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A crowd-sourced social media swarm that is betting Tesla will crash

71 points by freerobby 7y ago

neonate 7y ago
http://archive.is/4b42M http://archive.is/4b42M
ozmaverick72 7y ago
I'm am conflicted over the whole tesla thing. The model S is a truly great car but I can't stand Elon's hype about self driving cars etc, etc. The model 3 got off to a rocky start but it sounds like the quality issues are improving. On the one hand I want them to succeed as they have been real innovators but by the same token when musk goes around hyping things up to create interest and bump up the stock price I would be happy to see them crash and burn.
- Turbots 7y ago
  I never get why Elon Musk gets roasted for hyping up his products while EVERY OTHER car manufacturer does the exact same thing. Heck, Jaguar boasted endlessly about their i-Pace being a great Tesla competitor, while in practice it disappointed in range (https://insideevs.com/news/340027/jaguar-i-pace-range-test-yields-disappointing-results/ https://insideevs.com/news/340027/jaguar-i-pace-range-test-y...)
  - aeturnum 7y ago
    I think there are real material differences between being overly optimistic about range estimates (something Tesla has also done iirc) and overly optimistic about the car driving itself. One leads to extra charging or missed meetings, the other to bodily injury and death. I certainly don't mind Elon talking up how Tesla is fighting giants and doing Good Things. I like "little" companies taking on big ones. I don't like selling things people that may kill them or others.
  - hn_throwaway_99 7y ago
    I think that's a huge overstatement. "Funding secured", preselling full self driving that doesn't exist, taking reservations for a 35k car that doesn't exist, etc. etc. is a big step above what other manufacturers do. I agree with the GP comment, I really want Tesla to succeed but they (or, rather, Musk) take hype and overselling to a new level.
  - rchaud 7y ago
    The difference is that Elon Musk's hype has the stench of the monorail salesman in that episode of The Simpsons. A slick pitchman painting grandiose visions of the future ripped straight out of '50s science fiction comics. Seeing as how his Reddit following talk about him like Tony Stark, I feel like Musk knows exactly who he's courting. The chasm between Musk's superhero image and his Twitter meltdowns and missed deadlines, is likely what makes people be skeptical/annoyed with his communication style.
    - true_tuna 7y ago
      I was a member of his cult of personality till the debacle in Thailand and his utter inability to handle criticism for his absurd proposed course of action. Couple that with his weird lashing out at employees and insane persecution of whistleblowers and I’m done. Once you see it in that light he’s just another petty tyrant. I don’t imagine he’ll go very far with the current level of emotional maturity. It’s too bad because many of his initiatives are really beneficial.
- elisharobinson 7y ago
  its not hype if the tech is real.
  - untog 7y ago
    And it is hype if the tech isn't real. I mean, it's called "auto pilot". It is not an auto pilot. It is not nearly ready for unattended driving. And yet, people use it as such and are surprised when they crash into a divider or something. There's a built in assumption that because the tech has progressed from point A to point B that it'll easily move to point C in the same amount of time. That's not at all guaranteed, and for all of the millions (billions?) being poured into self driving tech we don't have to show for it. It may be many, many years before we do.
    - derekp7 7y ago
      I fully understand the frustration with people thinking Tesla's driver assist is more than what it is. But what I don't understand is the issue people have with the product name. Almost all commercial airlines have an autopilot, but not one of them flies without an actual pilot and co-pilot in the cockpit. The only thing an airplane autopilot does is keep the bearing and altitude constant -- Tesla's "autopilot" actually does a bit more than that. Is the outrage over calling it "autopilot" based on the public's misunderstanding of how an airplane's autopilot works?
      - untog 7y ago
        My issue with the name is that it's a bad comparison at best, and misleading at worst. Yes, a plane autopilot only maintains bearing and altitude, but that's also all a plane needs to do. An equivalent system in a car would be utterly useless, so if you're taking Tesla's terms literally then they're telling you they've made something that's of no use to you. If, instead, you think of an autopilot as being something that allows the pilot to take their attention off the controls to do something else then, well, Tesla's autopilot explicitly doesn't do that. So it's not the right name when taken either literally or figuratively, so little wonder people get confused.
- meekstro 7y ago
  The question no-one asked. How difficult is it for BYD to clone his autopilot chip and will that stop the Chinese from exporting knockoffs because I'm certain they can close the data and software gap instantly by swapping out a harddrive or 10. I think he's got 10 years before the chinese chip fabs catch up. Musk's question how did Tesla build the best AI chip for driving in the world without being a chip designer was the far more interesting yet overlooked question. Musk has a talent for framing problems appropriately so that optimum solutions emerge with a minimum deployment of capital. And he's not secretive about it, he applies his training in physics and phenomenal knowledge to make good bets and eventually identifies and acknowledges his mistakes. Tesla doesn't have an advertising budget. Musk couldn't care less about it's shareprice but I think he will be a bit perturbed if identical technology emerges faster than he foresaw as was Apple when the Android ecosystem emerged. As it stands with his chip and data it is game set and match for autonomous driving which is a software game and the leader takes all the data and a fully autonomous vehicle is worth significantly more than non-autonomous vehicle and if you are data scientist you probably want to work for the company with the best data-set and highest remuneration. The data is the gold and Tesla owns it and no-one can steal it and use it for at least 10 years by which point battery vehicles will be cheaper than petrol vehicles which is the major problem with the model 3. It is currently uneconomic against a toyota corolla but gains ground with every piece of battery and energy storage research that musk does not pay for.
  - dominotw 7y ago
    > Musk couldn't care less about it's shareprice seems to be constantly tweeting about it though.
  - FireBeyond 7y ago
    > Tesla doesn't have an advertising budget. This is an oft-repeated trope, but one look at Tesla's reports will show it's not the case. Last year, approaching $100M (I want to say certainly greater than $80M) spent on "Advertising and marketing".
    - zaroth 7y ago
      Absolutely true. I’m sure the Referral program cost is the majority of that. They have a highly effective, modestly funded, non-traditional advertising strategy.
- jessewmc 7y ago
  I really hope someone else eats their lunch soon. There are some genuine improvements to the status quo in their cars, but the unbelievably poor quality control and silicon valley user hostility (near impossibility of DIY repairs & parts acquisition) should not be part of the future of cars. This is to say nothing about their quixotic attitude towards self-driving in the face of competitors using better methods.
  - thatoneuser 7y ago
    Who exactly would eat their lunch? They're doing a ton of things the traditional auto industry Sat on for years not thinking about. I don't really see anyone doing all the things tesla does while still using parts ubiquitous enough for individuals to do their own repairs.
ShorsHammer 7y ago
With enough money could you short a profitable company into bankruptcy?
- qubex 7y ago
  Yes. It’s a strict subset of “the market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent” class of financial disasters.
- basetop 7y ago
  No for two reasons. 1. Share price has nothing to do with bankruptcy. Bankruptcy happens when a company can't meet its obligations and debts. If a company is profitable, then by definition, it met its obligations and debts so it cannot go into bankruptcy. You go to bankruptcy protection to ward off creditors. If you are profitable, you paid off your creditors and made money on top of that so there is nothing to protect you from. 2. Shorting involves borrowing shares. There are a finite number of shares that you can borrow. So you could have an infinite supply of money but your broker only allows X amount of shares available to short. Shorting doesn't cause bankruptcy. It's a method of profiting when companies veer towards bankruptcy of their own accord. Think of it as surfing. The surfer doesn't cause the wave, he just rides the wave.
  - raiyu 7y ago
    Depending on how their debt is structured if it's linked to stock price then it's possible to force a liquidity event on outstanding debt through depleting the share price. I think the recent $960MM debt payment was actually linked to not hitting specific share price hurdles. Given the massive amount of debt they have outstanding versus capital on hand you could technically do that. However shares have to be available for shorting in order to achieve that.
    - soperj 7y ago
      Yeah, same with the $700 million one in November.
    - 7y ago
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
tschellenbach 7y ago
It seems like they are a few moves away from checkmate on the car market. Electric SUV, with better self driving than the competition could do really well.
MrQuincle 7y ago
If there are indeed many unsold Teslas on desolate parking lots, what would be a legitimate reason for this?
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- pseudometa 7y ago
  Tesla produces vehicles in batches based on order statistics. Vehicles are then matched with customers based on their selected options. Vehicles may be awaiting matching, or vehicles may be awaiting transport. International transport across the ocean happens when they can fill an entire ship to capacity.
- Theodores 7y ago
  If you think of the perspective of these people wanting to short Tesla they probably have no experience of how much inventory you need to sell stuff. Stuff being anything. Think of a typical bicycle shop and how many hundreds of bicycles they have given the actual store footfall. They will also have a warehouse or stockroom with a similar or larger quantity of stock. Plus a lot of sales will be special order from the supplier. None of that inventory will be a year old and the product is far simpler than a car. Yet there is a mountain of it. Sure bicycles come in 3-4 sizes and that adds to the inventory requirements but colours, trim levels and options certainly add to the inventory requirements Tesla has. You could look at your typical bicycle store and decide to 'short' them somehow. If you had no idea of the practicalities of how sales works you could assume the warehouse was full of the broken ones or the ones returned from customers. You could also look around the showroom and find that quite a few were dusty and not setup correctly. There would be no confirmed buyer for any of them. You could go back a week later and still see pretty much the same. Yet if you didn't work there you would not realise a huge amount had made it to customers. This is the problem of the information these Tesla short people are working with, they don't understand how the business really works and they jump to conclusions.
  - ethagknight 7y ago
    I recently had this realization experience with large TVs at Bestbuy. I went to purchase a 65" tv after Christmas hoping to score a great deal. I tried haggling with a few 'important looking' staffers, and they basically said 'ok let me know which one you want, and we will grab it for you.' No give on price. I asked if they had a certain tv in stock, and the young man walked to the back of house area, and I peaked inside. Huge shelves totally full of TVs. I had the 'Tesla Short' thought process of, oh wow, they have a ton of TVs to unload. Moreover, I thought I should be able to strike a deep discount. When the rep returned, I asked if they were backed up with TVs, to which he replied, "no, this is pretty typical, we will move most of those in a week." I gave up my haggle (after an hour of grilling the sales guys on difference and tv trends and crap). they didnt budge. While I was waiting in line to pay and get someone to load my tv into my car, I watched TV after TV roll out the front door. A huge stockpile of vehicle inventory could mean a major sales collapse. It could also mean $45mm ready to flow into the Tesla bank account in the next week. The stockpile information by itself doesn't tell you much beyond that there are loads of cars sitting at the dock. EDIT: I mean, just look at the staggering number of vehicles at Hyundai's Georgia Plant (MOBIS). They even have cars parked in the grass! Tesla's Fremont plant doesn't really have finished product storage at this scale. https://www.google.com/maps/place/MOBIS+Alabama,+LLC+-+Georgia+Plant/@32.9160073,-85.1294347,2019m/data=!3m1!1e3!4m5!3m4!1s0x888ca615b1e9d277:0x5849b0bcf49a3410!8m2!3d32.9142448!4d-85.1241106 https://www.google.com/maps/place/MOBIS+Alabama,+LLC+-+Georg...
personjerry 7y ago
There's always a ton of sentiment analysis to be done on "crowds" i.e. on twitter towards companies. If they worked well we'd see 10x numbers from the funds that figured out the methods, but we don't. The crowd means little beyond technical analysis. Tesla is the most shorted company in the world, of course people are going to try to use whatever they can as evidence to prove it sucks; They have a vested interest in doing so, and Tesla rightly fights back against these kinds of claims, because it's in their shareholders interests. This article provides some examples of people talking about speculative evidence that Tesla isn't doing well, but you can find that for almost any company. That's what a lot of investment articles are, actually. So it seems like mostly fluff to me.
no1youknowz 7y ago
I dont have any shares, but if I had the money I would purchase a boat load of them. 1) He has a fleet of cars which is giving him a lot of data and edge cases. Of which is growing with every new car purchased and on the road. 2) He has a team developing the software, refining it with each new release and it's just getting better and better with more data. 3) He has a team developing the hardware, on the investor day he said that another chip will come out in 2 years and be 3x more capable. Going from memory on that one, so feel free to correct. But this point still stands. They aren't standing still. I do believe that vision trumps lidar and they'll get to level 5 automation with much more precision than waymo and get there a hell of a lot faster than uber. 4) It seems with every car that rolls off the assembly line, they are consistently making modifications and improving the battery tech and drive train. Again, they have the data to keep on improving their cars. 5) With the maxwell purchase I'm sure they'll start to develop their own batteries and get even better performance due to optimising the whole car. So, Tesla owns the: 1) Data 2) Self Driving Software 3) Self Driving Hardware 4) Drive Train 5) Battery Tech 6) Power Grid Network Also don't forget that the grid and charging stations keep improving over time. Imagine if we get to 5 minute charging, faster than the current paradigm? Game changer. Can anyone suggest another vendor getting close to this? Once Telsa put out the robo-taxis it really is game set and match. They own the whole stack, end to end. He even mentioned that the price could go down. Can you imagine a $25k robo-taxi and does 1k miles? The other car makers should be very afraid of this prospect.
- hi5eyes 7y ago
  of course this rests on the assumption that teslas revenue continues with the investigations looming everything you assume and hope for costs a lot of money >I do believe that vision trumps lidar and they'll get to level 5 automation and the robotaxi meme are just dreams for elon to sell to pump the stock
- codexon 7y ago
  This is assuming that level 5 automation is possible any time soon, while a growing number of people believe it isn't. If it turns out that we need another 2-3 decades to get there, Tesla will run out of money long before then.
doctoboggan 7y ago
I can throw my additional anecdote into the mix: I live in the boston area and have noticed a ton more Tesla cars on the street. I remember previously thinking it was cool Tesla car every now and then, but now I see multiple a day.
seem_2211 7y ago
I was originally very pro Tesla, until about 18 months ago when a friend who works in finance gave me the heads up on TSLAQ, Here's a few datapoints on what's convincing me that this is not a healthy company: • Musk is constantly promising things that don't happen (full self driving, robotaxis, Model Y, Tesla Semi truck, Tesla Roadster, car with a rocket motor, 10k/wk production). This week it's an electric leafblower. Seems like everytime there's bad news, there's a distraction ready to go. • The entire cult of Musk working 100 hours a week yet he shitposts more than I do. • Funding secured, followed by funding not secured is a bit of a joke, but also, if the CEO of General Electric, or Chevron tried that, they'd be fired. • The reports of people waiting months and months to get simple repairs done. If Vinod Khosla (1) can't have his car repaired quickly, where does that leave the average joe on the street? • Enormous price decreases. The price of a Model S decreased $12k a few weeks ago, and the Model X decreased by $18k. This is horrific for your margins, especially if you're short on cash. • Batteries exploding (2), and people dying in car accidents that they should have walked away in - the example here is someone who couldn't get out because the door handles didn't work (3). • Enormous Health & Safety violations at the Freemont factory (4). Before we even get into the nonsense that was the factory operation (compare to say the efficiencies and tight tolerances of the Nissan operations in the UK). • Simple errors meaning the Tesla factory is enormously inefficient by North American standards (the consensus being that Tesla made the same mistakes other American firms made in the 1980s) • Panasonic freezing investment in Nevada and China (6) But finally, the biggest thing that makes me skeptical is that none of what I've said matters. Because this isn't about facts, it's about faith. And I think Tesla is a fraud and that Elon Musk could give Elizabeth Homes a run for her money, which is a real shame because the Model S is a nice enough car, and electric cars are clearly something we'll have in the future. You can fudge the numbers a bit if you're a VC backed startup. You can't do that if you run a publicly traded company. 1: https://twitter.com/vkhosla/status/1085931446542290944?s=20 https://twitter.com/vkhosla/status/1085931446542290944?s=20 2: https://www.asiatimes.com/2019/04/article/teslas-china-inroads-hit-by-car-explosion/ https://www.asiatimes.com/2019/04/article/teslas-china-inroa... 3: https://futurism.com/tesla-driver-killed-burning-model-s https://futurism.com/tesla-driver-killed-burning-model-s 4: https://www.forbes.com/sites/alanohnsman/2019/03/01/tesla-safety-violations-dwarf-big-us-auto-plants-in-aftermath-of-musks-model-3-push/#1e941ac354ce https://www.forbes.com/sites/alanohnsman/2019/03/01/tesla-sa... 5: https://arstechnica.com/cars/2018/04/experts-say-tesla-has-repeated-car-industry-mistakes-from-the-1980s/ https://arstechnica.com/cars/2018/04/experts-say-tesla-has-r... 6: https://asia.nikkei.com/Business/Companies/Tesla-and-Panasonic-freeze-spending-on-4.5bn-Gigafactory https://asia.nikkei.com/Business/Companies/Tesla-and-Panason...
torpfactory 7y ago
I think the general tone about Tesla on HN is a bit strange. On the one hand, Musk is certainly guilty of creating "hype" around Tesla. He has a showman's aesthetic, and deploys it to great effect generating interest in his products. His timelines are always ambitious (or insane), and I never take them at face value. He boasts about capabilities that are presently out of reach and sound impossible. On the other hand, what other company has yet brought such compelling EVs to market? Would Porsche have invested in the Taycan as soon/at all if not for Tesla? I think the years ahead will be filled with fantastic EVs, but Tesla should be given credit for showing what was possible. It's not like they've stop innovating, either. They just upped the range on the Model S to 370 miles. A lot of the hand wringing on HN these days has to do with Tesla's self driving efforts and Musk's controversial statements about timeline and technology. I think it remains to be seen if he is correct that (1) Lidar is not required and (2) if his timeline is even remotely reasonable. On the other hand, which other car company is shipping a product as capable as the current 'navigate-on-autopilot' feature? Google is doing pretty limited testing in Arizona, Uber is doing so in Pittsburgh. GM has their cruise division. But none of these offerings are in customer hands. I really doubt there will be L4 self driving in a Tesla by the end of this year, but sometime next year? I don't think that is out of the question.
- 6gvONxR4sf7o 7y ago
  I don't like the narrative that they are responsible for what other companies are doing. My grandpa had an electric car back in the 90s. A toyota, I think, so it's not small no-name companies. People have been working on this since before tesla, and are still working on it outside tesla. But the time is right for the technology to take off now, so it is. Attributing that to tesla seems like a misguided belief in "great man theory" where it's usually just that the environment was finally right for an idea. If tesla hadn't, someone else would. I get frustrated by instances of great man theory in general, though. It's not unique to tesla.
h2odragon 7y ago
I wonder how many people the established auto industry pays to write negative Tesla opinions. I can't help but think my kids will look on this like I do Tuckers' efforts.
mml 7y ago
Call me when any of this stuff works in snow.
vgchh 7y ago
It’s unfortunate that the crowd sourced mobs can be unleashed the way they are being unleashed. Internet appears to be commoditizing takedowns and toxicity. While Tesla deserves criticism, instead they are currently being bombarded with hate and FUD. It’s hard to tell who these people are and what are their motives. FWIW - I recently bought a Model 3. And one thing you realize living with it is that it’s like living in the future. Some people don’t like the interior. That’s fine. I personally love the lack of all the buttons. FSD is another controversial topic. But it’s worth noting that people are getting real value out of Auto Pilot and NOA TODAY. It’s a very iterative delivery approach, which I find is quite practical vs the Big Bang delivery of 100% working FSD. Lastly, you can tell that Tesla is no fraud simply by looking at Model 3 hardware and software. Yes there are some rough edges, but those are minor. You can tell it’s being executed by extremely capable people and at extreme speed.

71 points by freerobby 7y ago

http://archive.is/4b42M http://archive.is/4b42M

I'm am conflicted over the whole tesla thing. The model S is a truly great car but I can't stand Elon's hype about self driving cars etc, etc. The model 3 got off to a rocky start but it sounds like the quality issues are improving. On the one hand I want them to succeed as they have been real innovators but by the same token when musk goes around hyping things up to create interest and bump up the stock price I would be happy to see them crash and burn.

Turbots 7y ago
I never get why Elon Musk gets roasted for hyping up his products while EVERY OTHER car manufacturer does the exact same thing. Heck, Jaguar boasted endlessly about their i-Pace being a great Tesla competitor, while in practice it disappointed in range (https://insideevs.com/news/340027/jaguar-i-pace-range-test-yields-disappointing-results/ https://insideevs.com/news/340027/jaguar-i-pace-range-test-y...)
- aeturnum 7y ago
  I think there are real material differences between being overly optimistic about range estimates (something Tesla has also done iirc) and overly optimistic about the car driving itself. One leads to extra charging or missed meetings, the other to bodily injury and death. I certainly don't mind Elon talking up how Tesla is fighting giants and doing Good Things. I like "little" companies taking on big ones. I don't like selling things people that may kill them or others.
- hn_throwaway_99 7y ago
  I think that's a huge overstatement. "Funding secured", preselling full self driving that doesn't exist, taking reservations for a 35k car that doesn't exist, etc. etc. is a big step above what other manufacturers do. I agree with the GP comment, I really want Tesla to succeed but they (or, rather, Musk) take hype and overselling to a new level.
- rchaud 7y ago
  The difference is that Elon Musk's hype has the stench of the monorail salesman in that episode of The Simpsons. A slick pitchman painting grandiose visions of the future ripped straight out of '50s science fiction comics. Seeing as how his Reddit following talk about him like Tony Stark, I feel like Musk knows exactly who he's courting. The chasm between Musk's superhero image and his Twitter meltdowns and missed deadlines, is likely what makes people be skeptical/annoyed with his communication style.
  - true_tuna 7y ago
    I was a member of his cult of personality till the debacle in Thailand and his utter inability to handle criticism for his absurd proposed course of action. Couple that with his weird lashing out at employees and insane persecution of whistleblowers and I’m done. Once you see it in that light he’s just another petty tyrant. I don’t imagine he’ll go very far with the current level of emotional maturity. It’s too bad because many of his initiatives are really beneficial.
elisharobinson 7y ago
its not hype if the tech is real.
- untog 7y ago
  And it is hype if the tech isn't real. I mean, it's called "auto pilot". It is not an auto pilot. It is not nearly ready for unattended driving. And yet, people use it as such and are surprised when they crash into a divider or something. There's a built in assumption that because the tech has progressed from point A to point B that it'll easily move to point C in the same amount of time. That's not at all guaranteed, and for all of the millions (billions?) being poured into self driving tech we don't have to show for it. It may be many, many years before we do.
  - derekp7 7y ago
    I fully understand the frustration with people thinking Tesla's driver assist is more than what it is. But what I don't understand is the issue people have with the product name. Almost all commercial airlines have an autopilot, but not one of them flies without an actual pilot and co-pilot in the cockpit. The only thing an airplane autopilot does is keep the bearing and altitude constant -- Tesla's "autopilot" actually does a bit more than that. Is the outrage over calling it "autopilot" based on the public's misunderstanding of how an airplane's autopilot works?
    - untog 7y ago
      My issue with the name is that it's a bad comparison at best, and misleading at worst. Yes, a plane autopilot only maintains bearing and altitude, but that's also all a plane needs to do. An equivalent system in a car would be utterly useless, so if you're taking Tesla's terms literally then they're telling you they've made something that's of no use to you. If, instead, you think of an autopilot as being something that allows the pilot to take their attention off the controls to do something else then, well, Tesla's autopilot explicitly doesn't do that. So it's not the right name when taken either literally or figuratively, so little wonder people get confused.
meekstro 7y ago
The question no-one asked. How difficult is it for BYD to clone his autopilot chip and will that stop the Chinese from exporting knockoffs because I'm certain they can close the data and software gap instantly by swapping out a harddrive or 10. I think he's got 10 years before the chinese chip fabs catch up. Musk's question how did Tesla build the best AI chip for driving in the world without being a chip designer was the far more interesting yet overlooked question. Musk has a talent for framing problems appropriately so that optimum solutions emerge with a minimum deployment of capital. And he's not secretive about it, he applies his training in physics and phenomenal knowledge to make good bets and eventually identifies and acknowledges his mistakes. Tesla doesn't have an advertising budget. Musk couldn't care less about it's shareprice but I think he will be a bit perturbed if identical technology emerges faster than he foresaw as was Apple when the Android ecosystem emerged. As it stands with his chip and data it is game set and match for autonomous driving which is a software game and the leader takes all the data and a fully autonomous vehicle is worth significantly more than non-autonomous vehicle and if you are data scientist you probably want to work for the company with the best data-set and highest remuneration. The data is the gold and Tesla owns it and no-one can steal it and use it for at least 10 years by which point battery vehicles will be cheaper than petrol vehicles which is the major problem with the model 3. It is currently uneconomic against a toyota corolla but gains ground with every piece of battery and energy storage research that musk does not pay for.
- dominotw 7y ago
  > Musk couldn't care less about it's shareprice seems to be constantly tweeting about it though.
- FireBeyond 7y ago
  > Tesla doesn't have an advertising budget. This is an oft-repeated trope, but one look at Tesla's reports will show it's not the case. Last year, approaching $100M (I want to say certainly greater than $80M) spent on "Advertising and marketing".
  - zaroth 7y ago
    Absolutely true. I’m sure the Referral program cost is the majority of that. They have a highly effective, modestly funded, non-traditional advertising strategy.
jessewmc 7y ago
I really hope someone else eats their lunch soon. There are some genuine improvements to the status quo in their cars, but the unbelievably poor quality control and silicon valley user hostility (near impossibility of DIY repairs & parts acquisition) should not be part of the future of cars. This is to say nothing about their quixotic attitude towards self-driving in the face of competitors using better methods.
- thatoneuser 7y ago
  Who exactly would eat their lunch? They're doing a ton of things the traditional auto industry Sat on for years not thinking about. I don't really see anyone doing all the things tesla does while still using parts ubiquitous enough for individuals to do their own repairs.

ShorsHammer 7y ago

With enough money could you short a profitable company into bankruptcy?

qubex 7y ago
Yes. It’s a strict subset of “the market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent” class of financial disasters.
basetop 7y ago
No for two reasons. 1. Share price has nothing to do with bankruptcy. Bankruptcy happens when a company can't meet its obligations and debts. If a company is profitable, then by definition, it met its obligations and debts so it cannot go into bankruptcy. You go to bankruptcy protection to ward off creditors. If you are profitable, you paid off your creditors and made money on top of that so there is nothing to protect you from. 2. Shorting involves borrowing shares. There are a finite number of shares that you can borrow. So you could have an infinite supply of money but your broker only allows X amount of shares available to short. Shorting doesn't cause bankruptcy. It's a method of profiting when companies veer towards bankruptcy of their own accord. Think of it as surfing. The surfer doesn't cause the wave, he just rides the wave.
- raiyu 7y ago
  Depending on how their debt is structured if it's linked to stock price then it's possible to force a liquidity event on outstanding debt through depleting the share price. I think the recent $960MM debt payment was actually linked to not hitting specific share price hurdles. Given the massive amount of debt they have outstanding versus capital on hand you could technically do that. However shares have to be available for shorting in order to achieve that.
  - soperj 7y ago
    Yeah, same with the $700 million one in November.
  - 7y ago

deleted 7y ago

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tschellenbach 7y ago

It seems like they are a few moves away from checkmate on the car market. Electric SUV, with better self driving than the competition could do really well.

MrQuincle 7y ago

If there are indeed many unsold Teslas on desolate parking lots, what would be a legitimate reason for this?

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
pseudometa 7y ago
Tesla produces vehicles in batches based on order statistics. Vehicles are then matched with customers based on their selected options. Vehicles may be awaiting matching, or vehicles may be awaiting transport. International transport across the ocean happens when they can fill an entire ship to capacity.
Theodores 7y ago
If you think of the perspective of these people wanting to short Tesla they probably have no experience of how much inventory you need to sell stuff. Stuff being anything. Think of a typical bicycle shop and how many hundreds of bicycles they have given the actual store footfall. They will also have a warehouse or stockroom with a similar or larger quantity of stock. Plus a lot of sales will be special order from the supplier. None of that inventory will be a year old and the product is far simpler than a car. Yet there is a mountain of it. Sure bicycles come in 3-4 sizes and that adds to the inventory requirements but colours, trim levels and options certainly add to the inventory requirements Tesla has. You could look at your typical bicycle store and decide to 'short' them somehow. If you had no idea of the practicalities of how sales works you could assume the warehouse was full of the broken ones or the ones returned from customers. You could also look around the showroom and find that quite a few were dusty and not setup correctly. There would be no confirmed buyer for any of them. You could go back a week later and still see pretty much the same. Yet if you didn't work there you would not realise a huge amount had made it to customers. This is the problem of the information these Tesla short people are working with, they don't understand how the business really works and they jump to conclusions.
- ethagknight 7y ago
  I recently had this realization experience with large TVs at Bestbuy. I went to purchase a 65" tv after Christmas hoping to score a great deal. I tried haggling with a few 'important looking' staffers, and they basically said 'ok let me know which one you want, and we will grab it for you.' No give on price. I asked if they had a certain tv in stock, and the young man walked to the back of house area, and I peaked inside. Huge shelves totally full of TVs. I had the 'Tesla Short' thought process of, oh wow, they have a ton of TVs to unload. Moreover, I thought I should be able to strike a deep discount. When the rep returned, I asked if they were backed up with TVs, to which he replied, "no, this is pretty typical, we will move most of those in a week." I gave up my haggle (after an hour of grilling the sales guys on difference and tv trends and crap). they didnt budge. While I was waiting in line to pay and get someone to load my tv into my car, I watched TV after TV roll out the front door. A huge stockpile of vehicle inventory could mean a major sales collapse. It could also mean $45mm ready to flow into the Tesla bank account in the next week. The stockpile information by itself doesn't tell you much beyond that there are loads of cars sitting at the dock. EDIT: I mean, just look at the staggering number of vehicles at Hyundai's Georgia Plant (MOBIS). They even have cars parked in the grass! Tesla's Fremont plant doesn't really have finished product storage at this scale. https://www.google.com/maps/place/MOBIS+Alabama,+LLC+-+Georgia+Plant/@32.9160073,-85.1294347,2019m/data=!3m1!1e3!4m5!3m4!1s0x888ca615b1e9d277:0x5849b0bcf49a3410!8m2!3d32.9142448!4d-85.1241106 https://www.google.com/maps/place/MOBIS+Alabama,+LLC+-+Georg...

personjerry 7y ago

There's always a ton of sentiment analysis to be done on "crowds" i.e. on twitter towards companies. If they worked well we'd see 10x numbers from the funds that figured out the methods, but we don't. The crowd means little beyond technical analysis. Tesla is the most shorted company in the world, of course people are going to try to use whatever they can as evidence to prove it sucks; They have a vested interest in doing so, and Tesla rightly fights back against these kinds of claims, because it's in their shareholders interests. This article provides some examples of people talking about speculative evidence that Tesla isn't doing well, but you can find that for almost any company. That's what a lot of investment articles are, actually. So it seems like mostly fluff to me.

no1youknowz 7y ago

I dont have any shares, but if I had the money I would purchase a boat load of them. 1) He has a fleet of cars which is giving him a lot of data and edge cases. Of which is growing with every new car purchased and on the road. 2) He has a team developing the software, refining it with each new release and it's just getting better and better with more data. 3) He has a team developing the hardware, on the investor day he said that another chip will come out in 2 years and be 3x more capable. Going from memory on that one, so feel free to correct. But this point still stands. They aren't standing still. I do believe that vision trumps lidar and they'll get to level 5 automation with much more precision than waymo and get there a hell of a lot faster than uber. 4) It seems with every car that rolls off the assembly line, they are consistently making modifications and improving the battery tech and drive train. Again, they have the data to keep on improving their cars. 5) With the maxwell purchase I'm sure they'll start to develop their own batteries and get even better performance due to optimising the whole car. So, Tesla owns the: 1) Data 2) Self Driving Software 3) Self Driving Hardware 4) Drive Train 5) Battery Tech 6) Power Grid Network Also don't forget that the grid and charging stations keep improving over time. Imagine if we get to 5 minute charging, faster than the current paradigm? Game changer. Can anyone suggest another vendor getting close to this? Once Telsa put out the robo-taxis it really is game set and match. They own the whole stack, end to end. He even mentioned that the price could go down. Can you imagine a $25k robo-taxi and does 1k miles? The other car makers should be very afraid of this prospect.

hi5eyes 7y ago
of course this rests on the assumption that teslas revenue continues with the investigations looming everything you assume and hope for costs a lot of money >I do believe that vision trumps lidar and they'll get to level 5 automation and the robotaxi meme are just dreams for elon to sell to pump the stock
codexon 7y ago
This is assuming that level 5 automation is possible any time soon, while a growing number of people believe it isn't. If it turns out that we need another 2-3 decades to get there, Tesla will run out of money long before then.

doctoboggan 7y ago

I can throw my additional anecdote into the mix: I live in the boston area and have noticed a ton more Tesla cars on the street. I remember previously thinking it was cool Tesla car every now and then, but now I see multiple a day.

seem_2211 7y ago

I was originally very pro Tesla, until about 18 months ago when a friend who works in finance gave me the heads up on TSLAQ, Here's a few datapoints on what's convincing me that this is not a healthy company: • Musk is constantly promising things that don't happen (full self driving, robotaxis, Model Y, Tesla Semi truck, Tesla Roadster, car with a rocket motor, 10k/wk production). This week it's an electric leafblower. Seems like everytime there's bad news, there's a distraction ready to go. • The entire cult of Musk working 100 hours a week yet he shitposts more than I do. • Funding secured, followed by funding not secured is a bit of a joke, but also, if the CEO of General Electric, or Chevron tried that, they'd be fired. • The reports of people waiting months and months to get simple repairs done. If Vinod Khosla (1) can't have his car repaired quickly, where does that leave the average joe on the street? • Enormous price decreases. The price of a Model S decreased $12k a few weeks ago, and the Model X decreased by $18k. This is horrific for your margins, especially if you're short on cash. • Batteries exploding (2), and people dying in car accidents that they should have walked away in - the example here is someone who couldn't get out because the door handles didn't work (3). • Enormous Health & Safety violations at the Freemont factory (4). Before we even get into the nonsense that was the factory operation (compare to say the efficiencies and tight tolerances of the Nissan operations in the UK). • Simple errors meaning the Tesla factory is enormously inefficient by North American standards (the consensus being that Tesla made the same mistakes other American firms made in the 1980s) • Panasonic freezing investment in Nevada and China (6) But finally, the biggest thing that makes me skeptical is that none of what I've said matters. Because this isn't about facts, it's about faith. And I think Tesla is a fraud and that Elon Musk could give Elizabeth Homes a run for her money, which is a real shame because the Model S is a nice enough car, and electric cars are clearly something we'll have in the future. You can fudge the numbers a bit if you're a VC backed startup. You can't do that if you run a publicly traded company. 1: https://twitter.com/vkhosla/status/1085931446542290944?s=20 https://twitter.com/vkhosla/status/1085931446542290944?s=20 2: https://www.asiatimes.com/2019/04/article/teslas-china-inroads-hit-by-car-explosion/ https://www.asiatimes.com/2019/04/article/teslas-china-inroa... 3: https://futurism.com/tesla-driver-killed-burning-model-s https://futurism.com/tesla-driver-killed-burning-model-s 4: https://www.forbes.com/sites/alanohnsman/2019/03/01/tesla-safety-violations-dwarf-big-us-auto-plants-in-aftermath-of-musks-model-3-push/#1e941ac354ce https://www.forbes.com/sites/alanohnsman/2019/03/01/tesla-sa... 5: https://arstechnica.com/cars/2018/04/experts-say-tesla-has-repeated-car-industry-mistakes-from-the-1980s/ https://arstechnica.com/cars/2018/04/experts-say-tesla-has-r... 6: https://asia.nikkei.com/Business/Companies/Tesla-and-Panasonic-freeze-spending-on-4.5bn-Gigafactory https://asia.nikkei.com/Business/Companies/Tesla-and-Panason...

torpfactory 7y ago

I think the general tone about Tesla on HN is a bit strange. On the one hand, Musk is certainly guilty of creating "hype" around Tesla. He has a showman's aesthetic, and deploys it to great effect generating interest in his products. His timelines are always ambitious (or insane), and I never take them at face value. He boasts about capabilities that are presently out of reach and sound impossible. On the other hand, what other company has yet brought such compelling EVs to market? Would Porsche have invested in the Taycan as soon/at all if not for Tesla? I think the years ahead will be filled with fantastic EVs, but Tesla should be given credit for showing what was possible. It's not like they've stop innovating, either. They just upped the range on the Model S to 370 miles. A lot of the hand wringing on HN these days has to do with Tesla's self driving efforts and Musk's controversial statements about timeline and technology. I think it remains to be seen if he is correct that (1) Lidar is not required and (2) if his timeline is even remotely reasonable. On the other hand, which other car company is shipping a product as capable as the current 'navigate-on-autopilot' feature? Google is doing pretty limited testing in Arizona, Uber is doing so in Pittsburgh. GM has their cruise division. But none of these offerings are in customer hands. I really doubt there will be L4 self driving in a Tesla by the end of this year, but sometime next year? I don't think that is out of the question.

6gvONxR4sf7o 7y ago
I don't like the narrative that they are responsible for what other companies are doing. My grandpa had an electric car back in the 90s. A toyota, I think, so it's not small no-name companies. People have been working on this since before tesla, and are still working on it outside tesla. But the time is right for the technology to take off now, so it is. Attributing that to tesla seems like a misguided belief in "great man theory" where it's usually just that the environment was finally right for an idea. If tesla hadn't, someone else would. I get frustrated by instances of great man theory in general, though. It's not unique to tesla.

h2odragon 7y ago

I wonder how many people the established auto industry pays to write negative Tesla opinions. I can't help but think my kids will look on this like I do Tuckers' efforts.

mml 7y ago

Call me when any of this stuff works in snow.

vgchh 7y ago

It’s unfortunate that the crowd sourced mobs can be unleashed the way they are being unleashed. Internet appears to be commoditizing takedowns and toxicity. While Tesla deserves criticism, instead they are currently being bombarded with hate and FUD. It’s hard to tell who these people are and what are their motives. FWIW - I recently bought a Model 3. And one thing you realize living with it is that it’s like living in the future. Some people don’t like the interior. That’s fine. I personally love the lack of all the buttons. FSD is another controversial topic. But it’s worth noting that people are getting real value out of Auto Pilot and NOA TODAY. It’s a very iterative delivery approach, which I find is quite practical vs the Big Bang delivery of 100% working FSD. Lastly, you can tell that Tesla is no fraud simply by looking at Model 3 hardware and software. Yes there are some rough edges, but those are minor. You can tell it’s being executed by extremely capable people and at extreme speed.