Is Tesla the new Apple

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-03-31/tesla-buyers-wait-in-lines-hundreds-deep-to-place-1-000-reservations-on-a-model-3

People queuing up around the block… CEO that’s becoming a cult figure…hugely overpriced stock…

Palantir must be balls deep in this stock by now.

For what it’s worth, I’ve wondered for a while why US people don’t make the best cars. The best engineering talent aggregates here; it has just historically been focused on computer related things. Once car engineering becomes cool to young engineers and the industry moves out of Jesus land, I have no doubt that the US can make better cars than the Germans.

I don’t know about this particular stock. It does seemed over hyped, but I have no real framework to determine the fair valuation.

Market cap is $31 billion compared with GM which is $48 billion. Tesla sells <100k cars per annum. GM sells about 10m. Tesla is burning through cash at a ferocious pace and has never made a profit. Also, the competition in the EV space is only set to intensify from here out.

Obviously Tesla could come good, but the current share price is currently baking in about 10 years of perfect operational performance. Huge downside risks, not a lot of upside. SELL

Where do you think cars and car parts are being made, and where do you think this Jesus Land is?

Jesus land is Mexico. Pronounced Heyyyysus land

Sorry, I might have over generalized; I’m a coast centric person. What I mean is, you’re not going to get the best Caltech/MIT/Stanford guy to move to Detroit, MI. You can, however, get them to move to San Jose and live with their Google friends. The top 1% of engineers is 100x better than the next 10%. These guys have just never even thought about entering the auto industry until now. Car parts can be made anywhere. However, the center of design, engineering, and research needs to be in an intellectual center.

Moreover, the best tech project (like Google search) tend to come from academic research. The US is the world leader in such research, with the most, best quality, and highest funded universities. It is natural that if more US students decide to focus on battery technology or car technology (like DARPA self driving stuff), the best technology will also arise here for commercial use.

All the Japanese and Korean companies used to have a huge white collar presence in the LA Basin. Over the last 10 years or so they’ve moved out of state – TX i think. LA and OC still have some significant auto industry employment exposure though.

Indeed. But the point remains that best engineering talent has not joined the auto inustry in the US until recently (and even now, in quite small numbers). Geography is one thing - and even then, LA is not the top technology location. Attracting the best talent in the country is another thing.

This may be the case in software, but what makes you think it is true in mechanical/auto engineering? It is a completely different industry with very different production cycles.

Not at all. Different industry. Different customers. Competition exist and is in same growth phase as Tesla.

Completely agree with Palantir ^.

Interesting to see the preorders number at 180k, seems massive. I guess we will see how they execute but Tesla could certainly become a monster if thet do.

How else then would you explain how Tesla has made a better EV than any other company’s EV, and based on JD powers, better than any other car in general?

Anyway, the car is very complicated, and many hard and soft components are important. How the car handles or adapts to different driving conditions, for instance, is based on software, which Tesla updates regularly over the internet. Tesla also has many patents related to battery technology or the car’s propulsion, which might not have been possible with a less talented engineering staff.

I do not think the production cycle is substantially different from software. How often does Tesla make a new car, compared to say, how often Microsoft makes a new version of Windows?

Anyway, in case it is not clear, I think Tesla’s main advantages are their ability to attract top talent and the halo that Elon Musk himself projects over the company. They might still fail, since it’s hard to break into such an industry. However, they are doing things that would be basically impossible for many other people.

http://www.highsnobiety.com/2012/05/11/rimac-automobili-concept_one/

Does the gigafactory have a distinct valuation and NPV separate from the % of production that feeds the auto lines that is being overlooked? I feel like in this tech age that gigafactory has to be worth something. Honest question, I don’t follow this name / space.

These are the types of names I typically avoid like the plague though.

the best electric car ever is the prius. even larry david has one

There are a lot of things that are responsible for Tesla’s success, primarily Elon Musk’s vision but other structural things as well beyond the scope of this thread, but we shall ignore each and every variable and just assume it is because they attract the best talent.

I am not in TSLA stock, partly because the valuation doesn’t make sense and also because I decided that SUNE was the next AAPL, and may or may not have put a significant portion of my portfolio in it.

TSLA is modeled after AAPL, but doesn’t have the economics that AAPL has.

Adaptive cruise control was an option for a Ford Taurus in 2009. Like Apple though, it was not invented until it was put in a Tesla. “Building castles in the sky.”

any idea if tesla will get permission to sell directly to consumers instead of owning dealrships?

id prob go all in if this gets approved

http://www.autoremarketing.com/retail/direct-to-consumer-sales-debate-goes-way-beyond-tesla