Congrats Elon. Now go get some sleep
Tesla Third Quarter 2018 Update [pdf]
151–160 of 418 posts
Re: Tesla Third Quarter 2018 Update [pdf]
#152It would be interesting if they bought Workhorse, the electric delivery drone and pickup and van company. Low market cap, lots of good projects out, and possibly complementary capabilities.
Re: Tesla Third Quarter 2018 Update [pdf]
#153Earlier quoted context omitted.
How competitive will it be when all these model 3 owners start clogging them up?
That's a great question. Model 3 owners pay to use superchargers where S/X owners typically do not. That said, it's not prohibitively expensive (26c/kWh in CA where it cost me 16c/kWh to home charge, off-peak only, in tier 1 (tip: I'm not in tier 1!) Because it's not prohibitively expensive, Model 3 owners will use them fairly regularly, but not to replace home charging in a way an S/X owner might. For the most part.…
Wow is electricity seriously that expensive in CA? I pay 11c/kWh in Chicago and looove charging my 3.
Re: Tesla Third Quarter 2018 Update [pdf]
#154One massive advantage that I'm not sure most people realize quite yet is the Supercharger network. No manufacturer (other than Porsche talking about it recently) has actually built out chargers for their cars. Every other electric car has to rely on a broken, sparse, expensive charger network. Blink chargers and some ChargePoint chargers are expensive in many places ($2 an hour!), and Blink is notorious for having br…
While superchargers are great, I don't think they as big an advantage as you are making them to be. How often do you drive more than 200 miles in a day? 3 times a year? I am not going to buy a specific car for that reason. Besides using supercharger is not free as well. As more and more cars go electric, charging stations are going to be as common as gas stations and there will be competition with pricing etc. Not su…
> While superchargers are great, I don't think they as big an advantage as you are making them to be. How often do you drive more than 200 miles in a day? 3 times a year? I am not going to buy a specific car for that reason.
So every time you go on a road trip, what do you do? Get a ride to a rental car place, initial a stack of paperwork denying a half-dozen $10-25/day charges on top of whatever base rate you agreed to, finally get the keys to a super-bare-base-model of some car that looked good from the outside, drive it back to your house, then load everything up and hope for the best?
Or would you rather just load up in the car you already own, and are comfortable and familiar with driving, and not need to budget an extra hour or two on either end of the drive for rental company nonsense?
> Besides using supercharger is not free as well. As more and more cars go electric, charging stations are going to be as common as gas stations and there will be competition with pricing etc. Not sure if I want to rely on one company's charging network.
Tesla's supercharger network is a huge advantage precisely because no one else has anything like it. It also now has a fair amount of redundancy along major routes. It would be wonderful if competing networks actually existed, but they meaningfully don't. Tesla realizes that you actually need the network, and that having it allows a Tesla car to be your only car. Everyone else just thinks they can sell something with X miles of range, wipe their hands, and thinks spending 8 hours at a ChargePoint station in a grocery store parking lot is actually acceptable.
Re: Tesla Third Quarter 2018 Update [pdf]
#155One massive advantage that I'm not sure most people realize quite yet is the Supercharger network. No manufacturer (other than Porsche talking about it recently) has actually built out chargers for their cars. Every other electric car has to rely on a broken, sparse, expensive charger network. Blink chargers and some ChargePoint chargers are expensive in many places ($2 an hour!), and Blink is notorious for having br…
I'm pretty sure every Nissan dealer that sells a leaf must operate a charging station. Granted they're not as easy to access at the supercharger network... but it exists.
And how the heck does a charging station, at a car dealership in the middle of a city, actually help you when you're on a highway trying to actually drive between cities?
Re: Tesla Third Quarter 2018 Update [pdf]
#156Earlier quoted context omitted.
How long do you think the current Supercharger network will be a large competitive advantage? I agree with Benedict Evan's point that electric charging will become a commodity: https://www.ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2018/8/29/tesla-soft...
Eventually, yes, it will become a commodity. But the issue is, someone has to spend a lot of money to build out these chargers. Tesla has a big incentive to do it-- their very survival depended on early adopters willing to buy their car, which also means they need a place to charge it. Being able to go 100 miles from your house before you have to turn around was never going to work for car owners, hence Tesla's initi…
Agree - Tesla had an existential incentive to build chargers, but other car makers would prefer to wait and see (and let someone else build out the commodity chargers).
Re: Tesla Third Quarter 2018 Update [pdf]
#157Earlier quoted context omitted.
What are "adjusted" earnings?
They take the "official" accounting earnings and add back in charges they either 1) don't feel represent the true financial position or 2) are one-off charges. In this case they back out stock-based compensation (like most companies), turning GAAP earnings of $311m into adjusted earnings of $516m. Voila!
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Re: Tesla Third Quarter 2018 Update [pdf]
#158They have to be happy with those numbers, interesting question of whether they continue to sell the S,X,3's and generate a pile of cash before they start burning it on model Y development. In general it should also muzzle a lot of the nay sayers, it isn't easy to lie about money in the bank. Solar City is a disappointment. I keep watching the solar roof tile business to see if that goes anywhere. I'm getting close to…
> They have to be happy with those numbers, interesting question of whether they continue to sell the S,X,3's and generate a pile of cash before they start burning it on model Y development.
That's not how Elon works. He's likely to get a capital raise to fund Model Y development.
The Gigafactory was built on millions-of-shares being sold between 2013 and 2015, plus some loans (the 2014 5-year convertible which is now due 2019).
The thing about Q3 profitability was that it was necessary for Elon to achieve Q3 profitability... so that he can now start to push for the Model Y funding. Shareholders/ Investors need to be convinced that giving more money to Elon is worthwhile. So I think this Q3 profitability is very important to the message and plan that Elon is trying to build here.
Re: Tesla Third Quarter 2018 Update [pdf]
#159Amazing results - I am especially taking great pleasure in watching the shorts get decimated. The Model 3 is a game-changer for the masses. I walked past 6 of them just on my way to get coffee this morning. We're truly witnessing the EV revolution.
I will never understand why Tesla people are so obsessed with short sellers. They exist for every company. And the majority of them would have hedged their bets in some form so it's not like they are likely to lose substantial amounts of money. Tesla almost seems to be similar to Trump in that they need a fictitious enemy to distract the attention away from themselves.
My understanding is that Tesla short sellers are more visible because of the amount of money betting against Tesla. With an estimated ~$11B of short position (https://www.forbes.com/sites/chuckjones/2018/04/15/tesla-has...), that is not fictitious.
With so much money at stake, some short sellers might be tempted to start false rumors or even damage the company, in order to recoup some of their money.
Re: Tesla Third Quarter 2018 Update [pdf]
#160Congrats to Tesla and Musk. The numbers are just insane: "The electric car-maker reported adjusted earnings of $2.90 per share on revenue of $6.82 billion, exceeding average analyst expectations of losses of 15 cents per share on revenue of $6.32 billion."
What are "adjusted" earnings?
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