Tuesday, April 23, 2019

Tesla

As far as I'm concerned, the big news yesterday was Tesla's announcement that they have perfected self-driving enough to introduce it at the end of this year. If true, this is a revolutionary time frame. Many other observers are looking towards five to ten years.
I'm sceptical. A UBS analyst who went for a drive in it said that it required human intervention twice, even though the course was in good weather. So I'm not holding my breath.
One very big plus about Tesla that is mostly overlooked is that they design and build their own self driving chips. This is a major advantage. Their competitors buy NVDA gpu-based chips. These are slower and inherently less efficient. It's like the difference between mining bitcoin with an off-the-shelf chip vs. a custom made ASIC. I'm not sure how Tesla is going to monetize this, but there probably is a way.
That's why TSLA is such a complicated stock. Its intellectual capital is enormous; the ASIC chip is just the tip of the iceberg. OTOH, the company has had execution problems in its manufacturing operations. Maybe they should become a supplier to the rest of the industry. If they ever get to an oversold condition, maybe around $200, I'll buy it.

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