champignon

A friend of mine who is a business consultant, has had a contract over the years to do strategic planning for a huge electric and water utility in a Canadian Province. Utilities, by their very nature, have a "relatively" predictable business, and population and usage trends can be forecast with more precision than most business predictions that can be made.

Nonetheless, as you get further and further out, the accuracy of predictions gets to be less and less, which is fairly obvious. Even in this business, utility usage, predictions beyond 7 years are regarded to be next to entirely useless, according to my friend.

If you have ever tried to do financial and other long range planning for yourself over any period of time, you have probably found that whatever you predicted was way off. About 20 years ago I used some financial planning software to try to predict my own financial situation in the future going on through retirement years. After about 10 years the numbers were so far off that they were a joke, off by a factor of 2 or 3. I kept that set of projections with the colored charts for a while, but ultimately shredded them when they were just so silly that I couldn't even look at them anymore.

Electric vehicles are nowhere near as environmentally friendly as they appear at first blush, since the pollution is merely transferred to the electrical generating plant, and the manufacturing plant where such things as lithium batteries are produced. Without the enormous public subsidies present for electric cars, the future would be bleak. How long the general public will be satisfied subsidizing rich people's Tesla purchases is anyone's guess. And no one really has any idea how the whole autonomous car thing will ultimately work out.

So, in any event, good luck predicting the demise of the internal combustion engine in cars, the availability of fuel, or places to use our cars.

jimq

Guess you havent looked at the prices of 964's in a couple years. They go for as much or more than 993's these days.

manimal

He's saying it will take a while before the NA 996 gets to that point.

mark_schnell

That happened to me too. I had an assumption in there about winning the Lotto before now, though...

Carlo_Carrera

That is exactly my point. The 964s were forgotten/dismissed, not anymore.

Carlo_Carrera

Correct.

Carlo_Carrera

http://www.autoblog.com/2017/06/09/e...ound-ab-tile-1

champignon

Tesla remains a going concern only because of the subsidies it receives; without them, it would be out of business, and quickly.

The other new car producers are essentially forced to pay Tesla (and maybe some other electric car makers) fees for credits they need to stay in business, due to government pollution and fuel economy mandates. It is cheaper for them to just pay off Tesla than it would be for them to meet those mandates themselves.

And guess who ends up paying those fees, which are of course passed through to the eventual customers, the new car buyers? Of course, it is the average joe buying a new car.

Could it happen that people grow tired of this stealth tax on their vehicle purchases? I would not rule this out. There are no end of conservative lawmakers who would love nothing better than to give Mr. Musk his final pink slip.

Carlo_Carrera

As usually you write much but understand little.

And what does of any of this have to do with linked article?

Freddie Two Bs

I think I remember that you had a lot of insight into self driving cars because you had done plenty due dil ahead of a private investment, but you never quite expanded on your thoughts. Care to share a few soundbites? Can it still play out in various ways or are we inexorably condemned?

Hosewater2

Are you getting this nonsense from Breitbart, Drudge, or just talk radio? Nevermind, it's off topic anyway.

champignon

Wall St. Journal, lots of articles over the past few years. Just dissect the Tesla financials

mark_schnell

I did a Google search and some reading about Tesla and subsidies:


Details on subsidies:
http://www.latimes.com/business/la-f...531-story.html
Interesting comparison to subsidies to Big-three automakers and Exxon-Mobil:
https://electrek.co/2016/11/25/tesla...-oil-industry/


I don't think subsidies for Elon Musk's companies will end anytime soon. States are lining up to help him. Tesla will have the biggest battery plant in the world in Reno producing 6000 jobs, and SolarCity will have the biggest solar factory in the Western Hemisphere in NY producing another 3000 jobs. He's planning thousands more Supercharger stations, all solar/battery powered. He could conceivably have a Supercharger station in a place that's not suited to a fuel station due to lack of infrastructure.


The main thing keeping me from buying a Tesla is stories about the repair costs. Body damage to a quarter panel? $9000 - $18000 to repair from a "Tesla Authorized" body shop, of which there are only a few. Tesla owners say on their forum, just take it to a non-authorized shop. But other repairs? Some failures could be catastrophic/fatal, but aren't reported because Tesla asks for a NDA from their customers!
https://www.forbes.com/sites/lianeyv.../#43b837ef6258


So I don't see electric taking over in the short term, but there might be enough momentum to start the ball rolling. Within a generation we've gone from payphones and a printed yellow pages to Cell phones and Google. A similar revolution could sweep the car world. Someday.

champignon

I can't predict the future, and I don't even try.

I could provide links to WSJ articles and videos however they won't work for non-subscribers being as wsj.com is a paid website to which you must subscribe. A back door in is to do a google search using WSJ or wsj.com in the search terms, and generally if you link in from google they will let your read a certain number of stories before they stop letting you in.

The bottom line on the whole thing is that Tesla is valued as a technology play not as a car company; they don't even make any money on their cars. The current stock market valuation on Tesla is 10 to 20X what it is for other car companies such as GM, Ford, BMW, when one considers actual profitability.

People are betting on Elon Musk as some latter day Steve Jobs; I guess it is possible but the odds would not be with you on that sort of a bet, longer term.

One only has to look at analysts's estimates on Tesla's profitability and compare them over time to see how inaccurate the over-estimations have been, for example, From a June 7th WSJ article by Charley Grant, entitled "Elon Musk: The Man, The Myth, The Risk:"

"Tesla loses money consistently and analysts covering the stock have lately been slashing profit projections. For example, analyst consensus called for $6.26 a share in 2018 in adjusted profits a year ago, according to FactSet. Now, analyst consensus calls for an 89 cent loss. A similar pattern can be observed out to 2020, but investors clearly don’t mind."

champignon

The latter link on Electrek.co is an advocacy piece by an obviously unobjective website advocating a transition to "green energy." I would not take any of it at face value.