Others have dozens of fully autonomous cars with years out on the test track, and real actual roads. Tesla is a joke in this space.

They are not advertised hands free. They are not claiming that it's autonomous driving; it's merely driver assist. They are not hyping the **** out of it.

I'm sure you're traveling on well marked, highly traveled highways on the East Coast. *I* could write the code for this to work flawlessly. This is completely irrelevant to whether the product is ready or whether they're ahead in autonomy.

This is a shockingly low number. Fully 15% are unsatisfied. Note that this group also consists mostly of Tesla fanboys and stock owners and first adopters comfortable with major bugs in return for "cool" features.

This is just total bull****. If you can't admit they are many years behind even someone like Google (over a million REAL WORLD miles with FULL AUTONOMY, not some buggy highway-only **** that still fails), I don't know what to say. I really don't know what to say. You're an intelligent man who's spouting utter nonsense.

I'd agree if Tesla had viable sensors on their cars. They don't. Here's the thing. Autonomous driving is going to depend on object recognition (of all road objects in all conditions), situation recognition (for example - am I taking an off ramp? What should I expect? How fast should I go? How does this experience compare with the dataset of expectations?), and 3D surface mapping.

Whatever data is captured now with a worthless sensor set is worthless in terms of autonomous research. When autonomous cars come out in the 2020s, they'll be driven by by more advanced version of this with higher bandwidth and resolution, and a fully mapped out database of objects and situations. If Tesla already had the sensors, data collection and uploading of this data on its cars (or near future cars) to power this, I'd agree they have a huge edge that would be very valuable. They don't. The end. Tesla's effort is a ****ing joke right now and the data means nothing except tinkering around the edges of improving their deeply buggy simplistic algorithm.
Perhaps. How did you come to meet them, by the way?

I have no special insight, but everything I have posted is completely obvious. Tesla are many years behind and don't have the money to get ahead. Their current highway-only software is so clownishly bad and buggy, bad enough to prove that their algorithms are just a joke and have barely advanced to 2005 level. That people can't draw the dots from this is, well, why there is a market.

They haven't gotten there first with anything. They've simply released a buggy version of 2005 software to get some PR.

That will be gone in a few years. The batteries are almost ready. Take a look at the Mission E for example, which crushes TSLA on battery design. There'll be far more of that once there's a commercial case to start producing volume electric. Tesla has set billions of dollars on fire for no reason at all except Musk's aggrandization; once the battery tech is ready (2018 or so), we'll see a flurry of new pure electric models that crush Tesla on price, features and reliability (simply by the capital, know how, dealer network and volume edge that the major auto makers have). I don't doubt that Musk is fully aware of how far behind he is, how he lacks the capital and supplier networks, and how much of a clown he is, so he's trying to win at PR in the interim, in the hopes that mindshare will get him across the line in 2018-2020. I don't believe it will for many reasons, but that's the only thing that interesting to debate IMO.

TS,

why do you hype everything that is yet to come to market and compare those to already existing products?

LOL @ Mission E...

Porsche is selling 200k cars a year, only four times as many as Tesla yet their concept study is going to crush Tesla?
The Mission E is PR bull****. Same goes for BMW's i8 and i3.

You are contradicting yourself on the way as well.
So Tesla has only bull**** engineers, no one worth their name will go there, yada yada yada, yet you claim Tesla will be destroyed by Apple's talent poaching.

Apple will crush Tesla yet they get all their engineers from the joke R&D department at Tesla's.

Everything Tesla currently does was solved ten years ago, yet no car company has put out a product that can compete with Tesla's current product (according to studies conducted by external parties), because it would be too dangerous. But you yourself could solve the easy cases that would make the life of every driver a lot easier and the roads safer.

The number of Tesla engineers that worked at other car companies must have been not invited to the secret meetings where everything about autonomous driving was revealed. Because despite the fact that you claim financial incentives would motivate people to join Apple, Tesla would not be able to get some of the talent from existing car companies by offering more money?

Why do you need to insult Elon Musk in every sentence. Is it related to the fact that he is way more successful than you? You sound like a 9/11 truther who can't hold it together because somehow no one understands how only he knows the real truth. "WHAAAAT ABOUT BUILDING SEVEN YOU ****ING IDIOTS??????????????"

ToothSayer -

You make my head explode, I need to find some ice. And tylenol. I will keep my reply on ice until Elon has moved away from Tesla to focus on SpaceX, his clear first priority.

This will happen in 6 or 7 or 9 years. In that blessed future, there will be no more drama about Elon's contrived influence on the price of TSLA. Price will depend on whether Tesla's technical roadmap and execution was actually good or bad compared to all the others.

If TSLA is still worth less than F and GM at that time, I will give you a heartfelt, public apology for ever doubting your ability to psychoanalyze the world's 4th or 5th most successful entrepreneur from your (doubtlessly satin) armchair.

If (and when) TSLA is worth more than both at that time---because in fact Elon's roadmap was not bull**** but just reality---I'm going to expect you to read something you have to pay for. Probably this. And in a great shining moment, you will understand that some people with endless resumes, sociopathic affect, visionary research programs, and a circle of worshipful peers are not always charlatans---sometimes they're just really, really, really ****ing smart.

P.S. But I mean, yeah, how pathetic it is to be less accomplished than Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates and...Mark Zuckerberg, perhaps? Clownish incompetence at best, criminal negligence at worst.

To be fair, Tesla---as simply the only car manufacturer that works directly with Mobileye instead of going through a Tier 1 supplier---can't possibly have ToothSayer's visibility into the value of sensor data collected using the current suite.

Spurious, you and I have a lot to learn about the limits of people not named "Jeff Bezos" or "Bill Gates" to develop roadmaps for the technology they are directly involved in creating. We're so stupid. (I don't even have a 140 IQ, fwiw. Not even close.)

Spurious -

And you know what? The really amazing thing is that MobilEye only refined the technology to support highway autopilot the third quarter of this year (not a coincidence). And it took them that long despite being the market leaders in autonomous-driving-related computer vision for the last decade.

So what ToothSayer doesn't realize is that if he had just taken a few weeks off to write the algorithms that he's claiming he could, he could have got funding to start what would arguably be a multibillion dollar business in a few years.

Even the wisest among us can have blind spots, sometimes.

I've been researching a bunch of stuff in that sphere today and the hardware stuff TS claims cannot be validated. It is a bit of a crapshoot as to which technology is actually superior but the claim that everyone in the game has it solved and is waiting for an improvement is just BS.

More like waiting for ToothSayer to get his lazy ass out of the (satin---or is it velvet?) armchair and write those algorithms, amirite?

Subfallen, others who think Tesla autonomy is meaningful or (lol) ahead, have a read of what Tesla owners and fanboys - some engineers - think. It's from March, but nothing has changed except a very buggy software update. It also has some links about what others are up to.

By the way, I started off fairly ignorant about Musk and a fan from a distance - have a read of post #5 in this thread. The more I've researched Tesla, watched its PR cycle, learned about Musk, the lower my opinion has gone.

As for Musk's intelligence, how do I sum it up? Musk is best explained as a lower end high IQ, iteratively applied to various subject matter far more times than most because of an unhealthily strong drive. Add in a personality that is grandiose and doesn't believe in boundaries, and you have Musk. His comments, his worldview, the accounts of him, fit with this. Donald Trump has a similar life story without the physics/engineering background. Geniuses look and act different to how Musk does.

Um, Google has been driving fully autonomous cars for years (albeit map assisted) through all kinds of city (non-highway) traffic, which is orders of magnitude more difficult than highway autopilot. Your own paragraph contradicts itself. If you follow the link above, you'll see a Delphi coast-to-coast test in March. Clearly your paragraph is clownishly false.

Remove your nose from Musk's nuts for a nanosecond and go do some reading. It'll be enlightening.

Why would you start a business that's years behind Google, or Mercedes, or even academics? Flawless highway driving of the kind Musk is failing at (lane changing, lane following, car following, collision avoidance) is a long solved problem; the only issue is that sensor set is far too expensive for commercial cars.

Get a clue, guys. It's embarrassing.

Google's cars aren't "map-assisted", they require centimeter-resolution maps to be constructed in advance. They're not even working on a highway driver assistance system right now, so that's irrelevant.

Bump this thread when you have a link to a review that shows why Mercedes' ACTUAL, COMMERCIALLY AVAILABLE driver assistance makes Tesla Autopilot look like "crapware".

Kthxbye.

Correct.

I feel like almost all your posts on the technical side are reasonably correct, atleast wrt Tesla. I think your posts made a meaningful impact on TS's view of SDC. However your last post what a couple strawmen/non sequiturs. (Weirdly most AI researchers think they'll see AI, speculating 30y in the future, but still have no concept of how that will even be achieved. Actually it isn't weird at all, but pretty normal.)

I think a couple major issues with Tesla can be explained:

1) Most people have an issue with the weird accounting/reporting Tesla engages in.
2) Why are sales targets continually missed for bizarre and unknown reasons? (I could be wrong if these are sales/production/delivery, since as we know... Tesla reports their figures in a variety of strange ways.)

This ignores the weirdness with the charging stations, the reasonably fraudulent exploitation of the ZEV credit system, or any of the other myriad issues.

You seem to get too caught up in whatever Tesla/Church of Elon is doing, without regard for any of the actual feedback from reality (People are not getting Teslas for whatever reason. Clearly demand is insanely high and there is just a massive backlog.)

Mikhel05 -

About the future of AI...I'm a big believer in Bertrand's Russell's principle from the introduction to Sceptical Essays:
The likelihood of ASI is in category (2); so I don't believe that anyone can be called "profoundly idiotic" for having a opinion one way or the other.

You said that you don't think any roadmap to ASI exists. This is also a matter of opinion. I haven't read much on AI recently, but offhand I remember a Wired interview with Dennett and Minsky (can only find an excerpt here), where Minsky says the architecture he described in The Emotion Machine is programmable. (We might guess it would require Manhattan Project-type funding, but that's his opinion, which pretty much by definition cannot be "profoundly idiotic".)

So to summarize, I think you are reasonable to believe ASI will not appear for centuries. And I think Elon's position (which is well within the AI mainstream) can also be well-supported.

Personally, I think ASI will appear in our lifetimes. Mostly because the ongoing deep learning research program looks almost guaranteed to result in super-human representational systems for visual/auditory/kinesthetic inputs.

--------------------------------------

About Tesla's various execution problems...I didn't see anything about the specific problems you mentioned in the SeekingAlpha articles.

I'm sure Tesla has a wide range of huge challenges ahead. I'm sure the auto incumbents do as well. And, in large part because I do think Elon is a Minsky-level genius who is uniquely capable of THREADING ALL THE TECHNOLOGICAL NEEDLES, I believe Tesla will have outsized success in this problem-rich environment.

That summarizes my view. I'm not exactly buying the stock, but that's just my opinion based on what I've read. I could be wrong.

Sub,

To try and give some semblance of rationality: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/...ating-mankind/

Apparently the quotes are from the book you cite about the foremost expert. To synthesize down Musk's worries, it would appear that he seems to think that Google's current efforts could create an evil robot army that would wipe out mankind. That is specifically what I consider profoundly idiotic, for reasons you lay out. (Although your view is kinda neckbeardy and really stretched.) Weirdly Musk cannot be considered an expert in AI, but Tesla is rapidly moving into some pretty advanced AI. Maybe he is just making **** up again?

wrt my criticisms. I'm sorry that you know nothing about the sector or Tesla and are unable to address them. I'd suggest getting outside of SA to educate yourself. These things are well documented in the financial media and should be known by someone who is eager to discuss Tesla as an investment.

Personally, I think Tesla is overpriced and overhyped, much like Musk, but not an outright scam.

ETA: "I think the architecture described in The Emotion Machine is programmable. If I could afford to get three or four first-rate systems programmers, we could do it." - AGI so close. Just need a couple million.

Pretty sure that is dumped into the profoundly idiotic bin.

The rise of AI is by far mankind's greatest existential threat. Musk is correct in that.
Can you name one thing that Musk has achieved, with his billions, and billions more in taxpayer dollars, no less, that is noteworthy? So far we have an ultra-ultra-ultra low volume ultra expensive car that's losing money even with government subsidies and is years behind (his own) schedule.

The only thing he's done that's noteworthy is SpaceX, and Bezos has shown with his stunning success that the non-business actions of founder are largely irrelevant (Bezos is busy running a real business - Amazon - and certainly doesn't do what Musk does in getting involved in details as you gushily point out). It comes down to staff, and that comes down to money, not founder genius. I suspect space technologies was an area that was ripe for billionaires to pour in money, hire the right people, and get impressive results, since there was no commercially viable application thus far and most other efforts were bureaucratic.

All I see from Musk is massive failure. He's succeeded in doing absolutely nothing except acquiring business assets (like Donald Trump). Yet you're blowing smoke up his ass like he's some godlike genius. It's really, really weird, man. Musk is a brilliant businessman, and obviously sociopath-level clever at PR, but there's no evidence he's good at anything else, let alone a "Minsky-level genius". Let me repeat: there is no evidence whatsoever. He's invented nothing, had no breakthroughs, and can't even beat with public money what an internet shopping founder can do with a lesser amount of private money.

You're basing most of your opinion on a hugely gushy book by what is a sickening, not-too-bright sycophant. Given that we know that Musk and his PR actively seeks out sycophants to give them access despite his busy schedule and write favorable articles (on the other side, he's hung up on reporters that ask even mildly tough questions), you don't think a massive selection bias might in play here?

Your butt-sniffing of Musk is just incredibly embarrassing.

As for existing technology, as I've mentioned, other car makers are FAR ahead of Tesla, they've simply chosen not to release because technology is dangerous and there's no reason to release it apart from hype. This isn't a controversial opinion, by the way, as the opinions in that article show. Earlier I posted an article about Nissan prototypes driving around Tokyo, which is orders of magnitudes ahead of highway driving for complexity and difficulty. As for highway driving, here for example is a test drive that an MIT writer did over two years ago with BMW. It seems to have fewer bugs than Tesla, while having more features (it's actually hands free including weaving around traffic automatically):

This is two years ago - sensors have improved greatly, as has software. Clearly fully automated highway driving here was ahead of Tesla over two years ago.

Your opinion is so ridiculously contrary to the facts. You reduce to "but but but commercially available!!!" which is irrelevant since I and others have pointed out that Tesla's release and hype of this software is stupid and dangerous and something no other car maker would do. For one, the proper sensor set is expensive still, and for two, enough unknown edge cases still exist that the technology simply isn't ready for the general public. But you can be sure that, while they might have bugs, they aren't doing incredibly stupid things like taking off ramps repeatedly when all they have to do is go straight.

Ok, that's fine, we just have different principles for evaluating evidence and forming beliefs.

That's also fine. I do not intend to invest in TSLA, and as mentioned above, I think the extent of dysfunction in the incumbent US players will be the single biggest factor in determining how far Tesla gets. (The books I linked above on the US auto industry go into detail on the head-spinning level of historical incompetence. They are very interesting.)

I do not plan to read anything else about either topic.

In reality, Tesla has a competitively-priced luxury sedan with solid margins that last year was #2 in its segment to the Mercedes S-class. Growth rates are best-in-segment.

So, in reality, we have a young startup that is well on its way to capturing market leadership and mindshare in one of the most lucrative and influential car segments.

It has done this while spending $0 on marketing. (Comparison: Mercedes-Benz has a 90 year brand legacy and spent ~$350M in US advertising alone last year.) Even better, it is iterating rapidly on the tech platform of the future, while incumbents face a classic innovator's dilemma.

In reality, this is an extraordinarily noteworthy accomplishment.

Blue Origin is making incredible progress toward enabling space tourism, but that's not really comparable to what SpaceX is doing.

Do you realize that unlike Bezos, Elon was not actually a billionaire when he got into rockets? He had less than $200M and risked every penny of it to keep SpaceX and Tesla alive. Are you aware of this fact?

You are free to use words in any way you like, but since Bezos is worth triple NASA's annual budget, I don't see how your numbers add up.

I'm not sure why you expect me to take your assessment over mine about a book that you haven't even read. Especially since I've read many biographies of many tech founders---including the definitive bios of Gates, Bezos, and Jobs---and Vance's work compares very favorably.

(Also fwiw, if you had ever tried to do something that is actually hard---like write a good biography---you would realize that Vance is a very bright guy.)

ZFG.

You're going to be in for QUITE a surprise when Audi and GM announce sometime next year that they will be adopting Mobileye for their highway driver assistance as well.

True, they'll almost certainly be going through a Tier 1---unlike Tesla, which is working with directly with Mobileye to accelerate the expansion of its feature classification set---but you'll still feel a little dizzy, I suspect.

You see, in reality, the software side of even highway driver assistance is just reaching maturity; and getting lots, lots, lots more data FOR WHICH CURRENT SENSORS DO SUFFICE is going to be a big step to keep moving to the next stage. Tesla is on the cutting edge and poised to move far ahead if their competitors don't act quickly.

If we frame him in exactly this way:

1. Larry Page & Sergei Brin
...
<huge gap>
...
2. Jeff Bezos
...
<large gap>
...
3. Bill Gates
4. Mark Zuckerberg
...
<large gap>
...
5. Elon Musk

Then yes, I agree Elon Musk is a massive failure among the top five-ish living entrepreneurs. Are you satisfied now?

Yes, he is brilliant and very careful at PR. Thank you for supporting the contention I've made, which that he has a Trump-like brilliance at business and self promotion, but no evidence of anything else.
This is just absurd. There's no dilemma. They will rapidly start building electric models in an arms race for market share once the batteries are ready for commercial viability (a few years).

In terms of his talent: he is a brilliant businessman, no question, who has managed to stay afloat by getting vast amounts of government money. I agree that he's a brilliant businessman and PR manager; that is not up for debate. But then, so is Donald Trump. so how is Musk different? That's the question I'm asking. Nothing you have written addresses this.

Musk has managed to pick up and invest early in companies with good people that were going somewhere (he didn't found either PayPal or Tesla, and bought into them) and managed to pull off government financing to stay afloat. He has never had a commercial success though. These are business skills. I'm not seeing any evidence of this "genius" that you're lauding that can solve all technical problems and that makes him a near sure bet. He seems to have entered not-commercially-viable uncontested areas and failed to achieve business success apart from stock market hype. He has made horrible decisions with Tesla, missed deadlines, over engineered, and it's still a cash flow nightmare 11 years after founding, even while able to secondary a hyped stock in a tech risk bull. This has happened while he had a virtual monopoly, since there was no point whatsoever to burn the kind of cash that Tesla is burning unprofitably duct tape engineering not-commercially-ready batteries.
Who cares what Audi and GM do? Some car manufacturers have very little progress on autonomous, others are low middle of the road (Tesla), others are way out in front (BMW group, Nissan, non car makers like Google). You're claiming that Tesla are in front of everyone and I'm claiming that's bull**** and that they're years behind. The evidence which I've posted seems to back me up.
And I'll let that be the last word as I know this is getting tiresome for you. As for my predictions, two things will happen by 2021:

a) If it's still listed, Tesla will be worth less than $10 billion
b) Musk will end up in a psychiatric hospital for a time

Good getting your perspective.

Blue Origin's VTOL rocket is not even remotely analogous to SpaceX's VTOL program, much less SpaceX as a whole. To imply that they are equal achievements is simply laughable.

Pretty much.

One had worked. The other never has. SpaceX is extremely successful at cost cutting via cutting corners with safety. Let me know when they stop blowing up packs of food, and start killing people. I'd be interested to see how "Oh... We don't test our structural elements" goes over.

I know two different people who work in this space -- one at a major university on pure research and one with Google. Neither of them consider Tesla a joke. The Google guy disagrees with their approach and would agree with you that it is better to wait until they have full autonomy before releasing driver assist functions, but he takes Tesla very seriously as a player. I've personally seen a Tesla mule with the next gen sensor suite and I guess we'll just have to agree to disagree with your assessment.

This is fair criticism. Tesla is good at hype, and everyone who knows the first thing about autonomous driving knows that their current release is Level 2 of autonomous driving under the NHTSA guidelines. It is, however, better Level 2 software that anyone else has released.

You should apply to Mercedes or Honda or any of the other carmakers who have released software that works much worse than Tesla's. They would appreciate the coding help.

You've not spent enough time on TMC. More than 15% are unsatisfied with the MP3 player because it doesn't always get the album art right on podcasts.

They are definitely behind Google. They aren't many years behind. Both companies are pretty secretive about exactly where they are and both are approaching the problem differently. Google's implementation depends very heavily on pre-mapped roads and LIDAR, Tesla's implementation is heavily visually based and won't ever use LIDAR.

Forward-looking camera and radar is pretty much the standard feature set. Stereo forward cameras would be nicer, but certainly no one would deny that video and radar data is pretty damn significant. Side and rear radar and/or camera would be better for level 4, but probably not terribly useful for data collection.

I snipped the rest of your reply because it seemed repetitive to continue point by point. You dismiss their R&D as if you were intimately familiar with what is probably one of the most closely held projects in the company (other than their changes to battery chemistry) and you denigrate the current level 2 automation as poor quality and trivial when it is demonstrably superior to the efforts of other players in the field.

I'm a long-time Porsche guy and my other regular ride is a 911 and I've love nothing more than to see the Mission E prove to be something more than typical automaker concept car BS, but I'll be completely shocked if it turns out to be the case.

Their future is all about the gigafactory and getting the new chemistry into cells and getting the unit price down. If they get there, it will be such an enormous competitive advantage I don't see any other carmaker beating them in the BEV space for 10 years. If they don't, they will end up being purchased and folded into some other brand.

Missed this one. One I know well was a grad student with an old friend of mine who is an EE prof at a major university who does R&D in the field. The others I met at an annual TMC meeting where Tesla sends engineers to answer off-the-record questions and do power point presentations of stuff they are working on. Its probably nothing they don't give to major investors and VIPs, but its a fun way to learn stuff over a beer or two.

Thanks for your answers. I guess time will tell.
How do you figure this?? Here's what GM claims: GM says li-ion battery cost per kWh already down to $145

LG Chem and other researchers are certainly as advanced as Panasonic and every other player. There isn't some magic bullet here; unlike Musk's other ventures, which are largely immune from competition due to lack of commercial viablity (perhaps that's why he chooses them?), battery chemistry is a multi billion dollar, heavily and widely researched and competed space. I find it quite frankly unbelievable that you think Tesla will have an advantage here, let along "such an enormous competitive advantage"; there is zero evidence to suggest they will. EV battery factories are going to pop up mushrooms (some already are in China - Samsung, LG Chem are just two recent ones building pure EV battery factories), built by people with the billions for capital outlay and deep research histories.

The bolded sounds like deeply wishful thinking on your part, presented as likely.

You're sounding a lot like a fanboy. You claim batteries are going to make all the difference, point out where you think they're ahead, and give no credence to what's in the multi-billion dollar research labs of other car and battery makers, or just how good they are at making cars while making a profit, compared to Tesla, who has never done it even at absurd price points.

And now you sing Tesla's praises on a stock forum. Musk sure is good at PR. Anyway, nice to get a slightly more inside take.

"Already" is misleading.
GM says LG is on track to accomplish that price:
GM executive vice-president Mark Reuss recently acknowledged that LG is on track to get cell costs down to $145 per kWh in 2016

Tesla has made significant strides in silicone anodes. Their latest battery chem uses some silicone, but they expect to go to a much higher level of graphite replacement, which will drive significantly higher energy densities. Its too early to be sure, but Tesla believes that they have solved the cycle life problem with silicone anode that has prevented anyone else from releasing a production cell with that chem (other manufacturers only use minuscule levels of silicone)

Tesla's R&D in combining metal-air and LiIon is also a promising avenue that they have shown patents for (#1 and #2). They have lots of other R&D in battery tech that hasn't been patented.

If the gigafactory achieves 50% cost reduction and achieves the volumes they predict, it is a significant competitive advantage. I have no idea if the claims Musk has made about those two items are real or not.

The whole "still hasn't made a profit" thing is a bit of a stretch, btw. Take away the capital investment and R&D and they make money -- they are just plowing the money back into the future, as they should.

2+2 seems like a poker forum that dabbles in stocks. I couldn't possibly be motivated enough to post on seekingalpha or any of those other hotbeds of crazy talk. I'm not particularly clear on exactly what performance Tesla needs to justify the PE ratios that it currently trades at. I'm kind of an idiot investor, I find products or companies I love and buy stock because I figure companies with good products should make more money. Sometimes it works (Amazon, Apple, Tesla) sometimes it doesn't (FitBit, EMC).

I wish someone could talk more about the battery chemistry. Everything I've researched has indicated they are not ahead of anyone, and are very unlikely to be. Given their research budget and the global, capital heavy, cutthroat nature of the battery business, I think there's zero chance they'll be ahead, let alone have a meaningful cost advantage. To give you an idea of scale, Apple for example buys as many lithium ion kWh as Tesla does.
That's a common misconception, but it's not true. I think it's because they heavily push non-GAAP. They have a 20% gross margin, which you can see in this income line here. This excludes non-essential R&D and capital investment.



Their R&D budget is actually very small - less than $800 million a year, a lot of which goes to building car bits and processes that others have already figured out. On top of that - separate from their losses from their business - they're burning through a small fortune - for which they have to issue stock to fund - for capital investments:



As you can see, they've taken $1.3 billion in 9 months from selling stock and getting loans, and are still $479 million in the hole.

You can see why other carmakers have no interest in this space with 2012,2013,2014,2015 battery technology. Why would they blow through many billions to sell a mere 50,000 cars at a massive loss and no competitive advantage?

As a business it's an enormous failure, and many years away from turning a profit even if they stopped R&D and capital expenditure.

If everything goes absolutely perfectly for the next 10 years, Tesla will not be able to scale up - by the their most optimistic estimates - to make more profit than Ford (with a P/E of 12) makes on 5 million cars/year with $144 billion in revenue. Ford is valued at $57 billion, while Tesla is valued at $30 billion. Include the 4% dividend that is Ford is paying, over 10 years - it will be at least that long until Tesla has any profit able to be returned, even in the most optimistic case - gives you 50% of the Ford's market cap back in that time.

Tesla for the long term is one of the most worst stock bets in history. Even if you think they'll beat everyone at battery tech and electric cars and autonomous, you're lighting money fire by buying them.