Isn't Tesla trying to be SpaceX's vertically integrated robotics division? My gut feeling says they are trying to move out of the EV business as crazy as that may seem to us normals.
> My gut feeling says they are trying to move out of the EV business as crazy as that may seem to us normals.
It's not that crazy. The last new release of a truly mainstream car was the Model 3 a decade ago. Anything ever since has been facelifts and the ill-fated Cybercuck.
The major problem Tesla faces is that on the one side their brand image is in the gutters and has been for years and on the other side, "established" car companies finally have brought competitive cars to the market at relevant scale. They'll need to invest a lot of money to develop a new model from scratch with a high chance of not making back the money.
$100 per month in a $40k vehicle that allows it to drive sufficiently well 99% of the time such that it reduces driver stress and liability is worth something.
Other car manufacturers somehow can’t even provide dashcam recordings in a $40 vehicle.
> The last new release of a truly mainstream car was the Model 3 a decade ago.
I'm no Tesla fan, but having longevity in car models is a good thing. My fun car was built by VW in Germany for a decade and then by VW in South Africa for another decade; parts availability is great.
In today's marketplace of very samey cars, models that work should probably last a decade or more.
That said, Tesla could have built out a couple more styles, such as maybe a minivan/workvan/delivery van, although van sales can be pretty cyclical, and Tesla parts and service was (is?) notoriously poor in some cases, so I dunno if commercial users would be interested.
The problem I see is with focus. Elon/Tesla seems to go after the next big thing every couple of years without a real plan.
I'm surprised that the markets have given Elon the amount of slack he's gotten. Once you merge Tesla into SpaceX, what's the plan? Tesla can't seem to roll out new vehicles with different body styling. Is robotics or AI the next big thing? What will happen to their car business? Will it just be CyberCabs? Will they become a mobile phone carrier?
The list of questions goes on and on. All this feels like a YC company looking for a new line of business because they just figured out their current line of business isn't all that great.
I think it’s pretty obvious: sell the machines that replace humans as AI improves, and be ready to run that AI at massive scale.
First off is robotaxis and semis (99% of highway driving and 80-90% of city driving driver jobs have been very effectively replaced right now by machine, look at Waymo if you don’t believe Elon), and then Optimus for stuff that needs hands, like warehouse workers or other low-skill “move heavy things from here to there” jobs.
My six year old Tesla 3 just drove me from Vegas to LA, door to door, without me having to give it any control inputs. Not a lot of people seem to be paying attention to how good it is now.
I imagine Optimus will be a really big deal once they get it working as well as Teslas drive.
> First off is robotaxis and semis (99% of highway driving and 80-90% of city driving driver jobs have been very effectively replaced right now by machine, look at Waymo if you don’t believe Elon)
Waymo hasn’t achieved that, though, right? They’re deployed in minimal markets, and I would be surprised if they had even replaced a majority of taxi rides where they are deployed.
Your trip still requires you to be at the wheel and conscious because the technology can’t be guaranteed to not try to murder you. How many miles do you go between driving accidents? Really asking: how many miles do you go between intervening with self driving?
The lack of complete market takeover is a sign the technology just isn’t there yet.
Worth noting that Mercedes and BMW were the first to offer real L3 under specific conditions (as in: you could legally do something else, and the company would be responsible in case of accident), but they dropped it this year due to low demand and high cost. Some Chinese manufacturers offer it still.
I'm quite aware that the self driving capabilities of a Tesla is good, has been for a while.
So were is the revolution now?
Even the internal Tesla paper determined that the self driving market is not that big. There are clear issues no one seems to really like to hear:
People don't mind driving; A lot of people have to drive at the same time (which is not economic to catch this spike and then have all these cars with low utilization the rest of the day); We know the taxi/uber market.
Either it is so good that i literlay can do whatever i want while its driving and not getting car sick and move around, OR i'm sitting in a car seat anyway. I hate being not the driver, its a lot more boring than driving.
Once the Tesla semi is shipping in greater numbers, I expect a lot of trucker jobs to disappear. Not all, and not even most, but still, tens or hundreds of thousands. (IIRC there are 3 or 4 million truckers in the usa.)
Waymo has very little market penetration where I live. I've only seen a handful of them driving around. When I went to visit San Francisco last month, I never realized how prevalent they are.
I'd say that only some places have seen city drivers replaced by Waymo to such an extent. As for self-driving semis, the market penetration is near zero. Maybe the tech is good enough but no one is buying it.
The line of business is fine. Tesla & SpaceX both make things people want. Neither cars nor rockets are being disrupted by AI. They could achieve good-to-great growth under stable, full-time, drug-free management. But if you feel you need a large amount of capital and you want to retain control of SpaceX and Tesla, bolting these startups onto them is a way to double down. It's just a shame to see those existing things get torched.
"Elon/Tesla seems to go after the next big thing every couple of years without a real plan."
I wouldn't consider this to be a weakness, necessarily. No plan survives a contact with the enemy, and the market is sorta-kinda war with unclear sides and developments. Plans tend to bind people to their old decisions, and make them beholden to sunk costs even if the world drifts in another direction.
Musk's companies are good at entering a stagnated industry and proving that it can work better if radically changed. But once the new concept is proved, they seem kinda spent, a pivot makes sense to me.
It'll be interesting to see if they can do well in places where there aren't a bunch of stagnant incumbents to upset. I'm sure Musk would love to edgelord his way through a conversation where he offends a bunch of people by implying that they have been doing asteroid mining all wrong, those idiots, and then go prove himself right, but there's just nobody doing that.
It's not "crazy," it's flim flam. It's what Elizabeth Holmes would've look like had she bought a health tech firm before starting the Thernos scam so she could pump her stock to a P/E ratio over 300 instead of scamming naïve noob tech investors.
That roadster demo proved to me they are not serious about making EVs anymore. Strapping rockets to a car makes an interesting spectacle, but is utterly impractical for a real consumer vehicle.
To be fair, I did not believe for a moment that this was a serious idea. Instead it looks a stunt to be performed, not a serous consumer feature. Surely? Such a feature would never pass FMVSS muster.
Truth. However it's pretty great marketing, fairly certain every car enthusiast on the planet has seen that demonstration. Eyeballs that likely can't be bought otherwise. The flying version will never be made for a human occupant, but if they do make a few they will be collectors items.
The only thing that demo proved to me is that I will never buy a Tesla. I’m even in the market for a new car and I’d be interested in getting an EV.
Imagine if they put all that engineering effort to building an affordable, reliable, EV? Man that would be something to behold. But America is in the meme economy now, nobody cares about real products for real people. Just hype generators that appeal to the 1%.
Was it great marketing? Did it move the needle on sales? That’s what marketing is supposed to do. I see Musk do dumb stuff all the time and all it makes me think is “I will never buy a product from this scam artist”.
Probably not good - if you are buying Roadster you'll never get flying model as thats for friends and family, despite car absolutely mogging everything else in the market.
Maybe not the needle on sales, but the needle on stock valuation. The moment the company stops making dreams is the moment the stock start to fall down to a car company valuation.
Jaguar also did extremely well spread marketing campaign. It is really questionable if it moves units. Same goes for this one. You might get notoriety but that doesn't always translate to sales. And I am pretty sure no one was unaware of Tesla at that point.
It’s pretty absurd to base such a high valuation on things that don’t exist. Not only do they not exist, they’ve missed every deadline put out by Musk for over a decade. This is where you put the CEO in prison in a functioning society.
Why would Tesla pivoting seem strange? They've lost the global EV race, they've sabotaged their American market and they haven't done anything but weak publicity stunts in years. Their profits are tanking, their brand is toxic and their prospects are dim. That doesn't scream 'bright future' to me.
> My gut feeling says they are trying to move out of the EV business as crazy as that may seem to us normals.
Expect this trend to continue. I've started seeing it all over across different industries. Consumer based businesses are being abandoned to instead chase the bigger numbers from B2B sales and premium consumers.
It's no secret to anyone paying attention. The EV business is basically dead, and they're getting their asses kicked by Chinese competition.
Robotics is the new focus. Depending on who you ask (and how well they execute), this will either be another grift for bagholders or exactly the right move to capture a massive emerging industry.
I do think people are massively underestimating robotics. The convergence of LLMs and robotics will be the next great wave of AI, unlocking an enormous boom in productivity across the economy.
Elon had an insane talent of finding the right people with wild moonshot ideas to run his companies while he was getting the credit and the limelight.
Then he got older, got into politics and fully bought into the marketing about himself. He thinks he's a genius and that everything he touches turns to gold.
Well... Turns out stuff works as long as he is out of the loop and doesn't make any direct decisions.
> Turns out stuff works as long as he is out of the loop and doesn't make any direct decisions
This is not unique to Musk - many tech CEOs learn this the hard way when they start meddling in the day-to-day. Bezos built an empire, but the projects he took personal control of (like FirePhone) tended to be unmitigated disasters.
So is at least half the US auto industry, if not all. Modern Chinese cars look great and you get a lot of bang for your buck. Even without CCP subsidies keeping prices low they would eat up other manufacturers if priced similarly.
The Model Y outsells every Chinese EV in China. It's every other US manufacturer who would be doomed if the China EV tariff went away. That's why the 100% tariff was imposed by Biden, not Trump.
Of course BYD sells more cars overall. The point is that the Model Y and Model 3 are competitive with BYD models even in their home market and would continue to sell even if BYD came to America.
The only major one is the US. Excluding both home countries (US and China), Tesla's automotive revenue was ~$20B and BYD's was ~$27B. Hardly the blowout you're trying to portray. And a lot of that BYD revenue was from hybrids, not EVs.
FSD that actually works and the massively popular in live markets robotaxi service are the obvious answer to “big-deal things that came after this CTO left”
$2B cybertruck failure barely registers vs how impactful FSD has been on model Y / 3 sales. Tesla is supply constrained again, with multi-month waits for the model Y L edition
There are so many robotaxis in austin. Something like 300 waymos and 350 Teslas? I love waymo and wont step into a robotaxi, but people definitely are riding them.
FSD is old and the promises too. Its not new its not whatever its just very slowly progressing to what was promised and it still doesn't show up as the big deal.
Wasn't there even multiply lawsuits against Tesla because the payed for FSD didn't work? Didn't exist? Wasn't supported by the Hardware build in?
2016 did Tesla announce that every future car has the hardware for FSD. 2016!
They update it all the time. It’s not old, it’s new. Yes it finally is starting to achieve the promise of 10 years ago… and the market is recognizing it and they are calling out the subscription growth on the earnings calls. 67% yoy growth this year.
Most people don’t care that some guy paid $10k for a feature on a $80k car 10 years ago that didn’t achieve its crazy promise. They care that they can pay $99 today for a feature that blows away their expectations, AND is good enough to not just be a surprising novelty but something they use long term.
I’m not saying I would. I’m saying that 1.7 million subscribers currently do, and that number is growing rapidly. It’s also a big reason why people buy the cars. People legitimately talk about and consider it from a safety perspective. Drive to the ER, that kind of thing, as well as a luxury feature.
People don’t like driving, and they hire(d) people to do it for them. There’s even a word for it: chauffeur. Now the car does it itself. Yes the chauffeur could do other things as well, but you can’t pay a chauffeur $99 a month.
I don't have a Tesla, my uncle has a Model S. I met up with him recently for lunch, I told the car to drive us to a seafood place, it did most of the work and parked itself. This is commuting. And, it didn't roll through stop signs.
I like myself a Cooper or a GTI for the twisties, but that's a different thing.
It was very strange, in the beginning people celebrated Tesla, they raved about it, the sales were great, but then as soon as the politics got involved, suddenly it's all turned negative.
Elon's cognitive decline from drug addiction affected both his business and political decision making. pre-ketamine Elon delivered the Falcon 9, Model 3/Y, and Starlink. post-ketamine Elon gave us Cybertruck, Starship (aka the SpaceX Cybertruck), and a bunch of fake products like the flying roadster, humanoid robots, and Cybercab.
"Politics got involved" from the beginning. In the context of USA politics, being an EV company while your CEO talked about how important electrification was to stave off the effects of human caused climate change is 100% a politically coded act.
What happened wasn't "politics got involved", what happened was that CEO started talking other politics.
And to say that "politics got involved" is a ridiculously passive statement. Elon has full control over how he publicly acts. Politics "didn't get involved" from 2022 onwards, Elon's publicly articulated political views significantly shifted, AND THEN Elon personally led massive organizational changes in the federal government.
Regardless of if you support or oppose DOGE, it's completely dishonest to wall off his actions at DOGE into a separate category of acts that you can clearly separate from his business.
Musk has been consistently vile the entire time, it's just that liberals always think they were always right, even when they had the opposite opinion five minutes ago and were advocating that people who have their current opinion be fired and arrested for treason. He must have changed they say.
Even now, they have no idea how to criticize him because they adore the blindingly wealthy, opinionated, and willing to use that wealth to force that opinion on others (it's upper-middle-class sainthood.) His biggest crime somehow is that he allowed you to say what you wanted on twitter. His second biggest is that he went after the "administrative state", which is this mysterious theory that the Executive Branch should have authority distinct from the President, and therefore not be subject to democracy at all, in any way. Just like they turned on Assange, it's always telling that their consistent enemy is democracy. Democracy is directly offensive to the credentials that they dedicated their lives and compromised their personal integrity to get from wealthy people and institutions.
They're offended by Musk because they wanted to show their Teslas off, and to talk about the projects that their company partnered with Tesla on at parties, and to be proud of their kids getting named Tesla scholars and getting Tesla genius grants. They can't be because he's obviously a slimeball in a way that they can't overlook and ignore and mock the victims of (in return for money and status.) That's it. They, however, are currently overlooking the crimes of their favored billionaires and employers, so have no language to articulate their resentment of him that doesn't also incriminate themselves. So it's just this insane inarticulate id-explosion.
Reminds me of people being embarrassed about working at Arthur Anderson or Lehman Brothers at parties. "I worked in accounting; I worked in insurance," they would say. Their mothers used to gush about them, and now they don't even mention the names of the companies, like a father who died in prison. All Musk's properties are like that now, as well as Google, Facebook, Amazon, etc.. Musk's properties still actually even come out better than other tech slop because they all ostensibly have some material purpose other than extracting rents from normal people through deceit and by doing the least work possible.
I used to have a name for people who can't see this dynamic: "emoluments libs." They were the libs during Trump's first term who kept saying "The Democrats aren't going after Trump for profiting from his office because they're too afraid." No, dude. They're not going after him because they have the same deals with the same people, and everything that they would go after him for implicates them too. After you avoid the obvious, you're left with impeaching a totally corrupt guy for not arming Ukraine hard enough to threaten Russia hard enough because they wouldn't cooperate in uncovering the blatant corruption of his predecessor. If that's the best you've got, a thing that sabotages one of your own prominent politicians (who was destined to win the next presidency by a hair), and highlights an evil thing you're currently doing in Ukraine, the other alternatives must be really horrible i.e. would send you to jail with him. Their only bright spot is that they hoped it would take (a notoriously disobedient) Biden out so The Atlantic libs could push one of their soulless golems Harris or Buttigieg into the presidency.
I have to be honest. I'm part of the ancient left that is celebrating the imminent death of the middle class, because it's their weird psychology that is killing us. I encourage their replacement with AI wherever it is possible, my criticism of AI is that it is still not good enough to do it, and if the middle class have anything to say...
There are millions of Americans like me who will never step foot in one because of their association with Elon Musk.
That's an insane negative attribute that Waymo doesn't have to worry about. I hate the Alphabet guys too, but not to the same extent of completely boycotting all their products (yet).
> There are millions of Americans like me who will never step foot in one because of their association with Elon Musk.
You guys have to realize at some point that you're not a significant part of the market. There are a lot of people who don't particularly like musk but the amount that would never use a cybercab isn't a significant part of a 300m person market.
Speaking as someone who follows the NFL, people will forgive all kinds of horrendous behavior if the player's team is winning. It's easy to say things in the abstract like "won't buy a Tesla" because most people aren't really shopping for a car all that often. But if the cybertaxi works and is cheap, then I would guess a lot of people won't be sticking to their proclaimed values. That said, I have my doubts that cybercab will really work all that well.
> Cybercab seems to have had a very promising start, metrics are good. This seems far more of a political hate piece than one based on any data.
What? This is just a political hate piece because of the potential of something that just started five minutes ago? You're damning Tesla with faint praise yourself and don't even know it.
Lack of lidar isn't the biggest problem. Nor will adding it make Tesla's cabs suddenly reliable and useful. They don't have Google's geospatial data, they don't have the remote intervention infrastructure, they haven't expanded it across multiple cities and built out the service infrastructure to clean and repair their fleet. They don't have the financial history to go to Pimco for term loans paid out of cash flow.
Is this a paid piece behind the scenes by JB Straubel? It reads exactly as someone who was paid or got exclusive access to write something to over highlight someone.
They aren't on par - but people are irrational and the world has a lot of detail. Therefore, it's hard to do credit assignment on why Tesla is making fewer hit products.
Exceptional success is both timing and having an exceptional team. But yea, let's keep attributing it to great man theory, because that's more digestible and people like to mythologize a single person.
You mean when sales were lower? Sales numbers are pretty clear. They are up every year, along with the price.
The slate is a joke. They said they need to sell 80k per year to break even. The maverick is currently only double that in its 6th year, after a major mid cycle refresh, basically without competition. Now the slate is going to appear with less utility, fewer features, 205 miles of range and sell in comparable volumes? What a joke.
MKBHD made a good observation about the Cybercab[1]. The way the doors are designed, you will get high incidents of “collision with an open door of a stationary vehicle” also known as a dooring accident. If it was intended to be a robotaxi, why didn’t they just make the door swing up in a vertical plane rather than butterfly out like that. Another impractical vanity door feature just like with the Model X doors. Most likely conjured up by none other than the boss.
If we are to be charitable to Tesla, new car development isn’t like new tech product development. The shortest possible period of time to develop a new car is probably about 4-7 years.
I’d also say that the YL is something of a new product and a very successful one, even though it’s more of a long wheelbase variant.
Still, I agree with the thesis of the article. Where are the smart decisions?
The Cybertruck could have been a home run product for the US market, but Tesla’s own hubris about that market really buried it. They focused on styling and marketed it as a cyberpunk lawless society survival vehicle where angry mobs of cyberpsychos can’t break your window.
Hello, Tesla, you needed to put the truck in NFL advertisements and show how it’s going to be amazing for your blue collar cosplay sessions and how it’s going to get 300 miles of range while towing a boat (which it was supposed to but it didn’t).
The Cybercab being a two-door coupe is insane. How did that pass the first design discussion? Look at how the Waymo Zeekr cab is designed, look at a how a London cab can fit like 5-6 people in a normal-sized car, look at the Nissan NV200 as NYC’s exclusive taxi from 2012-2018.
None of these are two seater low entry coupes.
Where is the full size 3-row family vehicle to convince upper middle class suburban moms to not buy an EX-90? Where is the European city car?
This is an opinion piece - there’s no factual basis (nor any facts quoted) to support this narrative at all. Plus, key things missing from the calculus include:
- COVID, that put a strain on manufacturing during lockdowns and the eventual worldwide supply chain disruptions
- the new administration and its anti EV stance
- emergence of AI
- betting the future of Tesla on Optimus (product) and Robotaxi (service)
How much could JB Staubel have influenced Tesla during these times is anybody’s guess.
Since we’re listing things that potentially negatively affected sales, you have to include Elon’s public antics. Alienating your base demographics is not smart
Even EV Car makers are making now what the Tesla Roadster should have been.
This is the weirdest thing ever by far. Why would you not just build a Tesla supercar? Why 2028?
You know what I bet? They are so dependend on what Elon Musk does and says and decides, that stuff like Twitter, DOGE and alllll the other garbage he did on the side, just stalled everything.
Sure, if you don't count the redesigned Model Y as a new product, with the successful synchronized global factory changeover. Or the Y L, backordered until well into next year. And you don't count Semi which is being delivered to customers from its new factory right now. And you don't count the Cybercab even though hundreds are giving rides today. And you don't count the Robotaxi service even as it passes Waymo for number of cars and miles ridden per week in Austin.
Yeah, if you disqualify or assume imminent failure of all of those, then zero successful new product launches.
The CyberCab won't work out since it has to be truly self driving, as opposed to Tesla's Full Self Driving (Supervised) which is merely a driving aid with the driver responsible if something goes wrong.
That means it will have to be more capable a driver than most human beings and that seems unlikely at the moment if you look at how well FSD works today. Yes, it works okay most of the time, but that's just not good enough for a self-driving taxi cab without a steering wheel or controls. And Tesla can't have thousands of remote taxi-drivers standing by all the time. That would make the service uneconomical and a loss leader.
it only needs to be better than an average human. isn't the crash rate already better?
some say the bar is higher due to sentiment, but it's insurance companies who will decide, and they are more interested in the numbers than sentiment. Your view that it has to be better than 'most' humans doesn't make any kind of insurance sense
Autonomous vehicles will be held to much higher standards than the average human being and therefore incredibly difficult if not impossible for them to attain. Why? Because we can relate to another human being and their infallibilty ("That could've been me") but the same cannot be said of an A.I.
One child run over and killed by a CyberCab and the government will have to nationalize SpaceX to prevent it from evaporating and taking $4 Trillion with it.
Everyone else is getting the counter-argument wrong. The counter-argument is that the robots are better than humans in some cases, but the places they are worse they're worse in a non-human way and react in non-human ways. It's precisely that that will make the risk worse. Also, when an insurance company insures a driver, the lawsuit is against the driver and they're most out what a single bad driver can do. When the lawsuit is against CyberCabs, it's against all cabs and the most they're out is a class action lawsuit against all CyberCabs + negligence etc + Tesla has deeper pockets.
So on principle, you're probably right. In practice it's easy to see why a corporation running a fleet of self-driving vehicles would have a different insurance profile than randos driving around.
From the HBO Documentary Films Musk documentary released 2026:
"Clearly, there was never any real effort to make battery swap actually work because the value to Tesla was not, you know, as an actual viable way to drive adoption. It was a way to earn ZEV credits. Once California changed its rules and insisted that Tesla prove that customers were swapping batteries, Tesla abandoned the program. But Tesla had already banked over 100 million dollars from its phantom battery swaps. Since its founding, Tesla padded its bottom line with more than 11 billion dollars in government carbon credits."
Perhaps Tesla's most successful product was carbon credits
"The electric automaker earned $10.7 billion from selling credits created by government climate programs, a total that accounted for a third of Tesla's profits over the last decade, according to an analysis of securities filings by POLITICO's E&E News. In the first nine months of 2024, some 43 percent of its net income came from those credits, which Tesla sold to rival carmakers after exceeding climate mandates in California and elsewhere."
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[ 4.0 ms ] story [ 62.1 ms ] threadIt's not that crazy. The last new release of a truly mainstream car was the Model 3 a decade ago. Anything ever since has been facelifts and the ill-fated Cybercuck.
The major problem Tesla faces is that on the one side their brand image is in the gutters and has been for years and on the other side, "established" car companies finally have brought competitive cars to the market at relevant scale. They'll need to invest a lot of money to develop a new model from scratch with a high chance of not making back the money.
Other car manufacturers somehow can’t even provide dashcam recordings in a $40 vehicle.
I'm no Tesla fan, but having longevity in car models is a good thing. My fun car was built by VW in Germany for a decade and then by VW in South Africa for another decade; parts availability is great.
In today's marketplace of very samey cars, models that work should probably last a decade or more.
That said, Tesla could have built out a couple more styles, such as maybe a minivan/workvan/delivery van, although van sales can be pretty cyclical, and Tesla parts and service was (is?) notoriously poor in some cases, so I dunno if commercial users would be interested.
You see one Tesla, you have seen every Tesla. Colors? The same too.
I'm surprised that the markets have given Elon the amount of slack he's gotten. Once you merge Tesla into SpaceX, what's the plan? Tesla can't seem to roll out new vehicles with different body styling. Is robotics or AI the next big thing? What will happen to their car business? Will it just be CyberCabs? Will they become a mobile phone carrier?
The list of questions goes on and on. All this feels like a YC company looking for a new line of business because they just figured out their current line of business isn't all that great.
First off is robotaxis and semis (99% of highway driving and 80-90% of city driving driver jobs have been very effectively replaced right now by machine, look at Waymo if you don’t believe Elon), and then Optimus for stuff that needs hands, like warehouse workers or other low-skill “move heavy things from here to there” jobs.
My six year old Tesla 3 just drove me from Vegas to LA, door to door, without me having to give it any control inputs. Not a lot of people seem to be paying attention to how good it is now.
I imagine Optimus will be a really big deal once they get it working as well as Teslas drive.
Waymo hasn’t achieved that, though, right? They’re deployed in minimal markets, and I would be surprised if they had even replaced a majority of taxi rides where they are deployed.
Your trip still requires you to be at the wheel and conscious because the technology can’t be guaranteed to not try to murder you. How many miles do you go between driving accidents? Really asking: how many miles do you go between intervening with self driving?
The lack of complete market takeover is a sign the technology just isn’t there yet.
So were is the revolution now?
Even the internal Tesla paper determined that the self driving market is not that big. There are clear issues no one seems to really like to hear:
People don't mind driving; A lot of people have to drive at the same time (which is not economic to catch this spike and then have all these cars with low utilization the rest of the day); We know the taxi/uber market.
Either it is so good that i literlay can do whatever i want while its driving and not getting car sick and move around, OR i'm sitting in a car seat anyway. I hate being not the driver, its a lot more boring than driving.
Your claim that robotaxis and semis have replaced humans is not credible. Show me all the truck driver job losses due to self driving trucks.
I'd say that only some places have seen city drivers replaced by Waymo to such an extent. As for self-driving semis, the market penetration is near zero. Maybe the tech is good enough but no one is buying it.
I wouldn't consider this to be a weakness, necessarily. No plan survives a contact with the enemy, and the market is sorta-kinda war with unclear sides and developments. Plans tend to bind people to their old decisions, and make them beholden to sunk costs even if the world drifts in another direction.
It'll be interesting to see if they can do well in places where there aren't a bunch of stagnant incumbents to upset. I'm sure Musk would love to edgelord his way through a conversation where he offends a bunch of people by implying that they have been doing asteroid mining all wrong, those idiots, and then go prove himself right, but there's just nobody doing that.
Imagine if they put all that engineering effort to building an affordable, reliable, EV? Man that would be something to behold. But America is in the meme economy now, nobody cares about real products for real people. Just hype generators that appeal to the 1%.
"Come work for us and you could get to design rocket cars!"
Expect this trend to continue. I've started seeing it all over across different industries. Consumer based businesses are being abandoned to instead chase the bigger numbers from B2B sales and premium consumers.
Robotics is the new focus. Depending on who you ask (and how well they execute), this will either be another grift for bagholders or exactly the right move to capture a massive emerging industry.
I do think people are massively underestimating robotics. The convergence of LLMs and robotics will be the next great wave of AI, unlocking an enormous boom in productivity across the economy.
Then he got older, got into politics and fully bought into the marketing about himself. He thinks he's a genius and that everything he touches turns to gold.
Well... Turns out stuff works as long as he is out of the loop and doesn't make any direct decisions.
This is not unique to Musk - many tech CEOs learn this the hard way when they start meddling in the day-to-day. Bezos built an empire, but the projects he took personal control of (like FirePhone) tended to be unmitigated disasters.
Who sells more cars in China: Tesla or BYD?
$2B cybertruck failure barely registers vs how impactful FSD has been on model Y / 3 sales. Tesla is supply constrained again, with multi-month waits for the model Y L edition
Wasn't there even multiply lawsuits against Tesla because the payed for FSD didn't work? Didn't exist? Wasn't supported by the Hardware build in?
2016 did Tesla announce that every future car has the hardware for FSD. 2016!
Most people don’t care that some guy paid $10k for a feature on a $80k car 10 years ago that didn’t achieve its crazy promise. They care that they can pay $99 today for a feature that blows away their expectations, AND is good enough to not just be a surprising novelty but something they use long term.
What?
People don’t like driving, and they hire(d) people to do it for them. There’s even a word for it: chauffeur. Now the car does it itself. Yes the chauffeur could do other things as well, but you can’t pay a chauffeur $99 a month.
So 9% bought their Tesla with FSD.
A lot less bought FSD than I expected, a lot more people who pay for the subscription.
A lot of people btw. do like driving.
I don't have a Tesla, my uncle has a Model S. I met up with him recently for lunch, I told the car to drive us to a seafood place, it did most of the work and parked itself. This is commuting. And, it didn't roll through stop signs.
I like myself a Cooper or a GTI for the twisties, but that's a different thing.
What happened wasn't "politics got involved", what happened was that CEO started talking other politics.
And to say that "politics got involved" is a ridiculously passive statement. Elon has full control over how he publicly acts. Politics "didn't get involved" from 2022 onwards, Elon's publicly articulated political views significantly shifted, AND THEN Elon personally led massive organizational changes in the federal government.
Regardless of if you support or oppose DOGE, it's completely dishonest to wall off his actions at DOGE into a separate category of acts that you can clearly separate from his business.
Even now, they have no idea how to criticize him because they adore the blindingly wealthy, opinionated, and willing to use that wealth to force that opinion on others (it's upper-middle-class sainthood.) His biggest crime somehow is that he allowed you to say what you wanted on twitter. His second biggest is that he went after the "administrative state", which is this mysterious theory that the Executive Branch should have authority distinct from the President, and therefore not be subject to democracy at all, in any way. Just like they turned on Assange, it's always telling that their consistent enemy is democracy. Democracy is directly offensive to the credentials that they dedicated their lives and compromised their personal integrity to get from wealthy people and institutions.
They're offended by Musk because they wanted to show their Teslas off, and to talk about the projects that their company partnered with Tesla on at parties, and to be proud of their kids getting named Tesla scholars and getting Tesla genius grants. They can't be because he's obviously a slimeball in a way that they can't overlook and ignore and mock the victims of (in return for money and status.) That's it. They, however, are currently overlooking the crimes of their favored billionaires and employers, so have no language to articulate their resentment of him that doesn't also incriminate themselves. So it's just this insane inarticulate id-explosion.
Reminds me of people being embarrassed about working at Arthur Anderson or Lehman Brothers at parties. "I worked in accounting; I worked in insurance," they would say. Their mothers used to gush about them, and now they don't even mention the names of the companies, like a father who died in prison. All Musk's properties are like that now, as well as Google, Facebook, Amazon, etc.. Musk's properties still actually even come out better than other tech slop because they all ostensibly have some material purpose other than extracting rents from normal people through deceit and by doing the least work possible.
I used to have a name for people who can't see this dynamic: "emoluments libs." They were the libs during Trump's first term who kept saying "The Democrats aren't going after Trump for profiting from his office because they're too afraid." No, dude. They're not going after him because they have the same deals with the same people, and everything that they would go after him for implicates them too. After you avoid the obvious, you're left with impeaching a totally corrupt guy for not arming Ukraine hard enough to threaten Russia hard enough because they wouldn't cooperate in uncovering the blatant corruption of his predecessor. If that's the best you've got, a thing that sabotages one of your own prominent politicians (who was destined to win the next presidency by a hair), and highlights an evil thing you're currently doing in Ukraine, the other alternatives must be really horrible i.e. would send you to jail with him. Their only bright spot is that they hoped it would take (a notoriously disobedient) Biden out so The Atlantic libs could push one of their soulless golems Harris or Buttigieg into the presidency.
I have to be honest. I'm part of the ancient left that is celebrating the imminent death of the middle class, because it's their weird psychology that is killing us. I encourage their replacement with AI wherever it is possible, my criticism of AI is that it is still not good enough to do it, and if the middle class have anything to say...
That's an insane negative attribute that Waymo doesn't have to worry about. I hate the Alphabet guys too, but not to the same extent of completely boycotting all their products (yet).
You guys have to realize at some point that you're not a significant part of the market. There are a lot of people who don't particularly like musk but the amount that would never use a cybercab isn't a significant part of a 300m person market.
What? This is just a political hate piece because of the potential of something that just started five minutes ago? You're damning Tesla with faint praise yourself and don't even know it.
Examples: Covid controversies around musk in 2020, Twitter acquisition in 2022, Musk becoming the world richest person in 2021
Edit: All you Tesla haters just google "best selling car in the world last 3 years" and you'll see.
Look at the Maverick sales, when it was 20k. Slate Auto seems to have gotten it right.
The slate is a joke. They said they need to sell 80k per year to break even. The maverick is currently only double that in its 6th year, after a major mid cycle refresh, basically without competition. Now the slate is going to appear with less utility, fewer features, 205 miles of range and sell in comparable volumes? What a joke.
1: https://youtu.be/fo-uubnajWM?t=3m30s
I’d also say that the YL is something of a new product and a very successful one, even though it’s more of a long wheelbase variant.
Still, I agree with the thesis of the article. Where are the smart decisions?
The Cybertruck could have been a home run product for the US market, but Tesla’s own hubris about that market really buried it. They focused on styling and marketed it as a cyberpunk lawless society survival vehicle where angry mobs of cyberpsychos can’t break your window.
Hello, Tesla, you needed to put the truck in NFL advertisements and show how it’s going to be amazing for your blue collar cosplay sessions and how it’s going to get 300 miles of range while towing a boat (which it was supposed to but it didn’t).
The Cybercab being a two-door coupe is insane. How did that pass the first design discussion? Look at how the Waymo Zeekr cab is designed, look at a how a London cab can fit like 5-6 people in a normal-sized car, look at the Nissan NV200 as NYC’s exclusive taxi from 2012-2018.
None of these are two seater low entry coupes.
Where is the full size 3-row family vehicle to convince upper middle class suburban moms to not buy an EX-90? Where is the European city car?
What is Tesla doing with their time?
- COVID, that put a strain on manufacturing during lockdowns and the eventual worldwide supply chain disruptions
- the new administration and its anti EV stance
- emergence of AI
- betting the future of Tesla on Optimus (product) and Robotaxi (service)
How much could JB Staubel have influenced Tesla during these times is anybody’s guess.
This is the weirdest thing ever by far. Why would you not just build a Tesla supercar? Why 2028?
You know what I bet? They are so dependend on what Elon Musk does and says and decides, that stuff like Twitter, DOGE and alllll the other garbage he did on the side, just stalled everything.
Yeah, if you disqualify or assume imminent failure of all of those, then zero successful new product launches.
That means it will have to be more capable a driver than most human beings and that seems unlikely at the moment if you look at how well FSD works today. Yes, it works okay most of the time, but that's just not good enough for a self-driving taxi cab without a steering wheel or controls. And Tesla can't have thousands of remote taxi-drivers standing by all the time. That would make the service uneconomical and a loss leader.
some say the bar is higher due to sentiment, but it's insurance companies who will decide, and they are more interested in the numbers than sentiment. Your view that it has to be better than 'most' humans doesn't make any kind of insurance sense
One child run over and killed by a CyberCab and the government will have to nationalize SpaceX to prevent it from evaporating and taking $4 Trillion with it.
So on principle, you're probably right. In practice it's easy to see why a corporation running a fleet of self-driving vehicles would have a different insurance profile than randos driving around.
"Clearly, there was never any real effort to make battery swap actually work because the value to Tesla was not, you know, as an actual viable way to drive adoption. It was a way to earn ZEV credits. Once California changed its rules and insisted that Tesla prove that customers were swapping batteries, Tesla abandoned the program. But Tesla had already banked over 100 million dollars from its phantom battery swaps. Since its founding, Tesla padded its bottom line with more than 11 billion dollars in government carbon credits."
Perhaps Tesla's most successful product was carbon credits
https://www.eenews.net/articles/musk-made-a-fortune-on-clima...
"The electric automaker earned $10.7 billion from selling credits created by government climate programs, a total that accounted for a third of Tesla's profits over the last decade, according to an analysis of securities filings by POLITICO's E&E News. In the first nine months of 2024, some 43 percent of its net income came from those credits, which Tesla sold to rival carmakers after exceeding climate mandates in California and elsewhere."