Electric cars are actually a very good fit for many rentals. Thinking through my last 5 rentals.
A wedding that was 1 hour from an airport, ~100 miles RT.
A ski trip where I wanted to drive from Denver to my AirBnB near Winter Park Colorado, ~200 miles RT.
A hiking trip where I needed a second car for a point-to-point car shuttle (New Hampshire!), ~120 miles RT.
A bachelor party where I needed to drive from the airport to a trailhead then to an AirBnB then back to airport, ~150 miles RT.
A national park trip to the Grand Canyon, ~500 miles RT.
Each of those scenarios would have been 1 full charge of a Tesla round-trip, with the exception of the Grand Canyon. Maybe not the ski trip since it's mountainous and cold weather kills the battery so 200 miles might be a stretch, but I could have trickle-charged at my AirBnB. So basically I can see how many quick rental car needs are met by EVs, plus no dealing with filling with gas!
Right, because bringing it back empty means the car is out of commission for ~12h.
The last three times I've rented a car it's been turned and burned and I've had to wait a few minutes for a clean/wash to be complete from the last renter.
Electric cars are also a good fit for rental companies for another reason: Their customers want to make a good first impression on customers, new friends and other individuals they rarely see.
I would not associate myself with people who are concerned with the make and model of a rental vehicle. Or any vehicle for that matter. It is snobbish nonsense that should be shunned.
Can anyone with an EV speak to the difference in insurance for these vehicles? That is, if I rented a Tesla, would my regular insurance cover me sufficiently, or would I be a fool not to buy the rental company's insurance addon? I'm sure they'll charge a pretty penny for this, and scare plenty of folks into buying it. What would be good reasons to do so?
This is impossible to answer without the details of your car insurance. It entirely depends on what your insurer’s rental car policies are.
There are two issues at hand: accident liability and damage/theft.
For liability, it’s typical that states require rental companies to purchase stare minimum or sometimes a higher liability level than the state minimum as a base.
For damage/collision, there’s no requirement for anyone to hold coverage, so that’s on you. Many travel credit cards offer damage/collision insurance as a feature, and some individual car insurance plans extend coverage from your personal car insurance to rented cars, but don’t assume this.
You can generally rent a car if you don’t own a car and don’t own your own car insurance, and in most states you wouldn’t be obligated to purchase additional coverage from the car insurer.
A Tesla is no different than any other expensive car rental, the fact that it’s electric is irrelevant. It’s no different than renting an Audi Q7 from a rental car company.
They'll wise up to it when people start requesting it.
I'll even pay a premium for a 100% guaranteed reserved charging spot at a hotel. This way I can just gun it and arrive at 1% charge, plug in, sleep, have breakfast and be on my way with a full battery again.
On long trips, there may be one or more Hertz locations near your route. If all of them stock electric cars, Hertz could offer a premium offering where you change cars along the way...
If Hertz offers up their locations as supercharger locations... that's a LOT of locations to add to the supercharger network with a willing partner to help finance it and maintain it.
Kind of like how the dealer networks, which SHOULD be a massive advantage for Ford/GM to place chargers (and shadow market cars) and build out a huge charging network... well, that's not happening because dealers hate EVs.
I was very pessimistic about Tesla and confused by their stock price.
But I now believe that they indeed are doing it and that we’re finally at the EV revolution.
I’m not an early adopter type and the Teslas don’t excite me at all, but I’m really delighted that the market is evolving. I’m delighted that I was wrong.
Tesla’s stock price is confusing if you compare them to a car company. But they are not just a car company. They are also a car manufacturing supply chain, having brought much of their component production in house. They are also an energy company, both generation and storage, but also distribution, like gas stations. Think Exxon, BP, Chevron, ARCO, etc.
They are probably a few other things, but this is the mystery of their valuation.
For the record, their market cap is also greater than "Australia's Woodside Petroleum, Chevron, Exxon Mobil, Imperial Oil, Royal Dutch Shell, Shell Energy North America, Canadian Natural Resources, ConocoPhillips and French group Total [combined]" [1], so they're also valued kind of crazy compared to energy companies...and that was in January 2021 before the most recent spike. Sure, part of that is faith in renewables. But in any fair comparison their stock price is still a little confusing.
Maybe what you're saying is true regarding the company itself, but it's a meme stock. You go down and talk to people, people will say that yet wouldn't actually invest in the basket of companies of those industries.
It's not a problem for Tesla or Elon per-se, but we shouldn't assign intelligence to people basically voting for their favs with their wallets.
Every car manufacturer is a supply chain and and owns their own component production. Ford owns Motorcraft. General Motors owns AC Delco.
Tesla doesn't have nearly the size of the distribution network of any of the oil companies.
The fact is Tesla was trading at 1000x historic earnings, and 161x future earnings, or to put it another way, 10x any other car manufacturer, and this this was before this deal. [0]
Exactly what so many people are missing. Unlike other car companies, Tesla run almost the whole value chain themselves, from software to hardware. In a way, they're an amalgamation of Blackberry and GM and Exxon and whatever in between. And they're also going into AI robots and home solar.
While these may be hits or misses, they underline the immense market penetration of Tesla. They're not just cars, which is why many investors project a much higher valuation for them in the coming years.
That’s true. But also, presumably, these companies outsourced their supply chains etc because it was (or seemed) profitable.
There is still a disconnect for me. First everyone outsources, apparently successfully for automotive, and that’s great, all these joint ventures between car makers etc. Then Tesl comes along, integrates everything, and poof that’s also good..?
> Tesla’s stock price is confusing if you compare them to a car company. But they are not just a car company.
Tesla's stock price is confusing because it cannot be explained, let alone justified, by any market analysis, results, or market price calculation. It's purely willingness to pay driven by meme stock speculation.
> They are also a car manufacturing supply chain, having brought much of their component production in house.
This assertion makes absolutely no sense given that Tesla's market value is currently greater than Volkswagen's market value, and by no means is Tesla even comparable with Volkswagen in terms of any of the criteria you've brought up.
If your business model is an affine combination of other business models your valuation should also be an affine combination of the valuation functions of these business models. This is not the case for Tesla.
Do we actually have a detailed document explaining how much of their component production is actually in house? It seems like there are A LOT of common components between Tesla and others while at the same time they are clearly doing a lot of in house things that others dropped decades ago. (eg. Seat Production, having metallurgy department to come up with better alloys etc.) These are things other OEMs tossed to the curb decades ago.
> They are also a car manufacturing supply chain, having brought much of their component production in house. They are also an energy company, both generation and storage, but also distribution, like gas stations.
So basically a car company. GM makes their cars in-house. They own their own parts supplier (acdelco) and charging/distribution network (Ultium Charge 360). Ford and Stellantis are working on the same.
Tesla is an amazing company, however, still hasn't reached the peak of inflated expectations. As a seasoned equity investor put it:
"Tesla the stock isn't being valued by any metrics that make sense and today investors are paying too much for their future growth which is dangerous."
I am very happy with the Tesla company, CEO, marketing, and cars, but I can't believe that it should be worth 1 trillion dollars. A trillion is one with 12 zeros.
I know you can't compare valuation and production of a company, but still. If Tesla were making 10,000 dollar profit per car - and they don't - they would have to produce 100 million cars just to make a trillion. They produce less than 1 million per year. I know they also sell batteries etc. but it's still mainly a car company.
Their yearly profits might be a few billion. So their value is more than 100 times their yearly profits. This is insane for a manufacturing company. Currently their P/E ratio stands at more than 330. VW, a very well run auto manufacturer has a P/E ratio of less than 6, Ford 17, Mercedes-Benz 7, BMW 5, Hyundai 15.
These are all companies with electric cars on the road and a future that is totally committed to electric vehicles. These are all companies that already have production facilities, etc.
I like Tesla and their business model. I just think the stock is hyped way beyond what is sustainable.
Note, the EV revolution and Tesla being the winner of the EV revolution are different outcomes. They're certainly winning the EV race now, but it's possible that some of the other car companies can overtake them.
The bear thesis for Tesla has been something like, "Tesla might have an innovative EV-first design, but when the major manufacturers with a century of manufacturing know-how wake up to EVs, they will drown Tesla in vehicles."
I think part of what's driving the increase in Tesla's value is the realization that this thesis was wrong.
Tesla is now beating all the established manufacturers at gross automotive margins, and it's really not close. Toyota is around 18%, Ford and GM around 15%. Tesla is up at 27%.
Part of that might be demand-driven higher prices. But Tesla continues to reduce their cost of goods, and Tesla has emerged as the most innovative manufacturer, which we already see in teardowns of the Model Y, with huge sections cast as one piece, but particularly in the design of Cybertruck, and Gigafactory.
Tesla is far out in the lead on software. They appear to be rapidly improving on manufacturing. Tesla has paid down its debt with stock issuances, the company has $16 billion cash on hand, and the ability to go get a lot more nearly for free.
If the major manufacturers aren't going to catch Tesla with manufacturing prowess, or capital, what are they going to catch them with?
This line of reasoning reminds me the time when Android came out and people were predicting the imminent death of then-newborn iOS. Tesla is Apple of car manufacturing. That much is pretty obvious if you drive one of their cars. They seemingly deliberately depart from what everyone else is doing. And my bet would be that they'll continue to do so, and continue building out technological capabilities that no other manufacturer would even be able to imagine, let alone build, such as e.g. their own AI training silicon, new battery tech, material science stuff, deeper automation of manufacturing, etc, etc.
That said, I don't understand their stock price either, even in the light of all that, so I don't own any of their stock.
But my next car will be a Cybertruck. Once you go electric there's really no going back. And that's how it ought to be in general: green options _must_ be better all around (perhaps with the exception of price, though I'm sure price differential will go down over time), not a fucking "tofurky" style garbage that no one would buy if it wasn't "green". Because you can make people tolerate things "for the greater good", but you can't make them like things that suck, at least not for long.
Norway is the most mature EV market in the world and it's not clear from the sales statistics that Tesla is winning. They sell a lot of vehicles, but not the most (might be winning in profits though).
The thing to understand about stock price is that it is based on perception and not necessarily on potential. Ultimately it boils down to whether you think someone will be willing to pay a higher price for this at a future point in time more than whether you think the company has potential.
Retail investors, and particularly first time investors, in the market have been growing rapidly. These kinds of investors tend to be less careful with where they invest, relying primarily on the media, word of mouth and hype than on fundamentals. With enough people you have a critical mass, creating a chain reaction that's impossible to stop. This is literally free investment for a company. As a serious investor, you would be foolish to ignore this. Even if the company was not positioned to do well earlier, this new found cash flow gives them a huge edge. And thus this creates a sort of a self fulfilling prophecy where more and more people invest, because they believe everyone else is investing, and because everyone else is investing the company will surely become #1 irrespective of where they are today, and inadvertently propelling the company to become #1 in the process.
Not to throw any pebbles in the garden, but if you compare to how religions work (the self-fulfilling prophecy side), I would not be surprised if that's how the humanity will proceed. Semi-religious leaders speaking of hypothetical progress collecting money to do anything they want with them from a bunch of retail investors.
Tesla's stock price has become a self-fulfilling prophecy.
It seems like Tesla's success combination of a genuinely good product, the Musk hype (and troll) machine, early mover advantage, and most importantly access to cheap capital to build vertically integrated manufacturing and distribution operations that are unheard of in this industry.
Tesla's playbook is also unusual and contrarian to traditional wisdom on a number of things - unlike most tech companies, they outsource very little of their core manufacturing, making it an extremely capital intensive operation; they rely on their CEO trolling on Twitter for building hype for their products; they make promises which they almost always underdeliver and frustrate early adopters with quality issues; they make unsubstantiated claims about their self driving tech and yet are still making progress that skeptics are ignoring.
This is what keeps short sellers, stock analysts, economists and B-school profs on their toes when it comes to their predictions on Tesla. Reminds me of the early days of the iPhone era where a lot of folks were convinced it is going to fail.
Lucky they have cheap equity capital because their debt is junk status. And some of the self-fulfilling prophecy is the cycle of good old WS analysts overrating an asset, Tesla, and their simple endorsement creates an inflationary cycle that generates a huge bubble and more me-too analysts - where have we heard that before? And we know how those end up despite all the transient commentaries that 'its different this time'. I doubt the Fed will be eager to bail TSLA investors out the way they did the banks in 2009 though.
Revolution is years from now, the stock will surely readjust, especially once competing players enter the field (and people actually believe these players are playing in Tesla's league wrt. EVs).
I give them full credit for their EV technology, but I'm still pessimistic about FSD. How much of the current stock price is hinged on the assumption that FSD is 'right around the corner'? What happens if Elon pushes FSD out and it turns out to be a fiasco, possibly with catastrophic consequences?
They are worthmore than every car company combined. If they start making as many cars as Toyota will they be worth 10x as much as all companies combined?
It's not going to be a revolution despite all the EV bull market folks say, it will be an orderly transition, people are slow to change and adapt and STEM people should accept that. Electric cars are not in any way an order of magnitude upgrade in tech, which is a necessary trait for any technology that claims to be disruptive. Sure from a green perspective it is but not from a pragmatic one. I of course welcome the change. :)
I'd claim it's pragmatic too - but only if you have ability to charge at home AND you have an ICE car as well (maybe). Halving the cost of commute is highly pragmatic!
This applies to something like half the population right now (in the US). And we're on the path to alleviate issues for the other half of the population in the next few to several years.
The other major issue (which is probably the bigger one) is that car manufacturers other than Tesla can't seem to actually get out enough cars to do anything other than supply California and maybe NY. Teslas are expensive and have a litany of quality issues that push "regulars" away from them. Once Hyundai has an electric that has inventory nationwide at a reasonable price, then we have a revolutionary orderly transition on our hands.
Yeah this is kind of a big deal, like inflection-point big deal. Teslas are still for the well-to-do, but making infrastructure available may encourage even more investment in non-upper-end EVs.
Their price is fine if you look at the Apple analog. Not even knows they want a Tesla like not everyone knew they wanted an iPhone. It's not that they even want one, you basically have to have a smartphone nowdays. EVs will be similar in many many respects. And once someone tries one, that is it. There is no going back.
Of coarse there are other brands of smartphones, but not thing comes close to iPhone in terms of the brand, just like Tesla. There will always be metrics other brands can beat Tesla in, but the overall brand and product is unrivaled and will probably be so for the next 10 years. After that though, it's anyone's guess.
In Germany this marked niche is so under-served, there's a whole company (Nextmove) dedicated to rentals of electric cars. They position themselves as "try before you buy" experience, so you can do an extended test over multiple days to see if the car fits you.
There must be a business in tying purchase into rental companies in general. Rent car X and get your money back if you buy one in the next 3 months type thing.
Or "like the car you hire, pay X and keep it". There would have to be margin in that as rental companies usually sell cars to dealers quite early in their life and dealers are only going to pay bottom dollar.
I look forward to not having to give a flying fuck about fuel level upon returning my next rental car. Enabling rental companies to fill up their vehicles on-site without requiring becoming a gas station alone is a glaringly obvious rental EV win.
According to Car and Driver, a Hertz spokesperson said that ‘customers can return the EVs not fully recharged "for now," a difference from the rules for returning gasoline-powered vehicles.’
I am pretty sure these companies will price in the time to charge and up charge the electricity rates. Considering they wouldn't want to fast charge all the time, they probably price in 2 or 3 hours of time of every rental for charging.
Considering the barrier to entry for these rental companies to fast charge and/or renewables charge (solar?) on-site is far lower than becoming a gas station, I expect this to just be another axis they compete on as things mature.
That should translate into savings and/or warm fuzzies for customers in the long-run, though it may take a minute before we get there.
There was no realistic scenario for rental companies to start competing on this axis with ICEs, petrol is an inherently hazardous chemicals royal PITA.
Hope they disable some of the Tesla Easter eggs. Having the road diagram turn into a rainbow and Don’t Fear The Reaper blast out of the speakers because you hit an on screen button four times is pretty unnerving if you’re familiar with the car and really wouldn’t be what you want having just got off a long flight and driving in a city you don’t know in a car you don’t know.
christ, I want a cool electric car more and more. but reading stuff like this all the time is just re-enforcing my decision to leave Tesla off that list of potentials.
A car is a tool I use to get my family around from point A to B SAFELY. Its also a fairly significant chunk of debt, and I want it to last a long time and behave EXACTLY the way I expect it to. Every day.
Thus far there isn’t really a no-nonsense EV with limited tech and phsyical buttons for everything. Once you go the big center screen route you are kind of locking yourself into an infotainment computer that will be obsolete long before the cars powertrain is and an interface that will change over time like a modern smartphone.
Once you know those truths, Tesla isn’t a bad choice as their computers are at least partially upgradeable and the interface changes have been decent from my perspective (although this is hugely subjective).
I see this sort of “concern trolling” so often around Tesla and I just shake my head. Really, an easter egg inspires this reaction? I’m sorry, I don’t believe it.
That's only if you consider this a one time thing. Those 100K vehicles are going to need replacement in a few years. And considering, Hertz's stock price increase, investors are clearly believing this is a great deal for them. Which raises the question about where all their competitors will be buying their EVs. There are millions of rental vehicles. Close to 2M in the US alone.
The reasons Hertz is considered to be getting a great deal here by investors is that EVs retain their value a lot better and are known to have much lower maintenance overhead. So, they'll get more miles out of them before they have to sell them on, get back more when they do, and be able to charge a premium for them at the same time. In a market where margins are razor thin, that's a big deal.
It's more a question of when than if their competitors will be lining up to buy some EVs. They'll have to. And then of course the next question is which one they'd be buying. The answer for the next few years is that Tesla is one of the few companies that has both product and manufacturing ready for volume production. Of course a few other manufacturers might make some nice money here too.
So, investors are thinking that Tesla could end up supplying many hundreds of thousands of vehicles for rental per year in the next few years. On top of their other business, which is also continuing to grow at a very nice pace. They'll likely need a few new factories for this but they've shown they can deliver those as well.
This isn't just a very profitable deal for Tesla, it is a strong indicator towards that electric cars are really around to stay and that the electric car market is growing quickly. If it is more profitable for Hertz to buy Teslas than other brand cars, it should be for most car rentals and probably also most other customers.
Not too long ago Elon talked about Tesla making up to 20 million cars per year in 2030. That would make Tesla twice as large as VW, the currently largest car manufacturer. Of course this statement was treated as Elons typical optimism, but deals like this pave the way to that actually coming true.
> Of course this statement was treated as Elons typical optimism, but deals like this pave the way to that actually coming true.
I feel people have really short memory wrt. Elon's optimism. Not everything he promises pans out (autopilot being the prime example), but usually, it does, just slightly later than promised.
Check all the months. Tesla usually delivered them all in the same month/quarter as far as I'm aware.
It leads to a misleading number if not averaged over the other months.
> Normally, Tesla would deliver only a handful of cars during the first 2 months of a quarter and then deliver an incredible amount of cars during the last month a quarter.
I think people are doing the math on car TCO finally.
If nothing goes wrong, the first two-three years are practically free for an EV. Home charging costs pennies and if you're really stingy you can use free public chargers.
Then you might need a new set of tires maybe a quick maintenance at the dealership and you're good for a few years again.
This is the best thing that could happen to EVs. If Hertz is throwing down, it's likely that National and Avis will follow suit. (National is partially owned by Ford, which might complicate things.) This was also my primary use case for Turo, so I'm excited to rent my favorite car from a conventional rental car company
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A wedding that was 1 hour from an airport, ~100 miles RT.
A ski trip where I wanted to drive from Denver to my AirBnB near Winter Park Colorado, ~200 miles RT.
A hiking trip where I needed a second car for a point-to-point car shuttle (New Hampshire!), ~120 miles RT.
A bachelor party where I needed to drive from the airport to a trailhead then to an AirBnB then back to airport, ~150 miles RT.
A national park trip to the Grand Canyon, ~500 miles RT.
Each of those scenarios would have been 1 full charge of a Tesla round-trip, with the exception of the Grand Canyon. Maybe not the ski trip since it's mountainous and cold weather kills the battery so 200 miles might be a stretch, but I could have trickle-charged at my AirBnB. So basically I can see how many quick rental car needs are met by EVs, plus no dealing with filling with gas!
Wonder how the pricing and will be affected by the juice left in when you return it. And how their scheduling manages it.
Also, will “FSD” be enabled or disabled? There’s an interesting liability chain.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28996234
The last three times I've rented a car it's been turned and burned and I've had to wait a few minutes for a clean/wash to be complete from the last renter.
That seems, well, stupid. Frankly, I'm not sure if most customers ever even see me in my rental car.
There are two issues at hand: accident liability and damage/theft.
For liability, it’s typical that states require rental companies to purchase stare minimum or sometimes a higher liability level than the state minimum as a base.
For damage/collision, there’s no requirement for anyone to hold coverage, so that’s on you. Many travel credit cards offer damage/collision insurance as a feature, and some individual car insurance plans extend coverage from your personal car insurance to rented cars, but don’t assume this.
You can generally rent a car if you don’t own a car and don’t own your own car insurance, and in most states you wouldn’t be obligated to purchase additional coverage from the car insurer.
A Tesla is no different than any other expensive car rental, the fact that it’s electric is irrelevant. It’s no different than renting an Audi Q7 from a rental car company.
I'll even pay a premium for a 100% guaranteed reserved charging spot at a hotel. This way I can just gun it and arrive at 1% charge, plug in, sleep, have breakfast and be on my way with a full battery again.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pony_Express
Kind of like how the dealer networks, which SHOULD be a massive advantage for Ford/GM to place chargers (and shadow market cars) and build out a huge charging network... well, that's not happening because dealers hate EVs.
But I now believe that they indeed are doing it and that we’re finally at the EV revolution.
I’m not an early adopter type and the Teslas don’t excite me at all, but I’m really delighted that the market is evolving. I’m delighted that I was wrong.
They are probably a few other things, but this is the mystery of their valuation.
[1] https://www.tesmanian.com/blogs/tesmanian-blog/teslas-market...
It's not a problem for Tesla or Elon per-se, but we shouldn't assign intelligence to people basically voting for their favs with their wallets.
Tesla doesn't have nearly the size of the distribution network of any of the oil companies.
The fact is Tesla was trading at 1000x historic earnings, and 161x future earnings, or to put it another way, 10x any other car manufacturer, and this this was before this deal. [0]
This simply doesn't make any sense.
[0] https://www.tradestation.com/insights/2021/04/08/tesla-overv...
While these may be hits or misses, they underline the immense market penetration of Tesla. They're not just cars, which is why many investors project a much higher valuation for them in the coming years.
There is still a disconnect for me. First everyone outsources, apparently successfully for automotive, and that’s great, all these joint ventures between car makers etc. Then Tesl comes along, integrates everything, and poof that’s also good..?
Tesla's stock price is confusing because it cannot be explained, let alone justified, by any market analysis, results, or market price calculation. It's purely willingness to pay driven by meme stock speculation.
> They are also a car manufacturing supply chain, having brought much of their component production in house.
This assertion makes absolutely no sense given that Tesla's market value is currently greater than Volkswagen's market value, and by no means is Tesla even comparable with Volkswagen in terms of any of the criteria you've brought up.
So basically a car company. GM makes their cars in-house. They own their own parts supplier (acdelco) and charging/distribution network (Ultium Charge 360). Ford and Stellantis are working on the same.
"Tesla the stock isn't being valued by any metrics that make sense and today investors are paying too much for their future growth which is dangerous."
Dead Comment
I know you can't compare valuation and production of a company, but still. If Tesla were making 10,000 dollar profit per car - and they don't - they would have to produce 100 million cars just to make a trillion. They produce less than 1 million per year. I know they also sell batteries etc. but it's still mainly a car company.
Their yearly profits might be a few billion. So their value is more than 100 times their yearly profits. This is insane for a manufacturing company. Currently their P/E ratio stands at more than 330. VW, a very well run auto manufacturer has a P/E ratio of less than 6, Ford 17, Mercedes-Benz 7, BMW 5, Hyundai 15.
These are all companies with electric cars on the road and a future that is totally committed to electric vehicles. These are all companies that already have production facilities, etc.
I like Tesla and their business model. I just think the stock is hyped way beyond what is sustainable.
I think part of what's driving the increase in Tesla's value is the realization that this thesis was wrong.
Tesla is now beating all the established manufacturers at gross automotive margins, and it's really not close. Toyota is around 18%, Ford and GM around 15%. Tesla is up at 27%.
Part of that might be demand-driven higher prices. But Tesla continues to reduce their cost of goods, and Tesla has emerged as the most innovative manufacturer, which we already see in teardowns of the Model Y, with huge sections cast as one piece, but particularly in the design of Cybertruck, and Gigafactory.
Tesla is far out in the lead on software. They appear to be rapidly improving on manufacturing. Tesla has paid down its debt with stock issuances, the company has $16 billion cash on hand, and the ability to go get a lot more nearly for free.
If the major manufacturers aren't going to catch Tesla with manufacturing prowess, or capital, what are they going to catch them with?
That said, I don't understand their stock price either, even in the light of all that, so I don't own any of their stock.
But my next car will be a Cybertruck. Once you go electric there's really no going back. And that's how it ought to be in general: green options _must_ be better all around (perhaps with the exception of price, though I'm sure price differential will go down over time), not a fucking "tofurky" style garbage that no one would buy if it wasn't "green". Because you can make people tolerate things "for the greater good", but you can't make them like things that suck, at least not for long.
Retail investors, and particularly first time investors, in the market have been growing rapidly. These kinds of investors tend to be less careful with where they invest, relying primarily on the media, word of mouth and hype than on fundamentals. With enough people you have a critical mass, creating a chain reaction that's impossible to stop. This is literally free investment for a company. As a serious investor, you would be foolish to ignore this. Even if the company was not positioned to do well earlier, this new found cash flow gives them a huge edge. And thus this creates a sort of a self fulfilling prophecy where more and more people invest, because they believe everyone else is investing, and because everyone else is investing the company will surely become #1 irrespective of where they are today, and inadvertently propelling the company to become #1 in the process.
It seems like Tesla's success combination of a genuinely good product, the Musk hype (and troll) machine, early mover advantage, and most importantly access to cheap capital to build vertically integrated manufacturing and distribution operations that are unheard of in this industry.
Tesla's playbook is also unusual and contrarian to traditional wisdom on a number of things - unlike most tech companies, they outsource very little of their core manufacturing, making it an extremely capital intensive operation; they rely on their CEO trolling on Twitter for building hype for their products; they make promises which they almost always underdeliver and frustrate early adopters with quality issues; they make unsubstantiated claims about their self driving tech and yet are still making progress that skeptics are ignoring.
This is what keeps short sellers, stock analysts, economists and B-school profs on their toes when it comes to their predictions on Tesla. Reminds me of the early days of the iPhone era where a lot of folks were convinced it is going to fail.
If there genuinely is going to be a revolution, then Tesla can't own it all.
We don't know if this was a decision after thorough analysis or just a quick money grab.
This applies to something like half the population right now (in the US). And we're on the path to alleviate issues for the other half of the population in the next few to several years.
The other major issue (which is probably the bigger one) is that car manufacturers other than Tesla can't seem to actually get out enough cars to do anything other than supply California and maybe NY. Teslas are expensive and have a litany of quality issues that push "regulars" away from them. Once Hyundai has an electric that has inventory nationwide at a reasonable price, then we have a revolutionary orderly transition on our hands.
https://www.drive.com.au/news/norway-to-hit-100-per-cent-ele...
I'd call that a revolution on a small country scale.
Of coarse there are other brands of smartphones, but not thing comes close to iPhone in terms of the brand, just like Tesla. There will always be metrics other brands can beat Tesla in, but the overall brand and product is unrivaled and will probably be so for the next 10 years. After that though, it's anyone's guess.
[1] https://www.future.rent/
Or "like the car you hire, pay X and keep it". There would have to be margin in that as rental companies usually sell cars to dealers quite early in their life and dealers are only going to pay bottom dollar.
Dead Comment
https://www.caranddriver.com/news/a38052601/hertz-buying-100...
That should translate into savings and/or warm fuzzies for customers in the long-run, though it may take a minute before we get there.
There was no realistic scenario for rental companies to start competing on this axis with ICEs, petrol is an inherently hazardous chemicals royal PITA.
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No wonder they’re beating everyone else at this game. These guys rule!
A car is a tool I use to get my family around from point A to B SAFELY. Its also a fairly significant chunk of debt, and I want it to last a long time and behave EXACTLY the way I expect it to. Every day.
Tesla really doesn't fit that bill atm
Once you know those truths, Tesla isn’t a bad choice as their computers are at least partially upgradeable and the interface changes have been decent from my perspective (although this is hugely subjective).
(I have no Tesla investments or products.)
The reasons Hertz is considered to be getting a great deal here by investors is that EVs retain their value a lot better and are known to have much lower maintenance overhead. So, they'll get more miles out of them before they have to sell them on, get back more when they do, and be able to charge a premium for them at the same time. In a market where margins are razor thin, that's a big deal.
It's more a question of when than if their competitors will be lining up to buy some EVs. They'll have to. And then of course the next question is which one they'd be buying. The answer for the next few years is that Tesla is one of the few companies that has both product and manufacturing ready for volume production. Of course a few other manufacturers might make some nice money here too.
So, investors are thinking that Tesla could end up supplying many hundreds of thousands of vehicles for rental per year in the next few years. On top of their other business, which is also continuing to grow at a very nice pace. They'll likely need a few new factories for this but they've shown they can deliver those as well.
[1]: https://caredge.com/toyota/maintenance
[2]: https://caredge.com/tesla/maintenance
Not too long ago Elon talked about Tesla making up to 20 million cars per year in 2030. That would make Tesla twice as large as VW, the currently largest car manufacturer. Of course this statement was treated as Elons typical optimism, but deals like this pave the way to that actually coming true.
In 2012 Elon predicted 500k vehicles in 2020 and he was spot on. So lets see the 2020 prediction for 2030.
I feel people have really short memory wrt. Elon's optimism. Not everything he promises pans out (autopilot being the prime example), but usually, it does, just slightly later than promised.
Renault Clio on spot #2 with 18k sold.
Interesting considering the price of the tesla….
It leads to a misleading number if not averaged over the other months.
> Normally, Tesla would deliver only a handful of cars during the first 2 months of a quarter and then deliver an incredible amount of cars during the last month a quarter.
https://electrek.co/2018/06/07/tesla-sales-norway-surge-stab...
If nothing goes wrong, the first two-three years are practically free for an EV. Home charging costs pennies and if you're really stingy you can use free public chargers.
Then you might need a new set of tires maybe a quick maintenance at the dealership and you're good for a few years again.
Makes little sense for Tesla to sell at low margin when they are supply constrained.