301–310 of 516 posts
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Except apple is like louis vutton. Most people can actually afford an iphone or a louis vutton bag. Most people cannot afford to drop 50k on a tesla.
Investors are betting on Tesla cars getting cheap enough that average people can afford them.
Nissan Leaf $28,375
Mazda MX-30 $34,645
Hyundai Ioniq $34,650
https://www.cars.com/articles/here-are-the-11-cheapest-elect...
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On the automotive side, they are also a worldwide dealership network, a nascent insurance company.
Name a mass market international car manufacturer that doesn't have a worldwide dealership network and an absolutely massive financial arm?
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Tesla’s stock price is confusing if you compare them to a car company. But they are not just a car company. They are also a car manufacturing supply chain, having brought much of their component production in house. They are also an energy company, both generation and storage, but also distribution, like gas stations. Think Exxon, BP, Chevron, ARCO, etc. They are probably a few other things, but this is the mystery o…
For the record, their market cap is also greater than "Australia's Woodside Petroleum, Chevron, Exxon Mobil, Imperial Oil, Royal Dutch Shell, Shell Energy North America, Canadian Natural Resources, ConocoPhillips and French group Total [combined]" [1], so they're also valued kind of crazy compared to energy companies...and that was in January 2021 before the most recent spike. Sure, part of that is faith in renewable…
But my theory with petroleum is that it has so many HUGE economies of scale built into its production that a demand collapse will send it into a rapid tailspin.
A small version of this happened in the Dakotas when the Saudis started dumping oil to get it under a price, and the North Dakota oil industry collapsed. That was due to intentional oversupply, not necessarily due to collapsed demand.
But so much of the oil market is now pretty expensive extraction: tar sands, shale oil, fracking, deep offshore. The easy stuff is gone. That to me means that the industry rests on a certain price, and if it falls under that, the industry can't sustain it.
I think the big thing in this reverse economies of scale, where costs rise as the industry shrinks (and absorbs writeoffs) is that finance, already somewhat intimidated by the growing pressure to divest from fossil fuels, will rapidly abandon it once it becomes extremely risky due to collapsing demand and massive migrations of transportation modes to electric.
It's all vague decade-away prognostication, but you'll start hearing the violins playing for oil companies when some combination of this happens:
- charging infrastructure builds out (2 years to catch the current Tesla supercharger, probably another 5 years to get some semblance of every-50-miles availability)
- LFP chemistry hits a power density of somewhere around 200-250wh/kg (LFP is really cheap and has far less materials restrictions from cobalt) (probably in 1-2 years for mass production)
- various solid state technologies hit production (looks unlikely for 5 years)
- EV drivetrain cost (battery, motors, cooling, case, management systems, etc) drops to 2/3 of ICE (probably another 4 years)
- a carbon tax, a more substantial EV subsidy
The floor will rapidly fall.
I'm not saying Tesla isn't insanely valued. But the grim reaper is coming for all those oil companies.
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I certainly do not look forward to constant unloading/loading, adjusting seats and mirrors, and pairing bluetooth again every 3 hours.
Syncing your driving prefs to your phone or to the cloud would be very interesting. Show the car a QR code as you walk up to it?
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Assuming the rental market is at least somewhat comparative I doubt this will happen. When you return a ICE car partially empty someone has to either bring gas to the vehicle or drive the vehicle to a pump. Even though this is probably on-site it is very labor intensive and most rental places are pretty low staff. I could see future EV ones being entirely self service. Anyway an EV can just be charged where you park…
Estimates are that each supercharger slot costs Tesla over $100,000 for permitting, install, equipment. Have you been to a rental car company lately? Most don't give the impression of being flush with cash. In order to get the best charging speed and turn your cars around, do you see them laying out $100K per vehicle/slot?
Otherwise you don’t need to have superchargers, you can just use a normal charger which is a few hundreds dollars, probably less at the scale of Hertz.
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It's nearly there already. The average new car in the U.S. costs $41K, and the Tesla Model 3 is $45K.
The lowest spec model 3 is 45k. No one buys the lowest spec car except rental car companies.
> Car-rental firm, recently emerged from bankruptcy under new ownership, orders vehicles by the end of 2022 That does sound crazy that they re doing it while they ll be still in pandemic, which bankrupted them in the first place. I guess in the US people can always find a charger. I wonder how many people will rent those cars for the novelty factor, and novelty only works once. And it will be interesting to see what…
Many people are wondering where Hertz found the money to make this purchase. > it will be interesting to see what people think after they have rented one They will absolutely love it, just like I did when I rented one on Turo and then bought a new one the very next day. Also, the Hertz crowd is exactly the right target customer for Tesla. All of which shows how brilliant this deal is for Tesla, and how incentivized t…
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Name a mass market international car manufacturer that doesn't have a worldwide dealership network and an absolutely massive financial arm?
AFAIK, the major car manufacturers' dealership networks are franchises . Yes, they have massive financial arms but they are for financing the vehicles, not for insurance.
General Motors's old financial arm was GMAC, now Ally Bank. Under General Motors's ownership, they offered credit cards[+], mortgages, and were in the insurance market since 1939. This is not an innovation.
[+] This was the only credit card my parents had for over a decade.
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The bear thesis for Tesla has been something like, "Tesla might have an innovative EV-first design, but when the major manufacturers with a century of manufacturing know-how wake up to EVs, they will drown Tesla in vehicles." I think part of what's driving the increase in Tesla's value is the realization that this thesis was wrong. Tesla is now beating all the established manufacturers at gross automotive margins, an…
I wonder how much of the margin is made up of the $10,000 FSD option?
Is it just me that see that something funky is going on there? Hertz is just out of bankruptcy, and immediately they order 100,000 Tesla to be delivered, and so paid I guess, in just 1 year! Let's imagine that they have the Tesla with a very good discount: 30000$ a piece. That would cost them: 100 000 x 30 000 = 3 000 000 000 $ I have hard time to believe that they have that cash in hand, or that they can borrow that…