Lorenfb

Profound! This came to you last night during one of your "deep thinking" sessions, right? How about some down-to-earth predictions like what Tesla will report (Q2) tomorrow,
e.g. amount of GAAP P/L, the GP per vehicles, and Q3 guidance? Minimize your typical hyperbole.

RonF

No just by opening my eyes to take a look. I don't know Ford's earning reports back then but Tesla is still an ongoing business last time I checked. It likely will keep it this way for a long time too. What matters is it went from making 600 cars a year in the beginning of the decade to likely 1000x that many by end of the decade. Not even Henry Ford was able to do that. All you need to see is the simple fact that everyone is gravitating toward what Tesla is doing. Although not everyone would end up be successful in the endeavor.

Here is another one I'm sure will make executives in Stuttgart, Detroit or Tokyo cringe. All want/need a piece of that China (EV) pie but they are all hopelessly behind Tesla. Those Chinese are no fools. They are willing to do this even in the midst of the trade war with the US. They can tell who has it and who do not.

https://www.teslarati.com/tesla-giga...l-visit-video/

Lorenfb

Always more platitudes and hyperbole! It never ends.

RonF

You seem to have a problem separating facts and hyperboles.

whiz944

There are two H2 stations pretty near my house. Both co-located at normal gasoline stations. Both are serviced by off-site production. The H2 is delivered in big 'tube trucks' like gasoline is. So there is certainly a limit to how much is stored on-site before needing another delivery.

Also read for example: https://www.osti.gov/servlets/purl/1068156

On page 7: "At the time station design parameters were established, the cooling system for 700 bar vehicle fueling was designed for individual vehicle fills followed by recovery time to reestablish temperatures associated with the heat transfer system. As a result, the UCI Hydrogen Station could not accommodate back-to-back vehicle fueling. Drivers therefore tended to refuel when they thought they would have the best chance of avoiding other drivers, as demonstrated by the 4 am spike in Figure 3."

Perhaps the latest generation H2 stations have solved some of these problems. But I read through the rest of the report and just shake my head over the complexity of H2 stations in general vs "plugging it in overnight at home - like I do with my cell phone". Or when on a long road trip, stopping off at a Supercharger, using "the facilities" for a few minutes, and coming back to the car with a decent enough charge to make it back home or another Supercharger 2-3 hours away.

Lorenfb

You just have to love Tesla for its consumer benevolence. Based on the 2019 Q2 report, for every vehicle sold Tesla gave away $2K of shareholder wealth.
That great ASP Tesla previously got moving the MS/MX vehicles is gone. Now with the M3 ASPs in the low $50k with lower profitability, and with demand
now plateauing, the Tesla horizon doesn't appear as many hoped for. If and when the MY arrives, the ASPs and margins will drop lower, increasing the downward
spiral of Tesla. Tesla an automotive company with great profitability, another potential Apple or Amazon, right? Yes, we have many dreamers on this thread!

RonF

That is not true. The report said clearly it has ~19% margin, not quite as good as last time but still very respectable. Tesla could stop invest for expansion and get a very decent profit anytime it wants. It's just spending, deliberately, more than it made to expand product line and market share. And what a growth it has gotten so far! Tesla is still sitting on $5 billion of cash with no danger of running out of money anytime soon. It will continue to use the cash to fuel growth instead of to generate interests. Investors who want to just earn interests do not need to invest in companies like that.

Adk46

1) If we go by loss per car ($2000) then it will only take a 4% shift to get to breakeven. If the cars were already wildly expensive with a highly-tuned manufacturing process, then I might panic. But neither is true: a) total cost of ownership is already similar to or better than ICE cars, and b) Gigafactory 3 is coming soon.

2) I don't know what's wrong with people who are planning to celebrate when Tesla fails. Root against Musk if you must, but not an American company with many employees and a real shot at remarkable global success.

RonF

The only constrain for EV acceptance is the purchasing cost (and charging for non-Tesla EV's). By most accounts cost of EV will reach that of ICE cars in 3 to 5 years. Whoever gets there first and has the dominating market position will be the winner. Will Tesla be able to stay alive and continue this fast expansion for another 3 to 5 years? I'm sure that's the plan and I can't see why it will not achieve it.

Lorenfb

Even Tesla’s JB (CTO) finally sees the “writing-on-the-wall” as many have recently;

https://techcrunch.com/2019/07/24/te...stepping-down/

Elon will have to take some Physics I/II refresher classes now at a local JC.

Needsdecaf

Do you just Hate Elon personally or something? What are you going to do when they actually start making money? Come back and post that you were wrong?

https://www.theverge.com/2019/7/24/2...-stepping-down


Longtime Tesla executive JB Straubel is leaving his post as chief technology officer after some 15 years, CEO Elon Musk announced Wednesday evening. Straubel will transition to a “senior advisor” role, according to Musk, and is not fully leaving the company. The news comes as Tesla announced a $408 million loss for the second quarter of 2019.

“I’m not disappearing, and I just wanted to make sure that people understand that this was not some, you know, lack of confidence in the company, or the team, or anything like that,” Straubel said on the call.

“I’d like to thank JB for his fundamental role in creating and enabling Tesla,” CEO Elon Musk said on a call with analysts Wednesday evening. “If we hadn’t had lunch in 2003, Tesla wouldn’t wouldn’t exist, basically.

Lorenfb

Read the 10K and understand it! The key number noted is the GAAP loss/share times the number of shares divided by the number of vehicles sold equals the shareholder loss per vehicles.

Lorenfb

Right, another Elon stroke job!

Needsdecaf

Thanks for answering my question.

Not sure who you think is doing the stroking. The verge? Or me? If the verge, that's a quote from the investor call. Not a stroke job, just reporting. And if me, not hardly. Read through the posts. I think my last post said Elon should "STFU" regarding autonomous driving. I'm no huge fan of many of his games and BS.

But I don't root for the company to fail.

So why do you?

RonF

Once again it does not go this way. Loss/share includes everything from R&D for future models to spending on new plants and production lines. Tesla can easily show a profit if it slows down or stop doing those but its goal is pretty obvious to grab as most market as fast as it can at any cost it could afford to. It's other companies that are reluctant to do the same will have problems in the (near) future when this industry is turned upside down by Tesla.

Listen to this analyst Tesla actually had $600 million free cash flow in Q2 and is sitting on $5 billion cash. To those who hope it will fail here is the bad news. It's not going anywhere anytime soon. As for OEM's in long term trouble listen to last 15~20 seconds of the interview. Sorry but since you wanted to know.