In Germany this marked niche is so under-served, there's a whole company (Nextmove) dedicated to rentals of electric cars. They position themselves as "try before you buy" experience, so you can do an extended test over multiple days to see if the car fits you.
Hertz orders 100k Teslas
451–460 of 516 posts
Re: Hertz orders 100k Teslas
#452I was once told, by a car rental chap, that the rental companies don't make money renting out cars; instead, they make money by putting some miles on the cars in their fleet, and then reselling them at a profit. He told me that the deals the rental companies have with the manufacturers are along the lines of "you will buy 5000 cars at a large discount, but you can't sell them until they have 5000 miles on the clock".…
If they can sell them for more than they purchased, why even drive them for a bit? I think rental cars have a lower value/prestige compared to single-owner used cars (the idea being people are rougher and more careless with a rental they only use for a few days).
But I’ll definitely be checking the battery and motors before buying a used EV.
Re: Hertz orders 100k Teslas
#453Earlier quoted context omitted.
Every car manufacturer is a supply chain and and owns their own component production. Ford owns Motorcraft. General Motors owns AC Delco. Tesla doesn't have nearly the size of the distribution network of any of the oil companies. The fact is Tesla was trading at 1000x historic earnings, and 161x future earnings, or to put it another way, 10x any other car manufacturer, and this this was before this deal. [0] This sim…
As long as Tesla can grow at or around 50% a year all those numbers you are using are useless. They will be halved every year from the current level. Yeah right now its seems crazy, and it is a unbelievably high valuation. But its more a sign of things to come. The other OEMs are laden with debt, which Tesla doesn't have so any comparison there would be at the EV level which doesn't make Tesla look that out of line c…
Sure they were late to the game, and but it’s not a foregone conclusion that Tesla (or any startup) is going to dominate this market.
As for AI and FSD, I’ll put my flag in the sand. We will not have production fully autonomous self driving cars (ie cars without controls) on uncontrolled surface streets in 20 years. From what I understand, the technology has hit a plateau, and there’s just way too many edge cases. If this wasn’t the case, you wouldn’t have people like Andrew Ng going around telling people to redesign cities to make it easier for robot drivers.
If it does happen, it’s not going to be Tesla. I don’t think they’re the technology leader here. Last time I read something, Cruise and Waymo were leading, and Elon’s insistence on not having lidars was holding Tesla back.
Re: Hertz orders 100k Teslas
#454Earlier quoted context omitted.
They are also an innovation engine. You have to value all of the things they havent created yet but will.
What part of their market cap is unrealized tech dreams and what part is substance, in the traditional value investor sense, in your opinion?
Re: Hertz orders 100k Teslas
#455Earlier quoted context omitted.
Car manufacturers aren't by an large allowed to own dealerships in the United States. The point is, the number of dealerships is a good proxy for demand and sales. Also, dealerships by and large don't make much money on the sale of cars (due to having to purchase the cars from the manufacturer), but rather they make their money on the service and repair of cars. Even then, they're not really rolling in the dough. Gen…
It's not a good proxy for comparing demand and sales between Tesla and, say, GM. GM has a network of franchisees and Tesla doesn't, because Tesla wants the profits (sales, service, whatever) for themselves, but state laws won't let them own dealerships. So, if you want to compare GM and Tesla's market caps, you need to lump the appropriate fraction of GM's franchisees' market caps in with GM's in order to make them c…
As far as summing up dealerships, let's go!
Tesla has 438 stores worldwide. Toyota has 1500 dealerships in the United States alone. GM? 4500 in the United States.
Do you honestly think that if we summed up all the Toyota dealerships in the world, it would be worth $750 billion? I don't, but that's how much they'd have to be worth to give Toyota a market cap of 1 trillion dollars.
Or to flip it around, even if we spotted Tesla manufacturing 2x Toyota. (Toyota is the most valuable manufacturer by market cap at $240 billion.), that would mean those 438 stores have to be worth over a billion dollars EACH.
It's even worse for General Motors. Their market cap is only 84 billion. The entire worldwide network of dealerships would have to be 11x General Motors proper, or over $900 billion dollars.
Re: Hertz orders 100k Teslas
#456Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah I'm not a domain expert on decarbonization or anything, but from what I've seen on the industrial manufacturing side of things in the US, electricity prices would have to be consistently very low for the cost of re-outfitting existing natural gas heating systems with electrical ones to make sense without fairly punitive carbon taxes, and even if you pass carbon taxes in first world countries to make it "worth it…
Air source heat pumps are more efficient than gas boilers so total energy usage would decrease [1]. Running costs are also lower, but installations cost are currently higher. You would need to generate more electricity, although this could be mitigated through improved insulation and smart control of heating systems (for example turning off the heating for 30 minutes during spikes in usage, assuming the temperature i…
>Lower output temperature than conventional boilers – you may need to update your insulation and invest in bigger radiators too
is a pretty big problem when you are trying to heat industrial quantities of things up to industrial process temps at industrial rates.
Re: Hertz orders 100k Teslas
#457I was very pessimistic about Tesla and confused by their stock price. But I now believe that they indeed are doing it and that we’re finally at the EV revolution. I’m not an early adopter type and the Teslas don’t excite me at all, but I’m really delighted that the market is evolving. I’m delighted that I was wrong.
I am very happy with the Tesla company, CEO, marketing, and cars, but I can't believe that it should be worth 1 trillion dollars. A trillion is one with 12 zeros. I know you can't compare valuation and production of a company, but still. If Tesla were making 10,000 dollar profit per car - and they don't - they would have to produce 100 million cars just to make a trillion. They produce less than 1 million per year. I…
Re: Hertz orders 100k Teslas
#458I was very pessimistic about Tesla and confused by their stock price. But I now believe that they indeed are doing it and that we’re finally at the EV revolution. I’m not an early adopter type and the Teslas don’t excite me at all, but I’m really delighted that the market is evolving. I’m delighted that I was wrong.
Re: Hertz orders 100k Teslas
#459Earlier quoted context omitted.
We are so dependent on fossil fuels that I'm slightly more sceptical. Over 90% of global energy is created with fossil fuels. We often get fooled about the electricity sector which is something like 1/3 renewables. But electricity is only 30% of fossil fuel consumption. Even if the share of electricity increases to 40% because of ev's and we produce 80% with renewables, we still have ~70% that requires fossil fuel pr…
Zooming out to a global level, geopolitics becomes important to consider as well. As soon as renewables are able to change the power dynamics between eg Russia and Ukraine (Ukraine is dependant on Russia for oil for heating in the winter) things get very interesting indeed. We are still decades away from that imo.
The Navy will lose a huge reason for its existence: securing the seas for supertankers. There are so many countries we won't care about anymore. Iran. Iraq. Venezuela. Nigeria. Really, by extension, Israel, Egypt, Jordan, etc. Then again they'll just keep building up the China boogeyman to keep their money, regardless of its validity.
As you pointed out, Russia will face an existential crisis, I think oil revenue basically keeps Putin afloat. A total collapse of Russia is pretty risky due to the nukes, but we'll see.
Re: Hertz orders 100k Teslas
#460Electric cars are actually a very good fit for many rentals. Thinking through my last 5 rentals. A wedding that was 1 hour from an airport, ~100 miles RT. A ski trip where I wanted to drive from Denver to my AirBnB near Winter Park Colorado, ~200 miles RT. A hiking trip where I needed a second car for a point-to-point car shuttle (New Hampshire!), ~120 miles RT. A bachelor party where I needed to drive from the airpo…
Electric cars are also a good fit for rental companies for another reason: Their customers want to make a good first impression on customers, new friends and other individuals they rarely see.