Session 16: The Google Car - Case Discussion and Project Options

The bulk of today's class was spent on the Google GCar case. While the case itself will soon be forgotten (as it should), I hope that some of the issues that we talked about today stay fresh. In particular, here were some of the central themes (most of which are not original):
Theme 1: The discount rate for a project should reflect the risk of the project, not the risk of the company looking at the project. Hence, it is the beta for fitness companies that drives the cost of capital for Google GCar, rather than the cost of capital for Google as a company. That principle gets revisited when we talk about acquisition valuation... or in any context, where risk is a consideration.
Theme 2: To get a measure of incremental cash flows, you cannot just ask the question, "What will happen if I take this investment?". You have to follow up and ask the next question: "What will happen if I don't take the investment? It is the incremental effect that you should count. That was the rationale we used for counting the savings from the distribution system not made in year 8.
Theme 3: If you decide to extend the life on an investment or to make earnings grow at a higher rate, you have to reinvest more to make this possible. In the context of the case, that is the rationale for investing more in capital maintenance in the longer life scenario than in the finite life scenario. Thus, I am not looking for you to make the same capital maintenance assumptions that I did but I am looking for you to differentiate between the two scenarios.
GCAr Presentation: http://www.stern.nyu.edu/~adamodar/pd...
GCar Excel spreadsheet with analysis: http://www.stern.nyu.edu/~adamodar/pd...
Slides: http://www.stern.nyu.edu/~adamodar/po...
Post class test: http://www.stern.nyu.edu/~adamodar/pd...
Post class test solution: http://www.stern.nyu.edu/~adamodar/pd...

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