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Tesla Surges Above $500, Leaving Analyst Targets in the Dust

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Re: Tesla Surges Above $500, Leaving Analyst Targets in the Dust

#31

The horror stories about 3 month wait for parts and the videos of water intruding into new vehicles, are keeping me away.

I personally would buy one if I could. But if I'm not allowed to get parts for it and work on it then its not a viable vehicle to me. I can't be beholden on whatever schedule the service department has or how fast they can get parts. Which sounds like not very fast.

Re: Tesla Surges Above $500, Leaving Analyst Targets in the Dust

#33
I've been a big Tesla fan for a while now.

Certainly a big part of me is happy, perhaps even a bit smug, to see the share price so high.

Even though I'm pretty sure electric vehicles are the future, and that Tesla has, at a minimum, brought that future closer to the now, I still think its share price is borderline insane, and, in the end, doesn't serve the company or the vision as well as a more moderate, stable price.

I also acknowledge that its CEO has not only not taken reasonable steps to 'calm things down', but has done the opposite.

Having said all that, I could be wrong, and perhaps Tesla's sales are substantially driven by all of this crazy energy, positive and negative.

Re: Tesla Surges Above $500, Leaving Analyst Targets in the Dust

#34
The correction will be precipitous. There is no reason to believe that even at the 1M vehicle level, they can be so profitable, when engaged with direct competition with other experienced producers, to justify such a market capitalization. The same cost issues will affect all companies, and I believe some Tesla technical advantages will erode.

Re: Tesla Surges Above $500, Leaving Analyst Targets in the Dust

#35

According to Robinhood: “Tesla's stock has jumped 35% over the past month, becoming the most valuable American car company ever. GM and Ford produced a combined 39x as many cars as Tesla did in 2019, but the electric carmaker is now more valuable than GM and Ford combined. Oh, and Tesla lost almost a billion dollars over the past year while GM and Ford made over $10B in profit. Investors care more about future profit…

> Oh, and Tesla lost almost a billion dollars over the past year

How do you know this? Q4 results aren't out.

Re: Tesla Surges Above $500, Leaving Analyst Targets in the Dust

#36
post #10

The horror stories about 3 month wait for parts and the videos of water intruding into new vehicles, are keeping me away.

so i have an x and when it rains we do sometimes get some water into the back seat when raising the trunk... but to keep this in perspective... the car is like an iphone compared to your flip phone. 2007 was a long time ago so maybe people forget just how impactful that phone was when people first tried it out. That is the exact same experience I have had when first owning and S and now an X. A minor issue like water…

Imagine if you were annoyed at the UI in your current car.

Don’t have to, the UI in the Leaf (at least in the first gen), sucks. But you know what would annoy me more? If my $50K+ car leaked water. That’s something the industry figured out over fifty years ago. I’ll take a shitty UI over over water invading spaces I won’t find out about until the rust and bad wiring show up.

Re: Tesla Surges Above $500, Leaving Analyst Targets in the Dust

#37

For a while TSLA had an absurd amount of short positions against it, IIRC something like an order of magnitude more than other companies. Perhaps we are seeing a short squeeze? I'd love to see data (and interpretation) on how this has changed.

Short interest was highest at the bottom, and is much lower now (just generally, changes are going to correlate with price)...~45m in July, and is now ~25m (which is where it was at the start of the year).

So 20m shares have been called in...daily volume is about ~9-10m so no short squeeze (afaik, TSLA is pretty easy to short because it is owned by so many retail investors...total shares outstanding is ~175m so turning over ~10m/day is a lot of volume).

Re: Tesla Surges Above $500, Leaving Analyst Targets in the Dust

#38
post #10

The horror stories about 3 month wait for parts and the videos of water intruding into new vehicles, are keeping me away.

so i have an x and when it rains we do sometimes get some water into the back seat when raising the trunk... but to keep this in perspective... the car is like an iphone compared to your flip phone. 2007 was a long time ago so maybe people forget just how impactful that phone was when people first tried it out. That is the exact same experience I have had when first owning and S and now an X. A minor issue like water…

I'll weigh in on the curmudgeon side. The knobs in my car were perfect from the day I bought it because they were optimized by engineers over decades. If there was ever a UI issue, it was corrected before I was born. Because the controls are physical I can operate them by touch and habit while focusing on the road. Years of driving have resulted in mental circuits that automatically detect stop signs and manage lane-keeping with zero conscious attention, just as easy as walking.

No-haggle direct manufacturer purchases are good, though. I can only agree with that.

Re: Tesla Surges Above $500, Leaving Analyst Targets in the Dust

#39

According to Robinhood: “Tesla's stock has jumped 35% over the past month, becoming the most valuable American car company ever. GM and Ford produced a combined 39x as many cars as Tesla did in 2019, but the electric carmaker is now more valuable than GM and Ford combined. Oh, and Tesla lost almost a billion dollars over the past year while GM and Ford made over $10B in profit. Investors care more about future profit…

> who can compete with Tesla

From my seat, that really remains to be seen. The existing companies don't seem to have found a way to compete with Tesla's EVs yet. They may get there eventually, but Tesla has it now.

Regarding valuation, one point I read elsewhere is that Tesla does a lot more in-house, which adds to the valuation, whereas the existing companies will buy a lot of their parts and/or contract out work. I don't have a source on the specifics, but if true, the logic certainly seems reasonable and would explain things. The value of a company shouldn't be based on their final product, but on the value they added to the parts/components they took in to create that product.

Re: Tesla Surges Above $500, Leaving Analyst Targets in the Dust

#40
post #10

The horror stories about 3 month wait for parts and the videos of water intruding into new vehicles, are keeping me away.

so i have an x and when it rains we do sometimes get some water into the back seat when raising the trunk... but to keep this in perspective... the car is like an iphone compared to your flip phone. 2007 was a long time ago so maybe people forget just how impactful that phone was when people first tried it out. That is the exact same experience I have had when first owning and S and now an X. A minor issue like water…

thanks but no thanks, software is a disaster. I'm in no rush to be the first set of guinea pigs to have a software update cause a car crash
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