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Tesla Earning Result 3Q 2020 [pdf]
- caffeine 6y ago"Our Autopilot team has been focused on a fundamental architectural rewrite of our neural networks and control algorithms." Does anyone else find this worrying?
- mushufasa 6y agono. it's not even surprising. George Hotz at CommaAI seems to be doing the same thing or similar. Apparently some papers came out late last year that have laid the foundation for much better approaches.
- tjchear 6y agoAny pointers for said papers?
- person_of_color 6y agoGot a link?
- leesec 6y ago(1) Skip to 1:03:00. George Hotz comments on the paper (2) Model-Predictive Policy Learning with Uncertainty Regularization for Driving in Dense Traffic: 1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yhzU43ewcEA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yhzU43ewcEA 2. https://arxiv.org/abs/1901.02705 https://arxiv.org/abs/1901.02705
- jconley 6y agoIt's probably a good thing as long as they can reuse the training/annotation data. Startups often do full rewrites of underlying technology multiple times as they scale. With the pace of advancement of AI/ML right now I would assume some better algorithms have come along in recent years...
- mft_ 6y agoIt’s worrying... that... they’re working very hard to make it better? (I honestly don’t get your point?)
- nickik 6y agoWhat are you worried about?
- SEJeff 6y agoThe current system is a separate neural network running against every frame of every one of the 8 cameras. The new one is what elon calls the "4D" image processing. It uses all cameras to create a composite 3d representation where the 4th dimension is time. One of the things they use this for is to predict where an object will be in the future.
- zhaphod 6y agoI have an eithical dilemma for you. As of now on an average 33000 ppl are killed in road accidents in USA. Lets say Tesla's or other ICE makers' autopilot reduces this to 20000 deaths. But of those 20000 deaths, say 2000 were purely because of autopilot alogrithm which wouldn't have happened if there was no autopilot. As a regulator what will you do. Approve autopilot because it saved 13000 people or ban it because 2000 were killed just because of it? I know how this will play in media. Unfortunately autopilot will be demonized and most likely will get banned.
- ksec 6y agoI have had the same question as well. I dont think it will get banned, I just think the society as a whole will take a long time to adjust those perception. And we will likely have zones where all cars are AV. So as long as human sticks to rules and not popping out on a street for no reason. I still think we could have a future where AV becomes the default.
- xoxoy 6y agoThey made $331M in “profit” on $397M in carbon credit sales at 100% margin...meaning their core business still loses money. Also they have $14.5B in cash but only reporting $6M in interest income. Weird.
- m463 6y agoThey probably left it sitting in checking. I'm surprised their bank isn't calling them to upgrade their account. ;)
- xoxoy 6y agoThey had $8M in interest income on $8.6B in cash last quarter lol.
- vikramkr 6y ago5 billion of the cash was from a recent capital raise. Those numbers give you a roughly .2% annualized interest rate, which doesn't seem unreasonable for the current environment.
- xoxoy 6y agoit is for a corporate treasury.
- bryanlarsen 6y ago> They made $331M in “profit” on $397M in carbon credit sales at 100% margin...meaning their core business still loses money. In the last quarterly update Elon said that his goal was to have a profit margin of 1-2% with the rest going to R&D and expansion. So as long as carbon credit sales are more than 2% of revenue, we'll hear the same complaint.
- marvin 6y agoWell, even accepting that premise, there's the small matter of the ~$500 million share issue constituting Musk's milestone payment. This drags the profit down a bit. Surely they won't repeat a payment like that every quarter from now on. And of course, running the biggest growth business on Earth at a significant profit probably isn't the wisest decision.
- stokedmartin 6y agoSummary: Auto Revenue: $7.611B Automotive Gross Margin: 27.7% Total Revenue: $8.771B Total GAAP Gross Margin: 23.5% Net Income GAAP: $331m (non-GAAP $874m) EPS (GAAP): $0.27 (Non-GAAP $0.76)
- marc__1 6y agoCash flow: $2,4b for a 7.6b in revenue was outstanding Rule of 40 of 318 is outstanding and only Zoom has a greater number than Tesla (42% YoY rev + 276% in Free Cash Flow YoY
- jacobkranz 6y agoI believe they spent 2.4b on expansion but cashflow was still 1.9b. `Over the past four quarters, we generated over $1.9B of free cash flow while spending $2.4B on new production capacity, service centers, Supercharging locations and other capital investments`
- 11thEarlOfMar 6y ago>Automotive Gross Margin: 27.7% Beauty To Behold
- MuffinFlavored 6y agoHow do this compare to Toyota, Mercedes, BMW, etc?
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- crocal 6y agoProfit margins in automotive are typically single digits. Edit: Added « margins »
- bryanlarsen 6y ago
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- mijail 6y agoIn the section around core technology. I'm curious about this statement: "As we continue to collect data over time, the system will become more robust." This is one of these statements that sound true and I know Karpathy coined the term "operational vacation" but it's not clear more data always equals more robust system.
- ryanmarsh 6y agoit's not clear more data always equals more robust system It is for the "learning organization". If Musk is able to continue a generative culture within Tesla more data will equal a more robust system. If Tesla changes to a "rule/process" or "power" based culture, your concern will come true.
- mijail 6y agogreat perspective! the specific models might not be better but the people building them and the system will be getting better with more "data."
- zeroxfe 6y ago> but it's not clear more data always equals more robust system. Of course, however I imagine that the self-driving feature space is so large and so hard to collect that they probably do have lots of room for improvement simply with more data.
- hbcondo714 6y agoSame presentation in HTML on SEC.gov: https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1318605/000156459020047108/tsla-ex991_57.htm https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1318605/000156459020...
- dang 6y agoThanks, we'll change to that from https://tesla-cdn.thron.com/static/4E7BR9_TSLA_Q3_2020_Update_P0Q85U.pdf?xseo=&response-content-disposition=inline%3Bfilename%3D%22TSLA-Q3-2020-Update.pdf%22 https://tesla-cdn.thron.com/static/4E7BR9_TSLA_Q3_2020_Updat..., which is a pdf.
- perardi 6y agoI admit to being a Tesla skeptic. I’m now way less of a Tesla skeptic, but barring regulation, I am still an electric car skeptic in North America. The pure electric car market still feels like the hybrid market, which is to say, there was the big-selling Prius, and then pretty much nothing else that sold well. And that wasn’t because of technology; you could get fantastic in-town mileage with a hybrid Accord. But then you weren’t obviously signaling you were driving a green car. Which is where I feel like in the electric market. Lots and lots of Teslas about, because you get to show you’re driving an electric car, but then vanishingly small sales of anything else. At least in the North American market. (Citation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plug-in_electric_vehicles_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plug-in_electric_vehicles_in_t...) Now, that changes with regulation. See: sales of the Renault Zoe in Europe, where France and Germany offered massive subsidies, and demand went through the roof. https://europe.autonews.com/sales-segment/europes-no-1-selling-ev-isnt-tesla-or-vw https://europe.autonews.com/sales-segment/europes-no-1-selli...
- avalys 6y agoI'm a car enthusiast, and was once a Tesla skeptic. What won me over was renting a Model 3 for a weekend, and concluding that it was a _fantastic car_. The Prius is a miserable little piece of shit for people who hate driving. The Model 3 is a superior driving experience to pretty much every other midsize sedan on the market, including BMW, Mercedes, etc. The fact that it's "green" is just a bonus for me. I love the convenience of charging at home and never stopping for gas, the smoothness, the quiet, the linearity and directness of the power delivery, the clean and minimalist interior, and the precise and responsive handling. The reason no other electric car is yet selling in volume the US is that Tesla has for a long time been the only one that doesn't suck. The Porsche Taycan is the first credible competitor, and I understand Porsche is already selling more of those than they do 911s.
- phkahler 6y agoThe original Ford Fusion Hybrid was a fantastic car. Not exciting like a Tesla and not nearly as expensive. But it drove just like the ICE version of the car but got a LOT better mileage. But to the other posters point, for people who want to display "green" status it probably didnt deliver because it wasn't meant to.
- rasen58 6y agoDoes anyone know how car sales are doing in general during the pandemic? Are people still actually buying cars now?
- steve_adams_86 6y agoI did, but I was years overdue already. I wouldn’t have if I could limp my previous vehicle a little longer. When I went to the various lots in my city, each was very busy and the salesmen were talking a lot about how crazy business had been. It could just be my city, but maybe sales haven’t slowed at all.
- chillacy 6y agoQuite a few of my friends in the city have purchased cars for the first time to avoid public transit and Uber.
- RickJWagner 6y agoI wonder how many shorts are still hanging in there. I imagine Elon is laughing a lot about this.