http://www.teslamotors.com/about/press/releases/panasonic-enters-supply-agreement-tesla-motors-supply-automotivegrade-battery-c

Expect other EV makers like the Kandi technologies (KNDI), which is still quite cheap and has just opened a plant in China capable of manufacturing over 100,000 EVs a year initially (and much more later) to do quite well also.

China gets it. And since they are cash rich and have such a giant consumer market, Big Oil will NOT be able to stop this EV revolution with their USA based oil oligarchy propaganda machine.

I don’t own Tesla or any other stock. I wish I did. I opened a mock porfolio with Tesla and Solar city

April 29, 2013. As of today I have over 85% ROI on BOTH of them.
Sure, there will be some profit taking along the way but I believe the UP trend is your friend here.
This isn’t about luck; it’s about superior technology replacing inferior, poisonous and polluting technology. Musk is a great surfer riding the biggest wave in history since the industrial revolution called The Solar Revolution. Many others will surf this wave to prosperity COUPLED with biosphere enhancement instead of degradation. Join the Solar Revolution or be left behind. :>)

Aristotle(384 BCE – 322 BCE)

Tesla could screw something up. It looks like the company is being run by some pretty smart folks, but everyone is capable of making a mistake. I’d be really surprised if they made a fatal error.

“Forces” could do a number on them like what happened the Volt battery fire. Largely a non-issue was taken up as a way to beat on the hippies, IMHO.

Something similar has happened to Tesla more than once. There was the apparently scripted running out of charge and having to push home. The really crappy NYT piece where the reporter seems to have gone out of his way to have problems. And the one battery “bricking” incident.

Unless Tesla really screwed things up I can’t see them having more than a short term stock price problem.

I can see this current price increase becoming a real bubble, popping, and prices dropping below what is a reasonable problem. That’s called a “buying opportunity”.

This is ‘year one’ in the history of modern electric vehicles. Most companies are in the game.

Their current profit margin in no way justifies the price. The expected/hoped future of Tesla is priced into stock. With a 3 or 4 car line-up and 100’s of thousands of sales, Tesla could very well be making a billion dollar profit 5 years from now and start paying dividends. But if you wait 5 years, the price will have climbed much more and your profit will be much lower. So people are taking a risk now, hoping to get a better return on their money in the future.

Stocks don’t crash without reason.

It would take another, much worse financial meltdown, or a serious screw-up or some ‘act of God’ for that to happen. Their product is solid, the factory runs smoothly, the customers are happy. They have proven beyond a doubt they can deliver. Batteries are only getting cheaper, and so the margins on the car rise. Carbon taxes may finally be on the horizon in the US. Many people are concerned with climate change. The stars all line up.

It is a miracle the stock price stayed so low for so long. During the fall of 2012 I decided to invest because it was abundantly clear that
a) they were succeeding in ramping up mass production and b) the car was a hole-in-one and c) the reservation rate was going up. This information was freely available from the internet forums where owners and reservation holders posted their experiences. It is stunning that the rest of the world ignored that information and only woke up after Elon’s ‘we’re profitable’ tweet.

The market is still small, but it is growing bigger and bigger every year, and there will be a tipping point in a few years where it will become mainstream and sales will explode. The way the mainstream car manufacturers are only dipping their toes in hybrids and electrics shows they will behind the curve when the transition happens.

All you have to do is look at what Toyota did with the Prius. They subsidized it for a few years, building it in low volumes. Eventually, the technology and the market met up and sales exploded. To this day nobody else has been able to steal the mindshare and marketshare that goes with it when it comes to hybrids. (And IMO the Prius is a TERRIBLE car that wouldn’t sell if it had a gas engine.)

Tesla is positioning themselves to do the same thing when it comes to electric vehicles. If they are still THE electric car make when the market shifts, their stock price will be more than justified.

Tesla could turn out to be one of the US ‘big three’. It could become a major world car manufacturer, but it’s not like they have a lock on a unique product.

It’s as easy to believe that other car companies could jump into the market with EVs which are just as good and force Tesla to the sidelines based on their ability to crank out a lot more product and operate at lower margins. And their brand name. Toyota, Mercedes, BMW – those are names which the world recognizes and respects.
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Being a stock speculator is not a good way to build your net worth. Put your stock investment money into non-managed index funds.

What happens to Tesla if their stocks crash? What happens to EVs in general?