Submitted by QTR's Fringe Finance
In the latest episode of my podcast, I had the pleasure of welcoming my buddy Mark Spiegel, an outspoken investment manager and vocal critic of Tesla.
Our discussion delved into the nuances of Tesla's business model, market valuation, operational challenges and Elon Musk’s questionable track record.
Mark provided an analysis of the overvaluation of Tesla's stock, highlighting concerns about the company's profitability and competitive edge in the rapidly evolving EV market.
The podcast follows my piece earlier this month, wherein I detailed why I thought the wheels were starting to fly off of Tesla for Elon Musk: The Musk Of Desperation
"Oh, that story last week from Reuters essentially said two things,” Mark told me off the bat last week.
“Thing number one is that the low-cost $25,000 car, let's call it the Model 2, has been canceled, and they will instead turn their efforts into trying to develop robo-taxis. Musk immediately rebutted it with, 'Reuters is lying as usual.' Well, OK, so what happened after that? He announced that they're going to show a robo-taxi in four months. We'll talk about that. That's obviously just bullshit."
He continued about the Reuters article from two weeks ago: "So, in the article, it looked like it was well-sourced. Right….So, you know, [Musk’s] a liar who calls people liars when he's been caught lying. That's the bottom line."
"No, look, I mean, the reason I've been short this for so long, I just can't believe it's taken as long as it has. But by the way, I mean, we should keep in mind that the markets are at all-time highs and Tesla's all-time high was set over $400, you know, in 2021. So clearly it's in a very long-term downtrend. And, you know, even though it's still a complete bubble at the current market cap. So, look, I mean, the thing on this robo-taxi nonsense is, maybe he'll show a car without a steering wheel and say, 'Oh, yeah, and pretty soon it'll be a working robo-taxi.' We know for a fact his technology sucks for autonomous driving,” Mark told me.
Talking more about why Tesla’s autonomy isn’t good enough for Robotaxis, Mark tells me: "You charge it up for 300 miles, it crashed one and a half times on average in those 300 miles. I mean, it's absurd. I mean, if a taxi goes, I don't know, probably 50,000 miles a year for a taxi, but just say 30,000 to make, you know, if it's crashing every 200 miles, it would crash millions of dollars worth of crashes per year.”
“I mean, the system is crap for somebody to say, look, you know, people who are ignoramuses say, 'Oh, it's a great party trick. Look what it can do. And I only had to intervene with it once every 30 miles and it did all this neat stuff.' Okay, great. That's completely fucking useless from a business standpoint or a safety standpoint.”
I think that the numbers for like, well, okay. The average person, and I look this up and put this stuff on Twitter, the average person has a car accident once every 200,000 miles. That's the average. Like a crash that does damage to the car once every 200,000 miles, okay? So until it can do that, it's not even as good as the average American driver, right? And now it's like, let's say, one every 200 miles, it would have a crash if there was nobody behind the wheel. It's absurd. It's so absurdly far from being anything useful. These morons are mesmerized by this little party trick. But so what?"
“It's absurd. It's so absurdly far from being anything useful. These morons are mesmerized by this little party trick. But so what?" he adds.
"But anyway, so look, every legitimate robo-taxi, and by the way, even once Tesla finally gets a robo-taxi, if ever, there's already a shitload of them on the road now, just like the robots. I mean, Jim Chanos tweeted yesterday about Hyundai. Hyundai has robo-taxis on the road now, and it owns Boston Robotics, right? And it has a market cap like a tiny fraction of Tesla. But every single legitimate robo-taxi out there uses LiDAR, every single one, and radar. And Tesla has neither in its cars,” Mark said.
“I think it had radar for a while. Maybe it still has radar in the Model S and X. I'm not sure. But they have no LiDAR. So, and they have no data. You have to report apparently in California, you have to report how many autonomous testing miles you do every year. Right. It's my understanding that their most recent reports, in fact, say zero. They've tested zero autonomous miles. So what the fuck is he gonna say? Even if he shows something with no steering wheel and a LiDAR dome on top, it's completely untested.”
“I mean, he's got no product. As I said on Twitter the other day, him showing that car and saying, 'This is a robo-taxi and it's gonna work great like a robo-taxi, you know, soon.' That's exactly the equivalent of [Elizabeth Holmes] showing the Theranos blood machine, right? Which, 'Oh, yeah, this is our blood machine. It's going to work great.’”
You can listen to the full interview, where we also talk macro and beer, here.
