Isn't Tesla trying to be SpaceX's vertically integrated robotics division? My gut feeling says they are trying to move out of the EV business as crazy as that may seem to us normals.
Not crazy at all. Tesla gave up being a car company a few years ago, but there's lot of inertia and the 3 and Y are still competitive products in the marketplace.
Their charging network and carbon credits revenue were probably the more valuable parts of the company. Tesla's current promise and foundation for that valuation is that they'll deliver fully autonomous driving.
But Musk has enough avenues to spin things left and right and bury any losses in the process his DOGE assault helped a lot bury some things already) so he'll do that. He's a showman and he'll manage to steal the show for as long as it takes.
I think the market is mainly banking on Robotaxi being nationwide in 5 years, and Optimus being ready in 10.
For robotaxi, the last 2 years has shown us that FSD 14 has solved the really hard parts of autonomy, so the next logical step is some percentage of people deciding not to own their next car and instead only getting around by Robotaxi.
This is not a bad play by the market. They're poised to redirect a large amount of the existing cash that people are currently paying to (A) own a car, (B) pay interest on the loan, and (C) pay for car insurance. And C does not carry meaningful risk as autonomous vehicles are de-facto safer drivers.
Then the market is kind of putting their faith in giving Tesla 10 years to apply the same playbook to humanoid robots and all of the jobs that that _could_ replace (remains to be seen how capable they can actually make it and what the economics will look like).
Human drivers pay one insurance, for themselves. It’s easier to swallow because most drivers think they are above average skill. Not so easy when they need to cover someone else’s coding mistakes. And if the company has to pay for every car that self drives that can get ugly fast, one bug and half the fleet has a fender bender.
>Our fleet of Model Y and Cybercab vehicles offers autonomous rides in cities across the U.S. You can already hail a car in Austin, Dallas, Fort Worth, Houston, Miami, Orlando and Tampa with more rides arriving in more cities soon.
If you want any kind of good faith information or analysis on Tesla, you're going to need to ignore tesla.com. They are primarily in the business of selling hope and bullshit.
They have a xlsx download on https://www.tesla.com/robotaxi/safety that is somewhat transparent. For example it mentions the two following scenarios where hospitalization is alleged, although neither seem to be caused by the robotaxi car:
> The ADS was proceeding straight through a work zone on a street and drove over a pothole at approximately 29MPH. The ADS had two riders present in the vehicle. One customer alleged they sought medical care.
> Summary: The ADS was stopped at an intersection stop sign, waiting to turn left and yielding to crossing traffic. An SUV that was stopped behind traffic straight across at a stop sign drove into the oncoming lane passed traffic. The SUV then drove up to the intersection, stopped, and proceeded straight, crossing into the lane and path of a passenger vehicle from their right cross street. The front of the passenger vehicle collided with the right side of the SUV and the SUV's airbags were deployed. Post collision, the SUV's front was pushed into the ADS's lane and collided into the front of the ADS. The ADS was pushed backward, causing its rear to collide with the front of another SUV that was stopped behind it. The ADS had one rider present in the vehicle. The driver of the passenger vehicle from the original collision was transported to the hospital for unknown reason.
> Then the market is kind of putting their faith in giving Tesla 10 years to apply the same playbook to humanoid robots and all of the jobs that that _could_ replace
So when I go for a coffee, I don't go to the place where it's a dollar less expensive because it has a robot...
I'm not convinced we wanted to be helped by a robot, even if it does the same thing.
So the economics might be there.... But that's not the whole story, this isn't automating a production line...
The valuation would be realistic only if they were the only ones with a real shot at autonomy or at least a considerable head start, like they did in the EV market. But they don’t.
The real incentive is that Musk won’t let one of his companies “fail”. It will be absorbed into a larger more successful one and keep delivering “investor value”.
Tesla fan boys still say that NO ONE else can do self driving despite plenty of companies which do like waymo or Nvidia, Mercedes and BMW.
Then they tell you that no one will own a car anymore but we already have Taxi/Uber and the world hasn't changed much and they complelty ignore basics like traffic spikes for workers.
You don't get good utilization when you can handle everything and low utilization means a LOT of space for waiting cars.
Its the same spiel with Optimus but there people seem to be quite enough and do understand that china is ahead.
Lets ignore the fever dream of Space-Xs payload story...
> Tesla fan boys still say that NO ONE else can do self driving despite plenty of companies which do like waymo or Nvidia, Mercedes and BMW.
Absolutely no one is saying that. The bad faith is people saying that Robotaxi is doomed because it's vision-only. It may end up not being the best approach, but it's looking to be good enough to be performant and still be one of the larger players in the market.
> Then they tell you that no one will own a car anymore but we already have Taxi/Uber and the world hasn't changed much and they complelty ignore basics like traffic spikes for workers.
I'm not saying this either. This is like saying that busses and trains are vaporware because they can't serve 100% of transportation needs.
Some peoples' lifestyles will adapt to this change or already fit within it. A lot of people's won't. Over time, they will gradually close the gaps and/or people will change their own lives to fit it if they'd like to save money on transportation.
I'm reading this argument and had discussions with people plenty of times. I then remind them of all the other companies.
Does selfdriving work? yes. Is robotaxi a real business? Yes.
Thats not the point. The point here is the valuation of Tesla because of it and thats not justifiable. Despite the fact that Tesla originally sold FSD so that everyone can leverage this feature.
So either Tesla builds a cheap Robotaxi and floods the market as a car company OR Tesla becomes a competitor on a competitive market.
Why would people adjust their lifestyles based on a Robotaxi? We have already Taxis and Ubers.
The only chance for 'people changing their lifestyles' is if a Robotaxi is always available and A LOT cheaper which then again breaks the whole valuation of Tesla.
is this something that's actually happening, or just something elon told investors at his optimus event with the obviously fake robots a couple years ago?
It's not crazy at all. Elon, in all his genius, built up an EV company and then alienated the core demographic for his product. They tried to salvage it with a wildly over-priced, virtue-signaling "truck" and that didn't work. There are literally millions and millions of Americans who would have other wise loved to buy a Tesla but will never buy one because of Elon. They have to pivot.
Pretending Tesla isn't a car company and SpaceX isn't a satellite services company (Internet, maybe mobile) is wild stuff. The only real profits are from those traditional industries. All the sci-fi hype is for investors and fanatics.
Value the company by the sizzle not the steak. And before it fails completely fold it into the next grift. Sounds far fetched but it's been working for Elon for years.
Indeed. What I find particularly grating is that Tesla seems rather overpriced, but if SpaceX acquires it, it'll provide the Tesla investors with a nice exit. (And SpaceX of course is a very long shot that's in any number of retirement portfolios by virtue of its rash index inclusion.)
Those are just side projects. SpaceX is now an AI company. All their phony future revenue projections are dependent on magic numbers cooked up by a drug addict who convinces people to believe his stream of lies.
FYI, Tesla makes a large fraction of its profits off the margins from selling grid-scale ("Megapack") batteries to utilities; renewable energy projects (buffering energy generated by e.g. private wind farms); and most recently, data centers (where they act either as giant battery-backed UPS systems, or as reservoirs between on-site power generation and fluctuating on-site demand.)
They probably have also been trying to penetrate the military energy storage market (a.k.a. "tactical microgrids"), but so far they haven't. They need more vertical integration for that. Right now they don't own battery-cell manufacturing, so the defense contractors that build ruggedized battery packs skip them and go straight to sourcing from the battery-cell manufacturers.
(Fun fact: Tesla's Gigafactories as physical spaces produce a ton of battery cells, but Tesla itself doesn't. Tesla leases space in its Gigafactories to cell manufacturers like Panasonic, who actually produce the cells, so that Tesla can then directly consume some of the cells produced into battery packs, without any intervening logistics costs.)
It's always been my own personal stance that Tesla is a battery company, that happens to sell some of its battery packs in the form of cars. (Remember that 80% of the depreciated value of an EV is its batteries.) The cars were never the core of Tesla's business model; they were a useful vertically-integrated B2C demand-sink they used to bootstrap their B2B battery sales business.
Being in the EV business means having to accept predictable revenues that then tie to more predictable stock prices. Being in the business of "some future technology" doesn't.
The big problem for Tesla is that they cannot sustain their valuation from the car manufacturing business. There's a perpetual need to justify why Tesla should be valued an order of magnitude more than other automakers. Selling the dream of future profit is Tesla's main business.
(For the record Tesla makes roughly 10% of Toyota's profits and has almost 3 times the valuation, no Tesla shareholder is ready for a 97% share price drop so Tesla has to keep the dream machine at full steam).
Edit: Tesla is 3 times Toyota in valuation, not 5 as I said earlier, not that it changes the argument much.
The comparison is actually even worse if you compare it to other companies on the battery sector. How is Tesla supposed to be five times more than CATL ffs?
Not really. Tesla, like most automakers, purchases most of its battery cells from other companies (Panasonic, CATL, LG Chem). In recent years they have started to manufacture their own cells as well, with their 4680 cell manufacturing line at "Giga Texas". But this is a small portion of the cells they use globally.
Until the merger with xAI, spaceX was actually a decent company with a very solid business, a clear technological edge and clear growth perspective. It shouldn't be a trillion dollar company of course, but it should have been a cash cow capturing all the value from its niche market.
The only reason why Payload into space increased from 1000t to 3000t is Starlink.
And there they have also massive problems for scaling. Base Station is expensive and they have to replace the Satelites every 5 years. Withouth the v3 and rocket big enough to send it up, they can't scale properly.
If they then scale, the rate of atmosphere poisening through STarlink will increase.
I don’t know, I think at this point the Tesla stock doesn’t have a link with the company anymore and behaves like any meme coin or collectible token. Like in crypto there is some vague narrative about a crazy future but ultimately the point is only to drive further speculation ("buy it before you’re priced out/join the elite crowd that’ll own the future/etc."). The genius of Elon is having realized (I’d say around the time he tested the ground with pumping dogecoin) that in a stock market where investors don’t buy for dividends but only price speculation the underlying business doesn’t really matter, only the narrative does. Dividends are the only link with the real business, without them the price is only a function of the demand, and what Elon has achieved is maintaining demand through narrative, like in crypto, irrelevant of the company results.
> "Edit: Tesla is 3 times Toyota in valuation, not 5 as I said earlier, not that it changes the argument much."
Per Google finance, Tesla's market cap today is $1.42T. Toyota's is ¥48.72T, or $307B USD. So that would make Tesla's valuation about 4.6 times Toyota's.
You should probably compare revenue instead of profit because Tesla and Toyota are at very different places in their development.
But Toyota still makes 3x Teslas revenue.
I'm guessing some of the 9x difference is speculative and some is because Tesla is all in on EVs/etc, which are doing well, and Toyota is still very much in ICEs, which aren't doing as well.
Which begs a question: Is it really possible to compete with China on consumer products? The price and cost of labor advantage, indeed state sponsorship and support, would suggest that it's not.
For electronics, sure. iPhone and Android are American products. Playstation and Switch are Japanese. If you mean "can we compete on cost of manufacturing," no. They all build in China.
Musk's companies are some with the most state sponsorship on the planet. Remove the tax credits, government buying, and commercial barriers, and there's nothing.
Even then, he is losing to Chinese competition. It's pure incompetence.
It's sort of Tesla's core thesis that they want to attain the world's lowest manufacturing costs, by doing novel things with robotics and AI that automate away humans.
Everyone gets this backwards. Tesla isn't abandoning their low-margin auto manufacturing in order to switch to high-margin robotics tech; they want to capture the margin of robotics for themselves first. If their manufacturing half fails, that means their robotics half also failed at its primary task.
Techworld has an inductive bias towards expecting successful products to be luxury lifestyle products, because so much of past tech successes came from that. Most likely the first successful AI robotics aren't going to be iPhone-like consumer luxuries, laundry-folding novelties for bored techies. They'll rather continue the trend of robotics to focus on industrial processes in controlled settings, capturing value by lowering the costs of doing banal things.
It’s especially crazy since they sell cars and do not sell robots. Both of Musk’s public companies are little more than financial fraud. That the SEC allows any of this gives me zero confidence in the entire market.
> That the SEC allows any of this gives me zero confidence in the entire market.
It will be truly nasty for the next President. All of this shit is going to blow up hard, even worse than 2007 was. With any luck, it will blow up during Trump's final months, but in the truly worst case it will collapse during the early time of whoever the next President is, which means no matter who gets the job will get smoked in the 2030 midterms - in turn ending up like Obama who didn't have a majority of his own for six years (or, in the even worse case, end up like Biden who didn't survive the reelection against someone as unlikeable as Trump).
The cynic in me would say, "all according to plan", it will be right before the new house and senate are going to roll out universal healthcare or something equally good for the average person. Better to get head of it before that happens.
I would argue that the Affordable Care Act was nothing more then a common sense consumer protection legislation for a consumer market that should not exist in the first place.
The fact that it was this big and this hard to get and with this many compromises against consumer interest, speaks more of the disfunction of the USA government at the time then it does about the value of that legislation.
Maybe a bit of both sides in my opinion. It shows the dysfunction of the government and our healthcare system, but it was also practical and helpful to the those left out of the healthcare system.
This is a deep misunderstanding. Socialized healthcare has been a fight for almost 100 years. What you find "common sense" has been an intense, almost existential fight, up there with slavery, universal suffrage, civil rights, prohibition, and abortion.
This fight not about the dysfunction of the USA government at the time, it's about a fight over the structure of the USA as it was founded. There have always been strong political forces trying to dismantle all "common sense" features of the welfare state, who have convinced the masses to vote against their own interests out of the American Dream of rugged individualism.
This is in contrast to the unique decentralized communitarian history of America with community activism, charities, NGOs and nonprofits filling the social holes between the government and private enterprise. The current healthcare system evolved out of this, and gradually received more patchwork of private and government involvement (Medicare/medicaid, and the ACA) which why it's an expensive mess. Most European countries post WW2 had a chance to design something more efficient and didn't centralized insurance as a threat to liberty.
And to add to this, for also properly dealing with the 2008 financial crisis. Just as a reminder to those out there, the strategy of recent administrations for crises like this was to cut federal spending in order reduce deficits, and many of the politicians at the time were calling for cutting spending. Obama listened to his economic advisors who told him to stimulate the economy and get money into the hands of the people. There were some rough edges to their stimulus spending but it seems to have worked and our recovery was the envy of most of the world. In recessions, stimulus seems to have now become the norm.
You mean other than Obamacare, Dodd Frank, GFC stimulus, Auto industry support, repeal of DADT?
Yeah, you're right. Much better to have Trump who just passed tax cuts for billionaires and corporations, imposed tariffs on Penguins and pardoned a bunch of people, some of whom he said he didn't even know.
Hyundai even bought the humanoid robot company that actually has a working humanoid robot. But it didn't make them any money or give them an absurd P/E ratio.
> My gut feeling says they are trying to move out of the EV business as crazy as that may seem to us normals.
It's not that crazy. The last new release of a truly mainstream car was the Model 3 a decade ago. Anything ever since has been facelifts and the ill-fated Cybercuck.
The major problem Tesla faces is that on the one side their brand image is in the gutters and has been for years and on the other side, "established" car companies finally have brought competitive cars to the market at relevant scale. They'll need to invest a lot of money to develop a new model from scratch with a high chance of not making back the money.
$100 per month in a $40k vehicle that allows it to drive sufficiently well 99% of the time such that it reduces driver stress and liability is worth something.
Other car manufacturers somehow can’t even provide dashcam recordings in a $40 vehicle.
> The last new release of a truly mainstream car was the Model 3 a decade ago.
I'm no Tesla fan, but having longevity in car models is a good thing. My fun car was built by VW in Germany for a decade and then by VW in South Africa for another decade; parts availability is great.
In today's marketplace of very samey cars, models that work should probably last a decade or more.
That said, Tesla could have built out a couple more styles, such as maybe a minivan/workvan/delivery van, although van sales can be pretty cyclical, and Tesla parts and service was (is?) notoriously poor in some cases, so I dunno if commercial users would be interested.
I like what Rivian does, an EV skateboard where different bodies can be bolted on top with little design modification. I could see them moving into the crossover market just by shortening and lowering the frame.
The problem I see is with focus. Elon/Tesla seems to go after the next big thing every couple of years without a real plan.
I'm surprised that the markets have given Elon the amount of slack he's gotten. Once you merge Tesla into SpaceX, what's the plan? Tesla can't seem to roll out new vehicles with different body styling. Is robotics or AI the next big thing? What will happen to their car business? Will it just be CyberCabs? Will they become a mobile phone carrier?
The list of questions goes on and on. All this feels like a YC company looking for a new line of business because they just figured out their current line of business isn't all that great.
I think it’s pretty obvious: sell the machines that replace humans as AI improves, and be ready to run that AI at massive scale.
First off is robotaxis and semis (99% of highway driving and 80-90% of city driving driver jobs have been very effectively replaced right now by machine, look at Waymo if you don’t believe Elon), and then Optimus for stuff that needs hands, like warehouse workers or other low-skill “move heavy things from here to there” jobs.
My six year old Tesla 3 just drove me from Vegas to LA, door to door, without me having to give it any control inputs. Not a lot of people seem to be paying attention to how good it is now.
I imagine Optimus will be a really big deal once they get it working as well as Teslas drive.
> First off is robotaxis and semis (99% of highway driving and 80-90% of city driving driver jobs have been very effectively replaced right now by machine, look at Waymo if you don’t believe Elon)
Waymo hasn’t achieved that, though, right? They’re deployed in minimal markets, and I would be surprised if they had even replaced a majority of taxi rides where they are deployed.
Your trip still requires you to be at the wheel and conscious because the technology can’t be guaranteed to not try to murder you. How many miles do you go between driving accidents? Really asking: how many miles do you go between intervening with self driving?
The lack of complete market takeover is a sign the technology just isn’t there yet.
Worth noting that Mercedes and BMW were the first to offer real L3 under specific conditions (as in: you could legally do something else, and the company would be responsible in case of accident), but they dropped it this year due to low demand and high cost. Some Chinese manufacturers offer it still.
I'm quite aware that the self driving capabilities of a Tesla is good, has been for a while.
So were is the revolution now?
Even the internal Tesla paper determined that the self driving market is not that big. There are clear issues no one seems to really like to hear:
People don't mind driving; A lot of people have to drive at the same time (which is not economic to catch this spike and then have all these cars with low utilization the rest of the day); We know the taxi/uber market.
Either it is so good that i literlay can do whatever i want while its driving and not getting car sick and move around, OR i'm sitting in a car seat anyway. I hate being not the driver, its a lot more boring than driving.
Once the Tesla semi is shipping in greater numbers, I expect a lot of trucker jobs to disappear. Not all, and not even most, but still, tens or hundreds of thousands. (IIRC there are 3 or 4 million truckers in the usa.)
The line of business is fine. Tesla & SpaceX both make things people want. Neither cars nor rockets are being disrupted by AI. They could achieve good-to-great growth under stable, full-time, drug-free management. But if you feel you need a large amount of capital and you want to retain control of SpaceX and Tesla, bolting these startups onto them is a way to double down. It's just a shame to see those existing things get torched.
Musk's companies are good at entering a stagnated industry and proving that it can work better if radically changed. But once the new concept is proved, they seem kinda spent, a pivot makes sense to me.
It'll be interesting to see if they can do well in places where there aren't a bunch of stagnant incumbents to upset. I'm sure Musk would love to edgelord his way through a conversation where he offends a bunch of people by implying that they have been doing asteroid mining all wrong, those idiots, and then go prove himself right, but there's just nobody doing that.
It's not "crazy," it's flim flam. It's what Elizabeth Holmes would've look like had she bought a health tech firm before starting the Thernos scam so she could pump her stock to a P/E ratio over 300 instead of scamming naïve noob tech investors.
That roadster demo proved to me they are not serious about making EVs anymore. Strapping rockets to a car makes an interesting spectacle, but is utterly impractical for a real consumer vehicle.
To be fair, I did not believe for a moment that this was a serious idea. Instead it looks a stunt to be performed, not a serous consumer feature. Surely? Such a feature would never pass FMVSS muster.
Truth. However it's pretty great marketing, fairly certain every car enthusiast on the planet has seen that demonstration. Eyeballs that likely can't be bought otherwise. The flying version will never be made for a human occupant, but if they do make a few they will be collectors items.
The only thing that demo proved to me is that I will never buy a Tesla. I’m even in the market for a new car and I’d be interested in getting an EV.
Imagine if they put all that engineering effort to building an affordable, reliable, EV? Man that would be something to behold. But America is in the meme economy now, nobody cares about real products for real people. Just hype generators that appeal to the 1%.
Was it great marketing? Did it move the needle on sales? That’s what marketing is supposed to do. I see Musk do dumb stuff all the time and all it makes me think is “I will never buy a product from this scam artist”.
Jaguar also did extremely well spread marketing campaign. It is really questionable if it moves units. Same goes for this one. You might get notoriety but that doesn't always translate to sales. And I am pretty sure no one was unaware of Tesla at that point.
They have to move out of the EV business. Their shareholders have eyed up the big potential returns from optimus/cybercab/next-moonshot and valued the company sky high as a result.
When you have a sky high valuation, spending capital on something that just gives steady returns is a net negative for everyone. You have to put all the capital into the moonshots.
It’s pretty absurd to base such a high valuation on things that don’t exist. Not only do they not exist, they’ve missed every deadline put out by Musk for over a decade. This is where you put the CEO in prison in a functioning society.
Why would Tesla pivoting seem strange? They've lost the global EV race, they've sabotaged their American market and they haven't done anything but weak publicity stunts in years. Their profits are tanking, their brand is toxic and their prospects are dim. That doesn't scream 'bright future' to me.
> My gut feeling says they are trying to move out of the EV business as crazy as that may seem to us normals.
Expect this trend to continue. I've started seeing it all over across different industries. Consumer based businesses are being abandoned to instead chase the bigger numbers from B2B sales and premium consumers.
It's no secret to anyone paying attention. The EV business is basically dead, and they're getting their asses kicked by Chinese competition.
Robotics is the new focus. Depending on who you ask (and how well they execute), this will either be another grift for bagholders or exactly the right move to capture a massive emerging industry.
I do think people are massively underestimating robotics. The convergence of LLMs and robotics will be the next great wave of AI, unlocking an enormous boom in productivity across the economy.
So is at least half the US auto industry, if not all. Modern Chinese cars look great and you get a lot of bang for your buck. Even without CCP subsidies keeping prices low they would eat up other manufacturers if priced similarly.
The Model Y outsells every Chinese EV in China. It's every other US manufacturer who would be doomed if the China EV tariff went away. That's why the 100% tariff was imposed by Biden, not Trump.
Its more about lack of morals than IQ per se, seeing them only convenient when aligned. Plenty of smart folks with dubious morals when it actually counts out there
This is an opinion piece - there’s no factual basis (nor any facts quoted) to support this narrative at all. Plus, key things missing from the calculus include:
- COVID, that put a strain on manufacturing during lockdowns and the eventual worldwide supply chain disruptions
- the new administration and its anti EV stance
- emergence of AI
- betting the future of Tesla on Optimus (product) and Robotaxi (service)
How much could JB Staubel have influenced Tesla during these times is anybody’s guess.
And like the author, are you suggesting that is because JB left the company?
Why would him being there have changed anything? What ‘hit product’ could JB have launched that you would have bought given everything that happened with Tesla.
Since we’re listing things that potentially negatively affected sales, you have to include Elon’s public antics. Alienating your base demographics is not smart
Even EV Car makers are making now what the Tesla Roadster should have been.
This is the weirdest thing ever by far. Why would you not just build a Tesla supercar? Why 2028?
You know what I bet? They are so dependend on what Elon Musk does and says and decides, that stuff like Twitter, DOGE and alllll the other garbage he did on the side, just stalled everything.
FSD that actually works and the massively popular in live markets robotaxi service are the obvious answer to “big-deal things that came after this CTO left”
$2B cybertruck failure barely registers vs how impactful FSD has been on model Y / 3 sales. Tesla is supply constrained again, with multi-month waits for the model Y L edition
There are so many robotaxis in austin. Something like 300 waymos and 350 Teslas? I love waymo and wont step into a robotaxi, but people definitely are riding them.
FSD is old and the promises too. Its not new its not whatever its just very slowly progressing to what was promised and it still doesn't show up as the big deal.
Wasn't there even multiply lawsuits against Tesla because the payed for FSD didn't work? Didn't exist? Wasn't supported by the Hardware build in?
2016 did Tesla announce that every future car has the hardware for FSD. 2016!
Your first link comes from Tesla themselves, and the second smells strongly AI generated. If I search for the "best selling car 2026" and don't lead the search engine by feeding it "tesla model y", I see none of those results.
When I google "best selling car 2026" my results show Tesla Model Y. I suspect maybe google is playing a bit of the "confirmation bias results" game for the both of us based on our past search history.
Sure, if you don't count the redesigned Model Y as a new product, with the successful synchronized global factory changeover. Or the Y L, backordered until well into next year. And you don't count Semi which is being delivered to customers from its new factory right now. And you don't count the Cybercab even though hundreds are giving rides today. And you don't count the Robotaxi service even as it passes Waymo for number of cars and miles ridden per week in Austin.
Yeah, if you disqualify or assume imminent failure of all of those, then zero successful new products.
MKBHD made a good observation about the Cybercab[1]. The way the doors are designed, you will get high incidents of “collision with an open door of a stationary vehicle” also known as a dooring accident. If it was intended to be a robotaxi, why didn’t they just make the doors swing up in a vertical plane rather than chickenwing out like that. Another impractical vanity door feature just like with the Model X doors. Most likely conjured up by none other than the boss himself, designer of the Cybertruck.
If we are to be charitable to Tesla, new car development isn’t like new tech product development. The shortest possible period of time to develop a new car is probably about 4-7 years.
I’d also say that the YL is something of a new product and a very successful one, even though it’s more of a long wheelbase variant.
Still, I agree with the thesis of the article. Where are the smart decisions?
The Cybertruck could have been a home run product for the US market, but Tesla’s own hubris about that market really buried it. They focused on styling and marketed it as a cyberpunk lawless society survival vehicle where angry mobs of cyberpsychos can’t break your window.
Hello, Tesla, you needed to put the truck in NFL advertisements and show how it’s going to be amazing for your blue collar cosplay sessions and how it’s going to get 300 miles of range while towing a boat (which it was supposed to but it didn’t).
The Cybercab being a two-door coupe is insane. How did that pass the first design discussion? Look at how the Waymo Zeekr cab is designed, look at a how a London cab can fit like 5-6 people in a normal-sized car, look at the Nissan NV200 as NYC’s exclusive taxi from 2012-2018.
None of these are two seater low entry coupes.
Where is the full size 3-row family vehicle to convince upper middle class suburban moms to not buy an EX-90? Where is the European city car?
Is this a paid piece behind the scenes by JB Straubel? It reads exactly as someone who was paid or got exclusive access to write something to over highlight someone.
You make an excellent point. So long as the stock of a company continues to rise, or at best stable, is the only thing that seems to matter. Regardless of customer service, quality, etc. it's the stock price. I think we have seen that enough across other companies to reach some conclusion on the assumption.
Elon had an insane talent of finding the right people with wild moonshot ideas to run his companies while he was getting the credit and the limelight.
Then he got older, got into politics and fully bought into the marketing about himself. He thinks he's a genius and that everything he touches turns to gold.
Well... Turns out stuff works as long as he is out of the loop and doesn't make any direct decisions.
> Turns out stuff works as long as he is out of the loop and doesn't make any direct decisions
This is not unique to Musk - many tech CEOs learn this the hard way when they start meddling in the day-to-day. Bezos built an empire, but the projects he took personal control of (like FirePhone) tended to be unmitigated disasters.
My understanding (admittedly second-hand), is that he handed down the famous "malloc for the internet" requirement, and mostly left the team to their own devices past that point
Exceptional success is both timing and having an exceptional team. But yea, let's keep attributing it to great man theory, because that's more digestible and people like to mythologize a single person.
Isn't it completely overshadowed by Waymo? From what I've heard Waymo is more profitable and has substantially fewer accidents due to better technology.
Waymo's total is probably 5000 or fewer. But they operate 24/7. They are providing half a million commercial rides a week.
Tesla hasn't got the scale or operating consistency to even truly call itself a commercial service. Elon keeps claiming the Tesla will overwhelm everybody in the whole fleet will wake up one day and be a moneymaking taxi machine.
> Roughly 20 on a given day, never more than about 50 active in a week across all markets. The genuinely unsupervised slice peaked around 25 in spring and has drifted sideways since.
Waymo:
> Roughly 500,000 paid rides per week, a figure Alphabet cited at both Q1 and Q2, so it is flat, not fresh.
Tesla's taxi business isn't real. Waymo has been transparent about how their cars handle situations that require human intervention. Waymo's most important technology isn't superior sensors, it's the ability to be truly autonomous without continuous oversight, even when putting a human in the loop to make a decision. Humans never drive a Waymo remotely, because that's dangerous and stupid. Tesla won't say how their remote intervention works, but it's probably a sketchy as a Chinese Robo taxi but without the Chinese 5G network that actually is low latency.
Tesla has had a massive surge in cybercabs in Austin over the last few weeks. I would venture to say they have surpassed the number of Waymos over here. Don't have any numbers to back this up though. As for being profitable, it seems the cost of a cybercab should be much less than a Waymo.
From the outside in this is how I see it (being in Austin which seems to be ground zero for a lot of the testing):
Waymo is betting that cutting zero corners and being rigorous will pay off down the line. They seem best in class.
Zoox seems to be betting that reducing time to get passengers in and out while providing a novel platform will be a differentiator. More sensors than Tesla but fewer cars than both the others.
Cybercab seems to be about cutting cost (and corners) wherever they thing they can get away from it and betting cheap will win the day (sort of like a discount airline). This assumes they're not doing something O(N) expensive behind the scenes, like having every ride monitored by a human operator in another country.
I remember some company dragging a person for awhile and the car not realizing. I'm worried tesla will find itself in a situation like that (or another edge case). I feel safer being around a Waymo as a pedestrian than a cybercab. I even had a Waymo stop for me at a pedestrian crossing when I was waiting for it to go by (I wasn't trying to cross).
In the long run Waymo will have to figure out how to have a cheaper platform and Tesla will have to toe the cheap/good-enough line. Zoox is still seemingly unlaunched so IDK about them. Time will tell.
Interesting overview. And on who will win, on one hand, as you said, Waymo's platform is better, and they just need to continue focusing on developing it cheaper. But on the other hand, Tesla has the volume in that you can already buy a car with FSD (although, we're talking about taxis, not consumer cars, but Tesla has assembly lines ready to produce 100k of taxis). Hmm, hard call...
... just looked it up, Waymo's 6th gen hardware is estimated to cost $20k per vehicle. That's getting down there. And if they ever do even higher volumes, will probably go down further:
https://x.com/fchollet/status/2023522267846815874
It was very strange, in the beginning people celebrated Tesla, they raved about it, the sales were great, but then as soon as the politics got involved, suddenly it's all turned negative.
The early Tesla fans are politically engaged woke people. Having to settle for new Leaf now but in some ways it’s nicer than Model 3. And more friendly to my kids networks of ethnically diverse trans and queer friends and partners. And less scary for the many immigrant communities in my neighborhood.
Elon's cognitive decline from drug addiction affected both his business and political decision making. pre-ketamine Elon delivered the Falcon 9, Model 3/Y, and Starlink. post-ketamine Elon gave us Cybertruck, Starship (aka the SpaceX Cybertruck), and a bunch of fake products like the flying roadster, humanoid robots, and Cybercab.
"Politics got involved" from the beginning. In the context of USA politics, being an EV company while your CEO talked about how important electrification was to stave off the effects of human caused climate change is 100% a politically coded act.
What happened wasn't "politics got involved", what happened was that CEO started talking other politics.
And to say that "politics got involved" is a ridiculously passive statement. Elon has full control over how he publicly acts. Politics "didn't get involved" from 2022 onwards, Elon's publicly articulated political views significantly shifted, AND THEN Elon personally led massive organizational changes in the federal government.
Regardless of if you support or oppose DOGE, it's completely dishonest to wall off his actions at DOGE into a separate category of acts that you can clearly separate from his business.
Musk has been consistently vile the entire time, it's just that liberals always think they were always right, even when they had the opposite opinion five minutes ago and were advocating that people who have their current opinion be fired and arrested for treason. He must have changed they say.
Even now, they have no idea how to criticize him because they adore the blindingly wealthy, opinionated, and willing to use that wealth to force that opinion on others (it's upper-middle-class sainthood.) His biggest crime somehow is that he allowed you to say what you wanted on twitter. His second biggest is that he went after the "administrative state", which is this mysterious theory that the Executive Branch should have authority distinct from the President, and therefore not be subject to democracy at all, in any way. Just like they turned on Assange, it's always telling that their consistent enemy is democracy. Democracy is directly offensive to the credentials that they dedicated their lives and compromised their personal integrity to get from wealthy people and institutions.
They're offended by Musk because they wanted to show their Teslas off, and to talk about the projects that their company partnered with Tesla on at parties, and to be proud of their kids getting named Tesla scholars and getting Tesla genius grants. They can't be because he's obviously a slimeball in a way that they can't overlook and ignore and mock the victims of (in return for money and status.) That's it. They, however, are currently overlooking the crimes of their favored billionaires and employers, so have no language to articulate their resentment of him that doesn't also incriminate themselves. So it's just this insane inarticulate id-explosion.
Reminds me of people being embarrassed about working at Arthur Anderson or Lehman Brothers at parties. "I worked in accounting; I worked in insurance," they would say. Their mothers used to gush about them, and now they don't even mention the names of the companies, like a father who died in prison. All Musk's properties are like that now, as well as Google, Facebook, Amazon, etc.. Musk's properties still actually even come out better than other tech slop because they all ostensibly have some material purpose other than extracting rents from normal people through deceit and by doing the least work possible.
I used to have a name for people who can't see this dynamic: "emoluments libs." They were the libs during Trump's first term who kept saying "The Democrats aren't going after Trump for profiting from his office because they're too afraid." No, dude. They're not going after him because they have the same deals with the same people, and everything that they would go after him for implicates them too. After you avoid the obvious, you're left with impeaching a totally corrupt guy for not arming Ukraine hard enough to threaten Russia hard enough because they wouldn't cooperate in uncovering the blatant corruption of a prominent Democrat. If that's the best you've got, a thing that sabotages one of your own prominent politicians (who was destined to win the next presidency by a hair), and highlights an evil thing you're currently doing in Ukraine, the other alternatives must be really horrible i.e. would send you to jail with him. Their only bright spot is that they hoped it would take (a notoriously disobedient) Biden out so The Atlantic libs could push one of their soulless golems Harris or Buttigieg into the presidency.
I have to be honest. I'm part of the ancient left that is celebrating the imminent death of the middle class, because it's their weird psychology that is killing us. I encourage their replacement with AI wherever it is possible, my criticism of AI is that it is still not good enough to do it, and if the middle class have anything to say about it it will never be. They will ruin it by either coddling the owners of AI to total flaccid laziness or threatening the owners of AI to make them cripple it, but they will make sure that they will maintain a lawn by any means necessary. They will, however, never give a shit about the uninsured unless they get sick themselves.
There are millions of Americans like me who will never step foot in one because of their association with Elon Musk.
That's an insane negative attribute that Waymo doesn't have to worry about. I hate the Alphabet guys too, but not to the same extent of completely boycotting all their products (yet).
> There are millions of Americans like me who will never step foot in one because of their association with Elon Musk.
You guys have to realize at some point that you're not a significant part of the market. There are a lot of people who don't particularly like musk but the amount that would never use a cybercab isn't a significant part of a 300m person market.
Yeah, sure. That's why Tesla sales have fallen for two consecutive years ever since he exposed himself as a fascist. You keep telling yourself that, buddy.
Speaking as someone who follows the NFL, people will forgive all kinds of horrendous behavior if the player's team is winning. It's easy to say things in the abstract like "won't buy a Tesla" because most people aren't really shopping for a car all that often. But if the cybertaxi works and is cheap, then I would guess a lot of people won't be sticking to their proclaimed values. That said, I have my doubts that cybercab will really work all that well.
I was a Cleveland Browns fans for literally my entire life until they signed Deshaun Watson. I watched every single game, but now I haven't watched a game in like four years. I was already concerned about the effects of CTE, but I couldn't go on cheering for a team that knowingly signed a rapist.
You should surround yourself with people who are willing to stand up for their convictions.
> Cybercab seems to have had a very promising start, metrics are good. This seems far more of a political hate piece than one based on any data.
What? This is just a political hate piece because of the potential of something that just started five minutes ago? You're damning Tesla with faint praise yourself and don't even know it.
Lack of lidar isn't the biggest problem. Nor will adding it make Tesla's cabs suddenly reliable and useful. They don't have Google's geospatial data, they don't have the remote intervention infrastructure, they haven't expanded it across multiple cities and built out the service infrastructure to clean and repair their fleet. They don't have the financial history to go to Pimco for term loans paid out of cash flow.
Isn't Tesla trying to be SpaceX's vertically integrated robotics division? My gut feeling says they are trying to move out of the EV business as crazy as that may seem to us normals.
Not crazy at all. Tesla gave up being a car company a few years ago, but there's lot of inertia and the 3 and Y are still competitive products in the marketplace.
Crazy that they have a $1.4T market cap while having given up their entire business (which was never worth a fraction of that anyway).
Their charging network and carbon credits revenue were probably the more valuable parts of the company. Tesla's current promise and foundation for that valuation is that they'll deliver fully autonomous driving.
But Musk has enough avenues to spin things left and right and bury any losses in the process his DOGE assault helped a lot bury some things already) so he'll do that. He's a showman and he'll manage to steal the show for as long as it takes.
I think the market is mainly banking on Robotaxi being nationwide in 5 years, and Optimus being ready in 10.
For robotaxi, the last 2 years has shown us that FSD 14 has solved the really hard parts of autonomy, so the next logical step is some percentage of people deciding not to own their next car and instead only getting around by Robotaxi.
This is not a bad play by the market. They're poised to redirect a large amount of the existing cash that people are currently paying to (A) own a car, (B) pay interest on the loan, and (C) pay for car insurance. And C does not carry meaningful risk as autonomous vehicles are de-facto safer drivers.
Then the market is kind of putting their faith in giving Tesla 10 years to apply the same playbook to humanoid robots and all of the jobs that that _could_ replace (remains to be seen how capable they can actually make it and what the economics will look like).
Safer drivers I believe, but how do you get around the uncapped liability the service provider carries if someone gets hurt?
The same way you do it with human drivers is one option. I.e. mandatory liability insurance.
Human drivers pay one insurance, for themselves. It’s easier to swallow because most drivers think they are above average skill. Not so easy when they need to cover someone else’s coding mistakes. And if the company has to pay for every car that self drives that can get ugly fast, one bug and half the fleet has a fender bender.
Waymo is far ahead of them in execution and actually getting people around in major cities. Tesla Robotaxi is still just a concept.
https://www.tesla.com/robotaxi
>Our fleet of Model Y and Cybercab vehicles offers autonomous rides in cities across the U.S. You can already hail a car in Austin, Dallas, Fort Worth, Houston, Miami, Orlando and Tampa with more rides arriving in more cities soon.
They only have ~25 unsupervised rides a day across all markets.
https://autonomixinvestor.com/robotaxi-tracker/
If you want any kind of good faith information or analysis on Tesla, you're going to need to ignore tesla.com. They are primarily in the business of selling hope and bullshit.
They have a xlsx download on https://www.tesla.com/robotaxi/safety that is somewhat transparent. For example it mentions the two following scenarios where hospitalization is alleged, although neither seem to be caused by the robotaxi car:
> The ADS was proceeding straight through a work zone on a street and drove over a pothole at approximately 29MPH. The ADS had two riders present in the vehicle. One customer alleged they sought medical care.
> Summary: The ADS was stopped at an intersection stop sign, waiting to turn left and yielding to crossing traffic. An SUV that was stopped behind traffic straight across at a stop sign drove into the oncoming lane passed traffic. The SUV then drove up to the intersection, stopped, and proceeded straight, crossing into the lane and path of a passenger vehicle from their right cross street. The front of the passenger vehicle collided with the right side of the SUV and the SUV's airbags were deployed. Post collision, the SUV's front was pushed into the ADS's lane and collided into the front of the ADS. The ADS was pushed backward, causing its rear to collide with the front of another SUV that was stopped behind it. The ADS had one rider present in the vehicle. The driver of the passenger vehicle from the original collision was transported to the hospital for unknown reason.
500K commercial rides per week paid for by a large user population versus... undisclosed.
> Then the market is kind of putting their faith in giving Tesla 10 years to apply the same playbook to humanoid robots and all of the jobs that that _could_ replace
So when I go for a coffee, I don't go to the place where it's a dollar less expensive because it has a robot...
I'm not convinced we wanted to be helped by a robot, even if it does the same thing.
So the economics might be there.... But that's not the whole story, this isn't automating a production line...
The valuation would be realistic only if they were the only ones with a real shot at autonomy or at least a considerable head start, like they did in the EV market. But they don’t.
The real incentive is that Musk won’t let one of his companies “fail”. It will be absorbed into a larger more successful one and keep delivering “investor value”.
Its a story nothing more.
Tesla fan boys still say that NO ONE else can do self driving despite plenty of companies which do like waymo or Nvidia, Mercedes and BMW.
Then they tell you that no one will own a car anymore but we already have Taxi/Uber and the world hasn't changed much and they complelty ignore basics like traffic spikes for workers.
You don't get good utilization when you can handle everything and low utilization means a LOT of space for waiting cars.
Its the same spiel with Optimus but there people seem to be quite enough and do understand that china is ahead.
Lets ignore the fever dream of Space-Xs payload story...
> Tesla fan boys still say that NO ONE else can do self driving despite plenty of companies which do like waymo or Nvidia, Mercedes and BMW.
Absolutely no one is saying that. The bad faith is people saying that Robotaxi is doomed because it's vision-only. It may end up not being the best approach, but it's looking to be good enough to be performant and still be one of the larger players in the market.
> Then they tell you that no one will own a car anymore but we already have Taxi/Uber and the world hasn't changed much and they complelty ignore basics like traffic spikes for workers.
I'm not saying this either. This is like saying that busses and trains are vaporware because they can't serve 100% of transportation needs.
Some peoples' lifestyles will adapt to this change or already fit within it. A lot of people's won't. Over time, they will gradually close the gaps and/or people will change their own lives to fit it if they'd like to save money on transportation.
I'm reading this argument and had discussions with people plenty of times. I then remind them of all the other companies.
Does selfdriving work? yes. Is robotaxi a real business? Yes.
Thats not the point. The point here is the valuation of Tesla because of it and thats not justifiable. Despite the fact that Tesla originally sold FSD so that everyone can leverage this feature.
So either Tesla builds a cheap Robotaxi and floods the market as a car company OR Tesla becomes a competitor on a competitive market.
Why would people adjust their lifestyles based on a Robotaxi? We have already Taxis and Ubers.
The only chance for 'people changing their lifestyles' is if a Robotaxi is always available and A LOT cheaper which then again breaks the whole valuation of Tesla.
is this something that's actually happening, or just something elon told investors at his optimus event with the obviously fake robots a couple years ago?
It's not crazy at all. Elon, in all his genius, built up an EV company and then alienated the core demographic for his product. They tried to salvage it with a wildly over-priced, virtue-signaling "truck" and that didn't work. There are literally millions and millions of Americans who would have other wise loved to buy a Tesla but will never buy one because of Elon. They have to pivot.
Pretending Tesla isn't a car company and SpaceX isn't a satellite services company (Internet, maybe mobile) is wild stuff. The only real profits are from those traditional industries. All the sci-fi hype is for investors and fanatics.
Value the company by the sizzle not the steak. And before it fails completely fold it into the next grift. Sounds far fetched but it's been working for Elon for years.
Anyone with half a brain can see him stacking his house of cards higher and higher, but yet the market and investors love him.
You can't tell me there's a rational reason there's a common headline of Tesla missing forecast and guidance but still going up after earning report
> stacking his house of cards higher and higher
Indeed. What I find particularly grating is that Tesla seems rather overpriced, but if SpaceX acquires it, it'll provide the Tesla investors with a nice exit. (And SpaceX of course is a very long shot that's in any number of retirement portfolios by virtue of its rash index inclusion.)
Those are just side projects. SpaceX is now an AI company. All their phony future revenue projections are dependent on magic numbers cooked up by a drug addict who convinces people to believe his stream of lies.
FYI, Tesla makes a large fraction of its profits off the margins from selling grid-scale ("Megapack") batteries to utilities; renewable energy projects (buffering energy generated by e.g. private wind farms); and most recently, data centers (where they act either as giant battery-backed UPS systems, or as reservoirs between on-site power generation and fluctuating on-site demand.)
They probably have also been trying to penetrate the military energy storage market (a.k.a. "tactical microgrids"), but so far they haven't. They need more vertical integration for that. Right now they don't own battery-cell manufacturing, so the defense contractors that build ruggedized battery packs skip them and go straight to sourcing from the battery-cell manufacturers.
(Fun fact: Tesla's Gigafactories as physical spaces produce a ton of battery cells, but Tesla itself doesn't. Tesla leases space in its Gigafactories to cell manufacturers like Panasonic, who actually produce the cells, so that Tesla can then directly consume some of the cells produced into battery packs, without any intervening logistics costs.)
It's always been my own personal stance that Tesla is a battery company, that happens to sell some of its battery packs in the form of cars. (Remember that 80% of the depreciated value of an EV is its batteries.) The cars were never the core of Tesla's business model; they were a useful vertically-integrated B2C demand-sink they used to bootstrap their B2B battery sales business.
Being in the EV business means having to accept predictable revenues that then tie to more predictable stock prices. Being in the business of "some future technology" doesn't.
The big problem for Tesla is that they cannot sustain their valuation from the car manufacturing business. There's a perpetual need to justify why Tesla should be valued an order of magnitude more than other automakers. Selling the dream of future profit is Tesla's main business.
(For the record Tesla makes roughly 10% of Toyota's profits and has almost 3 times the valuation, no Tesla shareholder is ready for a 97% share price drop so Tesla has to keep the dream machine at full steam).
Edit: Tesla is 3 times Toyota in valuation, not 5 as I said earlier, not that it changes the argument much.
SpaceX and Tesla are just another form of the Star Citizen phenomenon.
That's an awesome analogy, I'm stealing it right away.
"Irrational exuberance" is, I believe, the most concise description.
They are a battery company. The cars are just a way to sell batteries.
The cars are actually a way to drive yourself around town. Yes they also contain batteries.
Very expensive batteries compared to the competition
The comparison is actually even worse if you compare it to other companies on the battery sector. How is Tesla supposed to be five times more than CATL ffs?
> "They are a battery company."
Not really. Tesla, like most automakers, purchases most of its battery cells from other companies (Panasonic, CATL, LG Chem). In recent years they have started to manufacture their own cells as well, with their 4680 cell manufacturing line at "Giga Texas". But this is a small portion of the cells they use globally.
You can laugh at it, and most likely it will crash and burn.
But at the same time, maybe they are doing the correct analysis.
"If we stay here and grow fat the others will eat us. To infinity and beyond!".
100 years ago your business was your warehouse or your locomotive. These days, maybe your business is defined by your rate of change?
Tesla and Space-X.
Until the merger with xAI, spaceX was actually a decent company with a very solid business, a clear technological edge and clear growth perspective. It shouldn't be a trillion dollar company of course, but it should have been a cash cow capturing all the value from its niche market.
Not anymore, I guess.
But not with the valuation it currently has.
The only reason why Payload into space increased from 1000t to 3000t is Starlink.
And there they have also massive problems for scaling. Base Station is expensive and they have to replace the Satelites every 5 years. Withouth the v3 and rocket big enough to send it up, they can't scale properly.
If they then scale, the rate of atmosphere poisening through STarlink will increase.
I don’t know, I think at this point the Tesla stock doesn’t have a link with the company anymore and behaves like any meme coin or collectible token. Like in crypto there is some vague narrative about a crazy future but ultimately the point is only to drive further speculation ("buy it before you’re priced out/join the elite crowd that’ll own the future/etc."). The genius of Elon is having realized (I’d say around the time he tested the ground with pumping dogecoin) that in a stock market where investors don’t buy for dividends but only price speculation the underlying business doesn’t really matter, only the narrative does. Dividends are the only link with the real business, without them the price is only a function of the demand, and what Elon has achieved is maintaining demand through narrative, like in crypto, irrelevant of the company results.
> "Edit: Tesla is 3 times Toyota in valuation, not 5 as I said earlier, not that it changes the argument much."
Per Google finance, Tesla's market cap today is $1.42T. Toyota's is ¥48.72T, or $307B USD. So that would make Tesla's valuation about 4.6 times Toyota's.
Sure and Toyota [1] has significantly more outstanding bonds than Tesla [2] which should depress it's market cap.
[1]: https://www.tradingview.com/symbols/TSE-7203/bonds/
[2]: https://www.tradingview.com/symbols/NASDAQ-TSLA/bonds/
You should probably compare revenue instead of profit because Tesla and Toyota are at very different places in their development.
But Toyota still makes 3x Teslas revenue.
I'm guessing some of the 9x difference is speculative and some is because Tesla is all in on EVs/etc, which are doing well, and Toyota is still very much in ICEs, which aren't doing as well.
Being in the EV business means having to compete with China. This market is dictated by manufacturing costs and so it is not where you want to be.
Which begs a question: Is it really possible to compete with China on consumer products? The price and cost of labor advantage, indeed state sponsorship and support, would suggest that it's not.
For electronics, sure. iPhone and Android are American products. Playstation and Switch are Japanese. If you mean "can we compete on cost of manufacturing," no. They all build in China.
That seems like a major issue national security wise. I wonder why no one has brought that up?
Veblen goods can compete. China is unique in cheap high tech products. As production scales down and shipping costs raise smaller markets open.
Musk's companies are some with the most state sponsorship on the planet. Remove the tax credits, government buying, and commercial barriers, and there's nothing.
Even then, he is losing to Chinese competition. It's pure incompetence.
Well the usa always shouts free market from every rooftop in all the invaded countries, so I wonder where the struggle is?
Chinese cars are effectively excluded from the US market mainly to keep Tesla afloat.
no, they mostly not allowed to keep fords, gm, and other inefficient manufacturing afloat.
Proofs? tesla exists in China and cable to compete there. There is no ford or GM in it's US shape, only sub brands that loosing ground.
Musk basically lost to China competitition, but can't assume it.
It's sort of Tesla's core thesis that they want to attain the world's lowest manufacturing costs, by doing novel things with robotics and AI that automate away humans.
Everyone gets this backwards. Tesla isn't abandoning their low-margin auto manufacturing in order to switch to high-margin robotics tech; they want to capture the margin of robotics for themselves first. If their manufacturing half fails, that means their robotics half also failed at its primary task.
Techworld has an inductive bias towards expecting successful products to be luxury lifestyle products, because so much of past tech successes came from that. Most likely the first successful AI robotics aren't going to be iPhone-like consumer luxuries, laundry-folding novelties for bored techies. They'll rather continue the trend of robotics to focus on industrial processes in controlled settings, capturing value by lowering the costs of doing banal things.
But is a low-margin business really the one where you want to bootstrap your robotics industry?
It stops being low-margin if suddenly you can build things much cheaper than your competitors can, and they can't replicate what you're doing.
Yes, but a lot of experience is required in robotics to reach that stage.
Maybe the insight is that it is better to first sell the robots (the "shovels") and only later go into the gold business yourself (if ever).
Well fsd and robotaxi are still mere futuristic concepts and semi vaporware but I get it, that doesn't sell shares anymore
It’s especially crazy since they sell cars and do not sell robots. Both of Musk’s public companies are little more than financial fraud. That the SEC allows any of this gives me zero confidence in the entire market.
> That the SEC allows any of this gives me zero confidence in the entire market.
It will be truly nasty for the next President. All of this shit is going to blow up hard, even worse than 2007 was. With any luck, it will blow up during Trump's final months, but in the truly worst case it will collapse during the early time of whoever the next President is, which means no matter who gets the job will get smoked in the 2030 midterms - in turn ending up like Obama who didn't have a majority of his own for six years (or, in the even worse case, end up like Biden who didn't survive the reelection against someone as unlikeable as Trump).
The cynic in me would say, "all according to plan", it will be right before the new house and senate are going to roll out universal healthcare or something equally good for the average person. Better to get head of it before that happens.
Obama didn't do much with his two years of majority anyway.
Plus, president's don't usually have more than two years of majority.
The Affordable Care Act is the biggest non tax cut legislation of the previous 30 years.
I would argue that the Affordable Care Act was nothing more then a common sense consumer protection legislation for a consumer market that should not exist in the first place.
The fact that it was this big and this hard to get and with this many compromises against consumer interest, speaks more of the disfunction of the USA government at the time then it does about the value of that legislation.
Maybe a bit of both sides in my opinion. It shows the dysfunction of the government and our healthcare system, but it was also practical and helpful to the those left out of the healthcare system.
This is a deep misunderstanding. Socialized healthcare has been a fight for almost 100 years. What you find "common sense" has been an intense, almost existential fight, up there with slavery, universal suffrage, civil rights, prohibition, and abortion.
This fight not about the dysfunction of the USA government at the time, it's about a fight over the structure of the USA as it was founded. There have always been strong political forces trying to dismantle all "common sense" features of the welfare state, who have convinced the masses to vote against their own interests out of the American Dream of rugged individualism.
This is in contrast to the unique decentralized communitarian history of America with community activism, charities, NGOs and nonprofits filling the social holes between the government and private enterprise. The current healthcare system evolved out of this, and gradually received more patchwork of private and government involvement (Medicare/medicaid, and the ACA) which why it's an expensive mess. Most European countries post WW2 had a chance to design something more efficient and didn't centralized insurance as a threat to liberty.
And to add to this, for also properly dealing with the 2008 financial crisis. Just as a reminder to those out there, the strategy of recent administrations for crises like this was to cut federal spending in order reduce deficits, and many of the politicians at the time were calling for cutting spending. Obama listened to his economic advisors who told him to stimulate the economy and get money into the hands of the people. There were some rough edges to their stimulus spending but it seems to have worked and our recovery was the envy of most of the world. In recessions, stimulus seems to have now become the norm.
You mean other than Obamacare, Dodd Frank, GFC stimulus, Auto industry support, repeal of DADT?
Yeah, you're right. Much better to have Trump who just passed tax cuts for billionaires and corporations, imposed tariffs on Penguins and pardoned a bunch of people, some of whom he said he didn't even know.
Surely there are options other than neoliberalism and MAGA? The world would've been very different with say, Bernie Sanders as president in 2016.
Don't worry, American tax payers will come to rescue the companies.
Hyundai has been making robots for decades. Imagine the hype if Tesla did half the things Hyundai is doing.
Hyundai even bought the humanoid robot company that actually has a working humanoid robot. But it didn't make them any money or give them an absurd P/E ratio.
> My gut feeling says they are trying to move out of the EV business as crazy as that may seem to us normals.
It's not that crazy. The last new release of a truly mainstream car was the Model 3 a decade ago. Anything ever since has been facelifts and the ill-fated Cybercuck.
The major problem Tesla faces is that on the one side their brand image is in the gutters and has been for years and on the other side, "established" car companies finally have brought competitive cars to the market at relevant scale. They'll need to invest a lot of money to develop a new model from scratch with a high chance of not making back the money.
$100 per month in a $40k vehicle that allows it to drive sufficiently well 99% of the time such that it reduces driver stress and liability is worth something.
Other car manufacturers somehow can’t even provide dashcam recordings in a $40 vehicle.
> The last new release of a truly mainstream car was the Model 3 a decade ago.
I'm no Tesla fan, but having longevity in car models is a good thing. My fun car was built by VW in Germany for a decade and then by VW in South Africa for another decade; parts availability is great.
In today's marketplace of very samey cars, models that work should probably last a decade or more.
That said, Tesla could have built out a couple more styles, such as maybe a minivan/workvan/delivery van, although van sales can be pretty cyclical, and Tesla parts and service was (is?) notoriously poor in some cases, so I dunno if commercial users would be interested.
I like what Rivian does, an EV skateboard where different bodies can be bolted on top with little design modification. I could see them moving into the crossover market just by shortening and lowering the frame.
Yeah but a decade ago is still a decade ago.
You see one Tesla, you have seen every Tesla. Colors? The same too.
Not to mention that internationally they are competing with Chinese EVs which are very compelling alternatives.
The problem I see is with focus. Elon/Tesla seems to go after the next big thing every couple of years without a real plan.
I'm surprised that the markets have given Elon the amount of slack he's gotten. Once you merge Tesla into SpaceX, what's the plan? Tesla can't seem to roll out new vehicles with different body styling. Is robotics or AI the next big thing? What will happen to their car business? Will it just be CyberCabs? Will they become a mobile phone carrier?
The list of questions goes on and on. All this feels like a YC company looking for a new line of business because they just figured out their current line of business isn't all that great.
Neuralink brain uploads! Preorder now for immortality!
I think it’s pretty obvious: sell the machines that replace humans as AI improves, and be ready to run that AI at massive scale.
First off is robotaxis and semis (99% of highway driving and 80-90% of city driving driver jobs have been very effectively replaced right now by machine, look at Waymo if you don’t believe Elon), and then Optimus for stuff that needs hands, like warehouse workers or other low-skill “move heavy things from here to there” jobs.
My six year old Tesla 3 just drove me from Vegas to LA, door to door, without me having to give it any control inputs. Not a lot of people seem to be paying attention to how good it is now.
I imagine Optimus will be a really big deal once they get it working as well as Teslas drive.
> First off is robotaxis and semis (99% of highway driving and 80-90% of city driving driver jobs have been very effectively replaced right now by machine, look at Waymo if you don’t believe Elon)
Waymo hasn’t achieved that, though, right? They’re deployed in minimal markets, and I would be surprised if they had even replaced a majority of taxi rides where they are deployed.
Your trip still requires you to be at the wheel and conscious because the technology can’t be guaranteed to not try to murder you. How many miles do you go between driving accidents? Really asking: how many miles do you go between intervening with self driving?
The lack of complete market takeover is a sign the technology just isn’t there yet.
Worth noting that Mercedes and BMW were the first to offer real L3 under specific conditions (as in: you could legally do something else, and the company would be responsible in case of accident), but they dropped it this year due to low demand and high cost. Some Chinese manufacturers offer it still.
I'm quite aware that the self driving capabilities of a Tesla is good, has been for a while.
So were is the revolution now?
Even the internal Tesla paper determined that the self driving market is not that big. There are clear issues no one seems to really like to hear:
People don't mind driving; A lot of people have to drive at the same time (which is not economic to catch this spike and then have all these cars with low utilization the rest of the day); We know the taxi/uber market.
Either it is so good that i literlay can do whatever i want while its driving and not getting car sick and move around, OR i'm sitting in a car seat anyway. I hate being not the driver, its a lot more boring than driving.
Elon/Tesla haven't delivered on unsupervised self driving cars, how is Tesla/SpaceX going to deliver on robots replacing humans?
Your claim that robotaxis and semis have replaced humans is not credible. Show me all the truck driver job losses due to self driving trucks.
Once the Tesla semi is shipping in greater numbers, I expect a lot of trucker jobs to disappear. Not all, and not even most, but still, tens or hundreds of thousands. (IIRC there are 3 or 4 million truckers in the usa.)
The line of business is fine. Tesla & SpaceX both make things people want. Neither cars nor rockets are being disrupted by AI. They could achieve good-to-great growth under stable, full-time, drug-free management. But if you feel you need a large amount of capital and you want to retain control of SpaceX and Tesla, bolting these startups onto them is a way to double down. It's just a shame to see those existing things get torched.
Musk's companies are good at entering a stagnated industry and proving that it can work better if radically changed. But once the new concept is proved, they seem kinda spent, a pivot makes sense to me.
It'll be interesting to see if they can do well in places where there aren't a bunch of stagnant incumbents to upset. I'm sure Musk would love to edgelord his way through a conversation where he offends a bunch of people by implying that they have been doing asteroid mining all wrong, those idiots, and then go prove himself right, but there's just nobody doing that.
It's not "crazy," it's flim flam. It's what Elizabeth Holmes would've look like had she bought a health tech firm before starting the Thernos scam so she could pump her stock to a P/E ratio over 300 instead of scamming naïve noob tech investors.
That roadster demo proved to me they are not serious about making EVs anymore. Strapping rockets to a car makes an interesting spectacle, but is utterly impractical for a real consumer vehicle.
To be fair, I did not believe for a moment that this was a serious idea. Instead it looks a stunt to be performed, not a serous consumer feature. Surely? Such a feature would never pass FMVSS muster.
Truth. However it's pretty great marketing, fairly certain every car enthusiast on the planet has seen that demonstration. Eyeballs that likely can't be bought otherwise. The flying version will never be made for a human occupant, but if they do make a few they will be collectors items.
The only thing a stunt like that is going to produce is either A. Nothing, or B. Billions more in losses.
I was actually surprised. My Fanboy friend did not mention it. It wasn't discussed at work either.
The only thing that demo proved to me is that I will never buy a Tesla. I’m even in the market for a new car and I’d be interested in getting an EV.
Imagine if they put all that engineering effort to building an affordable, reliable, EV? Man that would be something to behold. But America is in the meme economy now, nobody cares about real products for real people. Just hype generators that appeal to the 1%.
Was it great marketing? Did it move the needle on sales? That’s what marketing is supposed to do. I see Musk do dumb stuff all the time and all it makes me think is “I will never buy a product from this scam artist”.
Jaguar also did extremely well spread marketing campaign. It is really questionable if it moves units. Same goes for this one. You might get notoriety but that doesn't always translate to sales. And I am pretty sure no one was unaware of Tesla at that point.
They have to move out of the EV business. Their shareholders have eyed up the big potential returns from optimus/cybercab/next-moonshot and valued the company sky high as a result.
When you have a sky high valuation, spending capital on something that just gives steady returns is a net negative for everyone. You have to put all the capital into the moonshots.
It’s pretty absurd to base such a high valuation on things that don’t exist. Not only do they not exist, they’ve missed every deadline put out by Musk for over a decade. This is where you put the CEO in prison in a functioning society.
Why would Tesla pivoting seem strange? They've lost the global EV race, they've sabotaged their American market and they haven't done anything but weak publicity stunts in years. Their profits are tanking, their brand is toxic and their prospects are dim. That doesn't scream 'bright future' to me.
> My gut feeling says they are trying to move out of the EV business as crazy as that may seem to us normals.
Expect this trend to continue. I've started seeing it all over across different industries. Consumer based businesses are being abandoned to instead chase the bigger numbers from B2B sales and premium consumers.
It's no secret to anyone paying attention. The EV business is basically dead, and they're getting their asses kicked by Chinese competition.
Robotics is the new focus. Depending on who you ask (and how well they execute), this will either be another grift for bagholders or exactly the right move to capture a massive emerging industry.
I do think people are massively underestimating robotics. The convergence of LLMs and robotics will be the next great wave of AI, unlocking an enormous boom in productivity across the economy.
The odds of that acquisition actually happening dropped dramatically last week.
My gut feeling is that they won't selling any cars anywhere anymore because of their CEO. They can either shut it down already, or fire him.
There's too many confounders to say that JB Straubel is the cause.
Examples: Covid controversies around musk in 2020, Twitter acquisition in 2022, Musk becoming the world richest person in 2021
His Nazi salute is probably a huge landmark that ossified people into a stance on Elon
Tesla is one china EV tariff away from bankruptcy
So is at least half the US auto industry, if not all. Modern Chinese cars look great and you get a lot of bang for your buck. Even without CCP subsidies keeping prices low they would eat up other manufacturers if priced similarly.
The Model Y outsells every Chinese EV in China. It's every other US manufacturer who would be doomed if the China EV tariff went away. That's why the 100% tariff was imposed by Biden, not Trump.
The Cybertruck grossly misunderstood the target audience.
Look at the Maverick sales, when it was 20k. Slate Auto seems to have gotten it right.
look at the source. i think they hate elon so i discount their opinion.
is there anyone with >2 braincells that likes elon?
Its more about lack of morals than IQ per se, seeing them only convenient when aligned. Plenty of smart folks with dubious morals when it actually counts out there
i think you love elon so i discount your comment
What do you mean? Most their articles under the "Tesla" topic seem neutral or positive.
This is an opinion piece - there’s no factual basis (nor any facts quoted) to support this narrative at all. Plus, key things missing from the calculus include:
- COVID, that put a strain on manufacturing during lockdowns and the eventual worldwide supply chain disruptions
- the new administration and its anti EV stance
- emergence of AI
- betting the future of Tesla on Optimus (product) and Robotaxi (service)
How much could JB Staubel have influenced Tesla during these times is anybody’s guess.
What hit product has Tesla had during this time period? None.
And like the author, are you suggesting that is because JB left the company?
Why would him being there have changed anything? What ‘hit product’ could JB have launched that you would have bought given everything that happened with Tesla.
Since we’re listing things that potentially negatively affected sales, you have to include Elon’s public antics. Alienating your base demographics is not smart
Even EV Car makers are making now what the Tesla Roadster should have been.
This is the weirdest thing ever by far. Why would you not just build a Tesla supercar? Why 2028?
You know what I bet? They are so dependend on what Elon Musk does and says and decides, that stuff like Twitter, DOGE and alllll the other garbage he did on the side, just stalled everything.
FSD that actually works and the massively popular in live markets robotaxi service are the obvious answer to “big-deal things that came after this CTO left”
$2B cybertruck failure barely registers vs how impactful FSD has been on model Y / 3 sales. Tesla is supply constrained again, with multi-month waits for the model Y L edition
So massively popular Tesla doesn't disclose how many rides it does?
Your massively popular robotaxi is years behind Waymo. Years.
There are so many robotaxis in austin. Something like 300 waymos and 350 Teslas? I love waymo and wont step into a robotaxi, but people definitely are riding them.
FSD is old and the promises too. Its not new its not whatever its just very slowly progressing to what was promised and it still doesn't show up as the big deal.
Wasn't there even multiply lawsuits against Tesla because the payed for FSD didn't work? Didn't exist? Wasn't supported by the Hardware build in?
2016 did Tesla announce that every future car has the hardware for FSD. 2016!
Tesla Model Y is the best selling car in the world for like 3 years in a row. They don't need a new product any time soon.
Edit: All you Tesla haters just google "best selling car in the world last 3 years" and you'll see.
Tesla's net income almost halved twice in the said three years btw.
2023: $15B
2024: $7B
2025: $3.8B
Tesla's free cash flow is up over that time and that's the real measure of profit:
2023: $4.357 billion
2024: $3.581 billion
2025: $6.22 billion
I can find no evidence that supports this claim.
https://finance.yahoo.com/markets/stocks/articles/tesla-mode...
https://www.focus2move.com/world-car-market/
Your first link comes from Tesla themselves, and the second smells strongly AI generated. If I search for the "best selling car 2026" and don't lead the search engine by feeding it "tesla model y", I see none of those results.
https://www.goodcarbadcar.net/2026-us-auto-sales-figures-by-...
https://www.best-selling-cars.com/usa/2026-q3-usa-top-10-bes...
When I google "best selling car 2026" my results show Tesla Model Y. I suspect maybe google is playing a bit of the "confirmation bias results" game for the both of us based on our past search history.
Sure, if you don't count the redesigned Model Y as a new product, with the successful synchronized global factory changeover. Or the Y L, backordered until well into next year. And you don't count Semi which is being delivered to customers from its new factory right now. And you don't count the Cybercab even though hundreds are giving rides today. And you don't count the Robotaxi service even as it passes Waymo for number of cars and miles ridden per week in Austin.
Yeah, if you disqualify or assume imminent failure of all of those, then zero successful new products.
MKBHD made a good observation about the Cybercab[1]. The way the doors are designed, you will get high incidents of “collision with an open door of a stationary vehicle” also known as a dooring accident. If it was intended to be a robotaxi, why didn’t they just make the doors swing up in a vertical plane rather than chickenwing out like that. Another impractical vanity door feature just like with the Model X doors. Most likely conjured up by none other than the boss himself, designer of the Cybertruck.
1: https://youtu.be/fo-uubnajWM?t=3m30s
If we are to be charitable to Tesla, new car development isn’t like new tech product development. The shortest possible period of time to develop a new car is probably about 4-7 years.
I’d also say that the YL is something of a new product and a very successful one, even though it’s more of a long wheelbase variant.
Still, I agree with the thesis of the article. Where are the smart decisions?
The Cybertruck could have been a home run product for the US market, but Tesla’s own hubris about that market really buried it. They focused on styling and marketed it as a cyberpunk lawless society survival vehicle where angry mobs of cyberpsychos can’t break your window.
Hello, Tesla, you needed to put the truck in NFL advertisements and show how it’s going to be amazing for your blue collar cosplay sessions and how it’s going to get 300 miles of range while towing a boat (which it was supposed to but it didn’t).
The Cybercab being a two-door coupe is insane. How did that pass the first design discussion? Look at how the Waymo Zeekr cab is designed, look at a how a London cab can fit like 5-6 people in a normal-sized car, look at the Nissan NV200 as NYC’s exclusive taxi from 2012-2018.
None of these are two seater low entry coupes.
Where is the full size 3-row family vehicle to convince upper middle class suburban moms to not buy an EX-90? Where is the European city car?
What is Tesla doing with their time?
Is this a paid piece behind the scenes by JB Straubel? It reads exactly as someone who was paid or got exclusive access to write something to over highlight someone.
The stock is the product
You make an excellent point. So long as the stock of a company continues to rise, or at best stable, is the only thing that seems to matter. Regardless of customer service, quality, etc. it's the stock price. I think we have seen that enough across other companies to reach some conclusion on the assumption.
Elon had an insane talent of finding the right people with wild moonshot ideas to run his companies while he was getting the credit and the limelight.
Then he got older, got into politics and fully bought into the marketing about himself. He thinks he's a genius and that everything he touches turns to gold.
Well... Turns out stuff works as long as he is out of the loop and doesn't make any direct decisions.
> Turns out stuff works as long as he is out of the loop and doesn't make any direct decisions
This is not unique to Musk - many tech CEOs learn this the hard way when they start meddling in the day-to-day. Bezos built an empire, but the projects he took personal control of (like FirePhone) tended to be unmitigated disasters.
He personally co-designed S3.
My understanding (admittedly second-hand), is that he handed down the famous "malloc for the internet" requirement, and mostly left the team to their own devices past that point
Exceptional success is both timing and having an exceptional team. But yea, let's keep attributing it to great man theory, because that's more digestible and people like to mythologize a single person.
Cybercab seems to have had a very promising start, metrics are good. This seems far more of a political hate piece than one based on any data.
Isn't it completely overshadowed by Waymo? From what I've heard Waymo is more profitable and has substantially fewer accidents due to better technology.
If a few things work out for Tesla they can do overshadow Waymo very quickly.
Waymo’s entire fleet is estimated at about 6000 cars. Tesla produces this many cars in a little over a day.
The cybercab is also likely to end up costing 1/10th of a Waymo car
It’s not that Tesla is winning here. But the economics of their solution can totally tilt the entire market in the future.
> If a few things work out for Tesla they can do overshadow Waymo very quickly.
If.
I've been reading the same thing each year since basically the first version of Tesla's car AI. I'm sure I've even written similar things.
Waymo's total is probably 5000 or fewer. But they operate 24/7. They are providing half a million commercial rides a week.
Tesla hasn't got the scale or operating consistency to even truly call itself a commercial service. Elon keeps claiming the Tesla will overwhelm everybody in the whole fleet will wake up one day and be a moneymaking taxi machine.
No it won't. Here's the reality:: https://autonomixinvestor.com/robotaxi-tracker/
There always gonna be both Pepsi and Cola.
Except I can go to the store and buy a Coke and a Pepsi. Musk’s vaporware doesn’t actually exist in the market.
Meh, not a Muskboi but it's public now, no invite needed.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T1Id2aas5wI (you can find more using Youtube search or Chat)
Is it global, or US wide? Nope, Waymo isn't neither.
It’s not really comparable:
https://autonomixinvestor.com/robotaxi-tracker/
Tesla:
> Roughly 20 on a given day, never more than about 50 active in a week across all markets. The genuinely unsupervised slice peaked around 25 in spring and has drifted sideways since.
Waymo:
> Roughly 500,000 paid rides per week, a figure Alphabet cited at both Q1 and Q2, so it is flat, not fresh.
I was responding to this:
> Musk’s vaporware doesn’t actually exist in the market.
You mean Coca-Cola. Pepsi Cola is a Cola from Pepsi.
lil yachty and drake clip
Sugar water, whatever you want to call it, there's multiple providers.
Tesla's taxi business isn't real. Waymo has been transparent about how their cars handle situations that require human intervention. Waymo's most important technology isn't superior sensors, it's the ability to be truly autonomous without continuous oversight, even when putting a human in the loop to make a decision. Humans never drive a Waymo remotely, because that's dangerous and stupid. Tesla won't say how their remote intervention works, but it's probably a sketchy as a Chinese Robo taxi but without the Chinese 5G network that actually is low latency.
Waymo isn't profitable at all. It's a massive money loser. And in some cities Tesla is nearly at parity
Tesla has had a massive surge in cybercabs in Austin over the last few weeks. I would venture to say they have surpassed the number of Waymos over here. Don't have any numbers to back this up though. As for being profitable, it seems the cost of a cybercab should be much less than a Waymo.
They have a lot of cars registered, but how many are actually on the road? Does anybody know?
About 250: https://robotaxitracker.com/cybercab. (Waymo has about 4000.)
Thanks for sharing this, nice data, the increase in sightings aligns with what I'm seeing in my area.
Did you take a look at amount of money waymo is losing let alone profit?
Unsupervised robotaxi has lower (at fault) accidents than unsupervised waymo.
All notable cybercab accidents have been done by remote driving.
The only thing waymo have are - large fleet thus large miles/week - many cities
In last week or so, Tesla went from tiny to equal/more than waymo in Austin seemingly in just a few days.
They'll do that in other cities too in due time.
> Unsupervised robotaxi has lower (at fault) accidents than unsupervised waymo.
Waymos exist and have for years. Whatever fabricated data Musk came up with here has no relation to reality.
Do either of them have _any_ at fault accidents?
My non-existent robotaxi company has had zero accidents! We're better than tesla OR waymo!
It may be the other way around if the pace in Austin is repeated elsewhere. Cybercab rides per week has already surpassed, Waymo, allegedly.
https://x.com/KHerriage/status/2114902145627504719
From the outside in this is how I see it (being in Austin which seems to be ground zero for a lot of the testing):
Waymo is betting that cutting zero corners and being rigorous will pay off down the line. They seem best in class.
Zoox seems to be betting that reducing time to get passengers in and out while providing a novel platform will be a differentiator. More sensors than Tesla but fewer cars than both the others.
Cybercab seems to be about cutting cost (and corners) wherever they thing they can get away from it and betting cheap will win the day (sort of like a discount airline). This assumes they're not doing something O(N) expensive behind the scenes, like having every ride monitored by a human operator in another country.
I remember some company dragging a person for awhile and the car not realizing. I'm worried tesla will find itself in a situation like that (or another edge case). I feel safer being around a Waymo as a pedestrian than a cybercab. I even had a Waymo stop for me at a pedestrian crossing when I was waiting for it to go by (I wasn't trying to cross).
In the long run Waymo will have to figure out how to have a cheaper platform and Tesla will have to toe the cheap/good-enough line. Zoox is still seemingly unlaunched so IDK about them. Time will tell.
Interesting overview. And on who will win, on one hand, as you said, Waymo's platform is better, and they just need to continue focusing on developing it cheaper. But on the other hand, Tesla has the volume in that you can already buy a car with FSD (although, we're talking about taxis, not consumer cars, but Tesla has assembly lines ready to produce 100k of taxis). Hmm, hard call...
... just looked it up, Waymo's 6th gen hardware is estimated to cost $20k per vehicle. That's getting down there. And if they ever do even higher volumes, will probably go down further: https://x.com/fchollet/status/2023522267846815874
Looked online, Waymo is really starting to ramp up it's services. They're now in 13 US cities (including Atlanta and Austin): https://support.google.com/waymo/answer/9059119#zippy=
And are planning on increasing the size of their fleet by a factor of 5: https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/waymo-...
They will have a huge advantage and seems to me like Waymo is going to win out, but can never tell.
It was very strange, in the beginning people celebrated Tesla, they raved about it, the sales were great, but then as soon as the politics got involved, suddenly it's all turned negative.
Almost as if journalists were paid partisan hacks.
The early Tesla fans are politically engaged woke people. Having to settle for new Leaf now but in some ways it’s nicer than Model 3. And more friendly to my kids networks of ethnically diverse trans and queer friends and partners. And less scary for the many immigrant communities in my neighborhood.
Elon's cognitive decline from drug addiction affected both his business and political decision making. pre-ketamine Elon delivered the Falcon 9, Model 3/Y, and Starlink. post-ketamine Elon gave us Cybertruck, Starship (aka the SpaceX Cybertruck), and a bunch of fake products like the flying roadster, humanoid robots, and Cybercab.
This is a business lesson that most competent CEOs are intuitively aware of.
"Politics got involved" from the beginning. In the context of USA politics, being an EV company while your CEO talked about how important electrification was to stave off the effects of human caused climate change is 100% a politically coded act.
What happened wasn't "politics got involved", what happened was that CEO started talking other politics.
And to say that "politics got involved" is a ridiculously passive statement. Elon has full control over how he publicly acts. Politics "didn't get involved" from 2022 onwards, Elon's publicly articulated political views significantly shifted, AND THEN Elon personally led massive organizational changes in the federal government.
Regardless of if you support or oppose DOGE, it's completely dishonest to wall off his actions at DOGE into a separate category of acts that you can clearly separate from his business.
Musk has been consistently vile the entire time, it's just that liberals always think they were always right, even when they had the opposite opinion five minutes ago and were advocating that people who have their current opinion be fired and arrested for treason. He must have changed they say.
Even now, they have no idea how to criticize him because they adore the blindingly wealthy, opinionated, and willing to use that wealth to force that opinion on others (it's upper-middle-class sainthood.) His biggest crime somehow is that he allowed you to say what you wanted on twitter. His second biggest is that he went after the "administrative state", which is this mysterious theory that the Executive Branch should have authority distinct from the President, and therefore not be subject to democracy at all, in any way. Just like they turned on Assange, it's always telling that their consistent enemy is democracy. Democracy is directly offensive to the credentials that they dedicated their lives and compromised their personal integrity to get from wealthy people and institutions.
They're offended by Musk because they wanted to show their Teslas off, and to talk about the projects that their company partnered with Tesla on at parties, and to be proud of their kids getting named Tesla scholars and getting Tesla genius grants. They can't be because he's obviously a slimeball in a way that they can't overlook and ignore and mock the victims of (in return for money and status.) That's it. They, however, are currently overlooking the crimes of their favored billionaires and employers, so have no language to articulate their resentment of him that doesn't also incriminate themselves. So it's just this insane inarticulate id-explosion.
Reminds me of people being embarrassed about working at Arthur Anderson or Lehman Brothers at parties. "I worked in accounting; I worked in insurance," they would say. Their mothers used to gush about them, and now they don't even mention the names of the companies, like a father who died in prison. All Musk's properties are like that now, as well as Google, Facebook, Amazon, etc.. Musk's properties still actually even come out better than other tech slop because they all ostensibly have some material purpose other than extracting rents from normal people through deceit and by doing the least work possible.
I used to have a name for people who can't see this dynamic: "emoluments libs." They were the libs during Trump's first term who kept saying "The Democrats aren't going after Trump for profiting from his office because they're too afraid." No, dude. They're not going after him because they have the same deals with the same people, and everything that they would go after him for implicates them too. After you avoid the obvious, you're left with impeaching a totally corrupt guy for not arming Ukraine hard enough to threaten Russia hard enough because they wouldn't cooperate in uncovering the blatant corruption of a prominent Democrat. If that's the best you've got, a thing that sabotages one of your own prominent politicians (who was destined to win the next presidency by a hair), and highlights an evil thing you're currently doing in Ukraine, the other alternatives must be really horrible i.e. would send you to jail with him. Their only bright spot is that they hoped it would take (a notoriously disobedient) Biden out so The Atlantic libs could push one of their soulless golems Harris or Buttigieg into the presidency.
I have to be honest. I'm part of the ancient left that is celebrating the imminent death of the middle class, because it's their weird psychology that is killing us. I encourage their replacement with AI wherever it is possible, my criticism of AI is that it is still not good enough to do it, and if the middle class have anything to say about it it will never be. They will ruin it by either coddling the owners of AI to total flaccid laziness or threatening the owners of AI to make them cripple it, but they will make sure that they will maintain a lawn by any means necessary. They will, however, never give a shit about the uninsured unless they get sick themselves.
There are millions of Americans like me who will never step foot in one because of their association with Elon Musk.
That's an insane negative attribute that Waymo doesn't have to worry about. I hate the Alphabet guys too, but not to the same extent of completely boycotting all their products (yet).
> There are millions of Americans like me who will never step foot in one because of their association with Elon Musk.
You guys have to realize at some point that you're not a significant part of the market. There are a lot of people who don't particularly like musk but the amount that would never use a cybercab isn't a significant part of a 300m person market.
Yeah, sure. That's why Tesla sales have fallen for two consecutive years ever since he exposed himself as a fascist. You keep telling yourself that, buddy.
Speaking as someone who follows the NFL, people will forgive all kinds of horrendous behavior if the player's team is winning. It's easy to say things in the abstract like "won't buy a Tesla" because most people aren't really shopping for a car all that often. But if the cybertaxi works and is cheap, then I would guess a lot of people won't be sticking to their proclaimed values. That said, I have my doubts that cybercab will really work all that well.
I was a Cleveland Browns fans for literally my entire life until they signed Deshaun Watson. I watched every single game, but now I haven't watched a game in like four years. I was already concerned about the effects of CTE, but I couldn't go on cheering for a team that knowingly signed a rapist.
You should surround yourself with people who are willing to stand up for their convictions.
The Cybercab has not had a promising start. Years behind schedule, available nowhere and Musk has negative brand value. Another DOA Tesla scam.
> Cybercab seems to have had a very promising start, metrics are good. This seems far more of a political hate piece than one based on any data.
What? This is just a political hate piece because of the potential of something that just started five minutes ago? You're damning Tesla with faint praise yourself and don't even know it.
I think Cybercab is cool but I think its continued reliance on cameras is not the best path for this technology.
Lack of lidar isn't the biggest problem. Nor will adding it make Tesla's cabs suddenly reliable and useful. They don't have Google's geospatial data, they don't have the remote intervention infrastructure, they haven't expanded it across multiple cities and built out the service infrastructure to clean and repair their fleet. They don't have the financial history to go to Pimco for term loans paid out of cash flow.