Oh boy, What Ford just tried pulling off is something we gotta talk about in this video, especially as it relates to Tesla Are things as great at Tesla as they're made out to seem? We'll talk about that, We'll talk about margin projections. We'll talk about full self driving. We'll even talk about Mercedes and how they're competing, as well as potentially a setback that Chevy Cruze just got hit with along with Google's Waymo, Let's get started. Just remember today is January 30th, which means the coupon codes on Building Wealth expired today.

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When Tesla's price Cuts first came out said, oh, don't worry, Tesla's price Cuts won't affect the broader Market nobody else is going to follow them and cut prices. What happened basically within a week of Tesla's price Cuts BMW cut prices three and a half to 10 thousand dollars for multiple of their markets. Uh, their their vehicles in their market and take a look at this Zero Hedge article here. Five days after we reported that Tesla was accused of weaponizing price Cuts In order to crush their competition in the electric vehicle space, Ford has announced price cuts for their electric Mustang Machi along with several other models across the board.

keep in mind that a Ford is not even profitable on the Maki Ford is arguing that they are going to ramp up significantly. their production of the Mustang Maki in 2023, which is basically a way of saying they're going to lose even more money in a recessionary year. and in an Autos crisis this year? that's wild. Zero Hedge Goes on to say that Tesla's move to squeeze competitors by sacrificing some of its strong profit margins could be seen in recent price cuts of the model Y which is now priced at 53 000 from around sixty six thousand dollars.

If buyers qualify for the federal tax credit, they can knock off another 7 500 Bank of America analyst John Murphy says unlike Tesla traditional automakers have very thin profit margins or lose money on their EV lineups and that's exactly what I just said about Ford Uh-huh So reducing prices is even worse. Keep in mind that if a company like Byd, everybody's freaking out about it by Dyd. But if a company like Dbyd ends up dropping prices, they only have 1.45 percent of their net profit margin and then they crumble after that, then they're negative. Uh, which might happen in a recession.

So now there's a suggestion of who's and next to drop a prices we'll see. but at the same time as uh we have, we have uh, this this price War happening in the auto space Uh, we have uh, you know the Tesla or Nature report that came out last week and I want to be very clear because I I Don't think folks are paying attention to this I Do think this is a red flag and don't get me wrong, Okay, I'm a big fan of Tesla I'm an investor in Tesla uh uh, you know I've got a lot of exposure to that slime in many different ways and I'm not sure Tesla but I Want to be very clear about this and I'm saying this because you know I think a lot of people get misled by little quotes that float around the internet. Tesla does not have a lot of free cash and I'm not talking a free cash flow. Free cash flow already fell by more than half.

Uh, in the last quarter. I'm talking about free cash That is cash available above and beyond their actual accounts, payable and current liabilities. That is payables and liabilities do within the next year. Tesla does not have a lot of free cash.

There's a reason they just signed up for an up to seven billion dollar credit line just to have some flexibility with their cash. They also did not tell us why there are other long-term liabilities increase by exactly one billion dollars. Just all of a sudden, a little little one billion dollar increase in current liabilities. Don't mind that at all.

Don't mind the 26 billion dollar current liabilities portion next to their 22 billion dollars in cash. Now every time I Do this. you get people that are brilliant and they start saying things like oh, but Kevin they have all this inventory and when they sell their cars in inventory they're 13 billion dollars in inventory. Then they'll have more cash again.

But those are the same people who then go double count the money in free cash flow. You don't need to look at inventories, you need to look at operating cash flow and the operating free cash flow is down to about 1.4 billion. That's still fine, but the Investments Tesla expects to make over the rest of the year are going to be very high so Tesla's cash position will be tight. There is a reason why Elon Musk says hey hey um you know BuyBacks are a great idea but we're not going to do them because we don't know how bad the recession is going to be and we want to make sure we have enough money for 2023 and all of our expansion plans.

That's great. I'm glad they're expanding. Giga Nevada has already been announced. We expect potentially a an announcement for an Indonesia plan, maybe a Northeast Mexico plan.

Each of these could have initial investments in the range of three to five billion dollars, massive output of expenses, massive money pits, right? This is good. It's obviously good for Tesla's expansion and their belief that demand will remain high. But keep in mind Tesla also implied that more price Cuts could come to their vehicles in the future. And I want to be very clear about this because I don't want anybody to get blindsided going.

Oh my gosh, their margin was 25 in Q4 Everybody thought Q4 was going to be bad wait for Q1 I Think that's when you're actually going to see their margin potentially fall as low as 20 percent. That's what they alluded to in their earnings. Actually, they didn't even allude to it. They straight upset it.

They straight up said in their earnings call you should expect a gross margin of 80 percent and not in 2023. but going forward after 2023. Uh, we will try. We will try to approach a 70 uh, gross a cost of goods sold again.

So that would be a 20 margin expected for 2023 and a 30 percent is what they're going to try to get to in the future. So keep in mind when people are bragging about Tesla and the price Cuts it's going to hit their margin Q4 was not the bad Q4 was not the worst. It's more likely in my opinion to be q1 Q2 2023 and there will probably be more price cuts which put even more pressure on Tesla That's okay though because of Tesla's massive existing profit. As long as they can continue to fund their expansion, Tesla's going to eat up the rest of the industry and now we're starting to see not only the rest of the industry cut uh, their their prices which is expected, but on top of the price.

War That's going on Now You've also apparently had a San Francisco officials complain asking that Waymo and Chevy Cruze scale back their self-driving division because too many of their self-driving vehicles are getting stuck on roads and uh and are basically jamming up uh, the flow of traffic because nobody is is available to go. uh to solve these, uh, or nobody can quickly get these vehicles off the road because while nobody's in them. this is in contrast with Tesla's self-driving system over the weekend over one of the morning live streams in the weekend, I Reviewed the Mercedes self-driving system and the Mercedes self-driving system was a joke. Let me just give you a rundown of it.

the Mercedes self-driving system wouldn't enable in turns on a highway and they said well, this is unusual that you would have a turn in a highway. Bizarre, uh But then also the Mercedes self-driving system only operates the Mercedes drive system which you get in like the 115 000 plus Vehicles The Eqe eqs the Mercedes self-driving system only operates when you have a lead car. so in other words, if you're on the highway and there's nobody else there. One of those beautiful times to be able to drive on the highway, you can't enable the system so you have to speed up to get behind a car once you're within about 100 meters of the car in front of you.

then you can enable the drive system because it needs to someone to follow. You know what it needs a Tesla to follow like the sheep that Mercedes is being. Then it will only work when you're going less than 40 miles an hour. It's basically just a adaptive cruise control which keeps you at a distance from the car in front of you.

and then Lane keep assist. that's boring. That's stupid. Tesla has had that for five years when I bought my Tesla my model X in 2017 I didn't need a car in front of me I didn't have a 40 mile an hour limitation I could turn on autopilot on the highway and autopilot on the store like city streets was was not good back then.

it wasn't advertised as being good back then either. It's gotten really good now. now. yeah now I've got FSD It's freaking incredible I'll talk about that in a moment, but Autopilot back five years ago was phenomenal And no 40 mile an hour restriction on self-driving So keep in mind, well, I'm I'm somewhat saying warnings about Tesla that does not make me a Tesla bear.

it makes me a Tesla realist. I'm not only the Little Bull kid who's only gonna say good stuff about Tesla because their whole portfolio is in Tesla It's not true for me. It shouldn't be true for you. It shouldn't be all in on one stock.

Uh, but I do believe that Tesla's full self-driving is Miles Ahead of the competition I don't really care about Crews don't really care about Waymo. Great. They've got mapped self-driving in certain areas which now Regulators are pissed about Mercedes doesn't hold a candle neither the other automakers or Byd because what do they have? Adaptive cruise control and Lane keep at certain speed limits? That's stupid. that's boring.

What does Tesla have Tesla has the ability for me to sit down in the car, press where I want to go in my navigation which is basically always the same bar. I mean uh, destination downtown and uh I hit go and then you go I was kidding I I would never drink and drive uh well anymore. not not that I ever have. uh.

but anyway. uh the the what's great about the vehicle now is that you you plug in a destination and you hit go and the darn thing almost always drives without intervention. Now it's pretty incredible. It's getting good.

I Just got another software update yesterday which I'm really excited to try out. Uh, this is something that the competition can't hold a candle to and I think that's where the uh the massive margins are going to come for uh, come from for Tesla Keep in mind that uh, right now, the way I'm modeling Tesla is I am assuming the worst case scenario. uh for uh, Tesla with vehicle margins and I'm using that 80 number as cost of goods sold for my Tesla projections by using Uh 80 is a cost of goods sold uh I I think you're you could be a lot more comfortable with your projections. Uh, and it's fair.

I think to include some reduce level of forecast uh for a take rate on FSD because you're not going to really realize a full fifteen thousand dollar sale on everyone who but gets FSD The problem with that or or the reason for that is Tesla does allow people to sign up for FSD as a monthly service option right? So you can pay a buck 99 or whatever to get FST per month that money is going to flow through as cash flow to Tesla a lot more slowly than somebody who just swipes the credit card so to speak. And finance is a fifteen thousand dollar purchase which they might do in fact, that is that is. The best hope is that as long as Tesla can have individuals include in their vehicle financing full, left full self-driving that's probably the best way for Tesla to increase their uh, actual free cash flow because now the lenders are basically paying for free cash flow or for uh, full self driving rather than the individual basically borrowing full self-driving at a buck 99 a month for uh Tesla Now, uh, what's interesting about that is if we do a quick calculator, Let's do an auto loan calculator if we do an auto loan calculator and let's go ahead and go with Fifteen thousand Dollars for Sixty. No, let's go to 72 months because everybody's going with longer uh uh ad now and let's go with six percent down Payment zero.

I'll put zero for sales tax and all this other crap. So if I finance a fifteen thousand dollar car loan at six percent, I'm looking at a payment of principal and interest of about uh, what do we got here? Let's see here: Monthly schedule I Don't care about the monthly schedule. My goodness, Why do they make the amortization so darn completely there? We go: 248 dollars. Now that's actually really interesting because if you can Finance Full self driving in your seven year car loan for 248 dollars and own Full self-driving you might be inclined to take full self-driving up front with your financing.

Still get the inflation Reduction tax credit because that is deemed a separate sale even though you could Finance it Together, it's deemed a separate sale from the sales price of the car for the factor of qualifying for the inflation reduction. Act Tax credit in English You could still get the 7 500 credit even if you add on FSD afterwards and finance it all together. So think about it. Finance Full self-driving over 72 months for 248 dollars per month principal and interest for fifteen thousand dollars, right? Or borrow it from Tesla at 199 per month but never actually own it I Think a lot of people could end up going for that uh in their upfront financing as as a take rate with Tesla Uh, so that's where the profit comes from from Tesla that I think is going to substantially boost margins for Tesla And so that's where I think you could probably uh, throw in at least a 10 full take rate on on Tesla Uh FSD So if they sell 4 million Vehicles come 2025 average selling price: 47 000 per vehicle? Uh, take a throw on only a nominal 10 take rate at fifteen thousand? Uh, you're looking at at least four hundred dollars per share for Tesla and we're not even at 200 bucks yet right now Now if we do it 200 by the expiration of the coupon code I have to dye my hair green.

but right now Tesla's flat and pre-market so who knows. But then again, it was flat in pre-market Friday and the darn thing ended up running 11 that day. Pretty wild. but uh, Ford Uh, four chairs again down now two and a half percent Premier: Market On the announcement of these price Cuts We'll see what happens, but I think this is very good information for you to keep in mind.

If you're exposed to the EV sector, you're going into an era of a lot of car repossessions. You're going into an era of high interest rates High interest rates that are staying stubbornly high so you're not really getting relief on the auto loan segment. More delinquencies means fewer people can qualify for a new car. High 10-year treasuries mean interest rates are staying High even as Financial conditions in the stock market are starting to slow.

in other words, lower because stocks are going up Financial Conditions loosen. interest rates are still high. Uh, part of this is with this massive shorting, uh, happening in the treasury's market. it's a massive amount of selling, leading yields to actually go up actually driving rates higher.

You have a tight cash position for Tesla and even though their margin is substantially higher than the competition Ford Losing money Byd probably soon to lose money full self-driving from the competitors being worthless in my opinion. Uh, you're you're not in the clear for Tesla right? You still have headwinds though. Fortunately, in the future, Tesla could probably sell vehicles at a break even and take full self-driving and still have a 20 to 30 margin solely by selling people full self driving. That's pretty remarkable.

Uh, so so we'll see what happens anyway. Uh, that's my take on a little bit of insight into Tesla What's going on with the Ford Market Make sure that you remember today is the expiration of the coupon code January 30th. Maximize that coupon code, we're looking at a large price increase you get Buy Sell alerts and stock and stocks and Psychology Money Group Real Estate Analysis and the Real Estate Investing course is really, really important for you to get into owning real estate. So check out those do-it-yourself Property Management Rental Renovations Build your wealth uh as by making more money as well through the Elite Hustlers course Probably this weekend we're starting the exclusive Elite Hustler live streams so if you want to be a part of those where we talk business and it's me, it's not like other people talking to you about business, we can talk about your business together with me.

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