releases on a more frequent basis. I think you are looking at the current developments as being more meaningful than they are.

I do not think it needs to be perfect for people to pay for it either, but I think it is very far a quality that will allow for mass adoption in its current state.