Tesla Passes Ford

"Rusty Vandura - www.tinyurl.com/keepoppo" (rustyvandura)
04/03/2017 at 11:20 • Filed to: None

I wonder whether President Trump is going to do more harm than good to the US auto industry. Relaxing CAFE standards and environmental standards, fossil-burning cars will race ahead in sales and when cooler heads prevail, if they ever do, the manufacturers will be behind the 8-ball. Again.

The graphic comes from today’s Wall Street Journal.

DISCUSSION (37)

TheTurbochargedSquirrel > Rusty Vandura - www.tinyurl.com/keepoppo
04/03/2017 at 11:27

Even if the rules were relaxed I think that people are starting to come around to hybrids and electric vehicles and that will help to prevent things from getting out of control.

Textured Soy Protein > Rusty Vandura - www.tinyurl.com/keepoppo
04/03/2017 at 11:33

I don’t put too much stock (no pun intended) in Tesla’s market cap vs. traditional automakers. It’s not a good indication of actual performance in selling cars, because its stock is valued like a tech company more than a blue-chip, long-established auto manufacturer.

As for what will happen with the American car companies, I think the push towards generally improving efficiency is something that will not unravel even with looser CAFE standards. Car buyers have started expecting a certain degree of fuel efficiency.

fintail > Rusty Vandura - www.tinyurl.com/keepoppo
04/03/2017 at 11:34

If only market “values” were based on logic and not emotion. I don’t embrace Trump, but I don’t know if the alternative is any more a “cooler” head.

Can’t wait for the undeserved tax break to end.

Rusty Vandura - www.tinyurl.com/keepoppo > Textured Soy Protein
04/03/2017 at 11:46

And in California at least, gasoline prices are rising. For my part, I would like to see a tax levied on gasoline with the sould purpose of highway infrastructure maintenance, repair and construction.

Rusty Vandura - www.tinyurl.com/keepoppo > fintail
04/03/2017 at 11:47

“...undeserved tax break...?” What are you referring to?

Rusty Vandura - www.tinyurl.com/keepoppo > TheTurbochargedSquirrel
04/03/2017 at 11:58

Personally, I think hybrids are a dumb concept. Lots of complexity, yada-yada. For my money, straight fossil-burner or straight battery power.

My brother-in-law has a 2nd-gen Prius. He’s put a quarter-million miles on it, the engine is worn out and has needed a quart of oil frequently for many tens of thousands of miles. The hybrid batteries are about 40% of their former selves as well. I have an ‘89 Camry and a ‘91 Corolla, each at 250k miles, and each still running strong, though each will need a new catalytic converter, probably, at their next smog test. That makes the Prius a throwaway next to my 30-year-old, reasonably efficient fossil burners. And his Prius has used a LOT more oil than either of mine do. And all the e-waste in a Prius...

So if your motivation to buy a hybrid is to do the planet a favor, I am not convinced.

My bird IS the word > Rusty Vandura - www.tinyurl.com/keepoppo
04/03/2017 at 12:08

Shows you how overvalued tesla is right now. They don’t have even remotely the same market share

Moral of the story, sell tesla stock if you have any and wait for the dip.

nermal > Rusty Vandura - www.tinyurl.com/keepoppo
04/03/2017 at 12:09

Teslas are selling because they are well designed and provide value to their customers over the competition. They have also done an excellent job in building a brand around the cars, so there is some value there as well.

Somebody that can afford a $100k + automobile DGAF about fuel prices. As counter-intuitive as it seems, somebody shopping for a $100k+ Tesla is more likely to have multiple cars than somebody shopping for a $25k “do everything” CUV.

Why is Tesla’s market cap higher than Ford’s? Growth potential. Ford’s realistic growth potential is at best single digits annually. Tesla’s is exponential, not just from cars, but also other products they are diversified in - Home power units, solar, etc.

Censored > Rusty Vandura - www.tinyurl.com/keepoppo
04/03/2017 at 12:13

Somewhat devils advocate here, but you have to realize that the CAFE standards were set entirely too high and impossible to achieve. To think that a brand could achieve 35mpg average across their line up by 2020 is absurd.

Take Chevy from the big 3 for example in 2015. They sold approximately 3m Vehicles of which 800k were full size trucks (doesn’t include vans, burbs or tahoes). A stab in the dark says that those 800k trucks combined average mpg is around 19-20 so lets call it 20.

((x*2,200,000)+(20*800,000))/3,000,000=35 so X=41

So the remainder of chevys lineup including the Vans, Burbs, Tahoes, Colorados, Vettes etc.... have to have a combined MPG average of 41mpg. This is simply not attainable.

I do believe that standards should exist, but they must be made on achievable grounds. A blanket “every vehicle this company makes combined must average x” doesn’t work in my mind.

Textured Soy Protein > Rusty Vandura - www.tinyurl.com/keepoppo
04/03/2017 at 12:17

I’m generally not a fan of increasing gasoline taxes, only because most of the country is suburban or rural where it’s not practical to live without a car. So it ends up disproportionately impacting the poor.

Here in Madison we have a halfway decent bus system and there are certainly people who live with a combination of bicycles, buses and taxi/uber, but they really have to plan out where they go and when. As soon as you get to the edges of town and especially when you get outside the city itself, a car is a necessity. Which is why if you search for cars for $1500 or less on our local craigslist , there are plentiful choices. Not necessarily good ones, but they’ll get you around for some amount of time before you need to spend more money on fixing them or buying something else.

Rusty Vandura - www.tinyurl.com/keepoppo > My bird IS the word
04/03/2017 at 12:29

Maybe. I bought $800 of Tesla stock the week they went public and it’s now worth over $5,000. I wish I’d bought ten times as much because I would definitely sell off a bit of it.

Personally, I think part of this valuation is a reflection of some folks’ social values.

Rusty Vandura - www.tinyurl.com/keepoppo > nermal
04/03/2017 at 12:36

Thank you. I could not have said that, nor seen it. There is a social element to Tesla’s ascendancy as well, I surmise. Bunch of tree-hugging Liberal investors (like me) and a fan base for what Elon Musk is trying to do. May he live long...

Rusty Vandura - www.tinyurl.com/keepoppo > Censored
04/03/2017 at 12:42

Nice arithmetic. I’m a math teacher...

I entirely accept what you say here. Perhaps CAFE was not the most relevant thing to mention in my initial post.

As I read your reply, I thought of No Child Left Behind (NCLB, or Nickelby... ), where after some period of time, 100% of students would be at grade level. Absurd.

Rusty Vandura - www.tinyurl.com/keepoppo > Censored
04/03/2017 at 12:43

In fact, I am going to save your post for a future math problem to use in class when I am teaching averages. I am astonished by how innumerate children are these days.

Rusty Vandura - www.tinyurl.com/keepoppo > Textured Soy Protein
04/03/2017 at 12:48

That’s an excellent point. I will have to include that in my thinking. It seems to me that it would not be a bureaucratic nightmare to levy the taxes by county and if Interstate 90 passes through your county, maybe you buy gas in the next county to save $0.25 per gallon. Just thinking out loud...

Along the same line, those rural roads are used by fewer people, which probably deserves consideration...

I live in a much more urban area.

Textured Soy Protein > Rusty Vandura - www.tinyurl.com/keepoppo
04/03/2017 at 12:58

I don’t think a county-level patchwork of gasoline taxes is practical. How do you judge the fairness of them? What about people who live in one county and regularly travel to other counties? It’s just kind of a mess.

I know there’s a gas tax fight going on in California right now where the democrat governor wants to raise the gas tax while a republican representative wants to prevent the transportation fund from being redirected but also devote 30% of the transportation to “traffic relief.”

Here in Wisconsin we overwhelmingly approved by referendum a constitutional amendment to prevent our transportation fund from being redirected. Since then, infrastructure spending has gone up, without increasing gas taxes.

That 30% for “traffic relief” in CA feels a bit too rigid to me to make sense, even though you have plenty of traffic. But I suppose the definition of what exactly constitutes “traffic relief” is fluid enough to give some flexibility.

Rusty Vandura - www.tinyurl.com/keepoppo > Textured Soy Protein
04/03/2017 at 13:06

Perhaps. I was thinking aloud, mostly. That democratic governor, Jerry Brown, is probably one of the only true public servants in politics today, however one feels about his policies. For my part, I am very sensitive to any claim that a policy places undue hardship on the poor, as to me, poor is a broad discriptor that scoops up ethnicity and other factors.

I like roads and bridges, especially when driving on them does not destroy my car. We don’t have particularly good public transportation infrastructure in the San Francisco Bay Area and my wife and I have been fortunate to be able to have a life where we do not need to use automobiles overly much.

Censored > Rusty Vandura - www.tinyurl.com/keepoppo
04/03/2017 at 13:11

To me, and trying as hard as I can to not be political, bills like CAFE and NCLB are prime examples of people who have never worked in a particular field making the rules for that field. Our government is, IMO, to big for its britches.

Censored > Rusty Vandura - www.tinyurl.com/keepoppo
04/03/2017 at 13:15

Also, on topic, though I love Tesla and what they are doing, their stock is grossly over valued when looking at only the vehicle market. There are too many other pots that Tesla has their fingers in for it to be an apples to apples comparison to any auto manufacture only.

Rusty Vandura - www.tinyurl.com/keepoppo > Censored
04/03/2017 at 13:29

I think that when two people are being honest in a discourse, they are not being political . Along the same line, we have teachers’ unions directed by career folks who have spent maybe five years in a classroom. Plenty of politics there, and an accompanying lack of honesty.

Rusty Vandura - www.tinyurl.com/keepoppo > Censored
04/03/2017 at 13:34

I agree: not apples-to-apples, but interesting nonetheless. Certainly some good branding. Certainly some good earth friendliness. I would suggest that the Tesla valuation is measuring several things, and from what I find important in the world, good things.

You are a Wisconsiner? Isn’t that the state where the teachers’ union got smashed by the governor? Have teachers’ salaries plummeted? I tend to suspect not.

Rusty Vandura - www.tinyurl.com/keepoppo > Censored
04/03/2017 at 13:34

What is your field of endeavor?

Textured Soy Protein > Rusty Vandura - www.tinyurl.com/keepoppo
04/03/2017 at 13:43

Well, I’m using “poor” in a purely economic sense. Perhaps “low income” is a better term.

If you look at low income people who rely on a car for their assorted basic functions of living like getting to get to their job and the grocery store, they may make some discretionary trips but there’s only so much they can reduce the amount they drive. This is who a gas tax increase hits the hardest.

I’m sure there are plenty of folks like this in California.

Like I said, here in WI we made it so transportation funds had to be spent on transportation. We had to figure out other ways to balance our state budget without tapping transportation funds.

Just anecdotally, I’ve observed somewhat of an increase in road construction projects since that happened. With our winters, there was always road construction going on, but it used to be much more just resurfacing roads, or in the case of concrete roads, tearing them up and laying new concrete.

Now we still have stuff like that but there’s a lot more projects along the lines of totally reconfiguring intersections and highway ramps with newfangled traffic engineering. Which could in theory satisfy that “traffic relief” thingie in the CA proposal but I just think that bit should be gotten rid of. It gives more flexibility to spend money on transportation but then handcuffs it in a different way.

Rusty Vandura - www.tinyurl.com/keepoppo > Textured Soy Protein
04/03/2017 at 14:05

I use poor the same way. It’s just that there are certain other groups that get scooped up in the “poor” scoop. Some of those groupings are obvious when you look at the peoples’ skin color, but some groupings, like trauma, dysfunction, malnutrition, lack of socialization (loaded word), are universal to the poor. Not meaning to sermonize nor lecture here, just illustrating my point of view on that comment.

What is your field of endeavor? I am a public school math teacher.

Textured Soy Protein > Rusty Vandura - www.tinyurl.com/keepoppo
04/03/2017 at 14:28

I’m an HR/staffing recruiter and spent not quite 2 years working in career services at a now-defunct for-profit college. I took that job with some reservations given what I knew about the for-profit education sector, but I needed a job and the head of the school talked a good game about improving students’ lives. Those reservations were all proven true, and then some. High pressure recruitment, complicated overpriced tuition structures with “scholarships,” dropping students from classes when they didn’t attend which invalidated their “scholarship” for that quarter, high-pressure selling them to come back and finish their degree, giving people passing grades in technical classes for essentially turning in anything for every assignment, even if they don’t have basic writing and composition skills. You name it, they did it. I started looking for a new job within maybe 6 months of starting there.

I regularly worked with people who were just barely scraping by. Even though my job was supposed to be placing people who were coming up on graduation in jobs related to their degrees, I spent just as much time helping people with basic “being a grownup” skills like setting up an email address so they could apply online for subsistence-level jobs. This was not technically part of my job but I took it upon myself to help these folks because I felt like they were getting screwed by the school and the least I could do was try to make some improvement in their life.

Thankfully I got out about 8 months before it closed up shop. The students did get screwed. Hopefully at least some of them I was able to help.

My wife is a substance abuse counselor and I get to hear her venting about how terrible a lot of her patients’ lives are as well.

So I’m definitely on the side of trying to help lift people up out of bad circumstances.

My bird IS the word > Rusty Vandura - www.tinyurl.com/keepoppo
04/03/2017 at 15:28

I’m not saying not to invest in tesla, I am just saying to sell at a high value and then wait until the value comes back down and reinvest. No company is immune to stock market swings and scandals.

Rusty Vandura - www.tinyurl.com/keepoppo > Textured Soy Protein
04/03/2017 at 15:46

Thank you for sharing that with me. Have you found another job? One of the other Oppos has had their troubles with a for-profit school...

I add this to the list of many meaningful discussions I have had on Oppo. For my part, I am having troubles of my own at the hands of treacherous other teachers who, for the sake of politics, would assassinate my character and destroy my career. Fortunately, I live my life in such a way that they cannot succeed, though it has been painful for my family. Fortunately, the end is in sight. All of this has been with the willing aid of the local teacher union, and with their unrestrained glee. That’s the thing about organized labor: when you are honest and you want to improve your game, and when they are dishonest and mediocre, and you do not pretend not to notice, then you can become marked. And this is all the more so when administration is week and ineffective. And sometimes when they are not.

I don’t know if you are a church guy at all, but I am, and I have become convinced that the most adversity is thrown up against those who seek to do the most good.

Peace, Bro.

Censored > Rusty Vandura - www.tinyurl.com/keepoppo
04/03/2017 at 20:48

I’m from Illinois (the other half of the state) where all unions are still intact and strong.

I am a mech eng by paper, and for money am a project manager for a conveyor company. We are a small company so I have to wear a lot of hats. I do all of our machine design in solidworks, oversee fabrication and assembly and manage the installation in the field. Its fun getting to see behind the scenes of things we take for granted.

fintail > Rusty Vandura - www.tinyurl.com/keepoppo
04/03/2017 at 20:57

The local and federal tax credits given to this egg shaped baby, rewards for those who need it least.

gmporschenut also a fan of hondas > Censored
04/03/2017 at 22:03

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_Average_Fuel_Economy#2011_agreement_for_Model_Years_2017-2025

your calculation is based off of EPA milege vs the CAFE figure which is about 30% higher. in 2015 that suburban getting 18 epa combined mileage would list at 23.5. A small car ar 29mpg would list at 39 mpg. not as extreme to hit that 41. Also burbs, tahoes would be classified as trucks and not cars.

Rusty Vandura - www.tinyurl.com/keepoppo > Censored
04/04/2017 at 00:08

I got you confused with another Oppo. That sounds like fun. When I am reincarnated, I might be an engineer. I started down that road in college, but it requires too much focus, I realize now. I am better at a range of things than many people are who earn a living at those things. But it’s like they say, wash out of enough things and then become a teacher.

Rusty Vandura - www.tinyurl.com/keepoppo > fintail
04/04/2017 at 00:09

I have zero clue what you are talking about.

fintail > Rusty Vandura - www.tinyurl.com/keepoppo
04/04/2017 at 09:27

https://www.chargepoint.com/drivers/incentives/

Rusty Vandura - www.tinyurl.com/keepoppo > fintail
04/04/2017 at 10:56

Okay, so what is your point? That the government is giving EV credits to folks who already have enough money to buy expensive EVs and it’s a waste?

I am no stranger to irony, cynicism or sarcasm, but I want to be objective more than anything and sometimes, I think that makes me a little bit dense. Please be patient with me.

fintail > Rusty Vandura - www.tinyurl.com/keepoppo
04/04/2017 at 10:57

Yes. Those buying 12oK toy cars shouldn’t receive such a gift, at either the federal or state level. There’s no excuse to not have an MSRP cap. Otherwise, it reeks of the trickle down stupidity that has created so much wonder over the past 35 years.

Rusty Vandura - www.tinyurl.com/keepoppo > fintail
04/04/2017 at 11:01

What is your field of endeavor (apologies if I’ve already asked...)?

I am a secondary math teacher.

fintail > Rusty Vandura - www.tinyurl.com/keepoppo
04/04/2017 at 11:11

I’m an auditor at a fairly large telecom concern.