TSLA Market Action: 2018 Investor Roundtable

[shlokavica22]

To achieve the sustainable transportation goal after road is well on the way the next two logic developments are sea and air..

This is my speculation about Elon's long term plans:
- City transportation - Tunnels for the masses + Fleet of Self Driving Tesla cars (with access to the tunnels as well)
- Continental/Intercity transportation - High speed tunnels + Self Driving cars (mainly for the Intercity travel)
- Intercontinental - Starship based solution

I think the Boring Company will make huge impact and become a monster company. As Elon said- there are no technical difficulties. They know what needs to be done and it's just a matter of time before BC achieves the planned improvements.

BC will become big TSLA customer- batteries, electric "skates"/"bus". Probably the opposite can also be true- tunnels for TLSA's needs.

In any case- Elon makes the future much more exciting.

 

[Artful Dodger]

FUN FACT: If USAforAfrica had been recorded 40 years later, Stevie Wonder and Ray Charles could have driven everyone home.

 

[mongo]

Agree as well, it's misleading, purposely. Any company hiding the actual price of a product is trying to deceive. Be better, Tesla.

???
Why are you and Fred saying Tesla is hiding it? Here are desktop and mobile views:
Disclainer before the prices (not an asterisk at the bottom) and all others paired with both prices.

 

[avoigt]

Musk has already stated that Tesla would not build the plane. Which is understandable. I'm sure he'd much rather have it as part of a private company rather than a public one.



Tesla's really not a leader in density. The emerging solid state producers are going to dominate that. Tesla is about getting $/kWh down. For electric aircraft, you can afford to pay more, but you have to have extreme density in order to be able to reach your cruising altitude / velocity with enough energy left to actually cruise. And for electric aircraft, both the optimal altitude and velocity are very high.

Having actually done a number of calcs on this, I know exactly where Musk is going. VTOL lets you minimize your wing area / wetted area and optimize your wing shape for very high speed travel, and electric motors/batteries have ample power for rapid climbing / acceleration. The lower your cruising density and the higher your cruising velocity, the more you can achieve this. Density drops off rapidly at high altitudes. Note how climbing just 50% higher than a typical crusing altitude (10 km / 32800 feet) halves the density:

And it just keeps declining like that.

Fuel-propelled aircraft are limited in altitude and velocity by their ability to provide sufficient oxygen, challenges with preventing flameout, and at very high speeds, "frozen" reactions (combustion doesn't have time to complete before the fuel-air mixture leaves the engine). Electric aircraft aren't limited suchly. So you just keep climbing and accelerating, and your ability to cover distance for a given amount of energy keeps rising. Once you go supersonic, drag starts falling, and keeps falling up to hypersonic speeds (although it never gets as low as subsonic... but it's a lot less than the transsonic regime).

In short, small increases in energy density will make large - and in fact, increasingly large - differences in electric aircraft range.

Very interesting and thanks for sharing.

Thinking about it, its kind of obvious that electric planes will have many advantages versus what we have today. Nevertheless there are hurdles to overcome to make it work.

In terms of energy density of batteries I ask myself who is heading that race though but what you write about costs makes sense. However in my view that would not hinder Tesla necessarily to enter that market. It won't be the same development obviously but we know that Tesla is ahead in battery development for cars and given SpaceX there is nobody who has experiences in ground and air transportation as Elon and his teams have. On the other side he declined to build an electric aircraft but I believe he considers it feasible.

He can't do everything though but I do not see Boing and Airbus or Bombardier doing it really. They talk about it and build some prototypes like VW, BMW and Audi or Toyota did for cars.

Right now I am just not confident that the air industry is really investing new solutions so we have almost the same situation like we had with cars (ICE/EV) a few years ago. Can you imagine that even on a runway moving to the terminal or to the runway planes do not use electric energy to move? There was a development that worked but never has been implemented on a large scale.

What happens in the air industry is that they turn to Hybrids which is I believe not the solution that will be helpful to transform air transportation into a sustainable business. I did never believe in Hybrids for cars and do not for aircrafts.

Tesla was able to change that narrative for ground transportation and I do feel the same is required for air to accelerate development. There are some start ups are out there but even the few attempts from Airbus and Boeing sound half baked to me.

 

[JBRR]

Artko Capital Q3 2018 Commentary - Tesla, Inc. (NASDAQ:TSLA) | Seeking Alpha

This "hedge fund" has 11 clients and somehow only 1.000.000$ under management.

TL;DR
Was short TSLA via ATM puts for 2% of capital heading into "funding secured" tweet. Had to cover. Reentered with ATM puts for 3% capital heading into Q3. Hedged via short term calls before earnings.
Made a profit (bc of short term calls) and has now closed all TSLA position after Q3 showed solid balance sheet.
Still calls Elon Musk a fraudster but seems no longer willing to bet on that belief.

I'm very happy to get the chance to bet against investors like this.

 

[AlexS]

???
Why are you and Fred saying Tesla is hiding it? Here are desktop and mobile views:
Disclainer before the prices (not an asterisk at the bottom) and all others paired with both prices.

I think Fred have some personal issues going on(probably girlfriend/boyfriend dumped him) and he is living it out on Tesla. I guess electrek views are declining, because of his tone of writing lately. Or maybe I am just a cult follower

 

[pnungesser]

Thanks for sharing that. It brought back so many memories and tears to my eyes. It's easy to become cynical as we age (I'll be 73 on Christmas) and that song helps me remember the idealism of my youth.

Happy Thanksgiving to you all!

FUN FACT: If USAforAfrica had been recorded 40 years later, Stevie Wonder and Ray Charles could have driven everyone home. [/QUOTE

 

[schonelucht]

Where did you hear about it? (I want to add sources to my reading list)

For this company specifically: their quarterly reports and Korean business news (sadly need to rely on English Korean business news, I am sure a Korean speaker would have picked up a lot more). They show numbers for their Energy business and with the mobile market more or less stable and stationary storage that not big of a business, a lot of growth is coming from automotive. The revenue growth trajectory paints a good (but not perfect) picture of their production capacity. Segment revenue was 1,253B Won in 2017Q4 and 1,245B in 2018Q1. That's when they reported they'd increase capacity (standing at around 4GWh) in Poland threefold 'soon' (no timeline was given). But in Q2 their revenue grew to 1,494B with Q3 bringing in 1,704B so it makes sense that 'soon' was already starting to happen and not something for 2020 or later as we often hear here on TMC with regarding big battery expansion plans from anyone but Panasonic. Btw. their CapEx in the segment ramped from $200M to $500M on a quarterly basis over the same period. The other players are building big capacity too, that's a simple fact.

 

[Artful Dodger]

I'll be 73 on Christmas

Hoho, well then hear's to an early Merrry Christmas, birthday boy!

CH3ERS!

 

[Unpilot]

Whales are out on holiday.

Shorts, OTOH, have no family or holidays.

Well, it's great if you want to generate lots of ozone and want almost no thrust

Electrohydrodynamic propulsion more interesting re: thrust when it comes to airships (the thrust is low per unit surface area, but in that case you have a lot of surface area). But it's always going to be an ozone generator. If I recall correctly, the three-electrode designs are less polluting than the two-electrode designs.

On the upside, EHD propulsion is surprisingly efficient when surface area isn't limiting. You have a lot of mass moving at low velocity rather than a little mass moving at high velocity, and the former leads to more efficient propulsion. Of course, you have to subtract the added losses from the EHD system...

I was last looking into EHD for the application of propulsion for a Venus colony for a book I was working on. It's promising for that role, but just not mature enough (probably the biggest problem is that electrode longevity is still a big challenge). Interestingly, it might have some potential for simultaneous propulsion + carbon sequestration - decomposing CO2 to CO and atomic oxygen. Carbon monoxide is highly reactive at Venus surface temperatures / pressures and might have some potential for being sequestered into surface minerals to form carbonates (although I'd more expect it to be consumed in reducing surface oxides). It also might be possible to generate graphite dust as a propulsion waste product, although configs that would encourage that haven't been explored. This is all an area that would need a lot of further research and should be taken with a grain of salt without further studies.

For Earth applications, I'm more sanguine about electric ram-arcjets. Got a CFD sim running right now on my compute node at home. Unfortunately, it's in an genetic algorithm to optimize the shape, and evolution has a nasty habit of finding ways to cheat. In this case, it discovered a way to make the model omit its end caps, which made it not an "airtight model", and thus left normals ill-defined, which confused snappyHexMesh and thus rhoPimpleFoam. Net result, a powerful current of air was just streaming from the walls straight into the engine :Þ I had to scrap like a month's worth of work and start anew after fixing that bug.

Hey that was what I was working on in my garage the other day. Right next to my time machine.

 

[KarenRei]

Well, while we're in the Christmas mood, some traditional Icelandic Christmas music:

That's "Jólakötturinn", the Christmas Cat - a giant black cat that breaks into houses at Christmas and eats all of the food (and sometimes the children). A ward against it breaking in is to receive new clothes for Christmas - a single sock is enough to stop it from being able to enter the house.

The cat is owned by Grýla, a troll woman who rounds up naughty children in a sack and brings them back to her cave to make into soup. Her twelve children are our traditional "troll santas", the jólasveinar; they also break into your house and do things like lick your pots, walk around with a meat hook, slam doors, stare through windows with big eyes, etc - but they leave presents as an apology.

The influence of American culture has sort of confused things up a bit. Our traditional santas now look (mostly, not entirely) like the American santa. But there's also a lot of songs and cultural references that refer to just a single santa. And kids end up developing their own theories to explain these inconsistencies. My former stepdaughter had this notion that there was one named "Jólasveinninn Minn" ("My Santa" / "Dear Santa"), because (for rhythm purposes) the Icelandic version of "Here Comes Santa Claus" uses "jólasveinninn minn" in the lyrics instead of "Here comes Santa Claus" ("Hingað kemur jólasveinninn" doesn't really work ) Among other changes

 

[KarenRei]

Hey that was what I was working on in my garage the other day. Right next to my time machine.

EHD thrusters actually are a common garage project. Particularly popular among the antigravity-conspiracy crowd, which calls them "Lifters" The MIT team's work is much more professional, of course, with actual calculated optimal currents, voltages and geometries, which is what let them (barely) carry their own power supply for the first time.

CFD genetic algorithms for evolving arcjets, though... yeah, not many people seem to do that for fun

 

[LST]

Well, while we're in the Christmas mood, some traditional Icelandic Christmas music:

Thanks for sharing! Love the music of Björk since the beginning with Sugarcubes and everything later ; )

 

[ItsNotAboutTheMoney]

What happens in the air industry is that they turn to Hybrids which is I believe not the solution that will be helpful to transform air transportation into a sustainable business. I did never believe in Hybrids for cars and do not for aircrafts.

Tesla was able to change that narrative for ground transportation and I do feel the same is required for air to accelerate development. There are some start ups are out there but even the few attempts from Airbus and Boeing sound half baked to me.

I think that when companies talk about hybrid planes, they are really talking about plug-in hybrids. A key issue in aviation is maintenance. Engine maintenance requirements would depend on hours of use of the engines, so a plug-in hybrid system that reduces engine hours would help reduce maintenance, while a regular hybrid system would not.

There's a very significant challenge in aviation that's leading to more focus on hybrids: mandatory fuel requirements.

The fuel requirements are such that for the shorter flights that electric airplanes could technically handle with foreseeable battery technology, fully electric planes would need so much additional battery capacity that they could not practically be achievable.

Hybrid systems that allow for the use of aviation fuel, resolves the fuel requirement issue, even if the plane would be expected to be using the batteries most of the time.

Also, having decided on use of hybridization, the reduced dependency on advances in battery technology could allow the product to reach the market sooner.

I see a very large difference between hybridization in aviation and hybridization in ground transportation.

Except perhaps for the engine manufacturers, I think the aviation industry would be very happy to see electrification of aviation. There are potential cost and operational benefit that would only help the industry grow.

 

[KarenRei]

Thanks for sharing! Love the music of Björk since the beginning with Sugarcubes and everything later ; )

Honestly, I was tempted to share a different version, any other version, just because we have such a disproportionately massive, amazingly talented music scene here - but all anyone outside Iceland has ever heard of is Björk, Of Monsters and Men, and Sigur Rós

 

[9837264723849]

I think that when companies talk about hybrid planes, they are really talking about plug-in hybrids. A key issue in aviation is maintenance. Engine maintenance requirements would depend on hours of use of the engines, so a plug-in hybrid system that reduces engine hours would help reduce maintenance, while a regular hybrid system would not.

There's a very significant challenge in aviation that's leading to more focus on hybrids: mandatory fuel requirements.

The fuel requirements are such that for the shorter flights that electric airplanes could technically handle with foreseeable battery technology, fully electric planes would need so much additional battery capacity that they could not practically be achievable.

Hybrid systems that allow for the use of aviation fuel, resolves the fuel requirement issue, even if the plane would be expected to be using the batteries most of the time.

Also, having decided on use of hybridization, the reduced dependency on advances in battery technology could allow the product to reach the market sooner.

I see a very large difference between hybridization in aviation and hybridization in ground transportation.

Except perhaps for the engine manufacturers, I think the aviation industry would be very happy to see electrification of aviation. There are potential cost and operational benefit that would only help the industry grow.

Could an electric plane regen?

 

[avoigt]

 

[KarenRei]

Could an electric plane regen?

On a steep enough descent, a prop-driven electric aircraft can regen, yes. Of course, your main form of "regen" is just simply gliding down.

 

[JRP3]

???
Why are you and Fred saying Tesla is hiding it? Here are desktop and mobile views:
Disclainer before the prices (not an asterisk at the bottom) and all others paired with both prices.

I see something different on my desktop:
Edit: Proving my point, I didn't notice at the bottom of the page in the black area is the actual pricing:

 

[Cartegena]

Well, while we're in the Christmas mood, some traditional Icelandic Christmas music:

That's "Jólakötturinn", the Christmas Cat - a giant black cat that breaks into houses at Christmas and eats all of the food (and sometimes the children). A ward against it breaking in is to receive new clothes for Christmas - a single sock is enough to stop it from being able to enter the house.

The cat is owned by Grýla, a troll woman who rounds up naughty children in a sack and brings them back to her cave to make into soup. Her twelve children are our traditional "troll santas", the jólasveinar; they also break into your house and do things like lick your pots, walk around with a meat hook, slam doors, stare through windows with big eyes, etc - but they leave presents as an apology.

The influence of American culture has sort of confused things up a bit. Our traditional santas now look (mostly, not entirely) like the American santa. But there's also a lot of songs and cultural references that refer to just a single santa. And kids end up developing their own theories to explain these inconsistencies. My former stepdaughter had this notion that there was one named "Jólasveinninn Minn" ("My Santa" / "Dear Santa"), because (for rhythm purposes) the Icelandic version of "Here Comes Santa Claus" uses "jólasveinninn minn" in the lyrics instead of "Here comes Santa Claus" ("Hingað kemur jólasveinninn" doesn't really work ) Among other changes