Chevy Volt a Failure - GM to Layoff 1,300

This is the same thing HC posted. I started reading about graphene after her link. This could be a game changer, but likely not in the form of what everyone is getting excited about since that UCLA video about how they solved the problem of handling graphene with a DVD burner went viral. My immediate thoughts when I see stuff like that is 1) What is the potential? Is this hype or is it legit? 2) And then. ... how can you invest in it? (what a lot of people have been doing the last several years, actually, with regard to graphene, as I found out).

There have been people working on graphene as an ultracapacitor since 2004. The 2010 Nobel Prize was awarded due to work done with graphene. Nokia, IBM and others have been working on it for many things, including as an energy source. The thing is, it is just one of several similar materials, including carbon nanotubes and different conductive polymers, that could be the good energy sources that batteries aren't. This is really early-stage technology, though, that has not progressed much. There are some profs at the University of Texas working on this, and they rolled out a company in 2008 to try to commercially develop it, and it hasn't gotten very far yet (http://www.grapheneenergy.net).

Check out this link about their work from 2008: http://gizmodo.com/5051545/graphene-could-become-worlds-best-super-battery

Some of the other potential ultracapacitor technologies may have more potential, from what I was reading, even if they can manipulate graphene more easily due to what those guys at UCLA did.

I don't follow the science very easily, but ultracapacitors -- and the way the scientists are talking about them -- have the "game changer" feel that silicon and semiconductors did in the 1970s and 1980s. It's just really early to be banking on anything practical from their use, with where they are at right now. They are experimenting with too many materials and they haven't demonstrated anything except potential yet. But from my quick education, I get a strong feeling in some form, this is going to be something that is a part of our everyday lives at some point.

 

FYI. ... This was in the Financial Times, about a month ago.

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/6f4717b6-66f9-11e2-a83f-00144feab49a.html#axzz2M1MeSDcT

It's interesting and gives a bit of a graphene primer, and gives an idea about how much money is flowing this way to try to commercialize things.

The end of the story is worth keeping in mind:

 

As to what murphyc said, the market cap is a measure of how much the company is worth, based on the value of all the outstanding shares.

This is a company that has no earnings and has bled through a ridiculous amount of cash. The fact that it could lose that much in market capitalization based on one newspaper story -- whether the story was legit or illegit -- suggests a couple of things. The stock is likely way overvalued. At best, it is trading on a hype, not on anything the company has delivered yet, and all it takes is one little pebble to send the stock price down a bit and the company's paper valuation gets reduced by a lot.

The market cap will have no bearing on whether Tesla is successful or not. Supply and demand will. So far, they haven't been able to deliver on too many promises. Every quarter they miss a promise they made the quarter before in terms of how many cars will be rolling off a production line. They ramped it up a lot last quarter, at least, but the main reason the stock sold off a bit after the earnings were announced was that they didn't produce cost efficiently. And that was why a number of analysts downgraded the stock -- Bank of America was one that I saw.

If I really cared that much about this stock as an investor, I would focus on one thing. The biggest thing propping up the stock is the number of orders. Musk admitted on the call that they had 1500 cancelled orders in the fourth quarter and in that Bloomberg interview, he vaguely said they have had hundreds of others as the result of the Times story. That said, that 1500 cancellations was supposedly more than offset by 6000 new orders. I think the execution with this company has been a mess and it has floated by, in part, thanks to crony capitalism. But if there is demand for something, a supply-chain mess can be fixed up -- there is someone who will be able of doing that and putting out the cars more cost effectively.

So I would ask myself one question. He claims he has 15,000 orders in the hopper and hopes to sell 20,000 cars this year. The question: Assuming they actually turn into sales, a small if, given the recent cancellations. ... Are the orders he says he has EARLY adopters, or are they the ONLY adopters?