Tesla - I find it hard to see the worth

Me either, no money expert but have they even made a profit yet? Broken even? HOW much does the musk get for that valuation? Toyota worth twice the amount but look at the profit they make.

I have no idea but Tesla are leaders in battery tech are so far ahead of the establishment in terms of charging. Their IP must be worth a fortune and they seem to have the facilities to develop and manufacture.

Whats more surprising is the establishment letting a disrupter get such a lead.

It seems they are slowly but surely ironing out supplier challenges and increasing production volumes accordingly so things are improving. And, if my company is anything to go buy, company car schemes are starting to embrace electric far more than they have in recent past.

I've no idea if it would be cost effective for me (I have my own car and take a monthly car allowance) but the real world difference in BIK for someone in my position between a Tesla Model 3 (which is on my list) and a BMW 320d is over £10k in the Teslas favour (something like £2500 over 3 years instead of £12k)

The valuation does seem crazy though given the volumes shifted

WEF 1st April 2020 an all electric car will cost you the square root of nothing at all in tax for 2 years at least. Now is the time to strike if you want one.

I was in their factory 2 weeks ago.
They are building cars in a completely different way than other manufacturers and are putting huge investment into their production lines for all vehicles.
Besides that, they are opening plants in China and I believe there are plans to open one in Germany too.
It’s an impressive place and the aim is to go to a full lights out plant- no people involved in the build process on the floor.
They’re getting there too.
Funny thing is they are a very common car in California- think of how popular BMW’s and Audi’s are in the UK- that’s the level of popularity here.
Go to the east coast of America and they’re as rare as hens teeth...
I’m surprised at the valuation though.
While they are profitable now, I can see them getting bigger in the coming years.
They’re also planning to do all repairs at the factory. No more getting the specialist to quote repairs, the car gets delivered and then goes into a fully automated process, gets rebuilt to factory standards and is good to go. Big money earner for them there and also a great way of improving their vehicles.

Also slightly off topic, there’s a sub culture in California where people are building electric versions of old vehicles using Tesla components from scrapped vehicles. Didn’t think that was happening yet but there you are...

I wonder how that's going to work across here then because insurance companies are ruthless at telling repair places how little they're now going to be paying per hour - in 2014 the agreed rates were about £5/hour less than they had been 10 years previously.
Sending a car back to the factory to get rebuilt is going to scare the shit out of them.

Well ahead of you:


www.tesla.com/support/insurance?redirect=no

Would you not decouple the caravan and leave it parked, and while the car charged have a nice up of tea and a bacon buttie? In fact wouldn't the idea of having your own portable rest and recuperation vehicle that you can enjoy without having to mix with the undesirables in a service station, make caravanning more attractive for electric vehicle owners?

With the Tesla caravan there is additional battery packs in the chassis to counteract this. 

Somebody sees the worth - the FT is reporting that the shares have shot past $900 in pre-market trading today "triggering fears of a bubble"...

I think historic pension liabilities weigh heavily on the values of those companies. 

Well that's due to their history of manufacturing cars almost by hand until the 1960s and 70s and a lot of workers from that time still plodding on into their 80s and 90s. Tesla wont have that problem as they're planning a dark factory that requires no lighting as the cars are 100% assembled by robots with a human hand not touching them until they reach the end of the assembly line.

Tesla has 6 year lead over VW and Toyota:



electrek.co/2020/02/17/tesla-teardown-6-years-lead-over-toyota-vw/

Agreed, very interesting article.

I think the "destroying the supply chain" is probably a nice way of saying "having to change their entire design and business model". If I read that article correctly, Tesla seem to have all their computing power in the car in one super-module, whereas the main OEM's spread the power amongst the many ECU's in their vehicles. And a large part of that is driven by the fact that different suppliers provide each sub assembly / parts array that therefore has its own ECU.