Below are shorthand notes I have taken during the Tesla Shareholder meeting that just commenced on 6/11/2019.
Today was the Tesla shareholder meeting, while below I have full notes taken during the meeting, people are getting really excited about some of the images below which were posted by twitter user @vincent13031925
https://twitter.com/vincent13031925
OK, enough of the really sexy pics of amazing EVs…
Some noteable quotes from Elon:
“Won’t be long before we have a 400 mile range car” – Elon Musk
“63% trade ins are non-premium cars, people trading up to buy a Model 3. 12% are mid size sedans.” – Elon Musk
“We’ve laid the groundwork that anything made since October 2016 is capable of FSD by just switching out the computer. (for fsd cpu made a few months ago).Still need regulatory approval, but the capability is there.”
“Model Y market is 2.5x bigger than the Model 3 market.Put a lot of effort into design, incredibly low drag coefficient, even lower than the 3. It has a lot of room inside. If the car feels bigger on the inside than it looks on the outside, it’s a good design. Expect to have good production by the end of next year. We are hoping for sooner but want to have some margin on that timing.” – Elon Musk
“We are still looking for where the right place is for Gigagactory Europe. It makes sense to have a car factory at least on each continent. Having to not pay tariffs and really long delivery chain and costs will make it more affordable to those in Europe and China. Will make a decision by end of this year (about Europe location).” – Elon Musk
“I think we have a shot at being equal to a comp shingle roof plus someone’s utility costs. That’s one of the cheapest roofs available. A new roof with better comps available. If you have a better roof with better price, it will take off like crazy. Many other companies have tried to solve this problem and have no succeeded.” – Elon Musk
About the Version 3 supercharger.:
“Being deployed
around the world. 75 miles in 5 minutes at 250 kW system. There was recently a
test, what car could charge most kWh in an hour, it was the Model 3.” – Elon Musk
About consumer complaints:
“Collision repair taking an eternity. So we are moving body repair in house in Tesla and even providing it in mobile service. Just did first bumper replacement from van, in this case it took less than an hour.”
Regarding the pickup:
“Pickup truck, hope to unveil hopefully this summer. We spent a lot of time designing pickup, I think it’s going to be great, I think it’s the coolest car I’ve ever seen. Worst case scenario, more weird looking truck, looks like it came out of a sci-fi move, it will be really cool I think…”
There will be a Battery & Power-train investor day:
“Will have a battery and powertrain investor day, hopefully by the end of this year.This is a big deal. If I were an outside investor, what is timeline to FSD, how to get cost per kWh lower on battery cells. Those are the 2 most important things.” – Elon Musk
When asked about Starlink possibly being used to give internet access to Tesla’s on the road
Q: Do you think Tesla vehicles could rely on SpaceX’s Starlink network for their internet related services at some point in the future?
A: I think we would have 8 different antenna for starlink. It’s the most advanced phase antenna array, about the size of a small pizza. It would be fine for trucks, homes, etc. We will continue to rely on cellular networks.Power of starlink is Low latency high bandwidth low density areas. Rural, semi-rural areas right now. Probably able to serve 3-5% of people in the world. It’s not ideal for high density cities. It’s really to serve the unserved or poorly served is what it’s about.
When asked about making Tesla available in India:
Q: India?
A: Rules for importing to India are complicated. Want to come to India, there are complicated rules…tariffs for importing, what you are allowed to do for sales and service…we are currently able to sell as many cars as we make, so adding complexity is not required right now. We really want to come to India as soon as we can. I would be really surprised if we’re not there by next year
And one of the highlights, a PITA rep asked about the leather steering wheel:
Q: PITA rep, assured us Model Y would not have leather including the steering wheel. Will Model Y? Leather industry is responsible for more greenhouse gas than all industries combined.
A: I believe we close to having a non-heated steering wheel. Issues with heating a steering wheel over time. It’s easier for seats than steering wheel.
Q: will all Tesla vehicles be free of animal byproducts by next year.
A: model Y and Model 3 soon…
Full Notes:
Full Notes:
Model 3 outselling all competitors in US.
Best in class performance
Best selling car in revenue (including camry and accord). Tesla 4th best selling in numbers, best selling in revenue by any car in the US.
In class, outselling units for mercedez, lexus, combined
Most energy efficient cars in the world
Model 3 around 4 miles per kWh. (jokes about eTron having room for improvement).
New model S 370 mile range. (jokes it’s all down hill).
New Model x 320 miles.
No new car has exceeded the model S which first came out in 2012. (jokes that he won’t pick on competitors).
Won’t be long before we have a 400 mile range car.
There is not a demand problem. Sales have far exceeded production. We are doing well, have a decent shot at a record quarter at every level. If not it will be very close. 90% of orders are coming from non-reservation holders.
63% trade ins are non-premium cars, people trading up to buy a Model 3. 12% are mid size sedans.
Because driving electric is so much cheaper than gasoline, the actual operating cost of an EV are much less than a gasoline car.
Buying a model 3 is much like buying a Camry or an accord (jokes “better”).
Autonomy investor day was well received. Self driving computer is 21x faster than it’s predecessor. You will still need to supervise the autonomy, but it should be able to go from work to garage. Sometime after next year will have to convince regulators you don’t need supervision. Having a huge fleet, having a powerful AI inference engine (FSD cpu). Having sensors (cameras, radar, sensors, electronics).
We’ve laid the groundwork that anything made since October 2016 is capable of FSD by just switching out the computer. (for fsd cpu made a few months ago).
Still need regulatory approval, but the capability is there.
It’s mad to buy a fossil fuel car right now. A car that can not do FSD is not worth very much.
If you buy a gasoline car that’s not FSD, it’s like riding a horse and using a flip phone (hello? Not wise).
It takes a bi of time to convince people of this, but people are starting to get it.
A car is often a persons most valuable asset. Clearly we are headed towards electrification and autonomy, so that’s the car you want to get.
Model Y market is 2.5x bigger than the Model 3 market.
Put a lot of effort into design, incredibly low drag coefficient, even lower than the 3. It has a lot of room inside. If the car feels bigger on the inside than it looks on the outside, it’s a good design. Expect to have good production by the end of next year. We are hoping for sooner but want to have some margin on that timing (clapping).
Gigafactory 1 has almost half of global EV batter production.
(Elon calls up JB to talk about Gigafactory).
We did the quick math, we are going to build so many cars per year, so many kwH per car, need so many cells per year which was more than what the world was producing for everything just a few years before that. This wasn’t going to work unless we build a factory ourselves.
….it took thousands of people to do it, I feel super proud to be part of that team. (clapping).
Elon:
This was 5 slides, we showed a picture and asked investors to build this thing in the valley. Investors gave us the money and we built it.
35 gWh of potential. 70-80% of capacity has been realized.
I will be at the end of this year or next. It’s lowest cost per kWh.
Good progress on Gigafactory in Shanghai. It gets followed in great scrutiny. The shell of the building is basically done. It’s the fastest large factory construction that I’ve ever seen. Already installing factory equipment. Installing paint shop, battery module lines, etc. Chinese is largest EV car market in the world. We’ve had to pay import duties from 15-40%, did not have access to local incentives b/c they were only available to those in Chine. Those incentives are going away (when Tesla starts) no coincidence. Will have a morre affordable car to chinese market.
Gigafactory Europe. (jokes we’ve made great progress here, a pic of a fields with nothing build, jokes).
We are still looking for where the right place is for Gigagactory Europe.
It makes sense to have a car factory at least on each continent. Having to not pay tariffs and really long delivery chain and costs will make it more affordable to those in Europe and Chine. Will make a decision by end of this year.
Tesla energy
Looking to double storage growth. In order of 2-3 gWh. About to complete version 3 of the solar roof. This is a hard problem to have a solar cell with a roof tile. Roofs have to last a long time. The amount of testing that one needs to do to predict how this will perform is a hard problem. Making it easy to install, get costs low, really excited about version 3. I think we have a shot at being equal to a comp shingle roof plus someone’s utility costs. That’s one of the cheapest roofs available. A new roof with better comps available. If you have a better roof with better price, it will take off like crazy. Many other companies have tried to solve this problem and have no succeeded.
(Drew)
We are laser focused to achieve this (solar roof)….
Version 3 supercharger.
Being deployed around the world. 75 miles in 5 minutes at 250 kW system. There was recently a test, what car could charge most kWh in an hour, it was the Model 3.
Publishing new maps for super charger deployment. Finally going to get the trans Canada hwy (jokes we are going Alaska too).
The 2 critical factors for sales in any region are:
- Is service center in a reasonable distance.
- Are super chargers on routes you want to take?
Basically people are sensible (service car and charge). Where we have this, sales are good.
Mobile service
We have mobile service vans which will fix your car immediately when it breaks down. Notified by car and van will deploy immediately, van will arrive. Currently tested with tire repair in bay area. Adding bumper repair and minor collision repair.
Things troubling consumers:
Collision repair taking an eternity. So we are moving body repair in house in Tesla and even providing it in mobile service. Just did first bumper replacement from van, in this case it took less than an hour.
Pickup truck, hope to unveil hopefully this summer. We spent a lot of time designing pickup, I think it’s going to be great, I think it’s the coolest car I’ve ever seen. Worst case scenario, more weird looking truck, looks like it came out of a sci-fi move, it will be really cool I think…
Semi to get into production next year.
A lot of this is driven by the ability to produce enough cells. We’re matching the product rollout according to the scale of battery production, that is the main limiting factory. As we scale battery production, look further down supply chain, we might get into the mining business. We will do whatever we have to in order to scale at the fastest way possible.
Will have a battery and powertrain investor day, hopefully by the end of this year.
This is a big deal. If I were an outside investor, what is timeline to FSD, how to get cost per kWh lower on battery cells. Those are the 2 most important things.
We need to scale battery production, need a large scale solution and get energy density higher. We are taking all moves, not sitting by. We have solutions in place.
There are some important technologies talked about on battery investor day.
Question: When will advanced summon be ready?
Elon: we do have advanced summon out now, it’s close to being amazing, It’s not there but it’s close. There is a lot of complexity in a parking lot. That’s quite tricky. It’s close to being magical.
Feel good about going to release fairly soon. It’s got to be awesome and super safe. We can’t run anyone over, that would be really bad. If you make the car really sensitive it goes paranoid and doesn’t move. You don’t want to make it too aggressive too. If it’s more convenient to walk to your car then it’s not worth it.
Q: Tesla insurance.
A: really close, an acquisition to complete, we are close.
Q: When will pickup truck even be?
A: probably end of summer. You want it to be great, it’s very hard, it’s a very hard thing. Our goal is to have more functional than F-150, and top selling vehicle in US and a better sports car than a 911. It’s physically possible, I think we can do it.
Q: Do you think Tesla vehicles could rely on SpaceX’s Starlink network for their internet related services at some point in the future?
A: I think we would have 8 different antenna for starlink. It’s the most advanced phase antenna array, about the size of a small pizza. It would be fine for trucks, homes, etc. We will continue to rely on cellular networks.
Power of starlink is Low latency high bandwidth low density areas. Rural, semi-rural areas right now. Probably able to serve 3-5% of people in the world. It’s not ideal for high density cities. It’s really to serve the unserved or poorly served is what it’s about.
Q: with regards to FSD, how does Tesla plan to work around the issue of obscured camera sensors? Especially in the rain and snow when he reverse camera can become highly obscured?
A: (jokes, we’re going to have really tiny wipers..) applying some coatings to solve this problem. We had this issue with the front radar, but if we apply a think hydrophobic coating it usually solves the problem. Or we’ll let you know “please clean the snow off your camera”.
Q: Short and long term demand, in tandem with profitability, seem to be the biggest concerns amongst investors currently,. How is Tesla feeling on these metrics?….What are Tesla’s plans to address these?
A: Not a major issue. Profitability is always challenging when you’re a fast growing company, the scale at which Tesla is growing is hard to appreciate. Last year we doubled our fleet. We made as many cars last year as our entire history. This year will have 60-80% of total vehicle fleet. It’s hard to be profitable with that level of growth. We can slow down, but that wouldn’t be good for sustainability. I think we can be cash flow positive despite having a very high growth rate.
Q: Would Tesla consider pushing out an update to is App for Ride Share Service soon so at least for both Tesla and Current owners as an easy way to make revenue now and fix bugs along the way till they get to FSD and Robo Taxies in the future with no Driver?
A: This might make sense. We’ll probably do something like this, sort of a supervised robo taxi.
Audience Questions
Q: Brian Campbel, shareholder for a few years….Tesla energy, read several analys’ about transmitting energy to other regions, would it make sense for Tesla to get involved in electricity transmission.
A: The big value of solar roof or retro fit solar is that so you can have localized power generation,. If you have battery storage, it’s very helpful to stabalize the grid. Release energy at night and use the wall powerpack to feed grid and reduce need for long distance powerlines. These are generally not great, unnerving to drive under, etc. Then you don’t need to build more sub stations and long distance power lines.
Storage is great to improve he utilization if existing infrastructure.
You could locally put powerpacks in the substation (where high power lines come in and get dropped from k volts to 500 volts…). In that same footprint you could fit a number of powerpacks..when usage is low charge of the packs and discharge them during the day, wouldn’t need to build more powerlines.
Q: china has 60% of Evs. Is 500k units per year a low number, that would give us 29% of market. If we go higher volume we learn more, connect with supply chain..On demand side with no import fees, Tesla compare well to other manufacturers and need help getting rid of smog..Why was target set at 500K? Do you think in China we are being aggressive enough?
A: Have you seen he factory being built in China? Fastest ever, pretty epic. (how about 2 factories) E: we can’t run out of money either..It may make sense to have other factories in other parts of China….A big impact is how soon you receive materials to deliver product, if you can compress time, faster you grow, more capital you have. It’s important to localize…you can scale, faster you scale, more cash you have. Counterpoint, you have to pay for ingredients long before you get the car. Non-US production is challenging from a cash flow because we have to pay for everything long before we get the car. Long term, is solving for that cash flow Gap.
Q: given continued need for super charger expansion, opportunity to partner with publicly traded real-estate company to buy land for super charges, structure to lease to hold the land, there would be huge demand to invest in EV charging, Tesla could finance and aggresively expand supercharging..would that be of interest.
A: most of our locations are free…Q: cell towers are leased and land is leased… E: Who would we sell I to? Capital efficiency of super chargers is pretty good.
Q: Representative of most owners which are really happy…now what we read in the mainstream media….company is on verge of bankruptcy. Have intelligent friends who are holding off buying tesla because of concern of company. Fantastic job of issues with manufacturing, etc. What is the plan to take this issue head on, so the true American success story gets told?
A: It’s true what you say, I’s very distressing it makes me sad. Not sure what to do with it, we do provide a rebuttle, it’s typically buried several paragraphs down, if at all. Some of these things are crazy, it’s 10 times more likely for a gasoline car , a combustion engine car! It’s in the name! (laughing) it has highly flammable fluid..there’s about 200,000 gasoline car fires in US per year. It’s extremely rare for a Tesla car to catch fire, it’s usually due to some extenuating circumstances. Would you rather have a gasoline powered cell phone or a battery powered cell phone.
Q: can you put more energy into this?
A: we do what we can….
A: if you can share your optimism, that’s our best defense…
E: safety especially, it’s paramount to maximize the safety of the car, this shows in statistics. It’s really hard to have a serious injury in a Tesla, rare. Probability of injury, Tesla has lowest of any car tested. If it was possible to have a 6th star, we would have a 6th star. There’s just a lot of forces against Tesla…
Q: It’s obviously on your mind, the constructive response is so challenging, maybe one opening such as Bloomberg, who is a titan in the industry, perhaps not a debate, but a joint discussion to talk about climate change, public awareness, something public…he biggest challenge with the media, there doesn’t seem to be anyone…false narratives, no one else is speaking up about it. (Suggests big names public figures)
A: Agree we need to take action. We will definitely provide people with rebuttles with info. We’ve don’t it piecemeal, we could put it all together on one page and debunk the myth…
Q: With Model 3 being so successful, where is Tesla in the mission to accelerate. Transport..
A: We’ve really helped convince the auto industry to move toward electrification. When we first started, always felt electric cars were important, thought it would just happen…not guaranteed. Trace back to 2003 with JB and Harold….thought for sure we would fail, it needed to be done. (moving forward with Tesla) was worth doing. While it’s rewarding, there is still a long way to go. Mixed emotions. Back in 2003-2004 people thought electric cars were stupid, wouldn’t look good, wouldn’t go fast…(not sure what this question or answer rambling was about?)
A: on the energy side, 100% RENEWABLE grids were in the same situation. Tesla and others are taking islands and other areas 100% renewable.
A: Key to a sustainable future solar, wind, geothermal…sun doesn’t shine 24 hours a day so you have to have batteries. Key is battery storage. When we show it can be done, then other companies will as well.
Q: As a horse owner, what will the towing capacity for the truck (be)?
A: It is designed to meet or exceed an F-150.
Q: You didn’t talk about nav on autopilot today vs end of 2019 feature wise. What gives you the confidence..?
A: When I drive the latest dev version it can take me from my house to office, there are interventions at times. It doesn’t perfectly deal with every intersection and every turn. I think it’s possible to game the system per route, but when route changes that won’t work. It’s hard to come up with a general solution. Other companies solutions are brittle, rely on high res maps, LIDAR, very expensive GPS, etc. It’s not a general solution, if they go off that route they don’t work. We want to release something o 500K cars all over the world. Our progress will appear slower than it really is. I think it is quite more advanced. Every element we release is a general solution.
A: we learn a lot about what to train the neural net to do? Curves for example, previously trained on freespace (space where car won’t be destroyed..). Rode edge and curb are 2 training nets being trained right now. Where does true road space end? Especially parking lots and tight corners recognizing curbs are really important. Most of this is working in the dev version of my car 2 branches, would not be good to release to general public yet.
Q: India?
A: Rules for importing to India are complicated. Want to come to India, there are complicated rules…tariffs for importing, what you are allowed to do for sales and service…we are currently able to sell as many cars as we make, so adding complexity is not required right now. We really want to come to India as soon as we can. I would be really surprised if we’re not there by next year…
Q: PITA rep, assured us Model Y would not have leather including the steering wheel. Will Model Y? Leather industry is responsible for more greenhouse gas than all industries combined.
A: I believe we close to having a non-heated steering wheel. Issues with heating a steering wheel over time. It’s easier for seats than steering wheel.
Q: will all Tesla vehicles be free of animal byproducts by next year.
A: model Y and Model 3 soon…
Q: Proactively advertise?
A: currently we are selling more cars than we can make. This would make things worse financially, it would increase demand but…not a thing that’s necessary right now. Too much trickery in advertising, false association, a bad product and put in a nice environment with good looking people, trick you into buying it, too common. It tends to be bad, don’t like it for that reason. Could have it as information to refute these issues. Wouldn’t say we are against advertising forever, it hasn’t been necessary thus far, so…year
Q: what about a short film or contest?
A: that could be cool…yep. Would have to give it some thought.
Q: will tesla make an aquatic car? On or under or both?
A: It’s funny you should mention that. We do have a design for a submarine car. I actually have the one from the movie…if you make it a bit bigger than it’s technically possible, I think the market for this will be small. Small but enthusiastic. We do have a design, it would be a bit if a distraction, maybe at some point.