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Tesla Model Y Prototype Spotted, NHTSA Looking Into Tesla Battery Fires As Trolls Swarm

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Published on November 2nd, 2019 |

by Steve Hanley

Tesla Model Y Prototype Spotted, NHTSA Looking Into Tesla Battery Fires As Trolls Swarm

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November 2nd, 2019 by Steve Hanley

Good news and bad news in the Teslaverse today. The price of shares in the company will either rise or fall on Monday as a result. Let’s begin with the good news, shall we?

Tesla Model Y Prototype Spotted On California Highway

Whilst motoring serenely along on a California highway last week, YouTuber kenken830 noticed a vehicle he had never seen before coming up on his left. It turns out the car was a Tesla Model Y prototype out on a test drive. Kenken830 followed the car for several miles, capturing video of it with his car’s built-in cameras.

Through a happy coincidence, a friend of his was also driving along the same highway in a Tesla Model 3 at that moment. For a while, the two cars were side by side, making it possible to assess their size relative to each other for the first time in a real-world driving situation. Watch the video for yourself to see the difference, which is quite remarkable. Several people who watched the video have commented that the Model Y is much larger in comparison to the Model 3 than they realized.

If it is true the world is crazy for SUVs, then Tesla is about to unleash an all electric SUV with all the features and benefits of the Model 3 that targets the most popular cars in the new car marketplace today, cars like the Honda CR-V, Toyota RAV4, Hyundai Kona, and Volkswagen Tiguan. Even cars like the Jaguar I-PACE, Audi e-tron, and Mercedes EQC will be in its crosshairs. Elon Musk has stated publicly he sees the Model Y outselling the Model S, Model X, and Model 3 combined! Seeing the Model Y up close and personal like this makes it seem Musk’s words are more than an idle boast.

The hope for Tesla fans is that the Model Y will get here sooner rather than later. During the most recent Tesla earnings call, Musk indicated the timetable for Model Y production is being moved forward by several months. There are rumors the first of them could begin rolling off the assembly line in Fremont before the end of the first quarter next year — not a moment too soon for Tesla fans.

NHTSB Opens Investigation Into Tesla Battery Fires
A report in the New York Times carries this headline: “Tesla Batteries Investigated for Possible Defects.” The story itself is a hatchet job that hardly rises to the level of journalism, something the Times does over and over again when the topic is Tesla. Here’s what you need to know: Last April, a camera in a parking garage in Shanghai captured what appeared to be a Tesla Model S bursting into flame. Tesla immediately sent a team to investigate and determined that a battery cell had failed and triggered the incident.

In response to its findings, Tesla created an over-the-air update for the battery management system installed in some of its cars to “further protect the battery and improve longevity,” according to Green Car Reports. That update decreased the range of those cars according to several owners. That’s when attorney Edward Chen got involved. He filed suit on behalf of the affected owners, claiming that all Tesla batteries are defective and that the company tried to get out of its legal liability to provide defect-free products with an OTA that cost little to nothing.

This was all done “under the guise of ‘safety’ and increasing the ‘longevity’ of the batteries of the Class Vehicles,” the complaint stated. “Tesla fraudulently manipulated its software with the intent to avoid its duties and legal obligations to customers to fix, repair, or replace the batteries of the Class Vehicles, all of which Tesla knew were defective, yet failed to inform its customers of the defects.” At the time the lawsuit was filed. Chen said in a statement, “This is no different than what Apple did to their older iPhones in the throttling and performance case.”

After the suit was filed, Tesla issued a statement saying, “A very small percentage of owners of older Model S and Model X vehicles may have noticed a small reduction in range when charging to a maximum state of charge following a software update designed to improve battery longevity. As previously noted, we have been working to mitigate the impact on range for these owners and have been rolling out over-the-air updates to address this issue since last week.”

Not satisfied with the progress of the litigation, Chen fired off a letter in September to NHTSA requesting it open an investigation into Tesla batteries and any BMS updates. In turn, the agency sent a letter to Tesla in October demanding information on — Are you sitting down? — all Tesla Model S and Model X vehicles ever built and all OTA since the beginning of this year. The letter ends with a threat to impose more than $100 million in fines on the company if it does not respond fully by November 28. The Times report clearly relishes the idea that Tesla might have to pay dearly for negligence.

This is clearly an attempt to work the refs, as they say in sports. Chen’s letter to NHTSA has the effect of putting pressure on Tesla to settle the lawsuit. The New York Times in its reporting breathlessly notes that lithium-ion batteries are known to catch fire under some circumstances, such as in early iterations of the Boeing Dreamliner and in various smartphones. It makes sure its readers know lithium-ion batteries are banned on commercial aircraft and that not only did a Tesla catch fire in Shanghai, a car in the US actually caught fire twice! In his letter to NHTSA, Chen refers to the “alarming number of car fires that have occurred worldwide.”

Oh my God! Hide the women and children to protect them from this danger! But never, ever mention that there are more than 150 gasoline fires every day in the United States. The Times even goes so far as to conflate the claim by Walmart that rooftop solar systems provided by Tesla have caught fire at several locations with the danger of vehicle battery fires. The message is clear: stay away from Teslas if you don’t want to get burned or blown up.

I confess I read the New York ‘Times on a daily basis and consider it an authoritative news source in most instances. (Besides, I have a crush on Maureen Dowd, even though her profile photo is probably more than 20 years out of date.) But I have to say its reporting on Tesla falls to the level of the garbage spit out routinely by the likes of the Daily Mail. It is solidly on the side of the Tesla FUD network and undeserving of any credibility whatsoever. When it comes to the NYT and Tesla, caveat lectorem!
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Steve Hanley Steve writes about the interface between technology and sustainability from his home in Rhode Island and anywhere else the Singularity may lead him. His motto is, “Life is not measured by how many breaths we take but by the number of moments that take our breath away!” You can follow him on Google + and on Twitter.

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Tesla Bulls Warned Tesla Shorts — 5 Key Warnings

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Published on November 4th, 2019 |

by Zachary Shahan

Tesla Bulls Warned Tesla Shorts — 5 Key Warnings

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November 4th, 2019 by Zachary Shahan

As you may have seen, Tesla recently showed another quarterly profit, which apparently shocked the market enough that the Tesla [TSLA] stock price shot up. I don’t follow the stock closely, but I am a shareholder and find the whole “Tesla bull vs Tesla short” debate quite fascinating. I’ve had several thoughts on the stock and these different investment communities in the past week, but the one that shot to the front most quickly and strongly was simple: TSLA bulls warned the TSLA shorts.

I started thinking about what exactly that means, how we Tesla bulls warned Tesla shorts. I realized that it’s been extensive — not just one point or another, but a consistent debunking of their concerns and pessimistic claims. It’s not been just one warning, but many different warnings packaged together on a daily basis. The combined takeaway warning was just that, yes, Tesla can make money. It’s not going bankrupt. Stop betting it’s going to crash before you get burned. But, on a more nuanced level, there are several key factors at play that explain why exactly the company can make money and what Tesla short sellers seem to consistently get wrong about Tesla. As I started thinking about this, I figured it deserved a full article. Perhaps this once will help keep more skeptics from getting burned next time Tesla shows a quarterly profit.

1. Tesla is obsessed with improving efficiency. This may be hard to understand or believe, and is sometimes hard to see since Tesla is growing so fast and keeps taking on new challenges in the midst of that rapid growth, but Tesla is obsessed with improving efficiency. I wrote about this at length recently, so I’m not going to repeat that performance. Just read about it here: “Capital Efficiency (Tesla’s Obsession).”

2. Tesla whoops the competition, literally (not really) and objectively. I can’t tell how much Tesla short sellers understand this (and pretend not to) versus somehow never digesting it. Sure, you may wonder if Tesla currently has demand for 60,000 Model 3’s a quarter versus 100,000 a quarter, but anyone who follows the company somewhat closely has to know that the Model 3 has received rave reviews all across the auto industry — like, all across the industry — and pretty much everyone who drives a Model 3 finds it to be amazing. On acceleration, infotainment, autonomous driving, safety, design, and more the Model 3 is a new world wonder in the auto industry. It obliterates the competition in the midsize luxury car class because it’s that much better. It can also compete with the Toyota Camry and Honda Accord on total cost of ownership for many buyers. Tesla owners and fans have explained the cars advantages millions of times in countless ways, yet short sellers often insist that the Model 3 is actually a crappy car. Sorry, but unbiased humans do not agree, not at all, and if you don’t see why, at least try to pay attention to the stats and objective reviews.

3. Word of mouth is a thing. The biggest question mark to me has been how fast word of mouth (and exposure to the car in more tangential ways) would spread and lead to sales. In the long term, the Model 3 must pull in buyers, but I wondered how many it could reach in 2019. Nonetheless, anecdotal experiences, Elon Musk’s comments about new orders and vehicle demand, and various articles on CleanTechnica about ways Tesla could stimulate more demand if production looked like it would outpace orders should have given short sellers the sense that demand has been rolling strong. Instead, short sellers have been insistent that Tesla reached a demand cliff, that almost no one would want a Model 3 after initial fanboys and fangirls got their cars, and that word-of-mouth sales would be very limited.

There’s even been hype about Tesla hiding cars, having more inventory than people think, and not having any more customers in [insert location] because registrations dropped for a week or so. Tesla bulls have argued: many more people discover every day that the Model 3 is truly awesome. This will continue to be the case as more people receive the car and share it with friends, family, coworkers, and neighbors. It seems Tesla short sellers will just keep assuming that demand has finally dried up and sales are about to fall off a cliff. That’s certainly been the case in the past several quarters.

4. Elon Musk is a business genius. Probably the most common assumptions among Tesla short sellers are that Elon Musk is a fraud who doesn’t really know how to run a legitimate business, Elon is actually an idiot who can’t execute, and Elon is constantly on the verge of taking Tesla off a cliff. I don’t really understand where these assumptions come from. I don’t understand how you can listen to or watch Elon and come to such conclusions, let alone follow his companies’ progress over the past couple of decades and think that stuff. Elon has a practically unmatched track record of business success in multiple industries. I actually can’t think of someone who has proven himself a more adept and qualified business leader. Billionaires like Ron Baron and Larry Ellison say the same thing, yet short sellers assume or at least try to convince others that the opposite is the case. We Tesla longs try to explain why Baron and Ellison back Elon, but the critics call us brainless fanboys instead of being receptive to the points made.

5. Tesla has been making money on its vehicles. Some people claim that Tesla can’t produce a Tesla Model 3 for the price it sells the car for. In other words, they say the whole business is a Ponzi scheme, a fraud, a multi-year accounting trick. Supporters have explained that Tesla makes a solid gross margin on its vehicles and could be easily profitable if it focused on that instead of rapid growth. Some critics have claimed that Tesla will simply lose more money if it sells more cars, and no matter how much we’ve tried to correct the record and point out actual gross margins, logical cash flow forecasts, and the fact that Tesla can in fact produce cars for less than the company sells them for, the short sellers have ignored us and yelled, “Bankwupt! Any day now!”

Those are matters mostly focused on financials and quarter-to-quarter topics. They should be enough to warn short sellers that it’s dangerous to play with the stock and bet on the company’s valuation going to $0. However, the even bigger matters for Tesla longs are … long-term matters. Word of mouth can grow exponentially. Tesla could crack the nut on self-driving cars years before the competition. Tesla appears to have a massive lead on battery technology and production. The fruits of Tesla’s efficiency obsession will come in future years. Tesla’s software advantage may be its top advantage. Electric vehicles get more and more competitive with gasoline vehicles by the day and will be disruptive tech in time, and Tesla is far and away the brand leader and tech leader in this disruptive EV space. Oh yeah, and then there’s solar and energy storage. Also, you think there’s a rabid Tesla fan base now? You ain’t seen nothing yet. Look at what kids and young adults think of Tesla and Elon Musk!

I don’t know how many short sellers are serious when they claim Tesla is “going to $0.” I honestly have no idea when one of them really believes that or just says it in order to try to drive the price down temporarily and make a quick buck. I have no idea how many of them are hired trolls, hired by an oil company, an auto dealer association, another automaker, a biased investor, or some other vested interest in order to drive down demand for Teslas and/or Tesla’s share price. I can somewhat understand a short seller who thinks they have an opportunity in a challenging transition phase to make money betting against the company. However, I have a very hard time understanding short sellers who think the company is doomed in the long term, who don’t see those various Tesla advantages noted above. Though, one thing is clear: Tesla bulls don’t spend their days and nights trying to trick short sellers into believing the company is about to crash, so that they can make money on the company when it succeeds. Nope, we don’t try to play dirty and manipulate people into shorting the company and losing money on it when the stock price goes up. What we’ve tried to do is explain to others why it is Tesla has been seeing such strong growth, why it is expected (by us) to keep growing strong, and why it is the last company someone should bet against in the long term. We have tried to tell the story as we see it. So, when those expectations become reality and short sellers get burned, it’s hard to have sympathy for them. It’s hard to have sympathy for people who have consistently blocked out our arguments and tried to scream “fraud” or “idiot” or “stupid fanboy” in response.

The funny/sad thing is, I’m here again making the case for why I think Tesla is a solid long-term investment, yet critics will see it as delusional and keep betting against Tesla. As LeVar Burton of Reading Rainbow would say, “But don’t take my word for it!”

Disclosure: This is not investment advice. I don’t provide investment advice. If you are considering an investment move, please consult an investment professional, or at least a magic 8 ball.

If you’d like to buy a Tesla and get some free Supercharging miles, feel free to use our referral code: https://ts.la/zachary63404. Or not. You can also get a $100 discount on Tesla solar with that code.

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