Tesla opened up about its progress on its fully autonomous driving solution, dubbed Full Self Driving, on its Q3 2019 earnings call today. CEO Elon Musk tentatively said that, “it still does appear that we will still be in Early Access release of Full Self Driving by the end of this year.”
Tesla just issued its Q3 2019 earnings report and the numbers are looking good across the board for the Silicon Valley electric vehicle builder.
Tesla’s continued positive cash flow and $5.3 billion in cash, even while quickly expanding both its product line and its manufacturing capabilities, and growing its leasing business, puts to rest any short-term worries on whether Tesla [TSLA] can sustain its aggressive growth.
It would be hard to think of any technology more critical to today’s technological wonders than the lithium-ion battery, which is found in everything from tiny hearing aids to giant power plants. Three pioneers of our “rechargeable world” — John Goodenough, Stanley Whittingham, and Akira Yoshino — have now won a well-deserved Nobel Prize in chemistry for their work in developing lithium-ion energy storage technology (as reported by Bloomberg).
Tesla’s like a drama magnet, CEO Elon Musk told investors when the company hosted its annual shareholder’s meeting in 2017.
Tesla had a record number of deliveries this quarter and left all of Wall Street scratching their heads. What remains to be seen is how that has affected Tesla financially. In addition, Tesla might let a few fun little details slip out and provide us with news we have not heard before.
There are a slew of articles right now telling wildly different stories about what we should expect when Tesla reports its earnings on October 23rd after the bell. Articles have ranged from negative spin to positive spin. The negatives mostly seem centered around wondering if Tesla’s revenues may have gone down as the product mix became more Model 3-centric, and the positives are about how many analysts have been revising their earnings expectation up lately.
Tesla critics and short sellers have moved a lot of goal posts. I recently highlighted this a bit with the articles “7 Things Tesla Couldn’t Do” and “7 More Things Tesla Couldn’t Achieve,” and have done so much more in our long-running “Tesla Flashbacks” series. Twitter user “The Short Shorts Historian”/@TeslaHistorian recently tackled this matter using another format — a timeline.
We no longer publish monthly US electric vehicle sales reports, because few automakers publish their monthly electric vehicle sales, and several don’t even publish quarterly sales of their EVs. Nonetheless, I continue to track the numbers that are published and estimate sales for the other fully electric models.
Over the years, as we’ve noted several times, certain electric vehicles from traditional automakers have been hyped as “Tesla killers” (mostly by members of the media and Wall Street, not the automakers). Those EVs have not turned out to be Tesla killers. On the contrary, the Tesla Model 3 is the top selling EV in the world and several of these “killers” have very limited sales.
