Tesla Passes Ford by Market Value • Hacker News Board

Re: Tesla Passes Ford by Market Value

#431

Post by aianus » Mon, Apr 03, 2017, 10:21 PM UTC

zeveb wrote: post #430

aianus wrote: post #427

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's 2017 and a $60,000 Audi still won't let you start it up remotely from your phone and run the heater/AC so it's comfortable by the time you leave your house. Seems like the most basic, obvious, easy to implement feature but they still can't manage it. Apparently because it's "illegal in Germany" to have a car running without an operator behind the wheel. What a joke. Tesla will wipe the floor with them.

Why would I want to install an app from a carmaker on my phone, complete with privacy-invading spyware, when I could just use the keyfob to do it?

At work I'm parked down the street from the car so the key fob wouldn't reach. But that's beside the point; you can't even do it from the key fob today on a new Audi.

Re: Tesla Passes Ford by Market Value

#432

Post by legolas2412 » Mon, Apr 03, 2017, 10:21 PM UTC

sxates wrote: post #167

strombofulous wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What makes you think solar is a hockey stick? I'm not saying you're wrong it's just the first time I've heard this before.

The price has been rapidly decreasing in the last 10 years, to the point that it no longer makes sense to not have solar everywhere. It's cheaper than coal, and will soon be cheaper than all the other fossil fuels as well, and will continue to go down, never up. China now employs over 1 million workers making solar panels. And they're ramping that up as fast as they can, and shelving coal power plants. We've reached…

I think solar is the future, but these claims are stupid.

> "to the point that it no longer makes sense to not have solar everywhere. It's cheaper than coal, and will soon be cheaper than all the other fossil fuels as well, and will continue to go down, never up."

Then the market should automatically have shifted to 100% solar by now.

Solar is getting cheaper yes, but it is dependent on hours of sunlight available, which like wind energy, is unreliable and doesn't work at periods (like night). Further, the capacity of a solar power plant isn't its produced electricity, because the capacity is mainly peak capacity, which is only reached a few hours a day.

> China now employs over 1 million workers making solar panels

Don't know where that figure is from, but I guess china must be covered in solar panels by now. 1 million is large number of people. Unless your figures are deceiving. For example, walmart sells solar panels. So, you will count every walmart employee as a solar panel retail employee.

Re: Tesla Passes Ford by Market Value

#433

Post by breser » Mon, Apr 03, 2017, 10:21 PM UTC

Spooky23 wrote: post #48

dan1234 wrote: post #2

Interesting, but market cap isn’t everything - FTA: "While Tesla’s market capitalization has swelled in size, Ford still overshadows the Palo Alto, California-based company in most other financial metrics. Over the last five years, Ford has posted net income totaling $26 billion, while Tesla has lost $2.3 billion. Last year, Ford had annual revenue of $151.8 billion compared with Tesla’s $7 billion. And when it comes…

The market makes mistakes over value all of the time. Look at the sad tale of post-bankruptcy Kmart, and how they used hype, valuation and newly available credit to gobble up Sears. Predicable trainwreck ensued. Tesla is alike and different. They have an amazing management team, Apple-like religious fervor/hype machine, but a marginal product category. Their continued growth is only possible as long as they can convi…

Calling Tesla just another car company is really missing the boat on their business. Tesla started as a car company. It's how most people are aware of them. So I don't really blame you for this mistake.

However, Tesla today is an integrated energy company. They make Solar Cells (the part of the business formerly called SolarCity), Stationary Battery Systems (generally referred to as Tesla Energy) that range in size from residential to grid sized and of course cars (which ultimately also use batteries).

Comparing them to car companies is like comparing Amazon with bookstores. Yes Tesla is a car company and yes Amazon is a bookstore. But both both of them are so much more than those simple comparison.

In fact I suspect the Amazon comparison here is rather apt because Amazon is now in the situation where Amazon Web Services is essentially able to prop up the retail business. I suspect Tesla Energy will be able to prop up the car business in the near future.

Re: Tesla Passes Ford by Market Value

#434

Post by sxates » Mon, Apr 03, 2017, 10:21 PM UTC

metricodus wrote: post #355

dangrossman wrote: post #352

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ford sells 6.5 million cars a year, and only 12,000 of them in Sweden. Ford already makes an electric car, and 12K cars is 3-4 weeks of production from one production line in one of their factories.

This kind of legislation will likely spread spread across the EU.

And China.

Re: Tesla Passes Ford by Market Value

#435

Post by kgwgk » Mon, Apr 03, 2017, 10:21 PM UTC

berberous wrote: post #373

cynicalkane wrote: post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> enterprise value, which is the correct measure of the value of a business Not even Warren Buffet thinks this. In economics, the correct measure of a value of a business is the future discounted expected value of cash flow and external utility. There's almost no way to measure this directly so major simplifying assumptions are made when applying this definition in practice.

I think his point is that DCF of a company's free cash flow is an attempt to estimate enterprise value, not equity value.

You can use either the cash flows to equity or the cash flows to the firm to calculate the value of equity (ex-non-operating-cash) or the enterprise value.

Re: Tesla Passes Ford by Market Value

#436

Post by iamacynic » Mon, Apr 03, 2017, 10:21 PM UTC

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #421

iamacynic wrote: post #396

Earlier quoted context omitted.

http://www.businessinsider.com/2016-was-a-record-breaking-ye... india and africa will be china in 20 years. this is the market that tesla is fighting for a fraction of, not the other way around. you're out of your mind. people like cars. people will spend an irrational amount of money on their cars. they don't give a shit if it pollutes, or kills people, or doesn't because it drives itself sometimes. the trends show…

Every year is potentially a record breaking year for profits. That's how inflation works! India and Africa are going to buy Fords? China has been really nice to Ford, it has kept them afloat while the American market tanked at home, BUT let's not delude ourselves about how Chinese JVs work. Also, China has some weird tax games going on, so its not clear where demand will eventually settle (disclaimer, I lived in Beij…

> Every year is potentially a record breaking year for profits. That's how inflation works!

do yourself a favor and never own or run a business. record breaking numbers do not happen by accident or because of inflation. you have a fundamental misunderstanding of what is actually going on here.

the analogy you are looking for is "right before the car showed up the record sales of horses looked unstoppable." but you're not putting the pieces together in a coherent manner.

also, ford will make whatever the car is. doesn't matter if it's electric or gas or diesel or bio.

Re: Tesla Passes Ford by Market Value

#437

Post by wang_li » Mon, Apr 03, 2017, 10:22 PM UTC

jeff_petersen wrote: post #412

wang_li wrote: post #371

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If we are serious about climate change, then sometime in the 2030s [1] we have to stop building new combustion engines. Or there might be a breakthrough in carbon capture, converting atmospheric CO2 into petroleum and we can drive combustion engines forever. CO2 capture is an area of active research and it's entirely possible that advances there will make Tesla and Solar City moot.

> CO2 capture is an area of active research and it's entirely possible that advances there will make Tesla and Solar City moot. I don't know how likely that is. Even if carbon capture comes through, the low hanging fruit of fossil fuels are gone so now we have to get more invasive in harvesting the hard-to-get ones (strip mining, fracking, etc). It's likely that even with C02 emissions taken care of that we'll want e…

I mean capture of CO2 from the air and conversion into a fuel that can be used. Something along the lines of algal farms that soak up sunlight and CO2 from the air and excrete alcohol. Combining solar and the CO2 that has already been released into a liquid fuel suitable for a variety of uses. We could cease raw material extraction entirely.

Re: Tesla Passes Ford by Market Value

#438

Post by emodendroket » Mon, Apr 03, 2017, 10:24 PM UTC

criley2 wrote: post #392

emodendroket wrote: post #389

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it's so easy to solve why don't you share the solution?

I did. I literally did share a solution in this post, and the one before. - Commoditize storage and transport it to you on demand - Offer pet friendly cars Boom. Solved . As I also wrote: "I'm sure you could come up with a better solution if you tried." Is this hackernews, where builders come to talk about exciting ways they're solving tomorrow's problems? Am I on the wrong site?

I thought I was here to discuss programming and related news rather than engaging in mindless boosterism.

Re: Tesla Passes Ford by Market Value

#439

Post by willyt » Mon, Apr 03, 2017, 10:30 PM UTC

netfire wrote: post #359

username223 wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The automobile industry will contract as we move from individual ownership to mobility. What does this even mean? People like to leave stuff in their cars (e.g. mug, gym bag). They like them to be at their preferred level of cleanliness or disorder. Some even use them as a means of personal expression. If "mobility" were so desirable, ZipCar would have taken off 10 years ago. The "mobility" market will be about the…

I think you are generally right about a primary/family car, but less so for a second, commuter car. I think this mainly hinges around making the self-driving technology safe, reliable and cheap (that is, cheaper than owning a car currently). I think taxis would be used more if they were significantly cheaper. Buses and trains have extra delays for stops, and you may still have to walk/bike after you get off. Having a…

Trains should be faster than cars in dense urban environments (if you are close to the station), e.g. London Euston to Watford 19miles 15-20mins by train 32mins by car (outside rush hour).

Re: Tesla Passes Ford by Market Value

#440

Post by legolas2412 » Mon, Apr 03, 2017, 10:32 PM UTC

sxates wrote: post #429

bischofs wrote: post #394

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. Nope. Are you just pulling numbers from a hat? Nissan sold 14,000 leafs last year, add that to the 24,000 volts and the 8,000 i3s and you get more than the model S. 2. Im saying the current business is minuscule, if we looked at elons promises as gospel (which you apparently do) we would have had a model x three years ago. LGchem and Samsung SDI are more than capable to meet the demand of the current lithium batte…

1. "Tesla delivered over 76,000 vehicles in 2016" [1]. My math may be rusty, but I'm pretty sure I'm right that they're outselling everyone combined with $100k cars. They're tracking to over 100,000 for 2017. 2. Several billion dollars worth of capital investments disagree with you. And what's important isn't the current market, but the future market - these things are growing and production bottlenecks kill growth.…

You do buy in Tesla's marketing as gospel though.

> A Tesla has all the hardware needed for Level 5 autonomy (which they've demo'd, but requires regulatory approval), and it's a software update away.

Audi, BMW, Google etc. demoe'd similar capacity as the tesla did 2-3 years ago. Do you even understand how difficult problem it is? It's not a problem you engineer away. Do you think Tesla made machine learning breakthroughs that Google or CMU (Uber) researchers couldn't? Tesla beating Google at Machine learning?

> And their whole fleet is sensors-on all the time, whether you're using it or not to enable that, which is not true for any other vehicle manufacturer.

Does it matter what kind of sensor? Almost everybody else agrees LIDAR is necessary. And what use is random data from useless sensors? It's like saying that you'd put cameras in a pedestrian crossing, and soon you'll process it to make a human level intelligence.