Akin to the Rust Evangelism Stike Force and the Julia evangelism force I expect no less than the Tesla haters to be here soon telling us that Autopilot is crap and they should use LIDAR etc. and that Tesla will inevitably fail because of this and several other standard responses.. gets the popcorn
I do think that they will need LIDAR to achieve the level of autonomy they advertise will be available. That being said, that does by no means mean the demise of Tesla. Even if they fail delivering autonomy promises with the current gen of hw, they could still deliver a solid vehicle.
Weed jokes aside, the market has finally caught up to the fact that Tesla is years ahead of their competitors. I bought my Model 3 18 months ago and it felt like buying a car from the future. I think my feeling was correct.
2019 saw a number of serious competitors (Audi, MB, VW, Porche) release their first EVs and they've all been somewhat disappointing. Very solid first releases taken in isolation, but the market expectations were that the "Big Boys" were coming in and were going to wipe the floor with Tesla. Turns out they couldn't, Tesla's head start is real and consequential.
If you go out and actually try to put down $40-50k on a car and judge all EVs on a collection of attributes (range, efficiency, safety, charging options, tech, etc) Tesla clearly stands out. It's tough to convince yourself to put down a nearly-equivalent amount of hard-earned money for another brand, so it is no coincidence that they outsell other EVs by a very wide margin.
Well, TSLA is a very sentiment-heavy stock, so it's hard or impossible to say what exactly caused this recent run.
For example, they've been guiding Q3 and Q4 profitablity since ~Q2 or earlier. They started building the Shanghai factory in Q1, the Model Y was announced in March, the Truck's been talked up since forever, etc.
What's really changed is that the Taycan is no longer a mystery, but a real car with a real price tag and real range. The ID.3 is almost-real and struggling with software issues. The E-Tron, new Leaf, new Bolt, etc have real sales figures. When these were unknowns, you could be reasonably skeptical of Tesla's claims, but that's increasingly untenable.
Everything you just typed can be explained by the phrase "Tesla is years ahead of their competitors", so not sure why you're so solid on that "Incorrect" statement.
Tesla already sells cars in the Chinese market, especially since there is really no other EV luxury alternative and Beijing ICE plate lottery allocations are lower than the EV ones. The factory means Model3s no longer need to be imported, so should be cheaper.
5. Tesla is one of the most manipulated large cap stocks on Wall Street. You're observing one of the many rounds of a pump and dump and 6 months from now it'll be at just above 200 again as something "bad" is discovered by the "free" press just in time for the big players to cash out again. Anyone who buys at 420 is a sucker.
Here's what most surprised me recently, which compounds all your points.
Middle of Nowhere, France, 11 AM. My Uber arrives, a cool Model 3, "huh, great!" I thought, "I'm gonna pry this guy's brain for info on EV's."
Sure thing the driver was a talker and over the course of the next 20 minutes proceeded to tell me all the good and bad, in his opinion — it was his 3rd or 4th EV.
Tesla is "out of this world" — his words. "And you know why? Because they have the best free charging network, period, others are not even comparable". Remember, we're in the middle of nowhere in a rural town. He points to me a couple gas stations on the map nearby: "I can charge there, super fast, no problem. But with any other brand, the German, the French, the Japanese? It's a mess. Nothing before 30-40 miles at least, can only charge during work hours, that sort of... problems. And Tesla's (sorta) free and has much more range to top it all."
Consider that we're talking infrastructure, Tesla being better than the French and German brands in France of all countries, about 200 km from the German border!
So, there's that. The headstart and pragmatism of Tesla, even far away from homeland, USA is big and consequential — it'll take years for others to catch up, and they're not heading this way as they all rely on different standards (NIH syndrome) and bodies like the EU haven't catched up on regulation yet (like they did e.g. for phone chargers normalized to micro-USB, now USB-C).
I know it's anecdotal, but for a professional driver it was pretty clear that Tesla is just about unchallenged in EV.
Agreed, it's insane. I don't know about most countries, but in France, some brands (Japanese iirc?) would have you go to their branded car dealership to charge. How crazy does that sound? (I couldn't believe it when he told me that, sorry I can't recall which brand it was)
The whole thing sounded mind-boggling, really. Anecdotally, my partner is seeking to buy a new car for a 1h commute so I wanted to get her a small EV — but the charging options make it totally impossible (short of getting a Tesla but that's way above our budget for this 2nd, smaller car). Consider that we live in France 30 km away from Luxembourg, a major financial/tech/political hub in the EU. What gives? I honestly don't get it.
If Tesla ever makes a sub-20K €/$ small EV suited for hourly commutes, they can just take my money.
CHAdeMO is only for fast charging, which manufacturers say you should only do occasionally. (It's hard on the battery pack.) The Nissan Leaf comes with a CHAdeMO and (at least in NA) and a J1772 plug for routine slow charging.
Does this mean that if you don’t drive a Tesla, you have to make a conscious decision whether you’ll charge fast or slowly, or you’ll damage your battery pack over tine?
> Anecdotally, my partner is seeking to buy a new car for a 1h commute so I wanted to get her a small EV — but the charging options make it totally impossible (short of getting a Tesla but that's way above our budget for this 2nd, smaller car).
Can't you get a charger installed where you live and charge overnight?
I wish. We live in a rented flat downtown a mid-size (100K pop) city. It falls down to city management, putting chargers on every street corner or just about... Suffice it to say it's not happening right now. :(
Yeah, pretty much all cars don't need it except for sports cars. Although it's pretty important if the car specifies that it needs high octane gas. I know one person trashed their engine cause they thought it was a gimmick... whoops!
I think newer cars have knock sensors, which just means you're engine will run rich and burn way more gas than you need to in order to protect the engine but I wouldn't risk it. If you can afford a sports car you should be able to afford the premium gas to go along with it.
I have a car that "requires 91 or above". It runs fiiiine on the "regular" octane (87). Obviously, you don't want to do it for an extended period, and if you do use it, it's not a great idea to put your foot down.
I have run into very rural stations with only 87 and a bottle of octane booster behind the counter.
There are charging standards and you can charge a tesla at the generic chargers, it is just slow. Similar to being able to put 87 octane in a sports car but then it won't perform as well (and there is a bit of risk as well should some sensors not be working properly)
Gas stations, I think, are required to post prices on signs, be regularly inspected to make sure they are providing the quality and amount of product they are supposed to, and don't require you to click through an EULA. I don't have the impression that this is the way chargers work.
And you can refuel much faster. I can fill my entire tank in less than 2 minutes, to get the same mileage with a car I'd be looking at an hour (if not longer). I spend less than 2 minutes a week getting gas and as a renter I can't install charging at home, and work doesn't have any charging options, meaning I'd be sitting around an 30-60 minutes a week at a charging station twiddling my thumbs. Also the cheapest Tesla is more than I gross annually. You just can't beat that time savings, I've got better things to do than driving way out of my way to find a charging location, hope a fast charging is available, park and sit there for ten minutes or more while right now in my 15 minute commute I pass 8 gas stations, that can all provide me fuel, that are all much faster.
EVs are never going to get widespread adoption until old apartments start getting torn down and replaced with new-construction apartments that have charging at every spot as a quick Google query shows something like 39 million people in the United States live in apartments with one article claiming:
>Apartment rentals will make up 27 percent of all new housing units built in 2018 and 2019. [1]
And the simple fact is, apartment owners are cheap. They generally use the cheapest appliances, the cheapest carpet, the cheapest fixtures... you think they're going to start shelling out even 1-2k$ per parking spot? Even if they added a surcharge of a few cents a kWh it would probably take them 3-5 years to recover their cost because people will charge elsewhere from time to time, and not everyone will drive an EV so some will sit unused for potentially years.
To put in the effective Tesla chargers, rather than the slow trickle ones, in many cases building owners would need to upgrade their panels, and likely need to put in higher amperage services. That's not cheap, and unless the premium you get for having a charger is on the order of a couple hundred bucks a month, or there are massive subsidies, it is not very attractive.
The charger network team is definitely forward thinking regarding demand forecasting and build out. Friend of mine used to work there and the team works very hard to stay ahead of the curve, knowing that this infrastructure is vital to the user experience
> That's why Ford announced that at least in the US they're buying into the Tesla charging network[0].
Ford announced no such thing and your summary is false. They are investing in a rival network (consisting of multiple independent providers) that they claim is more extensive than Tesla's.
Saw the first Model 3 I've seen in the wild today (north of England though I see a few S's on a regular basis), pretty pretty car in the flesh, the white looked lovely though like all white cars in winter I bet it's a bastard to keep clean.
I get what you mean about the car of the future, it glided past silently (couldn't hear it through my motorcycle helmet) like something from the future.
Porsche seems poised to eat the majority of profits from this space with the Taycan.
There's not a lot of money to be made selling baseline Model 3s. And Toyota & Honda et al will soon be coming for the entry level space.
Tesla seems like they'll be around for the long haul. But it doesn't seem like they're going to be highly profitable with a small market share like Porsche or Mercedes. It also doesn't seem like they're going to be the next Toyota.
But my crystal ball isn't working. I have no idea what will happen.
It's pretty likely that the incumbents will get competitive electric cars on the market eventually. The real question is, how much of the overall vehicle market will Tesla have before that happens? Because the longer it takes, the longer Tesla has to convert profits from existing models into developing new models and reducing manufacturing costs and the more likely it is that they become the electric Toyota.
But it'd be a lot harder for Tesla to grow that big if the incumbents were to provide meaningful electric competition in the near term.
Maybe I'm being naive, but I would expect a larger portion of profits going to R&D from companies with a smaller portfolio of products in an industry where you're expected to have a large one.
I’ve had my Model 3 just over a week. It’s great. I love it. But I can’t wait to get an EV in a few years from a mature manufacturer. I hope that mature manufacturer will be Tesla.
Right now, though, after sales care is pretty much non-existant, I have rattles that I didn’t have in a car with over 100k on the clock, the handover was chaotic and rushed, the interior is cheap.
Even so, I have no regrets. And I’ll recommend the car because it is such a game changer. It drives brilliantly and, of course, it’s great to know that I’m not pumping out diesel fumes. But if there was a EV BMW 3 series with the same range and performance I don’t see how the Model 3 could compete.
I have a Mazda 6. I would say that Mazda is a mature manufacturer. Yet the Mazda, which I purchased brand new from the factory, sight unseen (big mistake), shook at high speeds (I found out later due to a warped brake rotor), sounded like the windows were cracked at all times and you couldn’t ever roll them all the way up (for which Mazda issues a TSB years later), pulled to the right because it came off the truck out of alignment, and made a crunch vibration in the pedal every time I pushed the brakes. The dealer refused to even acknowledge any of these problems. I had no recourse.
On the other hand, Tesla lets you return the car within a week if you don’t like it.
Besides all the funding secured and pot jokes, can anyone explain what has happened to this stock recently? Over the last two months it has gone up roughly 30% after already having a big immediate jump after the last earnings. Is this mostly related to long term shorts finally closing their positions in the wake of those earnings? Or was there some big Tesla news that I missed that changed the perception of the company's financial position?
Stock prices are based on perception of where it's going. The surprise profit from the last earnings, trade deal leading to lower tariffs, new China factory opening up that market, and the general quality of electric car competition released this year have all shown that Tesla is still far ahead of the game and close to running a sustainable operation.
It's probably not one single reason. Tesla has had a lot of good news lately, from reports about Elon behaving a little better (and winning that defamation lawsuit), to competing EV from companies like Mercedes and Audi not really selling well and securing a large area for GF4 near Berlin. The most impressive feat for me was how quickly they built GF3 and started production in China, but my tiny contribution to the stock price was earlier this year (late May), the return to profitability in Q3 probably impressed many investors as well.
- Porche's Taycan EV is supposed to be the closest direct competition for Tesla cars, but its having production issues.
- Tesla just pushed a new software update that includes a lot of useful features (voice keyboard/commands, an official camping mode, saving camera clips on honk, etc)
- A lot of miscellaneous positive press is cropping up from the end of the year and end of the decade type reporting - Time for example put it as one of the "best gadgets of the decade".
- They recently released and presumably are testing a paid software update to boost M3LR off the line acceleration, which is an interesting situation to obtain revenue from already sold cars.
- Internally they're pushing to sell a lot to break sales numbers before EOY. Some places are reporting that they're even selling showroom floor models.
- They secured a US$1.4B loan from Chinese banks for GF3 acceleration, which was already ahead of schedule.
- They closed on the land for GF4 and are reportedly looking to start building Jan 2020.
- The recent news of possibly reinvigorating the EV tax credits in some way probably also helped.
- Solar is ramping up as well.
There have been 5 or 6 different pieces of good news in the past two weeks which have led into what I believe is an insane enthusiasm for purchasing this stock. Go on investing forums and you will see people casually throwing out numbers like TSLA to $1000. It's like bitcoin 2.0. I would not short it.
There has been lots of positive news in the past couple of months, and you'll see some listed in other replies, but IMO it's more due to the fact that the bear story has disintegrated.
Prognostications of Tesla’s doom have gone from concerning, to annoying, to boring, to pathetic[1]
Tesla has a successful ongoing business just selling Model 3's and Y's. The S could be destroyed by the Taycan, the Cybertruck could flop, the Semi could fail to take off, Autonomous driving could remain a slightly more intelligent cruise control, their solar tile business could fail and Tesla would still be OK. It wouldn't be worth $420 a share, but they wouldn't be bankrupt either.
Seems like a strange thing to go around correcting people on. I didn't even know it was supposed to be a police code, it's just some silly code word for weed that like 85% of American english speakers understand to mean weed.
I, for one, always thought 420 was a reference to a police code for possession (similar to 187 for homicide).
Eidiran's post just led me to a few posts about it, and I found this article where you can see a video of the guys back at the exact place of their high school they met at 4:20. I really enjoyed this.
The shorts on twitter are particularly venomous today. I have to wonder if they're too emotionally involved in this. Tesla is seriously flawed but "fraud" is truly ludicrous.
> 420 was the California Bill for medical marijuana legalization
“420” was established term for weed before SB 420 of 2003 was introduced; the slang didn't come from the bill but the bill was introduced on a timing to exploit the slang.
Also, Medical Marijuana was legalized by Prop 215 of 1996, SB 420 of 2003 was a measure to revise some provisions of the regulatory regime.
It hasn't been at $140 since 2013. It dipped to $150 in 2016, and $185 in the spring after a long, slow decline early in the year. If you'd bought it during that dip it would have been a big win.
Tesla finally seems to be focusing on building cars in volume. Not making heavy-truck prototypes. Not talking about "transportation as a service". Not claiming self-driving. Just making electric cars at a profit. That's good for the stock price.
>Tesla finally seems to be focusing on building cars in volume.
That has always been the case. Perhaps you meant "Media and markets know focus on Tesla's building cars in volume". It takes time to build plants, install machine them and organize the whole logistics/delivery part. They've always been focusing on this, and had to run the show so people would be ready to take delivery by the time they reach mass production.
101 comments
[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 137 ms ] threadhttps://www.reddit.com/r/wallstreetbets/
(don't downvote me, WSB joke)
https://youtu.be/bAgmGZ9iQ2Y
That being said, HN is not so bad towards Tesla. The real haters are at FT (Financial Times). It's hard to tell what they hate more, Tesla or Bitcoin.
Weed jokes aside, the market has finally caught up to the fact that Tesla is years ahead of their competitors. I bought my Model 3 18 months ago and it felt like buying a car from the future. I think my feeling was correct.
2019 saw a number of serious competitors (Audi, MB, VW, Porche) release their first EVs and they've all been somewhat disappointing. Very solid first releases taken in isolation, but the market expectations were that the "Big Boys" were coming in and were going to wipe the floor with Tesla. Turns out they couldn't, Tesla's head start is real and consequential.
If you go out and actually try to put down $40-50k on a car and judge all EVs on a collection of attributes (range, efficiency, safety, charging options, tech, etc) Tesla clearly stands out. It's tough to convince yourself to put down a nearly-equivalent amount of hard-earned money for another brand, so it is no coincidence that they outsell other EVs by a very wide margin.
Incorrect. The stock value is being pushed up by:
1. Unexpected quarterly profits in October;
2. Tesla planning to open a new factory in China and securing a 1.4 Billion dollar loan to do so;
3. Apparent strong interest in the Cybertruck and the impending announcement of the Model Y;
4. USA and China are easing the trade war, which is pushing the whole stock market up (there have been "records" left and right in the past few days).
But the big one is number 2. Tesla moving into China means that they can tap into the humongous Chinese market.
For example, they've been guiding Q3 and Q4 profitablity since ~Q2 or earlier. They started building the Shanghai factory in Q1, the Model Y was announced in March, the Truck's been talked up since forever, etc.
What's really changed is that the Taycan is no longer a mystery, but a real car with a real price tag and real range. The ID.3 is almost-real and struggling with software issues. The E-Tron, new Leaf, new Bolt, etc have real sales figures. When these were unknowns, you could be reasonably skeptical of Tesla's claims, but that's increasingly untenable.
Or, as the great Silicon Valley philosothoughtleader Russ Hanneman said: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BzAdXyPYKQo
The Model Y was announced in mid-March, to generally negative reviews/market reaction.
Middle of Nowhere, France, 11 AM. My Uber arrives, a cool Model 3, "huh, great!" I thought, "I'm gonna pry this guy's brain for info on EV's."
Sure thing the driver was a talker and over the course of the next 20 minutes proceeded to tell me all the good and bad, in his opinion — it was his 3rd or 4th EV.
Tesla is "out of this world" — his words. "And you know why? Because they have the best free charging network, period, others are not even comparable". Remember, we're in the middle of nowhere in a rural town. He points to me a couple gas stations on the map nearby: "I can charge there, super fast, no problem. But with any other brand, the German, the French, the Japanese? It's a mess. Nothing before 30-40 miles at least, can only charge during work hours, that sort of... problems. And Tesla's (sorta) free and has much more range to top it all."
Consider that we're talking infrastructure, Tesla being better than the French and German brands in France of all countries, about 200 km from the German border!
So, there's that. The headstart and pragmatism of Tesla, even far away from homeland, USA is big and consequential — it'll take years for others to catch up, and they're not heading this way as they all rely on different standards (NIH syndrome) and bodies like the EU haven't catched up on regulation yet (like they did e.g. for phone chargers normalized to micro-USB, now USB-C).
I know it's anecdotal, but for a professional driver it was pretty clear that Tesla is just about unchallenged in EV.
How stupid does it sound if I said I needed to find a Ford gas station to fill up my car?
The whole thing sounded mind-boggling, really. Anecdotally, my partner is seeking to buy a new car for a 1h commute so I wanted to get her a small EV — but the charging options make it totally impossible (short of getting a Tesla but that's way above our budget for this 2nd, smaller car). Consider that we live in France 30 km away from Luxembourg, a major financial/tech/political hub in the EU. What gives? I honestly don't get it.
If Tesla ever makes a sub-20K €/$ small EV suited for hourly commutes, they can just take my money.
That's probably because these Japanese brands use CHAdeMO (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CHAdeMO), while everyone else uses Combo 2.
Can't you get a charger installed where you live and charge overnight?
And none are manufacturer exclusive and virtually every gasoline powered vehicle made runs just fine on regular unleaded.
I think newer cars have knock sensors, which just means you're engine will run rich and burn way more gas than you need to in order to protect the engine but I wouldn't risk it. If you can afford a sports car you should be able to afford the premium gas to go along with it.
I have run into very rural stations with only 87 and a bottle of octane booster behind the counter.
EVs are never going to get widespread adoption until old apartments start getting torn down and replaced with new-construction apartments that have charging at every spot as a quick Google query shows something like 39 million people in the United States live in apartments with one article claiming:
>Apartment rentals will make up 27 percent of all new housing units built in 2018 and 2019. [1]
And the simple fact is, apartment owners are cheap. They generally use the cheapest appliances, the cheapest carpet, the cheapest fixtures... you think they're going to start shelling out even 1-2k$ per parking spot? Even if they added a surcharge of a few cents a kWh it would probably take them 3-5 years to recover their cost because people will charge elsewhere from time to time, and not everyone will drive an EV so some will sit unused for potentially years.
[1] https://www.nreionline.com/multifamily/apartment-rentals-now...
AFAIK they have already standardized on the IEC 62196 Type 2 connector (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Type_2_connector) for AC charging and the Combo 2 connector (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Combined_Charging_System) for fast DC charging.
https://www.businessinsider.com/ford-fordpass-charging-netwo...
Ford announced no such thing and your summary is false. They are investing in a rival network (consisting of multiple independent providers) that they claim is more extensive than Tesla's.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DuYRwf93Umo
clickbaity title but it was interesting to see the practical side of things rather than the skyrocket moonshot company changing the world.
Often that's bad news, though. If your competitors cannot sell their product, that's a sign of a small/poor market.
I get what you mean about the car of the future, it glided past silently (couldn't hear it through my motorcycle helmet) like something from the future.
Would be the car I buy if I ever went 4 wheels.
My only complaint is the price, but it's a Porsche so what can I do?
The Taycan release looks very promising.
Porsche seems poised to eat the majority of profits from this space with the Taycan.
There's not a lot of money to be made selling baseline Model 3s. And Toyota & Honda et al will soon be coming for the entry level space.
Tesla seems like they'll be around for the long haul. But it doesn't seem like they're going to be highly profitable with a small market share like Porsche or Mercedes. It also doesn't seem like they're going to be the next Toyota.
But my crystal ball isn't working. I have no idea what will happen.
But it'd be a lot harder for Tesla to grow that big if the incumbents were to provide meaningful electric competition in the near term.
Even with ICE cars, people have always compared multiple cars' EPA/mileage, drivability, etc. It's hardly a new issue.
Do the math.
Ford/GM don't even have an R&D row on their income statements.
Right now, though, after sales care is pretty much non-existant, I have rattles that I didn’t have in a car with over 100k on the clock, the handover was chaotic and rushed, the interior is cheap.
Even so, I have no regrets. And I’ll recommend the car because it is such a game changer. It drives brilliantly and, of course, it’s great to know that I’m not pumping out diesel fumes. But if there was a EV BMW 3 series with the same range and performance I don’t see how the Model 3 could compete.
On the other hand, Tesla lets you return the car within a week if you don’t like it.
https://techcrunch.com/2019/12/23/tesla-lands-1-4-billion-fr...
Prognostications of Tesla’s doom have gone from concerning, to annoying, to boring, to pathetic[1]
Tesla has a successful ongoing business just selling Model 3's and Y's. The S could be destroyed by the Taycan, the Cybertruck could flop, the Semi could fail to take off, Autonomous driving could remain a slightly more intelligent cruise control, their solar tile business could fail and Tesla would still be OK. It wouldn't be worth $420 a share, but they wouldn't be bankrupt either.
1: https://cleantechnica.com/2019/12/21/prognostications-of-tes...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/420_(cannabis_culture)
Eidiran's post just led me to a few posts about it, and I found this article where you can see a video of the guys back at the exact place of their high school they met at 4:20. I really enjoyed this.
https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/The-420-code-The...
Depending on how one spent their high school afternoons, it might bring back memories :)
Hah, this journalist is so out of touch with the joke. 420 is the time to blaze it!
“420” was established term for weed before SB 420 of 2003 was introduced; the slang didn't come from the bill but the bill was introduced on a timing to exploit the slang.
Also, Medical Marijuana was legalized by Prop 215 of 1996, SB 420 of 2003 was a measure to revise some provisions of the regulatory regime.
That has always been the case. Perhaps you meant "Media and markets know focus on Tesla's building cars in volume". It takes time to build plants, install machine them and organize the whole logistics/delivery part. They've always been focusing on this, and had to run the show so people would be ready to take delivery by the time they reach mass production.