3) B) Business model - No advertising, online first sales model, vertical integration, no legacy ICE liabilities - all leading to much higher profit per car & agility for innovation
4) C) Brand & infrastructure lead - Tesla synonymous with EVs, supercharger & service network.
D) Smart car software advantage - Superior driver assist, infotainment, OTA updates etc
5) These are all huge leads & go a long way to defeating fossil fuels (and there is no clear sign Tesla are letting their advantage vs EV competitors slip in any of these areas), however Tesla is planning to soon add several weapons to its armoury:
6) A) Roadrunner battery cell - Fundamental bottom up physics first principles in-house redesign of battery cells (but still based on tried & tested li-ion tech). See thread:
7) Tesla's new cell factory in Kato road is nearing completion & I expect it to lead to huge step change progress in volumetric energy density, cost per kWh, Capex per kWh capacity, footprint per kWh capacity, speed of new capacity ramp.
8) Tesla’s current battery advantage is largely via how its battery pack software & manufacturing methods allow for use of cheap to manufacture high energy density NCA cylindrical cells. See thread:
9) Roadrunner cells are likely to be a leap many years ahead of all competition on cell tech - solving cell supply bottlenecks. Not only accelerating new car capacity & reducing EV cost but also allowing ramp of cell intensive business lines (Megapack, Semi) with high cell cost %
10) B) New 4D neural net Autopilot infrastructure (hopefully in Q4) which could be a huge leap in Tesla’s vision system to matching Lidar at object distance & velocity measurements & significantly exceeding Lidar based systems at path prediction. Thread:
11) This could significantly increase perception of Tesla’s probability of success for its Robotaxi strategy. A successful release of Robotaxis rapidly accelerates the demise of fossil fuels because it has far higher utilisation rates than customer owned cars...
12) ... - leading to a 3-5x reduction in the number of EVs that need to be built to replace the polluting miles driven by the existing 1 billion global car fleet.
13) C) Non EV powertrain related auto manufacturing innovation & superiority: Tesla has always experimented with new auto manufacturing methods but it is only with Model Y & Cybertruck that it is likely to break out into a significant Capex & production cost advantage vs ICE OEMs
14) The huge new Y casting machine is a game changer in auto body production, new paint shops are a all new design & the key driver of CyberTruck design decisions & consequent aesthetics were for huge reduction in production cost, largely eliminating body shop robots & paint shop
15) D) Deliveries and operating cash flow breakout. Tesla is targeting an ~80% increase in deliveries in 2H20 over 1H20. SG&A & R&D costs are largely fixed so delivery growth means huge operating leverage. This provides organic cashflow to step up expansion project investment.
16) E) Rapid expansion, diversification & localisation of manufacturing capacity.
By year end Tesla is likely to be manufacturing Model Y in 2 factories on 2 continents & have made significant progress to building a further 2 Model Y factories (Berlin & Texas).
17) So, 2020 could be nearing endgame in Tesla's quest to drive an inevitable global Clean Energy transition - where progress on cells, auto COGs, capacity & Autopilot architecture lead to rapid repricing of probability of success in its business lines: Autos, Energy & Robotaxis.
1) It is sad how many people are against investment in space launch technology.
The narrative “Space is just a playground for billionaires” is not helped by those who focussed on sending themselves to orbit as an end goal, but why is space tech important?
2) More broadly, space launch tech is innovating towards a 100x reduction in launch costs and increasing the ease of access to space.
Why does this matter?
3)
A) Disaster preparedness; With cheaper & quicker access to space we have better odds of addressing issues such as approaching asteroids & satellite wipeouts from solar storms. This is the same as investing in pandemic preparedness ahead of an unknown future event.
Analysts have an irrational urge to be “conservative” when forecasting the future, as if you are only wrong if your forecasts are too high.
The future is uncertain, so acknowledge the range of possibilities.
But try to be accurate, don’t try to be conservative.
Technology production volume vs cost curves & adoption speed once economic parity is reached are all well understood.
Forecasting absurdly slow rates of clean tech price declines & deployment growth deters investment in them & prevents policymakers supporting them as the solution
Thread on what drives technology production costs to decline with cumulative production volume:
This is unsolved tech & will be a radically new product with very different cost structures vs current options; the future is highly uncertain.
This justifies a huge disparity in opinions but many may have too high certainty in their views.
Key questions:
1) Will self driving cars require 2x or 20x average human safety to achieve regulatory approval in a given jurisdiction? 2) Will it take 1 year or 20 years to get to this level of safety?
3) Is the Tesla-like deep learning heavy, hardware lite, incremental progress on driver assistance, general solution approach best? Or is the Waymo-like deep learning lite, hardware heavy, moonshot leap, geofenced approach better?
1) Tesla's Autopilot driver assist product is now largely feature complete, but how much further does it have to progress to achieve reliability 3-5x greater than the average human & allow removal of human supervision?
...
2) This is the March of 9s.
Tesla’s self driving strategy from the start was chosen & optimised for this moment now; putting a system & infrastructure in place without data or hardware bottlenecks to allow largely automated progress for a feature complete AP on the March of 9s.
3) But how far do they have left to March?
Is Tesla 99.9% there, does it have 9,000x further to go or its it 33% there? It’s all a matter of perspective.
And most importantly does this all mean is Tesla 1 year away or 10 years away from Robotaxi level reliability?