On a silly whim, I bought Tesla stock back in 2012 and held on for dear life. It’s been a crazy ride, but now I’m a Teslanaire:
I got extremely lucky. Like unicorn lucky. But never forget this:
Most companies will die.
They get disrupted by a competitor and/or new technology. RIM and Nokia were destroyed swiftly and mercilessly by Apple. Apple itself was almost killed by Microsoft only to make a miraculous recovery. Capitalism is rough baby.
If much of your net worth is tied up in one stock, you better pay close attention to that business. While making a lot of money on Tesla is great, it’s also caused me to obsess over the company. I spend at least 30 minutes a day listening to podcasts (thanks Tesla Daily!) and reading Tesla news.
The hard part of owning a stock is knowing when to get off the ship. Most of the time, we don’t realize the ship is sinking until we’re wet and the lifeboats have sailed. I’m worried about the Tesla ship.
Why Tesla Could Die
Elon Musk has stated more than once that Tesla is worthless without FSD. I believe him. When using a robotaxi service (no human drivers) becomes much cheaper than owning a car, car ownership will decline. Transportation as a service is the future. Before I go on, I’ll make a case for robotaxis.
Why Robotaxis Will Win
New technology is scary. But then we get used to it and before long, it becomes an indispensable part of our lives.
(Note: For some of the arguments below, I mention Waymo’s robotaxi service. However GM’s Cruise is using a similar strategy, high-definition maps and LIDAR as opposed to Tesla’s camera based system.)
When I talk about robotaxis, I usually get a lot of pushback. Here are the most common arguments:
I would never get in a driverless car! I’ll bet most people said the same thing about planes when they came online. The first ride may be intimidating, but people adapt quickly. The data will clearly show that an autonomous car is much safer that a human driver. While humans have 2 eyes, autonomous cars have many sensors. There is no one to fall asleep at the wheel. The autonomous car won’t check email while driving or race other robot cars. The autonomous car won’t smoke a big joint.
I love my car! Will you love it the same when you could save thousands of dollars every year by not owning it? Do you love the lost garage space, pumping gas, maintenance, and insurance bills? No thanks to all of that.
Robotaxis are a long way off. Waymo is already in parts of San Francisco and Phoenix. It’s coming to Los Angeles and Austin soon. If the engineers over at Waymo can figure out San Francisco, I’ll bet they can figure out Dallas, Houston, Orlando and <insert southern city of your choice> pretty easily too. Snow is a problem which I’ll write about later.
Waymo relies on high-definition maps which is a cumbersome strategy that is hard to scale. The robotaxis themselves can refresh the maps as they’re doing their jobs. Get enough robotaxis on the road and cities like San Francisco can be remapped 100s of times every day.
Waymo cars are expensive because of LIDAR. A Waymo vehicle probably costs between $130,000 and $150,00. This is certainly more than a Tesla, but still economically feasible. Eliminating the driver saves a lot of money. Also as the tech ramps and reaches economies of scale, prices will come down.
Electric robotaxis will destroy jobs. Yes they will, lots of them. But that’s how it works. Creative destruction. But consider all of the positives. The blind will have more freedom. Car accidents will decrease. People will be freed to be productive in their commutes.
Tesla’s FSD Has A Long Way To Go
Tesla has been playing the autonomous car game for years, but has there been much progress? Tesla refuses to release any data on the rate of interventions with its FSD software (this is ominous), so we must rely on driver reported data. One site I look at is the FSDBeta Community Tracker. The intervention rate is currently higher than one intervention every 200 miles. A driverless system would have to be much, much better. The cars will have to go thousands of miles without an intervention.
While there has been some improvement, it’s not anywhere close to being ready. Also, the pace of improvement isn’t moving quickly. The creator of the tracker site noticed that his commutes haven’t improved much in almost 2 years:
Yet Another New Version Of FSD
Elon recently announced that Tesla is working on version 12 of FSD. In this version, Tesla is using Real World AI, an end to end, neural net solution. This type of AI training is amazing, but it also means that Tesla is throwing out years of work and training data once again.
And every time a new version of FSD comes out, Elon Musk makes a grand statement like this one:
I tested the version 12 alpha build today. It is mind-blowing.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 27, 2023
And then the new version drops and it isn’t so mind blowing.
Left Behind?
Time is running out. The FSD software is not close to being ready for driverless operation. And even when it is, it will have to be submitted to regulatory agencies for approval.
Elon has stated that Tesla needs 6 billion miles of driving data to train the neural networks. Let’s take a leap of faith and say that Musk is right. In April, Musk announced that FSD was being used for 1,000,000 miles per day. While the pace is increasing quickly, this is a long way from 6,000,000,000. Perhaps Tesla can get to that number by 2025, but that assumes that it doesn’t have yet to pivot again with FSD strategy. It also assumes that Elon’s 6 billion number is right. Elon usually does what he sets out to do, but not on time.
But for the sake of argument, let’s say that Tesla has a successful FSD solution by the end of 2024. It would still need time for regulators to approve it, so maybe we see true Tesla driverless FSD by 2026. How many cities will Waymo be deployed in by then? Tesla’s first mover advantage could be long gone.
Why Tesla Could Boom!
Tesla Uberbulls, please don’t throw me under the Model Y. 25% of my net worth is tied up in Tesla, so I would love to be wrong. Here is how I might be:
Could Version 12 Actually Be The Real Deal?
I remain skeptical of Tesla’s FSD efforts. In 2015, Elon declared that FSD would be solved in 2 years. He has made many similar pronouncements since then. But maybe, just maybe, this time is different. LOL?!??
Maybe Version 12 of the software (real world AI) is the real deal. Could this be the approach that doesn’t hit a local maximum?
Tesla is building out its training capabilities very fast. Training neural nets takes loads of compute power and Tesla is ramping up aggressively. If the bottleneck to successful FSD is training, we should see the rate of FSD improvement accelerate soon. James Douma is pretty smart and he thinks so.
Elon Musk usually accomplishes what he sets out to do, just not on time. Tesla will figure out autonomous driving. It will have to. For those who doubt Musk, SpaceX figured out how to land rockets from space. It’s completely amazing.
Other Thoughts
Tesla is an energy player too. Many think that the energy business will be bigger than cars. If you think of Tesla this way, it’s a battery maker who just happens to put its product in a lot of cars at the moment. Perhaps Tesla will be less dependent on auto sales as its battery manufacturing capabilities improve.
Waymo and Cruise won’t be widespread soon. I expect robotaxi services to come to large, southern cities (no snow) first. Snow is a big problem for autonomous cars, but probably less so for a solution that depends on maps.
Some really smart people believe Tesla is on the right track. Lex Fridman and George Hotz are no dummies and they both believe in Tesla’s strategy. See here and here respectively.
It will take a while for Waymo to scale up. Waymo has to map new cities and outfit cars with LIDAR. Tesla’s solution doesn’t rely on high-definition maps and its cars come equipped with the hardware required for autonomy. If Tesla figured out the software part, it would just have to flip a switch to enable autonomy on cars.
I tend to be too enthusiastic. Back around 2016, I thought we’d be all riding around in autonomous cars by 2020. Wrong. Maybe 2030.
Tesla is a killer manufacturer. Tesla can build a really good car. The new Model 3 is amazing. Tesla is more vertically integrated than any other manufacturer. By far. Tesla is even building its own lithium refining facility.
It’s really, really hard to predict the future. Back in 2016, I thought Apple had run out of steam, so sold most of my shares. That may have been the biggest investing mistake of my life.
Who knows what Tesla will look like by 2030? Waymo is getting pretty good at the software side of autonomy while Tesla can make a really good car. Maybe Elon eventually throws in the towel on camera based autonomy and aligns with Waymo? Or maybe Tesla adopts LIDAR? The next 5 years or so are going to be very interesting.
My Next Move
I am skeptical that Tesla will achieve government approved, driverless level autonomy before the end of 2025. There has been too much hype followed by disappointment from Elon Musk over the years for me to have much confidence. Why should we believe him this time?
As a Tesla investor, what should I do? Thoughts:
I’m holding out for a while longer. Maybe version 12 is the real deal. I’m going to hang on to see how it performs. Hope springs eternal.
I own Waymo too. One of my largest stock holdings is Google which owns Waymo. I consider Waymo to be the leader in autonomous vehicles now. If this is true and Waymo crushes Tesla, I’ll be OK.
If Tesla went to $0, it would suck, but wouldn’t change my life. Losing a million+ dollars would probably make me sit in a corner and weep for a day or two, but Mindy and I oversaved, so it wouldn’t change our lives. Just less money to give the Longmont library one day.
One More Thing
The glorious part of owning an index fund is that you don’t have to waste precious brain space on thinking about stuff like this. And no matter how much I think about it, there is chance I’ll miss something and be completely wrong. Index funds for the win.
What Do You Think?
- I’d love to hear if you agree with me and why.
- I’d be even more interested if you disagree and why.
- Do you have FSD? If so, have you seen it improve? Do you have hope that your car will drive itself some day?
- I understand the basics of neural nets (identifying a stop sign), but I don’t understand how Tesla is using them for high-level problem solving (navigating a complex traffic circle). Can anyone enlighten me?
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Great post Carl, I tend to be a pessimist regarding level-5 autonomy in cars. And even if we ever get there I think it’ll be well over a decade from now. I’m sure you recall the former Waymo CEO John Krafcik saying he doesn’t think the industry will ever be able to drive at any time of year in any weather and any condition. He said that in 2019 and I wrote a piece about those comments on my blog (I won’t post a link as I know that will doom my comment to your spam folder).
Carl note: Here is the post: https://accidentalfire.com/2019/03/26/dont-hold-breath-waiting-autonomous-vehicles/
Sure, in some controlled and well mapped out environments like big cities with good weather we can get close. But put that technology on a highway that’s under construction with no line makers and shifting lanes in a snowstorm at night and, well, I won’t be letting a computer take the wheel anytime soon.
Over 45,000 people die every year in America by car – that’s including crashes, pedestrians and cyclists who are hit, and other car related deaths. It’s been a morbid and constantly running plague of our society that no one wants to talk about. Yet when the new “Fast And Furious” movie comes out America eats it up with a side of fries and LOVES it. Our culture celebrates bad behavior in vehicles. America is a car culture, despite the massive pile of corpses every year that comes from it. I WANT level-5 autonomy more than anyone. It would save over 40,000 lives a year and while I’d still own a car if we had it I’d love to go on a road trip and be able to relax and not stress. But I highly doubt we’ll see it before 2040, I hope I’m wrong.
Dave, thanks for the comment!
I just want to reiterate something you inferred; almost all auto accidents are caused by driver error. Autonomy would eliminate the vast majority of those accidents which would be incredible.
I’m a little bit more optimistic than you; maybe 2030 instead of 2040. And even if someone does solve it by then, it could take a while for the world to change over.
I’d just rather bypass it altogether and go right to an eVOTL for transportation! In the meantime, I like my legs and bikes a lot for most of my getting around.
Sell it.
Hmmmm…
Nice post Mr. 1500, I’m right on board with all of your thoughts here.
Tesla does seem to have the best cars and the fastest innovation in many, many fields. BUT this is balanced out by Elon being crazy and doing things like buying blowing one billion dollars of Tesla’s hard earned on money on Beanie Babies (Bitcoin) fad and losing most of it. Then REMOVING THE TURN SIGNALS from the cars so a lot less people want them, so they have to drop the price by $10,000 to keep the sales going. $10k to save $10.00. And of course pissing off most of his customer base by posting mean stuff on Twitter. Leadership is important, and Tesla has the opposite: an anti-leader with a good understanding of physics but a terrible understanding of humans.
As for FSD: I am now using it regularly myself. It’s pretty amazing and I do think it can quite quickly become better than a human driver. But right now in city driving, I intervene not only once per 200 miles or whatever, but more like once per city block.
It’s too jerky, drives too fast on narrow streets, it’s inconsiderate of cyclists and pedestrians, and you can’t go through stop signs when there are any other drivers around because your FSD Tesla will confuse everyone by COMING TO A FULL STOP for several seconds about 10 feet before you even reach the appropriate stopping point. This is unfortunately a feature that Tesla was forced to add to FSD by our traffic safety board, but it’s an example of one of many hurdles still to go. However, AI is an amazing thing so I expect the version 12 full AI iteration will do much better.
WAH WAH Elon’s political views don’t (fully) align with my own so I’m going to bash him as a business leader even though he is the richest man on the planet and has against all odds created some of the most innovative and disruptive companies on the planet and continues to do so. Yes he is not perfect but no one is. And it is no coincidence that all of the people that bash him as a human all come from the same (radicalized) part of the political spectrum. Elon is right when he says you people have a mind virus. Maybe if you understood people a little better, your marriage wouldn’t have fallen apart.
Musketeer spotted, swooping with a personal attack to deflect criticisms from the holy one.
Ooof, that’s a rough review. I’m super curious to see V12. This guy has some interesting commentary: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FDsZJA_bhTA But, I’m not sure who to believe.
And I wish Elon would keep his mouth shut too. Be more like RJ Scaringe. Keep your head down and let your work speak for you.
I have exited TSLA last week as I see frequent news of price reduction of cars and also lot competitors launching alternate options. Not sure if it is right decision, only future will tell.
Competition is coming, but for now, I believe the main competition are gas burners. And the competition hasn’t been doing a great job at keeping up with Tesla. It’s pretty difficult for ICE to start making EVs. That’s a lengthy topic though.
There are and will be too many factors that affect the future of autonomous cars in general, let alone Tesla. We can’t predict discoveries, inventions, or breakthroughs in scalability, marketability, business strategies, gov’t regulation, etc. We can’t predict shocks and setbacks to the systems that generate those, either.
I too had TSLA as about 25% of my portfolio at one point in early 2021. It drove me nuts (pardon the pun) to have one company with that much sway in my portfolio. So I sold 60% of my TSLA holdings and bought index funds. With additional contributions since then, TSLA’s weight in my portfolio is diluted down to 5%. I sleep better at night.
Perhaps if my portfolio was in the 4-million range like yours, I wouldn’t care about 25% in one company. As you wrote, Tesla could go bankrupt and you’d still be able to live richly off your remaining investments.
Here you go, FSD in Australia….
https://www.drive.com.au/news/tesla-fsd-testing-in-australia-report/
Interesting. If Tesla can get it to work in the United States with end-to-end training, it shouldn’t be difficult to implement anywhere else. If…
Self driving cars will probably work in some European countries but Americans love their cars and I don’t see them giving up the controls to a computer. IMHO., Insurance companies will rejoice.. In terms of individual stocks vs index funds, I have so far done better with individual stocks. As it appears you have too. I remember asking my financial advisor if I could just buy Apple with my SEP contribution one year growing weary of mutual funds and their fees and she said of course I could. I’m glad I went with my gut and decided to start buying individual stock. I try to pick leaders in their respective industries. Now, however, I am trying to make an effort, like you, to increase my index funds to have less volatility as I’m about to turn 53.! The goal is to get to 50 index/50 individual in my stock holdings in 5 years. Some benefits of index funds is your value won’t drop 10 or 20% in one day after missed earnings or poor guidance and you never underperform the market. Congratulations on Tesla and sticking with it and not selling allowing for huge gains. If you are starting to have trouble sleeping with it constituting 25% NW, I would get with a tax advisor to discuss tax consequences of selling some shares each year with the plan to reduce the percentage to a more comfortable one like perhaps 20% or 15%. You may consider leaving some of the proceeds in a money market earning 5%. I suggest a larger cash position will help you sleep better too since you already won the game and this will reduce NW volatility. OT, I have visited Colorado and Boulder many times but only in the summer to escape the Florida heat, I missed visiting Longmont which sounds like a nice place with friendly people. I even tried to buy two amazing houses in Boulder in 2016 and 2018 one with views of NCAR and one with Flat Iron views and was badly outbid both times. Maybe one day I will be a Boulder county resident too and be able to regularly run those amazing trails. Best of luck with your Tesla decision.
This was a fun read. I don’t know anything about Tesla or FSD (literally had to look it up!) but now I’m totally fascinated 🙂 I can’t imagine a world of robot cars so crazy to think it’s already being worked on – and people like you believe it’ll be here sooner than later! I love it all though….. not the cars themselves or anything, just these big ideas being floated around and reading everyone’s thoughts on it. Fun read – thx!
Wow great post. I am impressed that you are not a blind follower of the Tesla cult! 😉
(With 25% of investments linked to Tesla and the wealth it made for you, I wouldn’t blame you.)
I agree with your statements with self driving and how we will learn to trust machine driving as much as or more than a human. Distracted drivers are on the rise and as a cyclist I have been almost hit a few times with drivers looking at their phones instead of out of the windshield. It is hard to argue a self driving car is more dangerous than a human driver who is not even looking at the road.
Still think we are a couple years away and like you point out Tesla is not the only game in town anymore. Not sure who the winner will be, but I agree with the “Index funds for the win” statement. I am sure the winner of the self-driving car space will be part of the index.
Haha, I admit it’s hard to be objective. Obviously, I’d like nothing more than Tesla to be successful. The cult gets nutty though. I’ve seen this recently regarding Toyota’s solid state battery efforts:
Toyota has been trying for years! I’ll believe it when I see it. This is vaporware!
And then the same fanboys comment on FSD:
Tesla is going to solve it finally with version 12. This is the one!
I’ve almost been hit too on my bike. Americans drive horribly. When I was in Germany last year, no one was on their phones while driving. Not even at stoplights. The police could save a lot of lives by enforcing distracted driving laws with hefty fines.
Whether to sell is not an either/or question. You could sell 75%, or 50%, or some other amount. Also, do you enjoy spending time following Tesla, and listening to Tesla podcasts? Does owning the stock cause you stress? Seems like it does. You could skip all that if you sold a majority of the stock and put it in ETFs, and spend your intellectual energy on something else. What would Ramit Sehti tell you to do?
Ramit would probably tell me to sell, but I’m not sure.
I do enjoy thinking about the future, but not being beholden to certain outcomes!
I think you’re right; the answer should be to take some off the table.
$1M in one stock. You’ve got bigger cahoonas than I do, Carl.
How about taking some of your winnings off the table and diversifying a bit? Would avoid remorse if it tanks, but you’d still get solid gains on the remaining portion if it continues to grow that Unicorn horn?
As for self-driving, it will come. The question is when, who will perfect the technology, and what are the implications for the other players? A big enough risk to justify taking some of your winnings off the table, IMHO.
Good read.
Fritz. He has $1.174M now in Tesla but what’s another $174k. Tesla was up 4.69% today (wow) and the market as a whole down today. This sucker makes chunky moves. I’m guessing he would owe $174k in capital gains tax and walk away with with $1m which includes the cost basis. A huge win! But there is that what if and FOMO factor. Musk has said Tesla will be the most valuable company. If that’s the case he could be looking at $3m to $4m in Tesla. It’s yet to return to its all time high which have him at close to $2m. Very interesting predicament. Decisions decisions. What will Mr. 1500 do? Maybe sell just enough for a new Tesla?
The WSJ had an article on how Tesla is winning in Europe and the big European manufacturers want to push the all electric EU back another ten years from 2035 to 2045.
I agree. Everyone talks about how the competition is coming for Tesla. It surely is, but despite their simplicity, switching over to EVs isn’t easy.
Technically it’s hard because a good EV is designed from the ground up to be an EV, not just a gas car with batteries shoehorned in (hello Chevy Bolt and Ford F-150 Lightning). Batteries are complex.
From a cultural perspective, what do you do with auto unions when EVs don’t require as big of a workforce? Also, dealers make a whole ton of money from service departments. EVs require much less service. And as Tesla has proven, you don’t even need a dealer.
What do you do when the best charging network is owned by your competitor (Tesla’s Superchargers)?
Very chunky! And to quote Wayne’s World, sometimes it blows chunks too.
Not all of my shares are post-tax, but $1,021,000 of them are. I tried to catch falling knives more than once, so my gains are $745,000. At a 15% tax rate, I’d owe $111,727.50 if I dumped them all*.
FOMO: Transportation as a Service (TaaS) is going to be huge. The first widespread first-mover here will do very well. Google is the best AI company in the world, so its Waymo subsidiary could be the one.
And yes, I will sell enough to buy a Tesla later this year or first thing in 2024. Stop by and I’ll give you a ride.
*Some shares are still under a year old, so I’m simplifying a bit.
We bought a Model Y long range 10/22 after a long wait. Grey with white interior. Overall, my wife loves it and the convenience of no gas stations and charging at home. Only complaint is the ride is somewhat firm but still very comfortable and fun to drive.
Thanks for the mini-review. I didn’t like the suspension either when I test drove one a couple of years ago. I’ve heard that they’ve softened up the suspension now.
“How about taking some of your winnings off the table and diversifying a bit?”
That’s never a bad plan.
Thank you for the kind compliment.
Will you be at FinCon this year?
I am a big fan of the quote “If you have won the game, stop playing” from Bernstein. Even conservatively split in treasuries today ( 5%) and the rest in a S&P fund ( 10 % yearly average) you would still earn 280k ish per year. Or after paying your capital gains 200ish per year. Likely more then your spending needs including cool concerts
I watched my first big mover company (CHKP) in the tech bubble go up 20x and then go down 20x in. 2years. It had real fast growing revenue and profits. It didn’t matter when the market turned. Took forever to recover. I didn’t sell because I did not want to pay the tax. Wish I had 20 years later.
The funny thing a stock price can move with absolutely nothing to do with the underlying story and numbers. It’s been TSLA turn for a while. The carousel may slow down one day and TSLA may fall out of superstar status or all the tech stocks may sink at once. It’s incredibly hard to get off the ride.
Once you have won. And you have. Why do you need more? What will more money do for you?
Not only have you got money you have a community. Which is even more important.
Not trying to be preachy. I struggle with the same fight of having enough and wanting to keep playing. It’s hard once you have experienced the winning high to not keep risking it
The game is kinda fun though! I understand the sentiment though. And you’re right, we have no use for additional money.
“Not only have you got money you have a community. Which is even more important.”
Couldn’t agree more.
Thanks for the advice.
In the long run, self-driving cars will be a great boon to society. No more drunk driving, traffic jams, accidents, decrease in emissions; the benefits will be amazing. Are we anywhere near that utopia?
No.
As we transition through the various stages from driver to driverless vehicles, there will be an extended in-between period where accidents will likely increase because of automation. The driver may misunderstand to what extent the vehicle will react in a split-second situation. Did the vehicle do what it was supposed to? Lots of litigation due to this – whose fault is it, the driver or the vehicle manufacturer? Get ready for insurance rates to skyrocket.
Exceptional play on the Tesla stock. Quit while you’re ahead.
I disagree. I think that the autonomous cars will be safe to the point of being annoying. They’ll have to be, both for regulatory approval and for consumer confidence.
EDIT: Coincidentally, this just came out today: https://waymo.com/blog/2023/09/waymos-autonomous-vehicles-are.html
“Today, we’re sharing new research led by Swiss Re which shows Waymo’s autonomous vehicles are significantly safer than those driven by humans. In the over 3.8 million miles that Waymo drove without a human behind the steering wheel across San Francisco, CA and Phoenix, AZ, there were zero bodily injury claims and a significant reduction in the property damage claims frequency.”
Those are amazing statistics.
There is certainly the possibility of a utopia, particularly with crash reduction, but self-driving cars have dystopian possibilities as well, particularly with how much cars are used and how our land use responds. Governments need to get out ahead of this.
being productive on your commute = utopia
living a hour further from work thus requiring much more road space = dystopia
cars always stopping for pedestrians = utopia
cities lining streets with fences to keep the cars moving = dystopia
improving mobility for children, aged, and disabled = utopia
rich people owning many cars and sending one out with each kid and two more for dry cleaning and groceries = dystopia
reduced parking needs downtown due to shared fleets = utopia
private cars circling empty instead of parking = dystopia
mobility as a service = imagined utopia? as vehicle miles traveled have increased due to unproductive driving (e.g., Uber driving across town “empty” to a pickup)
Lots of great points there.
I’m really hoping that autonomous car fleets embrace a mini-bus format (8-10 passengers?) and pooled rides for maximum efficiency. Once ridership hit a critical mass, you’d hope that the fleets would run with a healthy capacity of people.
Looking around at my auto trips, most cars have a single passenger which is a crazy waste of energy.
Carl,
Your pre IPO holding is super intriguing to me, you must have a lot of faith to drop $300k on it! How did you find out about the company and how does one go about purchasing shares pre IPO? Also, what’s the reasoning behind having multiple S&P funds?
It’s SpaceX. I’m looking forward to the Starlink IPO in the next couple of years.
Purchasing shares was a huge pain. You have to find someone who invested earlier than you and buy the shares from them. There are a lot of fees, but I strongly believe in the company.
We have multiple funds in the same category just because of different 401(k)/HSA providers. We are going to start consolidating it all shortly.
Didn’t it come out recently that Tesla was systematically lying about the distance its cars could go without needing to be recharged to make their product look more competitive than it actually was? That would worry me.
Really, my question about electric in general is that, as I understand it, there’s not actually enough lithium on/in the planet for everyone to convert to electric cars. And if that’s the case, what then?
They didn’t lie about the overall range, but it did come out that the range the car told you it had left was optimistic. Not cool.
Their is enough lithium. The issue is mining and refining it. However, sodium-ion batteries are in the development stage and will probably replace much of lithium-ion before the decade is up, especially for stationary uses: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sodium-ion_battery
Everything I’ve read said that they wrote software that would deliberately show you an optimistic range left for your battery for the first half of trip (ie when you drove it off the lot) and only later show you the real range once the remaining battery life was at 50%. They then created a special team to cancel service appointments related to batteries when people thought their cars were broken because they were running out of batteries so soon.
https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/tesla-batteries-range/
The optimistic range is sort of shitty but could have initially been done in good faith. It’s hard to see how creating a team to shut down appointments once it became clear there was a widespread problem is anything other than a cover up. They could have adjusted the algorithm to be more realistic or made amends to drivers who bought expecting something very different from what they got. If you have a good product, you don’t need to pull that sort of crap.
Thanks for the link to sodium ion batteries. I’ll look into it.
Truthfully, I tend to think that car culture is such a blight on our landscape that it’s hard for me to get excited about electric vehicles. Even if there are fewer, we’re still left with these unwalkable suburbs and endless freeways. I won’t be excited until we start rethinking urban planning to make our towns livable.
(Apologies for typos – baby on my lap.)
I’m a car-person, but couldn’t agree with you more. I really hate how all of our cities are designed around cars and the support systems for them. Some folks here in Longmont go nuts if there isn’t abundant parking 3′ from the entrance to whatever.
It seems silly the way we plan towns too. We have huge clumps of plastic houses and then shopping districts that aren’t close and unsafe to walk/bike to. It’s great when you don’t have to get into a car.
FSD will never be fully implemented in all roads in the world, not to mention regulations in each country so Tesla may very well be doomed
Maybe not, but it doesn’t have to be. If robotaxis can cover big and medium sized cities, that would be enough. Rural areas would be the least cost effective and have the lowest usage anyway.
My only question for you is: do you have a donor advised fund? If you do, then you should consider donating some of your Tesla stock to it. If you don’t, then you should consider setting up one at Vanguard Charitable and then donating your Tesla stock. I did this a few years ago with some highly appreciated stock. It was ridiculously easy and it gave me a nice tax break. Now I have a charitable fund that is invested in low cost Vanguard funds that will last for years as I donate to a variety of worthy causes. I’ve learned that it doesn’t make sense to wait to donate your excess money. Do it now while you can enjoy the moment.
Not yet. I look forward to giving most of our money away, but I want to pay down debt first. My asset backed loan went from about 1% to 6.75%. Oof. If rates stay high, we’ll pay if off over the next 5 years.
Hi Carl
your biggest fan from Germany here… 🙂
I do not have a strong opinion on tesla. I hear a lot of engineers say that its approach to fsd “just wont work”, and that tesla, by selling the feature already for years, is actually misleading its customers, to say the least.
Either way, the tesla stock is a risky bet. You have already been quite lucky on the stock market. If I were close to 5 million, I would only take very limited bets. I wouldn’t want to lose a substantial portion. I would not want a single stock to account for more than 5% (or better 2%). Therefore I would reduce my position.
On the other hand you have enough to take some bets if you feel like it.
Keep going. btw, The house is looking great!
Greetings from Berlin
Patrick
Patrick! How the hell are you? How is the new addition to the family? Do you still have your Mustang? I hope I have the right “Patrick.” Could there be two German Patricks who read this blog?!??
I’m going to hold on to most of my Tesla for a bit longer. Maybe v12 will finally solve autonomy. Hope springs eternal.
I am going to sell a couple hundred shares soon and use the proceeds to help buy an actual Tesla. The car will be more fun than the stock…
Sorry man, I’m late to the party.
Since you asked for opinions, here’s mine:
Why not sell off a significant amount and see how that feels? Like maybe 30-50%.
It seems like while you enjoy following the Tesla stuff, it also brings you a bunch of stress when you’d rather be focusing your energy elsewhere.
Maybe by selling around half of it, you could test out if that makes your life better. If it does, awesome. Maybe consider selling more. If not, you still got like half a mil invested-if they go to the moon you’re not going to miss out on being able to buy that EVTOL fleet or whatever.
Just my two cents. Do whatever makes you happy. ????
Hey JSD! How’s life? Will I see you at EconoMe again next year? I hope that you’re doing well.
I’m going to hold on to most of my Tesla for a bit longer. Maybe v12 will finally solve autonomy. Probably not, but just maybe…
I am going to sell a couple hundred shares soon and use the proceeds to help buy an actual Tesla. The car will be more fun than the stock…
I’m good! Getting into a groove with this sorta retired thing. It’s been a lot more fun as I’ve learned to chill out and enjoy not getting much done.
Not going to do Econome next year, bummed I won’t see you. I’ll be traveling a bunch around then for my new part time gig, and want to spend my off time with the fam. Definitely going to a Camp Mustache though, especially after you and others recommended the smaller events so much. Seems like it’ll be more my speed. Hope to start going to some Camp FI’s as well.
It may just be me, but I think the tesla would be lots of fun even without the full self driving stuff. Stoked you’re going to get one soon!
Some day when my priui finally die, I hope to do the whole solar panel/full EV fleet thing you’ve got going on. Sounds awesome; look forward to hearing about your future full electric adventures.