Tesla 2Q 2021 Quarterly Result
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tesla-cdn.thron.com
I was a naysayer through 2020 and I lost a lot of money personally betting against this company ("but what about regulatory credits", ugh); however, with over one billion in net income in a single quarter and growing revenues and declining reg. credits , I will admit that I couldn't have been more wrong.
The stock price does seem very high though even if you DO buy into their story (which I do) - but a lot of the stock market feels high - just a lot of money sloshing around these days.
> Battery storage is a competitive, commodity business.
No isn't. There is really not that much Li-Ion grid storage being deployed right now and not by that many companies. That market is growing fast.
> Not sure how huge it will be.
The amount of needed grid storage is gigantic.
Edit: Elon just said on the call that they are massively limited on production. Partly because of the chip issue, same chips are used in the cars and the cars have higher margin. But cell supply is also limited. So the demand is growing but they can't increase production as fast.
Battery construction is incredibly intricate and has a huuuuge amount of process tech. There's already a huge moat around it because of the level of knowledge needed and a severe lack of talent. That moat will only grow as more and more in house tech is developed for production and for chemistries. There's a solid chance that all the players of one of our biggest new economic sectors this century are already producing.
I have to imagine that's a non trivial task that would require Permission To Operate from your power company.
When you have solar/batteries installed, you have to be inspected and receive PTO from your energy provider.
They only just opened up their Beta to allow your Powerwall to backfeed power to the grid on demand.
If and when they allow vehicles to supply power to the grid, it is going to require the vehicle owner to have their setup inspected and PTO granted. I have a feeling this will dissuade people who don't already have solar/batteries from participating.
The capacity in these vehicles is actually relatively good relative to household loads.
Their powerwall stuff with grid support / virtual power plant obviously has much bigger grid impacts / risks (ie, how do workers lock out feed to grid when working on lines etc).
Part of PTO is an inspection and one of the requirements to pass is that there's an ED on the exterior of your home so the power company can come by and disconnect you from the grid.
It's kind of the reverse of registering life support systems with the power company so they know not to shut off your power.
If you have a cut over in your home you could run your house off the car power but without PTO you can't backfeed the grid. That requires inspection of your installation and external ED installed so your energy provider can disconnect your home from the grid when doing service.
What happened during that week in 2002 that I'm not remembering?
> No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame.
So a fairly accurate review, and the opinion is totally fair. Maybe a bit short sighted now with hindsight and what not, but at least he compared a nomad instead of a zune. That would have caused the review to not age well.
I haven't read a more concise description of AAPL.
https://www.theverge.com/2021/7/26/22594235/toyota-lobbying-...
My rule of thumb is that if you're on the cover of Wired, either you've already succeeded, or you never will. They pick people who are already famous, or who want to be famous -- rather than people with the idea and ability to succeed. If you're on the cover and haven't already proven it, you're almost certainly better at selling yourself than your product.
I didn't know what would be wrong with the product, but I knew there would be something before I even opened the magazine.
Plotting ~$60 billion in earnings and a 70+ PE ratio in five years.
To do that they'll merely need $500b-$600b in sales (a couple trillion in sales across the next five years). And everyone in the developed world has to buy a Tesla within the next five years.
Hilarious. All from the Model 3, which is the only thing they have to carry the entire company to those levels. The Model S and Model X certainly aren't going to move the $633b market cap needle beyond where it's already at, nor will solar (look at what the top solar companies are worth), nor will batteries (look at what the world's largest battery businesses are worth), nor will the big rig (look at what the top big rig segments are worth to other automakers).
The article has some gigantic caveats given the obscene forecast, like this one: "the Cybertruck launch will need to go well" - understatement of the century. The Cybertruck is going to flop, after it initially sells well. Ford and the other traditional truck manufacturers will dominate electric trucks, because they're going to sell their customers the trucks those customers actually want to buy, not impractical gimmicks. Musk already knows it's going to ultimately flop, he has begun preparing the market for that outcome.
If Tesla owned the entire auto market globally in five years, it wouldn't be worth half that $4.3t forecast. That's every car, truck and big rig sold everywhere on earth. Add up the value of all other automakers, now or five years ago, or ten years ago. The fantasy projection dissolves instantly when you shine light on it. It'll be a small miracle if Tesla is able to maintain their present valuation while pushing earnings up to $20b in five years, that will require extraordinary market-conquering continued growth across all product lines. They have to become akin to another Toyota in five years just to do that.
I'll bookmark this ridiculous forecast and we can revisit it in a few years.
Amazon was a bit divorced from reality as well for most of its history. They had extraordinary continued sales growth to fuel that divorce, to underpin those high expectations, along with a quasi segment monopoly. That held up for a time. However it began to stall as online retail growth rates began to falter (look at Amazon's stock from 2011-2015, nice but nothing crazy while still carrying a ridiculous multiple; that's the result of retail profit & margin reality setting in). And then they started publishing AWS results and its software-like margins, and eventually the hyper margin ad business; kaboom goes the stock, due to that earnings growth and its forward expectations.
What's the Tesla AWS / Ad explosion? There isn't one. They don't have a business like that, where they'll get to print monopoly-like software profits. Amazon blazed a new path with AWS that they got to own as they went. Tesla has to take auto share from companies like BMW, Toyota, Honda, Hyundai, Daimler, VW, Ford, GM, etc. as they go (to say nothing of the Chinese EV makers that will eventually dominate that domestic market and gradually push outward globally). Entirely different context.
Tesla is an increasingly boring automaker, nothing more. EVs are just vehicles, they don't come with 4x or 6x the margins of ICE vehicles that Mercedes or BMW produce. The best case scenario, realistically, is that Tesla becomes Toyota or Daimler. That will be an astounding outcome, to get there and then hold that ground against that much competition. There's no AWS business coming to save their valuation. Batteries are not a stellar business, the solar business sucks big time (just look at the solar companies, their earnings and their market values), and the big rig business is also not at all spectacular.
Tesla also is not going to own the luxury market, they're horrible at making luxury vehicles. Daimler & Co will continue to dominate luxury vehicles. Tesla had its shot, a huge headstart, at conquering luxury EVs and entirely failed to put a big enough stake into the ground, they're out of time (look at what their high-end segment of sales is worth today or yesterday, it's a pittance despite the huge headstart; they've done a terrible job there).
The Cybertruck isn't going to take over the truck market.
What's left? The Model 3 has to conquer planet Earth in four to five years. Everyone has to buy one. It's not going to happen.
I defended Tesla for most of a decade on this forum. When a lot of people here said Tesla would never produce the Model 3 at scale, I argued against that skepticism across numerous threads over and over again; it was obvious it could be done. There's a difference between recognizing Tesla wasn't going to go bankrupt a few years ago for example (an easy argument I took up across numerous threads), and buying into really really crazy forecasts that are well outside of the realm of believable. There's being objective about what's actually likely, plausible, and just frothing at the mouth on bubble kool-aid.
Anyway, definitely agree with you on the valuation. Even if you believe there's a chance it's going the Amazon route and we'll all be driving Tesla autopilot cabs in 5 years, it's priced as if that's a certainty.
Were most people in 2011-2015 aware of the "AWS / Ad explosion" that was about to come? Or did we know ex ante that Amazon was willing to shift their focus towards these units? Likely not, but the high multiples (despite the retail margins dragging down the gross margins) suggest that a large portion of investors were willing to bet that better units with protective moats (i.e. AWS) were coming soon.
I don't follow Tesla as much, but it seems difficult to dismiss that some of their business units won't follow high-growth/high-margin paths. What if their FSD software is licensed out? What if the supercharger network is shared with other EVs for a per-charge fee? Given Musk's personality, I can see investors taking on risk and betting that he'll be bringing something better than just selling cough regulatory credits cough cars. It makes me wonder if Tesla losing market share in the EV market will be the ultimate catalyst for this shift.
That being said, I agree with you that the market has "priced in" all these what-ifs for Tesla with extremely high expectations of success -- which did not seem to be case for Amazon. A slip or trip in car sales these days doesn't seem to move $TSLA much - investors that are long seem to be betting on other stuff and we'll see how patient they are in times to come.
Complete nonsense. Ford or GM do not have supply of batteries to produce all those trucks you believe they will make. Specially not when also attempting to ramp many of their normal cars.
The claim that Tesla vehicles will drop of in sales after early adopters has been wrong every single time. Cyblertruck has more pre-orders then any vehicle ever. Every single analysis on interest in the truck show gigantic interest.
> Musk already knows it's going to ultimately flop, he has begun preparing the market for that outcome.
This statement is literally wrong. Musk actually did the exact opposite. Musk says its the best product they have ever designed. And they are building a gigantic factory specifically for that product, a factory that cost billions.
Solar, EV, Battery, Grid Battery, Semis are all in exponential growth. Saying 'look at the currently biggest battery company' is an dumb measure. That like saying 'look at what the largest airplane company is worth in 1920, therefore no large airplane company in 1940 can that big'.
I haven't look at that specific forecast, it might well be optimistic. But there is no question that all of those markets are gone grow exponentially and its no question that Tesla is incredibly well placed to take advantage of those growth curves.
Solar is a modest growth business, you can see that represented in the sales growth of all the largest solar companies. Annual sales growth in the industry is not expanding as you're implying.
The big rig / semi market is the exact opposite of experiencing exponential growth, it's largely a slow growth replacement market.
EV sales are overwhelmingly replacement sales, largely taking up the sales from the ICE vehicle market. Which goes back to Tesla's competition problem, they have to forever take market share from Daimler, BMW, Toyota, et al.; to become a giant, they have to eat one of the giants. The global auto market is not a high growth market, it's a slow growth market, which creates a ceiling growth problem for Tesla; the overall industry is growing slow, and they have to kill the other giant competitors to keep growing, which is a very difficult and expensive thing to accomplish. The masses of people in the developed world are not going to suddenly wake up and decide they should needlessly add an extra car to the family vehicle lineup; they're going to do gradual replacement purchases over time. And over that time, the competition is going to get a lot worse for Tesla in EVs, not easier.
What's Panasonic's entire battery business worth today? Now increase that 5x or 10x. What would that be worth? How much is Tesla worth today in comparison? How does that battery growth forecast then stack up to the $4.3 trillion in the forecast in question?
And besides that, even with the battery business and assuming an extraordinary outcome, Tesla is selling cars for $45,000+ and the battery packs are a modest fraction of that value. You think Tesla is going to validate $4 trillion in market value by selling $20-$30 billion in batteries on the side every year at 15% end profit margins? It doesn't get them anywhere remotely close and that's the optimistic outcome.
And we're specifically talking about what Tesla can do between now and 2026, not 2050. Five years. That's the $4 trillion forecast timeline in question that is the root of this discussion and that's what I focused on. How many vehicles Tesla can sell in that time, how their other segments might contribute, how much growth they can generate overall in that time, what their profit could be, and how that might translate to their market cap circa 2026.
> This statement is literally wrong. Musk actually did the exact opposite.
Nope. Musk has been trying to guide the market expectations and the high risk of the Cybertruck being a flop. He knows the damage a flop could cause to the stock.
July 16, Barrons: "Elon Musk Admits Tesla’s Cybertruck Might ‘Flop’ Because It’s so Different"
https://www.barrons.com/articles/elon-musk-admits-teslas-cyb...
> Complete nonsense. Ford or GM do not have supply of batteries to produce all those trucks you believe they will make. Specially not when also attempting to ramp many of their normal cars.
Tesla is still at an inferior position to both Ford and GM when it comes to industrial scale (to say nothing of political connections). There's no reason to believe Ford and GM will be incapable of securing the necessary resources to scale their EV businesses in the coming years. GM has an exceptional partnership history in China for one thing, if they need to produce huge volumes of batteries. What Tesla has done in making battery factories for their demand isn't a unique value proposition, it's going to be easily endlessly replicated by their competition.
Tesla represents a very small share of the auto industry globally. The majors all have more total resources, more political connections (which is very important for securing natural resources and manufacturing), and greater industrial scale. And they are bringing all of that to the field; not tomorrow, but right now. Tesla needs all the headstart they can get. The past decade was the easy part for Tesla, not the hard part.
Non of those are EV now.
> EV sales are overwhelmingly replacement sales, largely taking up the sales from the ICE vehicle market.
All those need to be replaced by EVs. Tesla has no ICE vehicles so for them its simply growth.
Tesla can scale EV faster and they can reach better margin then current companies. Currently these manufactures can subsidies their EV with ICE sales, but their ICE infrastructure will turn into a liability soon.
At the same time they build out global charging infrastructure to fuel all those cars giving them a long term income at great margin.
> What's Panasonic's entire battery business worth today? Now increase that 5x or 10x.
We are only just at 2% EV in the market and Panasonic is only a part of that market. Add grid and home storage, industrial vehicles and so on. And eventually also planes.
> Tesla is still at an inferior position to both Ford and GM when it comes to industrial scale
Who wouldn't want all those distributed factories with union workers demonstrating while giving most of the profits to the dealers and suppliers.
> (to say nothing of political connections).
Yeah California and Texas where Tesla produces all the jobs are politically so weak. Elon Musk is also not on of the most famous people in the world and a twitter profile more powerful then GM/Ford marketing budget.
> Tesla represents a very small share of the auto industry globally.
Yes and they are already at industry leading operating margin while still being comparatively small and they continue to grow very fast.
> The past decade was the easy part for Tesla, not the hard part.
And just continuing to produce ICE vehicles and ignoring EV was the easy part for the competition. Repeatably in history we have seen how difficult massive technology transitions are and how established players ran into a lot of issues.
Are you talking about Austin? Thats not specifically for Cybertruck, it is also building Model 3, Y, and the Semi according to wikipedia.
Semi might be in Austin but likely not in the current building.
Let’s say 70million cars are sold in 2021. And that they sell for 30k each. So that’s 2100 billion.
Say a 6% profit, we get 126 billion a year on global sales.
Say you expect a mature company to eventually coast along at 20x price/earnings
So a company with 100% market share (and you can’t really price in growth as it’s 100%) should be worth 2500 billion.
I’m no economist, and I may have made a math error somewhere, but I feel this puts a rough upper bound on the valuation
Do you realize that Tesla might not sell cars but rides in the medium term? And if their fleet drives more than 2% of the time (current usage of privately owned cars), they'll generate many, many time the profit the industry have been getting from car sales? And I'm not talking about energy generation, grid services and charging (the oil and gas of the auto industry)...
I think most agree that the pricing can seem unreasonably high, but plug the numbers into a spreadsheet and see where you end up. Basically the market believes that Tesla is to become one of the big players in the auto industry.
But yes, right now their valuation is a bit high, but reflect on this ; Tesla is in a net cash position, have already the infrastructure and technology to make electric cars. They now have to replicate/duplicate, create new models and markets, but they have a very solid footing within the EV space.
The other OEMS is laden with debt which was used to build outdated factories and invested in technologies which suddenly have a payback period in the singles, instead of decades - and they still must invest heavily into EVs to maintain their market share and service their debt.
The incumbent OEMS are having to run the gauntlet of the valley of death; Falling demand for gas/diesel while at the same time investing heavily into EV production. While beeing loaded up with debt.
There is a lot of competition in electric vehicles coming. There is no reason to think that the EV industry will be materially different to the ICEV industry in terms of competition, margins and company performance when the dust settles. At the end of the day the market is the same, convincing people to spend many 10s of thousands on a complicated machine.
The huge asset price inflation that has happened over Amazon's history is also not going to continue.
Additionally there are some major risks to Tesla's trajectory. One is China deciding to freeze out an American EV company. Another is something happening to Elon Musk, which will cause a stampede of retail investors out the door.
How do you explain Apple's shares of profits in the phone industry, then?
[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/tesla-making-model-s-x-for-s...
(disclosure: no TSLA exposure, but keep my ear to the ground, also for sentimental reasons)
That is unless you're looking at the model S plaid, but I can't envision huge demand for a car starting at 129k.
If 500+ mile range becomes an S/X exclusive for a few years, feels like they need to do more to differentiate.
These credits allowed Tesla to build the factories that are now pumping out EVs. If they had not sold these credits, the other manufacturers would sold less ICE, and without a successful EV markers to convince politicians that EV are viable, ICE makers would have proved to regulators that penalties are killing jobs and hurting the economy... for nothing. Credits would have been canceled and we would have more big polluting gas guzzlers around a handful of aging Tesla roadsters for billionaires.
That makes me think we're many, many years away from seeing $25K~ EVs. You can cut some things off of the Model 3, but battery reduction in particular is a headache since you risk damaging your reputation/EV's reputations if you make it too weak (particularly with normal degradation).
I know this is proprietary/secret, but I'd love to see a pie chart of where each dollar on a Model 3 goes. In particular how much is pure battery/drive system, and basically the whole rest of the car.
You might not see $25K new EVs, but you'll see used versions around that price with 100k+ miles on them that still drive like they're new (there are Model S and X vehicles with hundreds of thousands of miles on their drivetrain still going strong).
TLDR We're financially engineering our way out of combustion based transportation.
An EV is much less convenient than a conventional vehicle, it needs to have a lower CoO just to offset that. Once electric vehicles can charge in comparable times to gas for comparable miles, then we can talk, in the meantime you're gaining lower ownership cost for more hassle (and that's ok, but you cannot double-dip it).
> I don't mind an 84 month auto loan at <2% interest
That's available on gas vehicles too (and even better interest rates in some cases), largely offsetting whatever edge you're trying to argue.
> You might not see $25K EVs, but you'll see used versions around that price with 100k+ miles on them that still drive like they're new
Drive like? Yes. Range? Unlikely. Just look at the costs of a full battery module replacement, it would eat up over 50% of that $25K price. Plus the rate of technological advancement may hurt old EVs worse than gas vehicles, because one is advancing more rapidly than the other.
I suspect a lot of people care that electric sedans costs almost $15K more than hybrid sedans, and I suspect you'll see sales explode if a "Model 2" that cost $25K~ were ever produced (with a few disclaimers on range, seat capacity, etc).
Probably not true for a lot of people. I’d hit range limits maybe one or two days a year. In exchange I can have my car “full” all the time. It cuts out a lot of trips to the gas station, which aren’t always convenient.
I wish this argument would just die. It's so ignorant and assine. The convenience is different, not less.
I haven't had to stop at a gas station to fuel up either of my cars since Nov 2018. I haven't used a charger outside of my home since last August to charge my Nissan Leaf, and in 2020 I only used chargers twice. That's 2 times since Nov of 2019 on a vehicle with an 80 mile range.
Our Model 3 was driven across country and kept time with a box truck moving all of our belongings.
I plug my cars in when I need a charge at home. I don't have to run out for gas the night before a trip or on the way. I don't have to make planned or unplanned stops at gas stations. I don't have to go to gas stations at all.
But EVs are less convenient because you can imagine scenarios in your head.
Ymmv buy in my experience my EV is way more convenient
Your statement is laughably inaccurate, and sounds to me to support a narrative more than being based on personal experience. I fill the "tank" on the Leaf when I sleep, instead of going out of my way to find a gas station when I drive the ICE. And this is first-get Leaf, which is a loooong way from what more modern BEVs offer. I'm also reminded that I have to go get the oil changed on that Scion xB soon; how convenient.
Look, you don't want a BEV, don't buy one. You don't want to buy TSLA, don't buy the stock. What you don't get to do is just make shit up, like this statement:
Just look at the costs of a full battery module replacement, it would eat up over 50% of that $25K price.
I've looked. Your numbers aren't even close to reality.
I drove from Sacramento to Denver in a model 3, no big deal, we averaged 200 miles per stop, and often I could often stop a bit short, or a bit long depending on random preferences. Do you often drive 6 hours without a bathroom or food break?
Our average stop was between 20 and 30 minutes, when the battery is low it charges at 550 miles an hour or so, and we often just need 200 or so. That way we stop every 3 hours to stretch our legs, let the dog go potty, and let anyone hungry get a snack.
Sure, maybe sometimes we would have left 10 minutes sooner. But then again in the last year I've gone to a gas station zero times, taken my car in for an oil change zero times, had zero issues with spark plugs, timing chains, head gaskets, etc. I very rarely drive more than 300 miles a day, so just waking up in the morning to a full car is quite a convenience. Recently I was a bit worried about range, drove to the top of a 14,000+ mountain and was at 51% at the top, after starting with 90% (the Tesla recommended maximum for normal daily driving). I got home with 72%, which I found pretty amazing, the wonders of regenerative braking.
So I'd rank an EV for normal usage (commuting less than 300 miles a day) SIGNIFICANTLY more convenient than a gas car.
I just bought a model 3 a month ago or so. I don't drive often but I have been looking to drive my car because I now love driving the thing.
back to my point. I have been using this app optiwatt which, very conservatively, tracks my charging efficiency and how much it costs me to charge. In the first month i've saved almost $80 in what it would cost a gasoline car. This is coming from someone who doesn't drive very much. I can definitely see this number adding up for someone who has a 45min-1h commute.
The advantage there will come from a number of places over the current Model 3.
Structural battery will make the car lighter, cheaper and of course efficient. The perspective $25K car will also likely use a cheaper battery chemistry produced by Tesla themselves and a much smaller overall pack. The range should be the same or slightly only slightly less.
Put those things together, smaller, lighter, lower production cost and slightly lower margin (15%) makes this very much possible. Of course this car would have upgrades to, in the car industry the base model has much worse margin then the upgrade models.
> I know this is proprietary/secret, but I'd love to see a pie chart of where each dollar on a Model 3 goes. In particular how much is pure battery/drive system, and basically the whole rest of the car.
You can go to Munro & Associates and they will sell you a report with a detailed break down of the cost for literally every screw and how much it cost to screw it in. You can even get reports on the difference between China/US and so on.
They also have a lot of video very you can learn about this. They don't show all the numbers of course but they do show a lot of interesting numbers.
See: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCj--iMtToRO_cGG_fpmP5XQ
(Currently they are working on Ford Mach-E)
If you are more interested in EV in general, not just Model 3, they have actually made their report of the BMW i3 almost free. You can literally get a report that used to be $50k for $10.
See here:
https://munrolive.com/support-%2F-store/ols/products/bmw-i3-...
You can go and build your own BMW i3.
Energy and Solar margin are much worse but at least not negative anymore. This is a fast growing market and nobody else in the world is set up for it as well as Tesla is, both for home and grid. This will just continue to grow every year and there is large economics of scale that can be reached.
Something that many people miss is that other car companies make a huge amount of money on service, because they have such large old fleets that need parts. Tesla does not have this and service has been a huge negative for them. This seems to be starting to slowly turn. In a few years Tesla service will be a huge cash cow, and Tesla will not have to share that money with dealers for the most part.
Its the same with the supercharger network, huge investment now, hugely negative. But eventually that will be very profitable for them. Again, something people miss on the Tesla story. Large amounts of super-high margin revenue. Unlike players like Electrify America, Tesla builds its own chargers fully vertically integrated. Eventually Tesla can open the network to the competitors and that will give them high utilization on the network, making it very profitable.
They are still not a large car company, their operating margin has a chance to be significantly better in another year. More local production in Europe and Eastern US, more S/X sales, better margin on solar and storage for sure, and profitable Cybertruck.
Model Y/Cybertruck/Semi produced in Texas/Berlin will also use their own Tesla internal batteries, the far away most expensive part that they had to buy from suppliers. Tesla new manufacturing methods should allow them to both remove the profit the supplier would have made, and also produce the cells more cheaply. Storage should eventually get batteries from those plants as well but that might take a while.
Overall pretty happy with the progress.
Anything else that stands out?
Are there other examples of big tech companies that doubled their revenue over the last year?
You can use sales as an indicator of success if they are still production constrained. Read the report, it's well explained.
do we need 10 or 100M more vehicles streaming data, or do we need to use 1000x more transistors daily for the AI annealing? 10,000x the number of parameters?
Maybe things have to be a billion times better before we get real FSD?
The current deep learning approach is a dead end.
One problem with this kind of estimation is that it's not actually clear that we can get there from "here" using current approaches. If it turn we can't, estimation is pretty hopeless if history tells us anything about putting a timeline on breakthroughs...
Autonomous vehicles by and large aren’t a data problem anyways - it’s a robotics problem conditioned on the output of ML models for perception and prediction. The majority of the work is just implementing all of the bizarre edge cases inside of the robotics stack.
The idea of tackling this with an e2e ML model is a pipe dream touted by people that aren’t familiar with the space or trying to hype up their approach. Whenever this approach is attempted teams will very quickly realize how untenable it is and return to implementing individual robotics modules.
tl;dr there’s nothing special about Tesla’s approach to AVs or machine learning and you shouldn’t expect them to leapfrog the competition because of some nebulous ML-based advantage.
Coming from someone who has seen the interiors of both the FSD beta and the stack at an actual AV company.
Except Andrej Karpathy. Why dumb down if they know it isn't working, now that they have all the financial resources to pivot and overtake the other manufacturers (who have not achieve anything anyway)? It makes no sense, unless Karpathy does not know what he's doing.
Edit: the argument that others don't agree is not convincing because Tesla should not have succeeded by others' standards either.
If you listen to any of AK’s talks he only really talks about perception and he’s basically said that right now none of their planning is based on ML models. This is backed up by what reverse engineers have found in their Tesla’s.
Could you speed up labelling by using a combination of eye tracker cameras, road cameras, and brain signal sensors on real drivers? That way you could quickly understand what road footage corresponds with certain brain signals. Assuming brain signals are easier to label.
spaceX and starlink could end up being absolute MONSTERS of companies. Musk is just one incredible guy, despite his personality quirks.
I have been much more impressed with HUDs in common cars lately. Now that, although definitely not related to autonomous is a huge help to offset the cognitive load.
It's not "full" if it's missing the 5%. In that sense, it's vaporware.
I know what I paid for. And I am getting my money's worth given how much it has kept improving. The new FSD Beta looks even more promising. It's swiftly reaching the point where it is a question of liability and regulatory approval.
No, check that. My office chair frankly isn't as comfortable as the car.
Cybertruck comes next after Texas is pumping out 500k units a year, and they have the next battery pack ready to scale. My guess is summer-fall 2022 by the slow news on the topic.
Texas, Berlin, something in China?
Also, do we have a time frame for all of them? I'm trying to figure out how many vehicles they'd expect to sell per year in 5-10 years.
Plus, the really interesting challenge, I wonder if they can do it: could they make a cheap compact car for ~20-25k?
Though with Elon-time maybe tack on another year.
When you say growth has ended do you mean that there is no more demand or they just can't build and ship these $30K+ items fast enough?
128% YoY growth in gross profit
998% YoY growth in GAAP Net Income
920% YoY growth in GAAP EPS
151% YoY growth in production
120% YoY growth in deliveries
All the while building out two more factories and going through a global pandemic and supply shortage.
Yup. Definitely looks like it's come to a halt.