Tesla FY2021 Earnings Result | Hacker News Reader

Tesla FY2021 Earnings Result

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I find this mind-bogglingly impressive:

* Vehicles delivered: 0.31M/quarter = 1.24M/year run-rate (Q4 YoY growth: 71%).

* Total revenues: $17.7B/quarter = $70.8B/year run-rate (Q4 YoY growth: 65%).

* Cash flow from operations: $4.6B/quarter (Q4 YoY growth: 52%).

* Capital expenditures: $1.8B/quarter (Q4 YoY growth: 57%).

* Vehicle-producing factories: 2 online (California, Shanghai), 2 in testing (Berlin, Texas), ~4 in development (locations TBA).

A 5-7x increase in vehicle production over the next five years, from 1.24M to 6-8M vehicles, looks... quite realistic at this point -- gasp. By all counts, Musk and his team have successfully created a major automaker from the ground-up in a record short amount of time. Kudos to them!

I was looking for something that was a red flag in here, and could not find one. The only thing I could find is that the solar business is not doing well and that is just a drop in the bucket at this point in terms of revenue, its not even really material.

The red flag is not those numbers, it is the market cap they are trying to justify.

They are doing terrific.

Or maybe that part of its valuation is tied to bitcoin on its balance sheet?

There are a few in the call with the analysts [1].

- Multiple references to the FSD. Promised FSD to be ready this year again.

- Dojo may not be ready and not faster than a cluster of GPUs

- Solar installations are dawn

In general very positive results.

[1] https://seekingalpha.com/article/4481919-tesla-inc-tsla-ceo-...

Why is Nevada always omitted? By "online" I guess they mean manufacturing cars, whereas Nevada just produces parts (batteries) needed by the cars?

Yes. I added "vehicle-producing" to make it clear. Thanks!

Tesla is smashing even the most optimistic of expectations. I guess that huge rally in 2019-2020, which the media called irrational or a bubble, in hindsight was not so irrational. Wall St., hedge funds saw that Tesla was becoming mainstream .I can confirm this as well: I see Teslas everywhere. Price action tends to precede fundamentals.

I dunno. And I say this as a Tesla owner (though not investor) and huge fan of the company. Market motion is just irrational market motion 99% of the time.

I mean, yes, the stopped clock was right this time. Most of the time it's just a stopped clock. Most bubbles are bubbles.

Most of the time when someone calls something a bubble, it isn't a bubble.

Most of the time, it is a bubble. But it can remain a bubble for quite some time. And if you acted on it early, you'd miss a lot of potential gains.

"we achieved the highest quarterly operating margin among all volume OEMs, based on the latest available data, demonstrating that EVs can be more profitable than combustion engine vehicles."

I don't mean this to sound snarky, but I just can't think of a nice way to put it... it seems obvious, based on everything I've ready, they're building these things faster/cheaper and worse than many other cars, regardless of the engine. When you're assembling your cars with zip ties and wood, you're certainly going to be profitable.

https://drivetribe.com/p/tesla-is-jerry-rigging-its-cooling-...

So many things I've read about Tesla quality makes me think that they are just not well built vehicles. I know I didn't bother looking at them when I bought a new car last year.

(I have no skin in this game, just a thought from a pretty casual observer)

If consumers are buying them, it’s somewhat of a moot point. How long did legacy automakers make poor quality vehicles for and still had demand for them?

(own Teslas, all mostly well built, the newer the better)

True, there are plenty of accounts of Cadillac’s and Fords having pieces falling off cars as people were driving down the road.

My parents GM was a constant piece by of crap and would endlessly overheat and brake.

> […] pieces falling off then driving sown the road

Your sentence is falling apart as well.

> Your sentence is falling apart as well.

While it can be valuable to point out to ESL speakers/writers, in this case that's not a productive criticism.

What is sad then, is that the reliability of the other automakers has been so optimized for income that their cars fall apart just as fast.

Maybe we should have more zip ties and wood in this industry, then? It's frustrating you've formed such a strong opinion without having inspected an actual car, or investigated why people love these things so much.

I don't think anyone needs to do anything at all to realize that zipties and wood are not things that should be holding a modern automobile together.

Zipties are all over the place in any modern car. They are used especially to hold wiring and hoses securely so they don't flop around and abrade against other parts of the car.

Why? If the fastener works, what is the issue? This is the exact sort of thinking that compounds into large delays.

In this case, Tesla obviously ran into an unexpected problem, and did not have a part to fasten this piece. They used various fasteners to secure it, and I'm not aware that anyone has had any problems with it, except that it seems strange.

At the time, Sandy Munro saw something similar in his tear-down, and didn't think it was a big deal. Obviously not a permanent part, but nothing to be worried about, either.

I don't think zip ties and wood are a structural part of the car. It look like it was just there to absorb vibration when they ran out of the foam or plastic part. Not great, but hardly deserving of all the criticism that it is getting.

This is the kind of fix you can get with a recall or late problem. It's not a "zip tie" it's a steel cable tie. The wood's a bit shonky but another manufacturer might have got plastic clips made instead of the wood and otherwise made exactly the same fix.

Tesla makes improvements at a much faster rate than conventional car companies, which results in what we might call 'hacks' as those changes matriculate through the other design components. It's not ideal, but decades of building software has pretty conclusively shown that agility and shipping quickly is a better practice than waiting for perfection.

You might say "well agility is great, except in my self-driving car" but I would remind you that people said the same thing about security software, infrastructure, etc. and were wrong every time. My believe is cars will get safer and better built faster with them innovating than with the traditional model of annual incremental releases. As a Tesla owner, I can also comment that the car feels no less well built than any other car I've owned.

> Tesla makes improvements at a much faster rate than conventional car companies

Is that really the case? I heard their motors are pretty good. But the batteries are mostly Philips and there is a lot of innovation happening thorughout the industry. The software is in parts miles ahead, but their latest UX dicisions are getting dumber and dumber.

> shown that agility and shipping quickly is a better practice than waiting for perfection.

I would argue there is a sweet spot, which Tesla is obviously missing.

> You might say "well agility is great, except in my self-driving car" but I would remind you that people said the same thing about security software, infrastructure, etc. and were wrong every time.

Except for example with the 737 MAX development or the whole "a package got deleted from npm and broke everything". There is a reason for LTS-versions and thorough testing, especially when lives are at stake. My best counterexample to your argument would be Teslas "Full-Self-Driving". It's next year for the last five years, totally insecure and unpredictable, killed people and isn't even better than what the competition has to offer.

I understand how the perusing the media gives this biased feeling, just feels like Tesla mentions make for a more engaged article. I ordered a MYLR without ever sitting in one due to how neat my friend's Model 3 was. After driving it for the first time, I doubt if I will buy another car. Tesla just makes amazing cars period. Much better than the 3 series I had before as a comparison.

Where does the acronym "MYLR" come from? (Not what it means, but where you got it from.)

I know I can slowly work out "Model Y, Long Range." But it's not intuitive and you kind of have to be a "Tesla insider" to get that far, or at least closely follow their options/trim levels.

It's a bit better than the "M3" I sometimes see thrown around, because an M3 is a BMW, through and through. The car is actually a Model 3, and there's no reason to abbreviate it further unless you're on a Tesla forum (in my opinion.)

Agreed, spent way too much time on the Tesla forums and did not consider the target audience :+1

I think the Tesla has always gotten an unfair amount of negative criticism in my opinion. Yes they have had quality issues, but usually those go down as the production line stabilizes and they usually come out and fix it for you if there’s an issue.

I myself put my Tesla under a microscope trying to find every unsatisfactory item on the delivery day and I did see some uneven panels. But my wife also got a Subaru the same year and I put it under the same kind of scrutiny and it also had similar differences in paneling. Especially under the hood, either the design of parts wasn’t that great or they just put some non standard items to hold things together. It didn’t seem any better than a Tesla (or any cheaper).

What's wrong with wood and zip ties? I have an expensive high quality 3d printer that uses zip ties.

Unless wood or zip ties are deficient for the applications they are in, they don't count as cutting corners in my book.

You don't see a problem with putting wood on a heat exchanger?

I don't think you sound snarky. You do sound stupid, though.

> https://drivetribe.com/p/tesla-is-jerry-rigging-its-cooling-...

That was a temporary thing that happened for like a few weeks a long time ago.

You'd think big three would be swimming in money since they don't have to offer the usual massive discounts

Interesting to see Model S/X production volumes dropping. I understand they want to sell more Model 3s, but I am wondering if this is a comment on demand for S/X?

The Model 3 was designed later than the original S and X, meaning it had a fit-and-finish which S and X lacked, at least until the recent refresh. I see that disparity as an example of Tesla disrupting itself, being willing to launch a lower-priced model which could compete with it's own luxury vehicles.

Since then, the S has been refreshed (including Plaid mode), making it more competitive. They are now in a situation where demand outstrips supply, with extensive delays to get hold of a Model X in particular. To me this signals that demand is now there, but Tesla is actively making the choice to focus on the 3 and Y production volume (which also contributes to the Cyber Truck, Roadster, and Semi all not being available yet).

They effectively had a long production outage for those models when they upgraded to the most recent version, with the steering yoke. Wait times were on the order of 6-12 months.

Well they refreshed S and X. To do that they had to completely shut down production lines and sold 0 cars in first quarter. The demand is strong and at some point I tried ordering a non plaid X and the delivery estimates were almost an year out. That’s mostly because there’s a pent up demand that they need to fulfill for the plaid versions before they decide to sell the regular one.

This year S/X production dropped not because there's lack of demand but because of a design / manufacturing refresh.

Here's the story in numbers:

  Q4 2020: 16,097 
  Q1 2021:      0
  Q2 2021:  2,340
  Q3 2021:  8,941
  Q4 2021: 13,109

As you can see, the refresh required Tesla to redo production lines, which were shutdown for the whole of Q1 2021

After that the production is steadily climbing up and is on a clear trajectory to surpass before-refresh numbers.

S/X are sold out months in advance and Tesla reduced number of variants and options, both facts pointing to being limited by production not demand for the cars.

The current wait time for a Model X Long Range is ~1 year (quoting January 2023 delivery). Folks are selling February reservation slots for $3000 or more example [1].

[1] https://teslamotorsclub.com/tmc/threads/model-x-plaid-reserv...

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