Two bits of interest:
This link from Ark is a really powerful view of the company. They hold Tesla at ~7% and are therefore very biased, but interesting nonetheless. Essentially a comparison to Apple, who are pretty good company I guess.
And also this:
Thoughts and critiques welcome!
*not investment advice, solely intended to divide opinion between the pro-Tesla advocates and the NO-Tesla-is-overpriced-don’t-touch-it naysayers.
Even I used to tell friends about Tesla as Apple of EVs but not so sure anymore. My only reason for changing my view is, they don’t look premium and of good quality like Apple products.
No doubt they have some good technology but they are not unique. About software I don’t believe they are way ahead of anyone else.
I do own one Tesla, not a car though 
Is Tesla’s software really that unique? Lots of their driving technology already exists with other manufacturers - things like adaptive cruise control, lane keeping, automatic braking, blind spot sensors etc. exist in loads of modern cars. The likes of Waymo, Nissan, Uber, Mobileye all work on that side of things too. And the in car experience seems even more competitive.
On the vehicle side more high end cars which can match a Tesla’s range are slowly starting to appear. Jaguar is already selling one and Audi have announced theirs. The low end has lots of good competition too, less so on the range side though.
It’s possible that Tesla’s code isn’t quite the unassailable exemplar https://twitter.com/atomicthumbs/status/1032939617404645376 . (Who knows how accurate that link is.) If Tesla has a moat, perhaps it is more on-the-ground data than code quality.
Yeah fair point - I don’t know the accuracy of this nor of statements suggesting their code is/isn’t better than other car companies.
I would be surprised if it was awful as Elon is pretty techy himself - he’s not an old school paper and whiteboard kind of guy is he! May well be struggling with scaling quickly however.
Would definitely agree that their data capability is huge - every car they have on the road is feeding back information autonomous vehicles can learn from. Waymo is doing this through virtual cities, which is great until scenarios out of the ordinary pop up in the real world that haven’t been modelled.
Their battery pack/management and electric motor would seem to be the sources of hardware competitive advantage going off the results found by stripping down 2017 Tesla models:
Any thoughts here on yesterday’s happenings? Tesla brought earnings announcement forwards, a prominent short seller reversed position and went long. Stock rose ~10%.
Now that Tesla has reported a profit and recovered the stock price losses caused by Musk going a bit mad, I have returned to this thread to receive my reprimand, which I shall accept with good grace from the Tesla bulls.
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(I still think the company could be doooomed.)
Rod, thank you for your humility - we will welcome you back with open arms!
We hate to say we told you so…!
(More seriously, it’s a great PR headline but I want to see consistency, and I stand by the thesis their true value will come from MAAS and charging ecosystem)
