TSLA Market Action: 2018 Investor Roundtable

[phil0909]

Adam Jonas was also one of the analysts pissed off by Elons behavior on the Q1 CC. This is his retaliation. I guess he hasn’t changed his lowball Model 3 production estimates yet. This gives him the opportunity to change his estimate upwards again in the near future when actual production numbers are released/confirmed, claiming new data to support a new price target.

In fact, Jonas has been quite prescient in his Model 3 production estimates to date. Does anyone know whether he updated his latest predicted production numbers?

 

[Big Earl]

Picked up a couple more shares at $284 this morning. I'm just a small potato, testing the investment waters for the first time this year. Up to 40 shares now. My goal is 100 by the end of this year.

 

[phil0909]

Given that the "Stationary Object" problem will need to be solved for FSD doesn't make sense to focus on this now. I get why the software ignores a stationary objects, but a lot of lay people have a hard time understanding how a car with some level of automation can run into something sitting still. To them this should be easy. It's like the software team justifying how something should work based on a technical difficultly rather than than meeting the users expectations. This problem needs to be solved eventually for FSD so why not now to avoid all the headlines.

Presumably it's difficult.

 

[Waiting4M3]

Ignore the 12/31/2017 data, those companies should report Q1 activity very soon.
Only focus on 3/31/2018 reporting. Most of them added shares. T Rowe added a lot. If I were a short, I would be worried. But these shorts are very brave, I think they really don't know what they got themselves into. They are still digging the hole deeper.

Shorts are in difficult situation now. If they push hard, these institutions will take all the shares, consider how much money they have ... If shorts don't push, the stock will start to rally again. When it does rally, the short squeeze might start. There is no easy way out.

I can see one thing, the shorts will get burned worse on the way up than TT007 got burned on the way down.

 

[Intl Professor]

hmm, you got me thinking...

from various discussions here on TMC, and IIRC comments directly from Tesla, my understanding is that the reason stationary objects when traveling at considerable speed may not be picked up is that having the software designed to do so currently would result in false positives for the likes of highway overpasses to the point Tesla feels it would be a net reduction in utility to have AP react to this bucket of events.

if this is the reason such events are not currently detected by AP, how about pairing two changes,

1) use the eye tracking to determine when the driver is paying attention to the field of view ahead,

2) have AP respond with a vigorous alert, but not a driving reaction, for this bucket of events only when the eye tracking determines the driver is not looking forward.

in other words, both eliminate potential accident risk of AP having an agressive driving reaction to false positives AND greatly lower the nuisance factor of false positives by only having this aggressive alert go off when eyes are not on the road.

for those using AP as intended (eyes on the road nearly 100% of the time), this alert would almost never go off, so false positive nuisance issue reduced to nil. for those playing loose with AP instructions, lots of eyes off the road time somewhat deterred by more of these false positive agressive alerts (something of a nuisance), and, potentially fatal accidents considerably reduced in the instances when the alert is for a real stationary object ahead (not a false positive) when the driver needs to be alerted (and is) to have their eyes on the road.

Pardon my ignorance, but is the radar layer added to the visual ones so far in the AI application of autopilot? Can radar differentiate among solid objects, moving or stopped and where? Alternatively, what is the "visual" field of the radar and speed of recognition/differentiation?

 

[phil0909]

Tesla is not going to run out of cash. this is simple minded thinking. Elon announced something the other day that I dont think any bears processed because they are dumb. Elon said that orders would be open for Dual Motor, Performance and White interior. These cars will average over $70k ASP. But also, they require a $2500, non refundable deposit. If you have 500,000 WW reservations and 25% want SR and 50% are outside the US, that leaves roughly 187,000 reservations in the US that are waiting on one of the new configs. By this time next month there is a good chance that Tesla will have upwards of $250M (100k of 187k orders) in fresh cash for orders on cars that average 25% more then the current Model 3s sold to date. This would also convert $100M in reservation funds into non-refundable deposits. This is happening this QTR, while deliveries will happen the next 2. Now you see why Elon is so confident that Tesla will be profitable. That would be about $7B in sales for just the model 3 and just 4,000/w. So if they are at 5k/w, you can doss in another 25,000 deliveries or more at $50k+ ASP.or well over $8B in model 3 revenues to go with $5B+ in S/X revenues.

This idea that Tesla is going to run out of cash before being able to collect $13B in just 2 quarters with ASPs that are ridiculously high? Remember, margins on the base model 3 might be tight, but when the model 3 costs $60-$70K, the margins will be very very high.

That's if the conversion rate on reservations is 100%. If the conversion rate turns out to be 20%, results are different.

 

[Waiting4M3]

In fact, Jonas has been quite prescient in his Model 3 production estimates to date. Does anyone know whether he updated his latest predicted production numbers?

Market may be down but Jonas' M3 prediction is always a good laugh. I think "all over the map" is the more descriptive phrase. This below is a redddit thread in late Q4:
Morgan Stanley's Adam Jonas: TSLA could hit $561 in 2018, predicts 110k Model 3 produced • r/teslamotors

• Dec 2016, Jonas predicted that Model 3 delivery will start in late 2018 (not 2017!!)
• May 2017, after seeing a bunch of Model 3 RC cars, Jonas changed to 2K deliveries in Q4 2017, 90K in 2018.
• Aug 2017, after seeing 30 cars actually delivered at the July event, Jonas changed to delivery start in Q3 2017 (duh), and upped estimate to 10K in Q4, and 120K in 2018.
• Oct 2017, after seeing the Q3 delivery #, Jonas slashed his projection for Q4 down to 1K. I think this last guess will come in 1/2 of what Tesla will actually do.

I don't think Adam Jonas knows anything more than we do. If someone gives 4 estimates each different by 1 order of magnitude or more, one of them is bound to come in within shouting distance.

Jonas was way low in Q4'17 (1k) and Q1'18 (8k) production estimates, he's also predicting 24k in Q2'18, which I think we may hit it in early June. I think the track record speaks for itself.

 

[bdy0627]

In fact, Jonas has been quite prescient in his Model 3 production estimates to date. Does anyone know whether he updated his latest predicted production numbers?

He was wrong initially, then pretty close actually, and will soon be wrong again.

 

[Intl Professor]

I'm OCD and pedantic and graduate high school in Michigan. Do I qualify even though I'm not an engineer?

My guess is you would have made a great engineer had you wanted but it was just easier to hire one/them when needed.

 

[jbcarioca]

My guess is you would have made a great engineer had you wanted but it was just easier to hire one/them when needed.

How kind. We'll never know; I did intend physics, but became sidetracked.

 

[phil0909]

Its not going to stop the bleeding. No one believes Elon anymore.

Agreed. If Elon wanted to restore his credibility, he would provide simple, honest, factual statements like: "We delivered 3,000 Model 3's to customers last week."

Instead, he says things like "We are making 'great progress' and it is 'quite likely' that 'we will exceed 500 vehicles per day' (every day? just on one day?) across all Model 3 production zones (what the heck does 'across all zones' mean? Is that like the Q4 'extrapolated' burst rates on multiple stations?) this week". This is a needlessly complicated, forward-looking statement, and an expectation rather than a fact. It just sounds like it was carefully phrased for maximum deceptiveness, while maintaining just a shred of underlying truth for legal reasons in case the SEC comes calling.

If Elon were to start consistently going the simple, honest, factual route, everyone (except the fanatics) would believe him. Instead, he chooses the tricky leaked hype option.

 

[kelevra]

does somebody know what's going on? unusually large sell order.

 

[Waiting4M3]

Pardon my ignorance, but is the radar layer added to the visual ones so far in the AI application of autopilot? Can radar differentiate among solid objects, moving or stopped and where? Alternatively, what is the "visual" field of the radar and speed of recognition/differentiation?

I think radar (and similarly lidar) are good at gauging distance (and also speed) of object. Its response to material depend on the absorption of the particular wavelength of the particular material. In radar frequency what i heard is that metal objects will present a bigger reflection than an organic object. I suspect this is why overhead freeway signs are such a problem because they throw out such a large false signal. The AI algorithm may be ignoring those large radar signals from stationary objects to avoid false-alarms from the signs.

Radar also doesn't have the spatial resolution of a camera. Radar works at much longer wavelength than light. When the car is traveling at freeway speed, and trying to tell a large stationary metal object ahead, whether it's at ground level (a car), vs 20 ft overhead (a sign), is not trivial. 60mph is 88 ft/sec, so seeing something 5 sec ahead is ~450ft away, a 20ft vertical placement difference at that far away could be difficult for radar if it doesn't have the necessary spatial resolution. Lidar, on the other hand, with higher resolution, would do much better in this specific case.

IMO what is needed is for camera image processing to catch up and be able to recognize stationary objects. This is also difficult. With one camera (mono-vision) it is impossible to tell distance (and therefore speed) of an object from 1 single frame. By comparing frames at different times, the size of the object would change and that could tell the relative speed. But a lot of things can factor in, such as lateral speed, and also a big difficulty is that the image processing need to be able to recognize an object in one frame and "remember" the same object in the next frame.

With 2 camera and stereo vision, distance can be computed, and therefore speed. The difficulty here is the computation power needed to do it in real time. I trust Tesla saying that they can get there with the HW they have now, but it will require a lot of development work.

 

[Richgoogol]

If anyone is wondering why the sudden spike in volatility. Tesla plans six-day stoppage at factory for assembly line fixes -...

 

[j0hn]

does somebody know what's going on? unusually large sell order.

I see some sites just reporting the production halt for late may. Already known news , but you know how that goes with TSLA...

 

[Todd Burch]

First Tesla Model 3 safety test results released, IIHS says ‘superior rating for front crash prevention’

More good news, so expect TSLA price to fall...

 

[kelevra]

I see some sites just reporting the production halt for late may. Already known news , but you know how that goes with TSLA...

i always get a little bit nervous when i see something like this and don't know what's going on. (for my trading/shortterm stuff) could be bad news i don't know yet. learning that it is just a planned shutdown is actually good.

 

[Remus]

Agreed. If Elon wanted to restore his credibility, he would provide simple, honest, factual statements like: "We delivered 3,000 Model 3's to customers last week."

Instead, he says things like "We are making 'great progress' and it is 'quite likely' that 'we will exceed 500 vehicles per day' (every day? just on one day?) across all Model 3 production zones (what the heck does 'across all zones' mean? Is that like the Q4 'extrapolated' burst rates on multiple stations?) this week". This is a needlessly complicated, forward-looking statement, and an expectation rather than a fact. It just sounds like it was carefully phrased for maximum deceptiveness, while maintaining just a shred of underlying truth for legal reasons in case the SEC comes calling.

If Elon were to start consistently going the simple, honest, factual route, everyone (except the fanatics) would believe him. Instead, he chooses the tricky leaked hype option.

that email was intended for the employees.

 

[Waiting4M3]

i always get a little bit nervous when i see something like this and don't know what's going on. (for my trading/shortterm stuff) could be bad news i don't know yet. learning that it is just a planned shutdown is actually good.

It's almost like the same psychology as people waiting for the Model 3 cars. People can wait patiently for 2 years after reservation, but then after they configure, and mere 6 weeks away from delivery, people start freaking out, "what's wrong with my Model 3, where is the VIN, why hasn't anyone called me???" Does anyone actually think they won't get their car?

Now we're mere 6 weeks away from 5k/wk, we're all wondering "what does Elon mean when he says this and that, why is the line stopped, where is the Grohmann line, where is the 3rd shift???" 10s of 1000s of people at Tesla have been working 2 years for this. Does anyone think they're not going to get there?

 

[Richgoogol]

I think the retooling is a given since they plan to start the production of AWD models. And it makes perfect sense why the leaked email from Elon earlier this morning to confirm the increased production level.