Tesla is one of the most difficult companies to really understand
and even more difficult to value. It's not a car company, it's not an energy company,
and it's not a software company. Despite climbing by well over 500% percent in the last 2 years,
Tesla's stock, ticker symbol T S L A,
is still ARK Invest's number one holding by an insane margin,
meaning Cathie Wood's performance is heavily tied to Tesla's.
So, in this episode, I'd like to show you how exactly how I think Tesla fits into
ARK Invest's current vision of the future, a few key competitive advantages they have over
other automakers, and why Cathie Wood believes Tesla could still grow by 60% percent per year,
to over $3000 dollars per share in the next 5 years.
If you enjoy this type of commentary and analysis, consider liking this video and subscribing to the
channel with all notifications turned on. That way, you'll be the first to know when I come out
with new research, regardless of how YouTube tunes its algorithm. Let's drive right into it,
starting with ARK Invest's vision of the future and Tesla's place in it.
A little over two years ago, Brett Winton, the Director of Research at ARK Invest,
wrote a whitepaper called Disruptive Innovation: Why Now. It's actually a really easy read
and is filled with great information. I've referenced this paper in many of my videos and
all of my investments. I'll leave a link to it in the description below, but there
are two figures that I think really highlight ARK Invest's long-term vision of the future.
The first one is a timeline of innovation platforms that have transformed humanity,
going all the way back to the steam engine. The Y-axis of this plot is the net impact
of these technologies and innovations to our overall productivity. For example,
think about how different our lives, our jobs, and the markets would be without the telephone,
the automobile, and electricity, all of which started back in the early 1900s.
Then we have computers in the 1980s and the internet in the early 2000s,
each of which had huge positive impacts to our overall productivity.
Note that newer innovation platforms are often built on top of older ones. For example,
the internet is built to connect devices like computers and modern telephones,
which require electricity, and so on. In my first video ever, I said ARK Invest will keep making
history because they understand it better than anyone else and this type of long view is why.
Today, ARK Invest has identified 5 innovation platforms they think are about to change the
world in huge ways: Energy Storage, Artificial Intelligence, Robotics, Genome Sequencing,
and Blockchain Technology. Since they're all evolving at the same time, this plot adds up
their net impacts to productivity, which is why this upward curve is so steep, just like
it was back when electricity, the automobile, and the telephone were all evolving together.
Comment below or tweet me at ticker symbol you:
how do you learn from history? Do you look at any past data or technologies or trends
to help yourself understand certain things about the present? I'd love to hear about it.
Here's the thing about Tesla; it exists at the intersection of three of these platforms:
energy storage, artificial intelligence, and robotics.
The intersections between these platforms are the point of the second figure I want to show you:
ARK Invest's Clusters of Major Innovation Platforms. The big bubbles are the 5 key
innovation platforms that are evolving right now, and the smaller ones are 9 more disruptive
technologies that are evolving from their overlaps. Whenever I'm deciding whether or
not to invest in a company, I always try to identify where it would go on this chart.
As I begin highlighting Tesla's competitive advantages, let's keep track of which innovation
platforms they fall under. Let's start with the core technology platform that Teslas are built on;
their batteries, which are, in my opinion, their most immediate advantage.
Here's Cathie Wood putting Tesla's battery technology in this same historical context,
in a recent webinar with Kamco Invest:
So that's the historical context for how and why Tesla's cylindrical battery architecture,
which is kind found in consumer electronics, is so different from the lithium ion pouch
batteries found in traditional automobiles. Cathie Wood also mentions that she thinks Tesla is 3
years ahead because of advancements in battery chemistries, so let's spend a minute on each:
In terms of battery architecture, Tesla is moving away from battery packs and
moving toward using batteries as part of the car's structure,
kind of like how modern aircraft wings aren't actually just wings,
but wing-shaped fuel tanks. Fuel literally fills the entire wing of a plane, maximizing
the amount of fuel it can hold and minimizing the amount of metal that's doing nothing but adding
weight. This idea of battery cell-to-vehicle integration is such a huge differentiator,
that it got its own slide in ARK Invest's 2021 Big Ideas report. I'll get back to this in a bit.
On top of THAT, the actual batteries themselves are getting better. There’s a sweet spot in
battery cell diameter between lowering cost and increasing range. So, Tesla is building their
new cells in that sweet spot. Their latest battery cells are called forty six eighties,
because they have a 46 millimeter outer diameter and an 80 millimeter height. The problem with
bigger batteries is that electrons have to travel further to get to the exit, which is the tab.
So, Tesla came up with a new tab-less design that changes how the electrons
reach the exit. This design is also simpler and has fewer parts, making it cheaper. By the way,
this tab-less design addresses another common complaint that drivers of internal combustion
engine vehicles have about switching to electric. Charging time goes from this… to
this, because the electrons can take the same shorter path
INTO the battery as they would flowing out of it. This is a huge deal for power draw.
Like Cathie Wood mentioned, there’s also important advancements being made in the
battery chemistry itself. For example, Tesla is adding in raw silicon and a polymer coating,
which allows batteries to expand a bit without failing and increase range by up to 20% percent.
And, of course, since they're in control their battery chemistry, Tesla can separate batteries
by application and make the most of their resources. They can use more nickel for high-power
applications, like moving a lot of mass. They can use manganese with nickel to increase
range for premium vehicles and have Lithium IRON batteries for the cars where cycle life
matters more than range, like in Tesla’s power packs and small cars designed for urban areas.
This is a huge advantage of Tesla being so tightly
vertically integrated, meaning they control as many pieces of production as possible
instead of oursourcing things to outside vendors, like many other automakers do.
And that leads us right into their second competitive advantage, which might also be their
most long-term advantage: Tesla's gigafactories, which are the machines that build the machines. In
my opinion, Tesla is a world-leader in robotics and automation, which allows them to rapidly
iterate on machines and manufacturing processes to squeeze the most out of every resource they have.
Here's a quick clip from Tesla's most recent battery day presentation
which I feel really showcases how Elon Musk and the Tesla team think about
extending their competitive advantages in manufacturing in the decades to come:
If you haven't seen Tesla's whole battery day presentation, I'll leave a link to it in the top
right hand corner of your screen right now and in the description below as well. It seems that
Elon Musk also takes lessons from history; the continuous motion assembly lines of the
Gigafactories are taking inspiration from those of printing, bottling factories, and even toy cars.
Current car bodies are made up of hundreds of individual parts, which are made of many different
materials, and must be joined together in several different ways—welds, bolts and adhesives. Tesla
is going to use two castings for the front and rear underbody sections, and to connect them
with the structural battery pack I mentioned earlier. To make these gigacastings happen,
Tesla had to create their own aluminum alloy that doesn't need heat treatment to be strong.
The final result of building the car with gigacastings and a structural battery pack
is that Tesla's would be up to 10% percent lighter and gain 14% percent increased range.
Just to be clear, 14% percent on a 300 mile range is an extra 42 miles per charge. If
Tesla's competitors don't start doing this, they'll need to find
another way to close that 14% percent range gap. It's a huge differentiator.
Tesla's gigafactories show their world class competence in industrial robotics. By iterating
on and upgrading their machines several times a year, Tesla is constantly pushing the state
of the art in manufacturing. Here's an example of how their expertise in battery technology
and manufacturing are coming together for huge wins. Currently, their wet process for
making batteries requires several massive machines and processing plants to mix,
coat, dry, and compress the electrodes. Note the human on each of these rows for scale.
Their new dry electrode process turns the mixed powder directly into film. The powder
takes far fewer, smaller machines to mix and can be applied as coating without being dried
or compressed. This is a 10 TIMES reduction in the footprint it takes to make their electrodes,
meaning they could make 10 TIMES more of it in the same space their current electrode processing
takes today. Here's another look at traditional cathode processing versus Tesla's new cathode
process. Just like Elon Musk pointed out, future gigafactories are going to be MUCH more efficient
than existing ones, which is good, because today's battery factories can't scale fast enough to meet
all of the energy demands of humanity in a clean way. Tomorrow's gigafactories might.
Tesla's third competitive advantage is the one ARK Invest's valuation model for Tesla
really depends on: the prospect of full self-driving, or FSD.
To enable FSD, Tesla makes their own full self-driving chip AND are billions of miles
ahead of their competition when it comes to collecting training data for full-self driving:
Cathie Wood's comments about Apple designing its own chip are exactly how I feel
we should be looking at the past to understand the future. It's not about past price action, but the
broad lessons learned from past innovations in technology that can serve as analogues for the
things we're seeing today. If you're interested, I made an episode on Apple making its own chips
for their current devices. I'll link that in the top right hand corner
of your screen right now and in the description below as well.
I'm recording this on Friday, July 9th 2021, one night before version 9 of Tesla's full-self
driving autopilot beta will be made available to early testers via an over-the-air update
according to tweets by Elon Musk. By the time you watch this, it may already be in some Teslas on
the road. Beta 9 is the first version of Tesla's vision-only system, meaning the cars will no
longer rely on radar to drive themselves. Let me quickly point out a few things here:
Radar stands for radio detection and ranging, which is exactly what it sounds like. Radars
shoot radio waves out, detect the things that reflect those radio waves back, and estimate the
range of the object based on how long it took those radio waves to return. Range information
helps cars do things like know when to brake for obstacles and maintain the speed of the
car in front of them. Because they use radio waves, radars can see through snow, rain, fog,
dust, and have no trouble seeing at night, unlike normal cameras.
However, radars tend to be pretty low resolution compared to cameras,
meaning they have a harder time telling the shape of an object,
so cameras tend to do that job. Radars can also have a lot of false detections, which can cause
issues like phantom braking when the car tries to stop you from hitting something that isn't really
there. So, removing radars means removing the benefits of all-weather detection and ranging
and the drawbacks of trying to clean up, combine, and make sense of noisy radar data in real time.
However, the magic here is that Tesla already has radar data alongside all
of the billions of miles of camera data for their fleet so far, so they can use that to
help train their vision-only version of FSD to do better depth detection. Andrej Karpathy is
the Senior Director of AI at Tesla, where he leads the computer vision team for Autopilot.
Here's a quick clip from a couple years ago, where he's talking about how to extract depth
information from camera data, as well as using radar data to help train a vision-only AI:
Keep in mind that it takes years to go
from the theories in academic papers to safe implementation in regulated
consumer vehicles. Before becoming the Senior Director of AI at Tesla, Andrej Karpathy was
a founding member and research scientist at OpenAI, as well as designed and taught the
first deep learning class at Stanford. My point is, Tesla's expertise in artificial intelligence
is as world class as their expertise in robotics through the innovations in their gigafactories
and their expertise in energy storage thanks to their innovations in battery technologies.
So, this is how I would map Tesla onto ARK Invest's cluster of major
innovation platforms. A good gut check is that Tesla sits at the top of ARKW,
which focuses on artificial intelligence, and ARKQ, which focuses on autonomous vehicles,
energy storage, robotics and automation -- all of which we've covered in this episode.
The holy grail that sits at the overlap of these 3 innovation platforms is autonomous mobility,
which in this case would be Tesla's robotaxi network at scale. IF Andrej Karpathy's team at
Tesla can get full self-driving to work with vision-only, it's because of the mountains of
training data they have to train their AI, something none of their competitors have.
Coming out with a simpler, cheaper, vision-only solution before competitors can come out with more
expensive solutions that still rely on radar and LIDAR would be mean multiple massive advantages
for Tesla: lower cost, higher reliability, simpler maintenance, and so on. So, let's
ask the big question: how likely is it that Tesla actually pulls this off first
and what would it mean for them if they do?
Tesla is an insanely complex company with a lot of continuously moving parts. I hope this episode
helped you understand Tesla's deep expertise and competitive advantages in energy storage,
robotics, and artificial intelligence, which three ARK Invest's five major innovation platforms, as
well as how Tesla's vision-only full-self-driving solution could set them apart from the others.
If it did, let me know by investing in the like button and subscribing to the channel with all
notifications turned on. That's a great way to invest in the channel that invests in you.
Until next time, This is ticker symbol you. My name is Alex, reminding you
that the best investment you can make... is in you.