The EV Bubble spreadsheet: update uno

It’s been three working days since we launched the official FT Alphaville Electric Vehicle Bubble Watch spreadsheet (FTAEVBWS to its friends) and, it seems fair to say, it’s proved rather popular with several dozen lurkers who linger in it at any one time.

So, as promised, we made a few large updates to FTAEVBWS this morning, as per your requests on Tuesday.

First, we added a whole host of new companies we missed and/or forgot about when we initially put FTAEVBWS together, including $97bn Chinese electric vehicle giant BYD, ten-bagger FuelCell Energy, and European charging hopeful Fastned.

Second, we’ve added new columns at the end of the sheet that detail each company’s most recent gross margin figure, and their trailing research and development spend and capital expenditure.

Third, as a point of comparison, we’ve added nearly all of the lethargic, worn-out establishment auto manufacturers to the bottom of the sheet -- complete with all of the same stats as their upstart competitors. Close watchers of the car world might notice one company is missing: China’s state-owned SAIC Motors. We had to exclude it for the moment as, for some reason, Google does not provide live financial data from the People’s Republic. If that changes, we’ll be sure to update FTAEVBWS.

So, what are the main takeaways so far? Well, for one, this current crop of electric vehicle hopefuls (and related technologies) are sure creating a lot of stock market value without a lot of real spending. In fact, glance down to the aggregate research and development spend of the 36 companies we’ve listed and you’ll see that it totals just $3.7bn over the past 12 months.

For context, that’s exactly half of what Ford spent in 2019. Take out Tesla and BYD, and the figure drops to just $1.4bn -- roughly 8 per cent of what VW splurged on the same line item over the year.

Of course, nearly all of our EV hopefuls are scaling rapidly -- so the spending gap will probably be not quite as large in 2022, or 2023 for that matter. And there’s also the crucial point that it’s not about how much you spend, but how you spend it. Yet it’s hard to escape the feeling that in such an aggressively complex and capital-intensive industry as auto manufacturing, it does help to have gobs of capital available.

Meanwhile, it’s hard to not gawp at king stonk Tesla sitting on its throne at the top of FTAEVBWS, gazing down on the challengers and incumbents with a look of sheer disregard.

FT Alphaville is wondering, however, where Tesla goes from here. There’s the small matter of earnings next Wednesday but, looking at the stock price, no one cares about earnings. It’s all about the future, man. And the future, apparently, is conquering insurance, lithium mining, battery manufacturing and self-driving technology. And that’s of the industries we know it can disrupt, right?

If you think we’re being stupid (sometimes fair) we caught this today on Twitter from an account called “TSLA - The Big Long”. Their hypothetical 2030 share price of $27,913 -- which would give the company a market capitalisation of $39.1 trillion -- doesn’t even include flying cars, robots or vertical take-off jets. Just think of the possibilities.

And they say the easy money has been made eh?