So I guess this record bull market coupled with seemingly endless cheap money is the only thing that has allowed Tesla to exist (at least in anything resembling it's current incarnation) at all.

Like it seems like if we have any sort of exogenous event that causes a tightening of equity/lending then things go bad fast for Tesla. Real fast. I mean the company is in a pretty precarious position even with people fighting to lend them billions at essentially a junk rating for like 5%. It's amazing.

I think Musk would raise cheap money in any climate. That is why he's extremely valuable as a CEO. Look at the people ITT who equivocate the overt fraud and utter dishonesty he engages in. (Relying on vendors to test his rocket parts, his pretty overt security fraud, the horrid workplace conditions, etc etc) Creating this sort of fervent sycophants is super valuable as he has shown.

They got some cool tech, but they're super secretive and Musk is incredibly dishonest. I've soured on a lot of what seemed promising mostly since nothing has ever come of it. Their 2016 data for self-driving cars is terrible and they're vastly behind other players despite their data advantages. (They lack the sensor suite to overcome this as well.)

It'll be interesting to see what they end up doing.

I don't know at this point. I think it all hinges on Model 3 progress, which I think is likely to be poor for a while, but who really knows what's going on at the factory? We can only guess.

If it was anything even remotely good, don't u think we would know about it? Tesla doesn't exactly shy away from announcing good news


I find the biggest, and most suspect thing. Is the lack of transparency wrt china growth. Their top line in the Q shows significant china revenue growth, yet they never talk about it. And I don't mean the china factory which is a joke obv.

Yeah that was my argument in private 2p2 chat for shorting prior to earnings...radio silence from Musk. Guy would be crowing like a rooster and tweeting like Trump if anyone at all good was happening with M3.
China has a lot of home grown EVs, and they're ramping rapidly with a far superior price profile. And I don't mean Musk level ramping (200 cars/month), I'm talking 40K/month and soon to hit 50K/month in EV sales.

Doesn't explain why they don't speak of the growth in China


Also how do I join this private chat

semi-truck reveal on thursday.
which they won't produce for years.
i'm calling another capital raise before the next earnings call.

I've never really understood the deal with the semi truck.....as a layperson I don't see how the math works out vs. a diesel semi.

The semi-truck, solar roofs, boring company, inter continental passenger rocket transport, etc; I am getting a distinct whiff of desperation. Sort of a 'pay no attention to the man behind the curtain' moment for Musk Corp.

Hopefully he proves me wrong.

The boring company seems like the most ridiculous thing to me, although the rocket transport is close. This notion that drilling and maintaining some expansive network of tunnels to transport cars is a worthwhile endeavor, especially in light of the purported horizon that there will be a lot fewer cars in a few years because of autonomous-driving ride-shares, is baffling to me. It's not like tunnel tech has made some paradigm-shifting leap in recent years. Of all his ideas, this one smacks most of futile 1950s conceptions of the future.

Where is heltok? I haven't seen any good electrek propaganda of late

This is cool...Lamborghini creates self healing electric car with supercapacitors.

Trucks are slow and slow down traffic. Extra torque from electric truck should make society better as trucks won't be so damn slow anymore. Get from point A to point B helps truck driver and trucking company too.

Obviously TS would blast Musk for a fluff piece of that level, but if a competitor puts out a hype piece with literally zero tech he strokes it softly and lovingly.

Or maybe he thought it exists? Hard to tell with his knowledge of the space.

It's dumb and has no utility. An about-town electric makes a lot of sense (can go all day on one charge), but a semi? That's insane without a 700+ mile range, as it's going to take many many hours to fill up

The boring company is pure crazy. Some years ago I was looking at investing in a distressed inner city tunnel at one point, so I've looked into the economics quite a bit. Tunnels barely work cost wise without multi lane full flow per tunnel all day and a high toll. And even then it's a thin proposition.

The street elevator + car rails is the clincher for me. Pure unhinged crazy.You have to build on and off ramp tunnels for every ultra low flow entry point, the powered mechanics of an elevator (and the vertical digging/shaft creation into existing streets).

I can't tell if he's a loon or a master at setting himself up as nerd Jesus to loons. It has to be the latter, his PR is too tightly controlled and too carefully dishonest to not be deliberate.

It could work as a luxury product. There are a ton of rich people in LA and the traffic is BAD. Economics might not make sense for regular people, but if you pay up 8-9x (you probably know better by how much since you studied the economics of it), it could work. Would basically be a very profitable underground toll road for the 1%.

Thought the same thing when I read about it a few days ago. Was actually thinking to myself whether he will post it.

If a diesel truck is not going long distances between engine starts, the engine starts to deteriorate. Given that a lot of companies use their truck not for long haul but short distances and loading/unloading quite frequently, an electric truck is superior.

The total cost of ownership is superior as well. If the battery supports roughly 400km, it'll be very worthwhile to use it for long haul.

400km is not a long haul by any stretch.

Even if it were, and it isn't, you're saying that the Tesla Semi is going to get the ~the same range as a Model S. My back of the envelope calculations go something like this:

[envelope]
Model S is about 2000kg and the battery costs a lot, like a whole lot;
A semi in the US weighs in at 36000kg on the reg, I'm only on a 32 bit machine here so I'm just going to ball park the number of kwh a battery capable of getting the same range would need at a ****-tonne.

[/envelope]

A modern diesel semi come with ~240 gallon tanks at ~8 mpg. In round numbers that's 2000 miles or 3200 kilometers. Almost an order of magnitude greater range. That's long haul.

And it only costs like 150k or so for the whole machine.

A Powerwall today costs about $400/kwh. That's what I can actually buy a battery for from Tesla. I'll let you do the math, but if you multiply $400 times (a metric ****-tonne of kwh) then you are going to get a large number for a machine that hopefully can travel like 3.5 hrs without stopping.

I just don't see it.

And we haven't even talked about reduced cargo capacity b/c the weight of this ginormous battery is >>> two 120 gallon loaded aluminum diesel tanks.

eta: and even if 8 mpg is optimistic it's not like the calculus changes at 6 or 7 mpg.

So I've read some estimates of a 1200kwh pack for 500 miles.

Again, in the real world Tesla will sell me batteries at 400/kwh. Let's be generous and assume that for whatever reason they are 30% less in the truck.

That's over 300k for just the battery for a truck that can barely make an 8 hour day's worth of miles when it's brand new in ideal conditions. I don't see it.

At what point is the only cargo the truck can carry is its own battery?

There's a use case for these trucks for local hauling work. In CA they might even be economically viable at the 250k-350k price point particularly in LA.

I DO think electric trucks are coming, but not until the batteries are better. Electric engines have significantly fewer moving parts and maintenance expenses are actually a pretty meaningful piece of the cost of ownership of a semi truck.

And important thing to realize about commercial vehicles like semi's is that the only thing anyone in the industry cares about is cost per mile. It doesn't matter what the up front cost is as much as what the energy/maintenance/insurance/driver costs are.

Obviously this won't be in that price range and won't be viable for a while... But if the batteries get cheap enough these trucks are allowed to weigh 80k pounds loaded. They could definitely stick a large battery pack on the trailer without compromising too much cargo capacity.

Well that's the thing. Batteries are improving yearly. You shell out $300K for one of these things and not that many years later the battery is obsolete. Between degrading over time and battery tech improving rapidly and a $200K premium, the economics just don't work.

Perhaps Tesla will do something like guarantee resale value, which is really just a giant money-losing subsidy, but moved forward by some years. Essentially Tesla could run this as another way to get loan money it won't have to pay back if it fails.

Assuming they can even build the things. What factory would they be made at? Fremont is full if they want to get anywhere near 500K model 3s. What know-how do they have in heavy truck building? We know how their Model S & X's turned out with reliability (ultra low, lots of maintenance and down time).

To me this is a pure gimmick. Spend some meaningless millions to mock up a prototype for free PR. I mean, Musk's tweet about this event put the stock up $2 billion. There'll be the pump and dump analysts who now run 2022 truck numbers and add it to revenue. Etc. None of it will actually come true, but it feeds the pump.

First of all, I am not talking about the US and while it's large and matters it it's not the only place that matters.

Where I live and every surrounding country, there is a regulatory requirement to take breaks. You cannot drive more than 8 hours a day. It is completely meaningless if you could drive more than that because you are simply not allowed to. There is also a necessity for in between breaks (1 hour for an 8 hour day). This is where my 320km requirement came from.
The fact that current trucks can have more in their tanks is completely irrelevant.

Secondly, total cost of ownership goes way beyond the mileage. Trucks have notoriously high upkeep at the moment and (as BS indicated) if it was possible to reduce those costs and thus lower total cost of ownership, people would be willing to compromise.

Thirdly, it doesn't matter to the trucking company when you take your breaks. If you have to fill up every 250km and take a break and thus drive 12 hours in total they don't care (as long as they have people willing to drive trucks which is the way tougher challenge).

Arguing against electric trucks is really stupid. The business is not just long haul 2500km drives. It is mostly the opposite where trucks drive for shorter distances and carry cargo that needs to be driven from a port to a warehouse e.g.

You've never heard of more than one driver?

He's talking about Europe. The assumption is that the other driver is on strike.

Virtually unheard of (ultra expensive, would be interested if this actually exists) and have you not understood the fact that long haul trucking is the exception and not the norm?