Hey everybody, Rob Malware here. Welcome back to Tesla Daily. Today we are going to be talking about an updated note on Tesla from Alex Potter of Piper Sandler. We've also got some comments from Ford CEO on Tesla and their product lineup management. We've got some new Cybertruck photos and quite a few other stories as well. Quickly looking at the stock, Tesla today down 1.5% to close at $161.83, while the NAS deck was down 1.10% on the day. Looking at the week ahead, of course, the big item will be the FOMC meeting on Wednesday, two hours before market closed, we will get the FOMC statement and interest rate decision, and then 30 minutes later is Fed Chair Jerome Powell's press conference, which may have even more influence on how things unfold after the meeting.
Alright, we'll start off with an updated note from Alex Potter of Piper Sandler. This note was published about an hour after market close today. And Alex Potter has reduced his price target on Tesla, but is maintaining an overweight rating on the stock. The title of the note reads, margin negativity is hard to ignore, but IRA tailwind could surprise in second half 2023. Quote, we are adjusting our forecast and reducing our discounted cash flow-based price target to $280 down from $300 previously to reflect information extracted from the 10K.
Most investors will be unsurprised to learn that our 2023-2025 estimates are moving lower to reflect price cuts and a coincident impact on margins. Since the Q1 call investors have fredded about Tesla's willingness to trade price for volume, and while we share management's view that margins will eventually rise due to software, this won't occur quickly enough to offset the near-term impact of lower prices, higher warranty costs, and slower inventory turnover.
On the bright side, we think global ASP could fall by about $125 per unit every quarter, for the next two years, without impacting margins due to production credits under the inflation reduction act or IRA. So basically, what Potter is saying here is that therefore, forecast for Tesla's share of battery manufacturing credits from the inflation reduction act, scale alongside Tesla's production growth to allow Tesla to drop average selling prices by $125 a quarter, or $500 a year, without impacting Tesla's margin rate. So, that impact is important to consider, but at the same time, I don't think that's going to swage any broader concerns around Tesla's prices or margins, and the related demand, because so far, the price cuts that we have seen from Tesla haven't been $125 a quarter, they've been significantly greater.
Now, obviously, in general, those price cuts are coming off of a higher base where, in some locations, Tesla was really trying to not generate orders, and work through backlogs, but in terms of the sentiment out there, the fears of ongoing price cuts are a lot more than $500 per year. Anyway, in terms of that price target from Piper Sandler being lowered, that's just the results of the output of their model where they have changed assumptions, saying quote, our lower price target is due mainly to higher cap X and estimate cuts in 2023 to 2025.
Potter also says that with prices and margins falling, we think the valuation could languish for a few months. So, a similar line of thought there to what we had talked about immediately following the earnings call, it just seems like for this period of time. It seems a little bit more difficult to point to things that might provide upside, compared to things that might provide some downside for more rent, but the counterbalance to that is that if everyone thinks that, like the Morgan Stanley survey seemed to suggest, was the majority point of view, then hopefully that's already largely reflected in the share price.
Alright, moving on from that note, we've got some interesting comments from Ford's CEO Jim Farley on a Tesla strategy relating to price cuts, and in general how they have operated their business and communicated their plans going forward in terms of their product lineup. So, first off, Farley reportedly commented to media that Tesla's strategy of cutting prices was nothing new, and was simply a page out of the Model T playbook from Ford's early days, which Elon has referenced plenty of times in the past, so nothing too surprising there, but Farley said go and read 1913, which obviously discusses that period of time and says, this has all happened before.
Quote, what I think he's going to learn is product freshness means a lot, the product gets commoditized, and then he loses your pricing premium, that's a really dangerous thing, end quote. And he referenced Chevy overtaking Ford's sales leadership position in the United States, which happened in the mid-late 1920s.
So, it's interesting insight and feedback from Farley, which by the way is kind of humorous because he had just talked about how Ford needs to simplify their model lineup, so there's obviously a happy medium somewhere in between, but I think if you lean too heavily into an example like this from the past, you really miss thinking about things from a first principal's perspective, and I think that's where Elon comes from, with his belief that autonomous driving is going to happen and is going to happen relatively soon.
Under that circumstance, there is then no 10 or 15-year period where competition can catch up by fulfilling that desire for product freshness as Farley puts it. So it seems pretty reasonable, but only if you're excluding the disruptive force that is and will be autonomous driving, which Ford has really thrown the towel in on working on, they said that they're focused on giving time-backed drivers through level three type of systems rather than something like full autonomy.
So it's a massive part of the equation that is missing from these comments, and while I do think that Farley believes these things to an extent, I think the comments are also meant to try to put pressure on Tesla to stop that strategy, and also probably the main intention here is to reassure Ford shareholders that Ford doesn't necessarily have to compete on price because hey look, Chevy was able to fight back 100 years ago.
I think it also goes without saying that simplifying that two decade period of time down to this sort of one decision tree is probably a massive oversimplification of all of the dynamics at play at that time.
我认为不言而喻的是,将那个长达二十年的时间简化为这样一个决策树可能会大大简单化当时存在的所有动态。
Anyway, moving on from that, but perhaps keeping in mind the product freshness comments, we do have some new photos here of the Cybertruck testing at Fremont from Tesla Tech Bro on Twitter. I'm not seeing anything new from these photos that we haven't already talked about, but always interesting to see even if there aren't any updates, as sometimes that can be telling in and of itself.
Somewhat related to the Cybertruck kind of interesting here, this weekend Stellantis did close out a design contest for students in grade 10 through 12 to sketch out a design contest for a next generation Ram EV truck. So Stellantis named the top three finishers, and I think it's very interesting to see how these concepts look given this demographic.
There certainly seem to be a lot of design elements, especially with the winner and the third place version that draw from the Cybertruck, very angular, very polygonal sort of cyberpunk vibes, which is interesting to see these young designers lean in that direction and probably the influence that Tesla has had on them, and then also interesting that Stellantis themselves would actually pick these as the winners. It's obviously extremely early, but I think the Cybertruck is already having an effect on how people think about trucks in general.
Kind of cool to see. All right, next we've got some regional updates. Drive Tesla Canada is reporting that Tesla is starting to export rear-wheel drive Model 3s from Shanghai to Canada. Of course, we had previously talked about the newly introduced rear-wheel drive Model Y, also shipping to Canada from Shanghai, and it looks like they will be accompanied by Model 3.
看到这个消息有点酷。好的,接下来我们有一些地区更新。Drive Tesla Canada 报导说 Tesla 开始将从上海向加拿大出口后驱 Model 3。当然,我们之前已经提到过新推出的后驱 Model Y 也会从上海运往加拿大,看起来它们将与 Model 3 一同出口。
So maybe Tesla just taking the advantage of the fact that they've got to make some shipments might as well throw some Model 3s on there as well, and just like we talked about for the Model Y, this will have an impact on the allocation strategy for Model 3 from Fremont. And of course, for the Model 3, I think influencing all of these decisions, even if we are still a ways out from it, would be Project Thailand and how Tesla wants to manage that in downtime, etc.
Next, we had talked last week about how Tesla had stopped taking orders for the Model S and X in Australia, obviously a right-hand drive country. That lack of ordering capability is also extended to New Zealand, Thailand, and Singapore. As of right now, can still order in the UK, so Tesla seemingly is still intending to make some right-hand drive versions, but for whatever reason, doesn't seem to have imminent plans for a right-hand drive shipment to Asia Pacific.
And then a quick update over in Europe and Germany, I think this has been the case for a little bit, but Tesla is offering a low financing rate just under 2% for the Model Y in Germany. So obviously that can keep payments a little bit lower, it looks like this is being done in collaboration with Santander Consumer Bank.
So perhaps Tesla getting a little bit of a discounted rate from them, and then perhaps passing even a little bit more on to customers where Tesla might be taking that hit. Tesla says this will be available through June 30th, so just the second quarter, and looking at that now, yet looks like this did start on April 14th.
Next, a couple of quick factory updates. There's been some discussion on Twitter about how Shanghai is expected to shut down for Chinese Liberty Holiday, which I believe this year runs from April 29th through May 3rd. I haven't verified Tesla's plans on this, but I think the concern is that if Tesla allows these days off, that would be different than the precedent they have set historically for this time period.
But I don't think that's a good way of looking at things because there have been COVID impacts both of the last two years and the first half of the year. So the work calendar for those years is a terrible benchmark for how things are now. And in terms of whether or not this suggests there is a demand concern, I think it's extremely obvious to everyone that Tesla is less supply constrained than they have been before.
So of course, it makes a lot more sense under those circumstances to provide that time off, especially if it wasn't given previously. So if this time off was given, I don't view that as Tesla saying, hey, we have to pause production because of demand. I would take it more as, hey, production is now in a really good spot. We don't need to necessarily pay these workers triple over time or whatever the costs are, while also taking a potential hit on morale and having workers miss the holiday.
Now, to be extremely clear, all of that being said does not necessarily mean that demand is not lagging behind production and that further adjustments to pricing or production might be needed. I think we've talked about that being my expectation now plenty of times, but I just think it's a mistake to look at that and say that this certainly means that Tesla is only doing this because of demand.
Next over to Fremont, Tesla Rodies got some news on some updates that Tesla has been working on for the Fremont factory. Over the last few months, Tesla has had a number of these applications, most recently as of April 28th, Tesla has applied to complete the installation of new equipment, which they are labeling as tooling package and they say the new manufacturing equipment is adjacent to existing equipment on the second floor of the assembly building.
So I don't know much beyond that, but I think most importantly, evidence that Tesla is continuing to work on and refine Fremont and use that pretty constrained space as best they can.
Next, a couple of autopilot-related updates first relating to the boring company, Komoko, on Reddit, has discovered an application from the boring company to allow the Tesla vehicles that they are using to enable automatic emergency braking, lane departure warnings, and forward collision warnings in those vehicles, which it's kind of hard to believe that they don't allow those things already.
We've actually talked about this a long time ago, but for whatever reason, they don't allow any of the autopilot feature set to be used by these cars. Obviously, that seems like a huge miss, so hopefully this permit is granted, and then even more importantly, hopefully this is a stepping stone towards allowing autopilots and FSD to be used in these tunnels. Even with the driver in the vehicle, that is not currently allowed, which again, seems like a huge miss. This is probably the easiest place for full autonomy to be deployed, so even beginning to test that out would be a really nice step forward.
The other update is a quick one on FSD Beta Elon replied to a home-arrest wheat about some of that crew's accident data that we talked about on Friday, just simply saying that 11.4.1 is promising. So it looks like they're now into the second iteration of 11.4, which Elon had previously said was working extremely well for him. We've yet to hear any updates on when that might expand beyond employees. It seems like that was already relatively widely distributed for employees, so hopefully not too much longer now that they're on to 11.4.1.
All right, last few items for today, Elon Musk did reach a settlement agreement in a defamation lawsuit by Randy Puffy on Twitter, known as Skabushka. Those of you that followed Tesselbacken, you know, 2018-2019, perhaps familiar with this? This account was pretty popular in the Tesselcube community.
They would often try to find information out at Fremont and had at least a couple of run-ins with Tessel you can go and read about that if you want. Don't waste the time covering that today, but the defamation suit related to Elon having said in an email that after Tessel's security had asked Hathi to leave that while he was doing so, he almost killed a Tesselcurity guard with his car.
So the defamation suit was that there was no basis in fact for that accusation, so this was like three years ago, it's now been settled for $10,000, I'm sure that was totally worth the time for everybody involved. So it's really a non-story, but the interesting part about this is that of course a lot of different outlets are reporting this and saying that, oh, it shows that Elon is admitting guilt because he did the settlement agreement when last year Elon tweeted about Tessel saying, quote, we will never seek victory and adjust case against us even if we will probably win. We will never surrender slash settle an unjust case against us even if we will probably lose.
So the LA Times had line reads that quote, Musk said he'd never settle an unjust legal case against him, he just settled this one. End quote, which is just blatantly false, electric reported it in a very similar way, and despite them both including the exact language that Elon had used which is very clearly talking about Tessela, not himself, they decided to just completely ignore that, or they have terrible reading comprehension which at least used to be an important skill for what we used to call journalists, but I guess all that stuff is out the window these days. So extremely frustrating to say the least.
Rapping up Elon Musk did end up appearing on Bill Mauer's show about a 20-minute appearance, nothing too Tesla related there but of note, he did say that Twitter is now relatively stable, so echoes comments that we have heard from Elon recently and I think good news for everybody on that front.
And then lastly, after a couple of delays SpaceX did end up launching Falcon Heavy this weekend, successfully delivering multiple customers satellites into orbit, so congratulations to SpaceX on that success, always fun to see Falcon Heavy.
Alright that'll wrap it up for today then as always, thank you for listening, make sure you subscribe to and sign up for notifications, also find me on Twitter at Tesla 5Gask, and we'll see you tomorrow for the Tuesday May 2nd episode of Tesla Daily. Thank you.