Metroliner, often jokingly called as "flying sewer pipe" is one hell of a sturdy plane it seems. Glad to see both parties okay, but this makes me think if BRS should be made standard by FAA on GA planes given the lives saved by the technology so far.
Going public early in a company’s life used to be pretty normal. Only in recent decades has it become the norm to wait to go public until late in a company’s growth.
I think going public early is better. VC’s and insiders have been capturing the lion’s share of early-stage growth returns. If companies go public earlier, more of that growth will be accessible to more investors.
I have a paranoid fear that keeping companies private MUCH longer than previously normal will be the status quo going forward now that the general public has easy access to active stock trading.
A truly open market strips away a lot of the advantage insiders and old money have enjoyed for a long time, and keeping growth companies in the private market is a way to prolong that privilege.
I should add, keeping companies private could also be a scheme for throwing a wrench into the rising calls for a wealth tax. How you value property that has no liquid market (like private company shares) is one of the issues that makes a wealth tax extremely difficult to implement in practice.
This is already the status quo, and has been for many years now. There are only rare examples today where companies that have a plausible prospect of growing >100X, go public before this growth happens.
I'm inclined to agree with you that defending some sort of insider advantage is part of the reason, along with expensive regulations and avoiding manipulative, activist speculative behavior.
A $24bn public valuation without a product for sale has to be off the charts as "going public early", though, right? Amazon raised, what, $50M or $100M in its IPO (and is what I'd consider an early one)?
you mean versus having a product that loses money ?
Uber was losing between $1B and $5B a quarter when they IPO'd. In the last quarter of 2020, Uber lost close to $1B, and they're still valued at $108B, with no real long term plan for survivability. The way I see it, risks include legislative changes WRT driver status, bad press, self driving cars, a post pandemic world where more people own a car, and less people are in cities. And we're talking about a company that is primarily marketing and software, where the wind can change very quickly, and assets are mostly intangible and untransferable.
car manufacturing is much harder to get into, so having a factory and an almost-complete design is already a huge milestone. Obviously, they'll need to sell _some_ cars, but they could even make money if they were to sell cars at a loss, through carbon credits.
Pets.com went public the year after incorporating. The year after that they liquidated. (Granted... those were crazy times we probably don’t need to replicate.)
Lucid supplies the batteries for Formula E, and has for a few years, and I believe they recently resigned a contract to be the continued battery supplier for FE.
A company that is successfully making high-performance vehicle batteries only being valued at $24bn a decade before laws force the electrification of all the cars in the US and Europe seems really undervalued to me.
It is still a contract of some repute with 11% stake. Do you think GM would sell to just any other startup with no history, if it wasn't for the hype??
The 11% was an additional sweetener given to GM to induce the partnership, not money GM was investing in Nikola.
Would I be willing to take some shine from an EV company willing to give me an approximately $2B (at the time) stake in their company, pay me around $700M of my own costs, and buy vehicles from me at a cost-plus arrangement? Shall I use my pen or yours?
Many Tesla fans are willing to turn a blind eye to defects that you typically wouldn't find in other luxury cars. I don't think Lucid Motors' fan base is that dedicated and forgiving.
If they get a fan base, then by definition that base is going to be willing to turn a blind eye to some defects because they love some other aspect of the car. For Tesla, people loved the acceleration, handling, and interior styling, and so they were willing to forgive some of the build quality issues like gaps between the door and the body.
The question is whether Lucid can deliver some unique experience that customers value, and if so, then they too will be forgiven for their own gaps.
I’m trying to decide between buying a Tesla or a Porsche Taycan, and the main thing why Tesla is interesting to me is autopilot and the supercharger network: many people write that they can go 2x as far with autopilot without getting tired, which sounds great for getting lots of vacations or for traffic jams.
Purely anecdotal, but modern Porsches that is not a coupe (defined as having 2 doors) have shown horrible reliability of onboard electronics. Not that Tesla is a lot better either (MCU black-screen-of-death comes to mind), but yeah, YMMV.
I do agree that Supercharger matters a lot more than its "sticker price" and all the drama on various incentives. Turns out it did compensate (somewhat) early adopters for the, uh, rather brutal depreciation not completely anticipated by all, and is a huge enabler for even the not-so-long-ranged variants.
As a recent Tesla owner, the Taycan looks real nice. As far I have distilled it, the pros list comes down to roughly
Tesla:
* Price
* Supercharger network
* Minimalism
* Autopilot on highway
* Range
Taycan:
* Interior quality
* More familiar coming from ICE
* The Porsche dealership experience
You can see my lists are a bit lopsided, and I actually prefer the minimal Tesla interior to the luxury Taycan interior.. but I actually think the Taycan is a great car and can't fault someone for considering it.
I just did come back from a 1200 mile road trip that I could not have done very easily in a Taycan. The supercharger network was pretty flawless.
Having an electric car is still a luxury, and most people understand it. Economy of scale is not yet at the level of gas cars (the turning point will be when self driving starts working or at most 2030 when the batteries get cheap).
I know a few long time luxury car owners and enthusiasts. They also invest in TSLA. I’ve asked them: if you invest in TSLA and you spend millions on your car collection how come you don’t own any Tesla cars? The answer is they are not perceived as luxury. They don’t have the exclusivity of a real luxury car. So therefore I don’t think we can say that electric car is luxury. It is just electric. Will there be luxury electric cars? Someday but not now. And im not sure with Lucid either
Taycan is considered luxury by most owners. I consider it as a dumb luxury electric car, similar to a Rolex watch that I bought but never use (compared to an Apple Watch that people use even though it’s not a luxury).
It's easy to create a prototype, the true test of any manufacturer is it's ability to roll these from the factories at scale. How many have they rolled yet?
I think this is a greatly underappreciated point. Tesla is the picture of success these days but people forget things were looking quite grim from a production perspective not too long ago, and even now, Tesla's rush to scale has earned their cars a reputation for factory defects. Success is not a given even with a compelling prototype.
Why would they need scale for a $170k car? I don’t think there are many buyers in that range.
I don’t agree with the $24B valuation, I just think that they have at least a chance to sell real cars, unlike Nikola that had a bad strategy from the start.
This isn’t a “Nikola rolling a non functional truck down a hill” situation. They have a working product.
The car could suck, the company could be overvalued. But I think hard to compare Nikola to Lucid.
EDIT:
I should also add for comparison, that at the time that Tesla IPOed in 2010, it was a 1.7B market cap company. Only ~2450 Roadsters (their only car at the time) would be sold in total. By November 29, 2010 Tesla had not yet sold 1400 cars (https://www.tesla.com/blog/race-champions-2010-motorsport-go...).
Tesla's Fremont factory was opened in October 2010. In other words, when the company went public on June 29th, 2010 you would have been buying into a car company without a factory.
Not to say that Lucid will or won't ever reach Tesla's heights, but assigning a 12B valuation to the company isn't loony. The SPAC price though is a different story.
Agree. I got lots of Chinese friends, relatives and in-laws and not one of them are willing to openly criticise CCP about it. On the contrary, they are more on the defensive. Tells you the level of brainwashing going on.
