Why the leak of record Tesla Q1 European deliveries is authentic IMO:
✅ figures internally consistent
✅ record EU Q1 ships
✅ awkward April 1 timing
✅ fake leak would avoid typos in business email
✅ fake leak would leak global numbers
✅ reliable source of @RandyVegetables
✅ "Tesla authentic" language & non-obvious internal details a fake one with typos wouldn't know to replicate
✅ Timing of April 1 and AM European time is correct for the final figures to be summarized, and a rushed congratulatory email by a clearly proud EMEA team lead.
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Individually these details are all circumstantial evidence, but in combination they give me high confidence that this leak is probably authentic.
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✅ Was just confirmed to @WholeMarsBlog as well - so it's at least double sourced.
Tesla's all-time record deliveries of 184.8k vehicles is extremely impressive, given the countless Q1 headwinds:
❌ Q1 seasonally weakest (winter) quarter for auto sales: a 10-20% headwind
❌ Tesla had no Model S/X production due to the Plaid refresh: ~15k units missing
❌ China: the quarter was 10 days shorter due to the Chinese New Year and the calendar quarter being 2 days shorter. That's 10 days of missing sales & production days.
❌ US: some buyers were possibly waiting for the new federal EV incentives
❌ Samsung Texas factory shutdown
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❌ Europe: many key markets are in partial or full Covid lock-downs, such as the Netherlands which was on a hard lock-down for the whole quarter.
❌ Tesla had a 2-day production shutdown at Fremont, due to parts shortages.
❌ Model 3 cannibalized by ramping Model Y
Tesla has yet to disclose details about their "Dojo" training chip, here's the CPU die layout of their inference chip.
The large integrated SRAM cells & the single-clock 96x96 matrix multiplicators allow Tesla HW3 boards to run large NNs at unmatched power efficiency.
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Power efficiency is the primary limit of consumer grade, mass-adopted autonomy (self-driving in every car): while current top of the line GPUs are able to perform inference computing at a performance comparable to Tesla's FSD chip, they do it while drawing ~10x more power.
Why many Tesla investors are frustrated over Tesla's Bitcoin experiment.
@elonmusk describing money as "avoiding the inconvenience of barter" is a rare case of him misunderstanding the first principles of something utterly important: the history & role of money.
I realize that I'll lose followers over this - but this had to be said.
It is a commonly told story to economics students all over the world: money and coinage was created to replace unwieldy barter. Instead of exchanging goods, people exchanged valuable gold coins.
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This is a convenient story that, just like the story Tesla cars being inconvenient & "dirty", is utterly false.
There's literally 𝒛𝒆𝒓𝒐 evidence in the rich archaeological record of humanity suggesting high functioning barter economies who simplified barter with coinage.
I have Gbit fiber Internet, yet I pre-ordered Starlink:
✅ Planned speeds 1-10 GBit/sec
✅ Cells are valuable, limited real estate, 𝙚𝙨𝙥𝙚𝙘𝙞𝙖𝙡𝙡𝙮 in populated areas
✅ Independent
✅ Full constellation much lower latencies than terrestrial Internet
✅ To support SpaceX
Especially the "Starlink cells are a first-come-first-served limited resource" is poorly understood.
Starlink receiver's high-tech phased array antennas, consisting of ~600 ASICs, allow very tight radio beams - but beam size is still a few kilometers wide on the ground.
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This physical property puts an upper limit on the number of subscribers per Starlink cell.
Each Starlink cell is roughy 4km × 4km currently, which suggests a beam size of 2-4 km.
Effects on Tesla/TSLA of today's US Senate runoff elections in Georgia.
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Polls are showing razor thin margins and the results won't be known for days: initially Republican incumbents are likely to lead, because in-person votes are counted first, which votes lean Republican.
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But once mail-in votes are counted too we'll know the final result - possibly within the next 2-3 days. The election is still (way) too close to call.
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"Conventional wisdom" is that if Democrats win both senate seats and take control of the Senate, then there will be a market-wide selloff, TSLA included, because of more taxes.
Tesla posted a new video about their secret Kato Road 4680 cell production lines a couple of days ago, and it contains a couple of technological gems I haven't seen widely mentioned elsewhere yet, so here's an attempt at listing these new disclosures.
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The first thing is that there appear to be no human workers/operators whatsoever in the main production process.
To the left is an image of line workers handling finished cells in a traditional facility. To the right is the 100% automated conveyance system Tesla has.
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Here's how their 4680 cells are transported in racks of 8x8 cells: 64 cells each.
These standardized racks likely interface into automated pack production machines, made by Tesla Grohmann, or get directly integrated into the die-cast underbody (structural battery pack).