OK, in slightly longer form. There are a couple pieces in Tesla.
The EV piece is a commodity or soon to be commodity. The supply chain will have all the EV pieces for sale to any car builder.
The software that controls the dashboard, the giant LCD screen that control the car. Traditional car firms will struggle with this, but not sure if it’s essential to car buyers. Have you ever refuse to buy a car because its entertainment system sucks?
The critical piece is the self driving software. But curiously it’s the part that Tesla sucks the most because it refuses to put Lidar on its cars.
I don’t think charging station networks are all that interesting. Other EV’s don’t have them and that doesn’t seem to hurt their sales. Nissan Leaf doesn’t have it, the Chevy Bolt doesn’t have it, BMW i3 doesn’t have it…
Most people use their EV’s as a commute car to and from office. You charge it at home and some even charge at office. Why do you need charging stations? Long trip? Why would you drive your Tesla on a long trip?
I have no idea about patents. Google bought Motorola only for its patents. Moto started in 1928 and had tons of patents. The price was 12.5B. I bet Tesla’s patents are worth far less than that.
$10B is a great price for Tesla. I suspect fair value is around 20 to 30B.
I just thought of something. If the SEC won but the DOJ lost, Elon doesn’t have to go to jail but he can’t serve as CEO in public company. In that scenario Elon will have to take Tesla private so he can be CEO.
You solved his game. This way he can start nee companies and use the excuse of not being the ceo of a public company to stay private in every one of them
What does that even mean? Does Tesla not sell cars?
To put it in another way, what’s the unique advantage that Tesla has and others can’t hope to have? I can see its software will always better than Ford or BMW etc legacy car firms. But will it be better than Google and Apple? Unlikely.
The end game is Apple building its own cars, using its software and leveraging EV supply chains but chooses to build some key hardware in house. AKA exactly how it does the iPhones. It doesn’t build the glass, but it builds its own CPU. I expect something like that in Apple car.
That’s why the early report of Apple experimenting with its own brakes and stuff is so wrong. Why they had to reboot the whole thing and focus first on software.
Right. It’s not the Dell and HP that assemble computers that make money. All the money in PC is made by Intel and Microsoft.
Actually I heard someone compared Tesla to 1st gen Apple. Before Tim Cooks came along Apple used to build its own standard and custom hardware, while everybody else formed industry-wide standards.
I think Apple now doesn’t do it just for the sake of doing it, like going with SCSI while everybody else went USB. And when it tried to do it like with the Mac Pro it blew up in its face still.
Tesla model 3 has shit quality. I am starting to regret the purchase. The service center is jam packed with vehicles under repair. I am still waiting for them to make progress on my car
Mac volume is too small to fight the desktop and laptop trend.
iPhone calls the shot on connectivity and components. Many propriety stuffs. Huge volume even suppliers have to bend over to serve Apple iPhone.
iPhone power is not translated to Mac e.g. iPhone use lightning while Mac use USB-C.
