[jonathankoren]

Every car manufacturer is a supply chain and and owns their own component production. Ford owns Motorcraft. General Motors owns AC Delco.

Tesla doesn't have nearly the size of the distribution network of any of the oil companies.

The fact is Tesla was trading at 1000x historic earnings, and 161x future earnings, or to put it another way, 10x any other car manufacturer, and this this was before this deal. [0]

This simply doesn't make any sense.

[0] https://www.tradestation.com/insights/2021/04/08/tesla-overv...

[Seanambers]

As long as Tesla can grow at or around 50% a year all those numbers you are using are useless. They will be halved every year from the current level. Yeah right now its seems crazy, and it is a unbelievably high valuation. But its more a sign of things to come.

The other OEMs are laden with debt, which Tesla doesn't have so any comparison there would be at the EV level which doesn't make Tesla look that out of line considering it is about to overtake in 3-4 years most of the companies it is compared with. Also that debt the other OEMs have, was used to build ICE factories and technologies which are quickly becoming outdated.

If and its a rather big IF I'll grant you that Tesla manages to achieve what they aim for which is 20 million cars in 2030, thats effectively 1/5 market share globally. Add into that the energy storage, charging network, solar roof tiles, AI and FSD.

However any signs of growth weakness or interest rate changes will wreak havoc for sure.

Even if Tesla falters, the other LICE OEMs are destined to fail, maybe 1-2 survives (GM/VW), the cat is out of the bag and what looked like a totally entrenched industry has been blown wide open by Tesla, and loads of other startups are following through.

[jonathankoren]

Tesla needs to execute, and I’m not sure that’s their strong suit. Sure they identified that it was finally time for the electric car, and made an electric car that wasn’t ugly as sin (gdiaf CitiCar and EV-1), but theiyre plagued with manufacturing delays and poor workmanship. The other manufacturers simply are better at putting quality cars out the door.

Sure they were late to the game, and but it’s not a foregone conclusion that Tesla (or any startup) is going to dominate this market.

As for AI and FSD, I’ll put my flag in the sand. We will not have production fully autonomous self driving cars (ie cars without controls) on uncontrolled surface streets in 20 years. From what I understand, the technology has hit a plateau, and there’s just way too many edge cases. If this wasn’t the case, you wouldn’t have people like Andrew Ng going around telling people to redesign cities to make it easier for robot drivers.

If it does happen, it’s not going to be Tesla. I don’t think they’re the technology leader here. Last time I read something, Cruise and Waymo were leading, and Elon’s insistence on not having lidars was holding Tesla back.

[Seanambers]

Well, the fog of 'war' is thick right now. I've chosen to place my capital and belief with Karpathy and Elon. Tesla seems like to best multivariate bet and it's priced like a winner in that respect.

With regards to execution, I don't think anyone has done a better job of scaling physical production faster than Tesla? And you don't have to like Elon but he sure does know a thing or two about this.

I've heard both the quality argument and the Tesla killer argument for so long that I no longer believe it to be true. If they could, they already would - I would suggest that you drive a Tesla for a couple of days, then go back to ICE. All the revving of the engine and performance hooplas seems so last century after that. A comparison kills the ICE alternative (except for long ranges atm).

The consumer will if given a choice (Tesla supply is restriced) choose the best offering at the lowest price and everything is lined up for Tesla to be just that.

The big joker from my perspective is what the EU / US / Japan / Korea will do to ensure strategic production capacity / industrial strength capacity, enormous subsidies are definitely on the table.

China is all in on electric so they have nothing to lose.

[jonathankoren]

> With regards to execution, I don't think anyone has done a better job of scaling physical production faster than Tesla? And you don't have to like Elon but he sure does know a thing or two about this.

Does he though? Elon's hand can be traced directly to production and safety issues. Lest we forget his hubris in trying to do final assembly with robots, a task that was tried and dismissed by multiple "legacy" manufacturers, and directly resulted in defects and manufacturing slow downs. He's not even technically a founder of Tesla. He partially financed the A round, and then started telling everyone he founded the company. Even SpaceX widely seen as Gwynne Shotwell's baby. I will say that he he's enough money and a fan base to make a bunch of meme stocks. That's something.

As far as driving a Tesla, I have. I test drove a Model S several years ago. I thought the regenerative braking was weird, but something I would have to get used to. I liked the exterior of the Model S, but I did not like the interior. I thought it was ugly and empty (a personal preference), and the infotainment system a cruel joke that not only lacked features common on cheaper cars (CarPlay), but was filled with knockoffs (Slacker instead of Spotify or Pandora, and Google Maps without Google turn-by-turn in particular) and pointless gimmicks (Paint). Even with their v10 update that brought Spotify to the US (finally a win), also brought a bunch of video streaming services that only work when the car is in park. (Why bother? Just use your phone.)

I think you should compare a Model S to a Porsche Taycan. They're comparably priced plugin electrics, but the Porsche is well... a Porsche, a finely made automobile with attention to detail. A Model S is slapdashed together; but you're right, Tesla buyers don't seem to care. Also, for some reason Tesla owners purchase their cars instead of leasing them, the only electric car owners to do so. I can't explain either of these facts.

[fma]

I also question the quality and flexibility of the supply chain Tesla has. During the start of COVID, Tesla GM and Ford said they'll manufacturer ventilators. 2 out of 3 reconfigured their assembly lines to mass produce ventillators. One bought CPAP machines from China that hospitals had no use for.