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Tesla Tops GM by Market Value as Investors See Musk as Future (bloomberg.com)
Tesla became the largest U.S. auto maker by market value on Monday, overtaking General Motors -- a feat that would have seemed highly improbable 13 years ago when the electric-car maker first began tinkering with the idea of making a sports car. From a report: Tesla climbed as much as 3.4 percent in early Monday trading, boosting its market capitalization to about $51 billion. The company was valued at about $1.7 billion more than GM as of 9:35 a.m. in New York. The turnabout shows the extent to which investors have bought into Musk's vision that electric vehicles will eventually rule the road. While GM has beat Tesla to market with a plug-in Chevrolet Bolt with a price and range similar to what Musk has promised for his Model 3 sedan coming later this year, the more than century-old company has failed to match the enthusiasm drummed up by its much smaller and rarely profitable U.S. peer. No matter, say investors who like the stock. Tesla is a technology player with the ability to dominate a market for electric cars and energy storage. To those same investors, GM and Ford are headed for a slowdown in car sales that will erode profits. "Is it fair? No, it isn't fair," Maryann Keller, an auto-industry consultant in Stamford, Connecticut, said of GM ceding the market-cap crown. "Even if Tesla turns a profit, they will eventually have to make enough to justify this valuation."
Large American car companies have been a cluster fuck since the 70s. GM could have dominated this market starting with the EV1 years ago. Idiots.
If you made money on it, good for you. The company is grossly overvalued. Get out while you can.
It's shocking how much faith investors seem to have in what is essentially a Ponzi scheme with stockholder money despite how obvious it is. There is no way Tesla is ever going to make a profit in many years to come, even if it manages to pour more money into it several more times. The hallowed Model 3 will get trampled in the mass market. Several major companies that actually know how to build cars will have competing electric cars right around the time the Model 3 will be available in significant numbers, with probably very few redeeming features to set it apart, but with Tesla's famously lacklustre build quality. The Model S has been aging for a while and its target market is saturating. Moreover, it will get just as much competition as the Model S, with Audi, Mercedes-Benz and BMW all working on luxury electric vehicles that will put the Model S to shame.
Apart from two quarters artificially made profitable by accounting tricks, Tesla has never been able to make a real profit selling expensive cars in a niche market without any real competition, where buyers are Tesla fans and typically willing to forgive the shortcomings of Tesla's products. There is no way they can succesfully compete in the mass market, where margins are razor thin and customers tend to depend on a car they buy as their only vehicle, even if they can somehow stay afloat while trying.
Tesla has cars on the road, it's not vaporware company. His other companies are also progressing with their goals too.
If you want to talk about something that took a lot of people's life savings and that was completely legal, let's talk about the fucking banks. Not only did they ruin people's lives but they also got more money for bailouts. Banks, the very place that's supposed to be about managing money, fucked everyone and got more money on top of that. I wonder why the people at the top didn't get the firing squad.
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>I wonder why the people at the top didn't get the firing squad.
because they are in control of the single american party.
Yeah the Stock is severely overpriced and, as much as I like Tesla, there's no way it's value can compare to GM and Ford at the moment. We all know that, and we all know this balloon will eventually deflate. So what?
Unless someone put a gun in your head and force you to buy Tesla stock and kept them no matter what happens, this is good news for everyone. It's a proof of confidence to an emerging car maker in North America (who would have thought this would be possible in the 2000s?). Also, it send a serious message to the GM/Ford and it make them better (Ford is back on track and it's Ford Fusion is, in my opinion, the best mid-size sedan in the market, and for GM is launching the best competitor to Tesla Model 3 with the Chevy Bolt).
This is better for the car industry and it's better for the environment.
Elok
Not sure if I fully agree with your statement, but I will stay away from Tesla stocks, too. Too much of the stock price is hope and emotion, and I suspect there will be a lot of tears at some point in the future.
Oh, and if I had the money for a Tesla X P90D I would buy this car instead: http://www.porsche.com/interna...
Signature deleted by lameness filter.
A mac computer, these days, is the thingy you plug you iphone or tablet into. The latter two are more visible sexy status symbols whereas the latter is less so and if it's a desktop doesn't even get seen in public. And yet it's still a money maker and more importantly gets you to embrace the whole apple ecosystem which becomes self re-inforcing with itunes, and appleTV and any number of things you'd prefer not to lose if you were to switch to something else. Wrap that up in a superior customer service package and voila. It's home.
Likewise the tesla battery is not only what you plug your status symbol Tesla car into but also your gorgeous tesla roof and you power your house off of. And each of these items is best in class with great customer service experience and little complexity to be concerned about.
You will be able to plug your Ford or GM car into your telsa battery just like you can plug your microsoft phone into an apple computer. But it won't be smooth I would bet. When you update the OS in your battery (yes your battery is intelligent) you will need to wait for the new driver miodification from Ford to use the new features. Whereas the tesla battery and car will work together always.
Or so I think.
Tesla isn't just building a car. It's building an energy ecosytem.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Tesla "worth" $51 billion? Pfft. Back in the dot bomb bubble days AOL was "worth" $224 billion, now it's under $5 billion. We'll see how Tesla holds up.
Tesla has cars on the road, it's not vaporware company.
There is a continuum from "long established manufacturing company with a proven history of sales and profits" to "perpetual motion type scam". Just because Tesla is not the latter does not make its valuation realistic.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
I'm trying to find the current backlog for Tesla cars and it seems to be somewhere north of 400k vehicles with close to a billion in deposits for the orders. Nobody else has that kind of traction (if you'll excuse the pun) for current, announced or planned vehicles - in comparison, in 2016 Mercedes sold 374k vehicles in the US.
Yes, the investors are taking a risk on Tesla, but isn't that part of the job description?
Along with this, there seems to be a significant demand for electric vehicles. I don't expect them to overtake fossil fueled vehicles any time soon, but at least 10% of buyers are seriously interested in EVs and Tesla is the number one name there with generally great reviews for products compared to the competition (ie the Leaf makes you feel like you're settling for less and the Volt/Bolt just don't have the cachet), the company is serious about renewables/reducing customers' carbon footprint and a rock star CEO.
You can say it's a fad stock, but there are some solid fundamentals there in terms of backlog and customer demand which justify a high stock price.
Maybe if the Model 3 turns out to be a lemon, things will change with regards to the stock, but as I said, part of the job description for an investor is to take risks and people seem to think that there will be a reward at the end of the day.
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Large American car companies have been a cluster fuck since the 70s.
And yet people continue to buy their vehicles by the millions. I work in the industry and have for a lot of years. Fact is that the big US car companies are pretty well managed - they are at worst comparable to most of their competition. The problems they've had have mostly been legacy problems from back in the 80s and earlier when they didn't have as much competition. Primarily high labor and pension costs that they simply could not shed and that their competition was not subject to. US cars today are largely of good quality (with some exceptions) and all the US auto makers have managed to get their costs more competitive. FCA is still something of a mess but Ford and GM are pretty well managed and very profitable at the moment.
GM could have dominated this market starting with the EV1 years ago.
GM could have possible dominated the EV market but not with the EV1 and probably not its hypothetical successor either. They would have had to have a much longer investment horizon on EVs than was probably reasonable to expect. The EV1 was a nice enough little car if it happened to fit your needs but it was wildly impractical for most people (it was a two seater with very limited range) and hugely expensive to build. There was no way GM could have sold them profitably without huge government subsidies and it was never going to be a car with mass appeal. The battery pack in it only gave a range of 100 miles and the batteries on the last models were NiMh batteries with a capacity of 26.4kWh (a Tesla Model S has capacity 3-4X that amount). The EV1 routinely earns spots on worst car lists because it was a vehicle that relied on technology that just wasn't ready yet. EVs are only becoming practical now because of progress in battery technology.
On top of it having cars on the road, it's building out a nationwide network of superchargers, so it is putting in place the infrastructure that will be needed to transition to an electric car future. Unlike GM's attempts people believe in Tesla's, which is why their valuation is so high. They are doing it for real, not as a "look it can't work!" exercise like GM.
The Leaf is a great car and they have done a lot to get people driving EVs, especially in Europe.
The Leaf is not a great car. It's a good enough car that proves there is demand for EVs but objectively it is a car with some very serious deficiencies. The worst deficiencies are that it's ugly and the range of the vehicle stinks. And before anyone repeats the meme about how far people drive in a day, it doesn't matter. If the car can't go at least 200-300 miles on a change then it is a crap car as far as the mass market is concerned in the current market. My brother-in-law has one and it's fine for a second commuter car but it's not a great car for most people.
The problem is that circumstances have kind of screwed them - Tesla's Model 3 is looking unbeatable right now, so far ahead of anything anyone else can offer it's stunning.
How do you figure? Sure it's got a lot of hype and interest but the Model 3 isn't even on the market yet. The Chevy Bolt has similar range and is apparently a pretty solid car and you can buy one today. Even the vaunted pre-orders for the Model 3 are misleading because it doesn't tell you much about what steady state demand for it will be. Once Telsa delivers the pent up demand to the true believers it's unclear what number they will sell on an ongoing basis. I hope they do well but we just don't know.
That big screen, full self driving if not from day one fairly early in its life, and best of all software updates in an age when most manufacturers can't keep the sat nav up to date.
The Model 3 will not be a self driving vehicle. It will have some technology to enable some of that but to call it a self driving car is not really accurate.
Tesla has cars on the road, it's not vaporware company. His other companies are also progressing with their goals too.
Tesla hasn't made a sustained profit yet and it's still not clear if it is going to ultimately succeed as an ongoing enterprise. The fact that they've sold some product is nice but not sufficient. TSLA as a stock is wildly over valued given the likely prospects of the company in the next 10 years.
If you want to talk about something that took a lot of people's life savings and that was completely legal, let's talk about the fucking banks. Not only did they ruin people's lives but they also got more money for bailouts.
What the banks did is utterly irrelevant as to whether Tesla is a good investment or not. Your argument is nonsense. They have absolutely nothing to do with one another nor are they comparable.
First, thank you for (correctly) calling out Musk as the lying, manipulative douche bag that he is. If you give his cars a bad review, he goes ape shit which results in automotive journalists being very careful what they say. As such I will never never trust a review of a Tesla.
Moving on, cars GM makes that I want/could settle for:
Cars Tesla makes that I want/could settle for:
If you travel at all (I do all of the time), Tesla's entire product line is more or less useless. In addition, their cars become very expensive bricks when the batteries die and not recyclable. Meanwhile, an ICE car or hybrid such as the Volt or Karma can run forever and that ICE car is almost 100% recyclable. That, and given that Boeing found a way to produce ethanol efficiently, the more fuel inefficient your car is, the better it will become as far as CO2 goes.
I've owned two Leafs. They are great cars, and you don't realize how great until you live with one.
I've driven one a fair bit and my brother-in-law owns one so I've spent enough time behind the wheel to get a good opinion. It's fine but all the stuff you are talking about as good features (which I don't dispute) are second order considerations. It has crap range and therefore it's mass market appeal is going to be limited. I'd buy a Chevy Bolt over a Leaf without question for the range alone. It also is a rather ugly vehicle from the outside. Most people don't care how nice the interior is if it doesn't get them where they need to go. They also won't buy it if they think it looks hideous. It mystifies me why so many EV makers insist on making intentionally ugly hatchbacks.
The Leaf is fine if your needs for a vehicle are decidedly limited and you don't car how it looks and you have access to a second car. But it isn't a great car in any general sense of the term. Double the range and it might become worth considering.
The range is absolutely fine for most people most of the time.
Most people don't want a vehicle that is fine "most of the time". Most want a vehicle that is fine ALL of the time. I exceed the range of a Leaf at least 4 times per month and sometimes more often. I seldom exceed the range of a Tesla or even a Chevy Bolt. The number of people willing to live with a 100 mile range is not a huge number.
And most people have access to more than one car - via a partner or family member.
So to buy a Leaf you have to periodically sponge off of someone else with a gas powered vehicle or own two cars. Fine if you have lots of money and forgiving friends but not a situation I want to be in personally. If I buy an EV it will have enough range that it is rarely going to be a problem. That means >200 miles minimum. I should be able to drive from Detroit to Cleveland without stopping. $30K+ for a vehicle that cannot do that is a rather stupid waste of money in my estimation.
The M3 will be fully self driving in time, just like the Model S and X.
Neither the Model S or Model X are self driving in any general sense of the term. Not yet anyway. No production car is. Presumably you are talking about autopilot which is the basis for what Tesla hopes will be full self driving features in the future. They have the hardware and some nifty features for some limited circumstances but that's not the same thing as being a self driving car.