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Tesla Posts Big Quarterly Loss as Its Electric-Car Sales Lag

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Re: Tesla Posts Big Quarterly Loss as Its Electric-Car Sales Lag

#701

Post by WorldMaker »

rtkwe wrote: post #645
bluedino wrote: post #633

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This made me think of the future of gas stations. Will they just conver to charging stations, and charge customers to use them?

It'll be tough, most gas stations don't have a lot of space for a lot of charging stations and nothing to do while you wait for the charge. The large truck stop style ones might be able to convert more easily because they already have the larger lots and buildings with spaces to sit inside while you wait. I have heard anecdotally that gas stations make terrible money on their actual fuel sales and the real margins ar…

Yeah, at this point inside US cities the majority of pumps have been moving to the model of grocery stores with pumps attached, and that model still works with chargers augmenting and then replacing pumps, because grocery stores generally are useful places to charge while you shop. (Just as malls seem to be good places to add chargers, if you expect and/or want people to linger/browse while they charge.)

Convenience stores and restaurants will still be useful on the highways with or without gas pumps around. (People will always need to use a restroom or grab some grub on long road trips.)

I figure some smart "medium fast" food restaurant that benefits from a lingering dining experience, but doesn't take too much advantage of it (ie, doesn't actively slow the diner down), will integrate chargers into their franchise plans and become the new king of the highways in the way that MacDonald's (and regionally, Waffle House) became synonymous with pit stops along the open road in the 50s and 60s.

Re: Tesla Posts Big Quarterly Loss as Its Electric-Car Sales Lag

#702

Post by WorldMaker »

cagenut wrote: post #579
mtgx wrote: post #550

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tesla is wasting time, money and focus by investing too much in self-driving tech (they're even having their own chip division now! - is Tesla really in financial a position to compete with Intel/Nvidia now?). Not to mention they made all of their Model 3's thousands of dollars more expensive by including the "full self-driving hardware-that-wasn't" in every unit to the point where it didn't even make sense for Tesla…

there is a line of reasoning, rarely articulated, that EVs will never reach the price points it would take to fully 100% replace ICE cars in the private/personal market. li-ion batteries have done an excellent job walking down the learning/cost curve, but we can all see the way it bends and how much headroom is left in the chemistry. we'll likely hit $100/kwh in the next few years, but even just $80/kwh is likely 5+…

> EVs will never reach the price points it would take to fully 100% replace ICE cars in the private/personal market

The Chevy Bolt and to a lesser extent the Model 3 have already hit the "Corolla/Civic/Sonata/et al" sedan sweet spot for new sales. The mean in new car sales has always been around and just above $30k. Certainly the mean in total car sales is closer to $20k, but that hugely because of the secondary market and fast depreciation (used car sales). It's still too early to tell what sort of impact models like the Bolt and Model 3 may have on used sales (and obviously production numbers are still a factor, especially with Tesla's production and delivery woes).

Chinese manufacturers have been exploring the "bottom" of the EV market much more effectively than the US and EU markets simply because they don't need the carrot of luxury to attract early adopters in quite the same way. If Chinese EV companies are to be believed, hitting below that magic USD$20k mean is possible with new car sales alone due to EV supply chain efficiencies that ICE supply chains can't match.

> self driving makes this a nirvana

I feel self-driving is a red herring/impossible goal like the 60s AI boom all over again, and we're all going to look back on this in a decade or so and wonder what everyone was thinking.

Also, ride sharing isn't likely the answer in current America. It's enough of a culture shift to get gas-lovers/petrolheads to enjoy/love/trust EVs. It's even more of an ask to remove ownership from the question and to force them to only ever rent a car. We might not have time to take only one hurdle at a time, but we may have to.

Re: Tesla Posts Big Quarterly Loss as Its Electric-Car Sales Lag

#703

Post by grey-area »

koolba wrote: post #571
grey-area wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What can a smart car do that a 'regular' car can't? Save millions of lives by being safer driving than humans? Drive you home the rest of the time? Drive you cross country overnight while you sleep? Come and pick you up at the airport after a holiday? Make you money during the day as an autotaxi while you're not using it? Save your life by avoiding accidents you didn't see? Radically bring down the cost of taxis and…

> Save millions of lives by being safer driving than humans? That’s not a perceptible change. It’s a wonderful thing and I’m all for people not dying, but people aren’t suddenly going to notice the difference. It’s not like people entering a car think “ Am I going to die?! ” every time they go to work. > Drive you home the rest of the time? Again I don’t see this as being more than a convenience. At beta it leads to…

All these conveniences mount up, I sincerely think they are in aggregate a significant selling point for most people.

Electric has nothing to do with “smart”.

This is the same mistake big automakers are still making. Electric is the future, it is also radically simpler, allows for automated recharges etc. It's be very hard to build an autonomous gas car.

Re: Tesla Posts Big Quarterly Loss as Its Electric-Car Sales Lag

#704

Post by pbreit »

hyperbovine wrote: post #528
pbreit wrote: post #398

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Continuing to deny something that exists is actually beyond calling it impossible! If you've got some spare time, go read some third party research on how cameras might actually be better. Lidar superiority is a myth. https://arxiv.org/pdf/1812.07179.pdf

Dude, if you think a CS conference paper is going to be the secret sauce that extracts Tesla from the $5b hole it’s dig itself into, you a) know nothing about business and b) know nothing about CS.

Just an external, corroborating data point. That’s all.

Re: Tesla Posts Big Quarterly Loss as Its Electric-Car Sales Lag

#705

Post by WorldMaker »

cagenut wrote: post #682
telchar wrote: post #623

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that view neglects the costs of the fossil fuel infrastructure. At some point gas stations are going to start closing for lack of customers. That time is a while off yet, but all of the existing stations are not going to be able to be supported by say, half as many ICE cars. Convenience will go down and at some point prices may go up as the existing infrastructure is paid for by fewer stations and less fuel.…

I agree with your points on a longer time horizon, but elon needs to solve for model3 demand now (this year). EVs will not drive the kind of oil distribution market retraction you're describing until they're at least 10% of cars on the road, which would be years and years after they're 10% of new cars sold. So while I agree the affect you describe will help, we don't have time to wait for it.

I think the time horizon for a step change in oil distribution is a lot shorter than people expect, precisely because it will be more likely a severe step change (ie, a snowball/crash) than an easy transition. Oil distribution is extremely complex, amazingly baroque, and has only a small number of players (they use a shell game [Shell Oil pun intended] of a large number of different "station" brands, but are really only a few companies left). When instability hits, it is likely to hit hard and look almost immediate (look at 70s Oil crises, for example).

I don't yet have a guess what percentage of the car fleet needs to be EV for that to happen, but that number is also not the only potential disruption that may happen to cause it (again, we have the 70s Oil crises as examples).

(Not that causing an Oil crisis is necessarily the right way to combat climate change, but in the question of chicken-and-egg between ICE and EV, people sure have a short memory for how volatile Oil is.)

Re: Tesla Posts Big Quarterly Loss as Its Electric-Car Sales Lag

#706

Post by abalone »

jakobegger wrote: post #654
abalone wrote: post #549

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> they are horribly miscalculating at what German people expect from a car. Can you be more specific? What are Teslas lacking for the German market?

Not a German, but we Austrians love wagons and hatchbacks. Sedans are something that only old people drive here. A car with a tiny trunk like the Model 3 is no good for driving on vacation with the kids.

So, Model Y?

Re: Tesla Posts Big Quarterly Loss as Its Electric-Car Sales Lag

#707

Post by rtkwe »

WorldMaker wrote: post #701
rtkwe wrote: post #645

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It'll be tough, most gas stations don't have a lot of space for a lot of charging stations and nothing to do while you wait for the charge. The large truck stop style ones might be able to convert more easily because they already have the larger lots and buildings with spaces to sit inside while you wait. I have heard anecdotally that gas stations make terrible money on their actual fuel sales and the real margins ar…

Yeah, at this point inside US cities the majority of pumps have been moving to the model of grocery stores with pumps attached, and that model still works with chargers augmenting and then replacing pumps, because grocery stores generally are useful places to charge while you shop. (Just as malls seem to be good places to add chargers, if you expect and/or want people to linger/browse while they charge.) Convenience…

It won't work quite as well just because it takes so much longer to charge an EV than it does to gas up a regular car. So the limited lots of existing stations will have a much lower turnover rate than they do now. Also most places around me are very much just the traditional convenience store you can only get a very limited selection of stuff (like a smattering for fruit and milk at best with maybe some cereals or something) those places aren't going to be long stops to shop around in so charging at them isn't going to be a draw.

> Convenience stores and restaurants will still be useful on the highways with or without gas pumps around. (People will always need to use a restroom or grab some grub on long road trips.)

Yeah like I said in my original post I don't think they'll go 100% out of business along highways but it will largely be the larger stops that have some restaurant integrated or just restaurants along the highway that survive not the small snack food and gas places that are a majority today. Charging (today and for the foreseeable future unless there's another breakthrough in batter tech that pans out at large scales) just takes too long for anything without some kind of food or other attraction to make sense as the charging stations on longer trips.

Re: Tesla Posts Big Quarterly Loss as Its Electric-Car Sales Lag

#708

Post by freerobby »

serioussecurity wrote: post #622
deepGem wrote: post #369

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Am just curious, why does everyone believe that Waymo is way ahead. They have more miles driven, but so does Tesla. Waymo has some incredible guys going after autonomy but they have nothing to show as of yet at the L4 or L5 level. Is it because they are playing it super safe. They don't have any urgency to make money from autonomy unlike Tesla. Are they taking it easy ? Per my understanding, Tesla is tackling autonom…

This is one of those "you need to be an expert to evaluate the claim" problems. Talk to anyone with research experience who are building world scale ML systems that are used by real people, and it's unambiguous that Elon Musk is a con man. It comes down to small details, like the nature of the training data, the nature of the customizations, the nature of the business problems, the nature of the regulatory problems,…

Appeal-to-authority arguments are always uncompelling, but they are especially uncompelling against Musk. Authorities said hydrogen fuel cells were the future. Authorities said EVs will never outperform gas cars. Authorities said batteries will always cost too much. Authorities said reusing rockets will never work.

With each of these breakthroughs, Musk presented a well-reasoned view that was highly contrarian against the authority consensus; and in each case, his view turned out to be not only correct, but so correct that it became the new authority consensus.

Maybe this time he is wrong and you are right. But if you are wondering why the market and the masses believe him, it's because he continues to provide reasonable explanations for what he's proposing, and he has a track record to back them up. If history predicts the future, then in a few years, we'll add "authorities said you needed LIDAR for self-driving" to the list above. This is already starting to play out in the SDC space, with Hotz of Comma.ai sharing Musk's views on vision, and Levandowski sharing his more generalized concern about LIDAR (the latter is more recent if you're not familiar):

> Levandowski contends that this “race” to deploy autonomous vehicles has yet to start in earnest largely due to shortcomings from “crutch technologies,” a descriptor he uses for hardware like LiDAR and HD maps. His position is that while these provide sensing and localization for the vehicle in the present moment, they have serious compromises and don’t produce the level of predictive ability required to commercially deploy autonomous vehicles.

https://techcrunch.com/2018/12/18/anthony-levandowski-pronto...

Karpathy was able to explain in very simple and understandable terms this week why Tesla's approach is advantageous. If the critics understand this domain so well, how come they can't provide a straightforward retort? If Feinman could do it with quantum physics, surely a machine learning expert can do it with neural networks. I would love to read/hear/watch such a retort if anybody is interested in presenting one.

Re: Tesla Posts Big Quarterly Loss as Its Electric-Car Sales Lag

#709

Post by matthewdgreen »

dagw wrote: post #394
whttheuuu wrote: post #381

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Why would you buy a Tesla when you can buy a Hyundai Kona for a lot less?" Lol, is this a serious question?

is this a serious question? Of course it is. Saving a lot of money on a car means you can spend a lot of money on other things you enjoy. So why would you pay a lot of money to drive a Tesla instead of a Hyundai? Because the Tesla looks better? Drives better? Has better safety features? Is more reliable? Has a higher status value? I'm not saying that there aren't good reasons to buy a Tesla instead of Hyundai and had…

>I'm not saying that there aren't good reasons to buy a Tesla instead of Hyundai and had they cost the same then sure I'd buy a Tesla as well.

The MSRP on the base-model Kona is $36,950, which is a bit less than the $39,500 Tesla SR+, but not dramatically. The next level of trim above the base model Kona is $41,500, and doesn't seem to add any significant features (LED headlamps, etc., which Tesla already has.) The highest level of Kona trim is $44,900, which is only $5k less than the Tesla Long Range model! My suspicion is that, given the low production numbers, Hyundai is going to focus primarily on selling the more expensive models. In practice this means (with a few lucky exceptions) you're looking at Tesla prices to get a Hyundai.

Re: Tesla Posts Big Quarterly Loss as Its Electric-Car Sales Lag

#710

Post by navigatesol »

gonehome wrote: post #662
navigatesol wrote: post #501

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> People have been predicting failure for Tesla since the beginning. This is such a bizarre argument. Things don't fall apart overnight, until they do. Are you a software engineer? "People have been predicting our app will collapse under the burden of technical debt since the beginning. Hasn't happened yet!"

To clarify they’ve said each step was impossible and that Musk was basically a fraud or a liar and each step has been executed so far. I place the people predicting failure with those predicting a stock market crash - given a long enough time horizon you’ll eventually be right, but otherwise it seems to have mostly been nonsense so far. I suspect people outside Tesla are either just bad at predicting their ability to…

>To clarify they’ve said each step was impossible and that Musk was basically a fraud or a liar and each step has been executed so far.

This is a nonsense narrative that some people tell themselves to justify hanging on for dear life.

Sure, there was some skepticism about EVs, but it was mainly around whether there was demand and whether they could be built profitably at that level of demand. Who Killed The Electric Car? came out in 2006 and the entire premise was the feasibility of EVs.

So what has Tesla done? They've demonstrated that EVs can work, and that there is some demand there. They've burned through almost $20BB in subsidies and shareholder equity to get there. They are certainly not near profitability. In fact, they are changing their entire business model as of a week ago, apparently. Why, if they've proven that EVs can be so successful?

It's hilarious that the fanatics claim to think "long term", but then in the same breath claim Tesla has has nothing to fear because they haven't gone bankrupt yet, therefore they never will. Enron was the 7th biggest company in the US at one point, and won multiple awards for The Best Company to Work For. It doubled revenues between 1999 and 2000, and was set to do it again in 2001. Then it disappeared. "Nothing to fear!" right until the end...

>given a long enough time horizon you’ll eventually be right, but otherwise it seems to have mostly been nonsense so far.

By what metric? Most owners haven't owned the car for a year yet. If you bought the stock in the past 5 years, you're underwater. Do you consider that some ridiculous time frame for an investor or business? I certainly don't.

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