I mean, Andreessen is majorly involved in Bitcoin. If you think his support means likelihood of success, you should be hoarding bitcoins, not Tesla. Any kind of sane look at Tesla says that they'll max out at 10-20x under the most optimistic scenario where everything goes perfectly; bitcoin is a 1000 bagger if Andreessen is right (I think he's very wrong, FWIW).
Wasn't commenting on SPY (I don't think down was a bad call), just the idea that Tesla short might be ok because a bear market would pull it down. It was a good trade on its own merits. Tesla went down a ton despite a) no unexpected news after I posted and b) SPY going up 4%.

then again if he wasn't long BTC no one would take him seriously (talk is cheep etc....). We meed to redefine the sentence: "If you are so supportive of them, why don't you invest....?"

Andreesen is dishonest, Icahn said he knew Microsoft was interested in Skype sold he sold most of it at a low price to a company he was involved, the resold it to MSFT. It cost EBAY shareholders $4 billion. This is why you got to be wary of the Silicon Valley brat pack, they have been ripping off shareholders for 2 decades.

But, I would watch Mercedes as they have the tech to at least auto-park the car.
http://autotechnews.net/2015/10/12/s...te-with-tesla/

ToothSayer-
LOL at the idea of the Volt being a Tesla competitor.

That's like calling the Impala a 5-series competitor.

No matter the specs the BMW is a luxury good and the Chevy is a car.

Do you think Samsung is winning in phones vs Apple?

Wait until the NHTSA get a look at videos like this:



Musk's idiocy and showboating is going to kill someone. From the video's description:

If you actually read the post, I talk it about as an example of the first generation of what will complete with the Model 3 when it gets released in a few years to come.

Imagine the Volt with 2x the battery range, better performance, which will be minimum we'll see. It has zero range anxiety (which is relevant for most of the world; California is an exception), zero need to ever find or wait at a charging station, with all the benefits of using an electric (cost savings, smoothness, quietness, environmental) , which will run during all commutes, around town/city driving, etc.

The Model 3 - one of the steps to ramping up volume - is close to dead in the water given the competition that will be out. The Volt is a small taste of that. Read the actual review.

And no, I wasn't suggesting that a $30K car is comparable to an $80K or $130K car. Obviously.

TS, I really enjoyed your contrarian posts and you made some good points but now you come off as bitter and desperately try to grasp at straws.

The autopilot feature is ONLY for highway driving:
I am European, so I am used to different highways but that road does not look like a highway.

You're missing the point, Spurious.

Having "autopilot" that controls the wheel, hyping it up (despite it being behind other technology) in the desperate attempt to keep your stock price up and pretend to be ahead of the technology curve is stupid and a bad business decision.

If you must keep the hands on the wheel (and from that video it's clear that autopilot will randomly disengage with very short warning), then it's utterly stupid to have a steering function, because people will take their hands off the wheel. People will misunderstand the function, what a highway is, etc. And then it's only a matter of time before someone is killed by this horrible design.

They should have had a kind of cruise control function with automatic braking (always when engaged) and acceleration (only with a following car in range or perfect highway conditions). That would have been a safe way to do this, since you can't take your hands off the wheel anyway. Instead they added auto steering to the mix even though you can't take your hands off the wheel. It was a very stupid thing to do.

If this was not a highway, and autopilot is only for the highway, then a safe autopilot should have detected that, and not engaged. Instead they want to push the technology for PR reasons. It's a bad business decision. This will 100% be Tesla's fault when someone dies.

I'm amazed you can't see that this is a death, a lawsuit and bad press waiting to happen. For no reason at all.

this

One major scandal and it will push the adaptation back 5 years...

funny, even tho driver is 100% at fault the title is Tesla AutoPilot tried to kill me!

edit: another test not using the freeway - people be experimenting

The only thing I agree with is the fact that it shouldn't be able to turn on the function on a road like that. This is utter non-sense and the GPS should know which roads are safe.

The driver is 100% at fault here, sure it will create some bad press but quite honestly how much is it going to hurt sales? They can turn off the feature easily and it's all good again.

Tesla's cars don't have the cameras to even properly determine which road it's on. They have very little hardware and they're very backward compared to the research from even two years ago. Adding steering control with a mere warning that it's only to be used in highway driving and "to keep your hands on wheel" with zero safety controls around those two requirements was very silly and is going to blow up in their face. It was PR stunt to put Tesla on top of the autonomous driving race in the minds of the public (who are ignorant) and stay cool and relevant.

I agree it won't sink their company. I'm looking at this from a trading perspective. There will be unexpected bad press out of this, probably a death or two, and interest from the NHTSA. Worth watching out for.

It's also indicative of Musk making bad business decisions lately. Another was the gull wing doors on the Model X (not that great, and lots of lost time engineering them), another was slagging off his former employees who've gone to Apple.

-10% today. Seems like an overreaction to the CR report which came out a bit more negative than the actual numbers imo.

I think its in response to the CTO selling $2M worth of shares

This is irony right? It's in response to Consumer Reports, and it's an under reaction so far IMO.

Like I said earlier in the thread, I've driven a lot of high end cars and Tesla is at the very, very bottom of my list as far as quality automobiles. I don't trade the stock but it doesn't surprise me that CR is less than enamored with their cars now. Only a fool would spend money on one of those things. If they survive maybe their cars will be better in the future but they are WAY to expensive for what you get. I would honestly rather own a Prius.

Yeah I agree turtle. I've heard several people (IRL) used to luxury cars bag the **** out of Tesla. It's not surprising - look at the capital on the books of major car makers - hundreds of billions - combined with millions of man hours of know how, supply chains that took decades to set up, etc.

Still, the pumpers are back in full swing, claiming the report is irrelevant. But the amount of issues means that Tesla is in deep **** - warranty costs are going to be higher than expected, and they can't make a reliable car even at a $70K+ price point and a decade of lead time. That doesn't bode well for mass production Model 3 - intelligent first adopters are way more forgiving than mass consumers.

They're also making horrible decisions, like including steering control on their highway autopilot. That should never have been released, and it's going to blow up in their face. Other car makers are way more advanced in this area and aren't going near this yet, for a reason.

Interior materials and craftmanship are inferior is the only thing I've heard from a lot of sources. Driving has never been brought up. There are testimonies online as well to document.

I mean some valet parking guy coming in and claiming is hardly proof.

We'll see how things develop. Consumer reports coming in negatively is obviously not a good sign but oh well, expectations are way higher than anything else.

ToothSayer, can you please elaborate on the fact that GM actually sold cars that killed people vs. Tesla that has a build in software capable of being turned off any second. Why the former produces Tesla killers while the latter is bound for bankruptcy (where the former comes from)?

Dude get in a 550 benz then get in a Tesla and it ain't hard to figure out. I wouldn't trade a Camry xle for a Tesla. Seriously.

Stock seems to have recovered a bit, pretty happy with my panic buy at 206.3. Did any of you guys short it today?

" Tesla Motors has built a rabid following since the car’s 2012 launch, reflected in 98 percent of Model S owners saying they would definitely purchase it again. Not only is the Tesla roomy, comfortable, and a lot of fun to drive, but it also has low operating costs—returning the equivalent of 84 mpg (a consolation, of sorts, for the car’s $90,000-plus price)." - CR

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articl...faction-survey

If people like their cars, so what, and many S owners are now buying the X.

The p/s should be 2 imho, that is a 50% drop in price. Chipolte is overvalued too.

Maybe there will be some tragic incident involving autopilot, the stock price will plummet; and Alphabet will take Tesla private, promising to fix everything by spinning in Google's autonomous cars division.

So we get an auto genotype spliced with the best of SpaceX and Google engineering.

ToothSayer-

I totally agree on the auto-pilot. If they leave things as-is there will be a crash and bad press.

Tesla is based California. California Law defines what a highway is. Look at sections 110, 591 and 592.

http://www.leginfo.ca.gov/cgi-bin/di...0&file=100-680

Highway is synonymous with street. Alleys are highways.

Freeway is a limited access highway and the word you're probably thinking of.

And then weirdly enough highway is used by some people as a synonym for freeway.

Big 3 are probably thinking about it. Alphabet is a public company, and when people say they are going to take it private to fix it usually means they are going to use the dumb shareholders and crooked large shareholders to screw the small shareholders and take all the value from an undervalued company.

What would be a better choice is merge SpaceX, TSLA, Hyperloop, Tesla Homes, Mars Emerald City, Tesla wireless light rail, and solarcity into a company and issue a lot of shares to end all debt and have a massive cash position.