SOoo much to unpack from yesterday. Ok, lets take this one at a time. First the stock jump to over $1000 a share. In less than a week, TSLA went from $775 to close at $1080 today with a peak at $1094. This 25% jump is pretty crazy. So what is going on? Two things. Tesla made it numbers starting the run and then an unusual run on call options.

“Investors spent $5.11 billion on call options, compared with a total of $279 million on puts, according to an estimate by Nomura Securities. The firm calls the 18-to-1 ratio “unheard of.” And all the spike in calls means options dealers needed to snap up shares to avoid unwanted risk.”

The Motley Fool

Second Hertz placed an order for 100k cars!! Its this second event that is really interesting to me. So yes this is a great marketing move from a back-from-the-dead car rental company, but this also places a lot of pressure on other car rental services to match this offering. Does not necessary mean they will buy Tesla, but most likely that will part of the mix as other car manufactures try to get their EV exposed to the consumer market. As such, I would not be surprised to see other orders from other services in the near future. Does the mean the stock price will go up even more. No idea.

In other Tesla news, FSD started it first large release. Unfortunately, 10.2 had a pretty bad bug, ( I experienced it) and they had to pull it back. But soon after they released 10.3. So far so good! Yes its VERY much a beta so you have to pay very close attention. Big issue I noticed right off is the system does not always understand the concept of driveway slope paving when entering a community. It thinks it still on a road (according to Google Maps) and not only does not slow down, but unless you stop it, it can curb the tires pretty bad as its cuts the turn.

Other issue is when turning right. Often there is space for the car to occupy to bypass other cars in the right hand lane going straight. However, FSD does not understand that. That is an issue when cars behind you get confused that you turned on your blinker but did not get to the far right side of the lane.

Another odd one you will see in the video is when the car thought it was stuck trying to turn right and decided to go around. Only issue is, if you try that, you will not make your right hand turn anymore. I should have let it make the maneuver just to see what happens.

You can check out the video below. I cut most of the dead time out and only did a very short drive, but you can get a sense for its pretty quickly. Key note here. I have a sub 10k vin model 3. So its running on the older camera configuration (I think) so that may or may not play into performance.