Fickle and shorting investors have led to a 15%-ish drop in TSLA share price after Elon Musk’s much delayed September 22nd 2020 Battery Day where he announced a 3-year plan to tweak & implement five new battery technology & manufacturing innovations.

It should have been cause for celebration. And it will as longer-term commentators and brokers announce their impressions. The stock will go up – whether gradually or in spikes – as the realisation sets in that Tesla has just laid down the gauntlet again, but not without a precedence of success.

On every other count Tesla has proven good on its word, if a little delayed. Tesla DID demonstrate that EVs could be high performing. They did demonstrate they could make them. And at high quality and quantity. In fact Tesla’s manufacturing is looking world beating in efficiency and world equalling in quality. And Tesla has brought the prices down with Model 3 and Y. And Tesla has become profitable.

It’s disingenuous to say that Musk’s promise of FSD (Full Self Driving) is a prime example of a ‘non-delivery’. FSD will be one of the greatest achievements in the automobile industry not far off an Apollo Program or Manhattan Project achievement.

FSD is a finicky moonshot. You don’t have to land on the moon once. You have to land on every possible moon billions of times without error.

The steps towards FSD by Tesla are awe-inspiring. Their in-house chip is incredible, 5x faster than anything else. The features coming into production are heading step-by-step to FSD including lane changing, pedestrian awareness, traffic light awareness & street-sign awareness. And gutters! Tesla has machine-learned about 1000s of different gutter configs! That’s what keeps Elon up at nights.

It’s just a matter of time.

FSD is happening. And Tesla will be the ultimate winner. Experts from other projects have conceded with Elon that ‘LIDAR is a fool’s errand’ because only cameras can negotiate un-mapped anomalies.

So FSD delays are not a reason to doubt Battery Day. Skepticism in some quarters – from Bloomberg’s Emily Chang to CNN’s Julia Chatterly to the Tesla shorts – is due to a simple misunderstanding of the scale of the challenge without acknowledging the step-by-step achievements towards them.

Battery Day announcements

New cathode, anode, lithium chemistry, mining & manufacturing techniques are already underway and just need to be further tweaked in most cases according to the nerd-fest cum grab for power.

Tesla seeks to dominate the industry in another quantum leap promising batteries with at least 50% higher energy density and around the same in price cut.

Each innovation SEPARATELY adds between 10-15% improvement in energy density and/or cost reduction.

That means a $25K Tesla car model in 3 years.

Every other EV & ICE car manufacturer should be shaking in its boots.

And Full Self Driving (FSD) will be reality within a year technically and maybe 2 years regulatory-wise. It will happen and Musk’s approach is undoubtedly the best. Cameras instead of LIDAR makes too much sense. Uber has just admitted they are falling behind in the race.

The future is electric folks.

I’d recommend against betting against Elon Musk.