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TSLA showing cracks? TSLA showing cracks?

07-25-2016 , 05:22 PM
Right, but there is something like 31 million shares sold short, a non insignificant percentage of these shorts seem to buy into the Tesla is a pure fraud narrative. If GAAP loses suddenly shrink in Q3 and that narrative goes up in smoke... "Tsunami of Hurt" part II?
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07-25-2016 , 07:57 PM
I don't think so. Smart shorts know that storyline is a dead end.

They are banking on Tesla continually falling short of goals, cushioned by continuous equity dilution. The argument is essentially "Tesla is too expensive and built on unrealistic expectations so it must fall."

That said, I am sure most of the short sellers are hedged in some way. Either isolating the bets in a fund specifically set up for speculative shorts, long term call options to limit losses, or some other fashion.

Last edited by grizy; 07-25-2016 at 08:03 PM.
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07-25-2016 , 08:01 PM
I think what's going on at the moment is covered by that called-in borrows article I posted a couple of weeks ago, combined with an insanely high short %. It's like a penny stock short squeeze, a billion dollar version of what happened with KBIO.

Today the news that the SolarCity deal is likely - something which the market including most of the bulls thinks is terrible - and Tesla shoots up 3.5% in a down market.

Once the deal is finalized, the borrows are once again available and the reality of the massive new debt and cash flow burden is factored in, it'll be interesting to see what happens. I'm not expecting prettiness. Tesla's not only diluting their stock by 10%, but taking on bankruptcy level debt and cash burn.
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07-26-2016 , 02:02 AM
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07-26-2016 , 02:51 PM
Live in 10 minutes:


EDIT: seems like there will be no live stream

Last edited by heltok; 07-26-2016 at 03:05 PM.
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07-27-2016 , 03:53 AM





WANT!

Quote:
Musk said that once at full production, he expects the Model 3 to generate around $20 billion in revenue per year for Tesla with $5 billion in gross profit (or 25% gross margin).

It adds up to roughly 500,000 cars per year at a $40,000 price tag.

The Model 3 is expected to start at $35,000 for the base version, but with options and performance versions to be available, the average sale price will be higher.

The 25% gross margin is also an ambitious goal considering Tesla is having difficulty maintaining a similar margin on its Tesla Model S, a vehicle starting at $66,000:Tesla gross margin

But Tesla’s CEO also said that the Model 3 has been designed for being easy to manufacture and battery cost should be much lower once the vehicle hits its full annual production closer to the end of the decade.

During the event, Musk reiterated that he expects battery costs to fall below $100/kWh by 2020. They are currently below $190/kWh. The cost reduction will not only come from the battery cells manufactured at the Gigafactory, but also through lowering the cost of the overall battery pack for the third generation platform.

Finally, Musk reiterated that he is confident the Model 3 will enter production in summer 2017 for deliveries starting shortly after.
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07-27-2016 , 06:10 AM
Well I'm glad they'll have a positive gross margin. It would be a ****ing shame it it was negative.
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07-27-2016 , 11:01 AM


What if Tesla used the industry standard accounting methods to determine COGS?



Cells manufactured at the Gigafactory? This Gigafactory?



The line in black represents the portion that's been completed since 2014.

Elon said the Gigafactory will be funded by revenue (lol) from Model X and S sales as well as a "small capital raise" so at least he is being consistent about one thing, too bad it happens to be diluting the share count every year since IPO.
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07-27-2016 , 03:34 PM
One question came up in my mind for tooth and others who have been very critical of autopilot capabilities.

How do you explain that current Tesla owners continue to use it at a very high rate?

Based on the number of autopilot miles being driven per year, people who have autopilot seem to use it a lot. These are people who have 1,000s of miles of experience with it, so they obviously know its weaknesses and typical performance. These are people who are certainly aware of the crash. These are usually high net worth older people who are reasonably intelligent and value their lives.

If autopilot is so crappy and so dangerous, why do they continue to use it?
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07-27-2016 , 05:01 PM
Quote:
Originally Posted by Cuban B
Norwegian site Autofil compares the new Mercedes E-Class "Drive Pilot" vs the Tesla "Auto Pilot" system. Their real world metric testing came to a similar conclusion as both motortrend and caranddriver testing - "Tesla’s autonomous system is far superior to the Mercedes."



The test revealed a scary situation where the Mercedes system crossed into the lane of oncoming traffic and reset itself there as if it was the proper lane. Although, the benefit of these non tesla systems is that they are ****ty enough that no driver will be convinced that he can watch a movie and or otherwise pay no attention to the road while using them.
Another review/comparison of Tesla's AutoPilot vs Mercedes DrivePilot from the site TheDrive: 2017 Mercedes-Benz E-Class VS. 2017 Tesla Model S

Cliffs:
Tesla's AutoPilot is good and impressive.
Mercedes DrivePilot is a "disaster" and quote "This is actually a dangerous product".

Quote:
Drive Pilot: The only good thing about Drive Pilot is that your Mercedes will protect you from it. Did I trust it? Only at a crawl. Did I understand it? I don’t understand how Mercedes-Benz could release this to the public. I hated literally everything about it. It drove like a drunk ten year old, fighting for the wheel with a drunk fourteen year old. It was, in most conditions, dangerous.
Quote:
Autopilot: I loved it. A few hours in and one begins to learn a dance between looking out the window, looking at the display and using the stalk to manage speed. Once mastered, the pedals become largely unnecessary. It drives like a very good second year teenage license holder who really wants impress, and is getting better all the time.

It's definitely safer than a human driver alone, assuming you use it as intended. Without a doubt, it is the best ADAS system on the market. It’s incredible Level 2, but also a facsimile of Level 3 without sufficient advance warnings, which is where problems have risen. Ignore the warnings like a child and you will be disappointed, or worse. Heed the warnings like an adult, and it’s the best thing on the market.
I'm sure TS will be along soon to pillar Mercedes DrivePilot for it's deceptive "self driving" car branding. /s



I would quote mine all the stupid things TS has said about Tesla's autopilot being super terrible and others crushing them to lol at but I'm busy with work.

Last edited by Cuban B; 07-27-2016 at 05:15 PM.
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07-27-2016 , 05:24 PM
Honestly his comments about ML/SDC at this point are just outright trolling. There is not a shred of truth to most of his comments and the rest are based on out of context quotes.

I have not seen a single respectable publication have anything other than glowing comments for their tech.

But I would be interested in more of their non-standard accounting. I think its pretty well understood how they've been extremely deceptive in their reporting for years now. And extremely aggressive about protecting the shortcomings of their tech. (Supercharger NDA and Top Gear lawsuit.) Honestly its like Google's SDC company met Bernie Madoff. Probably a match made in heaven if you don't have the world's 2nd largest company to bankroll your fun time.
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07-27-2016 , 06:43 PM
Quote:
Originally Posted by Mihkel05
Honestly his comments about ML/SDC at this point are just outright trolling. There is not a shred of truth to most of his comments and the rest are based on out of context quotes.
Yeah, when he recently did some back of the napkin type math on the Model 3 and assumed everyone would be sold at the 35k starting price, i mean at that point you are either a clown or a troll.
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07-27-2016 , 07:14 PM
Quote:
Originally Posted by Cuban B
Yeah, when he recently did some back of the napkin type math on the Model 3 and assumed everyone would be sold at the 35k starting price, i mean at that point you are either a clown or a troll.
Clearly the minimum price is the average price, right?
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07-28-2016 , 02:39 AM
Some note on the MB. There are some different settings, the author in the review seems to have used the default "less control" option and not the "more control" option.

https://www.reddit.com/r/teslamotors...esbenz/d5tlfl4

It seems like a weird choice to use this as default. To be honest I find that the user interface of this 2017 model to be lacking compared to a 2014 Tesla. What impresses me the most is how Tesla was able to get ahead so fast from being far behind when they started.
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07-28-2016 , 03:50 AM
Cruise is by far the most impressive. Three years and a dude with a background in streaming video games, his friend's little bro, and 30 million.
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07-29-2016 , 10:46 AM
http://www.wsj.com/articles/tech-com...ent-1469795264
(to get around block, paste link into google search and open first hit)

Quote:
The company’s initial survey was done without respondents’ knowledge of the fatality, which occurred in May.

The results underscore the concern among conventional auto makers that they are perceived to be behind Tesla, Alphabet Inc.’s Google and other tech firms in the race to deploy autonomous vehicles. Most major auto makers have devoted significant research and budgets to self-driving car development, but Google’s car project team and Tesla Chief Executive Elon Musk have gotten credit for being faster movers in certain areas.

Google, for instance, has been credited for amassing more than a million test miles with autonomous prototypes on public roads, creating a sizable lead over competitors. While Tesla has been criticized for not doing enough to educate drivers on how to properly use its Autopilot, the company has been the most aggressive when it comes to equipping its cars with advanced safety systems.

Overall interest in autonomous cars didn’t take much of a hit after the Tesla fatality was disclosed, slipping only 3 percentage points. There was “not a massive falloff” in popular opinion around self-driving cars after the crash was disclosed, AlixPartners Managing Director Mark Wakefield said.

Joshua Brown, a 40-year-old Ohio owner of a Tesla Model S, died when his electric car drove under the trailer of an 18-wheel truck on a highway in Williston, Fla., on May 7, according to regulators and a Florida Highway Patrol report. The cause of the crash is still being investigated.

The second survey showed the crash may have raised Tesla’s name recognition in the self-driving sphere and raised awareness of autonomous cars generally. Before the crash, Google was the dominant company people knew of when it came to self-driving cars, at 42%, while Tesla came in second at 23%. In the second survey, 55% of participants cited Tesla, while Google’s name fell to 20%.
I guess all the crashes were PR.
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07-29-2016 , 01:46 PM
Interesting interview with George Hotz on tesla/google/mobileye and his driver assist startup.


He views mobileye as pretty terrible and just this week it was announced that tesla wouldn't use them going forward.

Musk:
Quote:
“This was expected and will not have any material effect on our plans. MobilEye’s ability to evolve its technology is unfortunately negatively affected by having to support hundreds of models from legacy auto companies, resulting in a very high engineering drag coefficient. Tesla is laser-focused on achieving full self-driving capability on one integrated platform with an order of magnitude greater safety than the average manually driven car.”
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07-29-2016 , 04:06 PM
Thanks for the link. It's amazing how many teams are working on SDC; with very material differences in their approach, I would think.

Someone should start a betting market on who gets there first.
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07-29-2016 , 04:32 PM
re: MobilEye relationship termination;

I am inclined to take Musk at his word that the divorce with MobilEye was expected. It would certainly explain TSLA's hiring of a lot of top shelf chip designers that I questioned a few months ago itt.

Also listened to some of Hotz's interview above. He is exactly right re: lack of rear facing radar on TSLA imo. I still don't know why they haven't remedied a super obvious problem.
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07-29-2016 , 07:48 PM
I just finished watching the interview.

Executive summary:
  • Comma.ai is focused on Level 3 autonomy, no Level 4 plans in sight.
  • Hotz believes this is entirely a software problem, not hardware.
  • Their software strategy is to apply deep learning to camera inputs.
  • Hotz believes data from cellphone cameras today are good enough to train best-in-class Level 3.
  • They hope to get training data at the necessary scale by giving away a free dashboard cam app for cell phones.
He seems a little over-confident to me, though obviously brilliant.

But the fact he's going all-in on cellphone camera data, to me confirms that Uber is in a strong position if they can deploy any kind of sensor suite across their fleet (even just dashboard camera).

Last edited by Subfallen; 07-29-2016 at 07:53 PM.
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07-30-2016 , 03:22 AM
Quote:
Originally Posted by Subfallen
I just finished watching the interview.

Executive summary:
  • Comma.ai is focused on Level 3 autonomy, no Level 4 plans in sight.
  • Hotz believes this is entirely a software problem, not hardware.
  • Their software strategy is to apply deep learning to camera inputs.
  • Hotz believes data from cellphone cameras today are good enough to train best-in-class Level 3.
  • They hope to get training data at the necessary scale by giving away a free dashboard cam app for cell phones.
He seems a little over-confident to me, though obviously brilliant.

But the fact he's going all-in on cellphone camera data, to me confirms that Uber is in a strong position if they can deploy any kind of sensor suite across their fleet (even just dashboard camera).
Some additional notes. They train using crowdsourced segmentation:
https://commacoloring.herokuapp.com

They gather a lot of data from users mobile phones. Exactly how they plan to use this for "training" is not clear. Maybe it will be used as testing or to train a simulation that will synthesize training data. Imo they clearly need side camera data to do lvl3 so one single smartphone looking forward will not be sufficient for training.

When I asked geohotz about Mobileyes paper about end2end DL not being feasible his reply was pretty funny:
Quote:
Amnon Shashua wrote a paper claiming that End-End Deep learning for SDC is not feasible. http://arxiv.org/abs/1604.06915
Talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GCMXXXmxG-I
Any comments?
Quote:
In other news, horse and buggy maker talks about why removing the horse from the carriage is just not feasible.
Some things are not possible, like FTL communication. Other things, like this, will just take time and cleverness.


---

Tesla Gigafactory Opening livefeed:
https://www.facebook.com/tesla
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07-30-2016 , 06:26 PM
Quote:
Originally Posted by heltok
...
When I asked geohotz about Mobileyes paper about end2end DL not being feasible his reply was pretty funny:...
Yeah I only know about him from this thread, but from that Vance article posted earlier:

Quote:
Originally Posted by Vance article
Hotz took a job at Vicarious, a highflying AI startup, in January to get a firsthand look at the top work in the field, and this confirmed his suspicions. “I understand the state-of-the-art papers,” he says. “The math is simple. For the first time in my life, I’m like, ‘I know everything there is to know.’ ”
I'm not sure how a rational person can say that when there are hundreds of world-class researchers working full time on deep learning...not a knock on Hotz's IQ, work ethic, or talent; but he may not be entirely tethered to reality here.
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07-30-2016 , 09:04 PM
I think he means the underlying theories and big problems are solved. The rest is grunt work and/or software/hardware development to implement.
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07-31-2016 , 03:05 AM
That would be astounding if true, as if you scan through e.g. posts in the Quora "deep learning" category, the research community clearly believes it is a young field with many big unsolved problems.

Typical comments are like this excerpt from a Yann LeCunn post, "Deep learning has more or less cracked the most basic form of visual perception: classifying the dominant object in an image when the object comes from a constrained set of object categories. However, despite this success, deep learning is still very far from human-level visual perception when these constraints are loosened, or when the task is changed from image classification to detecting and segmenting objects. For these more challenging tasks, or when objects are small, or when the set of possible categories is expanded to include hundreds of thousands of objects, more research is needed."

But Hotz is putting his money where his mouth is, so I guess we can just wait and see if he succeeds.
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07-31-2016 , 06:09 AM
I think what he means is that we have a fairly good picture of what is needed to develop a self driving car. Google has almost done it. He thinks that he can replicate almost all with less effort and cheaper sensors using machine learning and some clever hacks here and there and starting with lvl3 instead of lvl4. Maybe he is right, maybe he is wrong. But we have seen machine learning do some pretty amazing stuff over the last few years and he probably knows the limitations better than I do. And he has gotten pretty far in a pretty short time already:
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