All the car companies are developing software/firmware for their cars actually.

Your Car's New Software is Ready For Update Now

Quote:

TIRED of your vehicle and its aging, limited features? Don’t trade it in just yet. Download new software instead.

In some cases, that is already possible. And over the next few years, as the already extensive software on modern cars becomes even more feature-rich and upgradeable, manufacturers mean to step up the effort. They plan to offer many types of improvements or repairs through downloads that are beamed directly to the car via satellite, Wi-Fi or cellular signal, without the vehicle’s having to be brought into the shop.

Eventually, your car will be serviceable like a giant smartphone, with new features added periodically while you sleep.

A leading proponent of the approach is Tesla, the maker of electric luxury cars, which has been sending updates to its cars’ operating systems since 2012. The company is expected to announce an updated operating system next week. The chief executive, Elon Musk, has said via Twitter that the update will include improvements to the company’s Autopilot automated driving system.

No **** sherlock. In other breaking news, humans have two eyes and a nose.

And "are developing"? You mean "have been in ongoing development and successful large scale deployment in software and firmware for decades".

I really don't get what your point is. Is Ford a software company too now? The maker of Mars Bars uses and writes software. Are they now a software company rather than a candy manufacturer?

This is ridiculous.

Raining on your short parade a little I see. I have no position in this stock. Ford develops software for their cars, of course.

To rain on anything you'd have to say something sensible.

I see your edit clarified to "over the air updatable" software/firmware.

The notion that Tesla have any non-trivial percentage of market cap value in their software, and that this might provide a bulwark against bankruptcy, is ridiculous.

The notion that they have a lead in autonomous driving or even that their autonomous driving software has any value is ridiculous - Tesla are dead last.

The notion that they're a software company rather than a car maker is ridiculous.

The notion that over the air updates are going to disrupt the traditional dynamics of what car companies do (design and build highly advanced manufacturing facilities with low error rates and manage large global supply chains) is ridiculous.

Not going to get involved in a flame war on this. FWIW, one thing I always do in evaluating a stock that I potentially would take a position in is the bullish case vs. the bearish case. Being totally unfamiliar with TSLA I started wondering what the bullish case is for TSLA. No way this stock has the valuation it does without there being a bullish case.

I've read many posts on the internet over the years from bulls and bears on particular stocks. Universally they hype their reasons for their views while trashing the reasons why they may be wrong. Just a reminder to readers of this forum, all the information we see posted in this thread is widely known and most of us aren't the first to hear about events with TSLA. In my view you should always ask yourself why is my insight any more valuable than the multitude of people who follow this company. In reality your insight probably isn't valuable. Certainly you should at least try to understand the RISKS involved. My advice, FWIW, is keep this in mind when reading TS posts in this thread.

Whose excited for today!

efficient poster hypothesis

Assuming this is real (autopilot actually engaged and doing this), JFC. You can see how it happens, but it's inexcusable on so many levels.

Down another 5% today. This stock seems ****ed. And if there is a recession, likely before anything approaching profitability, that's going to be a demand problem at exactly the wrong time.

There's a lot of stuff like this all over the forums. Tesla "autopilot" is so extraordinary stupid that it merely follows the line, not seeing stationary obstacles. Thus it'll run into you into trees, fire trucks, concrete dividers.

That would be fine if it was sold as "lane keeping and close-traffic following at low speed". But it's sold as "autonomous driving" and "autopilot", and tons of hyped up videos are posted by Tesla's own PR on its amazing capabilities. They're scumbags.

Extraordinarily, both analysts and the people in this thread couldn't look at this (and dozens of other pieces of evidence) and realize that Tesla are and were always far behind on autonomy. I actually got ridiculed by Spurious for saying this incompetent software is going to kill people and it's going to tank the stock when it does. It's killed quite a few people already, they just haven't made the mainstream news. There was one in Germany where it ran into a divider and the car was totaled so badly that no data could be retrieved, another that ran off a cliff in LA (same scenario), another in China, as well as heaps of videos of it running into parked objects in broad daylight and suddenly swerving when it loses lanes or has a light flare. It's seriously dangerous and not ready for prime time. Multiple high level engineering staff have quit in protest on his releasing it when not ready.

The death statistics would be a lot higher if Tesla wasn't a late model two ton truck with a big crumple zone, primarily used on highways. There are certainly lots of crashes caused by autopilot.

Tesla goes bankrupt in a recession. That's the standard business cycle - cheap freeflowing credit + easy capital raising = lots of non-viable businesses sprout, who survive and even thrive on debt and leverage and capital raising in a robust bull and government handouts until the next recession. Tesla are in an even worse position since they die without tens of billion in capital and a strong luxury goods market.


The 5% down today is probably bullish, not bearish.

Ya kind of expected tesla to plummet when the market rips down so hard

And a pile of bad weekend news. Everything since Thursday 4pm is in today's trading. It should be down more if the market viewed this as catastrophic.

Elon taking over model 3 production responsibility so Doug field can focus on only engineering

What a clown show

Musk is getting aggressively ahead of the news cycle today.

- Multiple tweets

- "Leaking" internal emails to friendly news organizations with "congratulations" on imminently hitting 2000/week, without actually having to hit it.

- Leaking information that Musk is taking over line production and moving the manager for that, once they failed to hit 500/week by the end of March

- In response to question following the "leak", Tesla Spokesperson Says Model 3 Production Is "Highest Priority", So Elon Musk Is Focusing Time There While Doug Field Focuses On Vehicle Engineering

All this before any official announcement by the company. Basically, they're avoiding headlines of yet another massive fail - even with desperate last minute attempts to ramp production to hit their twice delayed target and 6 months overdue, they only just hit 2000/week.

They might even wait a few more days to get the juiciest numbers possible.

Clever PR from the fraudster/liar/carnival barker. It seems to have saved the stock today. The reality, for the long term view, is that Musk has yet again horribly failed to hit even his own twice delayed target despite a desperate attempt to juice the numbers in the last week. He is below 2000/week even on April 2nd.

TS,

Can you post sources for your claims that it killed a few people? Tesla maintains that AP is safer than human drivers. Your claim would kill that number.

Elon Musk’s Dad Just Had A Kid With His Stepdaughter


Musks are very weird dudes.

He's 72. She's 30.

Man, seriously?

Lol, wow

Disaster

Model x and s way down, 21k total vs 25k yoy and 28k qoq


Less than 800 week average production of model 3


The 5k/wk guidance subtly moved to "about 3 months" instead of end of q2


And lol, no equity raise required, translation, raise imminent


http://ir.tesla.com/releasedetail.cfm?ReleaseID=1062670

No one got decapitated driving a Tesla this quarter, so there's that.

Lol

His head was still attached after being burned alive


Bullish!

Quarter was a total disaster looked at objectively, but spun beautifully both in the statement and the prior PR/leaks. I sold puts yesterday and am holding them. The carrot is firmly back in front of the donkey. Only real risk is the market imo, or some (unlikely in the time frame) bad news.

Disagree

Although puts are insanely expensive

If you plug this into a model, the product mix is going to crush margins and lead to a 1b+ loss in q1. Maybe you are ok if they expire before q1 release but I think Pwc will be extra hawkish on their q1 review given the favorable going concern language that tesla just doubled down on regarding not needing cash.

Which I think most know is not true


Also feel like an orderly selloff by FMR Baillie etc is or should be all but a guarantee

I don't disagree that long term Tesla are bankrupt and that their cash flow is a disaster. They do still have meaningful cash holdings however, enough to breathe for six months without a raise.

If they ramp from <1000/week now to 5000/week in three months, they pull in an extra $200 million per week in revenue. That's enough to keep operations going for a long time. It gives them breathing room.

That is the carrot now and Musk has spun this well enough that the whole situation is bullish to enough of his investors (and scares enough of the shorts) that the bias is net bullish.