Hey everybody Rob Maye here, welcome back to Tesla Daily. Today we've got a lot to go through including some possible new details on Tesla's Robotaxi vehicle concept.
I also got a note from Adam Jonas, a really nice day of course for the stock, and a few other things as well.
我还收到了Adam Jonas的一张便条,当然对于股票来说是非常好的一天,还有其他一些事情。
So taking a quick look at the stock, Tesla today up 10.1% closing at $273.58. The Nasdaq, nice day, only up 1.1% so Tesla a really big outperformance today.
I think there are a handful of contributors to that outperformance, but the one that is getting the most attention is an updated note from Adam Jonas, we'll talk about that in a second.
我认为导致业绩超出预期的因素有几个,但其中最受关注的是亚当·乔纳斯的更新报告,我们马上就会谈到。
We also got some pretty positive news out of China, and the Musk biography, more and more continues to leak out about this, so who knows how much of an impact those details, or even details that we haven't heard about yet, are having.
Either way this 10% day for Tesla, this is the best day since January 26th and 27th, both of those days back to back plus 11%. Outside of those you have to go back all the way to January 2022, so top 3 day today over almost the last two years, which I'll obviously happily take that.
But the reason for it may be a bit more suspect, the headlines around this Adam Jonas note today talk about how Jonas sees a possible $500 billion opportunity for Tesla from Dojo. Mm, okay, multi-hundred billion dollar opportunity sounds a little bit familiar.
If we go back to the Q1 earnings call, Elon basically said the same thing, he said potentially a multi-hundred billion dollar level of opportunity for Project Dojo. So Elon, one of the greatest entrepreneurs and generators of value in history, says it, well, we can ignore it, better not pay any attention to it, but Adam Jonas says it, well, I guess we better listen.
So that's not meant as a slight Adam Jonas, it's just to highlight the ridiculousness of how the market can work at times.
所以,这并不是对亚当·乔纳斯的轻视,只是为了突出市场有时候的荒谬性。
Now there's obviously a lot more nuance to it than that, but just kind of amusing, we're not going to spend a ton of time on this note because I do actually think that it's stuff that we've pretty much talked about, and I think the headline tells us what we need to know beyond that, and that's that Adam Jonas's upgraded Tesla back to overweight, he's got a $400 price target now up from $250, and he lays out how Tesla, putting the resources they are putting into Dojo, could actually have a long-term benefit.
But again, those are things that we've talked a lot about, whether that's the contribution to autonomous driving that it allows for, Optimus, and what that could yield someday, or something like Dojo as a service. All of these are potentially highly lucrative.
So Jonas laying those things out, but more importantly, at least in terms of the reaction, I think, is Morgan Stanley kind of putting their full weight behind this thesis.
所以乔纳斯列出了这些事情,但更重要的是,至少在反应上,我认为摩根士丹利正在全力支持这个论点。
Now, obviously there's still plenty of hedges in there, but really starting to position Tesla as more of an AI company, and them doing so, that's going to change a little bit in terms of the perception from how people talk about Tesla in the institutional investor space. That's where things like this kind of carry some weight.
And although Jonas puts out pretty frequent notes on Tesla, and we've talked before about how that can seem more of like a blog post or a journal or something like that, this is not one of those.
There's again, an upgrade to their rating, increased price target, and a 66 page note, which includes multiple contributions from other team members, including their head of equity strategy, writing about Dojo saying that, quote, as we have written before, just 2.3% of all equities have generated $73 trillion of net shareholder returns over 30 years, finding plausible scalable moonshots that have not been fully discounted by the markets should be of interest to all investors.
We believe Tesla's project Dojo could tick all of those boxes.
我们相信特斯拉的项目Dojo能够满足所有需求。
Although Dojo is still early in its development, we believe that if the moonshot is successful its applications longer term can extend beyond the auto industry, Dojo is designed to process visual data that can lay foundation for vision-based AI models, such as robotics, healthcare, and security.
In our view, once Tesla makes headway on autonomy and software, third-party Dojo services can offer investors the next leg of Tesla's growth story. Humanoid robots and the potential to displace workers and social workers was one of our original and adjacent moonshots but could be substantially accelerated by Dojo's success.
So again, nothing there that we haven't already talked about but shows how they're now thinking about Dojo and presenting that thinking to others which will affect their thinking, etc.
That can go a long way for how a stock is perceived, which is obviously a huge factor in how a stock is priced. So nice to see that, but we're going to move on for now because we do actually have more exciting things to talk about, we probably spent too much time on that already.
Alright, let's get into the actually most exciting news for today, and that is some new details on Tesla's Robotaxy next generation vehicle concept. So we've got a few things here coming from the Walter Isaacson upcoming biography on Elon Musk.
The first is a photo of a page in the biography that has been posted on X and it shows what is described in the footnote as a Robotaxy concept. So there's going to be a lot of people saying that this is it, this is the next generation vehicle, now we know what it looks like, maybe, could be, but do you want to emphasize the other things? It says a Robotaxy concept. It doesn't say the Robotaxy concept, and it's very important that we don't forget about the concept part of this. There's no guarantee this is the final concept, there could be a lot of different ones, and even if not, concepts obviously evolve and change over time.
Now that being said, this could very much be a vehicle that comes to fruition. We can see it looks like a small compact or subcompact vehicle, just two seats, no steering wheel, apparently no pedals, doors that look to open upward, probably best described as butterfly doors, but feel free to correct me if another term is better. Not just two of those doors, two seats, probably some trunk or hatch space, and that's about it for the vehicle, and it looks like it may actually be a three wheeled vehicle rather than four.
It's kind of difficult to tell, but thankfully we actually at the same time as this are getting a little bit more context. So CBS posted an interview with Walter Isaacson and as part of that interview, they shared some B-roll footage that included a shot of Franz in front of a very early stage model of a vehicle that just so happens to look almost identical to the photo that we're seeing here. I don't think it's a bit ambiguous, but I lean towards both of these looking more like three wheel designs, but very interestingly, it looks like we even get one more hint here because on the board behind this vehicle model, so actually two photos that we can barely make out that seem to be concepts and very similar to the photo in the biography and the model that Franz is standing in front of here. So not the highest resolution look, but pretty clearly similar aesthetically.
To me, it looks like the top version might be a four wheel version, the bottom version may be a three wheel version, but hard to know for sure. So I think it looks pretty cool, also looks pretty plausible that this would be what Tesla would have in mind. I would imagine there will be a lot of debate about whether or not two seats would be the right choice for a Robotaxi vehicle. Obviously Tesla can do a number of different types of Robotaxis, there doesn't need to just be one form factor. You'd be able to request exactly what you need.
The equation that would need to be calculated is the trade off for a more efficient smaller vehicle for those single or dual passenger trips versus all of these vehicles just being a four passenger to cover it when you need it. Because that's kind of how cars are built today. Most people don't need four seats every time, but you need them frequently enough that it's still makes sense. And obviously that helps economies of scale and all that stuff for the manufacturing process, etc. But obviously Robotaxis changed that equation. So I'm sure that something Tesla's thought a lot about, you're still going to need those bigger cars, but I do think it would be a win for humanity resource wise if we could manage with something smaller for the majority. If this is it, that seems to be where Tesla's head is at as well. Obviously over time you could continue to go smaller and smaller, but that's going to come with other challenges, safety being one initially, but hopefully that becomes less relevant over time.
Final note on the design, Elon did clarify on Friday a topic that we had talked about, which was whether or not this next generation vehicle was quote unquote cyber inspired or reminiscent of the cyber truck. So I'm glad we talked about that on Friday with a lot of misinterpretation of that. Elon applied to a post on X about the Robotaxi being cyber truck inspired. He said no, but Robotaxi will look like the future. So that quote that we talked about best interpreted as looking like the future, like the cyber truck also looks like the future, rather than looking like the cyber truck. Now maybe that this photo is in grayscale, but when we look at this concept image at least from the side profile, you can kind of get some cyber truck vibes from it. Anyway, I'll be curious to hear people's thoughts on this Robotaxi concept in the comments today. So let me know what you think.
Alright, next up, but on a related note, we do have another excerpt from the biography. This is posted on CNBC and it's about FSD and Tesla's progress there and the switch over to version 12. We get some history on the timeline. It sounds like it was just December or January that Elon decided that Tesla should really pursue this end to end neural network approach. Then it was ready for Elon to test in mid April and after that test, Elon became a believer in the strategy and said Tesla should reallocate the resources to push this forward.
Fast forward to April, we had that test drive and the excerpt says that quote, the new system was ready to replace the old approach and become the basis of FSD 12, which Tesla plans to release as soon as regulators approve. So that's pretty exciting. It sounds like we may not actually be all that far away from at least maybe a limited release to some customers for FSD 12. Although with a new architecture, I'd expect the Tesla would roll that out pretty slowly, but maybe the data is just so good initially that they wouldn't need to do that.
Kind of interestingly, we had talked about how Elon on the FSD 12 live stream had talked about how they had to specifically find examples of human stopping at stop signs because it was so infrequent. So they had to find those and feed those examples to the neural network, but it sounds like the National Highway Safety Board is reviewing it and currently studying whether or not it would be permissible for self-driving cars to not fully stop in scenarios like that. That would be a huge win ever since. Nitsa made Tesla do this. I feel like the safety is actually lower and the frustration factor for other drivers is higher. Because the car acts unusual, it's not acting in a way that people expect it to act. It's like the old adage, which I don't know if it has an impairing in reality in terms of safety, but the old adage that it's safer to drive how you'd be expected to drive rather than trying to be overly courteous or something like that that people might not expect and then could cause problems. Anyway, I'm glad they're at least looking at that. If there's no data anywhere that shows that that's actually safer, hopefully we don't have to over-regulate if there's not a statistical basis to do so.
Finally from this excerpt, it talks about how the metric that Tesla is focused on and that they're looking at on big giant screens in their autopilot team area every day is the number of miles driven on FSD per intervention. So you want that number to increase and that is basically the scoreboard for Tesla's FSD progress. I'm pretty happy to see that. I've talked before about how I wish we had that metric. Tesla shows us the cumulative number of miles driven. They don't give us this almost certainly because people would use it against them, take it out of context, etc. Which is a bummer because it would be really interesting for us to see that data.
Alright last quick thing on Isaac's end, he did also go on the Lex Friedman podcast. I haven't had a chance to listen to that yet, but you can easily find that if you are interested.
Alright, next up as I shared on X yesterday, we do now have Tesla's China production for August. We had talked about how this looked set to surprise based on Tesla's announcement of their 2 million vehicle milestone at Kigashang High and it did. So August came in at 80,832 vehicles produced, 21,330 Model 3, 59,502 Model Y. So overall this was actually an increase from July and for Model 3 specifically, only about 1500 units less than July. So this is obviously a very strong number. It means that pretty much throughout the entire month of August, Tesla was pretty much at a full production rate, maybe not quite, but pretty full production rate for the Model 3. Despite the imminent announcement and transition to the highland upgraded new Model 3. So we might be set up for a really smooth transition depending on how quickly Tesla can return to volume production on the Model 3.
We do have a bit of a hint for September because again, that 2 million vehicle milestone announced that was on September 6th. So depending on if that was the first vehicle Tesla produced that day or the last vehicle produced that day, that's going to vary the daily production rate up to that point. But until that, that means that Tesla built 8,889 vehicles from the end of August to that announcement. If that 2 million vehicle was at the start of the day, you'd be looking at 5 days of production, so you've got 1,778 per day. If it was at the end of the day, you'd be at 6 days of production, so that'd be 1,482 per day. Put into monthly production rate terms, that's 45,000 to 54,000.
So that is obviously a drop from the 80,000 that we have seen for Tesla over the last few months, and that number could be accomplished with Model Y alone. So definitely some downtime, it's not just Tesla flipping a switch and all of a sudden they're back to volume production on the Model 3. Hopefully that happens quickly, we'll just have to wait and see. But Tesla has clearly already produced at least a few hundred of these, while still having been able to operate Model 3 at basically full speed leading up to that production. So a lot of game left of you played, but exciting to see these numbers.
Alright, a few other quick updates, we've got one from Edra, they've posted on LinkedIn, a photo of their team seemingly standing in front of the 9,000 ton gigapress, pretty impressive to see. And we'll look forward to the day when Tesla's willing to talk a little bit more about that. We've also got an update from Zangler on X, it's done a drone flyover of Gig and Nevada, and also shared an update that according to the rumors he is hearing Tesla has recently, as I understand his comment, brought in equipment to Gig and Nevada for the second iteration of the Tesla Semi prototype line. That could mean we'll start to see some more Tesla Semi's produced somewhat soon, and then hopefully that'll all go well and Tesla can move into mass production, but obviously we don't expect that for a bit of time yet.
Next there was some news that came up on X this weekend of Tesla perhaps doing some advertising or promotional video during a baseball game in New York. There was a Tesla video that was played on the display at the stadium, there was a Model Y vehicle brought out onto the field, so it kind of looked like that. However, turns out this was actually a Tesla gig in New York family day, and this was also a minor league baseball team, the Buffalo Bisons, nothing against minor league baseball, but I don't think that this is where Tesla would specifically choose to do their first sort of video advertising. More likely just stuff that was being done for Tesla family day versus something like a Tesla ad campaign.
Alright, so that is it for today, but just a quick reminder that we've got a busy upcoming week, we've got the Walter Isaacson book release that happens tomorrow, there's an Apple event tomorrow, we've got CPI on Wednesday, PPI on Thursday, and possible UAW strike, a lot of abbreviations in here, and then FOMC throwing one more Fed meeting next week. So a lot going on, we'll keep an eye on all of it, but that'll wrap it up for today, so as always, thank you for listening, make sure you subscribe to hand sign up for notifications, and also find me on the X-I Tesla podcast, and we'll see you tomorrow for the Tuesday, September 12th episode of Tesla Daily. Thank you.