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Tesla Passes Ford by Market Value

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511–520 of 604 posts

Re: Tesla Passes Ford by Market Value

#511
post #399

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…

Exactly. Maybe poor people will take the robocab from hell, with sick on the floor. Most people will not.

Uh, what? Cabs are already really popular. Why would a self driving car be "from hell"? You think they can't be cleaned?

Re: Tesla Passes Ford by Market Value

#512

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There are so many car makers, there is no monopole they could get. Same for solar and batteries. The automobile industry will contract as we move from individual ownership to mobility. But along with that transition some manufacturers will keep up and others will not. Tesla is hoping to be one of the winners, taking perhaps 25% of the mobility market as the car buying market dries up. Tesla's valuation is also base…

I'm far from convinced that the people buying 40,000 Ford F150s every 3 weeks are doing it for mobility and they're just dying to take a "taxi" everywhere instead.

Those aren't congesting city streets, at least that I've ever seen.

Re: Tesla Passes Ford by Market Value

#513
post #508

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have any evidence that either of those will make money? I have evidence that pet friendly cars lose money - Uber used to have a program that catered towards dogs and they cancelled it because it lost money. You haven't solved anything until you've demonstrated a working solution. If it were so easy to fix problems in the real world, politicians would have our economy constantly booming, there would be more job…

> Uber used to have a program that catered towards dogs and they cancelled it because it lost money. By the same standard uber as a whole is not a working solution.

In fact it may not be.

Re: Tesla Passes Ford by Market Value

#514

Ford is sitting on almost $16 billion cash. Tesla, like Amazon, burns through cash as fast as they can turn it into scalable future stuff. Whether you consider this good or bad depends on your future outlook: Being long Ford is making a bet that the future will look pretty much the same. Being long Tesla is making a bet that the future will look different. (Plus the risks of believing that they can do what they say t…

"Being long Tesla is making a bet that the future will look different."

This is funny to me. I think Tesla is selling more of the same: various big cars to car drivers who can't imagine a society without cars.

It feels like "trickle-down environmentalism", and I don't have a very high opinion about the economic variant.

A real radical vision of the future would be betting on train and bus companies or something wild like that.

Re: Tesla Passes Ford by Market Value

#515

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Says who It is foreseeable that ICEs will become banned, at least in Europe. Right now there is still too much lobbying by the traditional car makers, but long term there is no other choice for reaching climate goals. Edit: See e.g. http://bigthink.com/scotty-hendricks/the-end-of-the-internal... https://www.autoevolution.com/news/germany-asks-eu-to-think-...

That would never work in the US. It would be both impractical and politically impossible. Most people don't have 35k to drop on an electric car, and even if they did the infrastructure doesn't exist.

Things change. The car will landscape will look pretty different in 20 years.

Re: Tesla Passes Ford by Market Value

#516
post #369

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…

> The "mobility" market will be about the size of the taxi, bus, and train market. - A personal, individual vehicle which comes to pick you up where you are and take you to exactly where you want to go is a much MUCH higher value proposition than public transit. - Add self-driving to the mix, and the cost of that service will plummet. - When the car providing that service can drive itself, then there is little to no…

> I think there are a lot of pretty good reasons why the vehicle market is going to change significantly in the next 15 years

But not necessarily shrinking the market. The cost of mobility goes down, consumption will go up. How high? I'm going to guess absurdly high. The reason US cities are sprawling messes is that they were built as the cost of mobility dropped off a cliff (cars and trucks replaced horses). Go read Clifford Simak's "City". People will live in self driving cars and commute in their sleep. It's going to be nuts.

Re: Tesla Passes Ford by Market Value

#517
post #454

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Seems inefficient. Fossil Fuels work today because you just suck them out of the ground and ta-da! free energy when you burn it. If you have to pump enormous energy into harvesting the carbon so you can burn it and re-harvest it, why not just put that energy straight into the car and cut out the carbon entirely? The battery is the thing that makes an electric car "expensive" today, but it's following a consistent dow…

> If you have to pump enormous energy into harvesting the carbon so you can burn it and re-harvest it, why not just put that energy straight into the car and cut out the carbon entirely?

Energy density. Jet fuel has about 25x the energy per kg as the best lithium batteries. Perhaps batteries will be able to match carbon fuels some day, but it's a long way off.

Re: Tesla Passes Ford by Market Value

#518

Former finance professional here: Ford is actually worth 3 times as much as Tesla, once you factor in debt. The total value of the Ford capital structure ("enterprise value") is about 150 billion. When two companies have wildly different capital structures, you have to compare them on enterprise value, not the market cap of their equity. So while I give kudos to Tesla for building a valuable business, it still has a…

I can't help but think that # of employees and pension systems should be a bigger factor in valuations.

GM and Ford have 200k+ employees each and so much legacy baggage where-as Tesla, even with Scty, only has around 40k employees.

And they mostly tend to be fanatically hard workers.

Re: Tesla Passes Ford by Market Value

#519

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"A teenager doesn't just "want a car." He wants that freedom that car gives him." Precisely, and this is why owning the car isn't that important. This teenager presumably still has to pay for the car and fuel, or bug his parents for it. Paying for the (cheaper) self driving ride is no different.

So why not call a cab? or take a bus? It is different. If you're relying on someone (or something) else, waiting around, you're not "independent."

Cabs are expensive, relatively slow, and busses are just slow and don't take you to your destination.

Really, this doesn't seem like much of a stretch.

Re: Tesla Passes Ford by Market Value

#520
post #485

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry, can you elaborate a little more on how debt factors into enterprise value? I've heard this before and don't fully understand.

Market cap tells you the value of everything: both the business and its money (cash & debt). Enterprise value is the value of the business (the thing actually generating value) separate from the cash & debt it's holding. For example, if I have a banana stand worth $250K, but inside the banana stand is a briefcase with $245K, then the $250K is not really the value of the banana stand - it's mostly the value of the cas…

There's always money in the banana stand.
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