Hey everybody Rob Merritt here and today we've got a couple updates on Tesla Energy and Solar, news on Tesla in China and Canada and a few other items as well.
Quickly looking at the stock a little bit quieter today but still a nice day, up 8-10% to close at $233.19, although it did fall throughout the day alongside the markets, the NASDAQ finishing up a little bit less than a 10th of a percent on the day.
Quick reminder that tomorrow after market close, Nvidia will be reporting their earnings which could affect the markets overall.
友情提醒,明天收盘后,Nvidia将公布其收益报告,可能对整个市场产生影响。
Alright we're going to start off today with a couple of updates on energy storage. The first is an exciting report from Shanghai metals market. They have been tracking worldwide energy storage deployments in the first half of 2023 which they estimate at just over 72 gigawatt hours for that six month period. They then break that total down by company and their estimates put Tesla as the number one seller of energy storage in the world in the first half of this year. They've got Tesla at just over 7 gigawatt hours deployed which tracks what Tesla's quarterly reports which have indicated 7.5 gigawatt hours so far this year so at least a good start for the accuracy of the overall report here. Historically data like this has been difficult to find so it's nice to see some more efforts to track this as this becomes a much bigger industry worldwide. So these figures would suggest that Tesla's got a little bit more than 10% of worldwide energy storage market share which in the context of Tesla's EV market share might be a little bit lower but in context of overall automotive market share energy storage would actually be quite a bit higher. So hopefully Tesla can continue to set the pace here obviously big plans in the works at both Lathrop and then soon in China for Tesla's second mega factory and no surprise here Shanghai metals market points out that of these top 10 global companies six of them are Chinese companies and they say that China was responsible for shipping 47 gigawatt hours of that roughly 72 total so about 65% of the total. That should be pretty eye-opening for the rest of the world and I think that's definitely been a factor in some of the decisions made with the inflation reduction act and battery incentives. It's such an obvious growth industry and so many different facets that getting to scale is very important. Anyway good to see Tesla at the top of the list there and hopefully Shanghai metals market will continue to aggregate and report on this.
Next we've got a quick report on Tesla's solar from Electric they are saying that they have learned from sources familiar with the matter that Tesla has been laying off staff at its energy offices across the United States and that included in these layoffs have been several solar roof installation crews in North Carolina and Maryland they say the sources say that more layoffs are expected across the energy division. Electric's report on this I'm not sure if that's also coming from the sources or their opinion is that Tesla is revising their strategy to focus less on installation and focus more on providing supplies for certified installers. So if that is the case it'd be a little bit different than what we typically see where Tesla gets more vertically integrated over time but solar has always been a little bit of an outlier we've seen strategies shift there a number of different times with this being the latest shift. I think it's difficult to interpret exactly what this means for the business obviously with solar it's tough to be too optimistic based on what we have seen so far but you could look at it a couple different ways you could say that Tesla's making their product a little bit better easier for third party installers to do that's obviously a goal for Tesla and if they can achieve that then that's great but you could also look at it and say okay Tesla is dialing back their own team here which could be an indication that maybe the growth aspirations aren't high enough to support those teams which would also be a reasonable interpretation based on what we have seen so far and between those two or multiple other interpretations we obviously don't have enough information to determine which is more likely but I think my expectations personally for the solar business are quite low until we see some evidence of a new direction or some substantial progress obviously it's a bit disappointing because solar roof I think is an exciting product and does have a lot of potential and hopefully over time Tesla will be able to unlock that it just hasn't seemed to quite happen yet.
All right, next we'll move over to China for a few updates and of course start with Project Highland. Thinker Car on X has posted a shot of what appears to be three Model 3s on a road in China. They are covered in a very similar way to the sort of purported Project Highland test vehicles that we've seen in California with the front fascia covered, the rear covered, headlights etc. In this case, there does also seem to be some tape on the side/roof area, but difficult to tell what the purpose of that might be or what it may be helping to cover. Anyway, Thinker Car says this is Tesla's new Model 3 undergoing road testing in China.
Also on Highland, we've got a report from 36 Kr saying that they have learned from a number of people familiar with the matter that Tesla's new Model 3 will be delivered centrally at the end of September. Obviously tough to keep track of all the different reports and rumors that we have on Highland, but all coalescing around the same sort of time period roughly. And we, of course, have to watch out for reports that are just repeating other reports that aren't actually new, but they do have a little bit of unique information in here in this report at least that I haven't seen yet. They are saying that Tesla is going to be restarting production in the first phase of the battery production line, which is not battery cells to be clear. But we had previously talked about Tesla having done some layoffs and reassignments while reportedly pausing production on that production line in early July. At the time, the speculation was that Tesla was going to be doing some upgrading, maybe adding some further automation, and potentially eliminating some roles. So looks like that is now going to be reopened in September, which 36 Kr then ties to Project Highland and the battery needs that Tesla would have for it, which kind of makes sense, I guess. If you got a little bit of downtime for a retool for Project Highland, that could temporarily reduce your need for battery packs and therefore be a good time to implement any upgrades to the battery production line as well. But the article kind of makes it sound like it's because of some sort of unprecedented demand for Project Highland, so Tesla just kind of has to restart this. I don't personally view that as a likely scenario, especially when there hasn't even been an official announcement yet.
All right, last update on China. We do have another week of insured vehicle numbers here for the week of August 14th through the 20th. 13,900 vehicles were insured from Tesla in China, 14,000 last week. So basically flat week over week and another pretty solid week. Remember, Tesla has to average about 14,500 for the rest of the quarter to get a record, but this actually does improve the quarter-to-date trend compared to Q2, the previous record. In the first seven weeks of Q3, this puts Tesla at just over 72,000 compared to Q2 seven weeks through at 67 and a half thousand. So Tesla, through the first seven weeks of this quarter, trending up seven percent quarter-to-date. There was a little bit of downtime in that Q2 number to be fair, and Tesla will have a lot of work left to do the rest of the quarter, especially considering the Model 3 impact. But after a little bit slower of a start to the quarter, it is nice to see things trending in a much nicer direction.
All right, next we've got some new customer satisfaction survey results. This is the ACSI Automobile Study or the American Customer Satisfaction Index Automobile Study. These results were collected from just under 9,000 customers between July 2022 and June 2023. And the headline for Tesla is that their score has improved by four percentage points, up to an 83 customer satisfaction score, which is tied with Lexus for the top spot in what the ACSI study considers to be the luxury segment. So nice to see Tesla at the top. I think we've gotten kind of accustomed to those sorts of results, but also nice to see the four percentage point improvement from the prior score. Now, Tesla wasn't quite the overall leader, Toyota held that slot with an 84 customer satisfaction score. All of these being so close together seemed a little bit unusual to me, and if we look at the overall average, that was 79 percent. So there doesn't seem to be a whole lot of volatility, and however they're measuring this, I would have trouble saying that there's a really material difference between an 84 and an 83, even with the 79. It's not clear how material that would be. But if nothing else, a nice headline for Tesla and I suppose for Toyota as well.
All right, next we've got a couple updates on Texas. The first is from the Austin Business Journal via Drive Tesla Canada, which is reporting that Tesla has signed a pretty massive lease for some additional warehousing space about 40 minutes south of Gigatexis in Hays County, Texas. It's for a group of multiple warehouses where Tesla will initially occupy one million square feet with the potential to scale that to 1.4 million over time, according to the mayor. we use this space for storage and potentially some light assembly we've had a number of reports like this this year so always good to see more of those and this one in particular is quite a large space for tesla
好的,接下来,我们对德克萨斯州有一些更新。首先,来自奥斯汀商务杂志通过Drive Tesla Canada的报告称,特斯拉已经签订了一个相当大的租约,用于额外的仓储空间,位于德克萨斯州海斯县的Gigatexis南部约40分钟的地方。根据市长的说法,这是一个由多个仓库组成的地方,特斯拉最初将占用一百万平方英尺,未来有可能扩展到一百四十万平方英尺。我们将利用这个空间进行储存,可能还会进行一些轻装组装。今年我们收到了许多类似的报告,看到更多这样的消息总是好事,特别是这个特斯拉的空间相当大。
the other item on texas which i've seen get some attention today is that texas is going to be introducing on september 1st an additional $200 per year fee for registration for evs this was passed earlier this year so we have actually already talked about this but maybe just getting more attention this week since it is going to be implemented soon obviously a little bit disappointing to see especially in this early stage long term something like this could definitely make sense depending on the magnitude that is of for debate but obviously a little bit of a bummer for an industry that we're trying to support the growth of and this runs in a bit of contradiction to that
for example texas has an incentive that could offset some costs they say there's a rebate of up to $2,500 for up to 2,000 new hydrogen electric or hybrid vehicles every two years which is just about the smallest incentive you could probably add if you're texas and it seems a little bit purposeless to have a rebate and then increase other fees but obviously could shift around the time balance of the money anyway again we've already talked about this so we'll move on but just in case you did happen to see that wanted to touch on it
the next report today that we also have talked a little bit about is some news on tesla's conversations with kanda particularly onterio about future investments electric autonomy dot ca has been reporting on this various times throughout this year and they got a little bit more information from a freedom of information request that they had filed which shows that tesla and officials in ontario including the minister of economic development the minister of energy have had conversations over the last three years about possible future investments from tesla which really shouldn't be too surprising obviously tesla's gonna be having conversations like this with a lot of different locales
i think the most insight that we get from this is that ontario was very receptive and trying to show tesla the benefits and interest that ontario had in working with tesla there's a lot of redacted information and only parts of conversations were shared so beyond that i don't think it gives us a lot of insight on what future investments could be made but nevertheless still kind of interesting
all right last couple of things i know i'll get questions on it there was a new yorker article that's getting a decent amount of attention covering some things like spacex and starlink in ukraine and tesla autopilot and regulators and things like this all stuff that we've talked about all stuff that we've given way more context on than possibly could fit into this article i don't have much interest in going back and just rehashing all of that so if you have any questions on it let me know i guess i can try to answer but honestly i just don't really think it's worth the time for one example here that got some attention it was a business insider article about this new yorker article which of course tries to paint tesla in a bad light saying that they requested nica to redact information about autopilot being on in the case of certain crashes presenting it as some unreasonable thing to do but when we look at how the media portrays tesla and covers tesla obviously that seems very reasonable for tesla to do since the quality and accuracy of the reporting on those types of things is close to zero yeah if i were tesla i want to reduce the noise on that too seems very reasonable to me so i don't know i just think it's kind of a a bunch of stuff like that
and then the last item for today northfold has announced that they have closed financing for an additional 1.2 billion dollars of convertibles which they say will be used to finance for their european and north american expansion plans all right that'll wrap it up for today then as always thank you for listening make sure you're subscribed and signed up for notifications you'll also find me on x at tesla podcast and we'll see you tomorrow for the wednesday august 23rd episode on tesla daily thank you