dspp wrote:1. Tesla in their last Q report said they were rolling out their insurance offering to more US states. That is hardly decline. Hopefully it will reach more countries soon, however I fully appreciate that regulatory barriers act as a pretty good market entry restraint, so I am not holding my breath.
2. Tesla are doing this because their view is that the data does not justify the premiums that the legacy insurers are charging. One can see hints here that if the legacy insurers do not get with the programe, they will become incidental collateral damage via a en passant restructuring of the auto insurance industry. Tesla's control of, and ability to crunch, awesome amounts of data coming from the vehicles gives them a pretty interesting position to do this. So, just as the legacy auto-industry knows it is competing with Tesla at a business-model level as well as at a product level, so too does the legacy auto insurer industry. That makes for a lot of smear tactics at all levels of the legacy industry and their hangers-on in the S&M and media community. (have you ever seen a Tesla advert in the media ? ouch that is another revenue stream gone for these people).
3. If they do get with the program, and if the data justifies it, then premiums will fall. Or Tesla will charge low but justified premiums. Either way Tesla shareholders win through either faster Tesla adoption and/or creamy Tesla premiums flowing to the P&L.
4. My personal opinion is that auto insurance in the UK is pretty darn close to a cartel, albeit tempered by a degree of competition on price on a day-to-day basis in the mass market. If however you are in a minority niche market then insurers will cream you. That appears to be happening with Tesla and is, in my opinion, a rip-off. Unless the insurers put their data set on the table then I am not buying their spin on this. The only caveat I would place on this is that clearly the teslas are high performance vehicles, so maybe the insurers will ask owners to dial in a "gutless aceleration" mode in return for lower premiums. I don't know but I do expect it to come out in the wash one way or another as time passes.
5. Those of you who are running around repeating allegations and fearmongering about reports of high repair costs and high accident rates have yet to put any aggregate data forward to support your hypothesis. I am the only one on this board to have dug out actual data, which happened to be in respect of the rate of battery fire risk allegations, and the available data flat-contradicted the FUD you are all repeatedly smearing Tesla with as far as I could see - and even I went out of my way to point out the possible flaws in the data sets that would have acted against the Tesla view on this !
6. Again the available evidence that we have seen, and which I have verified with Tesla owners I know, is that the actual running costs of a Tesla over the years are lower than the comparable legacy dino-juice ICE cars.
7. Until you have hard, verifiable, real-world, statistically significant, comparable data then I am afraid you just get put in the box labelled "another lazy anecdotal smear campaign" as far as I am concerned.
8. I am long TSLA at the price I bought. If you think I am wrong, then go and put your $$$ where your keyboard is and short TSLA.
regards, dspp
There is a danger that Tesla investors believe the whole world is against them.
They see the insurance industry, government regulators, dissatisfied Tesla customers, slandered cave-divers, Walmart management and consumer organisations as an unholy alliance of Tesla detractors.
And it is easy for supporters to miss or ignore the information which has been posted on this forum.
I don’t have time to look up the “Which” reports again. But they are the best, statistically sound, surveys of Tesla customers in the UK and the Tesla brand is rated as one of the worst for car reliability in the UK. These surveys have been referred to several times on this forum.
There was another UK survey by a car magazine quoted on this forum which agreed with the “Which” report and rated Tesla badly.
The major US auto body “Consumer Reports” recently dropped its recommendation of the Tesla Model 3 because “owners reported problems with paint, trim and electronics”. This US body’s survey covers 470,000 vehicles, so not too shabby a sample base.
https://www.consumerreports.org/car-rel ... ty-issues/There has also been a well documented problem of Tesla delivering sub-standard cars to a German car-hire firm, which was well covered in this forum.
If you look at “Tesla driver” driving on Youtube you will see how flawed autonomous mode is for UK roads. Frankly this mode is a joke at the moment.
Tesladeaths.com shows details of 90 deaths caused by Tesla drivers over recent years. The Tesla brand is associated with some horrible accidents and has a much worse relative safety record than Mercedes, BMW or any other premium brand according to the site’s author.
I don’t have time to refute the other allegations about ICE cars or “Legacy Insurers” who are they??
To seriously suggest “Tesla in their last Q report said they were rolling out their insurance offering to more US states. That is hardly decline.” is a pretty weak argument, given the track record of over-claiming from the company. When they can argue that they are profitably insuring more than 250,000 cars, then maybe we realists will accept that they have a minor success in motor insurance.
Also the claim that “Tesla's control of, and ability to crunch, awesome amounts of data coming from the vehicles gives them a pretty interesting position to do this” is an amusingly naive comment which shows little understanding of the absolutely massive amounts of data which insurers hold about drivers behaviour and vehicles in the USA, UK and elsewhere.
It’s fairly easy to do some fancy-looking analysis of the future of Tesla but we all know that forecasting the future can be misguided. We have to go on the facts as they exist today.
As sceptical investors we don’t have to short Tesla. But to counter many “analysts” on the internet (not on this forum) who are blatantly ramping the shares, we can just point out that over the last five years Tesla have been a high-risk investment with poor returns. And we may choose not to buy one of their cars (like a lot of their most ardent supporters!)
We may believe that BEVs are a good thing (some of us have actually owned/leased one!). But as investors we find some of the claims about the imminent death of major ICE brands just too far-fetched and extreme. Especially as they have now been made for years and are proving to be based on fanciful views of the future. Maybe one day some brands may suffer, but at the moment it appears that the heavily subsidised Tesla is the one struggling to make a profit.
Tesla are led by an individual who has been caught out many times for making claims which are proven to be ridiculous within a short time. For example the claim in the results update published in April, “if our Gigafactory Shanghai is able to reach volume production early in Q4 this year, we may be able to produce as many as 500,000 vehicles globally in 2019”.
Time will tell if Tesla are going to succeed but in the short term they appear to be struggling to make a profit and to grow. Some of the statements in their recent quarterly report appear to be losing their shine already when carefully scrutinised.
regards
Howard