I believe it is likely that he will do that. He is burning a lot of capital, hiring a lot of talent, learning by experience and he seems pretty confident. His history has me convinced that he is not lying about his confidence and that he likely has a good a idea about what he is talking about. The evolution from Roadster->TMS->TM3 and Freemont->GF1 seems to indicate that GF3-GF6 could have a large improvement in efficiency for producing TMY. We will hear his plans later this year and see in a few years. But I am betting that he will succeed.

Spurious,

The idea that they can just cut development costs and be fine is absurd.

You are correct, I need to rephrase:
The way they are burning cash is not indicative of what they need to burn in order to stay alive. I think they could reduce themselves to a luxury electric car maker and survive even with their levels of debt at the moment.

They would reduce the speed to market their mass electric car.

They would have no problem reducing the speed in order to stay alive. That's my opinion. They would need to change strategy and would get hurt in the process but it would not be the end of Tesla.

If you would apply the same thing to Ford, it's a completely different story. They would need to cut production capabilities and fire a lot of workers. That's a problem that Tesla does not have.

I like that you started a counter to tesla having no valuable assets by pointing out they had 3b in cash

Laughed pretty hard, I mean you are right, cash does have value

There are a lot of assumptions about what will actually be there during a bankruptcy rather than what the company is worth not.

I'm sure they'll file Chapter 11 when sitting on 3b in cash.

Toothsayer: at least $2b 2 years. EBIT not earnings. Not sure what the odds are though.

http://teslaweekly.com

heltok,

wrt #3, why do you keep pretending that we don't have actual intervention numbers from cali? Or that they are intentional interventions?

It is the best source of data we have on the relative comparisons of SDC technology. Tesla has also "unveiled" technology that totally isn't what is in production (superchargers) and heavily regulates/litigates any attempt for the public to know. I think you're making some extreme leaps in logic to conclude that is production (why?) in the face of obvious factual evidence (extremely high rates of intervention).

they plan to produce 250k model 3 runrate by december this year. And about 125-150k Model S and Model X. And they plan to reach 25% gross margins on their model 3 production. That is already 375 to 400k vehicles runrate end of this year.

So if price is 330-360 still by december and january, and they only produced about 150k model 3 (might happen in this market given those terrible bonds), 2019 put options would be a great bet Or 2020 puts. If they are not significantly more expensive then.

Whichever way you look at it, the market really isn't rational on this one. They probably need to spend $10-15 billion in capex to get to $5-6 billion in EBIT, so then EV will probably be close to $100 billion. On a cyclical big ticket product that is sold to price sensitive consumers generally. If they generate 12% ebit margins on $90 billion of revenue that is still only about $6 billion of net profit.

I think there is this mistaken impression that this company is somehow similar to amazon and that earnings don't matter. Everyone is forgetting this buffett saying:
Car industry is terrible historically! Aweful margins, aweful ROIC. Cyclical. Then there is the self driving car trend, nobody knows who will be the winner here. And this will also reduce demand for automobiles in general.

So to sum it up, if they hit all production goals, then triple 2018 production, and within their price class somehow produce industry leading margins, and then the market needs to assign Tesla a Musk valuation earnings premium of 50%, Upside is about 50%. Talk about aweful risk/reward ratio.

Not a bad recipe for a short. I will see what Q4 brings I guess

I don't. I just don't think we can tell very much from it. This is from my experience as a SDC engineer. We did plenty of interventions for many reasons that were not because our system was failing. Thus we can't use this data to tell that their video was a lucky shot. We might estimate that it's more probable than we thought before we got this data, but we can't be certain only based on this.

I have made this position clear many times.

To clarify. I am not saying that I know it wasn't intentional interventions. I am saying I and most likely you also don't know if it was or not.

Imo available products/services are a better source. For example AP1, AP2, Waymo Pheonix, Uber Pittsburg etc.

Ya, this is what makes you come off as a TS-level poster for the bull case.

I mean... Why don't we use actual legally required reporting for SDC vehicles to evaluate SDC technology instead of a variety of driver assist programs? Sounds totally insane to me!

Also, poor use of Bayesian priors given Tesla's extreme secretive/borderline dishonest nature.

I did. But I think TS when he said that something along the line of 100% confirmed fake was being overly confident. I think we can only say it is more likely and imo not by many percent.

Also we have hundreds of engineers inside the company, some which I know and trust, and lot of managers who likely would have come out and said that they don't want to be apart of this claimed big fraud if this was the case.

As for Musk being dishonest, I disagree. He sets high goals to motivate his workers and sometimes are a bit late. He has been clear with this. And sometimes he is wrong, but he tries to be less wrong over time. And his track record the last year is not that bad. As for Tesla being secretive, imo they are far less secretive than their competition in the SDC race imo. We have a very good idea of exactly what they plan, I can't say the same for Apple, Waymo, VW etc.

Please don't use TS arguments to frame mine. His are utterly ridiculous. Tesla is far from a giant fraud. They operate in a rather secretive, non-standard method designed to obfuscate information. (lmk if you ever see how a battery swap works and take a video!)

Its fine if you think Musk isn't dishonest. You can believe he is the worst who has ever lived at estimating deadlines, and/or openly contradicting his 10Q when in the middle of a secondary because who knows what bull**** he said.

Your use of pronouns is pretty confusing as well.

Regardless, the biggest datapoint is when Tesla took their cars out on the public roads, they reported ~300x the rate of interventions than the leading companies in SDC. We actually know that. We don't know anything else other than that if you want to be specific. For example, it being production rather than unique. Or the video being spliced or not. Or that companies driver assist programs provide meaningful insight into their SDC programs.

https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/wcm/co...df?MOD=AJPERES

Lemme know how that isn't secretive. Seems super clear compared to Google!

Sorry I am not a native English speaker.

It seems we have the same information, but we draw different conclusions from it. Let's leave it at that?!

In your estimation, did they or did they not know that Musk was lying his face off when he promised, to customers in mid-late 2016, AP1 equivalence by December 2016? They missed automatic braking by eight months and counting from this deadline, let alone AP1 equivalence.

I don't think he was lying, I just think he was a bit optimistic and/or unexpected things caused delays. As for what my friends thought I don't know, but if I would guess it would be that they were under a lot of pressure during the time. I would guess the deadline they got were a bit tighter than they were used to from previous workplaces, but they are optimistic about Tesla, so I guess they thought they might be delayed a few weeks, but probably not as much as they were delayed. This is just me guessing.

TS, could you say more about Chevy intentionally throttling back the sale of the Bolt? I don't understand why they would do that.

(I do understand that I had high hopes for the Bolt and was saddened to see that it looks like a ****in Aveo and goes 0-60 in 6.4s.)

Throttling back? They never opened the throttle. They launched in a few states only where they need EV sales for regulation purposes. They only just (last month) widened it a little. Electric cars are money losers and largely unwanted, and will be until battery tech catches up, which has nothing to do with cars.

Why do you think all of the EVs have ****ty, weird, unbuyable exteriors? Do you think every car maker suddenly decided that EVs should look ****ty and unbuyable, while making loads of perfectly good looking normal cars? No. The answer is they don't want to sell them. They have to meet regulations and such so they sell a few, but there's no real interest. Six months in, they're only just expanding out of a few states in the US.

Once battery technology is advanced enough that they can be cost-comparable to ICE, you'll start to see an explosion of EV cars, and meaningful competition, which is why Musk is drawing stone dead in the long run. He's one of the few clowns in the entire history of business silly enough to lose money with a monopoly. Right now there's no point for them to compete and lose tens of billions like Musk is. But we're approaching the tipping point with the next generation.

Article for you:
http://insideevs.com/californias-zev...rollout-sales/

Not saying they are remotely the same, but would have loved to hear TS argue how stupid Amazon was a decade ago to try and compete with titans like Walmart etc in the retail market.

Not 10 years ago (I wasn't around), but 4, in this very thread in 2013:
Since then Amazon has run up with the tech bubble just like Tesla.

Easily scalable, strong network effects that have survived heavy startup competition, with competitive and cost advantages, under pricing the competition and surviving, in an industry where it's easy to print profit? That's a future bet.

Very hard to scale, zero network effects, capital heavy production, that has had no startup competition, with competitive and cost disadvantages, in an industry where it's hard to make profit? That's a dump.

This isn't hard guys. It's basic business analysis.

At this valuation you have a runner-runner out to the river that Musk has used his PR genius and rocket halo to convince guppies he's holding the stone cold nuts. Its comical.

lol there is a significant difference between amazon 4 years ago and amazon a decade ago.

Interesting you weren't long such a slam dunk play tho

10 years ago amzn had half of tslas market cap on slightly more revenue + positive earnings.

You were better off just not responding after the curb stomping u just took

Lol you guys missed the point. Well done.

Sent from my Pixel XL using Tapatalk

Tesla has been very weak since it was reported that a lot of sharp institutional holders sold a ton of Tesla stock recently.

Tesla Institutional Holding Plummet



Some large well regarded names there.