Yeah, some much great PR from that one! Wonder how many percent extra reservation they got thanks to that one!

can't wait for 2022 to see how many they sell.

.

So what exactly is the totem pole in terms of FSD right now? Never seems to be a straight answer...

I'm gonna guess 100k for 2023. For 2022 who cares... Beginning of S curves are hard to predict and it doesn't even matter for the NPV of future earnings.

Bears you have your fun with cybertruck, roadster and semi while it lasts! And never admit that you were wrong about long term growth, earnings or the competition...

EVs sold in the first half of 2023 from US-based automakers

1. Tesla: 889,015
2. GM: 32,322
3. Ford: 25,709
4. Rivian: 20,586
5. Lucid: ~4,000 (final # TBD)

Latest available EV margins (Q1 2023)

- Tesla: 21.1% auto gross margin
- GM: doesn't disclose EV margins
- Ford: -102.1% EV EBIT margin
- Rivian: -80.9% gross margin
- Lucid: -235.0% gross margin (not a typo)

I purchased more Tesla last week at 245 and this week at 279.
If GM hits $41 I will short it some more.

Now that we're a week away from the 10 year anniversary of this thread, can we admit that TSLA wasn't showing cracks?

It would be more accurate to say that it did indeed show cracks and nearly bankrupted itself once or twice throughout the years, but survived, thrived, went parabolic, and is now where it's at

As for my prior post, that was a genuine question. What exactly does the FSD race look like aorn? I've seen ppl claim TSLA is way ahead of everyone and I've also seen ppl claim they're dead last. I'd like some thoughts on the matter...

Also, is being first to FSD really going to be that big of a deal? I've always felt like it's kind of weird to assume that. FSD will eventually be something every vehicle has if it realizes its full potential. How does that benefit any single automaker? They're all going to have the same thing, no?

Different vendors are going about it in different ways. If TSLA really does come up with a Level 5 Autonomous solution before anyone else, and the others discover or decide that their chosen approaches won't get them there, then TSLA could have a long stretch of being the only true FSD provider. It would take the others many years to ditch their current approaches and switch to TSLA's. Having many years' worth of head start could be very lucrative.

That's the theory anyway. I have a hard time believing that's how it will play out but I really haven't kept up with the tech closely. My current impression is that TSLA is asymptotically approaching the best that they'll be able to do with their strategy, and that it will eventually top out at a good Level 3 solution. Others will also be at Level 3 autonomy in the near future. Elon says they'll have true FSD any day now, others think it's many years away. I read an article recently quoting a Mercedes exec saying they'll have a Level 3 system ready for some of their 2024 models (i.e. later this year) and that they might get to Level 4 by 2030.

FSD is not a binary thing. There are many ways it can add value to TSLA.

There is the bull case for robotaxi dominance with sky high valuation. Imo that's a bit overrated as they would quickly saturate markets and customers would compete who is willing to do it for less.

Then we have enhanced autopilot with city streets. Car drives you but you have to be ready to take over. Just that should be worth a few thousand dollars or a monthly subscription.

Then we have it included as standard and just adding demand for the car.

Then we have the case of Tesla becoming a Mobileye competitor selling their solution to other OEMs. If Tesla FSD is better and cheaper than Mobileye then Ford et al will have to look at it.

Imo if you look at Tesla vs Toyota for lane keep assist, Tesla has a big advantage in that they have it inhouse. They save money to suppliers, it is arguable more capable and in my experience it does the same task a lot better. They can do updates more easily as AI improves or their dataset grows.

The downside is that they risk getting sued for not delivering something they promised. I am not super worried about this, they probably used legalese and if some cars were sold with some badly formulated promise in some jurisdiction, it probably was just a fraction of them.


Imo the big story is Optimus, don't sleep on that one. The market for them is a lot bigger than cars, Elon thinks 1:1(one robot per human) so 10B. Let's say they are replaced every 10 years, that's 1B/year. If Tesla gets 10% of that market then that's 100M/year. Sold at $20k for a 25% profit, that's $500B/year. And these will ramp so much faster than complex large cars, a factory of the size of Giga Austin can probably make >10M/year. And software for these might be the real story... Credible rumors says several of them are walking around the factory floor doing actual task and they can do wire harnesses.

I don't know much about anyone else's experience with FSD, but mine is pretty good. The number of interventions i activate has gone way down
from FSD 11.4 to 11.44. The FSD is being its usual cautious self. When I do intervene it is usually because I am impatient and want the car to go.

Within the last 30 days, I did a 10k and 12k drive without intervention.

For context, I start when on a main street and end on a main street.
I do drive at the start out of my garage and park the car at the destination.
The FSD does not do well in a mall parking lot.

All of my driving I allow the FSD cameras record the streets and surrounding for the AI system to tag.
I have heard that all other FSD companies combined have a total of 2M hours of street recordings for the AI to run their model. I also heard that Tesla records 1M of street recordings every 14 hours.

"Credible rumors"? If this were happening, Elon would be holding a three day event showcasing endless videos of them roaming factory floors, and would likely bring several out on stage to dance with him as a grand finale.

AI day is at the end of this quarter or around that time. Expect to see them then. AI day last year showed the initial ugly hack bot already working in the factory.

There was a debate in Tesla if they should teach the bot to do parkour or not as a way to attract more AI talent. Elon put down the debate and said that no, they will focus on doing useful stuff with the robot.

that totally sounds like elon musk

Why US only? In China, by far the biggest EV market, Tesla was the only EV maker with negative YoY growth in June, and is now a distant second to BYD:

Here's a list of some electric car makers' profit margins per car:
https://www.notebookcheck.net/Tesla-....691126.0.html

Tesla: $9,574
GM: $2,150
BYD: $1,550
Toyota: $1,197
VW: $973
Hyundai: $927
Ford: -$762

Nice selection of data. Trying so hard to justify your thesis using one month in one country in an anomaly quarter to try to find a pattern. Zooming out just a little:




But yeah, Tesla was showing so much negative growth. Essentially a busted growth story:

https://twitter.com/Tesla/status/1680121747910148099

Cybertruck timeline.

1. Nobody will like the design.
2. Ok - they like it, but won’t order it.
3. They ordered, but Tesla won’t make it.
4. It won’t scale <— You are here
5. They made some, but production low.
6. Ok. They made loads, but panel gaps.
7. 300k a year is below forecast.
8. Best selling truck? Pfft. Trucks are not the biggest category.

I like the TeslaBot in the background giving thumbs up. Just one of the crew!


Alternative timeline:

1. Juice sales expectations by creating a $100 fully refundable reservation system
2. Cybertruck will be the best selling truck <--- You are here
3. Production delays
4. Issues selling traditional truck buyers on futuristic polyhedrons
5. ???
6. Profit (justifying ~$1T market cap)

Gordon Johnson (biggest Tesla Bear) is one of my fav. stock analyst.
He helps me to by Tesla stock for cheap!

3 sounds a lot like: It won’t scale <— You are here

For a company that is always late, they sure grow very fast. Maybe it's okay to always be late as long as you keep 50% growth rate. Maybe it's even a tactical decision to keep ambitious targets to push the workers harder to make the impossible late. Maybe they will be showing cracks as they grow both revenue and earnings year after year for another 10 years.

i'm not quite sure you realize that this is a $900b company. they better keep growing at insane rates. insane growth needs to be the base case.

if i stick 900 billion in short term bonds, i get paid 50+ billion in interest next year. how much is tesla going to earn?

they should probably be building 3 or 4 new factories right now to keep the pace.

All they need to do is to have a NPV of future earnings in excess of 900B. And yes, the bull thesis is that they will have very large profits in the future. Exactly which one will be the big winner bulls are not sure about, if it will be 10-20M vehicles at decent margins, if it will be Megapack at TWh scale, if it will be FSD or robotaxi, if it will be Optimus, if it will be Dojo with SaaS margins or some other future product such as HVAC, homes etc heck even hydrogen storage might come into play. Future will tell, maybe a combination of some of these getting part of the way to their intended size will do. Myself I believe that Optimus will be the product making most money in 2030 with a combination of high hardware margins, high volumes and even better software revenue and software margins.

Tesla seems be shopping for factories in many places, India, France, Brazil etc. Not sure about these locations, but we will see... Mexico intends to produce 2M/year, Berlin recently got approved to increase from 500k to 1M/year, Tesla recently starting building Megapactory 2 in Shanghai, Texas still has a lot of room to grow and Nevada needs to start to expand soon for both 4680 and Semi... The next few years might be slightly slower growth of automotive before 25k model goes into scale in different locations, but they still have a shot at 20M in 2030. But if they want to get there they probably should have started with a few more 2M/year factories by 2026 at least.

Will they get there? We will see. But at least it will not be boring. And the competition seems to struggle with demand for their EVs as customer likes Teslas and their prices. BYD and MG still keeping up, but the non-Chinese competition are in for some rough time for the next decade as Tesla and the Chinese keep expanding. At least the customers should be happy.

The guy who named this thread has one post itt in the last 10 years but I’m sure he feels very dunked on when you guys reference cracks