Yesterday was quite an eventful day for Tesla fans and I have since taken the opportunity to record some notes in order to better understand everything that was discussed. The day started with the 2020 Annual Shareholder meeting which is what this particular blog post will focus on. Please continue reading below for a copy of my notes in blog format or if you prefer you can download a PDF version of the notes here. All of these notes were recorded based on the content discussed in the original video stream which can be found here.
- In-person attendees were each assigned their own Model Ys which happened to be new, yet-to-be-delivered customer vehicles
- Last shareholder meeting for Steve Jurvetson for over a decade of service with Tesla
- Hiromichi Mizuno replaces Jurvetson on the Tesla board
- 3 Items brought to vote from the Tesla Board
- Election of 3 class 1 directors to serve for a term of 3 years
- Elon Musk
- Robyn Denholm
- Hiromichi Mizuno
- Approve Tesla’s executive compensation on an advisory basis
- Ratify appointment of PricewaterhouseCoopers as Tesla’s independent public accounting firm for 2020 fiscal year
- Election of 3 class 1 directors to serve for a term of 3 years
- 4 items brought to vote from the Tesla Shareholders
- Paid advertising
- Simple majority voting & governing document changes
- Reporting on employee arbitration
- Reporting on human rights
- Voting results will be included in an 8K document that will be published within 4 business days of the meeting (so by Tuesday, September 29th)
- Giga Shanghai from dirt pile to volume production in 15 months
- Tesla is only foreign company to have a 100% privately owned factory in China
- Eventual goal for Giga Shanghai is to produce 1M vehicles per year!
- Being currently expanded with second phase
- Giga Berlin
- Fast progress however Giga Austin is going even faster!
- Model Y will look the same but made in a completely different way
- Volume production reached of the Model Y
- Getting better at vehicle production and scaling production and this is proof
- “Making a prototype is relatively easy” – Is this a shot at Nikola? 🙂
- The real achievement for Tesla in car company terms is the fact that they were the first US-based company to reach volume production and be sustainably profitable in over a century
- Lowest-cost solar offering in the US at $1.49 / watt
- 4 consecutive quarters of GAAP profitability
- Future looks good for more profitable quarters ahead
- Elon believes they have had the best tech however they are really starting to find their groove & achieve economies of scale now
- Consistent free cash flow generation which is important for growth
- They have also focused a lot on tightening up supply chain to reduce time from order to delivery within a payables timeline (which helps increase the money they have on hand)
- This is why it is it is important to have a factory on each continent (Impossible to tackle this without)
- As they grow they’ll become even more profitable
- Tesla continues to grow while the industry as a whole continues to struggle
- 50% growth in 2019
- ~30-40% growth projected in 2020 despite everything going on w/ pandemic, economic uncertainty, etc
- Tesla’s are much better than ICE especially over lifecycle of the vehicle
- Continues to improve with sustainable mining & overall greening of the grid
- Teslas are the safest cars ever designed
- Lowest probability of injury of any cars tested by the US government
- This is passive safety only, when you factor in active safety it is even better
- Safety is number 1 design objective for Tesla
- Tesla continues to focus on safety at their factories and have made good progress over the last few years
- Autopilot
- US avg for collisions is 2.1 per million miles
- 0.3 per milllion miles w/ Autopilot and constantly improving
- Tesla aims to reduce probabilty of an accident and especially the probability of injury by 10x compared to the industry average
- Elon cited his personal testing of alpha builds
- Improvements were plateauing requiring complete rewrite of entire software stack (“local maximum”)
- Now labeling in 3D video with new labeling tooling (surround video)
- Previously they were labeling a bunch of still images from 8 cameras
- They would be labeled at different times by different people
- Lots of errors
- Entire surround video segments are now labeled which now includes time
- Plan is to release private beta of full self driving version of Autopilot rewrite in about a month or so
- People will then realize the impact of the changes they have made
- 3D + Time labeling is referred to by Elon as 4D labeling
- US avg for collisions is 2.1 per million miles
- Elon discusses manufacturing and how it is 10-100x harder than creating a prototype
- Tesla again referred to as both as a software & a hardware company
- “Laptop on wheels” -Elon (regarding Tesla cars)
