Sure thing. As it pertains to Tesla, there are some Tesla shareholders that go out of their way to not allow their shares to be loaned out. Not something I bother with (I only own shares indirectly), but some people really despise shorts and want to do everything they can to inflict pain. Reducing the number of shares to be loaned out increases the chances of the short squeeze that SunUp mentioned.
According to Google AI:
California has the most Teslas, with about 35% of the country’s total. Florida and Texas follow California in Tesla ownership. The Pacific Northwest, the Northeast, and the Southeast are also areas with high electric vehicle (EV) use.
I read that as saying that the vast majority of Teslas have been sold in the warmer or warmest areas of the country. Up here in the frozen tundra of Upstate New York (well, it’s been above freezing almost all month probably because of climate change), Teslas are still rare creatures. I see more of them while driving, but spotting one remains a non-daily occurrence.
Electric vehicles of all kinds, including hybrid and plug-in hybrids, don’t work as well in cold weather. Says Car and Driver:
Electric-car batteries are like humans; they like to be around 70 degrees F. When temperatures fall, the battery’s performance degrades, and the additional climate control usage also burns extra energy. It’s not a massive decline, but some owners report 10 to 20 percent lower range at temperatures below freezing, and generally the colder it gets the more your EV’s range will be reduced.
Since perhaps half the country still lives in the northern, near Canada, section of the US, suspicion of electric vehicles remains a legitimate concern. Who wants a 10-20% decline in range in areas of the country that have not been blanketed by charging stations?
The old market car companies radiated from Detroit and a few other northern cities. Heaters and snow tires and window defrosters and heated seats were major selling points when they were introduced and confined to a few brands. Tesla had the advantage of developing in California. Early models did not have good heaters. Later models have corrected that, but I’m sure that early impression lingers.
Up here, without even a local representative until a couple of years ago, you had to really wanna to buy a Tesla. If not a cult car, they were at best a niche car. Certainly not something that was thought of as just another car.
Tesla is ahead of other car companies because it had the advantage of concentrating on just electrics for a smaller, localized market that were the best customers for them. Musk has to be saluted for overcoming a multitude of obstacles that broke other brands. But the reasons why the Big Three companies haven’t been able to convert their firms while still needing to cater to the 90% of the country that they service have been laid out well in this thread. Tesla will never become GM and sell half the cars on the market. Every time it tries to scale it runs into huge, virtually company-folding, problems. If the Big Three fail in trying to serve both ICE and EV markets, America is in big trouble.
I say this as one who has had three hybrids over the last decade or so and will never get a pure ICE vehicle again. The charging station limitation is sufficiently bad to make getting an EV something I can’t persuade myself to do.
I totally agree that a very cold climate makes EVs significantly less desirable. None of the cars I have owned have ever driven on snow. That for sure needs to be addressed. The main point is that every Tesla car owner I have ever met and the vast majority of the ones in the internet forums either don’t give a shit about Musk or dislike him. To label us as Musk fans or that we somehow tie our identity up in our cars or that we care about the stock price or that we want other car companies to fail is so fucking pig ignorant that I don’t know where to begin.
But again, Hyundai sells more cars in the US than Tesla. Hyundai sells more cars globally than Tesla. Hyundais market cap is 36 billion. What exactly are Tesla fanatics going to buy that adds 1.3 trillion in market cap to Tesla?
The global marketplace for new cars is about 75 million cars a year. Tesla sells about 1.8 million globally. What % of people in the US are Tesla fanatics? I’m sure only some of those 1.8 million Tesla buyers are tesla fanatics.
Which is why the country with by far the highest EV adoption is the balmy, temperate checks notes Norway. EV adoption is by far an infrastructure problem over anything else. Making it convenient to operate EVs means more people choose EVs as their non-ideological, practical choice (monetary incentives spurred Norway’s rise in EVs but infrastructure investment is what kept people satisfied with them).
Same as how everyone claims the major limitation to cycling is their cities uniquely bad weather but ignores that Oulo, Finland far exceeds almost every non-Dutch city in cycling mode share. People are lazy and just don’t want to do the work to make any mode share pleasant so they point to any random factor outside of their control as a justification for the non-investment.
As long as people think of Tesla purely as a car company, they will misunderstand its valuation.
I agree, but we discussed this earlier and I’m still confused.
Tesla has no guarantee on the future of EV sales. Theres no guarantee a new startup, or an establishment car company, or a chinese company like BYD won’t outcompete Tesla. Theres not even a guarantee that we will not invent industrial scale, affordable carbon capture technology that reduces the desire to transition away from internal combustion engines.
As far as tesla’s non car technologies, they are in a market full of competition. AI, bipedal robots, alternative energy, etc all have lots of competition.
The Grok AI is one of a dozen or more AI cutting edge programs. There are dozens of companies working on bipedal robots.
Consider that many of these problems are highly correlated. Bipedal robots aren’t exactly the same thing as self-driving cars, but if Tesla cracks self-driving then the likelihood that they’ll crack bipedal robot operation goes up. And self-driving isn’t just self-driving; they want a full robotaxi platform. If they pull off vision-only self-driving, then the robotaxi part becomes almost automatic. Which implies selling zillions of their cybercabs and making rideshare revenue from them.
So even if one is somewhat skeptical, it’s not (say) a 1-in-4 chance times a 1-in-4 chance times a 1-in-4 chance etc. that they pull off all of them. It’s just one 1-in-4 chance whether they unlock a trillion-dollar multi-pronged business or not. And if they fail at one they’ll fail at all, because it meant their AI really wasn’t up to scratch or that there are hard limits to what AI can do or some such.
Bozeman, MT here–PLENTY of Teslas and Rivians around, along with a smattering of Bolts, Volts and our Lyriq. Does our range degrade in the winter? Probably. Do we notice? No. We charge at home 99.8% of the time. The day after we bought the Caddy it was -35F and we went out to breakfast. Worked fine.
Don’t know much about EVs but Hertz car rentals has this on their website
“Even in cold temperatures, Teslas have an impressive range. In a group test in January 2023, Norwegian title Motor.no tested 29 electric cars and found the Model 3 not only went the furthest, but also lost just 16.4% of its claimed range.
Defrost feature – the Tesla defrost feature helps to melt snow and frost, meaning you don’t need to scrape the windshield on a snowy or frosty morning”.
One of my cousin in Norway confirms his Tesla is just fine in extreme cold weather there. He says even ICE cars lose range in extreme winters and it is comparable.
What percentage of Tesla’s revenues come from solar power, robots, AI or anything else? Googling, more than 80% of the revenues are from car sales and all of the profits. So it’s a car company that dabbles in other stuff.
Interesting. Are the charging stations a loss leader?
Cherrypicking statistics without looking at context is a sure way to lose an argument. The proper question is “Why does Norway have such high adoption?” Google AI:
In terms of national EV infrastructure, the Norwegian government has already established fast-charging stations every 50km on all main roads, including the world’s number one fast-charging station.
As for Oulo, Finland and cycling, its snowiest month is January when it gets an average of eight whole inches. Upstate New York laughs at such numbers.
Just as all politics is local, so is all car buying.
It’s priced as a growth stock, and as such the current revenue mix is irrelevant. The whole point is that these new businesses are poised to grow wildly.
But again, I still don’t get it.
Boston Dynamics, which is a leader in bipedal robotics, is only worth 1 billion.
Agility Robotics, another major leader in bipedal robots, has a market cap of 957 million (with an M, not a b)
They sell thousands of robots, not millions. No one is selling many humanoid robots today because they’re useless. But as soon as you can ask one to unload the dishwasher or take out the trash, and it works in a general-purpose household environment, and the cost is in the low tens of thousands, they’ll sell tens of millions of them.
And as for robotaxis, if they work well they’ll completely destroy Uber. Waymo is already a threat but a limited one because the cars are expensive and they have to specially handle every new city they go into. Tesla’s robotaxi will be 1/10 the price per car and will work almost everywhere immediately (assuming it all works out).
ETA: You might further ask: ok, but why isn’t Boston Dynamics poised as a growth stock too? And I guess the answer would be that they’ve been around for 30 years and haven’t scaled their business yet, so why start now? Meanwhile, Tesla went from nothing to what they are today in about 20 years. Tesla has proven they can do large scale manufacturing.
Perhaps because Boston Dynamics has never been a publicly traded company? It’s currently a subsidiary of Hyundai, and previously Softbank and Google X prior to that.
There is effectively no ceiling on market cap for any company and increasingly it’s clear there’s little correlation between it and ‘the fundamentals’.
There is usually a floor - most companies will have tangible assets that usually prevent things from going all the way to zero.
But there’s effectively no ceiling. Asking ‘why’ is much like asking why tulip bulbs or Beanie Babies were once so highly valued. Sometimes, for reasons rational or more usually irrational, there’s a P/E bubble that cannot be explained. These bubbles often deflate or even burst but there’s no way in general to predict if that will occur, much less when.
Well yeah, there’s that too. I’d lost track of their current ownership, anyhow. Still, one could ask why they were bought for $1.1B rather than $110B. They have some neat tech but nothing that actually scales. And nothing remotely interesting for a consumer.
Though based on the valuation of Boston Dynamics, I assume that Tesla’s robot division is a tiny fraction of Tesla’s net worth.