1x Tsla Discussion Threads

[simon gordon] 16/4/2024 17:16

And Musk is trashing the brand with his wealthy audience who want to buy cutting edge cool, not a ranting troll.

[simon gordon] 16/4/2024 17:12

H,

Shouldn't Tesla's strategy be to become the BMW / Mercedes of electric vehicles?

Whereas the strategy is all over the place.

[cfb2] 16/4/2024 17:06

hosede: I think the economy is going to kill a number of legacy car companies. The recent 10% cull shows me Tesla are making preparations to survive it. I think cheap robotaxis are a sensible market to move into if people are struggling to buy cars.

[cfb2] 16/4/2024 17:00

hpcg:
1) I am talking about manufacturing without any humans involved. Tesla have been preparing their assembly for their optimus robots with all assembly done from the top using click placements.
2) Robotaxi are unlikely to ever run entirely autonomously. They will need assistance in distributing them sensibly around usage areas. They will need to be managed for vandalism, incapacitation, damage etc. Once you have thousands of robotaxis you will want a control centre to do this.
3) I don't know this to be the case but I suspect there will be significant similarities between the robotaxi unveiled on 8th August and the new lower priced model. It is the only explanation I have for the rumours that fueled Reuter's article.
4) Even a small market is worth selling into if it is untapped at the moment. I note that BYD has had multiple failed attempts at opening a manufacturing plant in India.

[hosede] 16/4/2024 16:51

cfb
I see you standing at the mast - saluting - and going down with the ship:-0
I'm afraid the global debt crisis is going to kill off the Green revolution - and probably a lot more

[cfb2] 16/4/2024 16:45

Tesla has proven that making cars can be profitable. They could have made considerably more money if they hadn't put all that FSD hardware in them. They have been playing the long game since day one.

The likes of GM, Ford, VW etc. are not profitable because they have massive debts to service, legacy thinking, shareholders to placate and golden parachutes to prepare for when it all goes south!

[hpcg] 16/4/2024 16:32

cfb2
1) Every car company uses robots for manufacturing.
2) Latency? Not sure what you mean.
3) There is no robotaxi, it doesn't exist.
4) India and South America are small-car markets. I would think China will take the SA market.

[blusteradjuster] 16/4/2024 16:28

That presumes these boards only serve to discuss money-making opportunities.

If that were the case, what are all the politics/pub/etc boards all about?


hpcg 16 Apr '24 - 10:58 - 10613 of 10615

[hosede] 16/4/2024 16:01

Making cars has NEVER been a very profitable enterprise - Musk is well aware of that

[cfb2] 16/4/2024 13:55

Looks to me like Tesla are pivoting away from selling cars as their main source of income. If you look at where the 10% cuts have been made they are on manufacturing and yet they are still recruiting on software and are spending on a data centre.

The narrative given by Musk is that Tesla is an AI company rather than a car company. Him pushing this view more strongly recently may be due to the collapse in the Chinese market.

I can see a number of possibilities:
1) The Teslabot being integrated into the car manufacturing process.
2) The data centre being a central control point for the robotaxis.
3) The robotaxi being a new platform to build the cheaper car on. This may explain the recent rumours that fuelled Reuter's story about Tesla shelving the cheaper vehicle.
4) Tesla looking for car sales growth in other markets, such as India, South America etc.

[hpcg] 16/4/2024 10:58

I'm not sure why both longs and shorts are just rehashing old arguments? Our job as investors is to assess the latest information and compare it with the price of the asset, and in conjunction with what other investors are doing. With respect to the latter, the chart tells us that existing investors are selling. That is unequivocal, even if there are bouts of recovery. If other investors are selling there better be good fundamental reasons to buy, so what are the fundamentals?

Revenue growth has slowed considerably, which means investors will not want to pay as much. A 100x multiple is fine with strong revenue growth and operational gearing. Talking of which, profits are actually down, so there appears to be negative operational gearing. We kind of know that to be the case with manufactured goods where gearing is apparent when production grows into a factory, but ceases once a factory reaches capacity. Irrespective, margins are down and dropping, so any price paid for the assets producing those revenue must drop also. Did Tesla's share price go up with similar fundamental patterns? No. Unlike the narrative it didn't go up because of, er, narratives like robo-taxis, it went up because revenue was growing very fast, and profits much faster. Nvidia didn't rise in the last year because of an AI narrative, it grew because revenue growth took off.

We can look at narratives though. Tesla now faces exceptional competition in China, who may export that to the world just as Japan did. FSD in its current incarnation doesn't work as anything other than driver assist, and the balance of evidence suggests it won't because that is what is what repeated failure after being on the cusp for years implies. Does Tesla have any growth engines? The truck will increase its product range, but it looks like an enthusiasts vehicle rather than a mass market product. Tesla appears to have dropped a small car offering, which limits its reach in China, India, Japan and Europe.

All in all this means investors will pay a lower multiple for sales and profits and it is as simple as that.

[hosede] 16/4/2024 10:39

However it is done the battery needs to contain enough energy to drive the car X number of miles and transferring that energy to the battery very quickly will be an inherently dangerous process

[blusteradjuster] 16/4/2024 10:26

I guess for the likes of Pierre, a 50% y-o-y cost reduction isn't fast enough.

CATL being the global market leader - not some university lab team.


:The world's largest maker of batteries for electric cars, China's CATL, claims it will slash the cost of its batteries by up to 50% this year, as a price war kicks off with the second largest maker in China, BYD subsidiary FinDreams."

[pierre oreilly] 16/4/2024 10:16

I think everyone realises that most technology will improve over time. What the informed people realise is that there are dreamers around who think battery development will be three orders of magnitude faster than it will actually be, which agrees with the previous rate of technological development.

Anyhow Busted, thanks for your bullish view on evs - I take it you own one and speak from experience of the pros and cons of them?

[careful] 16/4/2024 08:04

Smaller cleaner cars, max 1.2 ltr are optimal.
Luxury car market hates it, but that is the fact.
For decades to come the electricity needed to charge electric will be mostly dirty.

[che7win] 16/4/2024 07:44

Very few people want battery cars, they have a niche place on the roads, but most of us want to have option to keep ICE cars, perhaps hydrogen is the better alternative, both for the environment and for ease of use.

[blusteradjuster] 16/4/2024 07:30

If these supply-demand-price dynamics sound like solar panels, chips, mobile phones, flat-screen TVs etc that’s because the pathways to cheap mass-market commoditisation are similar.



Taken together, battery supply dynamics are now acting as a moderating factor for what happens on the demand side of the equation. When EV demand slows, battery prices fall, leading to lower prices and helping spur a recovery in demand.

There are several big implications here. The first is that prices will fall and margins will get squeezed. That’s already happening, with a 14% dip in average battery pack prices in 2023, and China’s CATL announcing that it expects to be able to sell battery cells at the equivalent of less than $60 per kWh this year.

[cfb2] 15/4/2024 23:14

careful: Google's Waymo have a couple of hundred Robotaxis operating in San Francisco at the moment. They also operate in Los Angeles and Austin but I've no idea how many.

Sorry to hear that real life has not met with your expectations. Drones, fixed wing deltas, reusable rocket ships, Sabre hypersonic rocket engines seem like pretty good technological progress to me. Unfortunately your flying cars will need a major breakthrough in something like room temperature superconductors, so I wouldn't hold your breath!

[1pencil] 15/4/2024 21:42

Tesla is the ultimate form over function statement, digital gauges, watches and such made their way in a while back ..this stuff can look very dated, very quickly.

Depreciation, closed loop repair making insurance costs higher than average.

There's a market but not sure its at this level, my thinking would be more at the other end budget city car, disposable (recyclable) rather than high end.

[careful] 15/4/2024 21:25

Hard to believe how reasonably intelligent people believe that autonomous driving or robo taxis will ever happen on a reasonable scale.
Cameras and sensors have so many limitation when applied to cars.

Once technology becomes mature, progress is negligible.
I remember seeing my first Jumbo Jet, a Boeing 747 at Heathrow in the early 1970's.
We all wondered what aircraft would look like in 50 years time. Crazy predictions, like the situation in Ridley Scotts Bladerunner film in the 1980's, predicting life about now.

Life has barely changed or progressed much in most fields and our predictions were way out.
Jumbo Jets look pretty much the same as 50 years ago, and we wait with excitement to see if Elon can go to the Moon as they did in July 1969.(yawn, yawn..55 years ago).

Pity really, in the original Bladerunner film you could purchase beautiful pleasure model such as the lovely Racheal, perfect in every way.
Roll on 2020...all we got was Covid.

[simon gordon] 15/4/2024 20:47

Believers gotta believe....


Bloomie - 8/4/24:

...the idea that Tesla will crack autonomous driving is the key to having its stock trade on a tech-like earnings multiple north of 50 times rather than closer to a Detroit-like 5 times. That is especially so when Tesla is doing distinctly Detroit-like things, such as offering discounts to clear a swelling backlog of inventory.

I have no doubt that something will be unveiled on August 8. As with Musk’s riposte to the original story on Friday, his after-market announcement lacked details. Perhaps, finally, despite all the false starts and missed deadlines, Tesla will reveal a car that can actually drive itself from Los Angeles to New York and then park itself (a vision Musk touted when Obama was still president). Perhaps not. Maybe it will be something else. Unveiling the physical design for a robotaxi — pending the actual roll-out of fully autonomous capabilities and regulatory approval, you understand — is also one potential outcome.

For the Tesla faithful, that could be enough. For everyone else, it might be worth remembering that Musk has been known, at a moment of stress on Tesla and himself, to tweet the odd grandiose, less-than-concrete claim. Robotaxis secured?

[cfb2] 15/4/2024 20:05

Tesla is being treated as a car company by some analysts. That's their mistake.

[blusteradjuster] 15/4/2024 19:07

Let’s hope so.

Cost-cutting is the zeitgeist, parity with ICE (and lower) is the goal.

Anything that hurries the ICE into museums.