Quote:
Originally Posted by ToothSayer
I mean, you answered your own question. It's a PR trick. A few million minds who think like yours, a news cycle to keep the stock elevated. Musk is buying his own stock!!! It's a vote of confidence!!! Lot of first level thinkers in the world.
It's zero cost PR. Particularly since he just uses the stock as collateral for loans (Last i checked he was $650 million in the hole with investment banks, with a few billion worth of stock as collateral).
And yeah, penny stock pumpers use this quite often. They have some great man (the visionary CEO, a new investor) put a small amount money into the stock to demonstrate their confidence, and the stock soars.
The difference is that this isn't a penny stock. It's a car company that has product market fit. This thread is called "TSLA showing cracks?" and is five years old. The bear stories are just repetitive. The company has the potential to be a dominating force in the electric cars business.
It is a misconception that established car companies can just switch their entire processes to become a primarily electric car company. Nothing in history suggests that.
If we look at the various elements that need to be changed to move the current operation to the new world.
Production- The current facilities need to be drastically remodeled and will basically be unusable - either temporarily for ICE production or permanently after the last ICE car was produced.
- Workers need substantial retraining. This isn't something that is done overnight.
- Fitting supply to demand is a very difficult task if you have highly volatile order volume.
People always overlook this aspect and think this is so easily done. I don't think anyone in the car industry actually thinks this is true. The reason why we see announcements for cars in x years from now is not because they are uneconomical, it's because they wouldn't be ready even if they had the orders.
If re-investments in ICE production facilities get stopped, the marginal costs to produce an ICE car will come down as well.
Suppliers
The number of potential suppliers isn't matching the potential demand that they would expect in a roll-out of widespread electric vehicles. This is mainly due to the fact that it is uneconomical for the suppliers to do mass production in advance if car companies are not willing to take the first step.
Also, the vastly less complex design of electric cars reduces the pie and benefits a few large scale suppliers. Today, a lot of suppliers are very specialized and heavily integrated into the OEM's supply chain. To just switch them isn't as easy as just changing contracts. It cost VW 9 figures to change the supplier for small items for a limited number of cars (most of the costs associated to get the suppliers' facilities in the position to take over from the old supplier). Imaging this on a large scale.
Sales & repairs
People have laughed at me before for bringing this up. I am still of the opinion that the sales force will sell ICE cars until hardly anyone buys them anymore. I have two reasons:
- The sales force is selling what they have experience with. They will not be able to switch unless they are heavily incentivized. In order to get them incentivized, a few things would need to happen:
- The car companies would need to overweigh future (uncertain) sales and underweigh lucrative current profits. To get this to happen on a large scale is almost impossible. Car companies hardly make any money today, operating in two markets (one of them being only promising) is not going to be the norm.
- Prices for electric cars need to be attractive. If a car company can sell an ICE car at a substantial profit, because it doesn't have to make re-investments in current ICE production facilities, the prices will naturally come down. It's a vicious cycle that is short-lived but will take down established car companies.
- Repairs are a substantial part of the profit of car sellers. It's the more lucrative side of the business and it's under threat in an electrified world. Preventing this from happening is going to be there number one goal.
Some of the things might be contradicting each other, but I feel like Zetsche summed it up quite well when he said that "electric cars are good for the environmental balance, but not good for the economic balance sheet." Something that Tesla investors are fine with - at least for the time being.