1x Tsla Discussion Threads

[johnwise] 25/7/2024 09:56

Tesla's Latest Earnings Report Leaves Investors Reeling


Tesla's recent earnings miss has sparked significant investor concerns. The company reported its fourth consecutive earnings miss, with adjusted earnings per share at $0.52, below the expected $0.61. Despite a 2% increase in annual revenue to $25.5 billion, automotive revenue dropped by 7%, and net income fell by 45% to $1.48 billion. Factors contributing to the miss include aggressive price cuts, increased spending on AI projects, and rising competition, particularly in China. The earnings miss led to an 8% drop in Tesla's stock. Tesla is heavily investing in AI infrastructure to advance autonomous driving and robotics, but these initiatives come with high costs. The future outlook is mixed, with significant uncertainty and cautious investor sentiment.

[johnwise] 24/7/2024 21:26

Expert sets next TSLA stock price target after Tesla ‘catastrophic earnings report’

Electric vehicle (EV) manufacturer Tesla (NASDAQ: TSLA) recorded disappointing results in the second quarter, missing key targets. Reflecting these results, the company’s stock has suffered significant losses, recording a double-digit decline

[hosede] 24/7/2024 18:09

In Britain they would need an extra one to make the tea :-0

[cfb2] 24/7/2024 17:47

Apologies all. That's some embarressing mental arithmetic! Thanks for picking it up zho!

Also the $28/hour was the rate prior to the renegotiation. CBS website doesn't say what GM renegotiated.

Yahoo quote the Ford UAW assembly line workers as getting $42.6 per hour in 2024.

The shift is 8 hours for Ford, which is $88,608. So a $40K Optimus doing the same work would be 45% the cost. If Optimus was doing two shifts then it's 22.5% the cost.

[zho] 24/7/2024 16:49

>>UAW workers earn around $28 per hour. Lets say they do 7 hours a day, 5 days a week. They are earning in excess of $200k/year.>>

Doesn't that work out at $50,960/year?

[cfb2] 24/7/2024 15:05

Industrial robots on the production line operate from a fixed location. This will often give them accessibility problems. No human is allowed within the radius of the robotic arm (they often operate within a cage).

A robot that is able to move and operate like a human is a major advantage and potentially can operate closer to the industrial robots. Reducing the length of a production line has multiple benefits: time, floor space, energy.

UAW workers earn around $28 per hour. Lets say they do 7 hours a day, 5 days a week. They are earning in excess of $200k/year.

If Optimus costs $40k and replaces a UAW worker then that costs 20% as much.

Optimus could potentially run 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. UAW workers may think they've made the deal of a lifetime but in the next couple of years they will get a big shock.

[hosede] 24/7/2024 14:35

cfb
But we already have vast numbers of robots on production lines. They are programmed in general to perform one very specific task.
Do you remember " Modern times" when Charlie Chaplin's sole job was to tighten one nut by about half a turn with a very large spanner, and when he came home he couldn't stop going thru the same motion :-o

[cfb2] 24/7/2024 14:01

Being able to fold towels would be considered a breakthrough in robotics. If it can tie its own shoelaces that'd be better than most politicians. Musk has said by the end of 2024 it will be able to thread a needle.

What we consider useful to us is a much higher bar than would be useful on the production line.

[hosede] 24/7/2024 13:10

cfb
When a robot can tie its own shoelaces, It could become useful.

[cfb2] 24/7/2024 12:50

No analyst is even thinking about Optimus for revenue predictions yet. Manufacturing of Robotaxis is at last forcing them to be considered though. My suggestion for "Optimus" is "Nihilus".

[cfb2] 24/7/2024 12:44

I agree zho, the quarterly call was a good performance by all the contributors but too "pie in the sky" for some investors and certainly analysts.

Version 12.5 of FSD software was released yesterday (was it a coincidence it happened on the day of the conference call?) but it only had one of the new features that Elon Musk promised (increased parameter count to the NN and HW4 support only). Things that weren't in the release:
Smart summon and banish
Support for Cybertruck
Combined highway and local driving models
Ability to reverse

Lack of required features being demonstrable is not a good sign for the upcoming robotaxi reveal. There will be a capex for the robotaxis and that needs to align with the software becoming plausible.

[hosede] 24/7/2024 12:40

Perhaps the Robot should be renamed Pessimus :-o

[zho] 24/7/2024 10:34

An 8% fall after market tells its own story. What was the problem? In part, the Musk schtick is beginning to wear thin. To cite two almost comical examples, he at one point said that “everyone on Earth” would want an Optimus robot, so the total addressable market for it was about 8 billion, and then answered a question about regulatory approvals for the robotaxi by saying: “Our solution would work anywhere, even a new Earth.” That inspires Musk’s legions of admirers but it falls flat with shareholders, particularly after a poor quarter.

[cfb2] 20/7/2024 16:40

hosede: Tesla have numerous moats which are crucial to their technology. A competitor would be unable to mimic Tesla's solution by merely stripping the car to its components and copying them.

Several talking heads/analysts remark that the intermittent windscreen wipers were copied by other manufacturers shortly after Ford rolled them out and the same will happen to Robotaxis, except they'll do it better than Tesla because they'll learn from their mistakes. So your misunderstanding appears to be common and hopefully I can explain some of the moats Tesla has:

1. All Tesla cars have eight cameras, a couple of dedicated AI based processors with full redundancy.

Tesla have been putting this hardware into their cars for a decade. Giving them the ability to upgrade any of the 6m vehicles to run as robotaxis. Any of these cars can send back specific video clips that can be used to train Tesla's AI.

The amount of compute power available spread over the Tesla fleet in the inference engines is vast potentially providing yet another revenue stream in the future.

2. Vertical integration.

Vertical integration means that Tesla can issue software updates to upgrade any of the software in the car's components. None of the legacy manufacturers have this ability as they buy in components and software from elsewhere resulting in upgrades requiring a return to dealer and the attachment of a cable to upgrade.

Allowing a car to upgrade any of its components is really difficult to do unless it has been designed in at the start. Most of the legacy manufacturers would need to throw away the majority of their software (and some hardware) and start from scratch to achieve this.

3. AI and neural network expertise.

The team has been put together over 15 years and judging them by their achievements they are world leading. There will be considerable amounts of in-house written software and knowledge accumulated over that time to support the FSD.

4. Data advantage

Over 2 billion miles driven by their cars and accumulated safety data ready for submission to the regulators. The best of the captured video data is being used to train the AI. Without this volume of data it will be impossible to discover those edge cases that need to be solved to make FSD safer than humans.

The FSD software is unlikely to ever be complete as there will always be the quest for the march of nines. The faster you can accumulate the data the faster you can feed this back into improving the software.

5. Data centre

Constructing a data centre with a hundred exaFLOP capabilities is difficult and expensive. There are few companies with deep enough pockets. A data centre of this capabilities requires it's own power station!

[iceagefarmer] 20/7/2024 08:51

Mr Trump said: “We will end the ridiculous and actually incredible waste of taxpayer dollars that is fuelling the inflation crisis.

“They’ve spent trillions of dollars on things having to do with the green new scam – it’s a scam.”

[hosede] 19/7/2024 19:58

Cfb
I still don't see why Robotaxis - if they come to fruition - should benefit just Tesla. Anything new like that and every man and his dog rush to get aboard; normally resulting in massive competition, and very little profit for anyone

[cfb2] 16/7/2024 16:27

The Robotaxis event has been delayed until October, not in itself a big deal in the scheme of things, but it suggests the initial announcement was to deflect attention away from reduction in YoY car sales. The rumour is that it is being pushed back to introduce a new feature that developers say is worth the delay.

Tesla shareholders are used to Musk's optimistic time scales and they're OK with it because Tesla are such trailblazers in their markets. What Musk needs to realise is there is a thin line between optimism and manipulation. Very difficult to come back once you've been proven to be on the wrong side of the line.

[hosede] 15/7/2024 11:16

Results out on 23rd - that's late: it's usually around 17th . You would think that if they were good you'd want to get them out early

[simon gordon] 11/7/2024 19:48

Bloomberg - 11/7/24

How Rivian Became the Anti-Tesla

The startup persuaded Elon-phobic car buyers to drop $70,000 on its EVs. Now it just needs to make money.

Like a lot of people, Chris Hilbert has complicated feelings about his Tesla Model S. Hilbert, who is 44 and lives outside Indianapolis, loves his car’s instant torque and neck-snapping acceleration, but there are other aspects of Tesla ownership he finds less appealing. For instance, he doesn’t credit the company’s claims that his car is a few software updates away from being able to operate autonomously, and he wouldn’t particularly care about such a capability, even if it existed. “I like to drive my vehicles,” he says. He’s also put off by the rabid fandom culture that’s come to surround everything related to Tesla Inc. and its chief executive officer, Elon Musk.

Recently, when Hilbert complained on social media that his car’s “Full Self-Driving” system seemed to consistently fail to stop for school buses, he was greeted with a mixture of denial (“Fake news as usual”) and ridicule (“You suck”). “The big problem is, there’s Tesla and there’s TSLA,” Hilbert says, referring to the two species of Tesla fan. The first group cares about the cars and is basically like Hilbert. The second is mostly interested in pumping up the stock ticker and attacking anyone who isn’t doing the same. “The stockholders are the toxic bit of it,” he says.

Hilbert, who works at a financial-services company, is a lot more enthusiastic when talking about his family’s other car, a Rivian R1S. Last year he and his wife bought the three-row SUV, which starts at around $76,000, by trading in their old Tesla Model X, a luxury crossover vehicle that seats six and features the distinctive “falcon wing” doors resembling those of a Bugatti Type 64 or a DeLorean. The R1S had a seventh seat, making it big enough for his five kids. (He considered a plug-in hybrid minivan, the Chrysler Pacifica, but couldn’t face the idea of actually having to fill up a gas tank.)

Continued....

[hosede] 11/7/2024 18:17

I Understand history Juliemara - and I know that the end of the US hegemony is not far off

[hosede] 11/7/2024 17:52

Three nice gaps above 195.
If Robotaxis ever actually make it onto the streets, I suspect that there will be as many robotaxi Cos. as there are normal taxis cos. today and they will have to compete just as they do now

[hosede] 11/7/2024 17:25

Bears seem to have come out of hibernation today

[hpcg] 10/7/2024 15:42

I can't see the logic of tariffs on Chinese EVs being good for Tesla. It has a large plant there with a lot of political risk. It needn't be government lead, it could be a consumer boycott.