Why are you focused on p/e ratio? It tells basically none of the story

Tesla sales growth currently seems limited by their ability to produce, so that's fairly bullish

Market cap isn't meaningless, though. Neither is debt. Market cap should be a function of assets, so presumably if Toyota had as little debt as Tesla it would be ~480b market cap.

Why is Tesla higher? It has a better story (not saying I buy it, but at least I can explain it!):

Better self driving prospects (data + compute), licensing charger design, huge growth numbers

I'd love anyone to justify that with a straight face.

There are lots of reasons for that enjoyment, but I'm not sure they matter

The Model Y Performance was $69,990 last year and now costs $54,490.

Not sure what point your trying to make, though. Smaller, faster-growing companies usually do trade at a premium over their larger, slower-growing counterparts. That's just... kinda how the stock market works?

You can certainly object to the magnitude of the difference between the two companies' PE ratios, but otherwise nothing seems weird here.

IMO people are heavily discounting Toyota’s stock compared to their car/total sales for two reasons. Most critically their 200+ Billion dollars of debt, but also the significant sign of mismanagement from their useless investment in Hydrogen.

Hydrogen aircraft/heavy equipment could have real utility, but it’s simply not compelling for passenger vehicles. High capital and operating costs + low energy density + low efficiency all for faster fueling times.

Hydrogen only creates water, and can be refuelled as quick as gas.

Wouldn't have minded driving one of those Toyota Mirais, but there isn't even a Hydrogen station at the other end of the long trip I regularly do, nor is it any cheaper than gas anyways.

And that's the story all over, better tech environmentally and practically but no infrastructure, no hype, and no momentum. It's dead.

Longer term I expect charging to become a low margin commodity business, but other networks have had serious reliability issues so people may be willing to pay a premium simply to know everything will work when they get there.

PS: Even longer term I expect in road charging to become a thing on major highways, but that’s easily 20+ years away.

Elon factor. He's been a significant factor in quite a number of significant companies created. That seems an attractive bet he will do good things vs anyone else.

I'm pretty skeptical on all things Elon these days.

And Tesla FSD is not even best-in-class between car manufacturers (Mercedes is, with actual approved and shipped commercial L3), not to mention the entire self-driving market (where Waymo is way ahead).

Really? From what I've read and seen, Tesla's self-driving is starting to feel like the butt of most jokes in the space. And Musk's absurd insistence that cameras are the only sensors anyone needs isn't doing their technology any favors.

> Elon factor.

I think Musk might be running out of steam. The Twitter fiasco shows how unstable and unfocused he is; the whole thing could collapse like a house of cards at any time. I had extreme respect for him 7 years or so ago, but that has eroded over time, and now I see him as a delusional, abusive asshole who happened to have the charisma (a nice way of putting "talent for emotional manipulation") to help build some successful businesses. (And it still remains to be seen if Tesla and SpaceX will continue to be successful in the long term.)

GM has a P/E ration of less than 6. Are they distressed? If not, isn't that absurdly cheap?

Reminds me of amazon vs everyone or nflx vs blockbuster. The 'market' seems to think tsla is just going to keep growing and gobble up much of the auto market share. Both amazon and nflx had absurd PEs for a long time. Eventually their grew into it.

6 P/E looks enticing as long as you think the 'E' is going to maintain itself over the long term. Do you think GM is going to maintain their earnings?

GM is a more difficult case. Their current efforts around Ultium haven't gone so well so far, and their ICE product line isn't even that much better. I think they will do well, but they have a lot of work to do.

They are still valued on $300k per car future numbers from when they were supposed to be renting cars with AI drivers in 2020, and the exuberance and “playing with house money” crowd has just kept the music going.

I’m aware of the solar roof thing and it’s more of a press release than a product.

A problem when you try to span those markets is you lose access to support from other major companies because you open up too many competitive fronts.

A further problem is when you try to reproduce a model (oil companies) that is dependent on finding and securing resources when almost everyone has a sufficient and unending oil-well-equivalent permanently incident on their roof.

Here is a grid storage project: https://electrek.co/2022/03/22/tesla-megapack-selected-big-n...

That's not a power plant... they are producing 0 electricity. They are allowing powerwall OWNERS to act as a grid-scale BATTERY. A battery != a power plant and produces nothing even remotely resembling a real power plant in recurring revenue.

>Here is a grid storage project: https://electrek.co/2022/03/22/tesla-megapack-selected-big-n...

Again, they are producing 0 electricity, they are selling a battery to someone else to use.

Let me know when Tesla starts building their own solar farms or nuclear power plants and using it to power their supercharger network. That will be the only way it's at all comparable to Shell.

Meanwhile, here is a Tesla subsidiary project https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2021-03-08/tesla-is-...

Tesla is also constantly vertically integrating. The writing is on the wall. If you’d rather not see it, then ok, that is your prerogative.

Except they don't, they specifically call it out as a "virtual power plant" because it doesn't produce power, and isn't regulated by the rules of a power plant that actually generates power.

>Meanwhile, here is a Tesla subsidiary project https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2021-03-08/tesla-is-...

So again, a battery, not a power plant, not actually producing any power. And at a cost that will be dramatically undercut by the wave of cheap LifePo4 batteries that make significantly more sense for grid storage and are slowly trickling into the US now that patents have expired.

>Tesla is also constantly vertically integrating. The writing is on the wall. If you’d rather not see it, then ok, that is your prerogative.

The "constant vertical integration" the Tesla fanboys constantly screech about is just a lot of marketing around doing exactly what every other auto company has done in the past. The fact they're finding secondary uses for their battery tech is great. But across the board, outside of EV's, they produce a vastly inferior product. The powerwall is an inferior product to countless existing home battery solutions. Their "solar roof" was literally a bailout of his cousin and is vastly inferior to existing solar panel options, and grossly overpriced. What's their total install base? 1,000 houses? Have they even hit that with the "solar shingles", not the bait and switch overpriced solar panel options?

I can't even tie a Tesla charger into my utility provider's night and weekend plan, I have to use a chargepoint or enel charger. So tell me all about this massive lead they've got.

At the very least, compare enterprise value (market cap + debt - cash & equivalents), so that you are comparing leverage agnostic values.

Why is Toyota investing in hydrogen when it makes no sense? What is Toyota going to do about it's massive debt.

These are some of the reasons Tesla is valued at what it is and Toyota is what IT is. Toyota has nothing exciting on the horizon that is going to dramatically change things for them.

Not to mention they make a pittance per car compared to Tesla.

Superior technology -- assuming it is; I have no idea -- often doesn't win.

It's superior in some cases where you have an existing pipeline network.

The robot: Tesla seems to have approximately reproduced the state of Japanese robotics in 2000 (Honda Asimo) using technology that has seriously advanced in twenty years. I am not qualified to say what the future value of that is, or why battery packs are a competitive advantage to something that never leaves the home.

Tech to sell to other car companies: Humans run the other car companies. What will they do if they recognize a competitive threat with a technology advantage? Will they say “great, let’s buy that from our competitor since they’re clearly superior”? Or are they more likely to say something like “let’s figure out a way to neutralize or eliminate this advantage” and then go about doing it (even as a collective)?

Tesla hired Toyota execs to build their manufacturing line. There is little chance that Toyota could not, if it could get out of its own way, do what Telsa is doing from a manufacturing and technology perspective. This to me suggests that others will, even if Toyota culturally cannot make it happen.

The profit per vehicle available is primarily indicative of competition. Toyota is a mature company in a mature segment with a lot of competition. Tesla is entitled to those numbers as long as they can maintain them and stave off competition. Some people think they will be able to do that for a long time. I’m not one of them.

Tesla’s barrier in justifying their market cap is not only the other car companies, of whom there are roughly a dozen with similar revenue or higher. In the process of capturing the value they are talking about, their competition becomes major portions of the structure of global markets in the energy and transportation sectors, at least.

If you factor in production, transmission, and combustion, tank cycling, and failure modes, is it still superior?

I also understand that there are fundamental limits to their physics and to the storage and transfer of hydrogen that put it at a severe disadvantage to batteries in these respects.

This does a reasonable job of explaining it:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesmorris/2020/07/04/why-hydr...

This is more technical and lays out the advantages and disadvantages of both: https://c2e2.unepccc.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/2019/09/...

Batteries also have the practical advantage that if a charging cable fails it does not with some probability spontaneously ignite into an invisible 1400 C flamethrower.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03603....

What you're really arguing is the existence of practical limits. The problem is that most of these practical limits are solvable. Some have long been solved, and most anti-hydrogen claims are attacking an version of the technology that hasn't been true since the 1990s. In reality, FCEVs are already pretty close to BEVs on efficiency. This is especially the case once you look at full lifecycle costs and energy consumption, where battery production and recycling are going to be major penalties.

A hydrogen car is arguably safer than a battery car. The problem is that battery fires continue until they consume the car. But since hydrogen is lighter than air, hydrogen fires are not persistent nor do they surround the car with fire. This argument is basically fearmongering, and is as silly as Edison's attacks on AC power.

Hydrolysis maxes out at 65% efficient. Then you need to compress the hydrogen to 700 bar. Don’t forget to transport it unless you are doing hydrolysis and compression in your home. Then you need to convert it back to propulsion.

Do that and make it beat EVs without hand waving at battery recycling (old EV batteries are great for a lot of uses and better than primary products in many lower volume markets, so this argument is nonsense). Please cite your sources.

It's worth noting that electrolysis and fuel cells are electrochemical systems. It is only BEV propagandists that wants you to not be aware of this. If more people knew this, they'd know that FCEVs are eventually going to catch up and surpass BEVs. So instead, they lie and spread FUD like crazy.

Alkaline electrolysis maxes out at 66% theoretically. PEM is maybe 80% but that’s neglecting system-level losses.

You cannot extract energy from compressed gas if your fuel cell requires gas at that pressure in order to operate.

There is this weird cult of first principles I keep encountering where people think they’ve cracked the code but they just don’t understand systems.

The theoretical limit of both alkaline and PEM electrolysis efficiency is 100%. Real world is somewhat less, but you can get to something like 98% even in the real world: https://www.inceptivemind.com/hysatas-record-breaking-electr...

Fuel cells do not operate at 700 bars of pressure. There is definitely a possibility of extracting energy from compressed gases.

Sorry, but you are spouting total bullshit on all levels here. The only cult is whatever battery/electrification fanbase you’re a part of. You are just repeating BEV propaganda designed to shut down critical thinking and defame all alternative ideas. If anything, this type of tactic is a good sign that we are witnessing the end of the BEV, mainly because its advocates must resort to blatant lies to promote it.

What tech is Tesla going to sell to other car companies? Beyond allowing access to a charging network?

Other manufacturers want as little to do with Tesla tech as possible.

Hah, if only Toyota... At one point, Tesla was worth more than: Toyota, Volkwagen Group, Hyundai/Kia, General Motors, Ford, Nissan, Honda, Fiat Chrysler, Renault, Suzuki, Daimler, BMW, Mazda and Mitsubishi combined. (Plus several Chinese manufacturers: SAID, Geely, Changan, Dongfeng).

I suspect the stock is priced with the possibility that Toyota is reacting to EVs the way Nokia and Blackberry to the iPhone.

As a result, people need to think carefully about what comes next. If anything, BEVs represent a transitional technology. You can think of them as being what Reddit is right now. Sure, it disrupted what came before (i.e. Digg), but it is not the end-result of that particular business sector. And if that is the case, then it is likely that Tesla, not Toyota, that faces the biggest challenge in the future.

See the "Hydrogen ladder" for further, more eloquent, information.

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/clean-hydrogen-ladder-v40-mic...

The simple fact is that fuel cell cars are also EVs. As a result, there are no fundamental limitations compared to BEVs. They are fundamentally guaranteed to be just as good as BEVs.

And since BEVs are not a sustainable technology, they are destined to be replaced by their truly sustainable alternative. Which is a "battery" made from water. That is the self-evident future of EVs.

I would recommend you to read the guidelines when posting here.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

> The simple fact is that fuel cell cars are also EVs. As a result, there are no fundamental limitations compared to BEVs. They are fundamentally guaranteed to be just as good as BEVs.

In other words, you pay for two cars in one when you could simply pay for one car and charge it from any wall outlet.

> And since BEVs are not a sustainable technology

This is a statement which requires proof.

In reality, hydrogen cars are far cheaper to make than BEVs. They have very little raw material needs. They do not need the hundreds of kilograms of batteries that BEVs need. They only need water as their raw material. That's fundamentally a superior idea. You can never make a coherent argument that an EV powered by rare or limited resources could ever be a better idea.

Again, a fuel cell car is literally an EV, only one whose "battery" is made from water. You cannot do better than that.

> You can never make a coherent argument that an EV powered by rare or limited resources could ever be a better idea.

Better idea or not, BEVs are being produced in ever-increasing numbers. Hydrogen cars are not. Sure, maybe that will change at some point in the future, but I think BEVs have too much momentum and capital behind them to fade away any time soon.

As an aside: judging by your word choice and tone in your comments, you seem to be emotionally invested in hydrogen cars. That's fine, but I think how you're presenting things is hurting your argument quite a bit.

BEVs where at basically zero not that long ago. The problem is that economically, they are always going to have a major upfront cost. And the more range and the larger the car, the bigger this will be.

It's Tesla fanboys that are invested in a particular outcome. My own opinion is just asking "what comes next?" If you ask that question honestly, you'll end up with the same opinion that I have.

• EV charging stations are already common, unlike hydrogen fuel stations that barely exist anywhere. Charging stations are easier and cheaper to install and maintain (no need to deliver fuel or deal with moving parts for high pressure or cryogenic storage), so this is likely to stay in BEV's favor.

• You can't refill the high-pressure hydrogen just by plugging into your home outlet. For people who can charge BEV at home it is a huge convenience.

• The range of the Toyota Mirai is barely higher than long-range BEVs'. It doesn't even solve BEVs' main shortcoming, despite compromising a lot of space for hydrogen tanks!

• High-end BEVs can already recharge to 80% under 20 minutes, and don't require you to be near the car while charging (so you can get a coffee/toilet break at the same time). All of this trouble and cost to shave it down to a 5 minute refill, which you have to spend attending to the pump, is just not worth all of the fuel costs, wasted car space, and rollout of a new fuel pipeline.

Hydrogen may find uses in aviation, or long-distance trucks, maybe heavy machinery, but it's a poor fit for passenger cars and has already lost.

2) Which is meaningless because hydrogen distribution is fundamentally cheaper. Once you realize that pipelines are cheaper than wires, you will eventually realize that hydrogen stations will be cheap to deploy and ultimately be cheaper than building enough charging stations for everyone.

3) Actually you can because home electrolysis is fully doable. This is another completely made-up argument. The only thing to be brought up is that you don't want home recharging at all. After all, cars are driven outside on the road, not at home. Once you have a network of refueling stations, you don't need a redundant refueling system at home.

4) That's like saying an ICE car has barely longer range. Your ignoring the fact that you need something like $30k of batteries to match that range in a BEV. For a FCEV that comes at a tiny cost.

5) And yet it is still an advantage. Five minutes, especially when you realize it is guaranteed everything single time, is a major advantage. And you will never have to worry about damaging the battery when refueling this fast.

This is ultimately a short-sighted argument. When hydrogen cars are no more expensive than ICE cars and the fuel is basically free, where does that leave BEVs? It doesn't. This is the end of the BEV.

Are you just trolling now? :) Do you think people charge their BEVs in their living room?

1. Even solar is not free - hardware has a cost and finite lifetime. We're not close to post-scarcity with electricity, so there will be cost for foreseeable future. "Free" hydrogen from production peaks isn't enough for mass adoption, especially that grids start to use batteries too.

2. Even if a tanker beats UHVDC, I'd expect last mile distribution cost to be really bad for a physical good.

3. A wallbox costs $600+, which IMHO is already outrageous. I can't imagine electrolysis station with high pressure pump to be cheaper. 30 seconds plugging in a driveway beats 5 minutes refuelling.

4. Fuel cells are expensive. BEVs are already cheaper than hydrogen cars.

5. Reliability of hydrogen stations is currently pretty low, worse than uptime of DC chargers.

You imply there are going to be a breakthroughs in hydrogen storage and fuel cell efficiency that will make hydrogen cars not suck, but not account for possible improvements in batteries. They have been gradually improving over the last decade, and got an order of magnitude cheaper too. There are further improvements in the pipeline, especially that exponentially increasing demand funds further development. Physics of hydrogen storage however are as tough as ever.

Seriously, what is your point here? Once you are a few miles away from home, you are closer to a public refueling station than your home. If there is a ubiquitous public refueling system, what is the value of home refueling/recharging? It is not much of a selling point.

1) Solar is already pretty cheap now. Turning solar and water into hydrogen will follow the same trajectory. It only shows your shortsightedness by not realizing this.

2) It is cheaper to distribute hydrogen than electricity. Pipes are fundamentally cheaper than wires. This is obvious if you looked at the basic physics of a pipe compared to wires.

3) A hydrogen pump is ultimately just a fuel pump. No more sophisticated than a natural gas station. And the problem with BEVs is that you can't move from that charge port for hours. A hydrogen car will always be refueled in 5 minutes.

4) Fuel cells are cheap and rapidly getting cheaper. You are blatantly inverting reality here. Hydrogen cars are cheaper than BEVs to make. Full stop. And it won't even be close once everything is said and done. An FCEV will cost no more than an ICE car to produce in the long run.

5) That's funny because you're admitting that DC chargers are terribly unreliable. Meanwhile, hydrogen stations usually suffer from lack of fuel, not lack of function. In the long run, this will cease to be an issue.

> You imply there are going to be a breakthroughs in hydrogen storage and fuel cell efficiency that will make hydrogen cars not suck, but not account for possible improvements in batteries. They have been gradually improving over the last decade, and got an order of magnitude cheaper too. There are further improvements in the pipeline. Physics of hydrogen storage however are as tough as ever.

There already have been "breakthroughs" in hydrogen storage. You do realize hydrogen cars are available right now and work exactly as advertised? This entire argument is trapped in the year 2010 and has never moved on. Not to mention the basic physics of batteries can never be solved. You will always have a large and heavy battery pack and it will always take a long-ish time to recharge. Instead of fantasizing about magic batteries from the future, it's time to thinking seriously about what comes after the BEV altogether.

That would show actual foresight. It would demonstrate that you really understanding the concept of disruptive innovation.

Though I don't think there are any good comparisons to be made with AMZN. Very different situation.

Now redo the calculation a bunch of times to account for all the other possible times you could have both opened and closed that short position, and see how many other times you would have turned a profit. Probably not in many of them.

You got lucky. Contrary to some popular belief, lucky timing is not a generally-applicable investing strategy.

I'm not saying doing so is trivial; aside from the equipment cost, many/most/all of those stations will also need electrical supply upgrades. But they at least already have the land, and a company like Tesla will have to deal with equipment cost, electrical supply upgrades, and the cost of acquiring land.

[1] https://www.tesla.com/support/energy/tesla-virtual-power-pla...

People said this all the time about Tesla a few year ago. But the stock value back then is easly justified by what they have achieved since.

So the reality is that 'Tesla fans' were not irrational, but they were simply correct. And the people who endlessly repeat the 'market can stay irrational longer then you can sty solvent line' were simply wrong.

Its also an absurd fantasy that Tesla stock is only carried by irrational Musk fan boys. When in reality is mostly large institutional investors who do the same financial analysis on Tesla as anything else they buy.

yes they make mistakes, but it has been a bloodbath out there for $TSLA shorters in the past 5 years

definitely not the smartest at the heights of marie curie nor stephem hawking

but smart and rich enough to be worth more than all of us in this thread

shorters are literally betting against the guy that spearheaded reusable rockets in space, i'm not saying all his decisions and perspectives are agreeable, but seriously what do you all think is your leverage against the guy?

Cheaper electricity is coming that is the bigger change than most people realise not electric cars. So far majority of electricity has been produced using fossil fuels a finite resource where as solar is practically an infinite resource price for harvesting it as well as storing it keeps dropping.

Not even. Musk had a company which had plans for an online bank (can you imagine?) but it wasn't working out so well. So his company merged with one that was in the process of creating PayPal (trademarked, prototype in place)...

Musk was the largest shareholder of the combined companies, so he was made CEO...

And promptly spent four months complaining that the working prototype needed to be thrown away, because it was written in Java on Solaris, and he didn't understand it, and he wanted it rewritten in Classic ASP on Windows.

Four months, because at that point, the board, lead by Peter Thiel had had enough of it and removed him as CEO.

That was the extent of Musk's tenure at PayPal.

TM net income ~2.5 billion

The relative valuation seems about right. Also, your P/E ratio for TSLA seems really high. It’s about a third of that.

https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/TSLA/tesla/pe-rati...

This is why the endless talk about PE is so incredibly dumb and misleading when elevating companies.