1x Tsla Discussion Threads

[johnwise] 30/12/2022 08:02

VIDEO

I'm Done with Electric Cars! Going back to Combustion Power - Here's Why!

[gaffer73] 30/12/2022 05:10

"Autotrader's latest EV market survey notes that the price of EVs has risen 36pc from a year ago, with the supply of used electric vehicles now outpacing demand for the first time ever. EVs make up just 3pc of the enquiries sent to retailers, the site's analysts report. It also notes that the pool of potential buyers, with their own charging spots, is diminishing. "Although current sales figures look positive, the rapid decline in consumer appetite for electric vehicles reveals the market is on thin ice where mass electric adoption is concerned," it concludes." No benefit to owning an EV soon, unless you want a "green" badge of course.

[hosede] 29/12/2022 22:39

Oh I think he has: hasn't he put up Tesla shares as collateral for his Twitter loans?

[johnwise] 29/12/2022 22:29

Why Britain's electric dream is driving so many of us to distraction:

As Tesla owners are forced to queue for hours to charge their cars, one disillusioned motorist who's just faced a nightmare Christmas journey reveals how

[dominiccummings] 29/12/2022 21:48

He hasn't got one. All made up.

[gaffer73] 29/12/2022 19:40

Interesting, at what price is the margin call?

[hosede] 29/12/2022 18:39

Gaffer
It filled the gap just below 124 but then retreated.
This from the Independebnt:-


“Not much left before Elon gets margin called and the stock goes into a death spiral,” wrote US entrepreneur and investor William LeGate on Twitter. “Investors are scrambling to get out while they still can.”

I see it below 30 this time next year - still twice what I reckon would be a fair price (1.5 x book)

[gaffer73] 29/12/2022 17:06

Decent bounce today, will it hold??

[hosede] 29/12/2022 17:04

Money printing has ALWAYS had disastrous effects

[dominiccummings] 29/12/2022 16:52

I don't believe disaster stories. The West will jog along manipulating the economies just as it has done for 5 decades. hosede, you are a desperate shorter. You don't have to spew the poison you do, because it is likely that Tesla share price will drop further, but not permananently.

[hosede] 29/12/2022 12:19

I don't think you grasp the size of the depression we are heading into: total car sales could be down 60% or more in 2023 - and it could go on for decades. Last time we were here, markets fell for 65 years!
The disaster caused by ZIRP and QE is just starting. Remember that in the WEST a total of more tha $15 Trn of fake money has to be taken out of the system.

[dominiccummings] 29/12/2022 11:34

But their production methods, no further CapEx for years, and continued expansion will make for good profits (although probably not supporting Trillion+ net worth).

Having said that, I bailed out of Apple Computer many years ago as it was overpriced. It has been overpriced for much of the last 3 decades!

[hosede] 28/12/2022 23:07

Dominic
Great - but Comopanies are about making money for shareholders - and NOTHING else.
And Tesla is NOT going to do that in the current environment. I fear 2023's losses will be massive: too many plants, products set too high up the price scale. etrc etc.

[gaffer73] 28/12/2022 22:46

"Why was Tesla ever worth so much?" Because people were suckered in by all the hype.

[dominiccummings] 28/12/2022 20:23

Interesting article by Paul Krugman, to which I would answer in a few words.

"Why was Tesla ever worth so much?" - you would know if you drove one.

What features will justify a premium share price long term:-
1. Manufacturing innovation. Already ahead of the rest and always looking for improvements.
2. Direct sale model. No dealer margins.
3. Battery design, manufacture and electronic management way ahead of competition.
4. Tesla charging. Incremental increase in numbers every year. High performing. Profit stream for ever.

[hosede] 28/12/2022 20:20

It's dead Dominic - all we are arguing about now is the funeral rites :-0

[dominiccummings] 28/12/2022 20:11

Aye. Earnings will be north of expectations.

[simon gordon] 28/12/2022 20:05

Paul Krugman - 27/12/22:

Did the Tesla Story Ever Make Sense?

If you’re one of those people who bought Bitcoin or another cryptocurrency near its peak last fall, you’ve lost a lot of money. Is it any consolation to know that you would have lost a similar amount if you had bought Tesla stock instead?

OK, probably not. Still, Tesla stock’s plunge is an opportunity to talk about what makes businesses successful in the information age. And in the end, Tesla and Bitcoin may have more in common than you think.

It’s natural to attribute Tesla’s recent decline — which is, to be sure, part of a general fall in tech stocks, but an exceptionally steep example — to Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter and the reputational self-immolation that followed. Indeed, given what we’ve seen of Musk’s behavior, I wouldn’t trust him to feed my cat, let alone run a major corporation. Furthermore, Tesla sales have surely depended at least in part on the perception that Musk himself is a cool guy. Who, aside from MAGA types who probably wouldn’t have bought Teslas anyway, sees him that way now?

On the other hand, as someone who has spent much of his professional life in academia, I’m familiar with the phenomenon of people who are genuinely brilliant in some areas but utter fools in other domains. For all I know, Musk is or was a highly effective leader at Tesla and SpaceX.

Even if that’s the case, though, it’s hard to explain the huge valuation the market put on Tesla before the drop, or even its current value. After all, to be that valuable Tesla would have to generate huge profits, not just for a few years but in a way that could be expected to continue for many years to come.

Now, some technology companies have indeed been long-term moneymaking machines. Apple and Microsoft still top the list of the most profitable U.S. corporations some four decades after the rise of personal computers.

But we more or less understand the durability of the dominance of Apple and Microsoft, and it’s hard to see how Tesla could ever achieve something similar, no matter how brilliant its leadership. Both Apple and Microsoft benefit from strong network externalities — loosely speaking, everyone uses their products because everyone else uses their products.

In the case of Microsoft, the traditional story has been that businesses continued to buy the company’s software, even when it was panned by many people in the tech world, because it was what they were already set up to use: Products like Word and Excel may not have been great, but everyone within a given company and in others it did business with was set up to use them, had I.T. departments that knew how to deal with them, and so on. These days Microsoft has a better reputation than it used to, but as far as I can tell its market strength still reflects comfort and corporate habit rather than a perception of excellence.

Apple’s story is different in the details — more about individual users than institutions, more about physical products than about software alone. And Apple was widely considered cool, which I don’t think Microsoft ever was. But at an economic level it’s similar. I can attest from personal experience that once you’re in the iPhone/iPad/MacBook ecosystem, you won’t give up on its convenience unless offered something a lot better.

Similar stories can be told about a few other companies, such as Amazon, with its distribution infrastructure.

The question is: Where are the powerful network externalities in the electric vehicle business?

Electric cars may well be the future of personal transportation. In fact, they had better be, since electrification of everything, powered by renewable energy, is the only plausible way to avoid climate catastrophe. But it’s hard to see what would give Tesla a long-term lock on the electric vehicle business.

I’m not talking about how great Teslas are or aren’t right now; I’m not a car enthusiast (I should have one of those bumper stickers that say, “My other car is also junk”), so I can’t judge. But the lesson from Apple and Microsoft is that to be extremely profitable in the long run a tech company needs to establish a market position that holds up even when the time comes, as it always does, that people aren’t all that excited about its products.

So what would make that happen for Tesla? You could imagine a world in which dedicated Tesla hookups were the only widely available charging stations, or in which Teslas were the only electric cars mechanics knew how to fix. But with major auto manufacturers moving into the electric vehicle business, the possibility of such a world has already vanished. In fact, I’d argue that the Inflation Reduction Act, with its strong incentives for electrification, will actually hurt Tesla. Why? Because it will quickly make electric cars so common that Teslas no longer seem special.

In short, electric vehicle production just doesn’t look like a network externality business. Actually, you know what does? Twitter, a platform many of us still use because so many other people use it. But Twitter usage is apparently hard to monetize, not to mention the fact that Musk appears set on finding out just how much degradation of the user experience it will take to break its network externalities and drive away the clientele.

Which brings us back to the question of why Tesla was ever worth so much. The answer, as best as I can tell, is that investors fell in love with a story line about a brilliant, cool innovator, despite the absence of a good argument about how this guy, even if he really was who he appeared to be, could found a long-lived money machine.

And as I said, there’s a parallel here with Bitcoin. Despite years of effort, nobody has yet managed to find any serious use for cryptocurrency other than money laundering. But prices nonetheless soared on the hype, and are still being sustained by a hard-core group of true believers. Something similar surely happened with Tesla, even though the company does actually make useful things.

I guess we’ll eventually see what happens. But I definitely won’t trust Elon Musk with my cat.

[hosede] 28/12/2022 18:14

Hootza
I always though that was the most sensible way. The batteries can then be charged slowly - almost certainly extending their life - when electicity is cheap - ie overnight

[hootza616] 28/12/2022 17:44

Fact is that China will take the EV market by storm in 2023/24 when they introduce their subscription vehicle with a 30 second quick change battery. Why does it take China's common sense to see that installing charging points all over the place is simply not practical and that garage forecourts can be easily upgraded to change your battery in seconds? Drive up to the forecourt, swap battery for fully charged one and off you go! Quicker than filling a tank of fuel and you get to chose if you visit the shop just like now!

[johnwise] 28/12/2022 17:39

And this comes as a surprise? Looks like the advertising mantra is still working; enough advertisings will always get customers, no matter how stupid.

[careful] 28/12/2022 16:08

Lucky Tesla did not accept Bitcoin as payment for cars as he once promised.
Tesla would be in serious trouble.

[hosede] 28/12/2022 14:49

Earnings ! I suspect we've seen the last of them - or will do this quarter

[simon gordon] 28/12/2022 14:44

Bluster,

Yes, success breeds success, then that confidence leads to being surrounded by yes people. You start to believe you are King Midas. Then like Icarus you fly to close to the sun, your wings start melting and the great goddess Nemesis pays you a visit.

Is purchasing Twitter Musk's journey into the sun?