So he milked Tesla for another $2B to subsidize xAI, has dropped the models to 2 (3 and Y), revenue is down, growth is negative, BYD is eating Tesla for lunch, followed by the other CN and KR vehicle companies.
He doesn't have FSD, camera only navigation without sensor fusion with LIDAR will fail, the only thing keeping Tesla where it is is the bullshit dispersal field that surrounds Musk.
> He doesn't have FSD, camera only navigation without sensor fusion with LIDAR will fail, the only thing keeping Tesla where it is is the bullshit dispersal field that surrounds Musk.
So if I hear what you're saying, the stock will be up another 50% this year!
Tesla has become a meme stock. The stock's performance is disconnected from the company's performance.
I agree that Tesla has clear strengths, like the vast amount of data they've collected from their cars, and their charging network, but it's also obvious that something is going very, very wrong with that company. The stock value is not reflecting that.
Fun fact - recently it was declared that both Tesla and CCP EVs are to be treated as completely untrusted and not accepted in any semi-secure facilities in Poland (so including pretty much any military location)
Loads of people trusted Huawei, even after all the hyperbole about backdoors for the government. It needed regulators banning Huawei to knock their share of the market and protect the homegrown spyware.
The government bans on Huawei were obviously do to three reasons: network security, economic competition, and politics.
Huawei doesn’t only make phones — they also make the cell network infrastructure and they sell it at much lower costs than American companies do. The US put pressure on allied countries to divest from Huawei infrastructure (especially 5G cell networking) to both avoid the security risks and to leave those allies with only American companies to buy from.
And we can’t forget that Trump very publicly used Huawei’s executive as a hostage to a negotiation.[1]
And was also the one that was contradicted the most as they were sharing all the source code, and several areas of national security reviewed it, including GCHQ, giving it the clear.
Politics and trying to stop an economic competitor from taking business away from overpriced alternatives was the real unspoken reason.
> to leave those allies with only American companies to buy from
This is conspiratorial nonsense, the EU has Sweden's Ericsson and Finland's Nokia and along with South Korea's Samsung there are plenty of choices. I can't actually think of comparable American companies.
They can make great phones and still be spying on the user and everyone near them.
They wouldn't be good for intel gathering (either deliberate or incidental, c.f. FitBit or whatever leaking some US military info because of all the soldiers tracking themselves) if they weren't also just straight up good products.
This lack of exclusivity between "quality" and "spying" is also why I found it hard to trust US products even before Trump 2.
Faith and trust is something nobody uses to describe Musk. Maybe you should pop your own bubble you seem to live in? Using faith and trust while completely ignoring twitter?
Tesla investor meetings are just lots of investor bros who have faith in Musk. They trust that Musk can continue to deliver the mindshare that he previously did to get the stock price to where it is.
I think he has tremendous downside risk, but there are a ridiculous number of people who still have “faith and trust” in him despite all of his downside risk.
The gamble with Cybertruck failed. It’s common sense, that such a vehicle will fail. The successful cars are made for masses and not for niche buyers. Common sense product could be something smaller than Model 3 for Europe and this car would eat Chinese for lunch. Expensive experiment failed, it’s time for consequences. Does Tesla have resources for another car experiment? Will it stay a car company?.. Or it will be now a manufacturer of robot soldiers?..
> Common sense product could be something smaller than Model 3 for Europe and this car would eat Chinese for lunch.
Yeah, that would be the Model 2, which Musk cancelled, then denied he cancelled, then has made no effort to review whatsoever so it exists in a limbo state of zero people working on it but it not being officially cancelled. Either way, it didn't come out in 2025 as planned.
For a normal company, this would be disastrous. For a meme stock, this makes total sense since anyone claiming the Model 2 is dead can be shouted at by fans saying Musk himself disputed it was dead.
A few years ago, perhaps. But the brand has become tainted to the point where the exact people who would buy such a car are now avoiding Teslas. Instead, European manufacturers are filling that niche with cars like the Renault 5.
> the exact people who would buy such a car are now avoiding Teslas
The traditional fix for this is to license the technology and do manufacturing for another carmaker to brand.
It's super common for brand X of car to actually be a rebadged Y with slightly different shaped body panels.
However, it only works if your product is good and you have decent margins. That means you have to compete with china cars, since the obvious thing for a western brand to do is to rebadge a chinese designed car and split the margins with the chinese designer/manufacturer.
> However, it only works if your product is good and you have decent margins.
Not sure if the product has to be good. Look at the lineage of my wife's car The 2019 Chevy Trax, based on the Buick Encore, based on the Opel/Vauxhall Mokka. It isn't a good car under any of the badges, but it does run, and is small, but the crazy thing is my Ford Ranger gets roughly the same milage as it. Note: the gas milage is probably an American issue, because it runs a naturally aspirated i4 gas engine instead of a more efficient turbo diesel.
Why would a small Tesla "eat Chinese for lunch" - the brand is tainted (to put it mildly) and the Teslas I've been in didn't seem to have great design or build quality?
There are people like me who still buy teslas. Buddy picked up his new Model Y couple weeks ago. The price and the whole package is fine. Zero interest financing is absolutely nice. Elon showed his real face during children rescue drama in Asia. With this defamation story it was well known who he is for years. Political involvement was the visible tip of an iceberg for everyone.
Now if you ask me if the German car managers are better I doubt it. Gassing apes by Volkswagen in US is on the same level as Elon. Mercedes guy was complaining about lazy workers too much. Only BMW guy was able to keep acceptable silence. Overall German equivalent of model Y is at least 20000€ more expensive than Elon‘s car.
Personally I don’t buy anything from China if I can. I am not brave and as the Ayways story showed clearly, that great Chinese car can quickly be without any service. Maybe it’s ok to lease such car for couple years, but I don’t want to have car after small accident for what no replacement parts are available.
Several years ago I wanted to buy an electric car. I didn’t like Musk, so my plan was “anything but Tesla.” Chevy Bolt was unavailable due to the fire problem. Cadillac Lyriq and Hyundai Ioniq 5 weren’t out yet.
I drove everything available to buy in my area. My real options were the Mustang Mach-e, Volvo XC40 Recharge, Hyundai Kona, Polestar 2. I decided to test drive a Model Y for completeness.
And CRAP.
The Model Y was obviously the best car. So much more refined than the other options. Way better charging network. 7 seat option. The only real downside was the zany CEO.
Fine, I thought. I’ll live with it.
I bought a Model Y and love it.
But.
I’ll never buy another Tesla. I have a bumper sticker disavowing the CEO. I paid off its loan so nobody would make money from me owning a Tesla. I honk support at the No Kings protestors outside the local Tesla facility.
I think the only thing that can save Tesla is a crash/buyout/relaunch. Get Musk out of the picture. Reset the stock price to something sane. Ditch the distractions. Release a Model 2. Keep expanding the SuperCharger network.
That’s a long hard road. Nobody involved makes money in that scenario. It’ll only happen when there are no other options.
As for me, I’m driving my Model Y until the wheels fall off. With the bumper sticker.
> Overall German equivalent of model Y is at least 20000€ more expensive than Elon‘s car.
What?!? VW id.4 has the same starting price as a Tesla Model Y if I look it up on their German websites. Don't see where the swasticar would be cheaper.
I spent a month in Spain driving a BYD daily and it was fine. I just don’t like the tackiness of the interior and not in love with the exterior either. The handling is also ok, nothing exciting. There’s something still very Chinese about these cars. Not saying that matters if you just want an affordable and reliable EV that takes you from point A to B. BYD can do that perfectly fine. I personally like the design of the Model Y (own one) very much, it also feels much more “alive” particularly the dual motor. There’s no comparison with the BYD I drove. Also never had any issues with build quality other than the charging port malfunctioning, and it was fixed outside my house, all I had to do was touch a button in the app to call service. FSD is pretty damn amazing. The tech is great and the updates do make the car better in many ways. I hope Tesla finds its way because apart from all the controversy they can make good cars.
Regardless, owner is a nazi and utter POS to be polite, basically same material as trump. Nothing in the world is going to change that, not now not in 40 years. He keeps insulting whole Europe (meaning all of fucking us living here) and our leaders almost daily, looking down on us very publicly.
Why the heck would I buy such car, even if it costed 1 euro? Have some self-respect and morality ffs, do you also go to restaurant where you know they will spit on you and insult you, just because they have cca same stuff as all other places, often worse while more expensive? [1]
> Teslas I've been in didn't seem to have great design or build quality
Design is subjective (I like it), and build quality. Not sure, I don't have issues with mine except one where after 2 years frunk latch started failing. It was replaced in an hour when I went to service center.
Teslas are the cheapest EV for the features offered in Europe. I would gladly buy another car, but they are either more pricey, or lack features. (I did market research 2 years ago when I was buying Model Y, the closest one was ICE - RAV4 for similar price, but I didn't want ICE).
Today probably not but there was a time where Tesla doing a rush to electric car market dominance was not totally far fetched. This would have required them to have cars filling the important segments.
The entire car is a surveillance machine and the company is happy after a crash to taint the driver in the public’s eye if it will improve the image of their AutoPilot. It’s bad enough having to deal with car insurance after a crash without your car’s manufacturer blaming you in public, sending the recipients to news outlets.
Tesla has a monopoly on their car repairs, which reduces the number of mechanics qualified to work on it, increasing the cost and the wait time.
Teslas are a very expensive platform to service being largely an aluminum frame. Difficult+expensive to repair and replacements are expensive compared to cheaper cars which usually have more plastic. This means insurance is also expensive.
And this doesn’t even begin to get into the weirdness of their reputation for hiring private eyes to stalk employees and call the police to in an attempt to get an employee killed. Having an exec who has a ketamine problem and mania issues doesn’t lend itself to long term stability.
What I've seen so far from Chinese car makers (BYD and MG, to be precise) is, to put it bluntly, the bare minimum. Build quality so-so, design is… unconventional and software is just bad. It drives, but only just.
Maybe the more recent models, like the Xiaomi thing, are better. But at the moment, Tesla is at least on par, if not better. The brand being tainted is very relevant though.
You see electric Volvo's everywhere in the more electrified markets in Europe like Norway and the Netherlands. Especially the smaller models like the ex30 and ex/xc40.
They fit very well design-wise and I think software quality wise in the European market and they are essentially Chinese (Zeekr).
I think it helps that they use Android Auto as the main interface and some of their designers are still located in Sweden.
Korean electrics are also taking over marketshare hand over fist.
And the Renault 4, the Hyundai Inster, and the Dacia Spring, and the Citroën C3, Fiat 500e, Kia EV3, Leapmotor T03.
There are heaps of small/subcompact EVs on the European market now, all with very competitive prices. The newer ones seem to be getting cheaper and cheaper.
Honestly I reckon a Tesla M2 will have a hard time succeeding in this market.
> The successful cars are made for masses and not for niche buyers.
When Tesla got started, full EVs were extremely niche. They were known for their short range and nothing else. Tesla defeated common sense. This is what supports their anti-common-sense stock price.
Is there any indication that they're going to "defeat common sense" again? They're cancelling products, making marginal improvements to old models, alienating their customers, etc.
Tesla as a car company seems dead-set on a continuous downward spiral.
Maybe the switch to robots will pay off and you'll be right. Somehow, I'm skeptical.
> Is there any indication that they're going to "defeat common sense" again?
If you equal Elon to Tesla then there are plenty of - SpaceX dominates near-earth orbit payload launches. A private company competing against and replacing NASA would have been a laughingstock idea 30 years ago. xAI made competitive SOTA models despite a very, very late start.
Of course Elon isn't Tesla. I think the biggest risk of Tesla now is the investors realizing he's more into AI and politics and will siphon resources from Tesla to his other companies.
Except SpaceX "competing and replacing NASA" is ... also a meme.
SpaceX is essentially the same kind of commercial provider as always, except that they didn't sit on laurels of 1960s ICBM work, and among other things built their own additional infrastructure.
... But remember they were explicitly early financed to do that by DoD and NASA.
Everyone knew that was the future and that the big auto manufacturers were deliberately dragging.
No-one (serious) thought there was a market for the cybertruck.
The stock price is pure madness, it's like it's priced in robotaxis, but that's clearly not going to happen for Tesla. And if it did, it would be a small-ish market, their brand has become toxic in so many big markets.
> No-one (serious) thought there was a market for the cybertruck.
If they'd hit the price and performance of the launch announcements they might have. $40k base for what he initially talked about is a vastly better proposal than $61k base for what he actually delivered.
Good for them as a company, thats why they are still here.
And now? Everyone builds EVs, everyone is as far as Tesla or better.
Even the old school companies like BMW have now more models than Tesla and the Cybertruck was expensive to build, build badly and did not deliver what Elon the druggy and antidemocrat Musk promised.
The first electric car predates the 20th century. That seems pretty obvious.
The problem was always batteries and charging infrastructure. I wouldn't call these semi-impossible, but it's something Tesla definitely contributed significantly to.
> The first electric car predates the 20th century. That seems pretty obvious.
If you count remote control cars as well then you have an even weightier point.
But if you're serious about adapting technologies, countries and drivers to electric cars then you'll know that an electric car being made in the 19th century is totally irrelevent. Toyota even bet big on hydrogen rather than electric for a long time; that's how non-obvious it was.
>an electric car being made in the 19th century is totally irrelevent.
But then you strangely ignored why it was irrelevant, which I already pointed out and was the meat of the statement. The concept of an electric car is painfully simple. Way more so than an internal combustion engine, in fact.
What I could see happening is Alphabet getting an exclusive lock on Tesla (probably not buying because the stock is too high) and then quasi-merging it with Waymo for a fully integrated, functional robo taxi company. A bit like when they bought Motorola phone division.
It will be a manufacturer of vaporware if you look at how much they announced over the last years and how much of that has actually materialized...
But yeah, I guess Tesla lives by its CEO (and his grand promises that keep the stock price up) and dies by its CEO (who alienated Tesla buyers by, amongst other things, throwing his lot in with a regressive fossil fuel supporting administration and by personally supervising the dismantling of agencies such as USAID).
The Cybertruck was very clearly designed to be a low production model to figure out teething issues in manufacturing and design. Think Plymouth Prowler. Like seriously, nobody makes a body out of heavy gauge sheet metal with simple shapes if they're planning on volume, it doesn't pencil out vs more die complexity and thinner material. But the future growth to justify that never seems to have materialized....
Has it? I really don't know but I see these every day in my major city and there was a closed mall parking lot filled with cybertrucks the local dealer used to park there which were quickly turned over.
Cybertruck was supposed to be for the masses. The just weren't able to hit the price point required because of overly optimistic engineering assessments. I think the whole stainless steel construction concept didn't work as first designed.
And of course, Cybertruck design might not have been mass compatible buy being ugly. But that is subjective, if it was cheap and functional and without the political connotations it might have been different.
- have a body that's not literally duck taped together in some places and can easily snap in others
- use steel (which bends) for body construction
- be suitable for towing hauls
- not be ridiculously overpowered (...to the extent where engine can overpower the breaks)
- have good visibility with a windshield that isn't at a sharp angle to the ground and body geometry which doesn't maximize blind spots
- not have sharp corners that the cut you or doors that can decapitate your dog
- have door handles that make doors openable in case of emergencies/no power situations/electric shorts
- not have bulletproof glass (WTF, "for the masses"?) which makes makes it harder to rescue people when accidents happen
- be easily repairable, or at least amenable to repairs in local non-Tesla shops, with customers being confident it their warranty won't go poof (as the law requires)
- be easily customizeable for different applications (particularly when it comes to the bed)
- not look so different from other trucks without any reason other than "Elon Musk wants to be edgy": ugly is subjective, being a billionaire's fashion statement isn't
...to start. That's off the top of my head.
And, of course, being priced for the masses, which doesn't just happen. It's a design requirement.
As it stands, the Cybertruck is, and has always been, a rich boy's luxury toy — and it was designed as one.
It really seems like something got to Musk's head that he thought the world has so many edgy rich boys.
You want to see a modern truck "for the masses"? That's Toyota IMV 0, aka Hilux Champ [1]. Ticks all the above boxes.
And hits the $10,000 price point [2]. A literal order of magnitude cheaper than the Cybertruck.
Speaking of which: a car "for the masses" isn't a truck. It's a minivan (gets the entire family from one place to another), it's a small sedan/hatchback (commuter vehicle), a crossover/small SUV to throw things, kids, and dogs into without having to play 3D Tetris in hard mode.
But not a pickup truck, which is a specialized work vehicle.
The masses aren't farmers and construction workers (most people live in the cities, and only a small number needs such a work vehicle).
The popularity of The Truck in the US is, in a large part, a byproduct of regulation which gives certain exemptions to specialized work vehicles.[3]
That's not even getting to the infrastructure part: trucks shine in remote, rural areas. And while one can always have a canister of gas in the truck bed, power stations can be hard to find in the middle of the field or a remote desert highway.
But again, it's not impossible to make a truck for the masses (at least for certain markets). That's the $10K Hilux Champ.
For all the luxury aspects of the Tesla sedan, it's been one of the most (if not the most) practical electric vehicles on account of range alone. It also looked like a normal car at a time when EVs screamed "look at me, I'm so greeeeeen!" from a mile away (remember 1st gen Nissan Leaf or BMW i3?). It was conformal and utilitarian, while also being futuristic and luxurious enough for the high price point was fair for what was offered.
The public image of having a Tesla was good: you are affluent, future-forward, and caring for the environment.
The Cybertruck went back on everything that made Tesla a success: it's conspicuous, impractical, overpriced, and currently having publicity rivaling that of the recent Melania documentary.
It was not a risky bet. It was an a-priori losing bet. The world simply never needed as many edgy toys as Musk wanted to sell.
And driving a car shaped as an "I'm a Musk fanboy" banner really lost its appeal after a few Roman salutes and the dear leader's DOGE stint.
Overly optimistic engineering assessments? Perhaps, but they are much further down on the list of reasons of Cybertruck's failure.
It didn't fail imo - it was intended a low-volume product for next-gen Tesla tech - Ethernet based fieldbus, 48V systems, area controllers etc. The philosophy is the same like other high-end cars - you field test your latest experimental tech first in a car with lower sales but high margins - if your fancy stuff has a 1% failure rate, in a 100k production run, that's 1000 vehicles - high but manageable.
If you sell millions and its your main product, your company is over. This is the same playbook German manufacturers followed since forever.
I bet the next gen Model 3 and robotaxi will get the cybertruck tech.
It failed based on the sales projections that Tesla set. Also, several reviews have not exactly been kind, along with lots of comments from owners about annoying issues and malfunctions.
If Tesla needed beta testers for things they hadn't figured out yet there would have been better ways to go about that.
I think the real issue was that Cybertruck required way more structural parts (body) than Tesla originally thought. It was originally supposed to have load bearing exoskeleton.
Musk projected that the Cybertruck would sell 250k annually. It's selling around 20k. Even for Musk, that isn't normal exaggeration; that's a huge difference.
That's weird too, maybe they just have some preorders they need to fulfill. They did stop its production for a while last year and reduced the number of models available.
Yes but the factory seems to be struggling to find staff, and the job adverts I see around Berlin suggest the hiring team is out of touch with what appeals to the German job market:
It's actually bizarre how seemingly nothing impacts $TSLA: profits down 46%, revenue down 3%, cutting successful product lines that used to sell quite a bit, a massively failed product in the Cybertruck, FSD promises still unfulfilled, and on top of all that US$ 2 billion siphoned away to another unrelated company.
With all of that, the stock closed upwards on the after market hours. Perhaps only Musk's death could cause it to tank, would have never expected to see a cult of personality being run on the top of S&P 500 market caps, what a strange world...
Its not bizzare. Retail investors can no longer compete with big banks, who pretty much set the stock price. Elon solidified this with DOGE by removing oversight of such things.
At this point, investing is exacly like playing slots at casino.
I think it was the FT that observed about a year ago that even as institutional investors were pulling away from US equities, retail investors (redditors, if you will) were filling in the gap quite enthusiastically. (You know, "Buy the dip!! " and brethren.)
I don't know to what extent that's still the case. But someone always ends up with the hot potato no matter what.
Meanwhile Waymo has actually cracked self driving, and is operating a fleet of taxis. Tesla said they were going to do this at least as far back as like 2018, and still aren’t.
FSD is good in video, given. But its not full self driving as it still requires you to keep an eye on it.
Real FSD for me at least, means I can sit in a 'car' open a laptop and work. But honestly working with a laptop in a car makes it dangerous when driving fast.
For my work commute, I don't need a FSD. For my holiday also not.
What I want is real and save FSD something which has proofen on the road that it is really really good.
We are far away from this. 5 years minimum if not 10. And while Tesla is playing around with FSD and putting it now behind a subscription and fooled everyone with the promise of FSD with HW3 and below, it will not suddenly make Tesla the single leader in FSD at all.
Waymo is working on it, Xpeng can do it, BMW, Mercedes and Nvidia.
For Cybertaxies alone you need a lot of infrastructure (parking spots), cleaning crew, management software etc. you need the legal framework to be allowed to drive them (not going to happen anytime soon in europe) and then you only compete with normal taxis and uber.
> Real FSD for me at least, means I can sit in a 'car' open a laptop and work.
Sure. Meanwhile, I'm literally using FSD 90% of the miles driven in my Y (the last update added a counter). I can appreciate a non-existant better product as much as the next guy, but as it is my daily commute is vastly improved.
FSD isn't perfect (probably about 90%!), but it's everyday amazing and useful.
I assume the S and X are being cancelled because 3 and Y are cannibalizing them with a very close product for a much better price point. Both have premium trim options. There’s very little difference in interior space. Aside from the doors on the X there’s just not much differentiation.
I just saw an R5 on the street in the bright green. Super cool looking car. There are a whole bunch of promising small EVs coming out in the EU. Hyundai Inster, VW ID.1, Kia EV2, etc.
Took one for a test drive - it was fun. The only downside is compared to some other compact/city EV's the legroom in the back is REALLY bad (and I'm not exactly tall).
The legroom in my son's VW e-Up! is markedly better, despite it being a smaller car.
> camera only navigation without sensor fusion with LIDAR will fail
I'm not so sure on this one. I think we'll see it this year. It will have embarrassing bugs (ie. running over cats which are hiding under the car) and we'll see lots of issues to begin with (ie. the car stops in the middle of a freeway because a camera got splattered with mud).
But I think they'll achieve the goal of something that can be deployed fairly widespread without public outrage causing it to be banned without lidar.
It's been "coming this year" for almost a decade now.
The bugs you describe are not embarrassing, they are critical issues that prevent it from being called FSD.
I have an opinion on EVs that basically the only models that make sense are the ones shaped like the 3 and Y.
I feel like EVs are a checkbox product - you either make things 'good enough' for the customer - range, driving dynamics, power, charge speed, smart features, autonomous stuff or don't.
To get range right you need a big battery and low drag and efficiency - the only way you can make the first 2 things in the same vehicle is to create an aerodynamic shape.
This is a packaging problem, you need to make the car low, and long - so you stretch it out, so the battery can be thinner and no longer pushes up the rest of the vehicle. You also have a lot of place in the front for crash structures, and aero shaping. Finally since your car is big (D segment), you can charge more money as per conventions of the market.
If you make a C or B segment car, you either reduce the battery size to save money, which makes it impractical for general use or pack in all that stuff into a smaller volume, and you get a car thats more expensive to make than a Model 3, while having worse drag and range, while the market expects you to charge less for it.
These small cars only make sense with a small battery, but you wouldn't want one for yourself as a second car - hence the robotaxi.
So no, your hypothetical Model 2 would not be cheaper if you didn't compromise it in some major way, which they dont wanna do.
Upwards differentiation is also hard for Tesla - base models are already powerful enough, have all the smart features, they wont compromise on autonomous stuff etc.
This is not only my opinion but the market's - S and X sold like 2 orders of magnitude less cars than the 3 and Y.
I think the S and X (and Roadster) sold less because they were expensive early models trying to create a "premium" halo-effect (if so, they succeeded).
For range, how much range is sufficient? This may be one area where the EU and US need fundamentally different vehicles, as per the saying "in America 100 years is a long time, in Europe 100 miles is a long way". Certainly the EU market supports B-segment with 44kWh @ 320 km / 199 miles: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citroën_C3#Europe_(2024)
> This is not only my opinion but the market's - S and X sold like 2 orders of magnitude less cars than the 3 and Y.
They sold less because they're far more expensive and have to compete against much more well put together products. Meanwhile, their platforms are 10 years old and there are now other offerings in an overall niche field.
You're right about aero to an extent, but aero is only felt on long highway drives and it can be mitigated somewhat with a couple more cells. Some consumers will choose style for a cost premium. Others will choose something more expensive simply because they don't want to support Musk.
The Tesla Semi was groundbreaking when they revealed it nearly 10 years ago. But now there are dozens of electric truck models, and they get delivered in substantial quantities for over a year now. At least in Europe.
If you can train a policy that drives well on cameras, you can get self-driving. If you can't, you're fucked, and no amount of extra sensors will save you.
Self-driving isn't a sensor problem. It always was, is, and always will be an AI problem.
No amount of LIDAR engineering will ever get you a LIDAR that outputs ground truth steering commands. The best you'll ever get is noisy depth estimate speckles that you'll have to massage with, guess what, AI, to get them to do anything of use.
Sensor suite choice is an aside. Camera only 360 coverage? Good enough to move on. The rest of the problem lies with AI.
Even the best AI can't drive without good sensors. Cameras have to guess distance and they fail when there is insufficient contrast, direct sunlight and so on. LiDARs don't have to guess distance.
>Self-driving isn't a sensor problem. It always was, is, and always will be an AI problem.
AI + cameras have relevant limitations that LIDAR augmented suites don't. You can paint a photorealistic roadway onto a brick wall and AI + cameras will try to drive right through it, dubbed the "Wile E. Coyote" problem.
> If you can train a policy that drives well on cameras, you can get self-driving. If you can't, you're fucked, and no amount of extra sensors will save you.
Source: trust me, bro? This statement has no factual basis. Calling the most common approach of all other self-driving developers except Tesla a wank also is no argument but hate only.
This is so dumb, I don't even know if you are serious. Nobody ever said it is lidar instead of cameras, but as additional sensor to cameras. And everybody seems to agree that that is valuable sensor-information (except Tesla).
Tesla's sales have suffered, yes, and Elon's image is a significant contributor to that, besides all the reasons directly related to the cars themselves.
But Tesla's stock price is still stuck in irrational heights, not even remotely justifiable by the company's performance.
It just seems that people reconsider purchasing a physical object way quicker than they reconsider a stock investment. Maybe because the stock investment, especially in TSLA, is considered more like a gamble - "as long as others also think that this stock will skyrocket, even just because they think that others like me think it will skyrocket - as long as that's the case, I'm good with buying shares".
Tesla is a meme stock. Its being buoyed up by retail investors (Elon Musk fanbois) and, its been said, by Saudis and others who were trying to curry favor with him (possibly to try and get Trumps ear or other greasy bullshit). The stock is completely divorced from reality, which also attracts further investment--as long as its disconnected from the fundamentals of being a company that has to make a profit, you can argue its worth 100 million billion dollars or a googel, both are just as valid.
How can you say camera only navigation won’t work with such finality when humans manage just fine every day!
You literally have an existence proof of it working.
It would be possible to build an ornithopter, evidenced by the existence of avians, but it turned out the easiest ways to make flying machines were otherwise.
What counts is the overall complexity, not the complexity of a single subsystem.
Using more senses allows simpler processing of the sensor data, especially when there is a requirement for high reliability, and at least until now this has demonstrated a simpler complete system.
I'm not sure I agree. I think just having wings that flex a bit is mechanically simpler than having an additional rotating propellor. After all, rotating axles are so hard to evolve they never almost never show up in nature at a macro scale. Sort of a perfect analogy to lidar actually. We create a new approach to solve the problem in a more efficient way, that evolution couldn't reach in billions of years
Rotating axles have not evolved in animals not because they were complex, but because any part of an animal requires permanent connections with the other parts, not only for the supply with energy but also for the continuous repairing that is required by any living body, to avoid death.
Artificial machines rely on spare parts manufactured elsewhere, which are used by external agents to replace the worn out parts.
For an animal to have wheels, it would have to grow wheels in some part of the body, periodically, then use its limbs to detach the wheels and attach them on the axles, after removing the old wheels. This is something sufficiently complex to be extremely unlikely to appear from evolution.
Even this huge complication would be enough only for passive wheels. For active wheels there exists no suitable motor, as the rotational motors with ionic currents are suitable only for the size of a bacteria. All bigger living beings use contractile motors, which cannot be used for a rotation of unlimited angle. So active wheels would also need a different kind of motor, which can work without a solid connection between the 2 moving parts. The artificial motors of this kind use either electromagnetic forces or fluid expansion due to temperature or pressure variation. Both would be very difficult to evolve by a living being, though electric fish and bombardier beetles show some possible paths.
Living beings are not devoid of axles and wheels; rather, they are entirely composed of them, at scales and in forms compatible with biology.
At every relevant level, life relies on rotating and cyclic structures coupled through continuous material exchange. The objection to wheels in animals assumes that axles and wheels must be rigid, permanently isolated parts. Biology does not work this way. Instead of discrete components joined once and preserved unchanged, living systems implement rotation through structures that are simultaneously connected, repaired, and replaced.
Cells are full of rotary and quasi-rotary machinery. Flagella are true rotating motors with stators, rotors, bearings, and torque generation via ion gradients. ATP synthase is literally a wheel-and-axle device, converting rotational motion into chemical energy and back again. The fact that these devices operate at molecular scale does not make them conceptually different from macroscopic axles; it shows that evolution favors rotation precisely where continuous repair and material flow are required.
At larger scales, joints function as constrained rotational interfaces. Hips, shoulders, knees, and vertebrae are axles embedded in living bearings, lubricated, rebuilt, and reshaped throughout life. Bone remodeling, cartilage regeneration, and synovial fluid circulation solve the very problem claimed to prohibit wheels: permanent connection combined with continuous maintenance. The difference from artificial machines is not the absence of rotation, but the absence of rigid separability.
Even limbs themselves behave as compound wheels. Gait cycles convert linear muscle contraction into rotational motion around joints, then back into translation. Tendons wrap around bones as belts around pulleys. Muscles do not rotate indefinitely, but unlimited rotation is not a requirement for a wheel; it is a requirement imposed by certain human machines. Biological wheels rotate as much as function demands, then reverse, exactly as many engineered systems do.
The claim that active wheels require exotic motors overlooks that biology already uses fields and flows. Ionic gradients are electric fields. Blood pressure, osmotic pressure, and gas expansion are fluid-based actuators. Electric fish demonstrate macroscopic bioelectric control, and insect flight shows that indirect actuation can drive cyclic motion far from the muscle itself. The distinction between electromagnetic motors and biological motors is one of implementation, not principle.
What evolution did not produce is a detachable, externally replaceable wheel, because life does not outsource maintenance. Instead, it internalizes repair, redundancy, and gradual replacement. From this perspective, an animal is not a wheeled vehicle lacking wheels; it is a dense hierarchy of axles and wheels whose boundaries are soft, whose materials are alive, and whose motion is inseparable from their growth and repair.
Life did not fail to invent wheels. It dissolved them into itself.
Most of what you have said is not different from what I have said.
All the rotating parts bigger than some tens of micrometers have only a limited rotation angle, where the limits are enforced by the solid connections between the 2 mobile parts, e.g. tendons, nerves and blood vessels.
The bacterial flagella and the rotating enzymes, which are powered by ionic currents, cannot be scaled to greater sizes. Already the flagella of nucleated cells (eukaryotes) are no longer based on rotating motors, but on contractile proteins, which must be attached at both ends on the mobile parts, limiting the relative movement.
Unlimited rotation is an absolutely necessary condition for a wheel that is used in locomotion, otherwise it is no longer a wheel.
A wheel used in locomotion that would have limited rotation would be just a leg that happens to have the shape of a wheel, because like a leg it would have to be raised from the ground for the forward motion, eliminating the exact advantage in efficiency that wheeled vehicles and tracked vehicles have over legs (i.e. that backward and forward movement are simultaneous and not separated in time during a step cycle, and no energy is wasted with a vertical oscillation of the leg).
The distinction between electromagnetic motors and biological motors is definitely one of principle and not an implementation detail. The only resemblance is that both are motors.
It is true that you can claim that when analyzing both chemical reactions and the interactions between the mobile parts of an electromagnetic motor they can be eventually reduced to electromagnetic interactions. Nevertheless such an assertion is completely useless, because most things that matter to us in the surrounding world can be reduced to electromagnetic interactions. Knowing this is not helpful at all for classifying them and understanding the differences between them.
The contraction of a protein caused by a chemical transformation and the magnetic forces that appear either between electrical currents through conductors or between electrical currents and ferromagnetic materials are very different phenomena and knowing that both of them have as primary cause electromagnetic interactions is of absolutely no help for understanding how they work or for designing either kind of motors.
Electromagnetic motors that are not extremely small need ferromagnetic materials. The only ferromagnetic material that is known to be synthesized by living beings is magnetite. Magnetite crystals can be good enough for sensing the magnetic field of the Earth, but they would be a very poor material for motors.
An easier to evolve rotating biological motor would be a rotating hydraulic motor, e.g. powered by pumped blood or lymph. This could work if the wheel would become non-living after being grown, to no longer need nerves and blood vessels. However it would be very difficult for a living being to seal the space between an axis and the rotating wheel in such a way so that blood or lymph would not spill out through the interstice.
Is it still a decent gamble after you've been trying (and failing) for a decade, and numerous well funded competitors are going the easy way, and when there is huge upside to being first, and when the value of FSD easily covers the rapidly falling cost of LIDAR?
No. It's not a good idea. It's not a good gamble. It's stupid, and the engineers can see it's stupid. A lot of them have quit, reducing the very slim chances of it working even further.
Because FSD driving not navigation is going to be held (rightly) to a much higher standard than human driving.
Humans are fallible and we have other sensors, like hearing, or touch (through feedback on the steering wheel) that are also involved in driving.
We already have other sensors that are not vision that work with us when driving like ABS and electronic stability.
The other reason it's dumb is that adding LIDAR and proper sensor fusion makes things better and the cost of LIDAR is rapidly dropping as its installed across new fleets in CN and elsewhere.
While I am in the camp that believes camera-only FSD won't succeed, your comment isn't entirely accurate.
CCD and CMOS sensors can easily work in sub-freezing temperatures with various kinds of heating. There are 10's of millions of surveillance cameras installed outdoors in sub-freezing climates that work fine.
Cameras also have moveable IR cut filters, which is analogous to your sunglasses example.
Human eyes do have greater dynamic range in the visible light spectrum, but solid state sensors can commonly interpret light above 1000nm, and of course you can do thermal/IR imagers to provide optical sensing of wavelengths outside of what a human can see.
Sensor technology relative to the human eye isn't what is holding FSD back.
The safety record of humans is not so great. They tend to fail in snow, ice, fog, rain and at night. We should be aiming a little higher.
I don’t think it makes sense to limit yourself while you are still figuring out what really works. You should go with a maximum of sensors and once it works, you can see what can be left out.
This is commonly said but trivially falsifiable — a blind human crosses the street better than a Tesla.
Eyesight isn’t the thing. Humans have a persistent mental model of the world, and of the physics that drive it. Our eyes only check in every now and then to keep our model up to date.
Our ears and sense of touch do a lot of work in walking and driving, too. Trying to narrow it all down to vision is silly.
Even though tesla has only 2 models, i would still consider it for a new car, if not for Elon Musk. I have an Y, and it does everything i want it to do. Drives nicely, lots of (cargo) space, no friction charging when driving in Europe. Just plug it in a supercharger and it loads fast. No hassle with subscriptions and cards. Very reliable.
With the 3 and the Y they're already catering for a large part of the market demand, but a smaller model, and a stationwagon might help get it up to 80%+ of all demand.
TUV inspection failures are not a good indication of reliability. The lack of Tesla dealers and no need for yearly servicing means issues get caught at the inspection step for Tesla where for others they are caught at the pre-inspection step.
Also, you need a breakdown of the failures as wear and consumables (washer fluid low, splits in wipers, headlight alignment, mobile phone holder in wrong location) can be a failure but would not be a good indicator for lack of quality.
That is bad. One issue seems to be that brakes of electric cars can get issues over time as they are not used enough (because instead of true braking the regenerative recuperation is used).
Good though: If you are in an accident Teslas are the safest car one can buy
> The Tesla Model Y achieved the highest overall weighted score of any vehicle assessed by ANCAP in 2025, recording strong performance across all areas of occupant protection and active safety technology.
"Most of the issues involve critical components like brakes, lights, and suspension. Many cars fail because of play in the steering or faulty axles. These are problems rarely seen at the same level in competitors like Volkswagen or Hyundai."
I agree that this decision is insane and the whole Optimus/xAI bullshit is tiring, especially with the shareholders actually voting against the xAI investment, but you should try today's FSD. It's genuinely good and shouldn't be discarded wholesale because the guy sucks.
The problem is not how well Tesla's FSD works, compared to other FSD from other manufacturers.
The problem is that Musk has been promising it for almost 10 years and it is still not sufficiently stable to be rolled out and relied upon by car owners.
FSD is only actually "ready" in terms of the whole "don't need to own a car for personal transport" when there can be passengers and no driver.
When Mom can dispatch the family car to pick up the kids from school.
If Tesla's FSD existed in isolation, it would be a fantastic breakthrough that signposted the future.
If.
It doesn't exist in isolation. The competition isn't just from the American firms, but also European and Chinese, and it isn't really possible to overlook Musk himself given both his long history of Musk over-promising and under-delivering, deflecting blame.
Even the current release isn't what Musk was talking hopefully about a decade ago, e.g.:
Our goal is, and I feel pretty good about this goal, that we'll be able to do a demonstration drive of full autonomy all the way from LA to New York, from home in LA to let's say dropping you off in Times Square in New York, and then having the car go park itself, by the end of next year. Without the need for a single touch, including the charger.
Likewise, based on a video I saw recently from someone reproducing Tesla's 2016 "Paint It Black" drive, Tesla's AI is only now around the performance level that they faked in 2016.
Don't get me wrong, that level was impressive… just, the world isn't isolated developments.
Tesla's Full Self-Driving (FSD) is officially classified as a Level 2 advanced driver-assistance system (ADAS). Despite its advanced capabilities, it requires the human driver to remain fully attentive, monitor the environment, and be ready to take control immediately.
So it's literally nothing special compared to other manufacturers. I am happy to argue that's it's a better Level 2 than most others, sure. But it's still just that. No magic, no bullshitty "by 2017 the car will drive itself from New York to Los Angeles". No it hasn't and no it won't.
Yet he's still doing less damage than others chasing the AI bubble, as competition is growing in the EV market.
Meanwhile, RIP Windows, Google Search, and maybe the entire games industry, maybe even then end of affordable home computing and being forced to rent computing power from 'the cloud'.
Google search? They already have an AI assistant at the top of every search result.
Google is winning the AI race. They did with self driving and they are doing it with LLMs. They are sitting back quietly not making noise and then massively rocking the status quo regularly.
I suspect they are going to do similar in the field of quantum computing.
For some reason my Youtube echo chamber is trying to convince me that BYD makes so many cars but cannot sell them. It's really bizarre. Other things it's trying to convince me of "Don't get an electric car. Period", "Ukraine won. Done deal", "Trump is devastated" about something else every day. Yes I do want the latter two to be true and it's playing on that but I don't get the BYD thing.
BYD is selling a lot of cars, but they're also making a lot more cars than they can sell at sticker price in China, as does every other Chinese car company. This oversupply leads to all kinds of distortions, like dealerships registering cars as "sold" to make their sales targets and then selling those brand-new cars as "used" at a discount. https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/local-...
Maybe your YouTube echo chamber additionally thinks that this will cause BYD to collapse, but I doubt that. There are about a hundred Chinese EV manufacturers in worse financial shape, who're likely to go bankrupt first, which should reduce oversupply enough for BYD to survive.
I’m sure I’ve missed plenty of others, but I could miss some 18 $50B automakers, and Tesla would still be worth more than all of them combined.
If Tesla was valued fairly, it would probably be at the tune of $5B. But I’ll never bet against it, because the markets can remain irrational for longer than I can remain solvent. And for some unbeknownst to me reason, the markets value Tesla as a hot tech company, not a 3rd rate automaker, which is what it actually is.
And to add insult to injury, even GM Super Cruise is widely renowned as better and safer than Tesla’s current “FSD”.
I think you're totally wrong on this. Tesla didn't waste the first mover advantage. They benefitted from it whilst it existed, but Electric vehicles turned into a commodity, which was entirely expected and there's no moat.
You've explained yourself why it would be untenable for Musk to pursue becoming the biggest car manufacturer in the world - if he succeeded in that goal... he would have succeded in shrinking the value of the company significantly.
It's pure logic that Tesla has to pursue bets that would justify billion dollar valuations and being a car company isn't that.
> It's pure logic that Tesla has to pursue bets that would justify billion dollar valuations and being a car company isn't that.
But it's make-believe. Tesla is a car manufacturer. They haven't shipped anything else other than cars. And they even suck at making cars these days. Tesla Semi? All but dead. The new roadster? Also dead. Full Self Driving? Doesn't exist. Robotaxis? Even if they got them to work, at this point the brand is too toxic for widespread adoption of those.
They could have persisted at being a disruptive car manufacturer and still held a several hundred billion dollar valuation. Now they are a very mediocre car manufacturer, with their only actual success being conning everyone into believing that they are a bleeding-edge tech company so their $1.5Bn valuation seems justified.
Everything tends toward commodification in a hyper-competitive, hyper-connected world. The only variable is time... and this "time" keeps shrinking.
As commodification accelerates, consolidation follows. In the current landscape, where private capital and state power are deeply entangled under the banner of national security, this consolidation no longer stays economic. It becomes geopolitical.
The end result... it translates to not just corporate monopolies, but geo-monopolies... enforced not by markets alone, but by coercion, conflict, and control over resources.
Coming up next: Tesla to end production of all cars and sell only NFT/Crypto with pictures of Cybertruck going to the moon/mars. This is the only company which provides Speculation as a Service. With a complete monopoly on SPaaS, the market cap will skyrocket to $20 Trillion. Elon will be given Nobel peace prize for saving mankind from itself as well as physics.
The next shoe to drop will be shifting Model Y production from Fremont to Austin. Fremont will make Model 3s. Austin will make Model Ys and Robotaxis/2s. Cybertruck will be canceled. None of the Tesla plants will be making robots at any scale for many years.
If they actually worked right now, the demand would be high. Demand is certainly high for Waymos. Even if they worked worse than a Waymo I think the demand would still be very high. But it's hard to tell if (or when) it will work well enough to actually be a real product.
The question is what 'high' means in context of revenue.
Uber, the globally available taxi company, is valued 8 times less than tesla. If you are now able to kill all the costs for the taxi driving and reduce the cost for the car also, how much revenue is left?
Robotaxi has to be cheaper than a normal taxi to kill taxis. The margin of that company can't be that much more than a company like uber.
And uber itself will also invest in this, as every other car company. XPeng and co everyone who is building or working on this, will not just idly looking and waiting for tesla to just take 'whatever this cake' will look like.
For me it becomes a complet game changer if it becomes so reliable so extrem reliable, that i can order a car at night, a fresh bed / couch is then in the car and i can lie down while it drives me a few hundred kilometers away.
Teslas Robotaxi has to be cheaper than a taxi with a human and i don't think they will be able to have a lot higher revenue per ride than uber. Not 9x
And if Tesla starts to deliver a robotaxi, all of this revenue has to be shared between taxis, uber, Tesla, Waimo, Zoox, Rimac, Cruise, Baidu, WeRide, ...
So how huge is the market for Tesla to be valuated 9x higher than Uber?
We can even combine a big car company, a robotics company, a solar roof company, battery storage company, ETruck and a robotaxi company and STILL don't get to the same valuation than Tesla currently has.
Waymo is already there, just needs to scale and they are already cooperating with Uber.
>public transit
Unless Musk develops the shrink ray it will never compete with actual high throughput public transit, for the same reason if jets flew themselves we wouldn't commute by air. The cost of drivers per fare is less than in a private car, so the benefits for a bus are lesser. Modern metros are already autonomous.
Also the US is essentially the only country with failed public transit, outside of Africa. If he thinks he can expand his robo taxi fleet to China or Europe or hell even Russia he's got screws loose
Early on in Uber's life, I went to a presentation they held where they showed there was a U shaped curve by income of who used Uber. Upper middle class people used them as discretionary entertainment vehicles but Uber had a substantial lower class population using them as necessary transport when working graveyard shifts in locations public transit didn't go.
So yes, there's a surprising contingent of people who commute to work every single working day using hire cars.
> Upper middle class people used them as discretionary entertainment vehicles but Uber had a substantial lower class population using them as necessary transport when working graveyard shifts in locations public transit didn't go.
This is information that suggests that Uber does not compete with public transit
When I was a child visiting my grandma in a large city in England, we would often take the bus to the supermarket, but use a taxi to come back with the shopping. In the 1990s some local taxi company even had a special phone by the supermarket entrance with a single button to dial to request one.
I think my grandma could easily afford this, but there would have been others considering dragging the shopping onto the bus.
Just a guess but she probably would have taken the buss back if you weren't there? Like, she wouldn't want to bore you waiting for the buss or try to time it shopping with a kid.
I think it was the weight of the shopping. My food would have increased what needed to be carried, but I was too young to be much use carrying it.
The point is taxis supplement and can replace public transport for low-income or unable-to-drive people in some situations — not necessarily every day.
Unless you're truly car sharing with a bunch of other people going the same way, I don't see how that makes sense. You have to wait for the car to arrive and you're paying a premium for it.
Most wouldn't because it's expensive. But at scale automated vehicles should be dramatically less expensive, in the range of 50-60¢/mi conservatively, and at that level it is going to be quite compelling to a lot of people since it's a private vehicle (no taxi driver) and it's reasonably affordable, a 1 seat ride, etc.
It's possible they'll be even cheaper but that range is the cost according to the IRS of operating a typical vehicle all in, and that seems like a reasonable guess of the cost of an autonomous electric vehicle with far lower probability of crash than a human (all the savings basically going to profit margin).
At ~60¢/mi, there'd be a lot of people who would save money on balance using autonomous taxis to get everywhere vs owning a private vehicle (10k mi/yr would cost only ~$6k/yr, a pretty low cost of ownership/use for a private vehicle).
I just calculated it for 40 cents per mi and just the basic commute to my company would cost already 40 euros.
But I calculated traveling 2 times a week, of course at the commute time everyone else commutes and public transport costs 50 Euros per month.
My company car though costs 200 Euros + 100 Euros energy.
Im pretty sure cybertaxi can't and will not provide 40 cents / mi in high demand times, for middle class paying more mone for the convinince of having your own car is still cheap and if i need to do anything further away like any trip, it will be expensive again.
And all of these cybertaxis have to live somewere.
First of all, some people do commute via ride hailing apps, yes. Second of all, transportation is a much bigger category than simply taking people to and from work.
To what extent by your estimation do taxis compete with public transit in New York City? The comment I was responding to said that New York City is obvious proof that taxis do, in fact, compete with public transit. That is what is being discussed here.
demand for any robotaxis will be high. Just look at the number of Uber drivers whom the robotaxis will replace. Plus leased robotaxis or personal/reserved ones - whatever shape it'd take replacing at least some percentage of personal cars.
There is only a "small" issue - to make those robotaxis, i.e. the self-driving system for them. Almost 20 years in, Google/Waymo is way ahead of everybody and is still not there yet (i believe we will get there anyday now - which maybe next year or in 10 years - especially giving all the avalanche of investment in AI. Though i'd have expected that 4+ years in we'd see a lot of autonomous platforms/weapons in Ukraine, yet it hasn't happen too yet)
Nothing prevents the drivers to long-term lease a robocar like a personal vehicle and send it to work for Uber during the time when they don't need it.
Currently an Uber driver can drive at any given moment only one car for Uber. With robocars, a driver can invest in 2, 3 or more robocars and send them to work for Uber. Similar to how people buy multiple properties to rent out on AirBnB.
The refresh would need large investment. And it seems that S/X weren't selling that well to warrant such an investment. Just looking around - SV, a key market for Tesla - everybody buys 3 and Y, not S and X. In some sense it seems that 3/Y cannibalized S/X.
While that's true, S/X were considered luxury vehicles, 3/Y mainstream and they far, FAR outsold the S/X. In most cases, volume trumps individual prices.
Of course, that doesn't mean they had to discontinue those lines.
Maybe I’m just naive enough, because I love cars and progress, but I think you agree that he really showed our whole small world that EV can exist and work. Everyone laughed, no one believed it will work and here he still is rich and we have Teslas everywhere. Driving, not killing more people than other brands.
I don't even think it is correct. Teslas as a whole have twice the fatality rate [1] per billion miles as the industry overall and the model Y has a rate 4x the industry average, but that can't overwhelm the fact that there are too few Teslas on the road to make that 2x or 4x turn into more total fatalities.
A quote from the original study [1], in which Porsche 911 is the 4th on the list
“The models on this list likely reflect a combination of driver behavior and driving conditions, leading to increased crashes and fatalities.”
I would like to remind you that Tesla's least powered vehicle has around 300HP and needs ~7s to go from 0 to 100km/h. Musk is a moron but Teslas are still good and safe vehicles.
This kind of maybe made sense for a while their revenue was growing at a very fast pace but now that its stagnant/falling they are no different to any other car company.
The stock is priced on expectations of how many humanoid robots they might sell over the next decade.
Those expectations in turn treat humanoid robotics as if Tesla is the only game in town, when Tesla's Optimus is not yet available for purchase and other companies already ship.
ChatGPT, for all its flaws, does actually exist and definitely isn't just a remote-control-based illusion, and some people even pay for it.
Optimus, the only thing we can be sure is real is the hardware, which is the least interesting part. But even if they really are running just on software without remote control, the one and only thing they've shown in any public demo that would actually be impressive, was voice comprehension in a noisy environment.
While you're correct on the one hand, Tesla made EVs feasible and mainstream, did the investments and caused a rolling effect of worldwide investments in e.g. batteries and EVs, and government subsidies that also made investing in EVs more attractive to competitors.
Besides EVs, Tesla's long term revenue could very well be in the supercharger network, too. It's not as exciting as self driving cars, but the oil companies have been the most valuable companies / stocks worldwide without being exciting like that. I mean I don't think EV charging will be anywhere near as big as oil because it doesn't involve nearly as much infrastructure or international trade, but it's still big, especially if governments refocus on replacing ICEs with EVs.
(the focus has been let go because the subsidies were too popular and expensive)
> The unnamed employees secretly conferred with a political advocacy group about a request to match Social Security data with state voter rolls to "find evidence of voter fraud and to overturn election results in certain States," the filing said. It remains unclear whether any data actually went to this group.
“Maybe you do not care much about the future of the Republican Party. You should. Conservatives will always be with us. If conservatives become convinced that they can not win democratically, they will not abandon conservatism. The will reject democracy.” —- David Frum
What you responded to was a quote of a request that claimed that was what they were looking for. Whether it was a good-faith request or they used the data for only that, etc is the real question.
And if they did find something, it would obviously have been in court a long time ago.
>Also I was told there is no voter fraud. Is that just because nobody’s looking?
I was told you haven't raped anyone, is that because we haven't looked into it?
Unless there's evidence that something happened when decisions need to be made we assume it didn't.
It's so sad an engineer like you believe there was widespread fraud in the 2020 election even after all the investigations. It speaks volumes to your abilities in all aspects of life.
> Without some big jumps in battery tech, EVs are going to be difficult to sell without subsidies.
The actual sales figures show otherwise, but sure, there's still a lot of uncertainty with regards to batteries / range, I can imagine even moreso in the US. Traveled to Austria a while ago in an EV (~1000 kilometers), we had to stop 3x on the way, but the battery was good for another 2.5 hours of driving after a coffee. I keep hearing that "solid state batteries are around the corner" and they will solve all problems with capacity and safety / fire risk, apparently. I'll just sit and wait patiently, it'll take years before their production capacity is on par with current battery tech.
Musk would love to be selling several billion dollars per year of model S/X sales, the issue is they aren’t that competitive with other cars in the luxury segment thus the falling sales numbers.
Tesla’s doesn’t really have a complex strategy at this point, they are getting squeezed out of the high end by legacy automakers where their lower cost batteries don’t matter as much. They are absolutely fucked on the low end as soon as Chinese cars enter the picture.
So self driving is really the only option to sell any long term upside to keep the stock from tanking. It’s not a very convincing argument, but you play the hand your dealt.
> getting squeezed out of the high end by legacy automakers where their lower cost batteries don’t matter as much. They are absolutely fucked on the low end as soon as Chinese cars enter the picture.
The deep irony here is that after ~15 years of trying ti differentiate from the legacy American automakers, they land in a very similar competitive position. Chinese EVs are in the process of running the table outside the protectionist markets of the EU + US/Canada.
Eventually those protective barriers will fall as they protect a relatively small number of citizens by taxing the majority. It remains to be seen whether the US and European domestic producers will survive.
If they are eating into model X or S sales it obviously counts here.
Porsche, Audi, BMW, Mercedes-Benz, Genesis, and Cadillac are all competitive in different ways. Stat wise someone buying the electric G-Wagon is making a poor decision, but swagger is a selling point which very much costs Tesla sales.
Cadillac’s approach of a huge dumb battery powering a huge heavy vehicle may not be ideal for the average use case, but customers are going to prioritize different things. One SUV just can’t be the best solution to every lifestyle.
And yet Chinese EV's are flying out of their factories, well, a few are - most are self driving out to the shipping yards.
This despite the 2025 support by the Chinese state for the Chines EV industry now being almost nothing.
By contrast, defenders of China could point out that the data show that subsidies as a percentage of total sales have declined substantially, from over 40% in the early years to only 11.5% in 2023, which reflects a pattern in line with heavier support for infant industries, then a gradual reduction as they mature.
In addition, they could note that the average support per vehicle has fallen from $13,860 in 2018 to just under $4,600 in 2023, which is less than the $7,500 credit that goes to buyers of qualifying vehicles as part of the U.S.’s Inflation Reduction Act.
You should also factor in lax human rights enforcement in China (which acts like a subsidy essentially in effect and is not factored in these calculations):
I should point out that is not my work, and dates from 2023. If you follow the link to the work quoted you might be able to contact the authors and pass them your thoughts.
You'd expect subsidies to drop as supply chains mature and economies of scale kick in. What about subsidies to inputs like electricity, aluminum, batteries, etc?
How come the US has a higher rate of struggling with groceries (12.2% US vs 8.5% EU), healthcare (44% US vs. 18.6% for costs) EU, education costs, etc.?
> they would also buy more expensive cars.
Price != quality. European cars have better safety standards, as well as being cheaper to own and run. American cars… the vibe I got from them on trips was the expectation for them to serve as an additional air-conditioned entertainment room that just happened to be on wheels, whereas the European ones are mostly a mode of transport unless you're specifically into luxury brands.
> How come the US has a higher rate of struggling with groceries (12.2% US vs 8.5% EU), healthcare (44% US vs. 18.6% for costs) EU, education costs, etc.?
Reliability of statistical data. The more totalitarian a state is, the more out of touch with reality it can be in its statistics. If we look at the statistics provided by North Korea, they have zero on all the points mentioned. Europe isn't there yet, but it's moving at full speed. Their cars even safer and cheaper to own and run than European ones.
> The more totalitarian a state is, the more out of touch with reality it can be in its statistics.
That's more of an American problem than an EU one at the moment.
We're not the ones shooting unarmed protesters in the head ten times after removing their legally owned gun, nor faking arrest photos, etc.
Even before that, our leaders have not* called for the death penalty to be used against politicians reminding troops of their existing obligations to not follow illegal orders.
Even before that, the US government shutdown at end of last year means some economic data was never collected at all.
Even before that, DOGE having Musk at the helm had obvious conflicts of interest with regards to e.g. ongoing investigations against Tesla.
* to my knowledge, but TBH wouldn't be surprised if Orban has, but also Hungary is to the EU as, IDK Wyoming perhaps, is to the USA.
My dad found it extremely amusing that Elon said "we just have to solve the 'AI problem' and we'll have robots doing shopping for us", or something like that. I can't remember the exact verbiage, but that was the gist.
The word "just" is doing a lot of work there. Going by that logic: We "just" need to figure out cold fusion to have effectively infinite energy. We "just" need to develop warp drives to travel across the galaxy. We "just" need to figure out the chemo problem to cure cancer.
It is like me at the climbing gym: "This problem is too hard for me, let's work on a harder one instead, then I at least look cool while failing."
"Since we failed on self-driving since 2016, robotaxis since 2020 (1 million on the road), and ASI since 2023, we might as well start on failing on robots now".
I find it amusing listening to his Q1 earnings calls; every year the same exact blabber of robots everywhere 'end of the year', self driving tesla's everywhere after the summer, mars next year etc. Every Bloody Year. The real clever thing of this guy, no matter how smart/not/nazi/whatever he is, is the fact that investors KEEP throwing money in even though the major ones are on those earning calls every year for a decade already and of course that these stocks are not cratering.
But I recommend listening to those calls, start 5 years back; because on reddit but also here, you get wide eyed awestruck people who say 'ow optimus is december this year! ow self driving everything in september!'.
And why would we even need or want robots shopping for us? I mean, most of us. For some disabled individuals it could be a benefit. For everyone else, it seems like the height of laziness and absurdity.
Its classic Elon over-promising. Problem with robots is that they are useless without AI, while cars can be driven by a human, so as long as controls work and range is good they are viable
Interview in Davos. The “right” has the same touch than the “just” here:
> MUSK: Yeah. But I think self-driving cars is essentially a solved problem at this point, right? And Tesla’s rolled out a sort of robo-taxi service in a few cities, and will be very, very widespread by the end of this year within the U.S. And then we hope to get supervised full self-driving approval in Europe, hopefully next month.
MUSK: Yeah. But I think self-driving cars is essentially a solved problem at this point, right? And Tesla’s rolled out a sort of robo-taxi service in a few cities, and will be very, very widespread by the end of this year within the U.S.
He said that would happen in 2025. And probably earlier, too.
Ah, see, no, and this is why you'll never be rich^. The rich people don't ever listen to that "if I tried that people would call bullshit" voice. They just try it. And try it again. And keep trying it. And then they become CEOs or President or whatever. They literally just keep doing it. It doesn't matter how untethered what they're saying is from reality. It doesn't matter that it's pure bullshit. They just keep going and pick up enough followers and the rest snowballs from there. Twas ever thus. How do you think every cult or religion to every form has come about? How do you think every dictator has come to power? They vehemently, psychotically ignored "if I tried that" and just tried it and kept repeating it until the cognitive dissonance wore down into oblivion and the pathological washed over them.
^Sociopathic rich, I mean. I'm sure you're doing fine.
I don't dispute any of that; I really hate plugging my own stuff but I actually wrote a blog post about a similar topic last night [1]. TL;DR Billionaires are sociopaths who act sociopathic and then define anything that doesn't benefit their sociopathy as a "disorder".
It's not that I'm surprised that they constantly lie, I'm just surprised anyone falls for it. Like, we were supposed to have "full self driving by next year", every year as far back as 2018, if I remember correctly. You'd think after the third time that FSD didn't happen, people would say "maybe this guy is actually full of shit".
I am also certain given time this problem is achievable but the problem is what we expect after that ????? mass unemployment or we just convert all human into robot repairer ???? what the end goal there
We "just" need to figure out the terraforming problem then we can all move to Mars and be interplanetary explorers. Imagine how cool it would be to have corporate leaders who had vision--environmentally friendly automobiles, cheap space travel, etc.--without the clammy snake oil grifter bullshit. Reality is cool AF. The things that are actually achievable are amazing. We don't need to spout nonsense to do great things. We don't need "AGI" (whatever that might be) to do neat things with machine learning. The Jetsons is a cartoon. Trying to make it real is dumb.
The Mars obsession absolutely blows me away. Like, he's obviously read KSR's Red Mars. He's obviously aware of the conditions out there. Mars is a fuckin' bummer. It is absolutely hostile to human life. Sure, we'll land people there, and maybe set up some sort of station if we really want to throw a few trillion dollars away from actual problems here on earth... but it's not going to be pleasant. Not anytime, ever. The gravity sucks. The dust and fines suck. The storms suck. And last for months. The temperatures suck. There's no "outside". There's no trivial way to generate power at scale. There's no magnetosphere, so you'll get cancer. The soil is poisonous.
Elon's stuck with this 12-year-old-boy absurdity about "becoming interplanetary to save the species" as if Mars could ever be a practical lifeboat when we inevitably drive the planet into the ground or a meteor hits. It's... absurd, puerile fantasy.
Doing such seemingly impossible things have been what humans have been doing. The tech developed for Mars would definitely influence our Earth society. Hard to say how and when, but it has been historically the case. I think instead of spending billions on election influence campaign, spending that on Mars has a better impact to society.
I think there's value in space exploration even for its own sake, but I think it's utterly idiotic to think that we're going to realistically be able to terraform Mars in the next century if ever.
Even if I do think it's worth exploring space, including Mars, I think it's silly to assume that it's going to be a way to guarantee the permanence of humanity.
This is precisely my point. Folly. (But the knock-on effects of the space race and exploration and on and on are valid and I'm a big space fan... it's just that caging it as some sort of potential lifeboat beggars belief.
Yeah I don't buy this announcement. Converting their huge Fremont facility to just making humanoid robots? Do they have some large buyer or something? I'm skeptical.
I suspect it's going dormant for a couple years and then he'll say "Hey, this robot thing isn't working out, so we're closing the facility." He doesn't have any desire to stay in California.
> Also, there are at least 18 humanoid robots good enough to have a Youtube video.
Agreed, thing is the robot hardware isn't the hard part anymore, the top ten robots are all sufficient to be transformative if they had good enough AI.
My bet is on Google/Gemini being the first to market from what I've seen so far.
Boston dynamics is a leader in getting robots to do useful niche work in well bounded environments, but that's yesterday's news.
We can kill robots without remorse, and they're likely going to be worse than a human agent at most things for a few years. Not a bad timeline for them to waste their time on.
As insane as American politics is "I can blast robots on my property" has exactly the right amount of crank appeal to be possibly the final 90/10 issue
What if they're private property though? Historically, the state has always valued private property over human lives, so the response could be even more brutal.
That is true of press, weld, and paint stages, which gives you a chassis and nothing else. It is absolutely not lights out for "final assembly" which despite the name is how massive amounts of the car comes together.
Robots are great at the bulk movement required for sticking sheet metal into huge stamps as well as repeatably welding the output of these stamps together. Early paint stages happens by dipping this whole chassis and later obviously benefits highly from environmental control (paint section is usually certain staff only to enter.)
But with this big painted chassis you still need to mount the engine/transmission, the brake and suspension assembly needs installing, lots of connectors need plugging in for ABS- and supporting all the connectors that will need plugging in is a lot of cabling that needs routing around this chassis. These tasks are very difficult for robots to do, so they tend to be people with mechanical assists, e.g. special hoisting system that takes the weight of engine/trans while the operators (usually two on a stage like this, this all happens on a rolling assembly line) drag it into place, and do the bolting.
Trim line is also huge, insert all these floppy roof liners, install the squishy plastic dashboard, the seats, carpets, door plastic trim, plug in all your speakers and infotainment stuff, again the output of the automated stages is literally the shell of a car, and robots are extremely bad at doing precise clipping together of soft touch plastics or connection of tiny cables. Windshield install happens here too, again these things are mechanically assisted for worker ergonomics but far from automated.
Each of these subassemblies also can be very complex and require lots of manual work too but that usually happens at OEM factories not at the assembly factory. Automation in these staffed areas mostly is the AGVs which follow lines on the floor to automatically deliver kanban boxes which are QR tagged (the origin of the QR code, fun fact) to ensure JIT delivery of the parts needed for each pitch.
It is far from lights out even in the most modern assembly plant and I think it will be a long time until that is true. The amount of poka-yoking that goes into things like connector design so there is an audible "click" when something is properly inserted for example- making a robot able to perform that task at anywhere near the quality of even a young child will take vast amounts of advancement in artificial intelligence and sensing. These are not particularly skilled jobs but the robotics skill required is an order of magnitude more than we can accomplish with today's technology.
Tesla is a meme stock in a similar manner to GME. You cannot bet against them even if they have incredibly unsure future prospectives because there are too many believers who will buy any dips.
That might be a little extreme. Tesla is making electric cars and robots. These are very much things of the future.
GameStop is buying and selling used games, which is becoming impossible as consoles keep pushing for digital games.
GameStop requires a major shift in their business model to stay relevant, while Tesla just needs to hope the public doesn’t reject the idea of electrics cars out of stubbornness or politics.
While there is a lot of hype baked into both stocks, it seems like hype with Tesla is founded in more reality than the GameStop hype.
They’ve been overvalued for a very very long time. And then the head of the company decided to alienate as many people as possible. All while pouring a ton of resources into a product that very few people want instead of saner things.
I always wonder why those robots have to be humanoid.
I swear I don't need a humanoid robot, give me a proper autonomous robot that cleans your house and I'm more than happy. Could be 40 cm tall, and look like a box, I don't care.
But this is all based on the idea we need generic robots when we really need specialized ones.
It's like skipping making kitchen blenders and vacuum cleaners and instead building a robot that will be mixing stuff manually or using a broom.
Manufacturing, where 90% of the process is generally automated has countless specialized ones. It would not make sense to put generic ones there, because humans really are doing very specific work in manufacturing.
I think the technology is just not there to make the business case for humanoid robots. It’s like the VR. Everyone would like to use VR but the tech is just not good enough. Same with FSD. The robots may be 10-20 years away from actual being good enough. If Elon can trick people for 20 years like he did with FSD then he may have a business case for humanoid robots
I have no particular idea whether there's a business case for humanoid robots or not. I would love to have the argument set out well. Perhaps you'd indulge my curiosity.
I don't understand why my question was so controversial. Oftentimes on this website I feel like everyone is tapped into some polarizing news source that I am not, and so when I ask some (to my mind) benign question it's actually a secret tripwire that everyone is super polarized on and so rather than engaging in my question they all just tell me I am a moron. But I am seriously just asking a question here.
My layman's opinion is that I would happily pay a lot of money to have a robot help me around the house: fold my clothes, do the dishes, whatever dumb menial labor. That seems like a business case to me, unless someone is going to tell me I'm the only one in the world who could want that (but I doubt it).
OP said:
> Humanoid robots? Ain’t nobody made the business case for that. It is pure vibes.
I can't make sense of this. Are you really telling me you wouldn't pay any amount of money to do menial housework? If not, why not?
> Are you really telling me you wouldn't pay any amount of money to do menial housework? If not, why not?
This is called having a live-in maid or a cleaning service. Even in the first-world, where there isn't a disfranchised rural population to provide cheap labor to the middle class (e.g. Philippines, most of LATAM 20 years ago) the service will be cheaper than the price of a vaporware bot [0]. Now, you might say the droid is cheaper if you want a live-in maid in HCOL area, but have in mind that this thing barely can fold clothes and fill a dishwasher (an actual domestic bot). Also it sometimes is actually a dude controlling it remotely.
We would need bots of the level of that awful I Robot movie with Will Smith.
> My layman's opinion is that I would happily pay a lot of money to have a robot help me around the house: fold my clothes, do the dishes, whatever dumb menial labor. That seems like a business case to me, unless someone is going to tell me I'm the only one in the world who could want that (but I doubt it).
The day that:
- displaced workforce issue is solved
- they cost less than 20k everything included, base model
- do all the processing locally in their HW
- are smaller and lighter than a human being (but can reach higher places)
- last 10 years at least
I will definitely buy one. I don't think I'm going to see this in my lifetime though (I'm in my 40's).
Like, more than the cost of your house? For something that can't do those things right and has to be supervised? To a company that can't deliver product on time?
> My layman's opinion is that I would happily pay a lot of money to have a robot help me around the house: fold my clothes, do the dishes, whatever dumb menial labor.
Then why don't you hire a helper for that?
You just said you'd pay a lot of money, so money doesn't seem to be an issue. What is then?
> Are you really telling me you wouldn't pay any amount of money to do menial housework? If not, why not?
Do you own a Roomba? I don't. It's a huge liability and doesn't do the cleaning I want out of it, even at a sub-$1000 price point. The humanoid robot is clunkier, more of a liability, and will still refuse to do certain tasks.
The business case for humanoid robots is simple... for lack of a better term, they're robot slaves. Companies or governments can buy them once, pay relatively minimal maintenance fees, and have an army of workers that don't need a salary, never take breaks, never complain, never unionize, and do things faster and more accurately than most humans ever will. Any company that can move to robots, will move to robots.
Imagine the profits companies will have when they can eliminate, or drastically reduce, their single largest expense... payroll. Not only the base pay, but 401K match, insurance, payroll taxes, etc. Poof... gone.
It has? I don't think every little thing has. Do I want a robot that has to lift the couch to clean under it, or do I want a robot that can get under the couch?
The part that often gets left unsaid or glossed over is what the transition period looks like. At most we get some Underpants Gnomes claim about unlimited abundance without actually engaging with the substance of what happens if this technology gets built and deployed. What do you imagine the political and economic impact will be if a huge portion of the population is left without jobs and the political reality hasn't caught up to the speed with which the technology gets deployed?
Oh no, but Elon Musk tells us that out of the kindness of his heart we're going to have unlimited abundance. The same man responsible for taking away aid from thousands of the poorest people in the world through DOGE's interruption of PEPFAR and USAID.
With a single sentence from him, he could start saving thousands of lives without impacting his wealth in the slightest. He could do that right now.
No, I’m saying they haven’t made the case. Or at least the case that is being presented and sold to investors is complete BS.
For example, I work in deep tech and pay attention to the manufacturing industry. The idea that humanoid robots will replace, streamline and revolutionize manufacturing is a joke in that community. They’ve already long since replaced the humans with CNC machines, industrial (non-humanoid) robots, and 3d printing.
The humanoid robotics craze is a lot like the crypto craze. Pure vibes and motivated reasoning. Like crypto, there is actual value there, but way out of proportion to the hype.
I mean, forget the manufacturing industry. I'd happily pay a lot of money just to have one help me with menial tasks around the house. I mean, I'd probably pay thousands for a bot that could just do the laundry. Are you saying that such a market doesn't exist?
A robot vacuum costs thousands of dollars (will about a thousand) and they don't work very. There is no way that you are going to get a machine that is orders of magnitude more complex down to that price point any time soon.
A business case is not just a matter of a willing buyer. It is a buyer and a vendor who can agree on a price that works for both. You may have agreed but the physics of the matter mean that there is nobody to take the other side.
The market exists, does it make financial sense to fill it? Are there enough johnfns out there willing to buy enough of them at high enough of a price to justify the mind-boggling capital required, not to mention the opportunity cost?
If you make a $10,000 robot that can do all of the dishes every damned household with kids in any semi-rich country will get one. A very good portion of our night is spent cleaning up after supper with just two kids, and that's time we can't spend with them. I'd even pay a subscription on top of that $10,000.
If it does laundry too? We'd easily pay $20,000, and we don't have FAANG type salaries.
Yeah, great. Except we need to unload the dishwasher every day, which takes a lot longer when you have all sorts of kid's cups and bottles. We also need to bring the dishes over, rinse them, put them in, wash the pots & pans by hand along with the high chair's detachable eating area, wash the table, wash the cooking area & counters, and then wash the sink.
A dishwasher saves a lot of time but it certainly doesn't save all of the time.
If the $10k robot only lasted 5 years that's a budget of $2k/yr. They have an expectation of someone cleaning most nights of the week. Cleaning services around me will typically charge ~$50/hr. Having someone come for ~2 hours 5x a week means $500/week. You'll blow your budget in four weeks. There are a lot more than four weeks in a year.
But let's be generous and suggest you'll actually get someone willing to come out for just one hour and work for half the pay of market rate. Sixteen weeks. Still far short of 52 weeks.
You already have machines that do the laundry. Put clothes in, they come out clean. Have you ever tried manually washing clothes? All you have to do is take them out and fold them.
For some reason I can't understand, you appear to be contorting yourself into making a totally bizarre argument (there is no valued in saved time whatsoever). You can't honestly believe that.
And yet such a HUGE amount of time is spent by families around the world (mine included) just moving laundry around in various states:
Dirty -> Sort It Yourself -> Plan Washing Chunks -> Load into Washing machine -> Yay It "Washed it For You" -> wet pile of clothes -> Unload it -> dryer -> Dryer "Dries" it For You -> Fold It Yourself -> Storage.
Now do this for a family with 2 kids that go to school. Washing is literally an hour or two of collective human time every day.
I'd pay money to rather spend that time with my kids instead of yet another useless daily chore that can be automated.
Now also apply the same logic to dishes, clearing up around the house, sorting cupboards, Driving!!, and a host of other things. The market is absolutely huge, and people are sticking their heads in the sand because they know that once this drops, humanity will reach an inflection point and all pointless manual labor will disappear, which means saying goodbye to cheap third world labor and only capital + raw resources + energy will be the only things holding back all scaling.
Humanoid robots are a lot of sizzle-- they promise all sorts of flexibility, at the cost of hugely higher cost/complexity/unreliability.
If you can scope your problem to some degree, you can probably make some purpose-built automation that won't look like a human, but will do the job competently and cheaply.
I see the demos with the robots carrying boxes and think "okay, why not just use a conveyer belt?"
Because, again, for home use we don't want a laundry robot, a dish washing robot, a cleaning robot, etc. We kind of have those (laundry machine, dishwasher, Roomba-types) but they all have big limitations. What people want is something that can do everything a human can do, so it can put away those dishes, wash a pan, clean the table, counters, etc. We've already scoped the problem and a humanoid-ish robot is probably the best option to do those things.
Well for home use you probably also want a robot that won’t accidentally murder your pet, injure your children, break itself and/or your prized possessions by doing the wrong thing, etc etc etc.
These are unsolved problems for robotics. There is a reason that most industrial robots work behind guards or in very constrained areas with use cases that are 100% on rails and stringently tested.
The idea that if you just make a robot in a human shape all these cease to be problems is magical thinking. We are fare from knowing that a humanoid-ish robot is the best option to do any of these things because we have no idea what it would take for it to do these things safely other than to say it would take technology that we currently don’t have.
The laundry bot would probably be a box with some some 6DOF chopstick like positioners doing “cloth origami” to fold clothes. No need for an overkill 2kW humanoid.
The market for that exist but the execution to get that product is beyond hard. Compare full self driving after all these years where are we? It’s still not a real thing. It’s still just a limited experiment. The cars have only speed and steering angle to manage. What do you think about “full self driving robots”? There is a business case for them but in the near term you cannot make one good enough for the tasks you want. Safety is a big issue on top of making the robot useful. You don’t want it hurt anyone.
I responded to someone saying "Ain’t nobody made the business case for that. It is pure vibes." When I point one out, all the responses shift the goal posts, as you are doing, to say execution is incredibly hard or Tesla is far behind or whatever. But that's not what I was saying, nor what I was responding to.
You didn’t make the business case though. How big is that market? How many units could be sold, at what price? What ongoing operating and maintenance costs?
There was a "business case" for $25,000 EVs before China did it, and Tesla conveniently pivoted. It's 2026, anyone who's watching the game knows the score.
> Tesla is trying to create self driving taxis to make the rest of the auto industry obsolete.
This is a pretty baffling take. Most people in the world operate their own cars, and even if taxis were free, a large portion of them would continue to operate their own cars because it's convenient.
Taxis also don't replace a good chunk of the new vehicle market. People driving fleet trucks aren't going to work out of taxis. The top selling vehicles in the USA are pickup trucks, and it isn't even close.
Lastly, even if they succeed, competition will catch up and the market will be saturated.
In 20 years, people will still be buying the humble Civic. While the next 20 years at Tesla will probably be a string of market failures and wacky promises of personal space craft or some shit.
> Lastly, even if they succeed, competition will catch up and the market will be saturated.
Waymo is already in the lead, and OEMs will be beating down Waymo's door to license a simplified Driver stack if L3 autonomy becomes a sales-driver (ha!)
Edit: Waymo already has strategic partnerships with Toyota and the Hyundai group, so OEMs are already further along this path than I thought
Well, check Hyundai as well. They do more than cars as well including robots(Boston Dynamics). Tesla is not doing anything special. It was the only EV someone could use but it’s no longer the case. Now it tries to go the robots way but it’s not the same as the EV was. There are tones of humanoid robot companies, some more advanced than whatever Tesla is cooking
It can happen. Its unlikely Tesla will catch up to Waymo any time soon though. Yet valuation for Tesla (relative to how much money they are making) is massively higher than Google’s. Which would make very little sense following this logic?
We're missing a part of the case though: why do you need to be a car-maker to be the vanguard for self-driving taxis?
The best case scenario for a self-driving company would be to target software and sensor solution packages that they can sell or license to other manufacturers. Such a vendor can focus on the self-driving problem and not have to bother with things like "we found a surprisingly big market niche for a 11-passenger minibus, but no platform for it" or "to sell it in the EU we need the headlights to be 5cm lower". I'd expect the margins are also a hell of a lot higher if they don't have to include two tonnes of steel with each auto-driver license they sell.
Maybe they build a small number of test mules, or just chop-shop a few off-the-shelf cars as a R&D fleet, but they hardly need to be a seven-figures-per-year manufacturer to be supplying those needs.
That's even assuming they come out green in the competition to deliver robotaxis. Right now the leading player in the US market is a company who is neither Tesla nor a legacy vehicle manufacturer. It's an adtech who started gluing the contents of a Radio Shack onto the worst cars you could possibly think of (Chrysler Pacificas and Jaguar i-Paces? Really?) and turned it into something that's an everyday thing in several major cities.
Tesla FSD story reminds me of the fracas that was early OS/2. IBM sold people 286 hardware on the promise of it running OS/2, so they had to waste a lot of effort building a 286-capable OS/2 that was clunky and almost immediately obsolete. No matter how talented Tesla's R&D team are, they're walled in by design choices made on existing vehicles (i. e. relying on cameras instead of lidar). I wonder if they'd be better off being ran as an arm's length startup to address the problem more generically, and then they can sell it to other firms if it turns out that the best solution won't work on existing Tesla hardware.
I thought it was hyperloop. I thought it was suboribital taxis. I thought it was underground taxis. I thought it was self-driving semi trucks. Or was it solar roofs? Or powerwall? Wait weren't we supposed to be on the moon again right now?
He's a bullshitter. Yea, he picks good targets, but he is entirely full of shit. The market just does not reflect this. He should have been golden parachuted onto a yacht years ago.
Tesla's sales are standing still in a growing market. Are they GameStop? Maybe not, but they still require a major shift or their competitors will leave them behind in the dirt.
This was true when Tesla was primarily in the market of making electric cars. It is not true if their business is humanoid robots: that's squarely meme stock territory.
The current administration is “rejecting the idea of electric cars out of stubbornness or politics.” See: Trump moving to withhold funding for EV chargers, terminating EV mandates and government support, etc. I don’t know what Musk is thinking by supporting this administration so steadfastly as they work hard to undermine his own efforts and initiatives.
I'm not making any specific assertions about what's in Musk's heart. I can draw some conclusions from his behaviors, actions, and words, but that's neither here nor there.
Musk got what he needed at the expense of losing some tax incentives for his customer base. He was able to shut down government investigations into him/his companies. That alone should have been worth quite a salary bump.
The only thing keeping Tesla afloat currently is tariffs and restrictions on far cheaper and far better foreign alternatives. That's not a solid foundation. It's certainly not a trillion dollar company.
The dam is breaking. We have Canada lowering tariffs and agreeing to allow the import of Chinese EVs (limited, at least to start with) and the US administration goes off on Canada for doing it because they know what it means: crumbling American influence.
South America, Africa and Asia are likely forever lost to Tesla. And European sales are tumbling.
The supercharger network will maintain some inertia for some time but only for so long.
You can see this in Tesla announcements about attempts to diversify. AI robots? I'll believe it when I see it. Robotaxis? Well you're reliant on FSD for that and you have stiff competition in Waymo and who knows what China is cooking up there.
The GP was correct: it's a meme stock. It's no longer an investment in a business. It's an investment in Elon and, more generally, an investment in the administration. There's no fundamental way to predict how that goes and on what time scale. If you want to gamble, gamble. But gamgling is what it is. And, just like Twitter, I guarantee you the people at the top won't be left holding the bag.
You can on the betting market bet against Tesla reaching their ever moving goal posts. Those same meme stock holders are so sure that FSD will come by March that they are taking the bets.
All fun and games until people game the system. Polymarket for example will frequently just bend/ignore the truth to make specific unlikely/not real outcomes happen.
There is no such thing as "meme stock." It's literally just how stock market is since forever. But every generation thinks they are so special that they have to coin new terms for the oldest things.
The Elon hate is really creating a blind spot for many people here.
You can’t just compare Tesla to a meme stock when the founder’s side gig is launching and landing orbital rockets - a feat that even the most technologically advanced nation states have failed to accomplish.
Come on people, use a little critical thinking skills.
Critical thinking might ask how the valuation of company A has any relationship to the activity of a completely separate company B (planning for its own IPO)
But I will concede the founder's other side gigs would appear to have significantly affected its sales
1. SpaceX was an exceptionally well-executed good idea, and continues to be a leader in innovation.
2. Tesla brought EVs to the mass consumer market and proved the profitability of EVs.
3. Elon Musk was essential to the success of SpaceX and Tesla.
4. Tesla now has fierce competition in the category it defined: EVs.
5. Tesla has undergone revenue and profit reduction.
6. While it experiences promise in alternate product lines, Tesla is not a market leader in robotics (Unitree, Boston Dynamics) or self-driving cars (Baidu, Waymo). Tesla reported profit growth in residential solar and residential power storage, but the revenues from these verticals are dwarfed by other segments.
7. The trend over the past decades is Elon Musk being successful at innovating in underserved parts of the market.
8. Elon Musk is not currently pursuing any underserved parts of the market.
I am confused about what Tesla is doing. They have effectively two automobile products now with one failed product (cybertruck). reading various articles about this doesn't make it more clear. Do they not want to be a car company?
The problem with being a car company is that they'd have to compete with China. It's possible, but they'd have to make additional capital investments to keep up. They've just wasted a ton of money on a failed Musk vanity project (Cybertruck) and squandered a ton of goodwill in their home market via the DOGE fiasco. Cash flow is not what it once was, and if they're going to make a big capital investment, they're probably right in looking at robots. But that strategy puts them back where they were 20 years ago, just getting started in EVs, and their cash flow will depend on cars for many years to come.
If the problem with being a car company is that they'd have to compete with China, then I have some bad news about being a robot company. China is already farther ahead in both technology and volume of humanoid robots.[0][1][2][3]
If you think of Musk companies as vehicles to extract money from state and federal governments, then everything falls into focus. Carbon credits, government launches and the Quixotic quest for Mars, and soon Tesla robots sold to the DoD and DHS. I'm only half-joking.
Fair point. It's hard to support Tesla's valuation as a car company, it may be even harder to support as a robot company. You have to wonder what might have been if they'd spent that Cybertruck money on battery research.
Market cap and it's not even close. Turns out financialisation is the classic you-get-what-you-asked-for-not-what-you-wanted of capitalism. We told the optimiser to make number go up, and number has certainly gone up. China's number? Not as up.
I think it could have gone differently if we gave our economic system something to optimise other than itself, but then we wouldn't have centibillionaires, so... swings and roundabouts I guess?
Who cares which country has a higher market cap? That's a capitalist concept, of course the capitalist country has more. I'm talking who has the more advanced technology.
China is a mixed economy with some capitalist parts and some socialist parts just like us. Their mix is just a bit more effective than our mix than our mix and they have higher scale.
It's more effective at depressing wages and at shovelling other people's money at whoever the politicians want to win. They are also much better at hiding debt -- in manufacturing companies, in banks, and in provincial governments. A lot of their successes lose money but they are awesome at hiding it and they might well outcompete Western companies and thereby cause a lot of harm.
What do you mean “hiding it”? Are you suggesting Chinas manufacturing capacity is entirely fraudulent or cooking the books? Or that the state is providing subsidies? Because if its the latter… have you seen the brouhaha over Amazon HQ2? Or seen the number of tax credits/incentives doled out by US cities to companies that “promise” jobs but don’t even deliver them? (but keep their subsidies).
China is capitalist on a state level, that's where they are winning. The US lets things get mired in red tape and special interests because nobody wants to take responsibility for growth.
In China, I imagine that if your company does something relevant to the five year initiative then you get a lot of red tape cut for you.
> CPC controls and owns production, policy, finance and even consumption levers.
These terms are useless for distinguishing anything -- what you said can be said about literally any capitalist state.
> China is one party system
This is also relatively uninteresting. There have been many countries where a single party has nominally remained in power for about as long as the CCP has. That Deng Xiaoping's coup occurred without nominally dismantling the party makes the "one party system" distinction a superficial one.
> These terms are useless for distinguishing anything -- what you said can be said about literally any capitalist state.
CPC mandates and gets seats on highest boards of companies, combines IP research across civil military, is both producer and consumer of products etc. Look at China's civil military fusion policy on the latest iteration of how they are doing this. In china there is no separate 3-4 branches of govt like in most places. CPC controls all legislative, executive, judiciary, military and private company boards and financial capital.
Again, just about everything you said applies to the U.S. state and its relations to private firms. Regardless of all that, profits accrue to private owners, investment decisions are determined by profit, and labor is hired and disciplined via market relations. All of the political relations you listed only marginally modify capitalist relations; the law of value still operates.
Making good cars. They can make cheap ones, maybe acceptable ones, but not good ones. They are not there yet. Of course, the general populace doesn’t really care, and the vast majority of the market is not driven by this, but still.
It seems counterintuitive, but this helped Tesla which is why Musk championed it. Basically when that tax credit came out, a bunch of Tesla owners had their cars underwater - loans were more than new cars were selling for and depreciation thru the roof. Plus the tax credit helped their competitors. Now that the credit is gone, Tesla owners are closer to being in the black on their cars and it also caused Ford and GM to cut EV production by I believe 100%. Win win for Tesla.
> It seems counterintuitive, but this helped Tesla which is why Musk championed it. Basically when that tax credit came out, a bunch of Tesla owners had their cars underwater - loans were more than new cars were selling for and depreciation thru the roof. Plus the tax credit helped their competitors.
This makes sense if your business strategy is to get existing Tesla owners to trade their current Teslas to buy new Teslas, rather than to convert non-Tesla owners to buy new Teslas. The latter market is WAY bigger and the tax credit was a huge carrot enticing them to look at a brand they'd never try otherwise in a market where ICE vehicle prices were skyrocketing.
As it stands, there are a ton of Tesla owners who bought their cars with the tax refund, are underwater on them, bitter about it and/or dislike Elon personally, and will never buy a Tesla again. This is churn and brand destruction without a corresponding top of funnel increase.
In contrast, the supercharger network was significant not just for the convenience factor for Tesla owners, but also for the fact that it was a social signal that Tesla was serious about growing the addressable market of EV owners generally by not just making a decent car but making the "EV lifestyle" seem possible to non-EV owners.
If Tesla actually is happy that the tax credit is going away, that seems like they're acknowledging that they're satisfied taking shrinking share of a shrinking market, which is their prerogative, but it's a bad business.
If your existing owners have made a "profit", or at least lost less to deprecation than normal, they're probably more willing to buy a new car from you (trading or selling their existing one) even if that new car is more expensive and they're actually paying just as much to upgrade as they would be anyway.
Of course, it's 4D chess. This was such a genius move that Tesla profits fell 46% last year and they are ending production of their highest-margin vehicles.
GM wrote down $4B when they reduced their EV production. Despite that, last year GM sold half the number of EVs as Tesla did. If THAT was reduced production by 100%, then Tesla would have been truly fucked had Harris won the election.
Tesla is suffering because Elon Musk was a genius at some point in the past. Then, he got into ketamine and fried his brain.
The cars are expensive, have QC issues, and are facing steep competition from the rest of the world. Tesla's attempt to build an F150 competitor was a disaster, Optimus is years away from being useful for anything, and after 15 years of "We'll totally release FSD this year!" the market seems to finally be realizing that it's not going to happen for a little while.
It really sucks to see a perfectly good company get blown to smithereens, but shareholders did choose to bet on the man.
The problem with being a car company is that they'd have to compete with China.
As if China cannot produce kick ass robots ? What special sauce does Musk have here that a country with a massive pool of highly trained and educated engineers and decades of manufacturing expertise don't have?
I would bet that as soon as someone "solves" robots. China will relatively shortly, that is months or few years produce something that surpasses them. They have all the pieces and all the capabilities. Just look at drones for example. It just requires correct solution and China might even be first to provided that.
I'm sure China can. But nobody is producing consumer humanoid robots at any scale yet, so Tesla can at least make the argument that they'll make better robots when people actually start buying robots. People are buying cars at scale right now, and existing Tesla models have fallen behind their Chinese competitors.
Looks like they took Peter Thiel’s animosity towards competition too literally by blocking BYD from the US market. Without competition, they had no incentive to innovate since they were selling into the wealthiest market in the world for their product, the US.
No innovation made them stagnate. Being blocked from the US made BYD innovate.
Elon generated goodwill with DOGE among a group of people. He then alienated them during a public spat with the president. This is also a president who has decided to make EVs synonymous with the opposition political party.
Nobody's buying EVs in the US since the subsidies expired. GM had a record Q4 because it gave up trying to sell EVs and started flogging expensive land yachts again.
Elon's a strange hero for MAGA. All the hardcore rural MAGAs I know hate Elon. They consider him a rich dickhead nerd (and group him with Gates) and they hate EVs with a passion, since they are quiet and produce no black smoke.
Automotive stocks are subject to the rules of gravity, aka "boring", while tech stocks are not. Automakers operate on low margins and high volume, and must compete on price, reliability or luxury brand status. Most automakers have multiple brands to sell to all market segments.
Tesla's value proposition was that it was going to be an iPod in a world of identikit MP3 players, and charge a premium for it. One brand to rule them all, no pesky dealerships, with futuristic EV tech and a touchscreen dash that made gas-powered, tactile button-laden cars obsolete.
That was twenty years ago. Tesla went from leading the pack to struggling to achieve scale, with its limelight-seeking leader increasingly holding it back. The leader wants headlines for pioneering "cool shit" and pushing hype to pump the stock price. Buyers on the other hand want affordable and timely repairs (impossible with their resistance to third party body shops and unit cost of replacement parts). As a mature company, it is completely un-equipped to compete with the incumbents whose leaders, not by coincidence, are all largely unknown to the public.
> Tesla's far more popular models are the 3 and Y, which accounted for 97% of the company's 1.59 million deliveries last year. The Model 3 now starts at about $37,000, and the Model Y is around $40,000. Tesla debuted more affordable versions of the vehicles late last year.
I’m confused as to what’s not clear from the article for you?
Agreed. I also thought it was a very dumb move until I saw that. That said, 3% but it costs 2.5x as much, maybe people option them higher idk, that could be a 10% revenue hit. But maybe that's worth it for them
If they just canceled the S and X I don’t think people would be making quite as much fun.
Saying they’re dropping two products that aren’t profitable so they can make a new product that most people seem to think is a complete joke is the problem.
Apparently Tesla dropped 4680 battery production for the CT by 99%, so the CT isn't long for this world either.
But that's okay! They have the Cybercab that will 100% drive itself For Real This Time, $99/mo Autopilot/FSD subscriptions and robots that will theoretically wash your dishes in an age where most people have an adversarial relationship with anything AI, so.
I'm not disagreeing with your overall take, but Tesla and other EV manufacturers have released the same model of vehicle with different battery technologies at different times. Only saying that dropping 4680 production isn't conclusive proof itself.
Ignoring who makes it, this kind of gimmickmobile usually sells well for about a year, and then everyone who wants one has one. It was never going to be a tentpole.
Humanoid robots make sense in only one context I can think of, and I definitely wouldn't put it past Musk to enter that market. It will be a big one. He may just be waiting for material science to catch up with his product vision. Much like Steve Jobs waited by the river until capacitive multitouch came floating by, and then pounced on it.
Meantime, as others have pointed out, the Model S and X are not selling enough to justify keeping the factory running. I don't see them going into Optimus production immediately, since as you suggest it's a solution looking for a problem.
If you’re beating around the same bush, I think the material science is already there. It’s more the power draw and the societal blowback that are issues. It is an underrated market, but not a >1T$ market (I hope).
I would. Someone in the market for a presumably profitable BMW 5 or 7 series isn't going to stay with BMW and drive a 3 series.
Yearly sales of model X have been comparable to the 5 series, at least until last year when musk's political activities took the shine off the brand.
High end cars are more profitable. There are millions of 3 and Y owners with positive experiences who would stay with the brand if it had something to move up to.
My 23 MX is the best car I've ever owned. I wouldn't buy the current iterations of 3 and Y.
Most refresh X owners think it's pretty great (not perfect). There are no alternatives at the moment, mostly because other manufacturers are terrible at software development...and that's not good for software defined vehicles.
It's sad to see Tesla walk away from the luxury segment so they can focus on robots, go karts, and robots pretending to drive go karts.
Tesla have always said the design of the X was a mistake of over-engineering. I'm guessing there was no money to be made from it, especially as the sales dwindled.
They are almost exclusively focused on autonomous cars, humanoid robots, and energy (batteries now, maybe more solar manufacturing later).
As much as I dislike it, I can't disagree with the business case here. They already have >300k monthly subscribers at about $100/month. That business will grow rapidly from here as well as the robotaxi business itself.
Within 2 years, this business will look radically different just because of these two changes.
Check out videos of Chinese car company factories. They are far more automated and futuristic than Tesla’s. Most of the new ones have almost no humans in them at all. They have great supply chains and partners for everything that is an input into these factories, and they’re often just up the street from the car factories. The costs are rock bottom and the competition between car companies in China is absolutely bananas.
About a decade ago, Musk said he wanted to kickstart the electric car industry, make electric cars cool by showing they can be high performance and promising not to enforce Tesla's patents against competitors. Remember how electric cars used to be perceived? The Simpsons put it as "people will think you're gay". I'd say he completely succeeded in that goal and the whole "make piles of money for investors" is just because investors decided to try doing that.
Sure. And selling the most popular car on the planet is a failure?
Didn't the US government put ~$80b into rescuing GM etc, years ago?
Subsidies bootstrapped the EV industry. Stupid policies mean walking away from the investment, ceding the market to foreign competitors, and doubling down on legacy ICE crap the rest of the world no longer wants...and Americans will be less and less able to afford.
Also, if you compare the entire model line up sales, Tesla isn't even in the top ten in sales. Tesla could disappear entirely and the car industry wouldn't even notice.
Car buyers are not confused. The market is naturally highly segmented. My needs "every day low distance compact car that can cope with city centre narrow streets with once a month motorway driving" is not met by the same car as "family of 5 with big dog living in a village"
The benefit of having control is that they can adapt them to their priorities. Similar Apple designing its own chips when there were already viable producers in the market.
They won’t need to rely on others prioritizing their priorities, like low volume, high cost early investments in batteries designed for a market (humanoid robots) that doesn’t exist.
If they then scale them up, they also have the benefit that there is no 3p supplier who can turn around and sell those to a competitor.
it's very difficult to have a conversation about this, because it would appear that sincere answers to your question will get downvoted. one POV is that, if you accept the bear case from Internet commenters that these guys are incompetent or stupid - blah blah blah, Cybetruck - the existence of their autonomous taxi product is extremely bullish. they managed to pull off something similar to Waymo despite being so much worse at it, yes? I'm not sure they will even need a diverse product line of premium cars, if they can sell an autonomous 3 for the price of a small house. on the flip side, the bear case there is, if they could figure it out, so will a lot of other car companies. and yet, Cruise ceased operations, and Tesla will seemingly pay a manageable amount of blood money for Autopilot and move on.
nobody really can predict the future, so unsurprisingly, "reading various articles about this doesn't make it more clear." but people on the Internet keep getting worked up about it. to me, people do not comprehend the meaning of "high risk, high reward."
Their autonomous taxi program is a joke right now, especially compared to Waymo. Way fewer cities/rides, and they haven't even deployed their cybertaxi thing.
If you think it is, take your hands of the wheel and close your eyes. Fall asleep at the wheel. Not willing to do so? I guess your car isn't really driving you everywhere.
Your view on how stocks work is interesting as well — you realize most of the investors are regular, uninformed non-techies who invest based on vibes, right? Vibes like "my car is driving me everywhere, this is the future!" — the exact same thoughtless, surface-level analysis you're going off of.
Therefore, you're trying to beat the market by using the exact same reasoning 99% of its investors have used. Good luck.
When Tesla started producing cars, everyone wanted what they proposed. Now, no one wants the cybertruck. No one is really asking for humanoid robots. Their self driving is vastly inferior to waymo when it comes to taxies, I can't see them winning that market. Their batteries and solar panels, like their cars, seem to be more or less abandoned.
So, it's pretty easy to see why people are confused and upset. Tesla is discontinuing all the things people like about Tesla, and selling vapourware that no one really wants anyways, instead. It's also not "a difficult conversation."
What seems more likely is that Musk, in his extreme shift to the right, has abandoned the original goal of Tesla: producing sustainable electric vehicles. He's become more and more delusional, with failing like the Boring machine and the Cybertruck starting to pile up. He's alienated his existing customer base by both getting into politics and dropping any pretext of trying to help the environment.
From my point of view, Tesla is a failed company with a leader who has gone off the rails, and a board that refuses to reign him in. Revenues are falling off a cliff outside of US governmental money, and it's betting the whole ship on only two ideas: self driving, which is so far no where close to being where it needs to be, despite the progress, and on yet another fairy tale that is humanoid robots.
The board cannot rein him in because doing so risks having the stock valued as a car company stock and not as a tech company or meme stock. I think they can only fix this after the stock has crashed.
imo their competition for autonomous vehicles doesn’t come from car companies, but from tech companies.
Amazon has a lucrative incentive to automate its supply chain up to and including last mile delivery. Waymo has proven out the tech and could easily partner with Uber or Lyft for the rider experience and reach.
If you’re FedEx, for example, would you rather buy from Amazon or from Tesla? Who is more likely to be a sane and trustworthy partner?
I don't think that Uber or Lyft are going to invest in self-driving taxis. The capital model is completely different: Uber and Lyft are by design capital light, they own nothing more than the software (1), and someone needs to buy all of these self-driving machines and then someone needs to maintain them, whereas their current model doesn't do that- they can't offer that to any tech partner.
The reason that you don't see more Waymo areas has nothing to do with rider pool or experience, it is because their tech requires pre-mapping everything with LiDAR several times- the advantage is that if you know what is static (because it was in all of that LiDAR mapping) then a simple difference algo can tell you everything that is dynamic in the environment. (Also, they are just starting to hit cities with significant precipitation- SFO, LA, ATX, PHX are all pretty dry cities, they are going into ATL, MIA, DC, DEN, etc.)
1: With a lot of suspicion that much of their profit comes from drivers not understanding depreciation of their vehicles, something that the accountants who work for Uber and Lyft will understand very very well.
> they managed to pull off something similar to Waymo despite being so much worse at it, yes?
similar?! what exactly is your definition of similar? tesla and waymo are so far apart that it is difficult to accept any argument that tries to make this comparison. they cannot co-exist in the same sentence unless to explain one’s success against the other’s failures
Nvidia follows the same strategy because having a large end-to-end model is how you get your customers to buy GPUs with their AI slush fund (and I don't think they limit themselves to vision).
His rationale at this point seems to be mostly stubbornness, coupled with a healthy dose of anxiety when he considers how much money he'll have to spend to deliver FSD to the people who bought it 10 years ago.
Elon for years has said Tesla is not a car company. He’s also said the “factory is the product.” Tesla also has energy divisions and investments, as well as xAI investments now.
Logically given that Model S and X are something like less than 5% of deliveries (and have been for years), if they’re right about Optimus, that capacity will generate far greater revenue.
They can probably hire enough random dudes in India, especially if AI reduces the need for call center employees.
It will be slightly creepy when the Optimus walks into the bedroom and stares while its owner is ... in the middle of something, but that's a small price to pay.
Plus the Tesla employees in the U.S. will also be able to share the video, so it's a win-win.
This is interesting. If Optimus hardware is supposed to be $15k, and Indian workers remotely operate it, there must be jobs in the US and elsewhere that it can handle. Median Indian salary is $4000 a year. No US minimum wage, no overly expensive health care, no Union fees, no workers comp, no visa. 86% savings over a US worker at $15 an hour. Plus, if they are a maid, there's a chance they'll get a free peek.
Optimus is complete vapourware. The quoted 1M units a year would be utterly unbelievable from any company, let alone Tesla with their history of over-promising.
Its not that strange; normally manufactures are focused on volume and brand.
So you have the 3 and Y in numbers where they can compete in the mass market price range; and CT and FSD for brand notoriety.
S and Y are not special enough to do anything for the brand, they dont qualify as halo products anymore. Probably still wouldnt be that interesting even if refreshed.
CT is still interesting, it looks different and has some tech inside that seems worthwhile to iterate on.
And unlike traditional brands, tesla has FSD, Optimus, and Musk to do enough to keep the brand itself healthy.
My guess would be they are deciding what they can learn by iterating the CT, and might decide to drop it in a year or two when the roadster takes the halo role.
They will keep trying to improve on volume for 3 and Y.
Five years ago, during the 2021 Q1 earnings call, Musk was asked about Models S and X. He responded:
> I mean, they’re very expensive, made in low volume. To be totally frank, we’re continuing to make them more for sentimental reasons than anything else. They’re really of minor importance to the future.
Pretty sad seeing people take pleasure in the company failing. See past your opinion about it's leader. At the end of the day, it's the company that brought vehicle electrification to the masses and has acted cash cow for SpaceX, Starlink and Neuralink.
There's nothing inherently wrong with a company deciding to stop producing models that are extremely old, have newer comparable models that are more widely available globally and sell multiples more of. So why would you keep those older models?
If anything its a good thing. But its Tesla so nothing they do will be spoken positively of.
Because Tesla is being measured against the benchmarks they set for themselves. It's not a good look with cancelled models, declining sales, and a lot of self-inflicted brand damage.
Musk used to claim Tesla will sell 20 million vehicles per year:
The new goal is to have sold 20 million in total by 2035. That target represents a further decline in sales. And, given that Tesla over-hypes everything, maybe they won't achieve it:
They went from being able to profitably produce a luxury car, to not being able to profitably produce a luxury car, to not being able to produce a luxury car at all. All while becoming uncompetitive in the econobox market, and losing huge chunks of it even before their real competitors arrive in market…
I'm not surprised at the X, but the S has always been the flagship model with all the best features and the top performance. The 3 is a fine mid-sized car but it's very strange to get rid of your flagship model. Those always cater to a small audience anyways.
Yes, flagship models aren't intended to be good sellers. They often are where new features are tested out on customers willing to overpay to be early adopters. Tesla did test out the new steering yoke and removing the control stalks in the S: both features were met with tepid reception and partially rolled back. This is also bad for the 3 and Y, since there will be low confidence in any changes before they are released.
I guess from my perspective you can't buy the S or the X in Australia, all I see everywhere are the 3 and the Y. So for me its not flagship but I do know that the S was the original popular Tesla and has all of the bells and whistles.
"Completely refreshed" is doing a lot of work here in that sentence.
The new refreshes don't look nearly as big in terms of changes as new generations of car models for other manufacturers, and Lord knows even Tesla fans have plenty of things they'd like to see improved.
Okay that's my ignorance of Tesla models then, I assumed the more expensive models were also faster.
I guess then it's more like Toyota EOLing Lexus or GM getting rid of Cadillac.
I understand the point that the cheaper models are higher volume. Historically that had not precluded the creation of sports and luxury models for most manufacturers. Are the legacy brands wrong to do this? Currently I doubt their business acumen far less than Elon's.
The model 3 performance model does 0-100 in 3.1 seconds, the model S does that in 2.1, it is therefore faster by a second but 3.1 will beat most cars off the line quite comfortably. The Supra for context does that in 4.1 seconds.
Nothing wrong with keeping a sport and luxury model, however I would argue that the latest models are quite sporty and luxurious in their own right.
Companies like Ford constantly discontinue models, but they don't get the level of attention Tesla does.
If Tesla aren't seeing the Model S and X being sold to anywhere near the degree of the 3 and the Y, then why continue making them? They aren't as globally available and its clear people don't want them as much as the others.
I think we're sort of back at the beginning here. They are welcome to focus on their bestsellers. Traditional automotive wisdom would favor halo models and upper trim models so people can boast about a sedan that can out-drag a Supra.
> Companies like Ford constantly discontinue models, but they don't get the level of attention Tesla does.
If they axed 2/5 of their models it might. But they're also not run by an attention wh- addict with an Apple-like fanbase.
Oh and also they're axing 2/5 of their models to build teleoperated robots. Seems like the attention is well deserved here.
Someone who owns a BMW 5 series isn't going to switch down to a new model of the 3 series. The X makes the 3 and Y feel like go karts (that are slow). The S is a missile. Fun, but not for me.
The other way of looking at this: The X is the only Tesla model with door handles that aren't stupid.
How are they slow the Model 3 high performance does 0-100kph in 3.1 seconds? The X does it in 2.1, both of which are extremely fast and on par if not quicker than a 5 series BMW
Just buy an i4, even the eDrive is pretty zippy 0-60 in 5.4 seconds (the M50 can do it in 3.1 seconds). I’m not sure what the M car EV will look like beyond a motor for every wheel, but I can’t really see a point to it.
The reason was sillier: China forced Ford to sell Mazda to enter the Chinese market, because Mazda entered the Chinese market before Ford and China considered them the same entity subject to the same outside manufacturer limits).
Mazda handled the small vehicle chassis design for Ford. So without Mazda, Ford no longer had the knowledge for continued development of their sedans and crossovers based on sedan platforms.
Ford was with Mazda in China with a joint venture with a Chinese company (as required): Changan, and they were building those shared Ford/Mazda platform vehicles there.
Ford wanted to also build trucks for the Chinese market, with a different joint venture. However, the rules limited companies to two joint ventures, which was a problem because Mazda also had a joint venture with FAW. Which meant it counted as part of Ford's 2 joint ventures.
So Ford sold Mazda. Changan Ford/Mazda got split in their respective halves. FAW was no longer associated with Ford and left with Mazda. Ford could then pick up a new joint venture for trucks, which they did and I don't believe they're doing well.
Ford just really wanted to double down on trucks, in more than one market.
Is that an international thing? There was a rug store next to where I grew up in Stockholm which had a sale because they were closing the shop from at least the early 90s until ca 2020 during covid when they closed the shop for real. There are also a couple more rug stores doing the same thing, one of them still to this day.
It's an international thing, down to the neverending "Closing now fr fr" sales. There was general bemusement in Sydney when one shop notorious for this actually closed down, but only because the building was demolished to make way for a highway interchange.
Absolutely. Tesla's already shown significant disdain/deprioritization for replacement parts in models they're not discontinuing. After all, every part in a service warehouse is not a part going on a new car to pump the quarterly numbers (or be parked in an abandoned shopping mall).
Tesla hatred here is surreal. If a company was overvalued for a couple of years, it's ok to be sceptical. Tesla has been at such high valuations for many years now. They have >40 billion cash at hand. Tesla cars were always going to face competiton. Their FSD is maturing with unsupervised robotaxis rolling out. They are making profit every quarter since years now. They are shipping millions of vehicles every year. Their charging infra quality is one of the best, and most are now adopting NACS. The top comment calling Tesla a failure is ludicrous.
Lol yeah Tesla is doing so great they just got rid of two flagship models.
Government rebates have ended. Sentiment towards EV has shifted negatively in consumer eyes. Manufacturers are sticking to gasoline. Even Jeep just got rid of all their electric stuff.
Maybe they'll be good for self driving robot taxis over in California with "FSD."
Past performance does not indicate future success.
Nop. The S and X were always meant low volume high priced. And it's a great strategy. Didn't Tesla repay loans before it was due?
Challenge is that even that good past performance was shat upon by people. I hate Elon. But I don't think Tesla is doing bad at all. GM is shitting itself on EVs.
There is no evidence of unsupervised robotaxis actually rolling out. These are just the same promises Elon has wrongfully done since literally 10 years and some publicity stunts.
Yes, privy influencers. And it was supervised from the car behind it. No one else was able to find such a ride. Tesla cars also autonomously self-delivered. Which also turned out to be a one-off publicity stunt. Up until now, nothing points to that this is something different this time.
Most of the people are bashing Tesla because they 1) Overpromised and underdelivered 2) They claimed/acted like they're so ahead that nobody can touch them.
Now, other automakers are closing the gap fast, and their overpromise of camera-only FSD is reaching Duke Nukem Forever levels, while other automakers use a diversified sensor set with more conservative autonomy levels because they value human lives more than playing fast and loose (plus, they are scrutinized way more heavily for various right and wrong reasons).
For me, it's not hatred, but I saw that they were hyped a bit too much and need some correction, and this correction is coming hard for them.
Valuations means nothing except investor trust. We have seen some spectacular collapses under unbelievable valuations. Theranos had a valuation of $9 billion. Tesla is not a scam or balloon per se, but they were a bit too overconfident of their moat.
FSD has been maturing for ~an entire decade now. Their latest stunt with moving the supervisor to chaser cars has made a lot of people understandably angry anew: Musk has to hit his robotaxi milestones to get more billions, so he's forcing the programme ahead with smoke and mirrors to get his stock option grants.
Their profit is decreasing, revenue growth is negative. Their autonomy programme is always "just one more update" away. Humanoid robotics is already full of competition from hundreds of other startups and larger companies (even Amazon, an AI sceptic, has a significant robotics programme).
I wouldn't call them a failure, but they certainly seem to have lost their way, and you have to really drink the kool aid to be able to justify the valuation in any sense.
Of course it's not about Tesla at all. Yeah, there's been overpromising and underdelivering on self-driving (is anyone doing better yet, though?), but in reality the hate is entirely about Elon and his politics.
Elon Musk doing Nazi salutes and calling people "retarded" on Twitter all the time has absolutely nothing to do with my stance on Tesla or how I feel about them.
I just don't like Tesla's vehicles, how they look, or the interiors of them. Nothing to do with the individual.
I think Tesla would make way more sense if they got out of the car part of the business. Serving the consumer market directly is very expensive.
Their electronics, batteries, motors, etc., are world class. Packaging this up into something a partner can use to build actual cars could have less risk. An electric motor or battery can propel many kinds of automobile. They tend to keep their value better when stored in this format too. The moment everything is integrated into a car, things get very bad very quickly unless you're selling Ferraris or Lamborghinis.
That would be lower margin and narrower moat even if they had the partners lined up and didn't have a valuation based on the assumption one day the car everyone would use would be a Tesla.
They need more room to make the next stock pump scheme look legit.
I'm sure they already have enough inventory to last a while and demand is probably cratering because of Elon's Twitter posts and the fact that Tesla never refreshes their models.
I'v seen quite a few Tesla Ys that needed repairs and... they seem to improve the car year to year or even months to months. Car interface suddenly changes to RJ45, some metal parts changed to aluminium (if I'm not mistaken), various things that become easyer to fix and so on. Low Voltage battery getting Li-Ion. Front under body changes: https://service.tesla.com/docs/BodyRepair/Body_Repair_Proced...
And then the airbag controller gets newer and newer.
Not something to market about, but you see steady incremental improvements.
What I want to say, the serviceability is very good for the cars. You get open documentation, you can access toolbox for a price, but it's there for the simple DIYer. Need to change pyro fuse? No problem, pop up docs, order part, change it. The parts are cheap.
They've just refreshed their Model 3 and Model Y within the last year or so. With the model Y looking considerably different so I'm not sure where you got that from
I can give you the Model Y but take a look at the rest of the lineup compared to when they were first released. Hell, you're in this very post calling the S/X old.
Personally I'm also rather turned off by elon musk killing several hundred thousand people per year by illegally shutting USAID. You know, mass murder and all of that. Inhuman filth.
Interesting that they're cutting S/X but keeping the Cybertruck. Whatever metric they're using (revenue, profit, units, etc.) that led them to cut the S/X would surely have similar numbers for the Cybertruck, if not worse.
The only rational reason I could come up with is that the pool of potential Cybertruck buyers is not as saturated as for S/X, which have been around for quite a while.
Painted metallic chassis of a car is always dipped in car sized acid baths and primer baths. Dipping the whole cars held on a carriage is the only way it's done, anywhere, for any brands, using any metals, even many Ferrari, as well as with many classic car restoration projects. Your cars will be competing with brand new 1960s Fords and Mazdas if you were not doing it in terms of corrosion resistance - unless, I'm guessing, you're making DeLoreans and Cybertrucks.
> Tesla is developing Optimus with the aim of someday selling it as a bipedal, intelligent robot capable of everything from factory work to babysitting.
“Full Automated Parenting”. You win a Darwin award on behalf of your kids if you fall for this shtick.
Before Tesla came along there were a small number of EVs but they were all pretty bad because their only purpose was to serve as “compliance cars” in states like California so automakers could sell more gas cars. (See the documentary Who Killed the Electric Car? for more on this.)
So Tesla deserves credit for building the first electric cars that people actually wanted to buy. They also deserve credit for building the largest and most reliable charging network - a key factor in making electric car ownership more feasible.
But they’ve made a lot of poor decisions recently and all the money and power went to Elon’s head. I think it was beneficial to the world for Tesla to exist and do that important work early on, and now it’s beneficial to the world for the company to die.
This is sad in that I was serious about finally getting one in two to three years (We have two Model 3 LRs already), but is fantastic in that no other car interests me and I now don't have this hyper materialistic goal distracting me.
If Tesla completely exits automotive and decides to license their FSD tech (or someone else catches up), then I'll probably just get whatever the equivalent of a Bolt is then with that and premium sound.
And they just might, too. Recall that the EV tax credit went away this year along with regulatory credits to other auto OEMs, which was a huge part of their business. This combined with the Cybertruck (unsurprisingly!) missing sales targets is problematic.
Wait, an S? Why? I've got a 3 LR too and.... I just can't say anything about the extraordinarily long-in-the-tooth S excites me. Usually something is desirable when it's new, then the desirability fades as the product ages and other new, hot things come onto the market.
Don't get me wrong, I don't generally lust after EVs, but I am looking forward to the R3X....
Bigger battery, larger center console and the cabin is slightly more premium. Not $76k premium but moreso than the 3. I also really like the yoke.
However, the 3 is lighter, has better headlight clusters, the light accent inside of the cabin (that I thought the S was getting, but I guess not), and a marginally better sound system.
Elon's $1T tranches are mostly based on market cap, right? Switching from just a carmaker to a "physical AI" company could be all he needs to convince the stock market to ignore Tesla's declining profits and raise the market cap even higher.
> Saying that, I wouldn’t be too surprised if robotaxi replaces 90% of taxis and Ubers in the next 5-7 years.
How about we start with 0.00076% first before we start throwing insane numbers like 90% (chance of which happening are in-line with me marrying Beyonce)
> Tesla is developing Optimus with the aim of someday selling it as a bipedal, intelligent robot capable of everything from factory work to babysitting.
I did not look forward to the news articles about robots accidentally dropping or squashing babies.
I can get them ending products. That is natural cycle. But what should be worrying is that they have not already introduced at least one model that replace either one. It looks like real stagnation which in long term will kill the company.
It is sad, but big sedans do not sell well and the X really needed to be replaced with something completely different. There are now several other 3 row EV SUVs competing with it, and even low volume ones (eg, R1S) outsell it easily.
Don't be surprised if something else takes its place as they do need something larger than Y and less expensive than X was.
The elephant Tesla mocked has run, and stomped over them. Now there comes the pivot.
While "The old auto establishment" is not a benevolent structure, they proved that experience is something earned with time and doing things. Corporate knowledge and memory is real, and you can't beat it with brute force.
They started the change, but they failed to keep up with the pace. Also hubris, greed and monies.
I don't really get this take... not when Tesla is by a wide mile the world's most valuable automaker. How does Tesla ending production of the S and X equate to the old auto establishment "stomping over them"?
Worth related statistics doesn't mean anything in the realm of hard engineering. I completely look from the point of "what the companies are doing tech-wise".
When Tesla came about, they were distinctively different. A different chassis, a different weight distribution, completely different dynamics. Since they started with a blank slate, their cars were greenfield projects, and they correctly took note of the pitfalls, and avoided them.
On the other hand, avoiding past pitfalls or remedying them doesn't make you immune from the future ones, and doesn't mean the other companies can't learn, too. This is where they made the mistake.
They overpromised (esp. with the Autopilot thingy) and underdelivered massively on that front, and while they "made" the software-defined-vehicle, they underestimated the problems and behaved like the problems they face are as simple as configuring a web service right. This is what slowly broke them. They also underestimated hardware problems of the car (like using consumer grade parts in the critical parts of the hardware. Remember wearing down flash chips and bricking cars?)
Because while car is software defined now, it's also an "industrial system". It has to be robust. It has to be reliable, idiot-proof even. Playing fast and loose with these things allowed automakers to catch them, maybe slowly but surely.
Because, "the old automakers" has gone through a lot of blood, sweat and tears (both figuratively and literally), and know what to do and what not to do. They can anticipate pitfalls better then a "newbie" carmaker. They shuddered, sputtered, hesitated, but they are in the move now. They will evolve this more slowly, but in a more reliable and safer way. They won't play that fast, but the products will be more refined. They won't skimp on radars because someone doesn't believe in them, for example.
Not everything is numbers, valuations and great expansions which look good on quarterlies, news, politics, and populists. Sometimes the slow and steads wins, and it goes for longer.
Physics and engineering doesn't care for valuations. They only care about natural laws.
Thank you for the explanation. I guess the thing I don't understand is what exactly the problems are that you are seeing. We've all heard the stories of wooden parts in initial production runs of Tesla models, sure. But it does seem like they iron out these kinks over time. Maybe I'm biased because I'm in the bay area, but it seems like every 3rd car you see on the highway is a Tesla, and lots of my coworkers speak very highly of theirs that they own. It just doesn't seem to me like there is actually a quality issue here?
If anything, ending production of SX and giving more focus to 3Y would probably increase the quality of those models, I'd imagine.
If you're pointing to Autopilot / camera-only as the main transgression here, yeah I'll agree that they have definitely overpromised, but it doesn't really seem to me like the lack of a L5 system is actually a deal-breaker for anyone, because from what I hear they are just damn good cars anyway.
Almost everything he says happens? Thats pretty far from the truth. Isn't Tesla still embroiled in a legal tussle over "full self drive"? What about the $30k model 3? What about the $200/kg to space?
He has very little connection to the truth. He's a hypeman and a conman
There are driverless Teslas roaming Texas giving rides _right now_. It happened. It was late, and there will be some fallout for HW3 compatibility with unsupervised FSD, but it happened.
On a scale of “happens” on one end to “doesn’t happen” on the other, he has a few “happens” that Elon fans will try and anchor against the weight of the enormous load down at the “doesn’t happen” end.
I think ever Elon made some strange moves (the chainsaw image, mass-firing people at DOGE and elsewhere or the right-arm gesture) people question more why they should give money to where he is associated with. Tesla suffered from this, in addition to the design becoming awkward compared to older models.
It seems fairly easy to find figures on how many cars Tesla has produced each quarter but, surprisingly (at least to me), it's harder to find compiled information on (for each quarter):
- Average Selling Price;
- Cars produced vs cars sold;
- How many unsold cars are in inventory. I did find this [1];
- A model breakdown of the above 2.
The reason I'm interested in this because my theory is that:
1. Sales have been shifting from the Model S/X to the Model 3/Y, which reduces average selling price and overall profit. Stopping production is really about the inventory glut;
2. Unsold inventory is going up, particularly for the Cybertruck; and
3. Tesla marketshare is collapsing in many markets due to a combination of brand collapse among the most likely EV buyers and competition from lower-priced alternatives, particularly Chinese EVs in developing markets.
So what exactly is propping up this company at an above $1T market cap?
Feels a lot like giving up. I guess this is why there is such a strong change in the Tesla messaging, to Robotaxis and robots. But maybe this is inevitable. The cars being made in China are pretty amazing and I don’t think it is possible for American or European companies to compete.
Nobody here seems to remember that this was always the plan: release expensive cars to bootstrap the company which allows them to release progressively cheaper cars until everyone can afford one.
Not a fanboy, but this seems like it went exactly according to plan.
Nowhere in that plan was "only produce cheap cars." Unless you're aim is to be the budget brand, it's bizarre behaviour not to have a top end flagship model.
Adjusted for inflation, $30k then is around $45k now. Tesla sells a Model 3 for just over $35k.
It doesn't make any sense to hold someone to a promise like that and not adjust it for inflation. I think you can legitimately complain that he didn't meet the timeline he was aiming for.
I think your point is fair, but look at the 2026 Nissan Leaf.
The base is around $28k. This feels like one of the first "affordable" EVs in the USA. It also comes with decent tech without a subscription, and has comparable ranges to Teslas.
Yes. It's interesting to see a consequence of this strategy, which is at least some part of your model 3/Y customers bought it because "it is a Tesla", and being Tesla is premium. If you get rid of the premium, you lose that aura. But maybe the impact is small.
If they want to sell a buttload more cars just make FSD free on all Tesla’s, done.
The possibility of FSD is probably the only reason I paid $10K more for a M3 over a BYD Seal. But free FSD? Who can compete with that. Nobody.
Also, turning FSD into a subscription is total enshittification and I hate it. It would also go a long way to coax back peeved off buyers and convince them not to make their 2nd EV a different brand.
My current sentiment towards Tesla for making FSD subscription-only AFTER I bought my car? Screw you. Go to hell. It’s MY $80k asset. I feel betrayed.
The S is simply too expensive. People in the market for $100K+ sedans/coupes are gonna perceive more curb appeal from a Mercedes, Audi, BMW or Porsche.
Tesla crashed the allure of its brand by lowering the price point of the Y and 3. The X and S aren’t different enough to attract $100K+ purchasers.
(It’s one reason why Toyota and other brands use different marks like Lexus for their high end offerings).
"HN is dying" is a cliche, I know, but I seriously want to bookmark this thread to revisit it in 10 years - I'm sure it will age even better than (in)famous Dropbox thread. So from that perspective, HN is alive and well :).
The level of cynicism of the discussion is overwhelming, frankly. I get it that some people don't like Musk because of his politics, but why should that prevent people interested in technology to at least try to present a steelman case?
Let me try it, at a risk to be down-voted to oblivion...
1. As people correctly point out, S&X are outdated, low volume models. Investing more engineering time in them doesn't make any business sense; these engineering resources and capital should be clearly redeployed elsewhere.
2. People think that Waymo is supposedly better(?) than FSD, but at least some very well informed people (and NVIDIA as a company) believe that it's not. Personal anecdote: an older (HW3) version of Tesla drove me perfectly well in Yosemite last weekend, in on winding mountain roads with 0 cell phone coverage. It will take Waymo forever to map everything there properly with LIDAR, and true autonomy only in selected metro areas has limited value.
3. It's obvious that when we have autonomous, general purpose humanoid robots, they will completely transform our societies. Any such robots would require an enormous AI/vision investment. Say what you want about Elon, but xAI basically caught up with the top LLM shops in ~18 months, and now have comparable AI training capacity. You can bet against Optimus, but who else would have the skills to bring both the technology and the AI to market first? China? Good robotics, but no enough data to train their vision models comparing to Tesla, at least not yet.
4. So the bear case is that (a) driving autonomy is not possible without LIDAR, (b) Tesla can't bring another very complex product to market, and (c) autonomous robots are not possible in our lifetime. If you look at the AI progress even in the last 12 months, that's a tough sell to me.
What are the serious, tech-based counterarguments to the points above?
Thanks for saying this. For new, impressionable minds here who read most of the comments here and think this it's all devs - it isn't. A lot of us value Musk and incredibly awesome tech like FSD and aren't consumed by political partisanship. That tells you more about the commenter than Musk.
Some of these same commenters were trying to make you believe not long ago that FSD wasn't going to be competitive with Waymo because it dropped LIDAR. If you bring that up now they'll just change goalposts. There's no point even arguing with someone unable to approach an argument in good faith.
Okay, I'll bite. For the record, I own Tesla stock and I am generally bullish about AI.
I'll try to provide some counter-points specifically regarding the rate of progress.
3. It's much easier to catch up in capability (ex. LLMs) than it is to achieve a new capability (ex. replace humans laborers with humanoid robots). You can hire someone from a competitor, secrets eventually leak out, the search space is narrowed etc.
4(c). To me, what's most important is whether or not truly autonomous humanoid robots happens in 3 years, 5 years, 10 years, etc. rather than in our lifetime.
These timelines will be tied to AI development timelines which largely outside the control of any one player like Tesla. I believe the world is bottlenecked on compute and that the current compute is not sufficient for physical AI.
It's extremely easy to be too early (ex. many of the self driving car companies of the past decade), and so for Tesla, there is a risk of over-investing in manufacturing robots before the core technology is ready.
Re: both 3 and 4(c) - agree that compute (or maybe even power for that compute) is likely to be a bottleneck in the next 3-5 years. However, I think Tesla/xAI are better positioned than many competitors as Tesla is a manufacturing company first and foremost; and this expertise (which is shared freely between Musk's companies) can help it to build it's own data centers, power generation (e.g., solar), or - in the most bullish case - even fab capacity.
Only if you are confusing FSD and actually autonomous. Which is basically just a bait and switch on Musk's part. FSD is whatever Musk says it is, actually autonomous is another thing entirely.
What's with the "outdated" adjective? There's nothing in the US market even remotely close to the X. Every other EV is a slapdash pile of hoobajoobs and knobs that can't even drive itself.
Source: 45000 miles in a bit over two years, loved every minute of it. Makes our other high priced German car a disappointing machine to be avoided if possible.
You might be more informed that I am. We only have 3 and Y in the family. I based my statement on th fact that S/X were last refreshed 5 years ago; so they would need to be refreshed fairly soon.
1. Your argument is that cutting off a rotting limb is good. Obviously it is, but I'd rather not have a rotting limb in the first place. I want a healthy, revenue-generating limb.
2. Waymo has been offering a driverless taxi service for some time now, and Tesla is not. That's a hard fact. Meanwhile your arguments are beliefs and personal anecdotes.
When, or rather if, Tesla starts offering their service, they will be behind Waymo by approximately however long ago Waymo started theirs, so at least a few years.
Unless you have some "serious, tech-based counterarguments"?
3. It's also obvious that when we have AGI, fusion, etc., they will completely transform our societies. I promise I will deliver you those by the end of this year. Send money now. If my timeline slips by a little—maybe a few decades—well, it was just a best-effort estimate and I did deliver in the end!
4. No, the bear case is that there's no real reason to believe Tesla would be the company that captures the market vs any other company. Their solar, tunnelling, and now car business models have failed/are failing, so they must win on self-driving/robots.
Self-driving is looking really bad, they're badly losing to Waymo.
They have shown nothing in terms of robots. If anything, dressing people up as robots and showing that is a rather negative signal. Oh, and robots are at least a 10x harder problem than self-driving.
Dropbox really was shit, the fact that we lampoon the HN anti-Dropbox guy is evidence that this place died long ago. You really could have just done it with rsync and I'm so glad Claude Code exists to kill every other shit SaaS business that doesn't deserve to exist. Dropbox first please.
Hard to tell whether you are serious or sarcastic, but assuming it's the former: my contrarian position on CC vs SaaS is that in the quest to kill shitty businesses people will discover that creating a high-value SaaS is very non-trivial. CC would kill a whole category of low effort SaaS while at the same time substantially raising the quality bar for SaaS that people are willing to pay money for.
I'm likely out of the loop, but what evidence is there that Optimus is anywhere close to ready for prime time, or any commercialization at all? I haven't seen anything compelling yet outside of highly edited videos in controlled settings.
I wish people that jeer Musk would decide if he’s running his companies or not. They think he’s an ignorant figure head and a conniving strategist. I don’t care either way just stick to one.
Shutting down low-volume, complex project, that needs to be substantially redesigned to be competitive, while these resources can be redeployed elsewhere, in high growth areas? I disagree: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46805773
Given the product splits, Model S and X served no further purpose besides taking up production capacity. If that unlocked capacity is used for more Model 3/Y builds or other product lines, then that would be a net positive for the company as opposed to continuing on with S/X for the sake of having product range.
I think of the i4 as being more of a Model 3 / BMW 3 series size car, isn't it?
The S is more in line with with 5er.
I love the way the Taycan CrossTurismo thing looks, but holy hell getting in and out of it is like getting in and out of a sports car. I expect it to be slightly compromised compared to the competition, not.. extremely compromised.
Sitting over here in Asia, I am doing a wild guess:
Most people in the western world have no clue HOW bad the crisis in our electronics industry caused by AI BS, tariff wars etc is.
When you wanted to get anything done in China as a western company, last year you might have issues to have China allow EXPORT. For example due to the pissing contest about Nexperia, a lot of really basic chips like USB controllers suddenly were forbidden for export.
And since January 1st 2026, things got far worse: Now some standard connectors (that are, amongst others, used in cars) that are made in the USA can no longer be IMPORTED into China. Which means that you now can typically will have parts missing on PCBAs that you then have to re-solder with the missing US components somewhere else. And many don't have the competence for this anymore.
This is all just wild speculation.
And I am pretty sure that right now it will be next to impossible to source parts for such a complex product like a robot. I need grey market brokers locally in Shenzhen to get even the most basic stuff at insane prices. And a lot of stuff simply is no longer available at all, due to things like "Intel has replaced anyone with a brain with an AI, and now no longer is able to produce and chip embedded N150 CPUs from the US to China, because... how?".
Tesla is now putting in 4680 battery cells back into the Model Y. Years after they had discontinued the 4680 program. What does that mean? They are using up whatever parts they still have, like everybody else in the electronics industry is now doing.
Good luck buying a computer, phone, fridge, car or toaster in the second half of 2026.
5. Peace out from Tesla for a while to pivot hard into far-right politics, using outsized power and influence to wage culture wars, alienate core customers, and inject volatility into a brand that was built on trust, optimism, and engineering credibility.
6. Unveil Optimus as the next grand pillar of the vision, not as a shipping product but as a perpetual demo, a future-shaped distraction that soaks up attention while core execution, margins, and credibility quietly erode.
Is there another car out there in the US that has a way to type in an address, tap a button, and it drives you there? All other car manufacturers software is terrible.
Elon should be sending robots to the Moon, Mars and the Asteroid Belt. That would make much more sense.
Setup automated low gravity refueling depots. Then automated mining of the solar system will scale up as it more than pays for itself. And as with Starlink, SpaceX synergy would give him a serious advantage.
Much faster to achieve (despite the challenges), less expensive, and more profitable than a human Mars colony which would burn money without return for decades.
(Regardless of wishful thinking, civilizations coming backup is a second substrate adapted to the rest of the solar system, not a colony suffering truly miserable conditions. Although I am all for human exploration, which would also be easier and cheaper on the back of expanding automated infrastructure.)
Electric cars hype topic is has rotted away. Time to bring new, yet novel for the the public. Now people will belive in the musk stories of the future shaped by the humanoid robots, not shaped by the electric cars. Who cares if in 3 years they will switch to another subject if stock keeps being pupmed (and compoensation keeps flowing in the hands of this guy).
His idea is to keep involving more investors, more people, government is possible in tesla's orbit with nice stories. When other are so invested the failures aren't his problem anymore, he got hist compensation which is tied to the company price.
He doesn't have FSD, camera only navigation without sensor fusion with LIDAR will fail, the only thing keeping Tesla where it is is the bullshit dispersal field that surrounds Musk.
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