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Joined 8 months ago
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Cake day: November 6th, 2023

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  • Turkey has the STM Kargu, which reportedly was devastating in the most recent # Nagorno-Karabakh fighting, as the autonomous suicide drone can’t be jammed

    Ukrainian units have (reportedly) already loaded ‘final approach’ AI target tracking and flight controls on their suicide FPV & glider drones, to counter Russian RF jammers mounted on tanks and heavy vehicles

    We really, really aren’t prepared for the threat vector that cheap (sub $500/ea for FPV) and autonomous drones provide, and every RF engineer and drone enthusiast I’ve spoken to has no good counter aside from barriers like nets. And that’s just the ones that fly their bombs INTO things, drone-dropped explosives are hard to detect without thermal imagers or specialized radar/acoustic detection





    • Fired the Supercharger head and the entire department
    • Fired the lead of new vehicle development
    • Previously fired head of battery development
    • Constantly “one year away” from Tesla full self driving, whilst Mercedes just launched geofenced FSD, with Mercedes assuming 100% liability during FSD
    • Elon just had a out of the blue trip to China, appears to have ‘kissed the ring’ of Beijing, and hyping TaaS robotaxis

    What’s Tesla’s USP to an investor now? The supercharger ‘lock in’ and early head start at the EV game are Tesla’s biggest boons, but the former appears to have been gutted and the latter has been squandered on a slow model release schedule



  • Not really news that Tesla has a lot of headwinds, even before Elon’s peculiarities and ‘leadership’ is factored:

    • Was disruptive in early 2000s, now suffering from many of the same diseconomies as the auto industry
    • Vertical integration especially introduces huge CapEx that has to justify its continued existence via regular, strong sales. There’s a very good reason the big automakers sub-contract out a significant part of their BoMs for production and JiT stocking
    • Traditional auto makers (and government) are pushing EVs hard, greatly increasing competition especially in entry level markets where Tesla has poor showing
    • High profile recalls, durability issues, and ‘autopilot’ deaths leading to growing concern, both regulatory and consumer

    We all know the stock is massively overvalued. The question is will it correct and level off, or fall so fast from that height that Tesla ends up like Lucid, Rivian, or Polestar etc as a low-mid manufacturer, or go so far that the short sellers bring the knives out until delisting