https://electrek.co/2023/05/25/tesla-model-y-is-now-the-worl...
If one gets news about Tesla only from HN then it does seem Tesla is ridiculous, because only negative stories tend to get upvoted and positive ones buried.
Stock price is based on future expectations, not past value. Tesla is still growing very fast.
Also margins have fallen like rocks, there's been 3 price cuts in one year.
I can buy a tesla for less than a golf in Italy.
Cars aren't great stocks. Low margins too much competition. jm2c
Source?
There’s a long list of technologies Tesla has already shipped that other car makers are just beginning to explore.
- Structural batteries
- The “Octovalve” heat pump
- Mega casted car frames
- Their custom ML IOC
The TSLA market cap is debatable, but their lead is real.
Those custom FET's haven't yet publically been torn down. But I'd guess they enable more efficient motor inverters. More efficiency means smaller battery, and less cooling. Less cooling means the whole heatpump system can be downsized, reducing weight. Reduced weight means smaller battery. Smaller battery means less weight... Which means an even smaller battery... And a smaller battery in a lighter car means more profit margins.
Because of the recursive nature of this, even small efficiency gains on the FET's have a pretty massive impact on profit margins.
And why would anyone bother with custom ML SOC when you can just partner with Nvidia like Rivian, Mercedes etc.
Every Nvidia GPU I’m aware of ships with both CUDA cores and Tensor cores. For a pure ML application those CUDA cores are almost useless. Tesla would be paying Nvidia’s premium for transistors that aren’t optimized for ML inference.
A Tesla designed chip can be 100% dedicated to tensor multiplication. You’re paying less per transistor and every transistor is utilized to the fullest extent.
https://www.reuters.com/technology/chipmaker-nvidia-launches...
I don't know if people realize how expensive it is to engineer an engine. Mercedes spent 4B $ to develop their diesel OM654. 4 billions of R&D to build an engine!
EVs don't have the same complexity, barrier of entry is much lower which is why Chinese are doing so well in them, even though they didn't with ICEs.
Auto industry will never be one where margins are good for long, doesn't matter who you are, it's a very expensive, risky low margin business if Tesla inverstors think thei company is immune they are in for a very harsh reality.
This is like investing abc.
A. "Plenty of other companies and CEOs can make as grandiose announcements"; see Apple's bi-annual events, among others
B. "Their future product pipeline is worth trillions"; Source? They have maybe 1.5 million preorders for the Cybertruck (which cost $100 to place, so probably a good amount will not follow through with purchase), which even at $90k per truck would be only $135b. While the Tesla Semi numbers are harder to estimate, I would say they're probably not nearly as large as the Cybertruck numbers and would be relatively negligible.
C. "... there's something else they will deliver very soon that will revolutionize the world. If you've read about it in a scifi book, Tesla will announce they are working on it first." What a load of horseshit. Tesla's main advancements have been almost solely within EV technology, and within a limited scope of EV technology (battery cells, etc.). To say that anything in a scifi book is being worked on by Tesla is a vast overexaggeration. The only other futuristic technology I can think of that Tesla has worked on is Robotics and Tesla's robot looks incredibly far behind other companies working on the space such as Boston Dynamics.
It's just so difficult to tell with Tesla because it certainly does have a certain portion of the population that would have posted the original comment entirely unironically.
https://www.statista.com/chart/8547/teslas-vehicle-deliverie...
Also, Tesla seems to have mostly successfully shrugged off the dealer model and avoided pension based compensation.
If they can maintain a reasonable level of satisfaction when offering service, they get to scoop up the 20% margins the dealerships take, as well as avoid the sentiment hit every other dealer has to take by forcing people to buy new cars through that truly awful process.
- Tesla's track record of rapid growth and their credible/plausible plan for growing volumes by about at least 10x And that's just cars. They have a few other rapidly growing business that are already billion dollar businesses. Some of which could outgrow their car market. Even when you consider the expected growth. It's only inflated if you don't believe they can do all of this. The reason the valuation is so high is that lots of investors seem to not agree with that.
- The underwhelming performance of essentially all their competitors; i.e. the next 5 manufacturers that you refer to. With the exception perhaps of Asian companies like BYD that have similar proven track records as Tesla to ship decent EV products in large volumes profitably. These new manufacturers other manufacturers are short term going to cause a lot of headaches for the (former, let's just call that out) top 5. The prospect of millions of dirt cheap good quality Chinese EVs undercutting cheap ICE cars has a high risk of decimating the market shares of the likes of Toyota, GM, etc. that are very dependent on sales of cheap, unremarkable ICE cars. They make most of their money selling products that are rapidly becoming a combination of obsolete, expensive, and undesirable.
Most of the former incumbents like GM, Ford, VW, Toyota, etc. of course have EV strategies of their own but they will need many years more before they match current production volumes and cost levels of their new competitors.
In short, they'll be struggling to catch up for years to come even under the most optimistic scenarios. The more pessimistic scenario is actually that a few of these companies might not survive the transition at all and that the remaining ones might find themselves vastly reduced in size. Tesla and several other new manufacturers certainly seem well positioned to continue to make life miserable for these companies for years to come. Whatever they do, Tesla et al. will be able to do it faster, better, cheaper, and in larger volumes for some time to come.
If consumers save measurable time and effort by owning an electric vehicle, whoever makes it the cheapest vehicle to own time-wise wins.