freerobby

> I cannot for the life of me rationalize spending so much on a car. The $35,000 just doesn't make sense in New England, so I need to add in AWD. Then I need to add in the autopilot because isn't that the point of owning a Tesla so you don't have to drive your car someday? Now, with government incentives, this car is $50k.

Nah, that's only if you're throwing in LR and a Premium Interior.

$35k + $6k for AWD + $5k for AP = $46k.

That's before any incentives or gas savings. And you're also getting an ADAS that outperforms Comma, a huge and growing Supercharger network, and all the OTA updates and hardware utilization to come. Skip Enhanced Autopilot software and you're only $5k over the average new car price (before incentives!).

Tesla has built a profitable EV in a market that treats EVs as loss leaders. The market's about to learn a hard lesson.

[1]https://mediaroom.kbb.com/2018-02-01-Average-New-Car-Prices-...

I'm being 100% truthful, but I recognize that saying this doesn't establish any additional credibility. :)

I didn't mean to make this about me or my investment strategy. I was just trying to back up the sentiment that the poster above me expressed -- that people with skin in the game will see this settlement as a great thing for Tesla. I have a lot of skin in the game and that's exactly how I feel.

Yeah, this is closer to how I got here (cost basis is way more than 2%, but nowhere near 25%). As you hint at though, there's a cognitive bias in holding my position by this reasoning -- my gains are a "sunk benefit" and I am where I am regardless of how I got here.

For me, it boils down to two things:

1. I'm pretty conservative with the rest of my money (index funds, rental property). If Tesla went bankrupt tomorrow, I'd be fine. Don't get me wrong -- it'd be a bad day. But the financial hit wouldn't threaten my long-term happiness.

2. I only buy individual stocks when I feel the market has wildly misjudged a company. Tesla fit this to a tee, particularly (but not exclusively) in the early days. I took a large early position and have been buying dips along the way (yes, still). By my judgment, a dollar invested in Tesla still has a much higher expected value over 10 years than a dollar invested in any other equity that I feel qualified to assess. I would love to diversify the highly aggressive part of my portfolio, but hard as I try, I cannot find a deal this good in any other public company. So I've decided how much I'm willing to lose on what I believe is a great bet, and have invested accordingly.

> I think a Tesla shareholder should be pretty happy with this settlement. The $20m fine at a time when Tesla is already running low of cash is certainly tough news, but every other part of this settlement is probably good news for the company's long term health.

Hi there. More than 1/4 of my net worth, and over 1/2 of my equity holdings are in TSLA. I agree with every word of this. The $20M hurts, but on net, I think this is better for Tesla than if Elon had won the lawsuit.

Fun fact: in California and Idaho, it is a capital crime to commit perjury that results in a wrongful execution.

https://deathpenaltyinfo.org/crimes-punishable-death-penalty

He doesn't even need to do that! The feds need to prove he never intended to take Tesla private, or that "funding secured" was somehow isolated from those intentions and tweeted disingenuously to move the stock price. Good luck with that -- all evidence is to the contrary (talks had taken place and the Saudis have entered the market in earnest, and relevant emails had been sent out across the entire company). It was a dumb tweet for a lot of reasons, and it's reasonable to subpoena emails and investigate (and obviously civil claims and losses are another story), but dwelling on "fraud" of all wrongs here is downright silly.

Andover resident here. The local response has been super impressive. I've never seen so many emergency response vehicles and personnel mobilized so quickly from so many different places.

We drove north to New Hampshire on instinct as soon as we had a sense of what was happening (about an hour before the formal evacuation), and saw police and firetrucks heading south the entire way. After dinner, on our way back south (not home, but to another place to stay tonight), all the highway exits in the affected areas were closed, with police at each exit offering guidance to drivers who weren't sure what to do or where to go.

The affected communities are suburban -- not in the boonies, but not urban either, and definitely not used to having to respond so urgently to a widespread problem like this. They appear to have been very well trained and ready for it.

Real answer: Tesla would be acquired before filing for Chapter 7 bankruptcy.

Theoretical answer: The cars would continue to function as cars, but network-dependent features like Autopilot and remote unlocking/monitoring would cease.

I think the actors who are eager to see Tesla and SpaceX fail are more powerful and motivated than is typical, but I acknowledge this is an unproven hypothesis.

However, Tesla does not need to be exceptional for the larger point to remain. Former heavily shorted companies have dealt with the same thing. Look at the war between Fairfax and hedge funds in the early 00s (similar claims, similarly evidence (i.e. circumstantial but unprovable), similar results (stock took hits and then jumped as financials improved).

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/fairfax-t...

Someone at TMC wrote up a more thorough and Tesla-analogous explanation if you are curious: https://teslamotorsclub.com/tmc/threads/elon-musk-vs-short-s...

His analysis is riddled with such fallacies. The other huge one is a conflation of the general with the specific, i.e.:

> the vast majority of the time, when a public-company chief executive officer complains that short sellers are sabotaging his company, he is talking nonsense

Sure, but we're not talking about the vast majority. We're talking about the most heavily shorted stock on a US exchange, and the one which entrenched players are most interested in seeing fail. Tesla is an outlier in myriad ways; deriving assumptions from the median makes no sense at all.

I think Levine has been pretty hit-or-miss on this saga. His line of thinking on short-seller narratives misses the point entirely:

> Elon Musk has been banging on for ages about how short sellers are trying to sabotage his company, Tesla Inc. [... examples and citations....] This does seem to be mostly nonsense. If you build lots of good cars and sell them for more money than it costs you to build them, then you will make a lot of money and no amount of desperate pushing of narrative will result in your destruction.

This is only relevant if you evaluate Tesla as a mature company that operates on fundamentals. Nobody sees it this way yet. The entire point of a short seller pushing a narrative is to influence the capital markets, ideally to prevent Tesla from getting funding or more realistically to worsen the terms it gets, to prevent it from reaching a state where it can operate on fundamentals.

It's perfectly fair to question the extent to which short sellers are working to influence things (or how successful they've been), but it's certainly not unprecedented[1], and just yesterday on the front page of HN was an ex-employee (who was highly critical of Musk), who felt Musk "isn't totally paranoid" because they had caught "bad actors" and found "advanced persistent threats in [their] network"[2].

Has Musk overreacted? Perhaps. Has he been wrong in his assumptions in some of the examples he's cited? Almost certainly. But that doesn't contradict the logic of the concern or make it "mostly nonsense."

[1]https://teslamotorsclub.com/tmc/threads/elon-musk-vs-short-s...

[2]https://twitter.com/atomicthumbs/status/1032944615475695616

> A tweet is not an SEC filing and it can never be one. It’s 140 characters typed on your phone. It is not reviewed by corporate counsel. It is not reviewed at all.

Right, but this is exactly the downside of disclosing things via Twitter. If Elon uses tweets and SEC filings interchangeably (that is what he's doing here -- this would ordinarily be disclosed in an 8-K), the rules are going to apply to both. It's not that I'm unsympathetic to his intentions, but the SEC can't carve out exceptions for impulsive behavior just because it happened on social media -- traders are acting on this information in real time and need to be able to trust it.

(I agree the calls for imprisonment are beyond insane; I focus on the Twitter vs 8-K part of the story because I find it more interesting, and I'd like to see more CEOs speak directly to followers as Elon does but with a bit less impulsivity).

> It's also worth mentioning that the idea of breaking long-term financial news for a Fortune 500 company via Twitter of all places is highly unorthodox and suspect in its own right, so I doubt this comment would have much effect in practice.

Elon can't have this both ways, though. Tesla has disclosed that it will use social media for financially material announcements, and Elon has embraced this. It can't be legitimate most of the time and illegitimate when it makes for a convenient defense.

Personally, I don't think Elon's intention was to defraud -- I think he was impulsive and careless, and I expect the SEC will reach the same conclusion. But I think if he's going to use Twitter to talk about such things, his tweets need to carry the same weight as an equivalent SEC filing.

It reinforces the narrative that this was his choice about what is best for Tesla, and not a market-driven outcome to remain public in spite of a desire to privatize.

Runtime isolation is distinct from compile/build-time isolation. You're citing the latter, but it's the former that matters. Tesla gets this right, e.g. an interrupt in the MCU does not have any effect on braking, drive-by-wire, or ADAS systems while a car is in operation.

Oh, I agree about that. I'm just saying that even if everybody felt that funding was secured, the price would still not be at $420, because there are other risks of a deal like this falling through.

There's more to a buyout than the funding though; lack of board approval or any agreement on terms (i.e. not just financial terms) are obviously deal-breakers.

Certainly the market doubts whether this deal will go through, but it's not clear to me that it's all about Tesla's access to capital.

You need to get current shareholders to sell their stock.

I've been working on this project nights and weekends for about a year. It's been a fun mix of a lot of things -- hardware, software, CAD, web apps, device drivers.

It's still rather primitive, but it's reached a point where I believe it could be useful to other astronomers.

I'd appreciate feedback from anyone about the web site, video walkthrough, and product. If you are into astronomy or astrophotography, I'd especially appreciate any feedback you have about the product itself, and what you'd find useful.

Thanks in advance for checking it out.

> Apple and Tesla can't support their designs indefinitely and remain profitable.

I don't see any indication of this. The support windows for all Apple and Tesla products are in line with consumer expectations. The two-year shelf life for iOS devices is driven more by market demand and the way that phone contracts (used to) work than anything else. You don't see that problem with Macbook Pros or iMacs, where consumers expect a longer lifespan.

The expectations for a car are even longer, which is why Tesla still supports its earliest vehicles, and says it will continue to do so moving forward. I don't see any reason to disbelieve this, nor evidence that the company can't sustain it.

> From an engineering standpoint, Apples devices became hard to repair because they optimized for weight and size over maintainability. Would Tesla do the same?

> Tesla offers very long warranties (I believe is 4/8 years for vehicle/drivetrain), so making things hard to repair would likely be costing them money.

The Apple analogy is a good one. Tesla makes similar tradeoffs, but instead of optimizing for size and weight, they are optimizing for safety, performance, and ease-of-manufacturing.

Sometimes, there is no conflict. For instance, Tesla's battery is designed to be super low to the ground to lower the center of gravity, reduce rollovers, and improve turning. They managed to achieve this via a bolt-on assembly that is easy to install and and just as easy to replace. Hurrah!

But in other places, the tension is very much felt. Replacing the front radar (even on pre-facelift cars, before it was hidden) requires removing the entire front bumper cover. Replacing a broken paddle gear in a rear door handle often requires removing the door's window.

If modularity were a first-order goal, these procedures would be a lot simpler, and major hardware upgrades (like Autopilot hardware or the 2nd gen MCU) would be reasonably feasible. But to the extent that modularity comes at even the slightest structural cost, or unnecessary weight, or any difficulty in robotic assembly, Tesla has erred away from it.

I assume their calculus is:

* Safety and performance are what they compete on

* Ease of manufacturing is their competitive advantage

* Modularity and cheap repair costs are "nice to have", but less important than the previous two.

It's not "easy" (or common) because a lot of unusual things need to line up for it to work. You need an established company with big pockets, a new company that poses an existential threat but which also desperately needs cash, and a credible enough narrative that you can push to the financial markets, to get picked up by the business markets, and create a feedback loop.

The examples you gave don't fit the model. They are all profitable, they do not constitute an existential threat as Tesla does to big oil, and the relative differences in market cap is nowhere near as big between the parties. It's hard to overstate the proportions here -- the entire $12B of short interest in Tesla represents less than 2% of the Big Oil market cap. And that's without touching Aerospace/foreign governments that might want to starve SpaceX by way of Tesla.

I think the last two are good reasons to short Tesla. I wouldn't touch those bets with a ten foot pole, but they are entirely rational depending on what you believe.

If you don't believe those things, then Tesla having a greater market cap than GM or Ford makes sense, because Tesla's future cashflows would be greater than GM's or Ford's.

Production deadlines aren't very compelling to me except to the extent that they starve a company of its operating budget. Heck, other car companies routinely show off concept cars that aren't only late but in fact never ship. It's not a big deal though, because those companies aren't betting the farm on those cars, whereas Tesla has needed the Roadster, S, and 3 to be successful to continue operating. That will be less the case on future cars though. So it may have been a reason to short up until now, but not so moving forward.

This analogy only works if you view the economics through the singular, zero-sum lens of Tesla. Imagine you have billions of dollars in big oil, or traditional auto manufacturing. If you can take a few percent of your net worth to establish a short position on Tesla, and in so doing create market weariness that could help bring down the company, then that would be a good investment for you overall even if you are unable to recover any of it (because your external holdings stand to benefit or be harmed accordingly). The fact that you stand to benefit directly on the short if you succeed is just icing on the cake.

> Ok, we have different definitions of maturity. To me, it means your system's core functionality works reliably in the use cases it is designed for. Nice-to-haves like speed smoothing are secondary.

I agree with this definition, but I see it more as a sliding scale than a checkbox. I think it comes down to whether you look at each system in isolation or whether you put them all on a single spectrum. I'm imagining human driving at one end of a spectrum and fully automated driving at the other, and looking at what percent of driving conditions each system provides a safety or utility improvement in (so you can see why features like speed smoothing and reacting to nearby cars quickly become relevant to my thinking). But I can see why, judging each system on its own, one would say that Autosteer is less mature at what it aims to do than simpler and more constrained systems are at what they aim to do.

You summarized my take on Autopilot as accurately as one can in a single sentence (thank you for that btw). Like you, I look forward to the day when data is available to resolve competing hypotheses like these. Elon pledged on the last earnings call to release quarterly Autopilot data reports; I'm hoping those will include Autopilot vs non-Autopilot driving usage and their respective highway accident rates, broken down by feature (TACC, Autosteer, TACC + Autosteer, etc). I think that'd be the best way to assess Autopilot safety, as it would control for all other factors. It'd be great to have apples-to-apples numbers from all manufacturers, but I think that will take longer and probably some coordination from NHTSA.

How mature a system is and whether it's morally responsible (or imperative) to release it are different questions.

> The "clones" are deliberately less good because the manufacturers offering them care more about safety and reliability than about marketing beta products.

When I say "maturity," I'm not talking about holding back features. I'm saying that Tesla's system works better in situations where other manufacturers offer similar features. For example, how many other manufacturer's TACC will slow down (below the set limit) when a turn is coming up and then accelerate through the turn as a human is taught to do? How many autosteering systems will sense an adjacent car drifting from its lane and "creep" away from it to avoid a possible collision? These are the sorts of mature behaviors that put Autopilot ahead of the pack and make it much more real-world useful than its competitors.

On irresponsibility, I passionately disagree. But rather than rehash a bunch of old discussions I'll just link to prior comments explaining why I feel the way I do, and we can debate it further in those comments if you're interested.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17302164

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17233845

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16773903

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17236608

> They have products that did, before or at the same time, similar functions.

I don't think that's accurate. Autosteer is the fundamental innovation of Autopilot, and no other manufacturer released a system that "did, before or at the same time, similar functions" as Autosteer. Other manufacturers have since released systems that technically check the box of turning the wheel. But the value of a system isn't how it's described on paper; it's how useful it is on real roads. I haven't seen anyone release a system that's competitive with Tesla's except for Comma.ai (which is a very special case as they are not an OEM and only sell raw hardware).

"Imitators" wouldn't be my word of choice (it feels needlessly pejorative), but until someone actually innovates beyond what Tesla has done, I think it's fair to frame the conversation as the gold standard vs everything else.

Thanks for posting that Waymo vid, that's the best processing of Lidar in adverse conditions that I've seen. I think the million dollar question is how far Waymo (or others) can push noise reduction with Lidar. The video seems impressive in isolation, but if you compare it to what Nvidia was doing with cameras two years ago (object recognition in snow/fog that appears to outperform humans[1]), it quickly becomes apparent that Lidar is still nowhere close. But maybe they can get it good enough to bridge us between specific and general techniques.

Personally, I'm long on the camera-based approach because I think reliable autonomy will require a generalized vision solution, and once you've achieved that, the Lidar is redundant.

1: https://youtu.be/HJ58dbd5g8g?t=7m20s

All due respect, have you used any of the Autopilot clones? There are endless debates about what's better on paper, but everybody I know who's actually used them says Autopilot is much more mature. Comma.ai seems to be right on their tail, but it's an aftermarket system requiring a fair bit of DIY (so it's not very accessible yet for most end users). Tesla was first to market with auto steering, and seems to have the most mature offering, so framing them as the market leader seems pretty accurate to me.

> Tesla expects to increase production to 6,000 Model 3s per week by late next month.

http://ir.tesla.com/news-releases/news-release-details/tesla...