I'd expect to see some pullback soon, and probably a "sell the news" type event when TSLA reports earnings next week.
I had a friend ask me if its a good time to buy TSLA a few weeks ago. I said it looked pretty pricey and he should wait for a pull back... which seems to never come. Im starting to think that shorts keeping driving this higher until we all stop caring about it around $5000.
Interesting day for Tesla. We all knew that a dip had to happen. Not possible for any stock to only go up, every day, without a little pause. Did short sellers make anything today? A few interesting articles. Some opinion pieces. Looks like there's a price drop. Are sales slowing down?
Price drops have always been a goal for them. The company mission is to make the world greener. Price drops through efficiency and better engineering is a way to usher that in. Production for demand, is and always has been the question mark to date, as to my understanding.
Audi is returning their focus to ICE. VW just fired their head of software. MBZ sold 397 EQC in 2019. So far this year, they are selling less. Bolt sales were never great and are in decline. The Tesla price drop just made the job of competing with them even more difficult. The majors have been so busy dismissing Tesla they are now sleeping in the bed they crapped in. Imagine taking over any major auto, right now. Your job would be to guide the company on a path to survival, not to dominate in any way. In March of this year, Elon said FSD is going to increase in price as it gets closer to fruition. At the time, he wrote the ultimate price would be around $100K. On the energy storage front, the distributed power plant is looking like the future of power systems. That's Tesla. Accomplishing this design will require the Tesla GridManager software platform. This is another industry where they are starting by selling batteries and they will end by selling software. Tesla is morphing into a software company and those are valued with a completely different approach than hardware companies.
Comparing today's Fremont pics from four days ago, it appears the spring structure that will house GA6 is now complete. I'm pretty confident this will be a second Model Y line. I believe the plan is to convert one of the Model 3 lines to Model Y, making 2 x Model 3 and 3 x Model Y general assembly lines. Back channels are oddly silent on the state of the battery cell assembly line at Fremont. It seems reasonable to assume it is destined for production, or they wouldn't have built it at Fremont. I think speculative thinking suggests the Fremont equipment will produce cylindrical cells. It sounds like Roadrunner will produce prismatic cells, so those won't be needed for a few months when the Plaid edition Model S (and possibly X but no one has mentioned it) becomes available. The time line fits with construction at Roadrunner that is happening, right now. They will need it online by the end of the year, or so.
A few years ago, there was a field right next to the South Gate. Right behind the test track. I remember that somebody farmed it. Tesla should have acquired the property. Perfect for expansion. I don't know how it worked out. ThermoFisher got the lot and erected a building.
Tesla had been on the verge of bankruptcy until 2016. It is miraculous they managed to bootstrap that company. It's only now with their infinite valuation and bottomless ability to fundraise they can buy whatever they need. Long term, I think Fremont is going to be turned into a self standing plant to feed a half million vehicles per year into the California market. Perhaps the seat plant will still be separate, a half mile away, and batteries can come from Roadrunner that is also nearby. That will free up Giga Nevada to become the a million vehicle per year self standing plant. No more building cells, batteries, and motors in Nevada, and then shipping them down. The self sustaining topology will make sense, once FSD is sufficiently mature that cars can be built in Nevada and drive themselves to their new owners, anywhere in the country. That day isn't all that far off but it's not today.
Edit:. Teslarati just published an article that makes it look like I just plagiarized their content. Some decent questions are being voted up in the order. I was too quick to criticize the questions. I am astounded by how bad some of the question submissions from retail investors for the Q2 EC are. There are a few good ones, also. Hopefully, the voting system will filter out the garbage. Sometimes good information comes from poor questions. Personally, I'd like to hear about the Kauai solar farm with regard to it's profitability and if production has achieved the designed fraction. It's been operating since 2017 so there should be some data. I'd like to hear an update on Puerto Rico and ongoing effort there (ie: powerwall market penetration, hospital and school solar, etc.) Actually, I'd like to hear as much detail as possible about all aspects of the power production side of the business. I'd also like to know the Supercharger production capacity at Giga New York. I speculate Tesla has achieved 30~50% of the needed Supercharger network build-out in North America so, will they still build Superchargers in New York when the roll-out slows and focus shifts to other continents in a few years? It seems to me, it would make sense to build Superchargers in Shanghai. I wonder if they plan to do so? Everyone is fixated on the automotive side but model Y motor options and interior fabric questions don't require C* executives to answer.
there is a facility in Lathrop. What is that for? US auto was The Big 3 for a long time. The last time that I could remember somebody trying to build and sell cars, As a new U.S. car company, was John DeLorean. DELorean ran out of money. Tesla fundraising made all the difference. People are willing to believe in the product. They believed in the product enough to order cars before the car was built. Venture Capital, shareholders, and consumers believed.
It is widely reported, but not confirmed, to be the casting center. Also, Welcome. Do you have a name that fits into my character set? It's always nice to meet a fellow Tesla follower.
Any idea what the estimate maximum.production number is? If the factory is full capacity operation, how many cars a quarter, or per year? I am excited about the technology. Not the car. I think Tesla as a technology company could be more profitable. Now that Ford, Toyota, Honda, GM, et al.know that Tesla is capable of building a car, and the people will buy the car, they could present the technology. License it out. Turn Tesla production over to a larger company with a dealership network. License the tech and updates. Focus solely on development. Hypothetically license the entire car to whomever wants the Tesla in their dealerships. Maybe Honda or Volkswagen could actually make the car under license, and sell twice as many via their distributor networks to dealers. Then license the tech to every manufacturer. Every car company could manufacturer electric cars with the Tesla platform. Tesla will make tons off the backend support, service, training, and updates. All without the expense of trying to operate factories and distribute cars without dealerships. Tesla could get paid for every.car sold in the world. Instead of fighting to sell cars to the world. Microsoft sells technology. Not computers. Microsoft doesn't incur the experience of operating production factories. Let whomever wants to build the computer set up a factory and worry about sales. Let them sell Microsoft in the computer.
Fremont = 600K units per year, with GA6 that just opened Shanghai = 250K units per year, according to Tesla
As someone who's been in the auto industry in an Assembly plant since 2011, 600,000 units per year out of one facility is a pipe dream. You'd have to build 68 vehicles per hour, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week all year without any down time at all. No plant is capable of that. Even if they automate more than anyone else, there will still be human components that need to be installed, so the line can only run so fast.
Interesting. Here is an article from May 2020 in which they cite Tesla claims of 400K unit production of 3/Y across 4 general assembly lines. They have since added a 5th GA for Model Y. They also mention their goal is 500K unit production of 3/Y in 2020. They can also build 90K units of S/X, so that's about 600K and it should be in place right now, with the commissioning of GA6. Perhaps Tesla is exaggerating? https://electrek.co/2020/05/20/tesla-installs-production-robots-fremont-factory/#:~:text=The automaker currently claims a,the end of the year. Tesla has always been cell constrained, until very recently. Apparently, they are just now getting to where they have enough cells to run the lines at full speed. For as long as I can recall, they would shut the line down for a while, let batteries accumulate, and then run the lines at maximum speed to test capacity. The battery shortage is why the shutdowns of 2017 were no big deal. As I understand, Tesla plans two, three week scheduled shutdowns per year for maintenance and improvements. That's the best information I have. It sounds like you are suggesting these numbers are a little suspicious?
I guess I haven't done enough research. Re-reading what you're posting, I missed the fact that they have multiple assembly lines. This will obviously allow more production. I still find the numbers suspect. They probably do what every car company does though and not factor in any sort of normal downtime. For example, my plant used to always have a target number of vehicles they wanted built per 10 hour shift. It allowed like 3 minutes of down time per shift or something like that. That's completely unrealistic in a production environment. I believe we hit the goal like 3 times in 4 years or something like that. Multiple body shops/paint shops/assembly lines will also produce extreme variance. Quality suffers as variance is added. Long-term, that could be a problem. Think back to the 80's/90's when American car company quality was widely known as far inferior to foreign cars. Now that it's back to basically even across all companies, people still have pre-conceived notions that American companies quality is worse. Tesla could suffer the same problem in terms of quality concerns. That's not to say they'll have quality concerns, but high variance increases the chances that they will. According to the bolded above, that's a lot of maintenance. My company usually has 2 scheduled down weeks per year, and due to production demands usually cuts one of them. If they have 6 assembly lines, they could shut them down in cycles to never quit building in theory. I'm assuming they'll have multiple body shops and paint shops as well in order to provide enough product. Body and paint shops also have a cycle time. I don't necessarily think they're "exaggerating", but moreso probably doing "basic math" and not realistic math. For example "this line can run at X speed, therefore we can build X vehicles per hour". Instead of: "this line WILL run at X speed because of cycle time allotment for operators, etc. so therefore we'll actually build X vehicles per hour". Ignoring break times for operators, shift change, etc. I'm just saying don't expect them to actually build 600,000 vehicles per year. I'd expect them to build <400,000.
They registered 105,000 serial numbers in 2019Q4 with Fremont being the only production facility. That extrapolates to 420K unit annual production and GA5 was only sampling, at that time. So, Mr. Pyle Styx, it sounds like we cannot say with confidence the production capacity of the Tesla Fremont facility.
I will add that my valuation model uses a likely case of Tesla achieving a production capacity of 750K units of annualized production in 2020. If this number is over-stated, that will significantly impact the valuation.
