You are all over the place with your arguments.

America will never be the biggest market for electric cars. It's simple why: America has a large interest in keeping the oil & gas industry alive and America is interested in keeping the traditional car industry in place.

China, India and others who emerge have a strong solar focus already and this will only increase in the future. For them it's way easier to setup a few solar plants and provide electricity than it will be to pump oil & gas throughout the country. Furthermore, they have no real investments in the traditional car industry and hardly any oil drilling.

While they have nowhere near the purchasing power of today's American middle class, they will be able to car share. Most automobile companies today start to make the shift towards car sharing services. So if even the ultra profitable mega smarts do it, there must be at least something they all believe in.

I explicitly said total cost of upkeep, not ownership.

Given the fact that you will just go ahead and claim xyz is not fully self-driving, it's useless to bet against you.

If we can agree that fully self-driving means that everyone, who lives in a jurisdiction that allows autonomous driving today, will be able to replicate what the Tesla is doing in the promotion video (i.e. autonomous driving to work) then I am willing to bet that this will be possible in 6 months.

Most of the stockholders are institutional or single individuals.

Again, you miss the crucial point. Musk is putting money where his mouth is. He installs all the capabilities for free. You don't have to pay for them, they are automatically installed. Why do you think he does that? It wouldn't make any sense. It's economically smart to activate it today due to the large discount you get for doing it. But that's another topic you will not understand.

Musk could have rolled out the Autopilot 2 way later, he didn't. He put himself and the company under pressure to improve the current car so it's better than the ones with AP1.

You have a great deal of difficulty understanding incentives.

He watched a DVD on his portable DVD player that he himself put/installed in his car. The guy did something illegal, no one ever suggested that this is how AP1 is supposed to be used. It's like blaming Porsche for an accident at 200 mph on a 55 mph highway.

It's laughable that TS still brings it up. He is the only one on the planet that still sees the accident as a negative.

In my opinion autonomous cars arent going to be a huge selling point or profit generator in the personal car category. I think theres huge potential for commercial use though. I think musk is using it to build a niche market and sell investors on this grand tech company to keep the cash coming in

To me the future of electric cars is solar roofs. Roofs have a life expectancy and as they need repairs, replacement, or new installation people will be able to justify the switch since it will make much more sense economically and for convenience. Imo the time electric cars takes off is when we see a reasonable and growing % of people replacing their roofs with solar. This will/should happen in the next decade unless the cost of the roofs are in a totally different ballpark which will delay progress sustantially. In places like california, arizona, nevada, florida, and texas i would assume a solar roof could save people $200 per month in gas per car along with trips to the gas station + cover some or all energy bills, especially air conditioning

I think im going to wait to see how the market reacts to earnings and likely get short. They have a long way to go and a lot of cash to burn

Cars or vehicles? They have a ridiculous amount of electric scooters in China.

I was too dumb to find a source for this but I remember hearing that a substantial part of the sold new cars were sold to businesses. If you take in trucking (the difference in software deployed is basically non-existent for autonomous driving) than the commercial demand will drive the business and thus the used car market.

China selling so many EVs has more to do with the governments massive subsidy and incentive support that far dwarfs anything comparable in the US. See for instance a review of the level of government support BYD has gotten. For reference, BYD the largest EV manufacturer in China sold 100k EVs in 2016. Tesla sold 76k with over double the EV total revenue. Also, when Tesla sells a EV in china it gets hit with something like 45% total import fees and has no access to china subsidies. Yet find me one product China imports into the US that faces that kind of unfair tariff protection? This is the kind of unbalanced trade bull**** Trump could hopefully address.

This sort of demo trip actually isn't as hard as people think since the trip can be done almost entirely, freeway to freeway. It will be a great organic marketing thing watching the Tesla employee live video blog the trip with his hands on his thighs ready to take over but not needing to for the entire journey.

The reference here is a strawman. Why don't you go find the actual quote and context and post that rather than using clickbate headlines to build false arguments to attack?

You're right, I didn't capitalize it like the charlatan Musk did, who wants you to pre-order:

Full Self Driving Capability*

*coming some time. Probably on different hardware. We don't care though - just give us your money! It's full self driving*!

*Not actually full self driving or anything at all, really.

A tech ceo talking up one of his products, no way! Your head must explode at every apple product launch when their boring minor incremental new product versions are trotted out with the usual "changing the world" and "super exciting new features" with such and such new version talk. Or remember when Bezos was personally overseeing the development and launch of the amazon "iPhone killer" that he was incredibly excited about and had pushed for many of the "unique features". I could go down the list with the same type of exaggerated marketing from Microsoft, or Oracle, ect. This is laughably standard stuff in the tech industry, everybody does it because all the big boys do it. Not sure why you have such a hard on over Musk doing it better. Which again, is an asset not a liability, and the reason why Tesla can generate 400k in deposit pre-orders with zero spent on traditional advertising in an industry that is use to spending several thousand on traditional advertising for each car sold.

Pretty big difference between hyping up/overhyping a product vs misleading about what a product is/does

Love to see you string together even the basics of a legal claim implied here using actual full context quotes from Tesla and or Elon. There is a reason why TS is burning down strawmen using clickbate headlines on this issue FYI.

He really is the Trump of the tech world (with apologies to Trump, who's a better human being and also smarter/more successful than Musk). Elon could kill a child and they'd be like "well, we do have a population problem, he just cares about the environment a lot".

ToothSayer, who are you even trying to troll here? Tesla and SpaceX clearly benefit from having a CEO that is a global celebrity and sales grandmaster. Everyone agrees with that.

But only you are, like, laser-focused on that one thing. Most people are more interested in the fact that Tesla and SpaceX have solved incredibly ****ing hard engineering problems on amazingly compressed schedules with shoe-string budgets.

SpaceX founding, 2002


SpaceX, 2017


Tesla (founded 2003), 2007


Tesla, 2016



Some people think it's pretty sexy to do this kind of stuff on a fraction of Ford's advertising budget. That's just some people, though. Obviously you differ.

Right. Just like the US benefits from having a global celebrity and a sales grandmaster as president, right?

Much of the commentary in this thread is Musk nuthugging - at the level of thought-free hero worship that religious leaders or Hitler got. I mean, look at you, a very bright guy, plenty of self awareness, off the reservation unironically posting things like this:
The bolded is just hilarious, man.

I disagree with those statements. Tesla so far has done nothing but make a low volume electric sportscar at a massive loss. There are tons of performance electric cars (exceeding Tesla, by the way) - the majors have been making them for ages. They just don't see the point in mass producing them at current battery prices, and losing a small fortune in the process:



I mean, you're completely unhinged, dude. The evidence is in that graphic. Musk hasn't solved anything hard. He actually did a lot of his engineering in a dopey way. Musk hasn't solved anything of note in the car field - he's a charlatan who's made himself rich preying off the good-natured naivety of people like you, while using idiot investors to subsidize highly environmentally destructive loss-making cars for rich people.



Again, what has he done in the car industry? Burned a ton of cash and done a heap of environmental destruction to make 0.01% of the world's volume of cars over the past 10 years? Taken government money and grandpa's money to finance sports cars for super rich people?

The guy is a charlatan. If you want to nuthug him for having Trump-level talent picking and government-benefit-getting talents in building up SpaceX, hey, at least you've got something backing you up. As far as Tesla goes, the guy is clearly a fraud...

You completely lost me here. A lot of Trump voters would even disagree with this. I guess it is going to be fun to quote a lot of your posts 2-3 years from now when the gigafactory is fully up and running.

Tesla should be able to reduce costs of their battery to $120-130/kwh with relative ease without changing battery chemistry. Overhead costs for example will be reduced by $50-60/kwh alone. According tothis article, annual operating costs of the Gigafactory are about $22-30/kwh. If you break down the cost of a battery, about half of current $150-200/kwh is actual raw material costs. And a sizable part is overhead and profit margins of different suppliers.

That source is not up to date though, so if you disagree, feel free to post another credible source (no seeking alpha articles) with more up to date numbers.

And that extra $20-30/kwh would not really matter anyway. Because that is $1400-2100 per EV (assuming a 70 kwh battery). Or if the car costs $35,000, only about 4-6% of the purchase price.

And if you factor in extra fuel costs for ICE cars, electric cars will start to get interesting at that point. This is often overlooked by Tesla bears, because generating energy in mobile petrol engine is much less efficient than in a stationary power plant. So even if you pay for the supercharger, it will still save thousands of dollars.

I did some calculation to show this for Europe: The average car in Europe drives about 37km a day. If you drive 13500 km a year, and your car uses 1 litre per 20 km (which assumes a fuel efficient ICE car). So that means you spend over a 1050 euro's a year on fuel at current fuel prices (1.58 per litre). So owning the car for 8 years assumes 8500 euros in costs for fuel (about $9000) at $50 oil.

Against a Tesla, that uses about 180 Wh/km (in reality, not what they say it does). We pay about eur 0.20/kwh in electricity in Europe. So driving 13500 km would cost you 500 euros in electricity. Or over 8 years it would cost 3900 euro's. Saving you about 4600 euros if you own an EV. If you use more realistic fuel costs for ICE cars (oil $75), then cost savings are closer to 6000-7000 euros. In theory, a sizable part of this can go towards higher prices for EV's. A $42k EV would be cost competitive with a $35k ICE car. I think there is a very large market in this price range, given that this is barely above ASP's of new cars.

A lot of cities especially in Europe and Asia are dealing with major pollution issues. So they will have a large incentive to ban ICE cars if the total unsubsidized cost of a EV is barely above that of a ICE car. And I think you have to factor in extra healthcare costs in as well if you want to use ICE cars, especially in densely populated cities with more traffic jams.

dfgg, your entire post except for the first sentence is in complete agreement with everything I've posted. So I'm not sure what your point is.

What you've posted is all terrible for Tesla, not good for them.

Not looking so good. Any of these open for action still?

For those that want a less clownish skeptical analysis on Tesla from former short Whitney Tilson recent email to his investors on the company that is worth a read:

· Two top engineering guys I met a couple of years ago who work/worked at Telsa told me that JB Straubel is also the real deal. One said to me: “There is NOTHING that Musk and Straubel can’t do”. Why would I want to be short BOTH of them?

· A friend in the know told me that the companies top engineers graduating from the top schools most want to work at are Google, Facebook and Tesla. And if you want to actually MAKE something – as opposed to spending your life trying to get users to spend one extra millisecond on your web page or click on one more spam ad – then it’s Tesla (and, if you’re into rockets, SpaceX) – and who else? I find it hard to believe that any top young engineer (the kind of person who actually WANTS to work 16-hour days) is going to take a job at GM over Tesla (or Lockheed Martin over SpaceX). Why would I want to be short the best, hardest-working engineering talent in the world?

· Tesla has built a very powerful brand. A BrandZ study from last June ranks it 10th in vehicle brands – but my gut says it’s a lot higher. Everyone I know/have met who owns a Tesla is intensely, passionately in love with it. That’s REALLY powerful.
...
I’m well aware that pretty much every major auto manufacturer in the world is rolling out/will soon roll out electric cars, many of which look very promising in terms of styling, price, features (especially range), etc., which could severely impact Tesla. That said, for well over a decade, everyone predicted that Wal-Mart and others would crush Amazon, and Blockbuster,Amazon, Verizon, Hulu, etc. would crush Netflix. In terms of CEOs and ability to attract talent, Tesla reminds me of Amazon and Netflix…

· I think Musk and Tesla have enough of a following among very-deep-pocketed institutional investors that they’ll be able to continue raising as much capital as they need on very attractive terms – if so, this removes one of the best catalysts for shorting cash-burning, hope-and-a-dream companies.
...

For what it is worth, calling out Musk for being late is getting old. It is a silly / easy excessive. OF COURSE he will be late. He has a LONG history of being late. EVERYONE doing anything ambitious is always late. Even the Apple earbuds were A LOT late when the company only makes a few products and even when it is a relatively simple product and even when they announced a date that was only a short time on the horizon.

^Do you really find those arguments persuasive. Looks like standard cuck rhetoric to me:
This is what say it all, however:
His thoughtful response to this?
hahah.ha? Comparing car manufacturing with $5 retail? Is this guy high?
Here's what you're quoting, said 6 months ago, on the 5th of July when it was $220:
Looks spot on so far...TSLA is stagnating and drifting with the market.



Sure! Make me an offer of a bet?

The part about strong 'following among very-deep-pocketed institutional investors' is likely dead on and something shorts ignore. Part of Tesla's success has been Musk ability to woo WS and raise billions at lofty valuations, as Thiel put it, "grandmaster-level salespeople". I also think Musk has proven to be exceptionally talented at hiring and attracting top talent, which is another point Peter Thiel has talked about - that Musk's most overlooked skill is his ability to attract and properly motivate top talent.


How is escrow done on here nowadays?

Lots of reputable, wealthy people here like mods ahnuld or cwar. I'm sure we can figure it out.

Maybe offer some terms first?
It's not likely dead on, it is dead on. There's a whole big-name banking industry who profits off Musk - in fact their pumping (like with Enron and other fraud stocks like VRX), is the reason it's up so high.

Like Enron and VRX (two which tons of institutions were packed in like sardines), it's going to be a panicked exit for the door once they realize the game is up. I was out calling VRX dead and finished and going way lower than $100 while all of Wall Street was pumping it. Institutional pumping means jack **** if your fundamentals aren't there - which Musk's aren't.

The terms are your first prediction "Certain to hit $150 again within two years" (7/5/16). Needs to close below $150 (adjusted for any splits) on or before 7/5/18. Buyouts close out the bet at the final adjusted stock price. If Tesla outperforms low expectations on Model 3 launch and TE and the sma 20 is above $330, that would mean Tesla entered a new trading range and your side would have essentially no chance anymore, so how about a mercy clause. 2k sound good, even money?

I strongly preferred Hillary but don't think the president can do all that much to move the needle, really. On the other hand, Tesla would have been bankrupt many times if not for Elon's ability to raise capital.

I'm not sure anyone is posting un-ironically in this thread, but the bolded is definitely a closer representation of reality than "[not as smart] as President Trump". Trump is 70 years old and appears to suffer from very severe ADHD.

I am trying to make an EXTREMELY NARROW POINT here. It is a matter of historical fact that in June 2008, a few people who had successfully put batteries in a Lotus Elise chassis announced they would design and build an entirely new BEV platform for a luxury sedan.

This is not an easy thing to do. (And it did not help that their company was on the verge of bankruptcy.) But it is also a matter of historical fact that eight years later, they had the best-selling luxury sedan in the world.

So the EXTREMELY NARROW POINT is that these people did an incredibly hard ****ing thing. It did not become easy and fraudulent just because one of the people happened to be Elon Musk.

Now, some of the auto incumbents have announced recently that they are going to design and build entirely new BEV platforms for luxury sedans.

Eight years later, perhaps one of them will even have the best-selling luxury sedan in the world. If so, they will have accomplished an incredibly hard ****ing thing. It will not be easy and fraudulent just because none of them are named Elon Musk.

Some. Things. Are. Hard. The. End.

January 2018 puts pay 3:1 for a $150 hit. As well as getting paid if it doesn't hit $150 but hits say $160, and getting paid even more than 3:1 if it goes below $150.

Why would I take a bet at odds far worse than the market is paying?

I know. Like i said the other week, you always get better odds on these sort of things in the market. That is why i passed on the Q4 delivery bet, i was wrong but the shorter term calls i placed shot through the roof anyway.