ERICOPOLY

BAC has lost $49B in market cap over the past 5 days. I doubt their discounted earnings come in $49B lighter due to a virus. How about just calling this a selloff with Coronavirus being the fuse?

The kind of driving makes a big difference too. EVs are, counter-intuitively for those used to ICEs, often more efficient in city driving than in highway driving because of the regenerative braking. It also matters what kind of elevation delta you had. If you were going downhill you'll get better efficiency than uphill (obviously, but most people forget to take it into account). There should be somewhere in your software that shows the elevation differential for a planned trip, and the range estimates should automatically take it into account, afaik. Higher elevations have better range due to thinner air, but my home is close to Sacramento. Beginning and ending points were the same, no net elevation change. Mix of highway and city, up to 65 MPH.

So the temperature outside began at 70 when I left the house today, reached 75, and fell back to 65 by the time I got back to the house this evening. I drove 41.5 miles and used 12.0 kWh. At that pace, a new 85 kWh battery would get 294 miles of range. Compare that 294 mile range to the advertised 265 mile range when the car was new.

Whatever he is thinking, he hasn't been able to convince Munger as DJCO didn't sell any.

I don't have any. On May 6, 2019, Charlie Munger said "Well I think it is a fine company, and so they made one bad decision about an incentive plan. I regard it as an honest mistake, not as some deep moral failure". When asked if the problem is fixed now, Charlie answered "I think so".

Another Berkshire bank is USB: If you held USB for the past 12 months the price increase is only 3%, and if you held it for 5 years the cumulative price increase is only +19.5%. A price increase of 3% to 4% per year. Dividends aside.

A big difference to an ICE car is running the heater. You get the cabin heat in an ICE car as a byproduct, but in a Tesla the cabin heat comes from an electric heater that puts a drain on the battery.

"What you do speaks so loudly that I cannot hear what you say." - Ralph Waldo Emerson

Then they've either already sold out of WFC completely, or they still like it. Or less likely, he doesn't like it and is still selling it while he is concurrently going on TV and telling everyone that he still likes it.

In today's interview, I heard Buffett say "I feel very good about the banks we own". Don't they still own WFC?

First off, Tesla says that you will shorten the battery life if you regularly charge the battery beyond 90% or discharge it below 10%. So you can use the full advertised range for the infrequent trip, but you'd better rely on 80% of published range most of the time in your daily use. Otherwise, the range is realistic if you drive in a certain manner, and in weather that is not too cold: 1. Don't speed on the freeway 2. Allow regenerative braking to do it's thing, instead of preempting it with the brake pedal 3. Turn off the climate control and heated seats Cold weather reduces battery performance, and obviously headwind/tailwind is a factor, and altitude change is a factor. I've found the range is pretty accurate in mild weather and where I measure the range after returning to the starting point of the trip.

Longer range batteries would negatively change the competitive landscape for Tesla. Once batteries reach the point of drive-all-day range, it won't matter what the size of the supercharger network is because nobody buying a new car will worry about ever needing one when driving between point A and point B. The sooner the battery tech gets better, the sooner the playing field will be leveled for a new entrant.

I could see swapping work if you were paying a monthly fee for your battery instead of owning your own battery.

I've heard from somewhere a while back that the system is pretty popular in Israel. But I don't see it working in the current iteration of EVs for a couple of reasons. 1. For it to work, the battery should be generic. If the battery is the most important thing in the EV, then all the manufacturers will fight the model like crazy. 2. In the large range vehicles like Teslas and most of all that's coming to market the battery is large. More importantly it is very heavy. That means it has to sit low on the vehicle, otherwise it's makes the vehicle unstable. So long story short, you can't easily swap it. Battery swapping was a design goal of Model S and X. They positioned the battery so that it could be swapped in minutes. https://www.teslarati.com/tesla-shuts-down-battery-swap-program-for-superchargers/

True, the customer may only need the added range every five years . Regardless, the extra range takes pressure off the reliance on the Supercharger network. For example, if range were 700 miles it would eliminate the need for most of their costly charging stations. As the battery range grows, the company’s costs drop.

I’m hoping their big battery announcement is to launch a battery leasing option. Knock 20% off the purchase price of the base Model 3 car and lease the battery for a monthly cost somewhat similar to paying for gas in a conventional car. Then you’ll get their base Model 3 price down to around $30k. The battery is obfuscating the real economics of the car vs a conventional car — people either cannot or do not want to see that.

In November, I drove my Model S from Richmond, Virginia to Sacramento, California. The trip took a total of 4 days. I charged roughly every 120 miles or so. Perhaps every other charging stop I ate a meal and didn’t spend any extra time waiting for the car to finish charging, and used the other charging stops to go for a walk. I was driving about 700 miles per day. My Tesla is 6 yrs old and had to stop every 120 miles due to the spacing of the charging stations. I could have made it perhaps twice as far between charging stops with a 2020 Model S due to the extra range of the new cars. That would have eliminated the waiting around during charging as most of the time would be consumed by the time to sit down and eat, use the bathroom, and go for a walk. It just isn’t desirable to drive 700 miles a day with stops for only 3 minutes to fill for gas. Get real.

So, why would the car be hot or cold?

Is that strictly passive? Or time intensive which equates to an imputed income?

My daughter also uses Snapchat for ‘filters’, Tiktok, and she uses VSCO.

The first poster of this thread mentioned his teenage kids used it. My 16 yr old stepchild doesn’t. My 14 yr old daughter doesn’t. They don’t want Facebook either. It’s a ‘boomer’ thing they say. None of their friends use it. They all are using Instagram and WhatsApp.

The default cost advertised by Tesla when you go to order a Model 3 is $33,690 for the "standard range plus" model, but it is clearly marked as "includes potential savings". It is further explained that "* Costs above include potential incentives and gas savings of $6,300". So if the article arrived at $33,000, this is possibly where it comes from.

This stock is a fun one because you can use your imagination as to which technologies Tesla will grow into and how successful it will be. If the shorts say it will lose $5b over the next five years, then knock less than $5b off the market cap if you are confident that the tech money in Silicon Valley wants a piece of the pie in the sky, the very place where Tesla’s cars are crowding the roads. In the end, what will be will be of course. I only shorted it on speculation that price would soon fall back. I have no intention of holding out for more than a few months and hopefully not more than a few days.

No surprise you timed it so well. I think fondly of your kind and hyper-rationale comments back in May 2006 that gave many of us including me the confidence to buy FFH options and make incredible gains. Thank you again. What a contrast to the quality of this board today when I post at the end of October my conviction that the shorts were failing to consider the disruption entailed in the recent series of positive developments and Tesla was likely entering into an exponential phase. Instead of support and discussion what I got in response was "ok Boomer". Perhaps in the future we all can realize that if we support and aid each other we will all be rewarded. I've got $600 in unrealized gains at the close today. Woohoo! More gains tomorrow? Losses tomorrow? This is fun stuff. So are you out of the trade, or do you think you can grow that $600 bucks into the one comma club? I'm still holding out but I hadn't put thought into making it to $1,000.

I took 70% and she took 30%. Payback is a bitch!