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Love to see your insights on TSLA. How do you think about the current trends of SUV increases in NA? Seems GM's gaining market share and ford, stellantis is loosing it.

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Thank you. It's difficult to truly tell - we do not have especial edge in that particular segment, and tend to be very cautious around the auto sector in general.

Taking a step back though, NA SUV sales saw a nice post-pandemic recovery, but have flattened recently, and many are expecting flat or slightly declining sales.

For most, the peak in SUV sales was around 2017-2019, and most players will be fighting within a consolidating market in the mid run, and although the shift from cars to SUVs might continue for a while, lower overall volumes might see brands gunning for the luxury segment.

In the same timespan, lot of the dynamics would be dependent on the business cycle, and of course monetary and fiscal policy.

In terms of brands, Jeeps actually seem to be doing OK, and quite a bit of that GM share gain may be at the expense of Asian and European brands.

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What I find fascinating is that the man who realised earlier than anyone the cost of batteries could fall exponentially seemed to miss the fact that the same could happen to Lidar. Maybe back in 2016/17 when he made the decision to skip lidar, he genuinely expected to have (real) FSD in a timeframe where lidar wouldnt be cost competitive, but the reality is that today, that still doesn't exist, and a basic full Lidar suite from Chinese suppliers is ~1000RMB - clearly affordable and getting put on 20,000USD cars like Leapmotor's C10.

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That's a very good point, as you say it's very possible that he was too optimistic on vision-only FSD, and too pessimistic on the progression of the cost curve for LiDAR. Another contributing factor might have been the production hell at the time to ramp up capacity, and LiDAR would have compounded this issue. Cutting down parts would probably have been seen as the lesser evil versus further delays. Tesla didn't solve production hell until the opening of Giga Shanghai, when they should have probably added LiDAR to the mix - though there was only a short window before the outbreak of the pandemic, when other pressing issues arose.

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