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Comment by twblalock | Hacker News Reader

I treat it as a meme stock.

Tesla is actually a valuable company and I wouldn't be surprised if it truly is more valuable than Ford or GM at this point -- but for a meme stock, the fundamentals are not tied to the price at all. It could go up or down based on a Tweet.

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Completely agree. Tesla might be worth about as much as any of the major car manufacturers, but not more than all of them put together. We've already seen Ford and others put EVs on the road, so there isn't much of a moat there. Either Ford, GM, etc. are all wildly undervalued or Tesla is wildly overvalued. One of those seems more likely than the other to me.

The Koreans have some particularly strong EV models now. Kia EV6, Hyundai Ionic 5 & 6

Until other public charging solutions become widespread, the Supercharger network will continue to be a killer feature for Tesla.

In the US market. In Europe it's far easier to find a CCS charger

Several Target stores near me have charging stations now. 7/11 starting to put in some as well. Some companies have put in charging spots for employees. Even our library has 3 charging parking slots.

EV charging stations are a lot less demanding in the form of safety, environmental regulation, and liability compared to fossil fuel fueling. You can put one in any parking lot that has a bit of slack space.

It's not that easy. Have you seen the electrical infrastructure that those need?

We have some spaces with Chargepoint chargers where I work, and they are powered by several electrical boxes that are each about half as big as a parking space. There is some serious juice being pushed through those -- and the Chargepoint chargers are only serving 30-40 amps, which is about the same as a home charger and nowhere near what a Telsa Supercharger delivers.

This kind of stuff is not trivial, or cheap. Tesla spent a lot of money to get their network to where it is.

True but less likely to end up a Superfund site.

the big issue is not in urban areas. + superchargers usually have 10+ stations, bigger ones in nowhere having 20+. Most of the non tesla chargers I've seen in the wild are 3 max

Still 3 years behind at very least of a Tesla. Disclaimer: I own a Tesla M3 but I really, really tried to buy a Ioniq5 before finally buying Tesla.

Well, Tesla still has some of the "first mover advantage" left: they secured gigantic supply of batteries, other manufacturers might struggle to get their hands on sufficient quantities.

The other moat was supposed to be Full Self Driving. Trouble is, it's been "coming soon" for a while now and a cruise control system that's a bit more ambitious and risky than other OEMs' isn't nearly as obviously a moat, and a class action lawsuit from the people that paid for the promise doesn't help matters. Even if you're bullish on Level 4 robotaxis within the near future, Tesla doesn't look like the most likely winner of that market.

It's not just FSD. Even supposedly mainstream analysts have based their targets for Tesla on non-existent revenue streams and assumptions about everything going up and to the right. For example you can't make a cheap Tesla and keep the same margins.

I would have bet that this would have come unraveled based on the dubious rescue of Solar City. But it was going to come unraveled.

> so there isn't much of a moat there

Tesla has not succeeded by building 'moats' (an anti-competitive concept favoured by monopolists). Tesla has succeeded and continues to succeed by their pace of (real, not fake) innovation, and there have been no signs, in my opinion, that they are losing this edge. Rather, again in my opinion, they continue to pull away from the major car manufacturers on this front.

And yet MKBHD notes that a Chevy that sells for $30k matches his own Tesla Model S feature-for-feature[0].

It's easy to quibble about that, of course, but the Chevy costs 30% as much.

Hard to see how Tesla is "pulling away" from anybody in 2022.

0. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NuaFJTQMoPI

Can GM produce this car in volume and with any sort of profit margin? i.e. Are they getting anywhere near Tesla with its manufacturing and battery production innovations?

If you can show me they can and they are then I'll be interested. I'm interested in business facts, not sponsored endorsements by influencers.

They're shipping 70k this year as demand rises, which it is mostly doing because of the big price drop between 2022 and 2023. So yes, it appears that they can produce them in volume and make money doing so.

P.S. Pretty sure MKBHD isn't getting paid by Chevy. His sponsors are phone/tech companies, even on his car-focused videos.

Tesla's market cap (~$500B) is still five times the combined value of GM and Ford (both ~$50B). There's a lot of air left in that bag.

The market cap of the 7 big car-companies combined (Toyota, Honda, Mercedes, VW, Ford, GM, BMW) = $557b. Tesla market cap = $527b.

This means at comparable margins, for Tesla to reach its current valuation, 3/4 cars sold in the developed world would have to be Teslas. For reference, the marketcap of the entire automobile industry [1] minus Tesla is $1300b.

[1] https://companiesmarketcap.com/automakers/largest-automakers...

Tesla is a stock to gamble on. Unlike GME, there is probably a lower bound on how much you can lose. (maybe ~70% at worst if Elon has a heart attack). But, 70% is a long way down.

> This means at comparable margins,

So what about in reality, where Tesla makes over double the margins of GM or Ford[0] or on the extreme end, 8x Toyota's profit margins[1]?

[0]: https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/teslas...

[1]: https://asia.nikkei.com/Business/Automobiles/Tesla-earns-8-t...

Tesla has a similar operating margins as BMW or Mercedes, which makes sense because they only sell premium cars.

Once Tesla starts selling Prius & Corolla competitors, their margins should go down accordingly.

I am no MBA but how do mass market auto makers defend margins like these in the presence of robust competition? Porsche is a brand built basically on top of VW infrastructure and they painfully win their high margins from expensive add-ons to cars which are (mostly) shared platforms with VW and Audi. Can Tesla carve out a similar niche? If you look at value, Teslas are not at the top of the list in terms of quality or the percentage by which their batteries empirically under/over-perform their range ratings. Consumers are slowly coming to learn how to compare EVs and no matter how well things go for Tesla I am a bit skeptical that their profit margins will survive fully intact.

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