Produced by 丨Miaotou APP
Author丨Li Geng
Head Photo 丨IC Photo
9 years ago Tesla When it was first founded, no one thought that it could reach its "height", whether it is the company's growth or value. Although global stock markets experienced ups and downs in 2021, Tesla still ranks first in the market value of global auto companies.In 2021, Tesla sold a total of 930,000 cars worldwide, nearly double the nearly 500,000 cars in 2020. Although the total sales of 1 million have not yet exceeded one million, it is at most a drop in the global automobile market of nearly 60 million vehicles. Compared with the industry leader Toyota , which has the largest sales volume and sold more than 10 million cars in 2021, it can also be summarized as "innocent"; but it is precisely such a core "basic" that has allowed Tesla to maintain its "far ahead" in market value for more than two years.
picture is from " market value storm " Source address
As of press time, although Tesla's stock price has declined recently due to the international situation and the US stock environment, its total market value is still as high as US$830 billion, "firmly occupying" the first place in the global auto company market value list, which is approximately equal to the sum of the market value of the second to eighth in the auto company's market value ranking.
These companies that are "connected by" plus signs are all traditional automobile giants with a long history (the company is established in brackets): Toyota (1937), Volkswagen (1937), BYD (1995), Daimler (1886), Honda (1948), BMW (1916), and Ford (1903). The combined age of these car companies is 625 years old. In comparison, Tesla is only 19 years old (established in 2003), but it is only 1/35 of the previous car companies.
is such a "nail-headed" but in a very short period of time, it has gained value recognition far beyond traditional automobile giants and beyond the perception of the automobile industry in this complicated market - this is a counterintuitive thing in itself.
The reason can be attributed to one sentence: Tesla has shown an unexpected "growth" in the new energy vehicle track, breaking the development laws of the traditional automobile industry.
Whether it is a traditional automobile industry that has long entered a stable development or a "new force" like Tesla that is still growing rapidly, the market's evaluation of its value is often to take the slope on the development curve and then multiply it by a certain amount of value overdraft time. This approach often does not deviate too much from the actual development curve for traditional car manufacturers with stable growth. However, for "new forces" like Tesla with smaller size and more severe development fluctuations, it is normal for the market to overestimate or underestimate their value.
In the inevitable value deviation of the market, this inevitable deviation from the value of investors in turn puts additional requirements: only by having a clear understanding of the future development trend of the company you judge can you hold the stock of a growth company for a long time, and never miss every rise and fall to obtain the highest expected profit.
As for Tesla, its key future trend can basically be broken down into the following questions:
What has Tesla innovated compared to traditional car manufacturers?
Facing traditional car manufacturers with huge size and influence, is Tesla currently capable of fighting?
How will Tesla’s core business develop in the future?
In the current predictable future, does Tesla's development have a ceiling (or a turning point in the slowing growth)?
According to the convention, let us put some key conclusions first:
Tesla is pulling the entire automobile industry back to the dominant cycle of technological innovation by itself;
Facing the traditional car manufacturer giants, Tesla has crossed the "life and death line" of new car-making forces;
Tesla For a long time in the future, making and selling cars will still be the absolute main business;
Tesla's development will inevitably encounter a "ceiling", but at least from the moment, it is still far away;
Tesla leads the automobile industry into a new round of technological innovation cycle
In the decades when traditional automobile giants dominate the global automobile industry, compared to innovation and uniqueness, what giants are more concerned about is mergers, mergers, and mergers. Taking the Stellantis Group , which just completed the merger at the beginning of this year and directly ranked among the fourth largest automobile group in the world (it is estimated that many people in China have not heard of it), it is actually a merger from the original FCA (Fiat Chrysler Group) and PSA (mark Citroen Group).
After this merger, Stellantis Group has a total of 14 automotive sub-brands, including a series of brands that domestic consumers have heard of: Peugeot , Citroen , Opel , DS, Abbas , Alfa Romeo , Chrysler , Dodge , Fiat , Jeep , Lancia , Maserati , etc. Sergio Marchionne, former CEO of
FCA, gave a speech in 2015 called "The Confession of Capital Addicts". In it, he bluntly mentioned the "problems" facing the automotive industry: the competition between different car companies in is too fierce, resulting in an increase in repeated investment, repeated investment by different car companies, and increased R&D expenses, which ultimately leads to the entire automotive industry wasting billions of dollars in product development costs every week. The best solution is to merge or cooperate, which greatly reduces investment in fixed assets and development expenses through cooperation.
The essence of platformization is to fix and share the fully mature parts of the vehicle. It not only saves costs, but also guarantees quality (pictured from Volkswagen). The best example of car companies' cooperation in survival is "platformization". The essence of "platformization" is actually to fix basic components such as powertrain, suspension, chassis, etc. of traditional fuel vehicles, and to develop multiple models based on the same platform. Taking the MQB series platform that is still being used since , Volkswagen Group, which was launched in 2012, as an example, it can easily develop models from A00, A0, A to B. Since its birth, at least 55 different models have been developed.
This phenomenon also reflects the high maturity of fuel-powered vehicles to a certain extent, and also raises the scale competition of car companies to a whole new level. All companies are trying to expand their scale in exchange for larger scale effects (costs further reduce, and thus lower selling prices in exchange for more market competitiveness). The height of " inverter " at
has pushed the automobile step by step to the peak of human industrialization, but it is precisely because of the ultimate pursuit of scale and efficiency that global automakers have become huge super-wheels with a displacement of nearly one million tons, but they have lost the "flexibility" in progress.
Although users are still willing to use it, EV1 is still completely recycled and destroyed by General Motors (picture from the documentary "Who Eliminated Electric Vehicles")
Musk's official biography "Iron Man of Silicon Valley" records a landmark event in the history of global new energy vehicles: in the 1990s, General Motors created the world's first specially designed electric vehicle "EV1". Although the vehicle performance and user reaction were excellent, just a few years later, GM finally decided to recycle and destroy all of this model. Sony Pictures even made a special film for this purpose called "Who Eliminated Electric Vehicles" (domestic video websites can still be found at present).
caused more than one illegal player to die before he could succeed in the "EV1", including oil giants who had a strong voice in the US economy at that time, other traditional fuel car manufacturers, and even factions that had oppose the internal opposition of General Motors. Everyone knows that new energy is the future, and giant car companies are no exception, but they also do not want to pay too much for "eating" in this transformation process. The final result of
is that in the more than ten years since "EV1" was eliminated, traditional car companies have always been "slightly" about new energy. Each company has basically conducted research on new energy vehicles, and has tried various solutions including lithium batteries and hydrogen fuel cell . Even car manufacturers have jointly announced that they have jointly promoted the development of new energy vehicles, but in the end they have been left alone.
The "little abacus" in the minds of traditional car companies is actually easy to guess: the scale effect of is enough to ensure that they will not be eliminated. Anyway, they have enough funds and resources, so they can let others explore new energy vehicles first, then "learning" by themselves, and once again give full play to their scale advantages.
butEron Musk, a strange person who can plan with logic beyond ordinary thinking and lead the research and development of many breakthrough new technologies, has attracted the future of pure electric new energy vehicles at this time node.
How "magical" is Musk? Take the private rocket company SpaceX, which he founded before joining Tesla, as an example: Musk chose to recycle the Rockets industry for the first time, just because the abandoned Rockets first stage accounts for most of the overall cost. But 20 years later, SpaceX has already been able to reuse the first stage of the Rockets for up to 7 times, with the average launch cost being only 50% of the traditional model. In the first half of 2021, SpaceX even sent a total of 1,020 spacecraft into space, accounting for 80.8% of the global number of spacecraft entering orbit. What's even more terrifying is that Musk's "breakthrough thinking + breakthrough technology implementation" strategy is also widely applicable. In addition to Tesla's cars, Musk later established other startups based on this strategy in multiple tracks such as solar power generation, artificial intelligence research, tunnel mining, brain-computer interface , and has also achieved results that the industry is aiming at the sidelines. Of course, these are all later stories.
As for Tesla, the most core technological innovation under Musk's leadership has three main points: solves the problem of charging and discharging management of large-scale lithium battery cells in automotive battery packs; reconstructs the digital architecture of automobiles in the new energy era to create more possibilities; and tries to break through autonomous driving with the power of a single car company.
One of the battery modules of Tesla Model S (pictured from Gruber Motor Company)
Let’s talk about the first point first. The Tesla Model S, which first used 18650 batteries, had at most 7,000 individual Panasonic cylindrical battery cells in the entire battery pack. Even after replacing a single size and larger 21,700 batteries in the later stage, the number of cells in the entire battery pack will be as high as 4,400, and the number of battery cells is far higher than the square batteries widely used by other power battery manufacturers such as CATL and BYD.
Because these batteries are actually single small batteries, and there will inevitably be certain differences in production (capacity, charging and discharging performance), they cannot be simply and roughly connected, but must control the charging and discharging operation according to the specific status of each battery. The larger the number of batteries, the greater the control capacity, and Tesla has demonstrated its technical strength very early in this area.
At the end of January this year, the domestic car review self-media "Big Car Speech" once conducted a test on a closed track, allowing Tesla Model 3, BYD Han, NIO ES6, Xiaopeng P7, and Ideal One to drive fiercely in the same field, and reciprocating full-strength acceleration (full power output) and full-strength deceleration (brake full-strength operation + maximum power recovery) until the vehicle runs out. In this test, except for Tesla, other vehicles have been driving fiercely for a period of time and the system has limited output power and speed. Only Tesla maintains full power output from beginning to end, which also reflects from the side the excellent management capabilities and good cooling capabilities of Tesla's entire battery system.
Tesla Model S network topology diagram, you can see that the overall structure of the system is "central-subsystem" (pictured from Zhihu user "cold winter melon")
The second point is relatively difficult to understand. Zhihu user "cold winter melon" analyzed the evolution of Tesla's electronic and electrical architecture in his own column article in 2018. Although its earlier Model S models already have a large central control screen and can control all aspects of the vehicle, its overall electrification architecture is actually still relatively divided. Basically, each function runs on a separate MCU chip, and finally connects to the central control platform through a large number of data bus .
By connecting various functions and sensor subsystems of the entire vehicle to the central management system, Tesla's Model S launched in 2012 already has the capability of OTA (Over the Air Technology). Manufacturers can remotely push vehicle software to all users and change the specific configuration of the vehicle hardware. They can not only upgrade the in-vehicle entertainment system, applications, etc., but also realize software updates to the ECU, such as battery management system, electric drive control unit, vehicle control unit, etc.
Compared with Tesla Model S, the network topology diagram of Model 3 is obviously flattering and the number of subsystems is smaller (picture from Zhihu user "Cold Winter Melon").
theoretically can achieve the level of Model S, but in the Model 3 released four years later, Tesla has made major changes to the vehicle's digital system again, and the electrical architecture is directly divided into 6 parts: CCM (central computing module), LBCM (left body control module), RBCM (right body control module) and FBCM (front body control module), as well as BMS and DI (Driver Inverter). The fragmented system on the body is directly connected to the body control module according to the principle of proximity, which greatly reduces the complexity of the vehicle's electrical architecture, reduces the performance requirements and load of the central processing system, and reduces the electrical architecture cost of the vehicle, including chips and lines, in disguise.
The improvement of vehicle electronic and electrical architecture of this level has exceeded the "regular" operation scope of traditional car companies. In essence, it is a process of taking functions back from complex suppliers and self-developing, expanding the upper limit of capabilities while enhancing the coordination of various systems in the vehicle. While traditional automotive architecture giants such as Bosch are still planning future development trends for automotive electronic systems, Tesla has turned them into reality and provided them to users.
is finally autonomous driving. As we all know, Tesla is radical in this area. Not only has it been shaping its assisted driving function very "automatic", it has also frequently upgraded its components related to autonomous driving, and even created processing chips on its own. However, from its deep development history, the most valuable thing is its overall autonomous driving neural network construction and the "shadow mode" data collection based on Tesla's existing vehicles (continuously collecting some key driving data while the vehicle is driving and uploading).
Another deep case released by Odin Asgard, a researcher at Huxiu Miaotou in March this year, "Tesla's valuation comes from it, but is it reliable? 》 once specifically mentioned that from the perspective of realizing autonomous driving, the data collected by all autonomous driving companies including Tesla and Google is far from enough.
But in the Tesla "AI Day" held in mid-2021 (Tesla previously held battery day and autonomous driving day, similar to the annual major technological progress), Tesla revealed for the first time the key neural network architectures in its autonomous driving, how shadow modes are combined with the overall neural network, and the results of the entire neural network now: As of the end of June 2021, Tesla has accumulated 7 rounds of shadow mode iteration processes, including 1 million highly differentiated scenes with 36 frames/s and 10 seconds of time taken by the camera, a total of 6 billion object annotations containing precise depth and acceleration, a total of 1.5PB of data. The millions of Teslas that are still driving normally around the world are still providing Tesla with new valuable data fragments.
Before traditional automobile giants officially entered the "involved" era, there were fierce technical competitions, and different car manufacturers continued to innovate in core components such as engines and gearboxes. But unlike the traditional automobile giants' previous expectation that "the core of new energy vehicles is the transformation of energy types" and "new energy vehicles require decades of transition period", after Tesla put down the burden of past automobile research and development, it has carried out rounds of thorough innovation in all aspects of new energy vehicles in just over a decade.
Although Musk's innovation is not always so "productive" (for example, solar energy is a little bit yellow, and underground tunnels are a little lost) , Tesla's development history is enough to prove one thing - the scattered and repeated innovation and development of the automotive industry, which is indeed a way to achieve it in small companies with very limited sizes through management.
Tesla, which can do this, has sufficient imagination.
Tesla has crossed the "life and death line" of new car-making forces
As mentioned above, the "conservatism" of traditional automobile giants is not unfounded. The biggest reliance is the "scale effect" given by their huge size and the subsequent " Matthew effect ".
Take Toyota Group, which won the global car sales champion in 2021 as an example. The total sales volume exceeds 10 million units, but the global sales of Toyota Huacoon for one model reached 1.13 million units, more than twice the total sales of all Tesla models. Moreover, the Toyota Crown itself is developed based on the Toyota TNGA-C platform. If the input-output ratio of this car is calculated only, Toyota will definitely be the winner.
So for Tesla, which is still a new force in the automotive industry, the lowest requirement is to cross the "life and death line" of the scale of the automotive industry - Automobile companies must reach a certain "scale" to have the hope of PKing at the same level with their competitors, so as to survive for a long time in the highly competitive automotive industry.
It must be noted that this "scale" is not a single attribute such as sales volume or production capacity, but the strength of the "scale effect" as a whole displayed in the company's own operation process. The reason why
emphasizes the scale effect so much is because since World War II , the automotive industry has entered a period of continuous growth for more than half a century. With huge market demand, automobiles, as large-scale goods with high value, extremely low consumption frequency, and new automobile manufacturers have gradually emerged, dragging the mainstream market into the "involved" rhythm very early. Car companies are naturally guided into the "small profit but quick turnover" model, roughly maintaining a gross profit level of 15-20% and a net profit of 5-7% to continue to grow.
Strictly speaking, in the context of fierce market competition (limited room for price growth), the ultimate decision on the profit margin is cost. In the automotive industry, there is actually a "Lai De Law" proposed in 1936: for every cumulative output of a single model, the cost price will drop by 15%.
Ford T-model applies the "reliance theorem"
. The scale effect of automobile companies can basically be divided into three bottom-to-top dimensions:
The overall automobile production scale of enterprises, including absolute production capacity and global layout (the larger the production capacity can be achieved, the larger the global layout, the larger the potential sales of the entire single model);
The simplicity of the final product system of enterprises, including the degree of application of platform strategy (the more complex the final product system, the more dispersed the scale, and the higher the completion degree of platform strategy, the more complex products can also form scale effect);
The cumulative sales of the final single model.
In these three dimensions, Tesla currently surpasses traditional car companies, and overall it is reflected in the fact that in 2021, when Tesla's net profit margin has surpassed Toyota, Volkswagen and GM in terms of net profit margin.
First talk about the overall production scale of the company. Tesla is still in a clear gap with traditional automobile industry giants. Taking a series of factory buildings and machinery and equipment necessary in the automobile production process as an example, Tesla's total fixed assets are almost 1/3 of that of Toyota. After combining sales, the ratio is calculated to obtain the reference value of the overall production capacity effect of the company. There is a significant gap between Tesla and the three leading automakers. The reference value of scale effect calculated on
is actually not the "upper limit" that traditional car companies can reach, because in recent years, the "ceiling" of global passenger car sales has become increasingly obvious, and the capacity utilization rate of global car companies themselves is not high, which has actually "reduced" the scale effect performance of the overall production capacity of traditional car companies to a certain extent.
In contrast, Tesla does not have the problem of insufficient capacity utilization. Currently, Tesla is actually responsible for automobile production. The production capacity of Model S and Model X is about 600,000 vehicles per year, and the production capacity of Model 3 and Model Y is about 450,000 yuan per year; the production capacity of the latter is about 450,000 yuan per year; the production capacity of the latter is put into production in early 2020 and has already achieved considerable production capacity by the end of 2020. The production capacity of the two main factories of
is about 1.05 million vehicles, which is not much different from Tesla's actual sales of 930,000 vehicles throughout the year. Tesla's own sales revenue to inventory assets ratio can also illustrate the problem. While sales volume continues to increase, the amount of inventory assets has grown slowly. means that production capacity has almost no "piled up", and it has been sold out in a very short time and converted into revenue. Compared with the defeat in the first dimension, Tesla showed its advantages in the second and third dimensions.
is the first model. Tesla currently has 4 models, namely "S3XY". Among them, Model S and Model X chassis are homologous, and Model Y is developed based on Model 3 chassis. According to information disclosed by Tesla, the Model X and Model S share about 30% of the parts; the share ratio of Model Y and Model 3 further increased to 75%. Rounding around, saving a whole car.
In comparison, traditional car companies have relatively complex product layouts, and the number of models is still quite large. Taking Toyota China's official website as an example, more than 30 cars are calculated separately by statistically using new energy and traditional energy models. In order to balance the scale effect disadvantages brought by the large number of models, Toyota is also spared no effort to promote the "platform" strategy. Toyota's TNGA platform has evolved into 6 versions, extending a total of 31 actual models sold. With the premise that there is still sufficient freedom in the appearance and interior of the vehicle, a high degree of production integration of the vehicle chassis and powertrain is achieved.
In addition to the development of its own business, Tesla's high market value is another important "courage" for its confrontation with auto giants.
Looking at Tesla's entire development history, it was not until 2020 that the net profit in the fiscal year was truly positive. Since 2010, Tesla's cumulative net profit of has remained negative, with a total loss of US$407 million, which is about RMB 2.6 billion.
.6 billion doesn’t seem to be much, but if we consider Tesla’s investment in order to operate normally and to increase its overall efficiency by expanding its scale, Tesla has actually accumulated a total of US$2.59 billion in its growth process over the years, and during the period when the “blood loss” was the most from 2017 to 2018, it once exceeded US$10 billion. What supports Tesla to this day is its strong financing capabilities. Since its establishment, Tesla has raised more than US$20 billion in various ways, which is almost RMB 130 billion, rounding the market to "sponsor" the entire amount of funds of GAC Group for it. So much money allows Tesla to invest heavily in the expansion of production scale while its net profit is not large. Among Tesla's past cumulative investment funds, "equipment and property" accounted for 90%. At the time point, the historical peak of "equipment and property" investment is consistent with the first construction of Tesla's Fermont factory in the United States (Model S and Model X are put into production), the subsequent expansion and production of the Fermont factory in the United States (expanded production, Model 3 and Model Y are put into production), and the construction of Tesla's Shanghai factory highway.
In addition to the considerable amount of funds, Tesla is also very "ingenious" in terms of financing methods. In addition to publicly raising funds from the secondary market, Tesla has a lot of "debt-to-equity" financing. After Tesla's debt expires, if Tesla's share price is higher than the target share price agreed with its creditors, the creditor can choose to convert the debt directly into stocks and obtain more profits beyond the debt interest.
For Tesla, converting creditors into shareholders means "borrowing money for free" means no money. From 2010 to the present, Tesla has carried out five large-scale bond conversions and 13 additional issuances of common stocks, which eventually increased Tesla's total share capital from the initial 93 million shares to the current 198 million shares.
From the perspective of results, large amount of debt-to-equity financing not only alleviates Tesla's repayment pressure; to a certain extent, it also allows its debtors to obtain considerable additional profits; the only loss is that other investors are relatively scattered, and they need to bear the risk of converting part of the debt into low-priced stocks into the market.
This can also explain to a certain extent why Musk frequently tweeted to protect his stock price in the past, especially since early 2020, he took the initiative to stand up to "strike" Tesla institutions that shorted . Because only Tesla's stock price keeps rising, most of Tesla's creditors will convert the money Tesla owes into stocks.
Musk's ability to always find financing in the Tesla crisis or critical development is also worth mentioning. The most typical one is Tesla's first production base, Fremont factory and the world's first Gigafactory Nevada factory.
Fremont factory was actually after the global financial crisis, and General Motors in the United States sold assets to convert funds to auction. At that time, the actual price of this factory was $42 million, which was "so cheaper than it could be." But through communication with Toyota, the second shareholder of the factory, Tesla negotiated a miraculous cooperation: Toyota gave Tesla $50 million to subscribe to Tesla's shares, and then Tesla itself took another $42 million to buy the factory. In other words, Tesla not only won the Fermont factory without spending a penny, but also asked for an additional $8 million investment from Toyota.
Nevada Gigafactory is more dramatic. After announcing its factory construction plan, Tesla publicly contacted governments across the United States, but it just did not determine the location of the factory. By deliberately guiding localities to "race horses" on the introduction conditions, Tesla not only finally got a piece of land for free, but also reduced a series of taxes including sales tax, property tax and employee tax. After fetching the government's wool, Tesla turned to Panasonic and finally persuaded Panasonic to invest 30% to put into production equipment to manufacture and supply batteries. Rounding, Tesla has won the world's leading power battery factory with very little investment.
Judging from Tesla's development trajectory, Musk himself is obviously very clear about the existence of the "life and death line" in the automotive industry, otherwise he would not value Tesla's scale development speed so much. Judging from various data, Tesla has crossed this "life and death line". Although Tesla still has a gap in scale effect with traditional car manufacturers, this gap will continue to narrow under Tesla's abundant financing sources and continuous large-scale production capacity construction.
Tesla's business model is fine. The real problem is that everyone "thinks too much"
Strictly speaking, Tesla's current revenue is still divided into four parts: car sales, car rental, energy production and storage, services and others. This category has been used until now since Tesla acquired "SolarCity" in 2016.
, "energy production and storage" includes SolarCity's solar power generation business for residents and Tesla's energy storage business built with its own battery technology. "Services and others" include Tesla's service revenue and official second-hand Tesla sales.
As early as 2016, Musk publicly stated in 2016 that Tesla will develop in the future with a combination of "solar power generation + energy storage + new energy vehicles", but only the new energy vehicle business has withstood the test of time. Especially SolarCity, which took a lot of effort to acquire it, has continued to decline from second place at the time of acquisition to outside the 60th place in 2021.
Compared with Tesla's products, many analysts have always believed that its business model is full of imagination, such as the previously popular "software-defined cars" and "Tesla is the next Apple ". But in my personal opinion, these analysis methods are likely not to reflect Tesla's real development.
We take the Tesla business model that Guosen Securities has been using as an example. It is divided into 4 businesses, namely hardware, software, services, and other businesses. When we first analyzed Tesla's attributes, we actually only divided them into two parts, namely "automotive-related business" and "other business". In Tesla's own financial statements, the software and services that the analysis agency has given great imagination space are classified as "services and other". The
category was launched in the first quarter of 2015, but it was not a brand new "business", but was spun off from Tesla's previous "car sales" category. From 2015 to the present, the cumulative revenue of "services and others" has been US$9.75 billion, the cumulative cost is US$11.63 billion, and the cumulative loss is US$2 billion.
This actually reflects the fundamental difference between Tesla and smartphone manufacturers such as Apple when providing "services": Although is a service consumer and installing software on Tesla's car machines is also somewhat similar to that on mobile phones, Apple's application service ecosystem is much larger than Tesla, and most of Tesla's services have huge pre-costs.
Take charging services as an example. As of the end of 2021, Tesla has nearly 3,500 super charging stations around the world, and the super charging piles arranged in public places have reached more than 31,000, but these all require venues and maintenance, obviously requiring additional investment.
is followed by various OTA functions that are so amazing, such as Internet service, power acceleration service package, battery life upgrade, intelligent summoning service package, rear heating function package and the most expensive fully automatic driving function. These "paid upgrade services" seem to be adding features, most of which are actually rebooting the features that are disabled after leaving the factory. Pure software functions such as intelligent summoning and Internet service are relatively better. For example, upgraded battery life, heating in the rear seat, and fully autonomous driving also require "extra investment" in the early stage.
If you want to upgrade your battery life, you must have redundant capacity. When the vehicle leaves the factory, you use software code to "shield" part of the capacity; if you want the rear seat to be able to heat, you need to arrange the heating device in advance in the rear seats; if you want each car to have fully autonomous driving function, then the highest specification of autonomous driving hardware must be installed during production.
Produced by 丨Miaotou APP
Author丨Li Geng
Head Photo 丨IC Photo
9 years ago Tesla When it was first founded, no one thought that it could reach its "height", whether it is the company's growth or value. Although global stock markets experienced ups and downs in 2021, Tesla still ranks first in the market value of global auto companies.In 2021, Tesla sold a total of 930,000 cars worldwide, nearly double the nearly 500,000 cars in 2020. Although the total sales of 1 million have not yet exceeded one million, it is at most a drop in the global automobile market of nearly 60 million vehicles. Compared with the industry leader Toyota , which has the largest sales volume and sold more than 10 million cars in 2021, it can also be summarized as "innocent"; but it is precisely such a core "basic" that has allowed Tesla to maintain its "far ahead" in market value for more than two years.
picture is from " market value storm " Source address
As of press time, although Tesla's stock price has declined recently due to the international situation and the US stock environment, its total market value is still as high as US$830 billion, "firmly occupying" the first place in the global auto company market value list, which is approximately equal to the sum of the market value of the second to eighth in the auto company's market value ranking.
These companies that are "connected by" plus signs are all traditional automobile giants with a long history (the company is established in brackets): Toyota (1937), Volkswagen (1937), BYD (1995), Daimler (1886), Honda (1948), BMW (1916), and Ford (1903). The combined age of these car companies is 625 years old. In comparison, Tesla is only 19 years old (established in 2003), but it is only 1/35 of the previous car companies.
is such a "nail-headed" but in a very short period of time, it has gained value recognition far beyond traditional automobile giants and beyond the perception of the automobile industry in this complicated market - this is a counterintuitive thing in itself.
The reason can be attributed to one sentence: Tesla has shown an unexpected "growth" in the new energy vehicle track, breaking the development laws of the traditional automobile industry.
Whether it is a traditional automobile industry that has long entered a stable development or a "new force" like Tesla that is still growing rapidly, the market's evaluation of its value is often to take the slope on the development curve and then multiply it by a certain amount of value overdraft time. This approach often does not deviate too much from the actual development curve for traditional car manufacturers with stable growth. However, for "new forces" like Tesla with smaller size and more severe development fluctuations, it is normal for the market to overestimate or underestimate their value.
In the inevitable value deviation of the market, this inevitable deviation from the value of investors in turn puts additional requirements: only by having a clear understanding of the future development trend of the company you judge can you hold the stock of a growth company for a long time, and never miss every rise and fall to obtain the highest expected profit.
As for Tesla, its key future trend can basically be broken down into the following questions:
What has Tesla innovated compared to traditional car manufacturers?
Facing traditional car manufacturers with huge size and influence, is Tesla currently capable of fighting?
How will Tesla’s core business develop in the future?
In the current predictable future, does Tesla's development have a ceiling (or a turning point in the slowing growth)?
According to the convention, let us put some key conclusions first:
Tesla is pulling the entire automobile industry back to the dominant cycle of technological innovation by itself;
Facing the traditional car manufacturer giants, Tesla has crossed the "life and death line" of new car-making forces;
Tesla For a long time in the future, making and selling cars will still be the absolute main business;
Tesla's development will inevitably encounter a "ceiling", but at least from the moment, it is still far away;
Tesla leads the automobile industry into a new round of technological innovation cycle
In the decades when traditional automobile giants dominate the global automobile industry, compared to innovation and uniqueness, what giants are more concerned about is mergers, mergers, and mergers. Taking the Stellantis Group , which just completed the merger at the beginning of this year and directly ranked among the fourth largest automobile group in the world (it is estimated that many people in China have not heard of it), it is actually a merger from the original FCA (Fiat Chrysler Group) and PSA (mark Citroen Group).
After this merger, Stellantis Group has a total of 14 automotive sub-brands, including a series of brands that domestic consumers have heard of: Peugeot , Citroen , Opel , DS, Abbas , Alfa Romeo , Chrysler , Dodge , Fiat , Jeep , Lancia , Maserati , etc. Sergio Marchionne, former CEO of
FCA, gave a speech in 2015 called "The Confession of Capital Addicts". In it, he bluntly mentioned the "problems" facing the automotive industry: the competition between different car companies in is too fierce, resulting in an increase in repeated investment, repeated investment by different car companies, and increased R&D expenses, which ultimately leads to the entire automotive industry wasting billions of dollars in product development costs every week. The best solution is to merge or cooperate, which greatly reduces investment in fixed assets and development expenses through cooperation.
The essence of platformization is to fix and share the fully mature parts of the vehicle. It not only saves costs, but also guarantees quality (pictured from Volkswagen). The best example of car companies' cooperation in survival is "platformization". The essence of "platformization" is actually to fix basic components such as powertrain, suspension, chassis, etc. of traditional fuel vehicles, and to develop multiple models based on the same platform. Taking the MQB series platform that is still being used since , Volkswagen Group, which was launched in 2012, as an example, it can easily develop models from A00, A0, A to B. Since its birth, at least 55 different models have been developed.
This phenomenon also reflects the high maturity of fuel-powered vehicles to a certain extent, and also raises the scale competition of car companies to a whole new level. All companies are trying to expand their scale in exchange for larger scale effects (costs further reduce, and thus lower selling prices in exchange for more market competitiveness). The height of " inverter " at
has pushed the automobile step by step to the peak of human industrialization, but it is precisely because of the ultimate pursuit of scale and efficiency that global automakers have become huge super-wheels with a displacement of nearly one million tons, but they have lost the "flexibility" in progress.
Although users are still willing to use it, EV1 is still completely recycled and destroyed by General Motors (picture from the documentary "Who Eliminated Electric Vehicles")
Musk's official biography "Iron Man of Silicon Valley" records a landmark event in the history of global new energy vehicles: in the 1990s, General Motors created the world's first specially designed electric vehicle "EV1". Although the vehicle performance and user reaction were excellent, just a few years later, GM finally decided to recycle and destroy all of this model. Sony Pictures even made a special film for this purpose called "Who Eliminated Electric Vehicles" (domestic video websites can still be found at present).
caused more than one illegal player to die before he could succeed in the "EV1", including oil giants who had a strong voice in the US economy at that time, other traditional fuel car manufacturers, and even factions that had oppose the internal opposition of General Motors. Everyone knows that new energy is the future, and giant car companies are no exception, but they also do not want to pay too much for "eating" in this transformation process. The final result of
is that in the more than ten years since "EV1" was eliminated, traditional car companies have always been "slightly" about new energy. Each company has basically conducted research on new energy vehicles, and has tried various solutions including lithium batteries and hydrogen fuel cell . Even car manufacturers have jointly announced that they have jointly promoted the development of new energy vehicles, but in the end they have been left alone.
The "little abacus" in the minds of traditional car companies is actually easy to guess: the scale effect of is enough to ensure that they will not be eliminated. Anyway, they have enough funds and resources, so they can let others explore new energy vehicles first, then "learning" by themselves, and once again give full play to their scale advantages.
butEron Musk, a strange person who can plan with logic beyond ordinary thinking and lead the research and development of many breakthrough new technologies, has attracted the future of pure electric new energy vehicles at this time node.
How "magical" is Musk? Take the private rocket company SpaceX, which he founded before joining Tesla, as an example: Musk chose to recycle the Rockets industry for the first time, just because the abandoned Rockets first stage accounts for most of the overall cost. But 20 years later, SpaceX has already been able to reuse the first stage of the Rockets for up to 7 times, with the average launch cost being only 50% of the traditional model. In the first half of 2021, SpaceX even sent a total of 1,020 spacecraft into space, accounting for 80.8% of the global number of spacecraft entering orbit. What's even more terrifying is that Musk's "breakthrough thinking + breakthrough technology implementation" strategy is also widely applicable. In addition to Tesla's cars, Musk later established other startups based on this strategy in multiple tracks such as solar power generation, artificial intelligence research, tunnel mining, brain-computer interface , and has also achieved results that the industry is aiming at the sidelines. Of course, these are all later stories.
As for Tesla, the most core technological innovation under Musk's leadership has three main points: solves the problem of charging and discharging management of large-scale lithium battery cells in automotive battery packs; reconstructs the digital architecture of automobiles in the new energy era to create more possibilities; and tries to break through autonomous driving with the power of a single car company.
One of the battery modules of Tesla Model S (pictured from Gruber Motor Company)
Let’s talk about the first point first. The Tesla Model S, which first used 18650 batteries, had at most 7,000 individual Panasonic cylindrical battery cells in the entire battery pack. Even after replacing a single size and larger 21,700 batteries in the later stage, the number of cells in the entire battery pack will be as high as 4,400, and the number of battery cells is far higher than the square batteries widely used by other power battery manufacturers such as CATL and BYD.
Because these batteries are actually single small batteries, and there will inevitably be certain differences in production (capacity, charging and discharging performance), they cannot be simply and roughly connected, but must control the charging and discharging operation according to the specific status of each battery. The larger the number of batteries, the greater the control capacity, and Tesla has demonstrated its technical strength very early in this area.
At the end of January this year, the domestic car review self-media "Big Car Speech" once conducted a test on a closed track, allowing Tesla Model 3, BYD Han, NIO ES6, Xiaopeng P7, and Ideal One to drive fiercely in the same field, and reciprocating full-strength acceleration (full power output) and full-strength deceleration (brake full-strength operation + maximum power recovery) until the vehicle runs out. In this test, except for Tesla, other vehicles have been driving fiercely for a period of time and the system has limited output power and speed. Only Tesla maintains full power output from beginning to end, which also reflects from the side the excellent management capabilities and good cooling capabilities of Tesla's entire battery system.
Tesla Model S network topology diagram, you can see that the overall structure of the system is "central-subsystem" (pictured from Zhihu user "cold winter melon")
The second point is relatively difficult to understand. Zhihu user "cold winter melon" analyzed the evolution of Tesla's electronic and electrical architecture in his own column article in 2018. Although its earlier Model S models already have a large central control screen and can control all aspects of the vehicle, its overall electrification architecture is actually still relatively divided. Basically, each function runs on a separate MCU chip, and finally connects to the central control platform through a large number of data bus .
By connecting various functions and sensor subsystems of the entire vehicle to the central management system, Tesla's Model S launched in 2012 already has the capability of OTA (Over the Air Technology). Manufacturers can remotely push vehicle software to all users and change the specific configuration of the vehicle hardware. They can not only upgrade the in-vehicle entertainment system, applications, etc., but also realize software updates to the ECU, such as battery management system, electric drive control unit, vehicle control unit, etc.
Compared with Tesla Model S, the network topology diagram of Model 3 is obviously flattering and the number of subsystems is smaller (picture from Zhihu user "Cold Winter Melon").
theoretically can achieve the level of Model S, but in the Model 3 released four years later, Tesla has made major changes to the vehicle's digital system again, and the electrical architecture is directly divided into 6 parts: CCM (central computing module), LBCM (left body control module), RBCM (right body control module) and FBCM (front body control module), as well as BMS and DI (Driver Inverter). The fragmented system on the body is directly connected to the body control module according to the principle of proximity, which greatly reduces the complexity of the vehicle's electrical architecture, reduces the performance requirements and load of the central processing system, and reduces the electrical architecture cost of the vehicle, including chips and lines, in disguise.
The improvement of vehicle electronic and electrical architecture of this level has exceeded the "regular" operation scope of traditional car companies. In essence, it is a process of taking functions back from complex suppliers and self-developing, expanding the upper limit of capabilities while enhancing the coordination of various systems in the vehicle. While traditional automotive architecture giants such as Bosch are still planning future development trends for automotive electronic systems, Tesla has turned them into reality and provided them to users.
is finally autonomous driving. As we all know, Tesla is radical in this area. Not only has it been shaping its assisted driving function very "automatic", it has also frequently upgraded its components related to autonomous driving, and even created processing chips on its own. However, from its deep development history, the most valuable thing is its overall autonomous driving neural network construction and the "shadow mode" data collection based on Tesla's existing vehicles (continuously collecting some key driving data while the vehicle is driving and uploading).
Another deep case released by Odin Asgard, a researcher at Huxiu Miaotou in March this year, "Tesla's valuation comes from it, but is it reliable? 》 once specifically mentioned that from the perspective of realizing autonomous driving, the data collected by all autonomous driving companies including Tesla and Google is far from enough.
But in the Tesla "AI Day" held in mid-2021 (Tesla previously held battery day and autonomous driving day, similar to the annual major technological progress), Tesla revealed for the first time the key neural network architectures in its autonomous driving, how shadow modes are combined with the overall neural network, and the results of the entire neural network now: As of the end of June 2021, Tesla has accumulated 7 rounds of shadow mode iteration processes, including 1 million highly differentiated scenes with 36 frames/s and 10 seconds of time taken by the camera, a total of 6 billion object annotations containing precise depth and acceleration, a total of 1.5PB of data. The millions of Teslas that are still driving normally around the world are still providing Tesla with new valuable data fragments.
Before traditional automobile giants officially entered the "involved" era, there were fierce technical competitions, and different car manufacturers continued to innovate in core components such as engines and gearboxes. But unlike the traditional automobile giants' previous expectation that "the core of new energy vehicles is the transformation of energy types" and "new energy vehicles require decades of transition period", after Tesla put down the burden of past automobile research and development, it has carried out rounds of thorough innovation in all aspects of new energy vehicles in just over a decade.
Although Musk's innovation is not always so "productive" (for example, solar energy is a little bit yellow, and underground tunnels are a little lost) , Tesla's development history is enough to prove one thing - the scattered and repeated innovation and development of the automotive industry, which is indeed a way to achieve it in small companies with very limited sizes through management.
Tesla, which can do this, has sufficient imagination.
Tesla has crossed the "life and death line" of new car-making forces
As mentioned above, the "conservatism" of traditional automobile giants is not unfounded. The biggest reliance is the "scale effect" given by their huge size and the subsequent " Matthew effect ".
Take Toyota Group, which won the global car sales champion in 2021 as an example. The total sales volume exceeds 10 million units, but the global sales of Toyota Huacoon for one model reached 1.13 million units, more than twice the total sales of all Tesla models. Moreover, the Toyota Crown itself is developed based on the Toyota TNGA-C platform. If the input-output ratio of this car is calculated only, Toyota will definitely be the winner.
So for Tesla, which is still a new force in the automotive industry, the lowest requirement is to cross the "life and death line" of the scale of the automotive industry - Automobile companies must reach a certain "scale" to have the hope of PKing at the same level with their competitors, so as to survive for a long time in the highly competitive automotive industry.
It must be noted that this "scale" is not a single attribute such as sales volume or production capacity, but the strength of the "scale effect" as a whole displayed in the company's own operation process. The reason why
emphasizes the scale effect so much is because since World War II , the automotive industry has entered a period of continuous growth for more than half a century. With huge market demand, automobiles, as large-scale goods with high value, extremely low consumption frequency, and new automobile manufacturers have gradually emerged, dragging the mainstream market into the "involved" rhythm very early. Car companies are naturally guided into the "small profit but quick turnover" model, roughly maintaining a gross profit level of 15-20% and a net profit of 5-7% to continue to grow.
Strictly speaking, in the context of fierce market competition (limited room for price growth), the ultimate decision on the profit margin is cost. In the automotive industry, there is actually a "Lai De Law" proposed in 1936: for every cumulative output of a single model, the cost price will drop by 15%.
Ford T-model applies the "reliance theorem"
. The scale effect of automobile companies can basically be divided into three bottom-to-top dimensions:
The overall automobile production scale of enterprises, including absolute production capacity and global layout (the larger the production capacity can be achieved, the larger the global layout, the larger the potential sales of the entire single model);
The simplicity of the final product system of enterprises, including the degree of application of platform strategy (the more complex the final product system, the more dispersed the scale, and the higher the completion degree of platform strategy, the more complex products can also form scale effect);
The cumulative sales of the final single model.
In these three dimensions, Tesla currently surpasses traditional car companies, and overall it is reflected in the fact that in 2021, when Tesla's net profit margin has surpassed Toyota, Volkswagen and GM in terms of net profit margin.
First talk about the overall production scale of the company. Tesla is still in a clear gap with traditional automobile industry giants. Taking a series of factory buildings and machinery and equipment necessary in the automobile production process as an example, Tesla's total fixed assets are almost 1/3 of that of Toyota. After combining sales, the ratio is calculated to obtain the reference value of the overall production capacity effect of the company. There is a significant gap between Tesla and the three leading automakers. The reference value of scale effect calculated on
is actually not the "upper limit" that traditional car companies can reach, because in recent years, the "ceiling" of global passenger car sales has become increasingly obvious, and the capacity utilization rate of global car companies themselves is not high, which has actually "reduced" the scale effect performance of the overall production capacity of traditional car companies to a certain extent.
In contrast, Tesla does not have the problem of insufficient capacity utilization. Currently, Tesla is actually responsible for automobile production. The production capacity of Model S and Model X is about 600,000 vehicles per year, and the production capacity of Model 3 and Model Y is about 450,000 yuan per year; the production capacity of the latter is about 450,000 yuan per year; the production capacity of the latter is put into production in early 2020 and has already achieved considerable production capacity by the end of 2020. The production capacity of the two main factories of
is about 1.05 million vehicles, which is not much different from Tesla's actual sales of 930,000 vehicles throughout the year. Tesla's own sales revenue to inventory assets ratio can also illustrate the problem. While sales volume continues to increase, the amount of inventory assets has grown slowly. means that production capacity has almost no "piled up", and it has been sold out in a very short time and converted into revenue. Compared with the defeat in the first dimension, Tesla showed its advantages in the second and third dimensions.
is the first model. Tesla currently has 4 models, namely "S3XY". Among them, Model S and Model X chassis are homologous, and Model Y is developed based on Model 3 chassis. According to information disclosed by Tesla, the Model X and Model S share about 30% of the parts; the share ratio of Model Y and Model 3 further increased to 75%. Rounding around, saving a whole car.
In comparison, traditional car companies have relatively complex product layouts, and the number of models is still quite large. Taking Toyota China's official website as an example, more than 30 cars are calculated separately by statistically using new energy and traditional energy models. In order to balance the scale effect disadvantages brought by the large number of models, Toyota is also spared no effort to promote the "platform" strategy. Toyota's TNGA platform has evolved into 6 versions, extending a total of 31 actual models sold. With the premise that there is still sufficient freedom in the appearance and interior of the vehicle, a high degree of production integration of the vehicle chassis and powertrain is achieved.
In addition to the development of its own business, Tesla's high market value is another important "courage" for its confrontation with auto giants.
Looking at Tesla's entire development history, it was not until 2020 that the net profit in the fiscal year was truly positive. Since 2010, Tesla's cumulative net profit of has remained negative, with a total loss of US$407 million, which is about RMB 2.6 billion.
.6 billion doesn’t seem to be much, but if we consider Tesla’s investment in order to operate normally and to increase its overall efficiency by expanding its scale, Tesla has actually accumulated a total of US$2.59 billion in its growth process over the years, and during the period when the “blood loss” was the most from 2017 to 2018, it once exceeded US$10 billion. What supports Tesla to this day is its strong financing capabilities. Since its establishment, Tesla has raised more than US$20 billion in various ways, which is almost RMB 130 billion, rounding the market to "sponsor" the entire amount of funds of GAC Group for it. So much money allows Tesla to invest heavily in the expansion of production scale while its net profit is not large. Among Tesla's past cumulative investment funds, "equipment and property" accounted for 90%. At the time point, the historical peak of "equipment and property" investment is consistent with the first construction of Tesla's Fermont factory in the United States (Model S and Model X are put into production), the subsequent expansion and production of the Fermont factory in the United States (expanded production, Model 3 and Model Y are put into production), and the construction of Tesla's Shanghai factory highway.
In addition to the considerable amount of funds, Tesla is also very "ingenious" in terms of financing methods. In addition to publicly raising funds from the secondary market, Tesla has a lot of "debt-to-equity" financing. After Tesla's debt expires, if Tesla's share price is higher than the target share price agreed with its creditors, the creditor can choose to convert the debt directly into stocks and obtain more profits beyond the debt interest.
For Tesla, converting creditors into shareholders means "borrowing money for free" means no money. From 2010 to the present, Tesla has carried out five large-scale bond conversions and 13 additional issuances of common stocks, which eventually increased Tesla's total share capital from the initial 93 million shares to the current 198 million shares.
From the perspective of results, large amount of debt-to-equity financing not only alleviates Tesla's repayment pressure; to a certain extent, it also allows its debtors to obtain considerable additional profits; the only loss is that other investors are relatively scattered, and they need to bear the risk of converting part of the debt into low-priced stocks into the market.
This can also explain to a certain extent why Musk frequently tweeted to protect his stock price in the past, especially since early 2020, he took the initiative to stand up to "strike" Tesla institutions that shorted . Because only Tesla's stock price keeps rising, most of Tesla's creditors will convert the money Tesla owes into stocks.
Musk's ability to always find financing in the Tesla crisis or critical development is also worth mentioning. The most typical one is Tesla's first production base, Fremont factory and the world's first Gigafactory Nevada factory.
Fremont factory was actually after the global financial crisis, and General Motors in the United States sold assets to convert funds to auction. At that time, the actual price of this factory was $42 million, which was "so cheaper than it could be." But through communication with Toyota, the second shareholder of the factory, Tesla negotiated a miraculous cooperation: Toyota gave Tesla $50 million to subscribe to Tesla's shares, and then Tesla itself took another $42 million to buy the factory. In other words, Tesla not only won the Fermont factory without spending a penny, but also asked for an additional $8 million investment from Toyota.
Nevada Gigafactory is more dramatic. After announcing its factory construction plan, Tesla publicly contacted governments across the United States, but it just did not determine the location of the factory. By deliberately guiding localities to "race horses" on the introduction conditions, Tesla not only finally got a piece of land for free, but also reduced a series of taxes including sales tax, property tax and employee tax. After fetching the government's wool, Tesla turned to Panasonic and finally persuaded Panasonic to invest 30% to put into production equipment to manufacture and supply batteries. Rounding, Tesla has won the world's leading power battery factory with very little investment.
Judging from Tesla's development trajectory, Musk himself is obviously very clear about the existence of the "life and death line" in the automotive industry, otherwise he would not value Tesla's scale development speed so much. Judging from various data, Tesla has crossed this "life and death line". Although Tesla still has a gap in scale effect with traditional car manufacturers, this gap will continue to narrow under Tesla's abundant financing sources and continuous large-scale production capacity construction.
Tesla's business model is fine. The real problem is that everyone "thinks too much"
Strictly speaking, Tesla's current revenue is still divided into four parts: car sales, car rental, energy production and storage, services and others. This category has been used until now since Tesla acquired "SolarCity" in 2016.
, "energy production and storage" includes SolarCity's solar power generation business for residents and Tesla's energy storage business built with its own battery technology. "Services and others" include Tesla's service revenue and official second-hand Tesla sales.
As early as 2016, Musk publicly stated in 2016 that Tesla will develop in the future with a combination of "solar power generation + energy storage + new energy vehicles", but only the new energy vehicle business has withstood the test of time. Especially SolarCity, which took a lot of effort to acquire it, has continued to decline from second place at the time of acquisition to outside the 60th place in 2021.
Compared with Tesla's products, many analysts have always believed that its business model is full of imagination, such as the previously popular "software-defined cars" and "Tesla is the next Apple ". But in my personal opinion, these analysis methods are likely not to reflect Tesla's real development.
We take the Tesla business model that Guosen Securities has been using as an example. It is divided into 4 businesses, namely hardware, software, services, and other businesses. When we first analyzed Tesla's attributes, we actually only divided them into two parts, namely "automotive-related business" and "other business". In Tesla's own financial statements, the software and services that the analysis agency has given great imagination space are classified as "services and other". The
category was launched in the first quarter of 2015, but it was not a brand new "business", but was spun off from Tesla's previous "car sales" category. From 2015 to the present, the cumulative revenue of "services and others" has been US$9.75 billion, the cumulative cost is US$11.63 billion, and the cumulative loss is US$2 billion.
This actually reflects the fundamental difference between Tesla and smartphone manufacturers such as Apple when providing "services": Although is a service consumer and installing software on Tesla's car machines is also somewhat similar to that on mobile phones, Apple's application service ecosystem is much larger than Tesla, and most of Tesla's services have huge pre-costs.
Take charging services as an example. As of the end of 2021, Tesla has nearly 3,500 super charging stations around the world, and the super charging piles arranged in public places have reached more than 31,000, but these all require venues and maintenance, obviously requiring additional investment.
is followed by various OTA functions that are so amazing, such as Internet service, power acceleration service package, battery life upgrade, intelligent summoning service package, rear heating function package and the most expensive fully automatic driving function. These "paid upgrade services" seem to be adding features, most of which are actually rebooting the features that are disabled after leaving the factory. Pure software functions such as intelligent summoning and Internet service are relatively better. For example, upgraded battery life, heating in the rear seat, and fully autonomous driving also require "extra investment" in the early stage.
If you want to upgrade your battery life, you must have redundant capacity. When the vehicle leaves the factory, you use software code to "shield" part of the capacity; if you want the rear seat to be able to heat, you need to arrange the heating device in advance in the rear seats; if you want each car to have fully autonomous driving function, then the highest specification of autonomous driving hardware must be installed during production.The most important significance of
is to manage the functions of each vehicle through software OTA, which is obviously not to make more money. Instead, it standardizes Tesla's production process to the greatest extent. In addition to the inevitable components such as body color, each Tesla can adjust its own configuration based on the software before or after leaving the factory, which in turn eliminates the additional pressure brought to production by personalized vehicle configuration to a certain extent.
Considering that most of the more expensive disposable packages in many OTA packages in Tesla services are installed by new car owners, we can directly divide Tesla's "service and other revenue" in a single season directly by Tesla's car sales in a single season, and we will get a very interesting revenue average trend: from 2015 to 2017, the highest was close to $12,000, and then it continued to fall. The latest average has dropped to less than $4,000. The change in the value of
actually clearly illustrates a change - a considerable number of Tesla owners in the early days of did try out the autonomous driving function, but as time goes by, fewer and fewer new owners buy the most expensive fully autonomous driving function. This can also explain why Tesla will launch a monthly subscription service for full-function autonomous driving in the United States this year, and the threshold for trying out full-function autonomous driving has dropped from the previous $10,000 to $199.
Finally, what needs to be discussed is Robotaxi, which has been given infinite imagination over the years.
First of all, we need to look at the operation of Tesla's own rental services. In 2021, Tesla's rental services achieved a leap forward in the fourth quarter, accounting for US$628 million of the overall "auto revenue" of US$16 billion. Calculated from the fact that Tesla car rental services were listed separately in the financial report in the third quarter of 2015, the revenue in this area was basically on a steady upward trend, and the gross profit was maintained at the level of 40%-50% (due to the replacement, there were several quarters of declines in the middle).
is currently the official price of Model 3 at $39,900. The official rental plan is a down payment of $5,600. Then, the next 36 months are paid $389 per month, which is about $530 per month. (The rent of Tesla's official vehicles corresponds to the mileage limit, which is 10,000 miles per year, which is about 16,000 kilometers) According to this price relationship, that is, the 3-year rent is $19,000, and the vehicle residual value is roughly 30%, the vehicles used for rent can basically be kept free of losses as long as two 3-year leases are signed. Compared with long-term rental, RoboTaxi has roughly the following differences:
RoboTaxi does not require human drivers in the end, and Tesla's cost should be similar to long-term rental (all only use cars);
Because in addition to cars, there are also autonomous driving services, it is estimated that its unit mileage income should be 2.5-3.5 times that of ordinary car rental;
RoboTaxi actual orders should be short-range, and a certain mileage connection is required between different orders, and the effective working time for the whole day is expected to be 10 hours.
According to the above figures, Robotaxi's gross profit margin is expected to be 40% higher than long-term car rental. But it must be noted that whether it is long-term car rental or Robotaxi, there are huge asset pressures behind it.
Take the figures disclosed in the fourth quarter financial report of 2021 as an example. Tesla's car rental-related fixed assets have risen to US$4.51 billion, while revenue and net profit in the same period were only US$628 million and US$232 million. According to this figure, even if the fixed assets no longer increase, Tesla will need to achieve a balance of revenue in 12 quarters (calculated based on the vehicle residual value of 30%). If it is Robotaxi, Tesla only needs 8 quarters to achieve a balance of revenue (calculated based on 40% of the vehicle residual value).
Referring to Tesla's current $15.7 billion in gross profit of $2.9 billion under the scale of "property, real estate and equipment" assets (most of which are automotive business), the estimated gross profit of "car rental" under the same scale is only $795 million, and Robotaxi's estimated gross profit is only $1.114 billion.
In short, compared to the production and sale of cars, whether it is renting or Robotaxi, it is actually not cost-effective in economic accounts.If Tesla's Robotaxi business wants to catch up with car manufacturing in terms of money-making ability, Robotaxi's overall profitability must be 3.5 times that of vehicle rental. It seems to be a very difficult goal to achieve at present.
Finally calculate the calculation
Looking back at Tesla's development history at this point in time, you can see two clear routes:
focuses on new energy vehicles, continuously increasing research and development, and use technological innovation to arm its product attractiveness and expand commercial potential;
is unswervingly looking for capital injection to accelerate Tesla's "scale" development speed to gain the qualification to fight against traditional car giants.
As for the new car-making forces, it is basically impossible for latecomers to imitate this successful route that Tesla has taken. Whether Tesla started in the last global financial crisis, it also received extremely important financing several times during this period, and finally encountered global quantitative easing after the epidemic. 's current environment background, combined with Musk's own foresight for the entire company and even the industry, finally brought Tesla to this day.
Of course, Musk also has his own "limits". For example, the solar power generation and energy storage company SolarCity, which was acquired in 2016 mentioned above, has been deteriorating over the years. It is likely that "Iron Man of Silicon Valley" has devoted all his energy to rockets and car manufacturing.
Finally, let’s briefly talk about Tesla’s future expectations. If
is calculated based on Tesla's existing information, the price-to-earnings ratio is roughly 154. Even if we refer to Tesla's ultra-high revenue growth rate of 48% month-on-month in the past two years and the expectation of 13% ultra-high net profit, its market value is still "overdrafted" for 10 years compared with the average PE level of around 10 in the global automotive industry.
is reversed from revenue. Such high growth means that Tesla needs to achieve 32 times its current revenue level by then. Even if the average price of Tesla products will not be lowered in the future, Tesla will sell approximately 32 million new energy vehicles a year. This figure is obviously unrealistic in the global shrinking automobile market.
According to Tesla's current development plan, the next key is the development of the European market. The German factory has experienced two delays and is expected to be put into production in early 2022; the construction of the factory in Texas, the United States is also in full swing, and it is roughly the pace of production in 2022.
According to the current construction scale, referring to the two car manufacturing factories currently operating in Tesla, Tesla may double its output from early 2023 to mid-2023. Among them, Berlin, Germany plans to mainly produce Model Y, and Texas will also put into production of Cybertruck, which American consumers are looking forward to.
As Tesla's factory scale continues to expand, regional coverage and vehicle models increase, the problems that plague leading traditional car companies are likely to occur to Tesla, such as slowing sales after the market is relatively saturated, competing models lower product profit margins, and more and more new models in turn reduce corporate scale effects, etc.
In the long run, Tesla's growth will eventually slow down due to the limited capacity of the global automobile market, but at least from the current market situation and Tesla's development trend, this turning point has not yet appeared.
is changing and people who want to change the world, all of them are in Huxiu APP
If Tesla's Robotaxi business wants to catch up with car manufacturing in terms of money-making ability, Robotaxi's overall profitability must be 3.5 times that of vehicle rental. It seems to be a very difficult goal to achieve at present.Finally calculate the calculation
Looking back at Tesla's development history at this point in time, you can see two clear routes:
focuses on new energy vehicles, continuously increasing research and development, and use technological innovation to arm its product attractiveness and expand commercial potential;
is unswervingly looking for capital injection to accelerate Tesla's "scale" development speed to gain the qualification to fight against traditional car giants.
As for the new car-making forces, it is basically impossible for latecomers to imitate this successful route that Tesla has taken. Whether Tesla started in the last global financial crisis, it also received extremely important financing several times during this period, and finally encountered global quantitative easing after the epidemic. 's current environment background, combined with Musk's own foresight for the entire company and even the industry, finally brought Tesla to this day.
Of course, Musk also has his own "limits". For example, the solar power generation and energy storage company SolarCity, which was acquired in 2016 mentioned above, has been deteriorating over the years. It is likely that "Iron Man of Silicon Valley" has devoted all his energy to rockets and car manufacturing.
Finally, let’s briefly talk about Tesla’s future expectations. If
is calculated based on Tesla's existing information, the price-to-earnings ratio is roughly 154. Even if we refer to Tesla's ultra-high revenue growth rate of 48% month-on-month in the past two years and the expectation of 13% ultra-high net profit, its market value is still "overdrafted" for 10 years compared with the average PE level of around 10 in the global automotive industry.
is reversed from revenue. Such high growth means that Tesla needs to achieve 32 times its current revenue level by then. Even if the average price of Tesla products will not be lowered in the future, Tesla will sell approximately 32 million new energy vehicles a year. This figure is obviously unrealistic in the global shrinking automobile market.
According to Tesla's current development plan, the next key is the development of the European market. The German factory has experienced two delays and is expected to be put into production in early 2022; the construction of the factory in Texas, the United States is also in full swing, and it is roughly the pace of production in 2022.
According to the current construction scale, referring to the two car manufacturing factories currently operating in Tesla, Tesla may double its output from early 2023 to mid-2023. Among them, Berlin, Germany plans to mainly produce Model Y, and Texas will also put into production of Cybertruck, which American consumers are looking forward to.
As Tesla's factory scale continues to expand, regional coverage and vehicle models increase, the problems that plague leading traditional car companies are likely to occur to Tesla, such as slowing sales after the market is relatively saturated, competing models lower product profit margins, and more and more new models in turn reduce corporate scale effects, etc.
In the long run, Tesla's growth will eventually slow down due to the limited capacity of the global automobile market, but at least from the current market situation and Tesla's development trend, this turning point has not yet appeared.
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