Well, this is only relevant for the US. Not sure what the distribution is between US and non-US. But yeah, a lot of people will be annoyed and cancel their order.

276k https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/716693951260938241

Has there been anything said about the ratio of US vs non-US sales for Model 3?

I know the sales are starting out West and moving East but don't think there was ever any estimates given.

FYI Elon had an impromptu Model III AMA on Twittter. A good summary can be found here.

The only part I found really interesting was when Elon responded to a tweet about the lack of dashboard instrumentation. He said it will all make sense in Part 2 of the unveiling, which he previously referred to as 'super next level'. Relatedly, when someone asked him if he was surprised by the volume of pre-orders he said they were expecting 1/4-1/2 the amount and didn't expect to pass the current threshold (~300k iirc) until the Part 2 unveiling.

So something pretty big is in store. Or at least Elon thinks so.

[TS]Or so he would have us believe! [/TS]

Considering MobilEye has all but said Tesla will be upgrading to the next gen autonomous hardware suite in 2016 I am holding out hope the super next level feature is autonomous related.

I'll settle for an Ironman like HUD. Nothing less will do.

Maybe you can get rid of the steering wheel and turn the front seats around or something. But I would say as well that they want to do it fully automated.

Who on Earth are you talking about? I'm the main dissenter in this thread I think, vs the hoardes of nutty Musk fanboys who don't even trade the stock.

The record of the dissenters is exceptional. My first posts are recommending not going short. More recently, I hammered the stock in the $230s in November and December when the Model X presentation was a disaster and delays were piling up, and $220s in January, said it was done (and it was). Turtletom (a "dissenter") said this in December:
You would have made a lot of money shorting or even more with puts. Then at $150, I said this:
This is basically the ****ing bottom and I recommended buying!! Yet you blame me for you losing money?? WTF is wrong with you? What more do you want?

Immediately after earnings (which were horrible), I recommended getting out in the immediate aftermath of earnings to anyone who following me into a pre-earnings long at $151:
And it did indeed sell down from $161 - back down to $144 - a full 10% drop. Once it stabilized down there, it was again a buy. You had a week to get back in at $150 once it stabilized.

The "dissenter's" take on trading this stock have been very clear (and very correct). If you're too much of a ****wit to parse written text and understand the difference between medium term (the first) and short term (the second) advice, that's not my problem. Perhaps I need to spell it out for the morons by specifying time frame? Do I need to hold your hand through the trades?

When someone shorted at $206, I said this:
If you can't parse simple text, or understand the difference between short, medium, and long term view, it's not my problem, Schwallie. Maybe invest in an index instead? If you can't make money selling when I strongly recommended in the mid 200s and buying when I recommended at $150 (and staying long through the Model 3 event), then you're too much of a drooler to ever beat an index.

Anyone who followed my trading view on TSLA has done very, very well. Meanwhile, the Musk fanboys don't propose a single trade. Like teenage boys in love, they're here to defend their beau, not make money.

For the long term, nothing has changed. The Model 3 is a nice looking concept car, and preorder demand is as strong as the article I posted said was likely (and got mocked for). It's a positive for sure and will be worth buoyancy for a little bit until big money dumps for the next down cycle.

But the fundamentals are terrible, they will never improve, and Tesla will collapse. Musk can't sell the Model 3 for $35K without losing vast sums of money. BMW could get 200K pre orders as well by promising to sell a lovely $50K cost car for under $30K (after credits). They'd go broke doing it, and everyone would think they are nuts, but that's what Musk is promising.

Musk cannot and never will compete with the majors. He lacks the capital, the supplier networks, and he lacks the skill/intelligence. It is a cutthroat commercial business and pretty much the opposite of the space industry.

I'll post again when I think it's time to short/sell. Try not to buy when I recommend that. I cannot for the life of me fathom how you could have lost money listening to my trading advice.

Yeah, micro-Tooth has been very right in this thread even if I think macro-Tooth is way off on his Tesla tea leaves.

This. A good lesson in that you don't really need to have any idea about a company's business model, product, or really any idea at all about what they're doing to make money trading! (Assuming he actually profits from his proposed trades, which may or may not be true.)

Elon Musk misses yet another target: 14,800 deliveries this quarter vs 16,000 predicted.

Elon Musk is a great genius according to his fans.
Yet Elon Musk has a near perfect history of failed predictions in nearly every aspect of his business.

Yet people still trust him. Just amazing. It's getting up to the level of securities fraud now. There are lots of badly failed predictions/projections piled up now, he's either mentally ******ed or he's deliberately lying/defrauding his investors.

In addition:

He has never turned a profit
He hasn't done a single thing for the environment - in fact he's done large scale environmental damage
He hasn't advanced technology in any way
All while burning billions in taxpayer money to produce a cult of personality and 100,000 ultra expensive second sports cars for rich people.

TSLA a perfect example of a stock I avoid and why I suck at markets. It's all stupid hype (why I avoid it) but apparently that just means the stock goes up. OMG A CAR THAT CAN GO FASTER THAN YOUR CAR EVEN THOUGH THERE ARE SPEED LIMITS--just incredibly dumb.

The one thing I really like about Tesla is that Elon understands the long game.

No other EV manufacturer (GM, Nissan) are committed to creating a charging network for long distance travel. They just want to sell EV cars to people who wont travel outside of a 100mile radius from their home. And in GM's case, their CEO has publicly stated that they have 0 interest in creating or facilitating an EV charging infrastructure for long distance travel, so when model 3 actually matters, every other EV manufacturer will have their customers tied to a 100mi radius from their house while Tesla will be selling cars that can go from 0-80% in 45m charge on almost every major interstate between cities.

Tesla is also forcing autopilot and full autonomous driving down every regulator's throat. If part 2 of the model 3 is some kidn of improvement over current Tesla autopilot, the car really becomes orders of magnitude better than every competitor.

I wouldn't be shocked if Musk announces another $2-3bn within the next 3-4 months.

I do think that the price at the moment is near the maximum where it could be. Musk is smart enough to realize this. Their language with regards to production plans indicated this imo.

On the oil argument:
I've never understood it with regards to Tesla's offering. They are selling cars that cost $70k+, no one buys them due to fuel efficiency.
And let's assume people do, the argument can really only be made for the cheap oil countries. European petrol prices have come down 20-30% in the last year. That's hardly a change, especially given the fact that the discrepancy between $-mileage on a Tesla and a gasoline car is more significant than it is in the US.

The strong dollar is a problem for Tesla in Europe though.

Added to my disastrous initial short @252.20 avp @224.05

TS why the hell did you delete your comment?
(My response above was a direct comment to it)

Yeah sorry for the confusion. I decided after 10 min that I disagreed with my own (weak) thesis and that it probably wasn't the optimal time. Your comment makes sense on its own though

Musk secondary is guaranteed I think. I mostly agree on oil.

As I said in my post I don't necessary agree that it's near the maximum. It's completely shorted out as of now - there are zero borrows available on IB for example, for a $30 billion company, which is pretty amazing (for comparison, Twitter has 20 million borrows available). Short squeeze fundamentals. I don't think they have much to pump at this point, but who the hell knows. Musk invents new bull**** out of thin air, like his "Tesla energy" products nonsense which kicked it up last year.

I don't mind it as a short at these levels, it's just not a "no brainer", and I prefer to stick to those.

Been following your posts and they're all interesting, to say the least. So let me ask this:

Didn't his Space Company created cheaper ways of transportating cargo from Earth to Int. Space Station?
What kind of environmental damage are you talking about?
Advancing tech part, so all this was available but nobody created electric cars with this mileage and speed, nobody tried created reusable rockets and etc?

I'm not knowledgeable in this area, nor am I a Musk fan, but you seem to be extremelly harsh on him, or even on his companies. By that I mean he probably didn't invent/advance much, but scientists/researchers/engineers working for him didn't as well, really?

nVidia just showed a self driving car. Should shake up the industry a bit.

Stuff like this makes you look bad. Missing sales targets by 7.5% and immediately disclosing it at quarter end is not even in the same area code as securities fraud and making wild accusations like that makes you look irrational on the subject of Musk and Tesla.

How many projections (dozens, of many kinds - future sales, revenue, profitability, launch dates, prices, features) has Musk missed? How many has he hit? I'm not talking about one event or one miss. That's standard. I'm not even talking about even five events or five misses. He's missed on nearly everything he's ever predicted about his own company.

At some point they're deliberately misrepresenting the company to their shareholders. Lawsuits have been filed before for wilful misrepresentation. NHTSA has called out Musk for lying. Etc.

What do you make of Tesla hiring Jim Keller and the recent hires from AMD? The Nvidia Tegra chip is used in the display and MobilEye Eyeq3 (i think) in Autopilot. Given Keller was named VP of Autopilot or something, presumably he is going to design an in house ASIC to supplant the MobileEye hardware? I mean what else would he be doing?

If it is indeed true that Tesla will be rolling out the latest gen MobilEye hardware with a new sensor suite later in the year, the Keller et al hire is even more confusing.

Counterpoint: Musk's bias towards vertical integration is well known; and if there is any truth to the Hotz/Elon emails then score another data point for Musk is trying to replace MobilEye.

I ****ed up. I made the same mistake shorting NFLX @ 107ish assuming it was overpriced when many signs pointed that it could twirl up 115-120. Did the same/but lesser mistake with CRM @77, not waiting for the silly momentum to drop off. Only landed CMG @746.

Edit: I'm starting to think TSLA may have the hoopla/momentum needed to reach new highs/300.

Lesson learned about early entry, but I can liver with selling shares of TSLA at 257+

It's hard to tell. I think developing custom ARM chips might be of interest at some point.

DrivePX 2 is where the buzz is right now. I think Tesla's strategy with developing their own software for Mobileye chips indicate that they are not married to the thought of always using those chips. My own guess is that since most automakers are eyeing the DrivePX, there is a chance that this unit will be used more and EyeQ4 needed less.


Designing a complete computer hardware architecture maybe.

Fwiw I think the nVidia/Hotz approach of just teaching the car to learn to drive seems really attractive. Not sure if Hotz is the right person to do it though, it seems that machine learning is not a one person job. Imo Tesla have a huge advantage in that they have a big fleet of connected cars out on the roads today. Which are driving semi-autonomously and getting driver interventions which could be used to train an agent. Doing this was a big PR risk, but it hasn't failed yet.

Viable self driving cars are going to run on hundreds of megapixels of total camera input (from multiple cameras around the car body) going to a very high bandwidth central processing unit that's faster than anything out today. This will provide perfect object recognition (likely deep learned) and environment mapping for decision making , whether the final driving algorithm is programmed or deep learning.

This is why what Tesla is doing right now (and the "data" it's collecting) is total bull****, and worth nothing. NVidia, Google, car manufacturers (like Nissan) are going to drive the SDC revolution through new hardware and cutting edge software design. Tesla is a punchline.

Even people in the industry are too idiotic to see the trajectory this will take. But computer scientists have a history of not being very bright when thinking about the future of their own filed. Look at predictions on AI and algorithms going back from today ("expert" idiots opining on Go), to 60+ years ago. Computer scientists made far worse predictions than the average person.

https://www.teslamotors.com/blog/the..._medium=social

Tanked on the news. Wall Street was expecting more at this point, apparently. I don't see why 325K (actual) or 370K (average expected at this point) "preorders" matter when we're years away from production and it's a $1K refundable 30 day note, anyway. But apparently it's worth -3%.