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Comment by adflux | Hacker News Reader

This is not an analysis, this is grabbing a bunch of numbers out of the air without supporting arguments... "Autonomous Ride-Hail Revenue (net, billions)" $327 billion in 2025? FSD won't be out by then, I am certain. The edge cases are still too poorly worked out. For instance, will it slow down seeing a child run after a ball on the pavement? Or can it see "through" cars/buses? KNOWING where bicyclists are instead of only SEEING them is vital in the Netherlands, where we share our road with them.

And lets just DOUBLE our profit margin on electric vehicles LOL. When the competition is getting increasingly fierce, GM, Volkswagen and other tech companies with very deep pockets (Apple, Microsoft, Google) working on self-driving technology and electric cars...

ARK seems to think that Tesla operates in a void, without any competition. And that they can set the price point in 5 years.

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> And lets just DOUBLE our profit margin on electric vehicles LOL. When the competition is getting increasingly fierce

Exactly!

VW doubled it's share price this week after announcing their goals for 2025 [1].

For 2021, they are targeting 1m EV and hybrid vehicles.

VW is "building six battery factories in Europe alone".

[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-03-16/vw-eyes-g...

"VW is "building six battery factories in Europe alone"."

Interestingly VW's six factories by 2030 produce totally about as much (240 GWh) as Tesla's one Berlin factory, which is due to start limited battery production in 2023, starting at 100 GWh per year, later ramping up to 200-250 GWh.

Tesla's original "gigafactory" talked a big talk, too, but they only completed 30% of the building. The Tesla Berlin factory is "capable of over 100 GWh per year" with only vague Musk-promises of it going above that over time.

That's a significant counterpoint I wasn't aware of, thanks.

This "analysis" isn't for them to make an investment call.

Its to make people buy into stocks they already have a position in..

It’s better this way than listening advice of people who don’t risk their money.

No, it's not. If someone has no stake then they have little incentive to be right or not. And in the long term, it's better for them to try to be right because they can brag about their historical accuracy when making future predictions.

But for people that have some risk in Tesla (this firm's ETF is over 10% TSLA), then they have an incentive to pump the price up, even if it means lying. If they can pump the price they benefit. There is no reason why their advice should be trusted if their advice is toward the direction that obviously benefits them. Now, if someone had 10% of their money long TSLA and they said the price was going to fall, then I would probably trust them because that advice isn't directly benefiting them (or I'd be very suspicious that they had some other scheme going on).

It does make them a biased source of information, which is the original point. Why would they ever publish a pessimistic report about Tesla and risk the stock going down even 0.005%?

Would you go to a doctor who had to pay you if he gave you a cancer diagnosis? How proactive do you think he would be to screen you?

That's not their money, though. It's the money of their customers who buy their ETFs.

They have a strong financial interest in pumping up Tesla stock, so I don't know if their "analysis" is much trustworthy.

They're not risking their money. They're risking clients' money.

Seriously, their "bear" case is pretty laughable too. The worst scenario they can imagine is Tesla increasing vehicle production and revenue by 10x and making >$40B/yr in ride hailing revenue (up from $0 today). In less than 4 years?

In case people are interested, this video from March 16th gives a good idea of the current state of tesla self-driving: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=antLneVlxcs

I'm not that knowledgeable about Tesla, from what I got they have a "Tesla Full Self Driving Beta" program (which has a terrible name as it isn't fully-autonomous and requires drivers to take over from time to time).

Edit: I'm not sharing this video to say that their program is good or bad, I don't have a dog in this fight and personally do not care about the topic that much. I thought people here would be interested to see how their program behaves in a somewhat realistic scenario. The result seems to be mixed.

Yes, but this video of two days earlier is also its current state, and it's pretty incredible: https://twitter.com/WholeMarsBlog/status/1370974296730824704...

Cherry-picking best or worst-case scenarios isn't particularly helpful - in terms of plotting likely future scenarios, which is what ARK is doing here, the point is that it's still unfinished but improving pretty darn fast.

I'm not sure how to read your comment. Are you saying that the video I shared is cherry-picking? It looks like a mix of good and bad situations for the self-driving assist, more like a realistic look at how it performs in the real world.

I guess what I'm saying is that as a Tesla owner I don't find this video representative of normal use - in general FSD is very good. The other video on the other hand is much better than my experience of everyday use. Best case or worst case scenarios aren't representative of the "current state", imo.

Yeah I've seen that one. It's the edge cases which will take a lot of time to smoothen out. Aside from never being able to notice things like someone walking on the sidewalk with headphones on who looks like he's going to cross the street in front of your silent EV. Or a bicyclist hidden behind a bus etc.

I think the one thing going for Tesla is early mover advantage - they have figured out what it takes to build EVs at scale and eventually make a profit out of it with a 5 year head-start. In their battery day video, they talk about how they're optimizing every last detail of their tech. They're not just focused on automobile design - they are focused on capital efficiency of their factories. They also have an insane amount of cash to operate at lower margins for an extended period if the market becomes too hot.

The competition is coming but they will probably find it difficult to compete with Tesla on price.

> The competition is coming but they will probably find it difficult to compete with Tesla on price.

There are plenty of cheaper EVs than Tesla e.g. Leaf, Zoe, Ioniq, Kona.

And there are technically better EVs than Tesla e.g. Porsche Taycan.

And you can argue there are EVs that are as good value e.g. VW ID.3/4.

I love VW and I think they are going to make awesome EVs but saying the Taycan is "technically better" is an outright lie or an unfortunate ignorance.

The drivetrain in the Model 3 is vastly more efficient and elegant in design. The overall systems design is more of the same, more efficient and elegant with simplified wiring harness, less onboard computers and more sophisticated infotainment and drive computers at that.

What the Taycan does do better is feel more like a sports car, has better finishing and likely much better quality control.

But "technically" Tesla is 5-10 years ahead of everyone except maybe Lucid which have been building advanced batteries and drivetrains for Model-E for the last decade.

Taycan is based on an 800V architecture which allows for lower charging temperatures and significantly faster charging speeds.

It's objectively better than anything in a Tesla.

Simply having a higher voltage architecture doesn't make it superior. It makes some aspects better but you need to consider the whole picture and that includes the efficiency of the drivetrain front and center as that determines range per kwh of battery capacity.

It's worth mentioning I consider the Taycan to be a better and more fun car. I just don't agree it's technically superior to the Tesla Model 3 on drivetrain/battery/onboard computer aspects.

All true. But you could argue it's beside the point, because che cheaper ones have other significant drawbacks (e.g. range, no driver-assist), and technically better ones are way more expensive. It's the combination of price-point, range, software and scalability in production that's difficult to achieve - any single one is relatively easy metric to beat Tesla on.

EVs seem pretty simple. I would guess "almost anyone" (where anyone means "big engineering company") can build an EV drive train. ICEs seem far more complicated to me (thousands of moving parts and so on). I would not expect "almost anyone" to be able to build an ICE which can last even 100k kilometers.

I don't own a car, never have, never will, so take everything with you know what.

"5 year head-start."

I can't see this at work. It seems the VW ID.3 is outselling Tesla Model 3 in some markets (though we need to see when production is ramped up and pre-orders are finished delivering for real number) and looks to be nearly profitable (if you take away the dealership - which VW has hinted they want in the future - from the German car makers VW is the only one that clearly stated they want to copy Tesla by business model and software centricity).

We'll see how the ID.4 starting next week performs in the market.

"they have figured out what it takes to build EVs at scale". https://www.goodcarbadcar.net/2020-us-auto-sales-figures-by-...

Tesla really doesnt produce that many cars.

IMO EV is just another car. I would argue it's probably easier to set up a supply chain/factory line for an EV than for a combustion engine. The latter is far more complex, far more moving parts.

yup, watch all the big guys go full on amazon and price their EVs low enough to wipe out tesla. Just sat in a Mach-E and ready to buy one but can't decide because there are so many other options coming to market now.

I have been hearing similar arguments for a long time. It used to be "tesla has one tiny factory, just wait until Toyota converts it's many huge factories to electric".

It would be great if the mach-e sold 500k units in 2022, but I would not bet on it.

Important to realize it's not binary. TSLA can be a great company, remain viable for a long time, and also not have a $3T market cap in 4 years. TSLA isn't living in a vacuum, and competitors are catching up. Unfortunately/fortunately for a lot of innovators, the first one to market is not always able to corner the entire market forever.

Additionally, their current market cap is a gift and a curse. It's great they were able to raise more money using their value, but it also draws huge attention from current and possible competitors who let TSLA figure the EV market out. Now competitors can use their respective skillsets to compete where TSLA is weak.

This is all to say that competition heating up and will dampen TSLA's potential valuation. It doesn't mean TSLA is going out of business anytime soon.

It is binary. Does your company exist to accelerate the transition to sustainable energy and transportation or do you have another mission like "delivering shareholder value"?

There's a whole heap of EVs coming from the established brands and honestly, I would choose them over any Tesla. If the VW camper van becomes reality, oh my oh my. Mach-E looks incredible! Even the Skoda EV looks amazing - it's a SKODA?!

Tesla's lineup is still great, but other automakers are closing the gap very quickly. And that's with the intentional market segmentation they have to do in order for EVs not to look too attractive compared to their ICE lineup.

Looking into the future, for example Hyundai Ioniq 5, it's not clear how will Tesla compete. Elon factor will only get them so far.

I personally feel like the "Elon Factor" is slowly turning on him as people find him more and more childish and cringy. Would be interested to see how his public perception has changed over the decade.

Kind of like how Android just wiped out Apple right?! I can’t say I understand where all the reflexive hate for Tesla comes from, especially here, but Tesla is a leader for a reason definitely check them out so you understand what the differences are before you buy that MachE

No, the big automakers had their chance to make a serious commitment to EV and they all failed to deliver. Now they’re playing catch up but Tesla is too big for them to drive out of the market

This reads like someone who has never used A Tesla’s autopilot or seen the FSD Beta videos from the public Beta test. It can essentially do all the things you are up on your soapbox about already and is improving rapidly.

Where's the Community-Adjusted EBITDA?

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