00:00Ed, what do you make of some of these auto numbers, delivery numbers from Tesla?
00:04How much does Elon Musk care? How much is this not really front burner anymore?
00:11Well, the first thing to point out is that the fourth quarter delivery numbers aren't just below Bloomberg consensus.
00:17They're below the Tesla compiled consensus that they made the unusual step of publishing just before New Year's Eve.
00:26And they always compile their own consensus. They just don't publish it.
00:31But you guys are kind of right that we got exactly what we thought we would get, which is a drop in deliveries year on year for the quarter, year on year for the year itself.
00:41But the stock and how investors value the company doesn't really have anything to do with that bread and butter business of delivering vehicles to consumers.
00:51Though I'd note, as I always do, in this compensation package for Elon Musk, the board does require him to continue to deliver vehicles to consumers going forward.
01:01I wonder what you think about, we were just talking with Craig Trudell on Bloomberg Surveillance.
01:07You know, he's Bloomberg's global auto czar. He's covered cars in Detroit, in Tokyo, now in London.
01:13And he said he thinks there's a possibility that we start to see no longer EV sales growth in America, like that we sell fewer electric vehicles in total, not just Tesla, but also GM and Ford and everything else.
01:28Right. As the incentives have gone away, you know, it looks like we could see shrinkage here.
01:37Yeah, that $7,500 federal tax credit that went away in particular is very interesting.
01:44Just very quickly on Tesla, but it's to your point, in the days, the last few days of December, you know, I already leased a Tesla, but the volume of marketing material and discounting and incentive that Tesla was offering itself, which is typical behavior.
02:02The company always tries to sprint to the end of a quarter to boost those figures, but they were offering a lot of discount, you know, trade in deals, et cetera, things like that.
02:14You mentioned Ford. I mean, that Ford news just prior to the holiday was really big, right?
02:19That they're essentially saying there's no point in us, even in the medium to long term, going all in on EV because it's not what the buyer is looking at right now.
02:27And so they pivot to that back to combustion, but with the hybrid part as well, but not uniform, right?
02:36There's pressure in the Chinese EV market. There are pockets of Europe where momentum continues.
Comments