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

[Thekiwi]

There’s a good chance it is similar to the 3000 layoffs rumour in Berlin (which turned out to be a couple of hundred): highly exaggerated.
How could the Supercharger team be 500 man to start with? AFAIK, most of the work neccessary to open a SUC (landscaping and digging and such, even setting up the transformers) is done by local contractors. So those 500 man would mostly be maintenance and planning. At 6300 open sites, that’s about 1 employee per 10 open sites. Let’s say less than 1000 sites in planning/construction according to supercharge.info. That means 1 employee per 2 sites in planning/construction. IIRC there were Tesla job openings for planners stating tens of concurrent projects.

What about the people that actually make all the supercharger hardware? That would be a large number. Maybe its all been outsourced to Tesla China (or a third party in China).

 

[mongo]

Okay, someone needs to slap some sense in me; give it to me straight, Will Smith-style:

How is dissolving 500 people from the Supercharger team any good? Are we talking about relocation? This is bizar.

First:
How big was the Supercharger team originally?
At what level did these layoffs occur?
How has the team changed over the past year?

Q1: 297 sites, 2,687 posts
Q4: 357 : 3,787
Q3: 330 : 3,023
Q2: 318 : 2,913

Leveraging regional electrical contractors could be more efficient than a remote centralized group. Even keeping things in-house, Tesla could hire contractors to match demand and region.

The minimum required level for continued rollout:
Manufacturing: Posts, cabinets, prefab bases (could be done in-house or outsourced)
Installation: Travel or regional teams (could be outsourced)
Planning: new site selection, permitting (could largely be outsourced to the contactor used for installation)
Maintenance: (again, could leverage contractors)

 

[alexxs88]

Got this in in email, none near me (Scotland )
View attachment 1043069

They don't have all the locations there. If you go through their website there's a good chance you'll have something close by. (I was in a similar situation, registered for the end of June).

 

[hobbes]

Just signed up for a Cybertruck event at my nearest Service Centre here in Norway.

Found the info under Events on the Tesla website.

Crossing my fingers hoping I secured a spot!

It´s coming !

https://twitter.com/x/status/1785257326800183743

 

[Huskyf]

Got this in via email, none near me (Scotland )
View attachment 1043069

not all are on the map see events lists

 

[hobbes]

Regarding China exports, anybody got a good source for boats en route? ‘Where boats dot com’ doesn’t seem to get updates anymore.

Map for subscribers only now, but he has a tweet for every ship on route in the attached thread.
Maybe one can then find them on a free tracking site to find out ETA.

https://twitter.com/x/status/1784958655193895060

 

[NicoV]

What about the people that actually make all the supercharger hardware? That would be a large number. Maybe its all been outsourced to Tesla China (or a third party in China).

I didn’t think of that. IIRC, that’s in Buffalo New York.
Maybe the prefab supercharger production process needs a lot less personnel now due to automation.
The leaked mail makes it sound like Tesla is stopping the rollout of the supercharger network. Let’s hope that’s not the case and it’s related to productivity increases.

 

[Usain]

This has been directly debunked- to you- multiple times.

There's no way 'around' a firmware that gets CRC checked on every boot and can not change without an update of the entire blob- and nothing else in the system survives a reboot.

There is no on-car learning. Period full stop.

By design.

NN learning on individual cars, as would be clear to someone with CS chops, would be a nightmare to ever debug anything- let alone integrate whatever it learned with the next actual firmware update.

It's not that this is actually impossible. Self-modifying code was a common technique in the early days of computing. It's now mostly a lost art. As for the checksum, it's possible to generate a new one and store it so that the system would still work on reboot. I can think of other ways to get around it as well.

But no sane developer would attempt such a thing for an application like FSD. Like @Knightshade correctly points out, it would be a nightmare to debug. And furthermore, it would invalidate all the data gathered from the fleet because no two cars would be running the same model.

 

[Ellec]

They cut off most of the UK in that email. If you go to the Tesla events page (https://www.tesla.com/en_gb/events) it shows more, including:

Cybertruck Odyssey on Edinburgh Castle Street (1st June 2024)
Cybertruck Odyssey at Tesla Glasgow (2nd - 6th June 2024)

As for me in Newcastle - there are none near me.

Oh great, thanks I'll check it out at Glasgow!

 

[hobbes]

China had a good week, 14.800 for April 22-28

View attachment 1043053

https://twitter.com/x/status/1785226228577992872

Seems like the 0% financing they´ve recently been offering (discussed above) is working

 

[DarkandStormy]

Seems like the 0% financing they´ve recently been offering (discussed above) is working

0% financing is basically a price cut.

 

[Singuy]

Seems like the 0% financing they´ve recently been offering (discussed above) is working

Interest rate isn't particularly high in China to begin with, lowest it has ever been the last 5 years.

Also from a 2010 article, only 10% of buyers in China get a car loan, number is over 80% in the US.

 

[Huskyf]

Red day for the moment due to layoff

 

[Grifon]

I didn’t think of that. IIRC, that’s in Buffalo New York.
Maybe the prefab supercharger production process needs a lot less personnel now due to automation.
The leaked mail makes it sound like Tesla is stopping the rollout of the supercharger network. Let’s hope that’s not the case and it’s related to productivity increases.

This may just be capital rationalization as the Supercharger network may now be well beyond needed capacity for the next x months given the slow down of EV transition by other US based car manufacturers.

 

[ItsNotAboutTheMoney]

Perhaps new blood will help the Supercharger Deserts. A few days ago there was a tornado that closed Ardmore, OK. There are no other Superchargers close to Ardmore (next stop going north on I-35 is Perry, 150 miles away, and going south it's ~90 miles to Buc'ees) 240 miles is not doable going normal highway speeds (traffic moves at 75-80 mph on this really busy Interstate).

Next stop north on I-35 from Ardmore, OK is Oklahoma City - NE 36th St, OK, 99.5 miles away.
South is Denton, TX 69 miles away.
Closest in any direction is Denison, TX 62.6 miles.
And if you really need efficiency in an emergency you can get off the Interstate to get extra range. US-77 parallels I-35.

But yes, we need more density. That's part of why NEVI's target is 50 miles or less separation.

 

[Unpilot]

Red day for the moment due to layoff

I thought Wall Street like layoffs?

Right...forgot that is every company except Tesla.

 

[hobbes]

I thought Wall Street like layoffs?

Right...forgot that is every company except Tesla.

Haha, remember what happened the last few days? Likely just some profit taking IMHO

 

[hobbes]

https://twitter.com/x/status/1785090964408750552

 

[DarkandStormy]

https://twitter.com/x/status/1729002907255853408

Whoops

 

[2daMoon]

Who would be interested in pitching in to pay Cramer to say something negative about TSLA just before the opening bell this morning?