Musk has done something remarkable as you say.
At the same time, the market cap is nuts and a portent of doom.
Bigger than all car companies combined, by market cap?
A market crash could take down Tesla and set back electric car adoption by 20 years.
Basically, Tesla's mission is 99% accomplished.
Basically an EV only makes sense if you own a house and can get your own charger.
The V2 supercharger still needs around 20 minutes for an 80% charge, while the new BMW iX3 needs around 30 minutes for 80%.
The Tesla V3 supercharger is promising, but the killer feature will be a unified charging platform and not one for each car maker.
New houses in the UK have required chargers as part of planning permission for 5 years. Most people have, or can have, a 3KW socket installed in their driveway, very cheaply (like 2-3 tanks of fuel)
73% of cars in the UK are parked on private property overnight. Most cars do under 8,000 miles a year, or 160 miles a week, 77% of cars passing an MOT in 2019 did under 10,000 miles/year, or 200 miles a week.
At 5 miles per KWh, that's 15mph of charging, or 200 miles in one overnight charge.
I'm currently sitting in a terraced house in East London.
The direction of travel is that it will be uneconomical to keep a petrol car in London in 10 years time, even if they were still available for sale, so it's fairly meaningless. People will have to adapt.
I think that's a particularly unhelpful way of framing it, when actually we are trying to help people adapt new technology.
"it will be uneconomical to keep a petrol car in London in 10 years time"
Just means that people will hold on to their old cars, because they can't plug them in - and be a bit poorer. Now, if "people will have to adapt" means that there needs to be a massive effort to provide in-street charging infrastructure, you might be right.
I suppose GP’s question is how does that 73% figure change when you look at people who can realistically have a charger installed in their parking spot.
We looked into putting in outside sockets, it was fairly low cost, the difficulty would be apportioning the metering as we didn't have allocated parking spaces, but with allocated parking spaces it's not a problem.
On my own housing estate in a typical British town almost every house has a drive. Those with two cars and just one drive that park 1 car on the drive and one on the street, but that's fine, just swap them occasionally (or better yet get rid of the extra car)
I can't think of seeing underground parking anywhere in the UK, other than commercial ones in cities like NCP etc.
There are already various technical solutions to this. Most chargers now days are "connected" - ie have a WiFi chip or cellular modem built in to the charging unit. Identification/billing can be apportioned via a RFID card or app interface.
In future, "Plug & Charge" will make it possible for the vehicles to securely identify themselves to the charger for automatic billing, doing away with the need for an app or RFID.
If cost of the chargers is an issue (ie you want a large number of outlets but it's initially split between only a few EV owners who are willing to pay for them), then consider something like Ubitricity (ubitricity.com) where the outlets are "dumb" and the billing smarts are built into the cable which EV owners purchase.
It's not a useful stat - the only useful one is how many journeys per year can I not do in an electric vehicle in the UK with one 30 minute stop or about 15 mins of charging.
I think the answer is very few because the UK is small, but averages don't really cut it when you plan a drive to Scotland and can't get there without 2 extra hours of delay compared to a petrol vehicle.
Define "private property". Is a private, shared (like in tens/hundred of vehicles shared) parking a "private property" by this statistic?
I found a study [1] based on the results of a survey (2021) from the European Union that states:
> Several conclusions can be derived in terms of the significance of driving patterns in relation to the potential use/substitution of a larger portion of the car fleet with electric drive vehicles. In particular, the average distance that is daily driven in 6 members states ranges from an average of 40 km (UK) to an average of 80 km (Poland). Such distances can be comfortably covered by battery electric vehicles that are currently already available on the market. Further R&D improvements in battery systems could ensure that the “range anxiety” factor is minimized. Considering the long recharging time of the energy storage systems of an EDV, the duration of the parking profiles is a good indicator for the estimation of potential recharge time availability. In our survey it has been revealed that the parking time after the last trip of a day amounts to more than 16 hours per day. This duration is more than sufficient to comply with the potential need for a full slow recharge of an average EDV battery. Also, almost 10% of the drivers in the survey park in a private garage or their home, places where a recharging point could easily be installed. The active parking time, defined as the parking periods between which the car is used during a day for several purposes, amounts to 6 hours.
[1] http://publications.europa.eu/resource/genpub/PUB_LDNA25627E...
In Europe there is already a single unified charging standard: CCS.
The entire industry, including Tesla superchargers, use this same charging standard.
They now have a warchest of billions of cash and cash equivalents (like BTC) that they can use to expand without going back to the public market for cash for a while. Especially with their cash flows looking a lot better now.
So a stock crash would be inconvenient, but unless it leads to a shareholder revolt or something, wouldn't really matter.
I'm very optimistic about Rivian. It's Tesla but without the ego thinking they are smarter than 50 years of manufacturing lessons.
One major issue is adoption. While there's a whole lot of people who want BEVs, price is still a major concern, as is infrastructure.
Tesla make it dead simple with their supercharger network - find a charger, plug in, fast charging happens. The find a charger thing is integrated into the car, and often has feedback about what chargers are busy or unavailable.
Unfortunately, outside of Europe and the UK, the BEV charging story is pretty terrible.
Volkswagon, who arguably have the biggest incentive to make this work, have a pretty atrocious charging experience in the US, as demonstrated by Engineering Explained[1] with their latest and greatest model the 'ID.4'
Europe and the UK have put down standards and basically forced some level of interoperation between charging network systems, which reduced friction for EV owners.
The other issue is getting dealers onboard. If you're someone for whom an EV might make a whole lot of sense, there's approximately zero chance you're going to get recommended an EV, even if the dealer has one to sell you (either because the dealership dont' keep units to test-drive, or the manufacturer doesn't sell a BEV). Dealers hate them, because there's little to no after-sales servicing requirement. I've seen many stories about people basically having to argue or beg a dealer to let them buy or even order an EV.
Perhaps Manufacturers could go with direct sales a-la Tesla, but there seems to still be a lot of political power left in the dealer networks, so that isn't necessarily going to be possible any time soon.
What will convince me that EVs are here to stay is when dealerships are pushing BEVs right alongside their ICEs.
They standardized the connector, but the problem (at least in my area in Austria when I looked into it 2 years ago) was that there are so many competing charging networks with different contracts and pricing models that it was basically unusable.
Near my house there were 3 chargers from different companies, each with space for two or three cars. If I wanted to use either of them, I would have to sign up with three networks, pay monthly fees for two of them, and have vastly different prices on each of the chargers.
The fast charging prices were also so high that I'm not sure it's any cheaper than a gasoline car.
I don't know if it's gotten any better since then, but as far as I could tell EVs only make sense if you can charge the car either at your home or at your workplace.
> The fast charging prices were also so high that I'm not sure it's any cheaper than a gasoline car.
While it being cheaper than gasoline is a nice perk, I think it's more important to get a wider deployment of fast charging infrastructure (and that is dead easy to use).
Without massive deployments of charging infrastructure, it won't matter what it costs - people will not buy EVs if they've got no way to rapidly recharge.
Governments should also be incentivising deployment of on-street charging infrastructure for areas where off-street parking is difficult or uncommon.
The next 5 years will see a big change for sure, but the legacy ICE automakers are still many years behind Tesla (often by their own admission - see VW CEO remarks on state of the VW groups car software platforms etc).
And that's just vehicles. Their solar business is scaling nicely. Grid storage is a growth market as well. And of course they are pairing their solar with domestic storage as well. All rapid growth markets. That's why their market cap is what it is. Multiple rapid growth markets, a proven ability to scale and execute, etc. That's why investors love them.
A market crash would be brutal for everyone. Particularly those with struggling product lines and outdated products that are very dependent on both to secure the revenue to invest themselves out of that mess.
Am I wrong or the cars were running software for at least a decade? What kind of software can’t VW develop?
Why? Even if TSLA dropped to 1 cent today, all factories, employees, supply chain, IP, sales channels etc would remain intact.
And level 2 is not self-driving and is just dangerous. And I don’t see how would we get to level 3, let alone higher levels.
And stock price represents.. basically hype, which is remotely may be based on some figures.
True, but look around at the electric platforms being developed by traditional car companies. Mercedes has one, BMW has one, VW has one, Nissan has one, etc.
Most of them will be transitioning. The stock price represents future value where that value is Tesla absolutely crushing everyone else, which we can now say with ~80% confidence won't happen. Irrational exuberance.
Self-driving is always around the corner, just 5 years away.
I think people want EV's and when they see that they only need to spend a little bit extra for that extra range and access to a nationwide supercharger network. They are willing to pay for it. I don't think a drop in stock is going to change that mentality. Other automakers keep trying to build a quality EV, but they simply do not hold up to a Tesla.
A large drop in shareholders certainly would disappoint shareholders but they are the ones valuing Tesla so high. Musk is on the record saying the share price is too high and it's factoring in a ton of potential future growth.
Look at the australian mega-battery project. They've reduced power outages and normalized the grid.
As household solar+battery installs grow, they're going to eat into the massive utility business.
They're much bigger than cars because they are not just cars.
Tesla Energy lost a little over $100 MM this quarter. Last quarter they lost less money. Solar installs have never recovered from the 2016 peak - they're barely at 50% what they were then.
The economy of scale is working in the wrong way and Tesla is competing in a commodity space against companies who are vertically integrated and specialize in the type of batteries and solar panels in use - in fact Tesla often buys batteries from them.
This is like if Apple were selling iron ore. The fan boy consumer may pay a 100% premium, but 99.9% of the world will just buy the cheapest iron ore around.