[quote]DBCooper wrote:
[quote]on edge wrote:
Speculative, high flying stocks like Tesla are usually prone to massive swings based on the mood of the market. I think it’s interesting that the market has been trending down for the last two weeks and tesla is hanging in there. Tesla owners seem to be happy to hold.[/quote]
Here’s my concern about these stocks.
What happens when Mercedes or GM or Ford develop their own electric car that compares favorably to Tesla’s? I think this could be right around the corner. Also, I wonder how much longer Tesla can remain profitable while still manufacturing their cars in Silicon Valley instead of Mexico or Brazil.
I plan on staying on top of this and when it looks like GM and Ford are about to put comparable electric cars on the market I’m abandoning ship. Tesla looks great right now and I think they’ve really revolutionized the electric car concept, but I harbor some doubts about how long they’ll remain viable in the market that they’ve been instrumental in developing.
Daimler is one of their investors and I think for them it’s a smart move. Tesla is really just a proving ground for Daimler/Mercedes. If Tesla fails, Tesla is the one who put a failed product out and not Mercedes, so Mercedes doesn’t have that stigma attached to it. And if Tesla does well, all they’ve done is make Daimler a nice return on their investment as well as show Daimler that they can enter the electric car market successfully without having to assume nearly the same risk.[/quote]
I don’t think you have to worry about Ford & GM in the least. They are incapable of competing with Tesla. The culture at those companies is incapable of changing, innovating and doing things in a better way.
You should look this up and do some reading or find some old NPR feeds. Ten or fifteen years ago -maybe even 20- the Japanese shared their production methods with The Big Three. That’s right, they gave them their technology for producing cars more efficiently and with better quality standard. Ford and GM tried to implement the better methods and failed. The unions were so entrenched in their screwed up ways they couldn’t implement these better ways of doing things. I don’t think I’ve ever been so embarrassed to be an American than when I heard this.
Tesla is a start up that is not entrenched in old ways. They can be innovative and efficient. They do need to move production out of California though. I’m not sure they need to leave the US but they need to get out of Cali.
My biggest concerns are that when they build out all these charging stations they will go basically unused. People can charge them all night in their garage then get 200 miles. IF I Owned a Tesla I’d never use a charging station except for the rare time I make a road trip. Even when I lived in LA, had I had a Tesla I never would have needed a charging station. The well used charging station is key to my vision of the success of the company. I want to see a culture develop where Suzi Winbourne of Huntington Beach California drops off her kids at school then heads over to Tesla to “top off” her car and have a latte.
I’m also concerned that this whole Tesla thing cold be just a scam on the part of Elan Musk to raise funds for his true passion; SpaceX. After all, the tesla plan kinda reads like a 6th graders class project to come up with a environmental idea. “Were gonna make electric cars so we don’t have to burn gas. Then were going to build charging stations all across the US so you can go ANYWHERE. All the stations will have giant batteries to store energy so we can buy electricity at night when its cheap. Plus we’re gong to put wind mills and solar panels on all the stations.”
I honestly think Elan may have started Tesla to make cool, high-end electric cars to fill an eclectic niche, but has since seen it as a vehicle (pardon the pun) that he could hype up in the stock market to generate capital for SpaceX.
