They are very clearly an energy company. I think I'm one of the few people who posts here who actually understands tech strategy. I vaguely remember a time when I was talking about Uber as a logistics company which is obvious now, but apparently I was "fever brained" then.

Then Musk buys out his own solar company and releases another energy product.

This of course ignores how an electric car company that wants a large share of the market can't be decoupled from being an energy company.

I honestly don't understand how people can be so utterly wrong about strategic planning for businesses. Here is another obvious one: Google is moving to an X-aaS company from an ad company. They've been telegraphing this for half a decade, but I'm sure that will receive the same derision. Guess actually having a clue about the tech helps to see obvious strategy being carried out.

Toyota are an energy company too. They make tanks that can be filled up with stored energy with an energy conversion unit to term chemical energy into kinetic energy. The produce these by the millions. On top of that, they make and provide and research hydrogen fuel cells for lots of purposes. So let's not analyze them as a car company - they're an energy company, guys!
Perhaps, but I personally haven't seen that demonstrated.
It's a meaningless abstraction - it lights up a bulb in your (literally, your) brain, but it doesn't mean anything. All the money in the abstract class of "logistics", as Uber are doing it, lies in human transport. Whoever wins the big portions of that, wins the general category of logistics. So the fact that they're doing UberPizzaDelivery and hinting at UberTrucking, yo! is irrelevant to analyzing the company. It's noise, PR, nonsense.

It's similar with Tesla as an "energy company" - it's noise, PR, nonsense. Tesla will live or die at their current valuation as a car company and only as a car company. Nothing they do in the cutthroat battery world is going to matter - they have no structural or research advantage, for one, and for two, the industry is moving so rapidly and with such fierce competitors and government-backed involvement that you can't get a stable enough position to ever get meaningful profit.

We all know why Musk bought out his own solar company. It was in serious financial trouble and he was bailing himself and his friends/family out with Tesla money. Even his most ardent supporters said it made no sense and was basically cronyism.

That he bailed out a near bankrupt solar sales company to bail himself out and stop horrible headlines tanking the shares of Tesla doesn't mean they're now an energy company.
Nope. Google are adding various X-aaS to what they offer in ads (and the X is broad for sure), but the biggest portion of their revenue will be in ads for decades to come (unless they get a head start in something like robotics which explodes), because ad spending is a meaningful portion of global GDP output, and will be for decades.
Giving a good abstraction/analogy doesn't make a bad one any better.

You are literally the worst poster at understanding 1) what tech companies actually do 2) their long term strategy. I'm not going to tear down your word vomit straw man, but I'll point out that Tesla has already made huge investments into 1) Gigafactory 2) Supercharger network 3) Energy products. The idea that they will "live and die as a car company" is absurd. Whether this was part of the Musk masterplan in the beginning or something he's selling in order to bolster his company's position as the market changes, I don't know.

Regardless, the idea that these additional product expansions both horizontal and vertical don't significantly impact the past and present of Tesla is borderline malevolent idiocy. (I'm ignoring possible synergistic advances from their software, which is by far the best in the world. You apparently couldn't even read their press release correctly and thought they were disabling Autopilot, lol?)

ETA: Your reading comprehension on disagreeing with my Google strategy then literally restating exactly what I said is mindblowing. Do you think anyone slurps that type of silliness up as anything more than inane, self-aggrandizing bull****?

Musk got his crony deal through. Tesla balance sheet is going to be fun going forward...

If he get's it cleaned up, the company is going to be unstoppable.

wtf is this

This is a joke of a deal. I'm glad TSLA shareholders could approve it.

What are you trying to say?

https://electrek.co/2016/11/17/tesla...ion-elon-musk/
If this is true then we can probably expect quite a few orders for their solar roof in many places.

musk is a propaganda champ

his products are so obviously awesome that the companies lose billions annually despite massive government subsidies

Video of self driving Tesla:
https://www.tesla.com/sv_SE/videos/a...al&redirect=no

Not especially impressive, considering it's like ten minutes of driving on nice roads around the Tesla headquarters and you can see several instances where the car hits the brakes in the middle of the road for no apparent reason. I wonder if it's less inclined to hit the brakes unnecessarily when there is a car behind it. If not, Tesla drivers can look forward to getting rear-ended a few times a month.

Yeah, there's a reason they put it to clown music and sped it up. The video is a shocker and shows how very unready they are. They are years behind the competition. And that's giving them the benefit of the doubt that this isn't a previously tested and tweaked or planned route.

Thanks for the proof, heltok. It's vindication of my view.

You guys sure are hard to impressed. I was mind blown by the video. Production cars today, which has been trained using very little data, seems to be able to drive in various weather conditions, in a residential area, while navigating turns, redlight and stop signs. The only flaw was some unnecessary cautious braking, which likely will become better over time.

I see some reasons, it is over cautious which I think is because of lack of data and testing, this should improve over time. For example the two runners were classified as car rear in lane for a while. With more data the misclassification should decrease.

I don't think so. Cars behind should be ready to brake if the car in front of them is breaking for correct or incorrect reasons. The driver should remain alert and if he disagrees with the cars decision to slow down he should take control back.

Exactly. Drivers always remain 100% alert and never drive too close to the car in front of them, so in the real world nobody ever rear ends anyone.

Which is why the driver should be ready to take over.

I would assume that the software will brake for a 100% inlane pedestrian and a 50% inlane pedestrian even if there is a car behind it. You cannot assume that other cars will be hitting you from behind, imo the task becomes infeasible. Do you have any source for software not stopping for cars/pedestrians in lane because of risk of being rear ended or are you just speculating?

Say whatever you want about tesla's balance sheet, cash flow, business model, w/e.

but to construct an argument that their self driving technology is years behind the "competition" is completely laughable.

https://electrek.co/2016/11/22/tesla...battery-solar/

Tesla is here for the long run i suppose, be whatever about the cars you say. it is here to stay

One of the big questions in this thread is whether Tesla's R+D and investment in factories will lead to any significant advantage in battery cost. Tooth has been adamant saying that Tesla has no advantage. This graph would seem to indicate that Tesla actually is well out in front in cost per unit of storage, maybe by as much as 30-50% over some competitors.

https://electrek.co/2016/12/01/tesla...ry-cost-chart/

The Tesla Advantage: 1.3 Billion Miles of Data
The company has collected more than 1.3 billion miles of data from Autopilot-equipped vehicles operating under diverse road and weather conditions around the world. And in the frantic race to roll out the first fully functional autonomous vehicle, that kind of mass, real-world intelligence can be invaluable. In that way, for now, the electric-car maker has a leg up on competitors including Google, General Motors Co. and Uber Technologies Inc.

“There’s no question that Tesla has an advantage,” said Nidhi Kalra, a senior information scientist at the Rand Corporation. “They can learn from a wider range of experiences and at a much faster rate than a company that is testing with trained drivers and employees behind the wheel.”

No advantage!

No advantage!

Looks like the market finally realizing Q3 financials improved quite a bit and Q4 gross margins and cash flows will look pretty good as well.

Cash flows looking good? Uhhh, they are going to have to raise more money, again, very soon.

Their cash on hand dropped from 3.2B at end of q2 to 3.1B end of Q3 with 250M in capex in q3. At the 100k/yr run rate with expanding gross margins for S/X Tesla is generating enough cash to pay for a good chunk of model 3 investments while still expanding stores/service centers and superchargers around the world. CFO Wheeler runs a tighter ship than the previous CFO, noticeable shift when he took over.