I’ve read the Elon Musk book by Walter Isaacson. I like Elon Musk and his endeavors. I like Tesla. I pay him dollars through X. I decided to see if I could truly be a fan of Tesla – know the company inside out. Be up to date with latest news of the company. Look forward to dates where data is disclosed. Follow social accounts of executives. Why am I doing this? My guess as of December 1, 2024 is that the company will still be very relevant well through 2029. I deem it as one of the companies that are extending the giant’s height at its frontier. I hope this following of a company is the first of many. Also, getting to know about businesses is quite fun.
2024 Q3 Earnings Call
I decided to start by listening to the latest earnings call from about a month ago.
Waiting Room Music
Damn, even their waiting room music is cool. I thought I was in Zara.
Delivery
Industry is seeing YoY declines in delivery while Tesla is hitting record deliveries. And Tesla is the only company that is profitably making EVs.
I was led to question why the term delivery is more heavily used by Tesla than say Ford. Latest 10-K yields 57 matches for Tesla and 28 matches for Ford for the word “deliver”. Tesla’s “deliver”s are much more used in the context of vehicle delivery and Ford’s is more the context of “deliver”ing value or results. My AI-assisted guess is that Tesla’s sales channel is directly to customer, whereas companies like Ford depend heavily on wholesale. Tesla produced and delivered around 465k vehicles in 3Q 2024. I wonder if Chinese EV makers are also not profitable yet.
Tesla Third Quarter 2024 Production, Deliveries & Deployments
Best-Selling F-Series, Vans Lead in Q2; Hybrids Grow 56%, EVs Up 61%
Energy Storage business
Musk says the energy storage business is doing well. Energy storage revenue grew 52% YoY in 24Q3. Growing from $1.6b to $2.4b. To investigate further solely covering this segment of Tesla’s business. Musk prophetically mentions the Kardashev Scale, enlightening listeners that we are even yet to harness the energy of Earth. Very primitive on a galactic scale. Lots of potential is another way to put it.
Tesla’s energy storage business ‘growing like wildfire’, Musk says
We, Robot event & Cybercab (Robotaxi)
The Tesla event on October 10th went smoothly, with 20 Cybercabs and 30 Model Ys all running fully autonomously. He expects vehicle sales growth to be 20-30% in 2025, Cybercab to reach volume production in 2026, with 2m to 4m yearly production.
4680 Cell Line
4680 cell line is on track to become the most competitive cell in the US in terms of cost per kilowatt hour. 4680 cell is self explanatory. It’s a cell is 46mm in diameter and 80mm in height. Previously, Tesla had been using the 2170 cell, which is counter-intuitively 70mm in diameter and 21mm in height (just joking), or the 18650 cell. The 18650 cell is actually counter intuitive since it’s 18mm in diameter and 65mm in height, with an ornamental zero. (not joking)
FSD V 12.5, FSD V 13
Version 12.5 leveraging neural networks, brought greater autonomy with greater miles between intervention and a combination of code into a single stack allowing unified processing for the city driving case and highway driving case. FSD Version 13 will be released soon, which is projected to increase miles between intervention by 5-6x.
But guess what, V 13.2 was already released as of Dec 1, 2024. Now the vehicle can go from parked to parked. FSD can start upon startup. Automatic transitions between park, drive and reverse are available. And it would park on its own. Let’s not forget about that ASS (singular). Says cumulative use passed 1 billion already. I bet.
Ride Hailing
Already operating ride-hailing for Tesla employees in the Bay Area. – couldn’t find a video on YouTube. The feature is expected to roll out in California and Texas to the public in 2025. But as always, subject to regulation. Trump being Musk’s Thanksgiving buddy adds more to look forward to. This is the moment Tesla directly takes on Uber.
Q3 Vehicle Safety Repot
In 24Q3 there occurred one accident for every 7 million miles of autopilot, a 10x perfomance compared to the US average of one every 700k miles.
Future is Autonomous
Non-autonomous gasoline vehicles will be like riding a horse and using a foot bone.
Marriage of the EV roadmap and the AI roadmap
There was a question on how Elon’s dedication to xAI is beneficial to Tesla shareholders. Some wonders that the two may even be in competition. Musk answers that the two companies are solving different problems. One is working on artificial general intelligence and furthermore, artificial super intelligence. Tesla is about autonomous cars and robots. Cars and robots train on real-world data, and the processor in the car cannot be a data-center scale GPU, but will be limited in power. It’s the issue of having to process all the visual inputs with the processing power available on device.
And now part of the way you can make up for the fact that the inference computer is quite small. It is by spending a lot of effort on training. And just like a human the way you train on something, the less metal work takes when you try to — when you do it, like when the first time like a driving it absolves your whole mind. But then as you train more and more on driving different than the driving becomes a background task. It doesn’t — it only solves a small amount of your mental capacity because you have a lot of training. So, we can make up for the fact that the insurance computers — it’s tiny compared to a 10-kilowatt bank of GPUs because you’ve got a few hundred watts of inference compute. We can make up that with heavy training.
Hardware 3 and 4
Musk has always emphasized that FSD tech will be rolling out to cars of the previous generation. However, the fundamental change in hardware raised questions of its viability. Tesla will work on FSD on the newer hardware, and retroactively design a version available for the previous hardware. If an update in hardware is warranted, the company will provide it.
To make a lower-cost car
And by the way, the amount of work we’re required to make a lower-cost car is insanely high. But like it is harder to get like 20% of the cost out of a car than it is to design the car and build an entire factory in the first place. It’s like excruciating. And there’s not a lot of movies made about the heroes who got 20% of the cost out of a car. But let me tell you, there should be little doubt that it’s incredibly heroic. Yeah. It’s like there should be the heroes who got 20% cost out of the cars. It’s like damn, I have a lot of respect for them. I think you probably could make a compelling movie, but it just — like if you actually saw how hard — if people actually saw how hard it was to do that, you’d be like, wow, that’s damn hard.
Lol
Written from scratch by Meston Ecoa.
May contain incorrect data and information.
Company overview and data from Yahoo Finance. Earnings call transcripts from Seeking Alpha. Answers for self-devised questions are summaries of Google and ChatGPT search results.