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

[alexxs88]

BTW, Tesla doesn't make their FSD boards- they don't own a chip or motherboard factory, they pay another company to do that based on their design. So does Nvidia. Same-same.

Yes. That theory is beyond pie in the sky. I know people working on the infotainment systems for big OEMs (Daimler, BMW) and the designs and production are auctioned off with the lowest bidder winning it most of the time. They use off the shelf processors that are available in volume and have very low margins since they're basically a commodity at this point. Even Nvidia has some of those as well.

The correlation between what people read in the media about Nvidia's crazy gross margins and what gets used in cars now is basically non existent.

 

[EQC_]

Tesla must face fraud suit for claiming its cars could fully drive themselves

Lawsuit targets 2016 claim that all Tesla cars "have full self-driving hardware."

arstechnica.com

Tesla is apparently contending in court that full self-driving needs lidar to be achieved.

I am not a lawyer, and only looked at this one article...but my read is:

1. The plaintiff declared as part of the complaint something like: "I was expecting Level 4 or 5 capabilities, but my car only has the hardware needed for Level 2, because Level 4 and 5 require LIDAR and Tesla doesn't have that."
2. Tesla's lawyers responded, effectively: "Okay buddy, but Elon has said many times publicly that Tesla's don't have LIDAR. So, you should have known that. Therefore, if YOU (the plaintiff) are claiming that LIDAR is needed for the capabilities you desire, then there can't be any fraud or deception. You believed the car needed LIDAR to achieve certain capabilities, and you should have known the car didn't have LIDAR, so you should not have expected those capabilities.

As to the other half of the quote from the Judge's statement:

"LoSavio plausibly alleges that he reasonably believed Tesla's claims that it could achieve self-driving with the car's existing hardware and that, if he diligently brought his car in for the required updates, the car would soon achieve the promised results."

Eesh...this is just obvious evidence that at the very least the judge doesn't understand Tesla's over the air updates. If the judge got the wording from the plaintiff's complaint, then he and his lawyers don't understand either.

It's a lawsuit from a guy who had HW2 and was upset that Tesla wanted to charge a fee to upgrade his cameras to HW3.

Aha.

I only have vague memories...but didn't Tesla originally try to charge a fee for the hardware upgrade, and then later made it free for folks who had purchased FSD?

If that memory is correct, then I'm guessing either this guy DID buy FSD, but clung to the lawsuit even after Tesla made it free, or he DIDN'T buy FSD and somehow thinks he is deprived because he can't get the hardware for free until he actually pays for the capability the hardware would enable. In either case, I hope he and his lawyers travel together every few weeks to "diligently bring his car in for the required software updates."

 

[Singuy]

Yes. That theory is beyond pie in the sky. I know people working on the infotainment systems for big OEMs (Daimler, BMW) and the designs and production are auctioned off with the lowest bidder winning it most of the time. They use off the shelf processors that are available in volume and have very low margins since they're basically a commodity at this point. Even Nvidia has some of those as well.

The correlation between what people read in the media about Nvidia's crazy gross margins and what gets used in cars now is basically non existent.

We are talking about a FSD competitor that actually use Nvidia's top of the line inference chips in order to compute their trained models for self driving, not the cheapo arm based processors made by Nvidia used for Infotainment or nintendo switches. This is in the context of a competitor's FSD gets licensed vs Tesla's. This is also under the assumption that a competitor's performance is as good as Tesla's.

 

[mongo]

BTW, Tesla doesn't make their FSD boards- they don't own a chip or motherboard factory, they pay another company to do that based on their design. So does Nvidia. Same-same.

A module requires many things:
Tesla:
Someone to create the schematic
Someone to create the layout
Someone to create the software
Not Tesla
Someone to create the physical PCB
Someone to assemble the components onto the PCB
Tesla?
Someone to assemble the populated PCB into the housing
Not Tesla:
Many someones to create the components that were assembled onto the board
Multiple stars to create the atoms
...

The vehicle has been in development by tesla since 2019, and 6 months after its consumer release, here in mid-2024, it still doesn't have working basic autopilot.

Thus your claim FSD would come easily or quickly on non-tesla vehicles appears.... not in line with observed data.

That argument fails to consider the change in FSD approaches that has occurred in the past 5 years as well as Tesla's recent increase in compute.
As a task, developing and maintaining a Cybertruck branch is not a priority when compared to unsupervised level FSD on the bulk of the vehicles. Get main branch functionality great, then fork.

 

[y_naught]

Now I'M confused. All I heard in response to Tesla skeptics was "you just need to drive one." So they drive a Tesla, love the experience, and buy one. And now that they just want to keep driving it - instead of using FSD - it's somehow baffling. Pretty funny.

It’s pretty simple: a Tesla is the best car you can drive and now, it’s also the best car you don’t have to drive.

I added the acceleration boost to my MYLR and it’s great. I use it in cases where I need to pass or accelerate quickly and I greatly enjoy knowing I have the capability. Initially with FSD on v10 it was more f an early adopter’s game, as I could drive both more safely and more reliably than the car. On v12, I can’t confidently say I am a safer driver than the car. I’m still more reliable in completing all merges and route selection, but that is quickly changing.

 

[elasalle]

Weekend boredom thoughts

Any one know the % of equity/voting control Elon has across all his companies?

e.g fished google and it says - Elon Musk (42% equity; 79% voting control) in SpaceX.

Just a thought, whether he wins/loses the vote, if he wants 25% stake in Tesla, can he not sell some of his other assets and buys tesla shares and be at 25% ? Basically it seems if Elon wanted 25%, there are ways for him to get it? Why not diversify and have 25% stake in all ...
If FED can play monopoly, Elon can/should too


Note. I voted all my shares for ELon, and not suggesting a no vote. Just saying that Elon can force his own hand and not depend on us common shareholders and the likes of Uncle Leo? Heres one way to stand up to bullies
Before the vote, if he like set aside couple of Billion (say like 4.4B - 10% of $ paid for twitter) and said I intend to buy Tesla shares in open market .... more people are gonna go back and change their vote to "Yes" ?


As always Cheers!!