Comment by vannevar

Probably not a great strategy to piss off every blue voter in the country and then try to setup a business in cities.

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.

that's why I said "Tesla's robotaxis".

They have not proven they are waymo level or near it, or that they will ever be there given the lack of lidar.

> Even if they worked worse than a Waymo I think the demand would still be very high.

They may already work better than a Waymo. It's hard to tell. It's certainly there using the public version of FSD. There's awkwardness, but the same can be said of Waymo. What I don't know is how many mandatory edge cases remain to be handled before they can set it free.

Hyundai is partnering with Boston Dynamics to deploy 30k robots a year.

Amazon is looking to replace 600k employees over the next decade.

Why do you believe demand for humanoids isn't high?

Tesla is already valued 9x higher than uber.

Uber makes money on every ride.

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.

Teslas share price is math for stupid people.

Private taxis don't compete with public transit. They operate in completely different spheres

>Uber, lyft, regular taxis

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.

It would be high if it worked, but it doesn't.

That means a lot more capex though (as it is drivers bring their own cars) and I'm not sure how much enthusiasm there is for more of that right now

It isn't just about sales, it is about margin. F150 Lightning was losing money on each unit produced - they cost about 40% more to product than they sold for. Cybertruck has a positive gross margin, so even though sales are terrible, they don't have have a pressing financial need to cancel it.

While I also don't mind manufacturers trying a new look, and I like the vague "halo warthog" look of the thing, the Cybertruck seems to have ended up a very bad spot.

It's just not a good truck.

It's also suffered from being insanely overhyped, and then underdelivering on basically every front.

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Part of my problem with modern Tesla is that they seem to have really jumped the shark on delivering products that are functional. Across the board - from autonomous driving, solar roofs, power walls, Cybertruck, Semi, etc... Even the mass manufactured lines like the Y get staggeringly bad reliability ratings and reviews.

Good form is great! Good form at the expense of good function is not.

If you drive a truck because you like trucks, then a Cybertruck works.

If you drive a truck because you need a truck, then Cybertrucks don't really work.

That being said, I think a lot of people are in the first category.

The second category people have things that can be fit in a normal truck, but not a Cybertruck.

I have bemoaned the sameness of car design these days. To the Cybertruck I say, thank you for trying something different!

But not like that.

(Also, the problem is "Americans love trucks"—the Cybertruck doesn't solve that. It's still just a lethal grocery-getter in suburbia where the Cybertruck was only going to sell anyway. I'd sooner get behind the new golf-cart craze in suburbia—let them drive their golf carts to Costco.)

In what world is the Cybertruck not "oversized" and "bloated". It has roughly the same footprint as an F150.

> people tend to drive their electric cars/trucks more gently too

Really? I tend to see much more aggressive acceleration from people in electric cars (including myself when I'm driving, though I try not to). I've been putting it down to people being used to how gas cars seem to be working harder when you ask them to accelerate heavily, while electric just goes with no complaints.

I don’t agree with that external analysis (cnbc is saying it’s lower than their expectations). This is a gen 1 product for super fans that they want to evolve into a mainstream one.

I don't know if it's genius or madness, but all of Tesla's cars look the same. When I see a Tesla, I can't tell if it's a 3, S, X, or Y unless I get close. The most distinct one is the X with its fancy doors.

So when I hear they're cancelling the S and X I can't even picture which cars we're talking about.

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.

How can legacy auto refresh models every two years and Tesla cannot?

The problem is just there is no concept of a car company where they only sell their standard mass market vehicles. Somewhat more expensive higher margin vehicles are in the lineup for almost all the other companies. Its kind of strange to suggest its not worth it when it is seemingly worth it for most other companies.

Maybe the wisdom of having a 'full lineup' is wrong and has to do with making dealers happy.

On the other hand, having 99% of your sales be 2 very similar vehicles seems questionable strategy.

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.

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 stock is the product.

Musk reeks of scam. But for a stock pump and dumb scheme there sure are a lot of teslas on the road.

Has it all really been just one giant grift to steal every Americans social security number.

> 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.

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.

Old source: https://www.csis.org/blogs/trustee-china-hand/chinese-ev-dil...

but the arc of less subsidies is clear.

> He wants to sell millions of cheaper cars, not thousands of cars for wealthy people.

Why hasn't the cheap car been designed yet then?

> Musk's goal all along was to get away from boutique production. He wants to sell millions of cheaper cars, not thousands of cars for wealthy people.

So the literal opposite of the Cybertruck, which was released less than a year ago.

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.

Source: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=IgifEgm1-e0

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.

A reasonable guess.

As far as I can tell, the number of humanoid robots doing anything productive is zero. It's all demos.

This is far harder than self-driving. As a guy from Waymo once said in a talk, "the output is only two numbers" (speed and steering angle).

Also, there are at least 18 humanoid robots good enough to have a Youtube video. Tesla is not the leader.

Remember the "cobot" boom of about five years ago? Easy to train and use industrial robots safe around humans? Anybody?

I'm not saying this is impossible, but that it's too early for volume production. This will probably take as long as it took to get to real robotaxis.

The story needs only to hold up until car production has shut down.

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.

Do think factories are still mostly humans on assembly lines?