Can you blame people for believing that Tesla is leading automated driving? They are the only company allowing people to actually use their software (probably because it's still so unsafe)

You know if Elon truly believed what he was trying to sell, he'd just STFU and do it. The loudest people in the room tend to be full of ****.

We know that 5K/week by end of 2017 was never possible/a pure fraud and he knew that for a fact. That's known at this point. So I'm going to say clearly a conman and maybe a little crazy besides (he actually tried to install full robotics in his Model 3 line, which proves complete engineering and managerial incompetence).

Besides, it's all he has left to sell. Model Y was a megaflop and useless for a pump. Semi and pickup are too pie in sky. Model 3/S/X demand are horrible as demand death continues. He needs a giant carrot to sell his raise, and this insane bull**** is the best he could come up with.

Victim of a scam? Come on now, if a consumer and/or investor refuses to educate themselves when there is countless articles negative on the company, the product and Musk itself then that's on them. This idea people are being duped into believing in this story is absurd.

Brainwashed sounds like a better word than duped. I think people do it to themselves via the media they choose to consume and believe and Musk operates accordingly. It's literally a cult.

You could call some on the bear side as being in a cult as well if we are being completely fair. There are some truly obsessed people on both sides with blinders on to anything that gets in the way of their own agenda. The main point is you will not get more warning that something may in fact be a scam and that Elon is a scam artist than in this name in the history of products/markets so I feel absolutely zero sympathy if that ends up being the case.

The cigarette companies totally agree

Yeah because the two are totally comparable! If anything that helps proves my argument that as people have gotten access to more information it has had a dramatic impact on cigarettes over the years.

Assuming he's lying, then yes, people are being scammed, duped, and are victims. He's operating from a position of perfect information and everyone else is merely speculating based on what's available. If I never saw this thread, I wouldn't necessarily be bullish, but I'd definitely have a different perspective on the subject

Wow. The amount of stupidity...

Put me in the camp that elon should get in trouble for all of the lying. He's the ceo. He should be held accountable at some point.

Lying about what exactly? I think Musk himself doesn't have perfect information, I think he's just delusionally optimistic. Even so, anyone with money on the line in terms of the stock and/or owning the car that's on them for not looking into someone else's opinion outside the CEO and or company itself.

When he did 420 people took out second mortgages to buy stock. A lot of these lies are less extreme versions of that. He's knowingly lying and if he isn't other people at the company know he's lying and people are losing money on those lies (potentially).

If it was seeking alpha article lying, fine. This is the ceo.

Your knowledge of Tesla - having access to this thread - and the average person's knowledge are worlds apart. The idea that Musk is a liar and a fraud and a conman was radical when I first started posting it, he was the darling of the media for years. It's a lot more mainstream now with Twitter but TeslaCharts for example only joined in Februrary 2018, the notion of Musk as a total fraud is still not mainstream.

Most people just pick up bits and pieces of what they hear and remember and assume that Musk is some great innovator (this still gets repeated everywhere) and that CEOs of large public companies have to tell the truth (which they do until the SEC broke down).

So that's just pure stupidity then and if the SEC (which I have called a joke every time they've been mentioned in this thread) doesn't have any true recourse then as of now its a non issue. Whether it's a crappily run car company still burning cash with declining demand is a separate discussion and the true one we all should focus on. Intent is what matters and good luck trying to prove Musk is deliberately trying to screw people over as opposed to be a poor manager which some bears can't seem to distinguish.

Obviously agree with the top part, as would any sane person with any understanding of this stock and/or the technology, but what would the SEC "challenge" mean in practice?

They can't even get him for his outright $420 funding secured fraud or blatantly violating the settlement terms. How are they going to get him for being intentionally overly optimistic beyond even the most unlikely bull case when he can just pretend he believes what he's saying?

What is cool about a resource like this as you put it TS is that it isn't completely mindless bulls/bears. A few of you guys that even have bearish positions pointed out the moment they announce a raise that's pretty bullish short term simply because at the very least it pushes back BK concerns. Respect to calling it how it is, this thread did get probably the lowest sentiment we've seen and yet that didn't prevent some from acting on the raise so I am glad we have it even if I disagree with some of the extremes that get argued.

I'm as long term bear as they come. It's an out-and-out fraud and money losing company with no real hope of sustained profitability. But I said from day 1 a Cap Raise and I'm insta-out, it buys them at least 6 months. That plus the fact the markets are at an all time high and ANYBODY can raise money means even if he needs cash in 6 months he can get it easily.

His equity deal priced $1 under the close, that is an insanely low discount, and it was still oversubscribed. Just an absurd number of bagholders with money.

Glad I closed yesterday morning obv, at a nice profit. I will look to get back short right before the Q2 deliveries report, which will be a big miss. That said he may raise again soon after. The story has changed - he even said yesterday it was all about robotaxis/FSD and everything else is "peanuts" so he will sell any delivery shortfall as "no problem" and "more money for us next year as robotaxis"

Bears should tread carefully here.

Is there good evidence that Tesla is not ahead in automated driving?

My biggest reason for not betting against Tesla has always been that they might win the autonomous driving race, since they are collecting by far the most amount of relevant data. I work in the area of ML myself and have taken some courses related to self driving cars and from what I can tell there is good reason to believe that Tesla has a decent chance to win. What makes you and others in this thread so confident they won't?

^^

This is usually used as proof. It's 2 years old.

Is there good evidence it is?

Yes, multiple reasons:

1. We can infer from the horrific simplistic errors in their software how unsophisticated it is. It is an absolute cuckshow, 2005 level sophistication. This is how I predicted in this thread, as far back as 2016, that Musk was lying about the state of autonomy, lying about his predictions and was far behind. And these simplistic errors are on ultra simple highway driving, which is "orders of magnitude" simpler than the (now solved) full city driving that others have been doing for years.

Some examples of that:

- The latest autopilot software loses track of trucks alongside and incredibly dangerously tries to turn into them for an automatic lane change when the undercarriage is parallel. This indicates:

a) Serious hardware flaws in detection
b) Ultra-clownish software that didn't plan for this, doesn't look backward, doesn't error correct (no check for "was there a truck detected there less than a second ago" before it starts driving into the truck)

- The forward radar and forward cameras can't detect stationary objects and slams into them at full speed. A number of people have died from this including two full decapitations on autopilot passing under trucks it didn't see. Let's just think about this for a second. The cars on which Musk claim have "all the hardware for fully self driving" who you are positing might be ahead in autonomous driving can't detect stationary objects and avoid them

- After two years of trying it can't take bends at the correct speed, often crossing lanes or even running people off the road

- The hardware (and software) can't handle lens flares. So when you're driving into the sun it does seriously dangerous stuff like suddenly swerve or drift.

- If lanes become unclear, the software gets completely lost, indicating lack of basic 3D mapping (essential for safe driving, especially in city environments as compared to safe/controlled highways where autopilot operates and is failing). There is a current lawsuit after Tesla autopilot pulverized the body of a Google engineer when it slammed him into a forking guard rail on a well traveled, clearly marked highway that no other autonomous car in existence would go near from 20+ different safety checks. Other drivers going past the same rail report the same suicidal behavior with no slowing.

- Their car following and decision algorithms are utterly ******ed. If a car comes in front then moves out, the Tesla will get confused easily and slam into nearby objects like parked fire trucks (Teslas on autopilot have taken out many).

- I could list dozens more. Even huge Tesla fans are now bagging autopilot and saying how incredibly dangerous it is.

2. Industry research reports that have been going on for a long time have put Tesla as increasingly further behind/dead last. This is a more recent one than the one above:



3. They have no R&D budget. Billions are being thrown into autonomous driving per company per year; Tesla puts in a minuscule fraction of that.

4. Their own autonomous investor day showed how juvenile and stupid their strategy is. I live blogged quite a bit of it here some pages back, but basically it comes down to: "we haven't solved anything at all but we plan to throw machine learning at every single problem including driving strategy and have this all solved in 8 months". This is a complete embarrassment and shows they are ****ed and have no chance; I can explain in detail why if you need me to.

5. There's no record of testing on public roads in the very state where there autonomous team are. Google and GM/Cruise have large amounts of submitted data (you're required to report every mile and incident in California) and have an amazing 12,000 miles between each disconnect, 95% of those being the fault of other drivers. They are operating autonomous taxi fleets in multiple cities for employees and early users.

6. Musk is a known liar, fraud and conman who routinely makes things up to pump his stock.

7. They have shown ZERO deployed city driving that anyone has ever seen. Zero. Even people last on the list for autonomous driving have inner city testing going. Waymo and Cruise cars have been a very common sight in various cities for years. In comparison, here are their competitors, over two years ago:



Cruise/GM are also running autonomous taxi fleets for 1000 employees, who can call it up and go from anywhere to anywhere in SF and have been for a year. Google has the early-release public ordering taxis without drivers in Phoenix.

It's an open and shut case that Tesla are dead last. Your question is wrong:
The proper question is: "Is there good evidence that they're not dead last in automated driving?" and the answer is "no there isn't".

Tesla said they haven't even started looking at snow

Not only did he say they have not even started to look at snow, but they would have fully autonomous driving in a matter of months despite the consensus that their system has ~0% current effectiveness due to snow blindness.

An AIDS cure is more likely to happen than his robotaxi.

Interesting past few weeks.

A few questions:

1. Did anyone on here expect gross losses to be 900m+ last quarter minus the emissions credits? Everyone knew it would be ugly, but did anyone actually throw out numbers like that? A 500m loss vs 900+m loss is gigantic.

2. The 200 million of non-ZEV credits, does anyone know whether that is from the fiat deal or something else? If yes, that's a pretty big deal. But someone in the thread earlier said that the FIAT deal couldn't be significant because there was no 8k. Reconcile?

3. There is an article quoting the FIAT CFO on the CC friday that they will be spending $2b over the next 3 years on emissions credits. He didn't disclose from whom they were purchasing the credits. That's a lot of $$ if even a portion of that is heading Tesla's way, but where is the 8k?

In addition, people asked "why wouldn't EM be announcing this deal from the hilltops if it was material?" Well, it should be clear now, he never mentioned the 200m in credits at all because it would highlight just bad the demand disaster was, much worse than even 700m.

But from the FIAT CC I'm assuming TSLA probably has several 100m's more coming to them over the next few years. It wont matter if they lose close to a billion dollars every quarter, but it could be huge if demand can pick back up somewhat.

imagine a tesla in these situations...