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”.
> And to add insult to injury, even GM Super Cruise is widely renowned as better and safer than Tesla’s current “FSD”.
My Huyndai's Autopilot equivalent (I don't even know what they call it) is better than the enhanced Autopilot in the Model 3 that I traded in. It actually changes lanes when I put on the blinker, instead of only changing lanes 70% of the time, and the other time just sitting with the blinker on and a clear lane.
I did not know this and explains why I see so many teslas with their blinkers on and not maneuvering despite having ample room and time. Ultimately this behavior makes them unsafe for their occupants as well as others around them.
Cars only work because we can predict driver behavior, if they break that prediction that’s when bad things are likely to happen…
Most probably because it has a radar that the Tesla lacks. That means your car has two sources of truth and can very efficiently and quickly make an informed decision about whether or not there's anything in the way.
My Model 3 has radar. It’s no longer functional and just a useless appendage. Until 2020-21 all Tesla had radar but Musk directed Tesla to disable the radar from the software stack, nerfing this hardware on tens of thousands of cars. Why? Because he staked on camera-only and to find out there’s still radar fusion would be against that. The real truth is probably they were derisking the part cost (during Covid) and the development timeline to improve the radar integration (after dangerous false braking incidents). It was wonderful when it worked, especially the time-of-flight ability to sense a decelerating car ahead of the car ahead of the one in front of you. When it didn’t work the Navy Seal guy driving and watching a video was the first statistic.
The real Tesla engineers must be in all kinds of frustrations getting whipsawed by their chief engineer-designer-physicist-scientist-government economist-savant but probably the stock options assuage that.
Lastly Tesla still doesn’t have real birds-eye view / 360 surround view for parking. It’s year 2026 and even cheaper cars have this.
> The real Tesla engineers must be in all kinds of frustrations
That's a very Hacker News point of view, that *of course* engineers have the correct opinion and attitude and are merely suffering under the boots of the real incompetent and nefarious.
It's clearly not, but cameras are cheap and Tesla is excellent at cost optimizing their cars. Elon was pretty good at film flaming that somehow imprecise cameras were actually somehow superior.
There's a reason Waymo is doing actual level 4/5 driving while Tesla remains at 2.5.
I don't think my 2018 Model 3 with enhanced autopilot ever used it radar for lane changes. As I noted above, it would just drive with the blinker on and a clear lane.
My 8 yo M3 has radar and it still is active since the yellow radar symbols light up when passing by obstacles. It's also used to figure out obstacles in the front and back and if disabled, the relatively poor cameras on my car would not be able to figure out the distance to the next car in the front.
My shitty Kia Niro has a UI element that indicates anytime it detects an obstacle in my blind spot. My side mirrors even have a red light that also tells me it detects something. Tesla doesn't do that?!
Kia Telluride here but I assume it's the same underlying system as Hyundai - I can attest that it's very good (and doesn't cost anything extra like Tesla charges lol) which makes sense considering they have the majority stake in Boston Dynamics since a few years ago.
Tesla FSD will change lanes when you use the blinker. It will also accelerate and remain engaged if you press the pedal, e.g. if you want to coax it forward at an intersection.
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.
Tesla's original "secret plan" (published on their website) was to become a commodity car manufacturer faster than electric cars became a commodity. Such that the other manufacturers would find them selling obsolete vehicles and Tesla just becomes the new General Motors.
This was the justification for their stock price for quite a few years: "It's logical that Tesla is worth more than all other automakers combined because it will soon be the only automaker."
But now Tesla is way behind on self driving (which was oversold by the whole industry tbh). So what's their new plan? Now they're no longer a car company and will make robots!
> 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.
What would you define as better? I rent various EVs regularly, and I'm still yet to find something that beats it on performance, range and price. That's all before comfort and features, which again most seem to lack. There are a couple pretty close to Tesla, but nothing that clearly beats it that I've driven.
In the US market, the Hyundai Ioniq 6 has better build quality, identical range in real world conditions, a ton of comfort, and no threat that their CEO will go off his meds and take away your driving assist features unless you pay a ~~ransom~~ subscription fee.
Tesla's greatest strength is/was that they did almost everything inhouse. The reason all the other manufacturers struggle to do basic things like dog mode is because they are almost all relying on the supply chain for everything. No infotainment/HVAC supplier has a dog mode so it doesn't exist.
The obvious downside to that is that when Tesla cuts back on R&D, it becomes painfully obvious to the car owners. I'm not expecting anything like dog mode to show up ever again.
I know it’s popular to hate on Elon and therefore Tesla, but you need to be accurate when doing so. They’re still chipping away.
> Tesla Semi?All but dead.
They’ve been running a pilot all this time, and the factory in Nevada to mass produce them is on schedule. Production ramp is second half of this year.
The factory is ginormous.
> The new roadster? Also dead.
Elon said yesterday the unveil is in April “hopefully”
> Full Self Driving? Doesn't exist. Robotaxis?
Cars are driving passengers around Austin now with nobody in either front seat.
It takes automakers almost a decade to bring a new vehicle online, Elon just does it all publicly while everyone else doesn’t take the wraps off until the final 6 months.
Obviously everything is way behind elons hype timelines, but I do still think it’s all coming.
Anyone who owns a tesla vehicle with "full self driving" is probably chuckling to themselves about Tesla ever making useful general purpose robots any time soon. Disclaimer, I own two tesla's with FSD and it's far from "full" or "self". I am very sceptical of robotaxis unless they have the appropriate sensors & SW (e.g. Waymo) which Elon has not done.
Finally, I know lots of people who own cars, but none who own robots. Many friends will not have Alexa in their homes due to privacy concerns. How many people will trust Elon to have a robot in their homes and assume he's being benign and safe with your personal data?
Also, what's the first billion dollar market for humanoid robots?
Industry? "lights-out manufacturing" exists already, and doesn't require humanoid robots.
Hyundai and BYD (among others) say they're going to put humanoid robots in their factories (2). They won't be Tesla robots. Is this really such a huge use?
If you do not want to run a car company, maybe do not... run a car company? Get an ice cream truck.
It absolutely makes no sense to convert a car manufacturer into an AI company. Or a robotics company after you have build CAR FACTORIES around the planet.
If you as a CEO don't like the business you are running for your shareholders, it is time to get a new CEO that does. There still are managers that really like running car companies.
I don't get the feeling that BYD management is bored about the EV business...
Pure logic would dictate that Tesla has a market cap of around $5B. It's actually fraudulent that it's not, and for some reason the SEC allows Musk to lie on every earnings call without repercussion.
Brand value is definitely a moat. Not the deepest of moats, but it is a moat nonetheless.
> It's pure logic that Tesla has to pursue bets that would justify billion dollar valuations and being a car company isn't that.
Tesla is valued as if it is a tech company with a car business as a side gig. Its balance sheet is a car business, and I'm not even sure it spends enough on tech to have tech qualify as a side gig. And the other tech avenues it has been pursuing (autonomous vehicles, humanoid robots) are areas that other people have been doing for better and longer. Hell, Honda had autonomous (not tele-operated) humanoid robots working 20 years ago.
To be honest, at this point, I mostly consider the other bets that Tesla is pursing are just passion projects to keep the stock price artificially high. Were Tesla more realistically valued, it would lose probably 90% or more of its value, and Musk would be a much poorer man.
Tesla had a very good computer, they were learning how to put a car around it.
Traditional manufacturers (German mostly) had good or very good cars, but they sucked at the computer stuff.
---
And unknown to all, the Chinese learned how to make good cars with good computers built in as those two were trying to achiever their respective goals.
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.
It's not that EVs are a commodity. Competition and speculative production capacity buildouts combined with lower than expected consumer demand made the market less profitable.
> a resource, that specifically has full or substantial fungibility: that is, the market treats instances of the good as equivalent or nearly so with no regard to who produced them
Uhh.. not sure where you live or what your local / regional market is like. I'm in the United States, where what car you drive is a really big decision. Many people share on social media what car they bought, and tell people around them about the new car they bought. I've yet to witness a situation where someone said "I bought an electric car" and the response was something like "Why are you telling me you bought toilet paper?" (Even toilet paper has brand names and advertising.)
That isn't to say that the car market hasn't shifted over time.
Cars began as "engine to move wheels plus a few other things" and evolved so that the engine seemed less of the central reason why you bought a specific vehicle. An electric powertrain does take things a bit further, in that most EV buyers know very little about the motors, though they certainly know a thing or two about the battery.
Batteries are generally a commodity at smaller scales, but in a car, they matter significantly. Still, brand matters, too. Ask Lucid or Rivian or Porsche how they sell their electric cars for $70K - $160K. How is it that a commodity available to purchase for ~$30K can be sold for $130K additional? (That's not how commodities work.)
No, electric cars are not a commodity. It's just a difficult market with a lot of players, and a broad market with constantly evolving tastes. Ask Toyota why they have half a dozen different SUV models. Or why the Ford F-150 comes in 200 configurations. (That's not how commodities work!)
Just because the gasoline-burning engine was replaced with electric motors and batteries, the car didn't turn into a commodity overnight. I'm open to counterarguments and persuasion to the contrary.
I think it's a wrong mental model to think of stock market value as "fair" or "unfair" (or maybe it's just me thinking of "unfair" when I see the word "fair").
My impression is that if Tesla would be valued based on quantifiable things it would be much much lower (production costs, competition, revenues, potential, etc.). Of course, you shouldn't value something only based on quantifiable things, but in Tesla the "wishful thinking" part seems to be much larger than for others.
I assume OP meant something closer to "fair market value" than "fair vs. unfair." Tesla is not priced according to its underlying assets or technical analysis (e.g. P/E ratio), but solely based on hype/sentiment.
Interestingly, retail investors and company insiders collectively own more of Tesla than institutional investors.
Fair market value: the price at which a thing would change hands between a willing and informed buyer and seller.
A company's market cap is, by definition, its fair market value.
> Tesla is not priced according to its underlying assets or technical analysis (e.g. P/E ratio), but solely based on hype/sentiment.
You're right that it's not priced according to underlying assets, but it doesn't follow that it is priced on vibes. Its price is based on potential future earnings; the expectation that Elon can pull off his plans for a robotaxi fleet or building an Optimus robot that might unlock the massive demand for household and/or general use commercial robots. Both offer the prospect of being the first mover into markets which could be worth trillions. It's speculation, sure, but not mere "vibes". The company is also led by a man who has made and delivered on massive, seemingly impossible promises, which adds credibility to the idea that Tesla might actually bring these markets into existence.
> Fair market value (FMV) is similar to market value, which is the price that the asset would trade for in the open market under current conditions. However, fair market value has the following additional assumptions: Both buyer and seller are reasonably knowledgeable about the asset, Buyer and seller are behaving in their own best interests, Both parties are free of undue pressure, Each is given a reasonable period for completing the transaction.
However that's why I said "something closer to FMV" as yes - what you described is generally how FMV is calculated for things like stock options.
> but it doesn't follow that it is priced on vibes. Its price is based on potential future earnings
To be clear, I also didn't use the word "vibes," but rather "hype/sentiment" which refers to things like "the expectation that Elon can pull off his plans for a robotaxi fleet or building an Optimus robot that might unlock the massive demand for household and/or general use commercial robots." I'm not sure where you got "vibes" that you quoted in your reply.
Technical analysis uses statistics (e.g. P/E ratios) and marketplace analysis to determine if future potential earnings are worth the price of the stock. TSLA's price is far in excess of any technical analysis I have seen.
> The company is also led by a man who has made and delivered on massive, seemingly impossible promises, which adds credibility to the idea that Tesla might actually bring these markets into existence.
We might have to agree to disagree on this one. (Are we FSD yet?)
Talk about market cap, especially meme stock maket cap, reminds me of that old XKCD comic on extrapolation. Market cap is what you get when you extrapolate the fair market value for the 1% of a company's shares currently on the market all the way out to 100%. But demand doesn't work that way - it doesn't scale linearly.
> And to add insult to injury, even GM Super Cruise is widely renowned as better and safer than Tesla’s current “FSD”.
Do you have any sources for that claim? I can attest that current iteration of FSD is very, very good, and very likely is a safer driver than I am. At least one major insurance company agrees [0]. I don't have any experience with Super Cruise though.
> Do you have any sources for that claim? I can attest that current iteration of FSD is very, very good, and very likely is a safer driver than I am.
That's a damning statement about your driving skills, and probably not true or you'd have had your license revoked by now. I've had FSD for five years, and even today it regularly makes dangerous mistakes. For example, left turns and roundabouts are the equivalent of Russian roulette, but just last week my FSD started driving through a red light because it interpreted a green left-arrow as a sign that it could proceed forward.
If you need to do 50 miles on the interstate it's pretty solid though.
I took it in for a HW update in 2023. I do believe there is an even newer hardware stack since then, but as far as I'm aware the HW doesn't impact the supported capabilities.
Congrats on the upgrade - what exactly did they upgrade and what version of FSD are you running? Hardware and software definitely matters. My FSD experience applies to 2026 Model Y, latest FSD (v14.x).
"The computer is not beefy enough" is not an acceptable excuse for blowing a red. If your model cannot comply with the most basic law of traffic, it should not be sold to consumers as "full self driving."
I don't know anything about Lemonade, so I can't comment on the logic behind that business strategy, but by definition all the dangerous behavior of FSD is excluded from the analysis since you have to shut it off to avoid the danger.
Beyond that, the effect size of my anecdotes assures me that it is not safer than a human driver. It's just obvious.
Lemonade doesn't support your claim that FSD is a safer driver than you are. It just says that, most charitably, they believe FSD and a human operator are safer than just a human operator (The co-founder said exactly this to Reuters [0]). Further, the program has only been around for a week and their marketing copy specifically cites "Tesla's data" as the source for the 50% reduction rather than any sort of independent analysis.
They are putting their money behind their words, unless there is some backroom deal we don't know about. If a human operator + FSD is twice safer than human operator alone, then FSD is still a large safety improvement. Considering how human operators behave with these systems, I'd also wager having the human operator (many don't even look at the road!) makes only a small difference.
> They are putting their money behind their words, unless there is some backroom deal we don't know about.
Their product is dynamically priced and individualized, and there is no guarantee of what the base rate will be. I don't see any reason they can't keep offering the 50% discount and then adjust the base rates to reverse engineer a sustainable price regardless of FSDs real safety.
> Considering how human operators behave with these systems, I'd also wager having the human operator (many don't even look at the road!) makes only a small difference.
Lemonade will likely be getting driver monitoring telemetry and calculating rates accordingly, but in either case I'm convinced that we are still on the left hand side of the Valley of Degraded Supervision [0]. Operators may not pay full attention at all times but they likely still have pretty good heuristics for what situations are difficult for FSD and adjust their monitoring behavior accordingly.
Tesla could of course release detailed crash and disengagement data to prove FSD safety. That they do not is itself a form of evidence, and in lieu of that we have to rely on crowdsourced data which says FSD 14.x still has a very long way to go to be safer than the average driver [1].
Also an insurance company that A.M. Best rates B+. Which is fine, but when buying insurance I want to make sure that my company can weather major catastrophes.
GM Supercruise on my 2024 Silverado RST is a joke compared to Tesla FSD. It's not even remotely comparable. Supercruise only works on freeways/highways, does not understand ANY navigation. It's a better cruise control, that's about it.
I own 2 Tesla model S of different vintages and FSD is a completely different animal. My 2017 model s can navigate from my house to, well, anywhere, with no intervention.
I have been very disappointed in how long it took Tesla to get here based on the promises they made 10(!) years ago, but they are there now. Even a year ago FSD used to scare me frequently and cause me to disengage but that never happens now.
I think these days you have to look at Tesla stock more like crypto -- you're betting on the hype and hope to ride the wave and exit before it crashes.
> Tesla will become a case study on how to completely waste the first-mover advantage.
It's a study in many things.
Tesla only exists because of the transfer of wealth from the government. DOE loans, EV tax credits and other incentives are the difference between existing and not existing.
That's not necessarily bad. The problem is the government really gets nothing for their money. Look at how China incubates their businesses.
As an example, imagine where we'd be if the government had insisted on standardized charging infrastructure instead of Tesla's originally proprietary Supercharger network.
> If Tesla was valued fairly, it would probably be at the tune of $5B.
I could see it as high as $100B but not $1.5T. Not even close.
And I, too, would never bet against it. Nothing fundamental is behind Tesla's valuation. It's just gambling.
1. Tesla has $40B in cash and is profitable. To say it's worth $5B is beyond absurd.
2. The market determines what is a fair value, not rando haters on the internet. Even professional Wall Street consensus is that it's fair value at approximately $1.2T market cap.
> 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.
Cult. It's a cult.
There's a contingent of tech bros that think they're "smart" because they latched on to Tesla and have been riding its nuts through Elon's political stunts without a care in the world. Tesla failing would mean to them that they failed. They can't fail, they're too smart. If they just HODL for a little longer, then he'll get something magical out and validate their decision making. Sunk cost running wild.
It's baked into the foundations of the U.S. While perhaps not a cult as we describe it today, even the first puritans that settled here were considered extremists not welcome in their home countries. For such a young country, we have always had a burgeoning industry in upstart cults, grifts, and religions (but I repeat myself).
Trust me, I hate Tesla and Elon as much as the next naysayer
But just to keep the story straight
Tesla received ~$3 billion in subsidies.
When Elon exercised his Tesla options in 2021, he paid $11 billion in taxes on it.
By all accounts those subsidies were an incredibly good use of taxpayer money, and similar subsidies should keep being handed out, even if the byproduct is another big troll on twitter.
Perhaps you are confused, the regulatory credits were sold by Tesla to other car makers so they could meet their emissions requirements. That $11 billion came from other automakers, not taxpayers.
So you're saying Tesla made $3 billion directly from taxpayers and another $11 billion in cash transfers from their competitors required by the government?
Tesla was given $3 billion in government subsidies.
It made $11 billion selling regulatory credits created by government regulation.
I'm not interested in getting bogged down in how actually government regulation is the same thing as subsidy even though the taxpayer doesn't foot the bill (but does collect the tax on the backend of it.) There is a good reason why subsidy and regulation are not the same interchangeable word. I suppose that without glasses of nuance/understanding they blur together and look the same (government action -> money for someone), but lets wear glasses here.
The original argument was that Tesla made a substantial amount of its revenue from subsidization, i.e., government mandated payments extracting money from one set of people to fund another. Subsidies can entail direct taxation, followed by payment to a company. Alternatively, they revolve around regulatory schemes that mandate transfer payments from one group (in this case, ICE car manufacturers and their customers) to another (EV manufacturers.) Although the mechanism is slightly different, they're both subsidies. To be clear: I have no problem with these subsidies! Just think your pedantry is misfiring.
If you even read the article you linked, you'd be aware the source of the money there is from other vehicle manufacturers to Tesla not from govt/tax payers.
> Trust me, I hate Tesla and Elon as much as the next naysayer
But then you go to defend them as if it were something you're obligated to do. I think you demonstrably do not hate Tesla and Elon as much as the next naysayer.
No I hate disinformation that makes people on my side look uninformed and stupid.
On a deeper level, I hate bandwagons because they are invariably full of idiotic parrots.
Elon has done a enough demonstrably stupid and bad shit that we don't need to play deception to drum up resistance. Especially when that deception plays on "government subsides in the green sector have been a colossal waste of money".
And then neo nazis go around telling susceptible people "Look, Hitler's detractors think he had 12 fingers, just look at any picture of him, he clearly only has 10. You're gonna trust people that stupid to be honest about him? To know anything about him?"
Disinformation feels good in the moment, but is immensely damaging overall. Even the people who believed he had 12 fingers will feel betrayed and question everything else when they one day learn he actually had 10.
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.
>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.
This just isn't true. If you're a woman, choosing a slightly more expensive robotaxi over a ride share where you might meet your end is a valid choice.
At the end of the day, you're still trusting a misogynistic man to get you from point A to point B. One drives the car and works as a gig worker and wears a flannel shirt, and the other sits in an office at Waymo HQ, wears a patagonia vest. Both are still part of the patriarchy and have very little interest in making sure you're safe, unless there's money to be made.
As much as I want to assume this is a trolling response, I'll pretend it is in good faith. The person you replied to is not speaking about nebulous dangers of "the patriarchy". They are talking about the risk of being verbally harassed, or physically/sexually assaulted by the driver during or directly after the ride.
> Robotaxi has to be cheaper than a normal taxi to kill taxis.
I'm not sure that's true. Self serve checkouts are killing the checkout. Washing machines killed the washing board. Something can be the same price or dearer if it's more convenient.
That comparison has the problem that it is not comparable. A robo taxi is not much different from human taxi. I can not see much of an improvement for the rider. Whereas washing machines are an incredible time saver and self checkouts can be faster (especially if you use these little hand scanners).
> 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.
And this is about industrial robots, which is much easier to handle than what household robots supposed to be about. Will we ever see a robot that will be able to take grandma to the tub and clean here, to then carry her up the stairs to bed, without killing her? I doubt it.
And finally: Boston Dynamics has actual working products for ages now. They don't need to cheat by using RC toy remote controllers to control their robots. And they are doing serious expectation management. This is completely different league than what Musk is doing.
Also, I don't think it's desirable to have robots taking away human work without first solving the question "and what are we going to do with all the unemployed?".
If the humanoid robots are no better than the cars, it's unlikely. Unitree and Boston Dynamics are pretty much there in terms of solving the hardware problem, and the rest is software and the hardware manufacturing learning curve.
The Chinese are massively out-manufacturing Tesla in the electric car market - would you bet on Tesla somehow being better than the Chinese at manufacturing?
The rest as I said is software; given Tesla's consistent lack of success in "Full Self-Driving", would you bet on them outengineering the rest of the world in the software aspect of robotics?
Tesla is good at building big factories. The Cybertruck (total sales ~46k) factory was designed to build 250k units a year and later 125k.
Meanwhile BYD outsells Tesla in China and globally.
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.
>> i don't think they will be able to have a lot higher revenue per ride than uber. Not 9x
Why would Tesla need to have higher revenue per ride than Uber? The value of a company is driven (ultimately) by its profit, not its revenue. And Tesla doesn't have to give the majority of the fare to the driver.
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.
To the extent that millions of customers use them every month to move around NYC. In reading this thread it appears you may have some narrower definition of "compete" than everyone else here.
Typically this word means that the product or service broadly serves same market in some way that overlaps. It isn't typically used so narrowly to imply that the products/services are directly replaceable in all ways.
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
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.
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.
268K of 5 top end Mercedes models were sold in 2025 (and like 1/3 of them were sold in Maybach or AMG version!). Where is Tesla S and X combined sales were only 32K in 2024 and 18K in 2025.
You wouldn't mistake Mercedes S-Class for E-class and E-class for C-class. Even BMW 7 vs. 5 vs. 3 look more distinct than Tesla S vs. 3 and X vs. Y. The Mercedes and BMW do the good job of market differentiation while in my view Tesla failed here, and thus cheaper 3 and Y cannibalized sales of S and X. Thus, paradoxically, given that Tesla started in luxury segment, Tesla hasn't recently been capturing that high margin of the luxury segment (which is doing very well overall - just look at those Maybach and AMG numbers)
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.
It is worth it when it is done right, i.e when you do correct market differentiation (see my other comment here on Mercedes) to avoid your low end cannibalizing your higher end. This high margin really helps you, and this is why almost everybody does it. EVs are probably even better suited for it given that the platform itself is easier/cheaper to share between the low end and the high end - thus the current Teslas S/X story looks even more of a failure as by releasing 3/Y that similar to S/X (that probably helped a lot with 3/Y sales though) they forced themselves into the need for a very significant (expensive) redesign of S/X while having very low sales of it.
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.
That's another question, and not a dumb one at all!
But still, while the product is what it is, there is still personal responsibilities in using it properly and safely. Otherwise we should ask regulators to just prohibit this kind of vehicles.
That ship has long since sailed. My college-age niece just bought her first car, which is a 2012 V6 Mustang with 305hp, naturally aspirated. I'm sure it's lighter, but that just makes it faster.
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.
I wonder if this coincides with Musk getting into politics? Never a good choice to alienate half your customer base. Michael Jordan famously said he never got into politics because "Republicans buy sneakers, too."
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.
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.
They're very cool in theory. My impression from the EngineeringExplained guy's experience isn't great. And Lucid does something similar to Tesla where too much (IMO) is controlled through the touchscreen.
> 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.
The confusion stems from the fact that gas cars don't fill up themselves before you depart, and they don't fill up themselves when you arrive. There are rather large differences between gas and electric cars, but people still treat EVs like gas cars, and demand EVs be more like gas cars.
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.
This is a retarded list of self reported paper commitments, not actual practice, i.e. no actual supply chain assessment was done, not that you can trust a propaganda shitrag like amnesty. Tesla simply "promises" in their PR to be better for human rights. Hint 50%+ of Tesla exports come from Tesla Shanghai which uses same supply raw material supply chain as rest of PRC auto, functionally they're the same.
Meanwhile how do you factoring in PRC manufacturing is simply more modern with more labour saving automation, i.e. they simply have less people to "abuse". PRC simply be peak human rights by eliminating the most humans from process.
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.
Ah, you’re talking about the regime that fired the commissioner of the Bureau of Labour Statistics because the president didn’t like the figures, right?
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.
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.
Wiring harnesses seem like the final boss of manufacturing automation. A lot of times they're still built entirely by hand, and also installed by hand.
Automation is really good at assembly of stiff, solid objects. Anything soft and flexible seems too error prone. See also: the garment industry.
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!'.
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
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.
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.
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".
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.
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
> I went through this Ford engine plant about three years ago, when they first opened it.
> There are acres and acres of machines, and here and there you will find a worker standing at a master switchboard, just watching, green and yellow lights blinking off and on, which tell the worker what is happening in the machine.
> One of the management people, with a slightly gleeful tone in his voice said to me, “How are you going to collect union dues from all these machines?”
> And I replied, “You know, that is not what’s bothering me. I’m troubled by the problem of how to sell automobiles to these machines
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.
An interview with a Silicon Valley big shot finally explained this.
The concept is that you can convince smart people to work extra hard for you by selling them the story that no-no-no, they’re not merely tweaking some dystopian algorithm to sell Chinese plastic crap to people, they’re saving the world.
Once you recognise this pattern, you’ll see it everywhere: Zuckerberg, Sam Altman, and Elon all do it.
Hence the “AI safety” rhetoric. Those CEOs will gladly take the safeties off and make an army of Terminators to sell to the highest bidder! The safety talk is for their employees, to convince them to work like slaves to “save the world”.
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.
Tesla doesn't disclose the gross margin on Cybertruck. They may say it is positive but if nobody knows what constituted those gross margins or what they amounted to, it's pretty much meaningless.
I agree. I am quite confident that if someone challenges them on this claim, they will say it was non-GAAP gross margin, which excluded all the crucial expenses
it's one of their models i would like for them to succeed the most. americans love trucks (especially where i live), and the impact of electric truck replacing ice ones on the gestalt of the neighborhood is significant, no noise, no fumes. people tend to drive their electric cars/trucks more gently too. my neighbor bought one, and it's night and day.
and oddly enough, while i kneejerk hated it at first, the design has grown on me, something genuinely different, playful. much rather see a parked cybertruck than yet another oversized bloated "regular" truck.
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.
---
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.
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.)
> 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.
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.
Sure but they also beat earnings and revenue targets, and the stock price rose. I think it was expected for EV profits to drop when the tax credit left
Yes, there's no business case for humanoid robots.
There's a business case for robots that are specialized in specific repetitive actions, and we already see this in manufacturing. But general purpose humanoid robots make no sense.
They're incredibly expensive and, from what we've seen, worse across the board compared to humans. It's cheaper to just hire humans.
The human form is actually pretty shit at most things. But, it can do everything. There's just little purpose for that in a business case. You know what you're doing, so you just need robots to do that, not to try to be humans.
Like, okay, you can get a humanoid robot to be a burger flipper. But that makes no sense. You can, instead, have an automated burger cooking machine. Which do exist! I worked in a restaurant with one 10 years ago.
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.
1 is the real reason. 2 is really down to things like a big brain and opposable thumbs. Our trunk/legs are evolved for persistence hunting and long distance walking - activities that drive approximately 0% of the economy at this point. If robots didn't have to navigate an environment built for bipeds, other configurations would be far more reliable/efficient.
For instance: a quadruped base can be statically stable in case of power loss - a biped really can't.
“I always wonder why those robots have to be humanoid.“
You are correct to wonder this and almost every use case for a robot will be optimized to a non-human form factor.
Certainly there are tasks - like BJJ training partner - that require a human form factor. Almost everything else, including general, purpose, helper, robot, will be cheaper and more extensible in a non-human form factor.
One of your children remarked that nature has experimented with form factors and humans have won… To which I would point out that the upright, bipedal, form factor arose from the limits of oxygen processing, and heat dissipation… Neither limitation will be encountered in the same way with a robot…
… or perhaps I would point out that nature has, indeed, experimented with form factors and ants won - by a very large margin.
instead, sub 12cm disc shaped ones are rather well understood and perform well. They suck opening doors though - but the 40cm one would have a similar issue.
Besides that: I, personally, am totally fine with the current state of the technology.
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
Robots yes. Humanoid ones? Why? So people can be amazed? Purpose built robots are the future. The human form is sub optimal for most enterprise use cases.
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?
> 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).
> 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.
Why would cloud connectivity be required? (I'm almost certain you're right, the big makers will require cloud--but that's not a requirement of the tech, is it?)
There is insufficient compute to operate these things locally in dynamic environments. The models for doing that kind of robotics inference are running on racks of H200’s.
> 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?
I can't speak for the other guy, but as a person who manages humans at work: I'd rather have a robot at home.
1) I live way, way out in the middle of nowhere.
2) Humans are fickle, late, emotional. They have requirements in their own life that conflict with the jobs I want them to do.
3) Taxes. I don't want to deal with this headache. 1099 my cleaner or whatever?
4) In my version, the costs of owning the robot are less than the costs of hiring humans. If that wasn't true, then I'd reconsider. I probably wouldn't buy one until the cost switched like that, unless maybe it was open-source or something.
Here's another way to think about it: Amazon is willing to pay workers to do the job, but they'd obviously rather have the robots do it. The robots work close to free, don't complain, and probably do a better job (at the jobs they're capable of). Why wouldn't they hire a human for that? A lot of the same reasons.
It costs approximately $200 for our house to be cleaned once (by humans). We do it about once a month because we don't feel like spending $200 weekly). It would be great to have it ~continuously cleaned but we the cost/benefit isn't there for having a full-time person.
FWIW, I emailed auntanns.com to ask what a combination personal assistant and housekeeper would cost:
> Thank you for inquiring about our services. I'd love to discuss with you further regarding the person you are seeking. Personal assistants do not do housekeeping and housekeepers do not have the P.A skillset to pay bills and make appts etc unless they are an executive level housekeeper. Rates for executive housekeepers range between $60-$65/hr and a minimum of 20+ hours per week, plus PTO, paid sick days and many also seek a health stipend.
> 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.
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?
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.
Some people will have jobs, even in the most robot-heavy vision.
I don't know if it's enough people to buy the goods, but robot-produced goods should bottom out on price, closing in on the actual cost of materials/energy.
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?
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.
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.
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.
Hehe. Yeah exactly. At the moment I have to prep the room for my roomba so it doesn't eat my rug and commit suicide by cable. I can't imagine a humanoid, presumably strong, robot let loose in my home and I am for sure a tech enthusast.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
Starting price is the same with less equipment. If you start putting the same things the new "cheap" Model Y has already by default, ID4 goes ~5k more expensive (and with less WLTP and I didn't check the charging curve)
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).
not having door handles in an obvious location is such a subjective "feature" that people have been killed in fires because of the door handle placement.
I've lost count of the number of times i've seen tesla drivers "defrosting" their door handles. You may live in a sunny desert but many people do not.
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.
yeah, they legitimately used to be but the rest of the world has definitely improved and Teslas weirdly haven't that much. They're cruising on name brand and a really decent charging network, but even that moat is being breached.
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.
Volvos are premium cars at a premium price point. Though the brand is now Chinese-owned, I would not group them together with the likes of BYD, MG, Leapmotor etc. They have no disruptive potential whatsoever from my perspective.
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.
You couldn’t possibly be singing that tune if you were taking their robotaxis taxis every day for the past half a year and seeing how well they drive (albeit supervised)
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.
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.
Tesla unveiled the Roadster 20 years ago. That's plenty of time for other companies to catch up. They made a bet that once the battery moat evaporated the millions of miles of driving footage, powering affordable fully autonomous driving, would be their next moat. They failed, not because camera-based FSD is a silly idea (we drive with our eyes after all), but because it's a really hard problem. If they had won that bet, Tesla would justify its valuation. They didn't, and so we're left with the flailing of a doomed company.
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.
> The first electric car predates the 20th century
Great, now do steam. Being produced in the past does not mean it will make a comeback, despite steam being quieter, with great torque, and the main ingredient for propulsion (water) being safer than gasoline for normal people to refuel
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....
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.
Any discussion of Tesla without mentioning Musk's actions is missing the most important piece. I heard someone on this site use the term "mind share", as in before Musk decided to alienate his main customer base, Tesla had the biggest "mind share" of any company in the world. I looked forward to buying a Tesla one day. Now, with Musk licking Trumps boots and actively doing very real damage with his work in DOGE and other things, I will literally never buy anything from that company ever again. It doesn't matter what Chinese car companies are doing. It matters that he stands for everything I don't so I will not give him my money.
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:
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 a 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.
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.
A flop is not a truck that was the best selling in the world two years ago and then 3/4 as many as Ford's EV truck and more than everyone else (according to your link).
And since when is HN just like Reddit when one is downvoted for asking a question for clarity?
It's a flop. The Cybertruck didn't meet its sales targets and the sales it did have in 2024 were cut in half in 2025. It will continue to struggle in 2026:
An failure that didn't live up to the hype that generated the initial sales volume in pre-orders.
The idea of the Cybertruck sold well — at a time before Musk's Roman salutes, shadowing Trump, running DOGE, and further enshittifying what remains of Twitter.
The actual Cybertruck, once the pre-orders ran out... did not.
Nearly half of all Cybertrucks sold (about 75% of those sold in 2024) were pre-orders.
That's to say, people stopped buying once they saw the Cybertruck for what it actually was (ditto for Elon).
Regardless, it's probably better to have one flashy car that doesn't sell big numbers than 3. They might treat it as their high end test car or something or plan to figure out a new top tier model.
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...
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.
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.
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.
Seems I was wrong. However, the Robotaxi fleet is still tiny compared to Waymo's. Jalopnik said the fleet was only 34 cars as of EOY 2025[0]. Waymo had over 2,000 as of September 2025[1].
Elsewhere in this discussion someone pointed out that each Tesla robotaxi in Austin is being directly followed by a supervisor in another car. That resource constraint could explain the low number.
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'm still convinced we are going to need dedicated roads - or lanes at the very least - and dedicated parking/waiting areas for this to be feasible on a truly large scale.
However, it may be easier than we think-- they've already done something like this for rideshare drivers in many places, and it wouldn't necessarily need to be much more complicated than that.
Just build trains at that point, I use my laptop for work all the time when riding for a few hours. It has its dedicated lane, can travel at 220km/h, and it's a much smoother ride than any pothole'd American road.
Isn't that an issue as well? It's always a bet on the next promised land which never arrives, the goalposts change but the stock never takes a hit from undelivered promises, it's bonkers.
But Apple under Steve Jobs had all the financial numbers to support it, it wasn't valued solely on Steve Jobs' personality, the products were there, and being loved by consumers. Revenue wasn't dipping while the stock was going up, revenue, market share, profits were consistently on the rise.
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've got a 2025 Model 3 and was blown away by what a great vehicle it is for the price point. I'd be curious how much of a difference there is between and S and a Model 3 Performance.
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.
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.
I think range only really matters in the context of highway drives, I kinda dislike these composite estimates like WLTP (as you can never be sure of what exactly they measure)
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.
> 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.
This is the first year that I personally think that it will come this year...
Actions speak louder than words, and the fact that a 'cybercab' production line is firing up this year is also a strong indicator - the fact they didn't do that 5 years ago means tesla leadership didn't think it was going to work back then. 'cybercab' wouldn't sell well as a 2 seater if it couldn't self drive. (although the actual mass production will be delayed till next year is my guess, but we'll see model 3 or y being used for a taxi service in the meantime)
It will be interesting to see.
At this point, I think much of what is coming out of Tesla in both words and actions is stock price theater.
They "fired up" a Cybertruck production line and we all see how that went.
How are those "bugs" not immediately disqualifying? "Move fast and break things" is not an acceptable strategy for controlling 2 tonne bricks hurtling down the freeway
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.
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."
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.
Cameras also fail when weather conditions cake your car in snow and/or mud while you're driving. Actually, from what I just looked up, this is an issue with LiDAR as well. So it seems to me like we don't even have the sensors we need to do this properly yet, unless we can somehow make them all self-cleaning.
It always goes back to my long standing belief that we need dedicated lanes with roadside RFID tags to really make this self driving thing work well enough.
Nah. That's a common "thought about it for 15 seconds but not 15 minutes" mistake.
Making a car that drives well on arbitrary roads is freakishly hard. Having to adapt every single road in the world before even a single self-driving car can use them? That's a task that makes the previous one look easy.
Learned sensor fusion policy that can compensate for partial sensor degradation, detect severe dropout, and handle both safely? Very hard. Getting the world that can't fix the low tech potholes on every other road to set up and maintain machine specific infrastructure everywhere? A nonstarter.
Well, we already provide dedicated lanes for multi-passenger vehicles in many places, nearly all semi-major airports have dedicated lots and lanes for rideshare drivers, many parts of downtown/urban areas have the same things... and it didn't exactly take super long to roll all that out.
Also, 99% of roads in civilized areas have something alongside them already that you can attach RFID tags to. Quite a bit easier than setting up an EV charging station (another significant infrastructure thing which has rolled out pretty quickly). And let's not forget, every major metro area in the world has multi-lane superhighways which didn't even exist at all 50-70 years ago.
Believe me, I've thought about this for a lot more than 15 minutes. Yes, we should improve sensor reliability, absolutely. But it wouldn't hurt to have some kind of backup roadside positioning help, and I don't see how it would be prohibitively expensive. Maybe I am missing something, but I'm gonna need more than your dismissive comment to be convinced of that.
You are missing the sheer soul-crushing magnitude of the infrastructure problem. You are missing the little inconvenient truth that live in a world full of roads that don't even consistently have asphalt on them. That real life Teslas ship with AI that does vibe-based road lane estimation because real life roads occasionally fail to have any road markings a car AI could see.
Everything about road infrastructure is "cheap to deploy, cheap to maintain". This is your design space: the bare minimum of a "road" that still does its job reasonably well. Gas stations and motels are an aside - they earn money. Not even the road signs pay for themselves.
Now, you propose we design some type of, let's say, a machine only mark that helps self-driving cars work well. They do nothing for human drivers, who are still a road majority. And then you somehow manage to make every country and every single self-driving car vendor to get to agree on the spec, both on paper and in truth.
Alright, let's say we've done that. Why would anyone, then, put those on the road? They're not the bare minimum. And if we wanted to go beyond the bare minimum, we'd plug the potholes, paint the markings and fix the road signs first.
You definitely have a point. It would not be rolled out all at once, everywhere. It would happen sporadically, starting with areas that have a higher tax revenue base. There may never be an international standard. There will be tons of places it will never work at all.
All the same, it still reminds me of past infrastructure changes which ended up being widely distributed, with or without standards, from railroads to fiber optic cables.
And this:
> if we wanted to go beyond the bare minimum, we'd plug the potholes, paint the markings and fix the road signs first
...just strikes me as a major logical fallacy. It's like the people who say we shouldn't continue exploring our solar system because we have too many problems on Earth. We will always have problems here, from people starving because of oppressive and unaccountable hierarchies they're stuck under to potholes and road markings the local government is too broke or incompetent to fix. We should work on those, yeah, but we should also be furthering the research and development of technology from every angle we realistically can. It feels weird to be explaining this here.
And as long as those places dominate, it makes more sense for AI car makers to say "let's put $5m more into raw dog vision only FSD AI" than it does to say "let's add a $25 long range RFID reader to every car". No one will bet their future on "the infrastructure for it will maybe one day exist".
Just look at how Waymo is struggling to grow and scale. And they don't even need every road remade. They just need every road mapped and scanned out into 3D objects with their reference cars. They're solving a problem orders of magnitude easier, and it still throttles their growth.
> Just look at how Waymo is struggling to grow and scale.
Are they? They seem to be growing fine.
Regardless, they are approaching it the right way. They start with a safe solution, even though it is expensive, then bring the cost down over the years as technology improves. The wrong way to do it is to start with a less expensive but unsafe tech then add a safety driver in every car. That approach is wrong both because the "tech" of the safety driver will never improve, and you'll kill a few people along the way, like Tesla.
So far, end to end seems to be the only way to train complex AI systems that actually works.
Every time you pit the sheer violent force of end to end backpropagation against compartmentalization and lines drawn by humans, at a sufficient scale, backpropagation gets its win.
> 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.
>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.
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.
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.
> When Mom can dispatch the family car to pick up the kids from school.
Tech level, I agree--that's FSD.
But even if we had that tech today, Mom ain't sending the car without getting a police visit.
You can't even let your kids go to the local playground alone anymore. They're not going to be captain and first mate alone in a vehicle if the Karens have anything to say about it.
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.
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.
There's not really NEV oversupply, the EV adoption curve will keep shooting up from 50% to 100%, many PRC EV companies will die from competition/pricewar consolidation not broader oversupply, since EV industrial base is still undersupply relative to 100% adoption curve.
Oversupply is in legacy ICE displacement due to rapid domestic EV penetration. "Zero-milage used car" accounting trick is primarily to export excess capacity of gasoline cars (now that EV has taken over) that aren't moving domestically anymore. MOST of PRC exports are ICE, IIRC 60-80%, there's plenty of global demand for ICE still. Pushing domestic sku new car with crushed domestic demand as "used" exports where there's plenty of demand = meet sales target, but less through discounts but import fees engineering - used cars circumvent import duties, certifications, warranty requirements etc. It's a lifehack to unload domestic ICE inventory, not EV. This also likely transient effect because NEV transition in PRC happened so fast ICE manufacturer that target domestic market caught flat footed. They need a few years to either retool to EV or shift primarily to target export markets that still has appetite for affordable gasoline cars.
The Reuters article focuses on exports because that's what their target audience is likely to be interested in, but the People's Daily article they reference in passing https://paper.people.com.cn/rmrb/pc/content/202506/10/conten... is treating it as a domestic problem, highlighting the appearance of "zero-mileage used cars" on the second-hand market, specifically calls out EV companies for putting quantity over quality, and floats stimulating used car exports as part of the solution.
Also, at least the EU doesn't distinguish between new and old cars when importing from outside the EU https://taxation-customs.ec.europa.eu/buying-and-selling-car... presumably precisely to avoid creating the kind of loophole you imagine exporters are exploiting. But they aren't; they just hurt their own profitability to juice their numbers and chase growth.
Domestic problem as in domestic involution problem not a EV overcapacity problem. I'm pointing out important to distinguish between ICE and EV, ICE is structural overcapacity, EV is under capacity but involution. ICE zero mile shenanigans is to liquidate/ unload excess inventory that doesn't have demand in PRC, mostly targeting loopholes in russia, central asia, mena. There's (less regulates) markets other than EU.
BYD/EV zero mile hack is more for subsidy harvesting, they're trying to dip on domestic subsidies for new sales then skip on stuff like servicing/warranty because used sale, i.e. shady involution behavior that abuse national policies, hence crackdown. It's not because EV are excess capacity, but so many EV players involuting and accountants find creative ways to carve margin. It's not EV sector makes 100 cars can only sell 50, because overcapacity, so discount to sell 100. It's EV sector makes 100 cars, sell 100 @1% margin but with some engineering they sell 100 @2% margin.
Yes, there are some brands that does use it for price cuts, premium brands, i.e. nio/xpeng, who won't lower sticker price, so they have to flip to lower price in used market. But that's also less overcapacity, more PRC EV moving so fast last few years no one wants 12 month old models. AKA tech stack progressing so fast / involution pressures so hard consumers won't pay sticker for anything older than 1 gen. What happens PRC manufacturing turns car cycles into phones obsolescence cycles. The broader the point here is EV makers are generally not doing accounting tricks to sell more cars due overcapacity / lack of demand (what over capacity implies), they're doing accounting tricks to sell the same amount of cars to make their razer thin involution margins slightly less razer thin, at the expense of the government.
Right. I can imagine seeing lots full of unsold cars might be interpreted as "there is no demand", especially if they are trying to push a particular narrative.
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.
They are not. Turbine engines require much higher quality manufacturing and tolerances and operate at much higher speeds and pressures. There is more to it than the perceived number of moving parts.
Others in this subthread discussed the comparison of the complexity of different ways of achieving flight itself, but I think there is an interesting discussion in that... well... we do add senses we don't technically need to achieve stable flight (but are very useful for safe flight and have reduced the incidence of aviation incidents and accidents dramatically).
Whether it be altimeters based on radio[1] or air pressure[2], avoidance and surveillance systems that use radio waves to avoid collisions with other aircraft[3][4], airborne weather radars[5], sensors that measure angle of attack (AoA), GNSS location, attitude, etc, many aircraft (even unpowered gliders!) have some combination of special sensing systems that aren't strictly necessary to take off, fly to a destination, and land, even if some are required for what many would consider safe flight in some scenarios.
Many of these systems have redundancies built in in some form or another and many of these systems are even built into unmanned aerial systems (UASes) big and small.
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.
Actually, that's the standard we're all talking about. Nearly everyone is totally fine with human-caused traffic deaths. Nobody wants to ban human drivers at that rate of death.
But if FSD had the same rate, people would be losing it.
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.
Yeah, but even if the safety level was 10% better, let's say--nobody would accept that rate. It wouldn't get adopted, we wouldn't be happy to save those lives. People would be outraged.
I think it's got something to do with an innate belief to self-determination. It's fine if I make a mistake to kill myself, and it's not fine if someone else does. It's super not fine if someone dies at the hands of a rich person's technology. Outrage, lawsuits, "justice."
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.
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.
I knew a guy with no arms who drove with his prosthetic hooks. Of course he can feel vibrations and things through his ass, but so could the car if they wanted. Do they use accelerometer data? (I don't know the answer to that) Do they have ABS sensors that can detect wheel lockup/speed status? Because I don't.
I believe I can drive a car to the legal standard, remotely, with a good enough camera array.
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.
> 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.
i.e. in China, the government controls capital; in the US, capital controls the government.
> 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.
One emperor in US state doesn't control legislative, executive, judiciary, military and private company boards and financial capital. The way you have to look at China it is an empire with bit of communism and capitalism. If the mandate of heaven is favorable emperor controls everything, otherwise power diffuses a little among the emperor coterie.
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.
Another 10 years and maybe they will have sold as many as Sony sold Aibo robot dogs. You're making my point---it's not a significant market, and won't be for many years.
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.
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.
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.
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"
At the moment most of them are running notably below capacity.
Tesla's growth plan originally had them doing factory expansions and new factory in Mexico by now, but instead they have pivoted to trying to keep utilization of their existing lines up by introducing cheaper trims of existing vehicles.
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.
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.
I'm talking about after, of course. They retained a massive investment in Aurora as part of that deal. They invested in Waabi not long after, then Nuro, Avride and started partnerships with Waymo, Motional, and others.
> 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.
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.
The S was a true American "land yacht" in the classic style of an Oldsmobile. There's a lot of reasons for it to be seen as the US flagship model and for it to have done poorly in other markets or not even released to them.
"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
If Tesla wanted to be BMW they could just do all the BMW things. But they are aspiring for more, so they flip the script quite often. I'm not arguing for or against their decisions; just saying that because BMW does it is not a good argument for them.
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.
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.
The sequel Revenge of the Electric Car is a very interesting follow up, especially now with hindsight. It followed the stories of the Tesla Roadster, Nissan Leaf, and Chevy Volt all in about the exact same time period and stages of development.
Of those, the Leaf is the only model that has continuously existed since then, and from the documentary there is a sense of that. GM admits the Volt was a stepping stone and not the final product. Tesla's part of the documentary involves a lot of trials and tribulations and even Tesla seeming unsure about their manufacturing problems. (Though the documentary itself spins a hopeful tune.)
Of the figures in the documentary the most prescient seems to be Carlos Ghosn, then in charge of Renault-Nissan. He very much insisted that EVs weren't just the future, they were the scramble for the present. Renault took that message to heart and seemed to be the side that won it in the messy divorce that also eventually wound up with Ghosn getting charged for treason and embezzlement in Japan. Which is an incredible and weird story on multiple levels and maybe the documentary makers will get a chance to include that in a third movie for the series.
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).
A genuine question, what are the use cases for Tesla's Optimus robots? Are they consumer products that help with household chores, industrial robots for warehouses or manufacturing, a play toy, something else?
> A genuine question, what are the use cases for Tesla's Optimus robots? Are they consumer products that help with household chores, industrial robots for warehouses or manufacturing, a play toy, something else?
Convincing investors to buy and hold Tesla, because of the vague promise of some great technological innovation being just around the corner. Electric cars and partially automated driving don't serve that purpose anymore.
If a use case emerges it will have to be industrial or commercial. The power and maintenance constraints for a robot like that make it pretty impractical for home use.
I know that the Model S platform is old but for me it was always seen as a halo car. I've owned three of them and I really wished they would release a completely redesigned S version.
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.
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.
You can compare the market cap of say GM (automaker) to Bosch (massive automaker supply chain and logistics company) to get a sense of why that sort of pivot would probably not be appreciated by the market. Supply chain companies are usually considered "lesser" companies.
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.
Part of it is they wanted that factory space at Fremont for the Optimus production line. That's because the Optimus team is located there, in Silicon Valley.
Wondered about that also. Seems like a really big decision to cut off the S and X though! Will they have something else to offer customers who want something more than a Y?
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)
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.
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.
Got it. Yeah, the headlights and sound system on my (2018) 3 are AMAZINGLY good, especially (now) for the age. I drove a 2017 S fairly regularly-- so it's a first year (?) of the refresh, but pretty dated now. The sound system is abysmal (I'm sure it's the low end option) and the car generally feels less cohesive.
The yoke and button turn signals would be a deal breaker for me, but to each their own.
I have multiple friends who have 6+ cars. To be fair, they're pretty well-off (mid six figure income), but one for example:
- Husband Tesla daily driver
- Wife Bronco daily driver
- Truck to pull their boat
- Campervan for outdoor adventures
- Older car for teenager to drive
- 90s convertible for summer fun
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.
> 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.
These robots give of a kind of dark vibe to me, especially with everything going on in his AI company. How long until one of them kills someone? I'd prefer a home robot that can't kill me (like something that is passively safe).
> 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.
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.
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.
I just hate that what's actually going on with this company is so buried between Musk's bs, and people hate Musk so much that they spew bs as well. Seems to be just "pick your liar" with this company.
X going away probably isn't surprising given sales dynamics. More people would tend to opt for the cross-over or sedan. The model S is a little more shocking since it was always niche, but honestly Tesla doesn't have the trim to be priced like that and I suspect in order to get from where they're at to BMW/Audi etc., just isn't where they want to invest their money.
This definitely feels like an "oh no, people stopped buying" pivot but the moves themselves make sense.
Looks like they are not selling the larger vehicles at all, so why not kill the truck too? It’s god awful and a flop. Ego? Or thy want to try to revive it?
What they are really signaling though is with EVs they are not able to differentiate between the higher and lower cost models enough to show value to the higher end models. This is a huge failure IMO. Model S was the OG car that really was looked up to when it launched. It did have them luxury image, by not matching the build and interior of the car to the image Tesla really dropped the ball. Now the S is seen as inferior to the other luxury cars in that price range and so it’s becoming tough for Tesla to differentiate between the 3 and S.
This actually brings up the larger question, does musk care about cars at all at this point? Or does he just want to move on to robots? Feels like his heart is not on the cars.
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.
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.
This is like asking Mrs. Lincoln what she thought about the play. The scope of the (financial and physical) damage by Musk's government meddling is breathtaking, is ongoing, and will echo for generations.
He's not just the leader, he's the primary beneficiary, and he's a blatant white supremacist. He's arguably responsible for the deaths of over 1 million people world wide from his short tenure shutting down USAID[0]. So yeah, I'd say its more than fine to take pleasure in his failings.
> Add why should anyone look past their opinions about the leader?
Because it's the most advanced car manufacturing in the US... Virtually the only successful EV maker outside of China, and it provides over 100,000 jobs worldwide.
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.
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.
It’s always funny to me that hating is fine if the person justifies it by some reason, but it’s generally not accepted, when that person doesn’t care about the reason.
“Stop the hate”, but of course only if it’s not me hating. Because that hate is valid and justified.
They say Tesla cars are not better than any other EV nowadays.
They say the Tesla stock is overvalued.
They say the Tesla robot will likely not be a super hit in terms of sales.
I don't see it as hate. It's quite pragmatic views.
I simply dont care how good or bad the cars are. I will never put a penny in Elon's hand. He is a despicable nazi and a terrible person. I hope he goes bankrupt.
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).
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
"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?
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.
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.
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 think there's a danger here of underestimating how varied mankinds 'mindware' is at large.
for us lot who were 'born in it, molded by it' (tech), it can be very hard to internalize that there are a lot of people out there who legimiately cannot for the life of them wrap their head around a computer, or the internet, other than "wifi logo = i can video call my grandkids".
you could say services like dropbox are outreach/charity organisations that onboard the masses onto 10x productivity curves (whether they like it or not!)
and to be honest, ive become guilty of drag n dropping tarballs to/from my gdrive account when im too dumb to figure out the ssh proxy tunnel incantation (or beg an llm for one for the 1000th time.) so really, everyone wins.
im not sure claude code will change all that much for the non-technical segment. from their point of view, you changed one terminal window for another. so what? its still a black box (literally).
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.
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.
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.
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.)
Tesla will become a case study on how to completely waste the first-mover advantage.
For many people, the very term EV itself is still ubiquitous to Tesla.
And somehow Tesla is still worth more than every other non-Chinese automaker combined. $1.5T.
GM? $80B. Stellantis? $40B. Toyota? $280B. Mercedes-Benz? $60B. BMW? $55B. Volkswagen Group? Also $55B.
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”.
> And to add insult to injury, even GM Super Cruise is widely renowned as better and safer than Tesla’s current “FSD”.
My Huyndai's Autopilot equivalent (I don't even know what they call it) is better than the enhanced Autopilot in the Model 3 that I traded in. It actually changes lanes when I put on the blinker, instead of only changing lanes 70% of the time, and the other time just sitting with the blinker on and a clear lane.
I did not know this and explains why I see so many teslas with their blinkers on and not maneuvering despite having ample room and time. Ultimately this behavior makes them unsafe for their occupants as well as others around them.
Cars only work because we can predict driver behavior, if they break that prediction that’s when bad things are likely to happen…
Lately I’ve started to ignore Tesla blinker.
Autopilot doesnt turn on the turn signal or change lanes, what you are dealing with is humans.
Enchanced autopilot and self-driving do.
Most probably because it has a radar that the Tesla lacks. That means your car has two sources of truth and can very efficiently and quickly make an informed decision about whether or not there's anything in the way.
My Model 3 has radar. It’s no longer functional and just a useless appendage. Until 2020-21 all Tesla had radar but Musk directed Tesla to disable the radar from the software stack, nerfing this hardware on tens of thousands of cars. Why? Because he staked on camera-only and to find out there’s still radar fusion would be against that. The real truth is probably they were derisking the part cost (during Covid) and the development timeline to improve the radar integration (after dangerous false braking incidents). It was wonderful when it worked, especially the time-of-flight ability to sense a decelerating car ahead of the car ahead of the one in front of you. When it didn’t work the Navy Seal guy driving and watching a video was the first statistic.
The real Tesla engineers must be in all kinds of frustrations getting whipsawed by their chief engineer-designer-physicist-scientist-government economist-savant but probably the stock options assuage that.
Lastly Tesla still doesn’t have real birds-eye view / 360 surround view for parking. It’s year 2026 and even cheaper cars have this.
> The real Tesla engineers must be in all kinds of frustrations
That's a very Hacker News point of view, that *of course* engineers have the correct opinion and attitude and are merely suffering under the boots of the real incompetent and nefarious.
Engineers at Tesla are wholly complicit.
In this case the dude giving the order is the richest man in the world, hopped up on ketamine and a habit of just YOLOing stuff.
A single engineer telling him that LIDAR and radar is superior to camera-based systems isn't doing anything except getting said engineer fired.
It's clearly not, but cameras are cheap and Tesla is excellent at cost optimizing their cars. Elon was pretty good at film flaming that somehow imprecise cameras were actually somehow superior.
There's a reason Waymo is doing actual level 4/5 driving while Tesla remains at 2.5.
I don't think my 2018 Model 3 with enhanced autopilot ever used it radar for lane changes. As I noted above, it would just drive with the blinker on and a clear lane.
My 8 yo M3 has radar and it still is active since the yellow radar symbols light up when passing by obstacles. It's also used to figure out obstacles in the front and back and if disabled, the relatively poor cameras on my car would not be able to figure out the distance to the next car in the front.
That’s your ultrasonic sensors. The millimeter-wave-radar was front only and designed for far focusing out front.
Yes, for parking obstacles. But their vehicle probably also has radar sensors in the rear corners of the bumper for cross-traffic alert.
My shitty Kia Niro has a UI element that indicates anytime it detects an obstacle in my blind spot. My side mirrors even have a red light that also tells me it detects something. Tesla doesn't do that?!
Apparently they do it via camera
Kia Telluride here but I assume it's the same underlying system as Hyundai - I can attest that it's very good (and doesn't cost anything extra like Tesla charges lol) which makes sense considering they have the majority stake in Boston Dynamics since a few years ago.
Tesla FSD will change lanes when you use the blinker. It will also accelerate and remain engaged if you press the pedal, e.g. if you want to coax it forward at an intersection.
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.
Tesla's original "secret plan" (published on their website) was to become a commodity car manufacturer faster than electric cars became a commodity. Such that the other manufacturers would find them selling obsolete vehicles and Tesla just becomes the new General Motors.
This was the justification for their stock price for quite a few years: "It's logical that Tesla is worth more than all other automakers combined because it will soon be the only automaker."
Then in 2022 Elon basically admitted that they couldn't win on production and had to continue to win on technology and they'd do that with self driving. [https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-tesla-worth-basica...]
But now Tesla is way behind on self driving (which was oversold by the whole industry tbh). So what's their new plan? Now they're no longer a car company and will make robots!
Your take makes sense.
i.e. the GigaPress for frames but it just didnt scale like they hoped.
way behind compared to whom ?
> 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.
> And they even suck at making cars these days
Aren’t model Y and model 3 considered the best cars in their class by most motor journalists?
No, not by a long shot, unless you define "class" so tightly as to only include those vehicles and no competitors.
What would you define as better? I rent various EVs regularly, and I'm still yet to find something that beats it on performance, range and price. That's all before comfort and features, which again most seem to lack. There are a couple pretty close to Tesla, but nothing that clearly beats it that I've driven.
In the US market, the Hyundai Ioniq 6 has better build quality, identical range in real world conditions, a ton of comfort, and no threat that their CEO will go off his meds and take away your driving assist features unless you pay a ~~ransom~~ subscription fee.
Internationally, BYD destroys it.
As a car? Anything. Hyundai Ioniq 5 for example.
As a computer? Not many to be honest. Dog Mode is an afternoon project for a junior programmer and still _ZERO_ car manufacturers have copied it.
Tesla's greatest strength is/was that they did almost everything inhouse. The reason all the other manufacturers struggle to do basic things like dog mode is because they are almost all relying on the supply chain for everything. No infotainment/HVAC supplier has a dog mode so it doesn't exist.
The obvious downside to that is that when Tesla cuts back on R&D, it becomes painfully obvious to the car owners. I'm not expecting anything like dog mode to show up ever again.
Have you ever tried a BYD?
A quick search verified they also manufactured batteries, solar modules, and solar shingles.
Ford Motor Company manufactured charcoal, but in the end it stayed a car company.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingsford_(charcoal)#History
I know it’s popular to hate on Elon and therefore Tesla, but you need to be accurate when doing so. They’re still chipping away.
> Tesla Semi?All but dead.
They’ve been running a pilot all this time, and the factory in Nevada to mass produce them is on schedule. Production ramp is second half of this year. The factory is ginormous.
> The new roadster? Also dead.
Elon said yesterday the unveil is in April “hopefully”
> Full Self Driving? Doesn't exist. Robotaxis?
Cars are driving passengers around Austin now with nobody in either front seat.
It takes automakers almost a decade to bring a new vehicle online, Elon just does it all publicly while everyone else doesn’t take the wraps off until the final 6 months.
Obviously everything is way behind elons hype timelines, but I do still think it’s all coming.
> Cars are driving passengers around Austin now with nobody in either front seat.
This is a good example of Tesla being sketchy: https://electrek.co/2026/01/28/teslas-unsupervised-robotaxis...
Musk made the announcement before earnings, put a few cars on the road, and now has pulled them all back because the earnings report is out.
This is a little more than doing it publicly - remember, Musk has been saying FSD will be functional every year for more than a decade.
They’ve been running a pilot all this time
So did Nikola.
Elon said yesterday the unveil is in April “hopefully”
Who could possibly argue with that.
Obviously everything is way behind elons hype timelines, but I do still think it’s all coming.
At least you've identified it for what it is.
Cars are driving passengers around Austin now with nobody in either front seat.
Unless the reporting was wrong, they've moved the supervisor to a chase car. The hobo-taxi still isn't operating on its own.
Why is making humanoid robots a moat? Other companies have been making robots for longer, humanoid and otherwise, and doing it better.
Has Optimus signed up for any sports yet: https://edition.cnn.com/2026/01/02/china/china-humanoid-robo...
Is Optimus close to what Boston Dynamics is doing with Atlas: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YIhzUnvi7Fw
Anyone who owns a tesla vehicle with "full self driving" is probably chuckling to themselves about Tesla ever making useful general purpose robots any time soon. Disclaimer, I own two tesla's with FSD and it's far from "full" or "self". I am very sceptical of robotaxis unless they have the appropriate sensors & SW (e.g. Waymo) which Elon has not done.
Finally, I know lots of people who own cars, but none who own robots. Many friends will not have Alexa in their homes due to privacy concerns. How many people will trust Elon to have a robot in their homes and assume he's being benign and safe with your personal data?
> Why is making humanoid robots a moat?
It really isn't. (1)
Also, what's the first billion dollar market for humanoid robots? Industry? "lights-out manufacturing" exists already, and doesn't require humanoid robots.
Hyundai and BYD (among others) say they're going to put humanoid robots in their factories (2). They won't be Tesla robots. Is this really such a huge use?
1)https://www.topgear.com/car-news/tech/here-are-nine-humanoid...
2) https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cvgjm5x54ldo
I want my laundry robot!
Yes I would easily pay 20k for a robot to fold and put away laundry.
Is that a billion dollar market, is it within reach, and does it require a humanoid? And if so, will any 1 company have a lock on it?
If you do not want to run a car company, maybe do not... run a car company? Get an ice cream truck.
It absolutely makes no sense to convert a car manufacturer into an AI company. Or a robotics company after you have build CAR FACTORIES around the planet.
If you as a CEO don't like the business you are running for your shareholders, it is time to get a new CEO that does. There still are managers that really like running car companies.
I don't get the feeling that BYD management is bored about the EV business...
Pure logic would dictate that Tesla has a market cap of around $5B. It's actually fraudulent that it's not, and for some reason the SEC allows Musk to lie on every earnings call without repercussion.
Seems low on a company that is profitable and consistantly has around a $100B a year in revenue with only $13B in debt...
more like 12b in 2022 and less every years since down 30% in 2025
Welcome to 2026:
Companies routinely, exaggerate, obfuscate and mystify investors. Most of investors don't care. The SEC is a joke.
Brand value is definitely a moat. Not the deepest of moats, but it is a moat nonetheless.
> It's pure logic that Tesla has to pursue bets that would justify billion dollar valuations and being a car company isn't that.
Tesla is valued as if it is a tech company with a car business as a side gig. Its balance sheet is a car business, and I'm not even sure it spends enough on tech to have tech qualify as a side gig. And the other tech avenues it has been pursuing (autonomous vehicles, humanoid robots) are areas that other people have been doing for better and longer. Hell, Honda had autonomous (not tele-operated) humanoid robots working 20 years ago.
To be honest, at this point, I mostly consider the other bets that Tesla is pursing are just passion projects to keep the stock price artificially high. Were Tesla more realistically valued, it would lose probably 90% or more of its value, and Musk would be a much poorer man.
The competition was this:
Tesla had a very good computer, they were learning how to put a car around it.
Traditional manufacturers (German mostly) had good or very good cars, but they sucked at the computer stuff.
---
And unknown to all, the Chinese learned how to make good cars with good computers built in as those two were trying to achiever their respective goals.
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.
It's not that EVs are a commodity. Competition and speculative production capacity buildouts combined with lower than expected consumer demand made the market less profitable.
> > It's pure logic that Tesla has to pursue bets that would justify billion dollar valuations and being a car company isn't that.
You can pursue everything with words, even you can pursue Sydney Sweeney but then you have to show the receipts.
The receipts of Tesla (Factories, lines of production, expertise of people hired, 25 years of history...) are one of car company.
But of course, it's all narrative so people will keep outbidding each other to own a piece of this company.
The financialization of hope, that's what it is.
> Electric vehicles turned into a commodity
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodity
> a resource, that specifically has full or substantial fungibility: that is, the market treats instances of the good as equivalent or nearly so with no regard to who produced them
Uhh.. not sure where you live or what your local / regional market is like. I'm in the United States, where what car you drive is a really big decision. Many people share on social media what car they bought, and tell people around them about the new car they bought. I've yet to witness a situation where someone said "I bought an electric car" and the response was something like "Why are you telling me you bought toilet paper?" (Even toilet paper has brand names and advertising.)
That isn't to say that the car market hasn't shifted over time.
Cars began as "engine to move wheels plus a few other things" and evolved so that the engine seemed less of the central reason why you bought a specific vehicle. An electric powertrain does take things a bit further, in that most EV buyers know very little about the motors, though they certainly know a thing or two about the battery.
Batteries are generally a commodity at smaller scales, but in a car, they matter significantly. Still, brand matters, too. Ask Lucid or Rivian or Porsche how they sell their electric cars for $70K - $160K. How is it that a commodity available to purchase for ~$30K can be sold for $130K additional? (That's not how commodities work.)
No, electric cars are not a commodity. It's just a difficult market with a lot of players, and a broad market with constantly evolving tastes. Ask Toyota why they have half a dozen different SUV models. Or why the Ford F-150 comes in 200 configurations. (That's not how commodities work!)
Just because the gasoline-burning engine was replaced with electric motors and batteries, the car didn't turn into a commodity overnight. I'm open to counterarguments and persuasion to the contrary.
Tesla's moat is constantly moving to the next thing and claiming it has a moat before moving on to the next thing.
Elon's business model is moving from one government subsidized thing to the next (see SpaceX now bribing for tax dollars to go to Mars).
Bingo.
> If Tesla was valued fairly
I think it's a wrong mental model to think of stock market value as "fair" or "unfair" (or maybe it's just me thinking of "unfair" when I see the word "fair").
My impression is that if Tesla would be valued based on quantifiable things it would be much much lower (production costs, competition, revenues, potential, etc.). Of course, you shouldn't value something only based on quantifiable things, but in Tesla the "wishful thinking" part seems to be much larger than for others.
I assume OP meant something closer to "fair market value" than "fair vs. unfair." Tesla is not priced according to its underlying assets or technical analysis (e.g. P/E ratio), but solely based on hype/sentiment.
Interestingly, retail investors and company insiders collectively own more of Tesla than institutional investors.
Fair market value: the price at which a thing would change hands between a willing and informed buyer and seller.
A company's market cap is, by definition, its fair market value.
> Tesla is not priced according to its underlying assets or technical analysis (e.g. P/E ratio), but solely based on hype/sentiment.
You're right that it's not priced according to underlying assets, but it doesn't follow that it is priced on vibes. Its price is based on potential future earnings; the expectation that Elon can pull off his plans for a robotaxi fleet or building an Optimus robot that might unlock the massive demand for household and/or general use commercial robots. Both offer the prospect of being the first mover into markets which could be worth trillions. It's speculation, sure, but not mere "vibes". The company is also led by a man who has made and delivered on massive, seemingly impossible promises, which adds credibility to the idea that Tesla might actually bring these markets into existence.
That's actually not quite what FMV is: https://www.investopedia.com/terms/f/fairmarketvalue.asp
> Fair market value (FMV) is similar to market value, which is the price that the asset would trade for in the open market under current conditions. However, fair market value has the following additional assumptions: Both buyer and seller are reasonably knowledgeable about the asset, Buyer and seller are behaving in their own best interests, Both parties are free of undue pressure, Each is given a reasonable period for completing the transaction.
However that's why I said "something closer to FMV" as yes - what you described is generally how FMV is calculated for things like stock options.
> but it doesn't follow that it is priced on vibes. Its price is based on potential future earnings
To be clear, I also didn't use the word "vibes," but rather "hype/sentiment" which refers to things like "the expectation that Elon can pull off his plans for a robotaxi fleet or building an Optimus robot that might unlock the massive demand for household and/or general use commercial robots." I'm not sure where you got "vibes" that you quoted in your reply.
Technical analysis uses statistics (e.g. P/E ratios) and marketplace analysis to determine if future potential earnings are worth the price of the stock. TSLA's price is far in excess of any technical analysis I have seen.
> The company is also led by a man who has made and delivered on massive, seemingly impossible promises, which adds credibility to the idea that Tesla might actually bring these markets into existence.
We might have to agree to disagree on this one. (Are we FSD yet?)
Talk about market cap, especially meme stock maket cap, reminds me of that old XKCD comic on extrapolation. Market cap is what you get when you extrapolate the fair market value for the 1% of a company's shares currently on the market all the way out to 100%. But demand doesn't work that way - it doesn't scale linearly.
> And to add insult to injury, even GM Super Cruise is widely renowned as better and safer than Tesla’s current “FSD”.
Do you have any sources for that claim? I can attest that current iteration of FSD is very, very good, and very likely is a safer driver than I am. At least one major insurance company agrees [0]. I don't have any experience with Super Cruise though.
[0] - https://www.lemonade.com/fsd
> Do you have any sources for that claim? I can attest that current iteration of FSD is very, very good, and very likely is a safer driver than I am.
That's a damning statement about your driving skills, and probably not true or you'd have had your license revoked by now. I've had FSD for five years, and even today it regularly makes dangerous mistakes. For example, left turns and roundabouts are the equivalent of Russian roulette, but just last week my FSD started driving through a red light because it interpreted a green left-arrow as a sign that it could proceed forward.
If you need to do 50 miles on the interstate it's pretty solid though.
> If you need to do 50 miles on the interstate it's pretty solid though.
So L2 is great, the issue is calling L2 "Full Self Driving"
If your Tesla is 5 years old aren't you getting a degraded FSD model due to weak hardware?
I took it in for a HW update in 2023. I do believe there is an even newer hardware stack since then, but as far as I'm aware the HW doesn't impact the supported capabilities.
Congrats on the upgrade - what exactly did they upgrade and what version of FSD are you running? Hardware and software definitely matters. My FSD experience applies to 2026 Model Y, latest FSD (v14.x).
You’re wrong. Your fsd12 is a very different beast from the current fsd14, so stop talking authoritatively about the latest fsd.
"The computer is not beefy enough" is not an acceptable excuse for blowing a red. If your model cannot comply with the most basic law of traffic, it should not be sold to consumers as "full self driving."
Do you think your anecdote is more likely to be true than an insurance company putting its money where its mouth is?
"Tesla Full Self-Driving is twice as safe, so Lemonade takes 50% off every mile driven with FSD."
I don't know anything about Lemonade, so I can't comment on the logic behind that business strategy, but by definition all the dangerous behavior of FSD is excluded from the analysis since you have to shut it off to avoid the danger.
Beyond that, the effect size of my anecdotes assures me that it is not safer than a human driver. It's just obvious.
Lemonade doesn't support your claim that FSD is a safer driver than you are. It just says that, most charitably, they believe FSD and a human operator are safer than just a human operator (The co-founder said exactly this to Reuters [0]). Further, the program has only been around for a week and their marketing copy specifically cites "Tesla's data" as the source for the 50% reduction rather than any sort of independent analysis.
https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/lemona...
They are putting their money behind their words, unless there is some backroom deal we don't know about. If a human operator + FSD is twice safer than human operator alone, then FSD is still a large safety improvement. Considering how human operators behave with these systems, I'd also wager having the human operator (many don't even look at the road!) makes only a small difference.
> They are putting their money behind their words, unless there is some backroom deal we don't know about.
Their product is dynamically priced and individualized, and there is no guarantee of what the base rate will be. I don't see any reason they can't keep offering the 50% discount and then adjust the base rates to reverse engineer a sustainable price regardless of FSDs real safety.
> Considering how human operators behave with these systems, I'd also wager having the human operator (many don't even look at the road!) makes only a small difference.
Lemonade will likely be getting driver monitoring telemetry and calculating rates accordingly, but in either case I'm convinced that we are still on the left hand side of the Valley of Degraded Supervision [0]. Operators may not pay full attention at all times but they likely still have pretty good heuristics for what situations are difficult for FSD and adjust their monitoring behavior accordingly.
Tesla could of course release detailed crash and disengagement data to prove FSD safety. That they do not is itself a form of evidence, and in lieu of that we have to rely on crowdsourced data which says FSD 14.x still has a very long way to go to be safer than the average driver [1].
[0] https://www.eetimes.com/disengagements-wrong-metric-for-av-t...
[1] https://teslafsdtracker.com/Main
> At least one major insurance company agrees
Lemonade has <1% market share
> At least one major insurance company agrees
You mean the insurance company that has only existed for 10 years and I never heard of before this Tesla tie-in marketing gimmick?
Also an insurance company that A.M. Best rates B+. Which is fine, but when buying insurance I want to make sure that my company can weather major catastrophes.
SpaceX will acquire Tesla and save the shareholders, just like Tesla acquired SolarCity.
Can they afford to do that? I would assume it would be the other way around unless the valuation of either/both changes drastically.
XAI acquiring twitter is probably a better recent example than solarcity.
GM Supercruise on my 2024 Silverado RST is a joke compared to Tesla FSD. It's not even remotely comparable. Supercruise only works on freeways/highways, does not understand ANY navigation. It's a better cruise control, that's about it. I own 2 Tesla model S of different vintages and FSD is a completely different animal. My 2017 model s can navigate from my house to, well, anywhere, with no intervention. I have been very disappointed in how long it took Tesla to get here based on the promises they made 10(!) years ago, but they are there now. Even a year ago FSD used to scare me frequently and cause me to disengage but that never happens now.
The only thing remotely comparable in the US is probably a Comma 4 with a forked OpenPilot build on a well-supported vehicle
And Elon canceled the S and X models but not the Cybertruck? C’mon…
I wonder if they reconfigure it and tone down the look to something more traditional.
I think these days you have to look at Tesla stock more like crypto -- you're betting on the hype and hope to ride the wave and exit before it crashes.
> Tesla will become a case study on how to completely waste the first-mover advantage.
It's a study in many things.
Tesla only exists because of the transfer of wealth from the government. DOE loans, EV tax credits and other incentives are the difference between existing and not existing.
That's not necessarily bad. The problem is the government really gets nothing for their money. Look at how China incubates their businesses.
As an example, imagine where we'd be if the government had insisted on standardized charging infrastructure instead of Tesla's originally proprietary Supercharger network.
> If Tesla was valued fairly, it would probably be at the tune of $5B.
I could see it as high as $100B but not $1.5T. Not even close.
And I, too, would never bet against it. Nothing fundamental is behind Tesla's valuation. It's just gambling.
I was with you until you compared super cruise to FSD. not even comparable
1. Tesla has $40B in cash and is profitable. To say it's worth $5B is beyond absurd.
2. The market determines what is a fair value, not rando haters on the internet. Even professional Wall Street consensus is that it's fair value at approximately $1.2T market cap.
$40B in cash/equivalents, minus some $13-20B in debt (depending what source you pick).
Plus assets
> 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.
Cult. It's a cult.
There's a contingent of tech bros that think they're "smart" because they latched on to Tesla and have been riding its nuts through Elon's political stunts without a care in the world. Tesla failing would mean to them that they failed. They can't fail, they're too smart. If they just HODL for a little longer, then he'll get something magical out and validate their decision making. Sunk cost running wild.
That valuation is sure interesting considering the people killed in crashes from Tesla's self-driving thing
Edit: I love making legitimate points and instantly accruing downvotes from 'Valley VC types. Look yourself in the mirror.
Oh their self-driving thing...Full* "Self" Driving (supervised)(see notes)(not liable for anything)
Sorry, I didn't remember what it was called. FSD, I think
We are in a time when people are in cults. Trump is a cult. Elon is a cult. Tesla is a cult.
Cults do not operate on logic, but almost always result in a mass casualty event of some sort.
It's baked into the foundations of the U.S. While perhaps not a cult as we describe it today, even the first puritans that settled here were considered extremists not welcome in their home countries. For such a young country, we have always had a burgeoning industry in upstart cults, grifts, and religions (but I repeat myself).
Tesla benefited from tax payer subsidies.
Trust me, I hate Tesla and Elon as much as the next naysayer
But just to keep the story straight
Tesla received ~$3 billion in subsidies.
When Elon exercised his Tesla options in 2021, he paid $11 billion in taxes on it.
By all accounts those subsidies were an incredibly good use of taxpayer money, and similar subsidies should keep being handed out, even if the byproduct is another big troll on twitter.
Dunno where that $3 billion comes from; tesla made 11 billion in regulatory credits alone: https://insideevs.com/news/767939/tesla-regulatory-credit-11...
Perhaps you are confused, the regulatory credits were sold by Tesla to other car makers so they could meet their emissions requirements. That $11 billion came from other automakers, not taxpayers.
So you're saying Tesla made $3 billion directly from taxpayers and another $11 billion in cash transfers from their competitors required by the government?
I'm not saying that, it's strictly true.
Tesla was given $3 billion in government subsidies.
It made $11 billion selling regulatory credits created by government regulation.
I'm not interested in getting bogged down in how actually government regulation is the same thing as subsidy even though the taxpayer doesn't foot the bill (but does collect the tax on the backend of it.) There is a good reason why subsidy and regulation are not the same interchangeable word. I suppose that without glasses of nuance/understanding they blur together and look the same (government action -> money for someone), but lets wear glasses here.
The original argument was that Tesla made a substantial amount of its revenue from subsidization, i.e., government mandated payments extracting money from one set of people to fund another. Subsidies can entail direct taxation, followed by payment to a company. Alternatively, they revolve around regulatory schemes that mandate transfer payments from one group (in this case, ICE car manufacturers and their customers) to another (EV manufacturers.) Although the mechanism is slightly different, they're both subsidies. To be clear: I have no problem with these subsidies! Just think your pedantry is misfiring.
If you even read the article you linked, you'd be aware the source of the money there is from other vehicle manufacturers to Tesla not from govt/tax payers.
Other vehicle manufactuers are taxpayers...
So are Tesla's customers but that doesn't mean car sales are subsidies.
How should we calculate the enormous subsidy they received through high tariffs against their competitors?
> Trust me, I hate Tesla and Elon as much as the next naysayer
But then you go to defend them as if it were something you're obligated to do. I think you demonstrably do not hate Tesla and Elon as much as the next naysayer.
No I hate disinformation that makes people on my side look uninformed and stupid.
On a deeper level, I hate bandwagons because they are invariably full of idiotic parrots.
Elon has done a enough demonstrably stupid and bad shit that we don't need to play deception to drum up resistance. Especially when that deception plays on "government subsides in the green sector have been a colossal waste of money".
I call this the 12 fingered hitler, frequently seen on reddit.
It goes like this:
Person A makes up some unsupported fact about a despised figure. For example, "Hitler had 12 fingers".
Person B comes in and says "I think Hitler just had 10 fingers like normal"
And then person A or some other person responds "holy shit dude, I can't believe you're defending Hitler!"
Exactly
And then neo nazis go around telling susceptible people "Look, Hitler's detractors think he had 12 fingers, just look at any picture of him, he clearly only has 10. You're gonna trust people that stupid to be honest about him? To know anything about him?"
Disinformation feels good in the moment, but is immensely damaging overall. Even the people who believed he had 12 fingers will feel betrayed and question everything else when they one day learn he actually had 10.
That's true for a lot of (most?) car manufacturers?
I fully agree that TSLA is madly overpriced as a car company, and too hyped as any other type of company.
An important question is therefore: why didn't anyone else?
Of course they did.
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.
Do you expect the demand for Tesla's robotaxis to be high? I don't see it.
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.
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.
>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.
This just isn't true. If you're a woman, choosing a slightly more expensive robotaxi over a ride share where you might meet your end is a valid choice.
At the end of the day, you're still trusting a misogynistic man to get you from point A to point B. One drives the car and works as a gig worker and wears a flannel shirt, and the other sits in an office at Waymo HQ, wears a patagonia vest. Both are still part of the patriarchy and have very little interest in making sure you're safe, unless there's money to be made.
As much as I want to assume this is a trolling response, I'll pretend it is in good faith. The person you replied to is not speaking about nebulous dangers of "the patriarchy". They are talking about the risk of being verbally harassed, or physically/sexually assaulted by the driver during or directly after the ride.
https://www.wctv.tv/2026/01/14/rideshare-driver-arrested-aft...
https://www.wkrn.com/news/local-news/nashville/woman-shares-...
> Robotaxi has to be cheaper than a normal taxi to kill taxis.
I'm not sure that's true. Self serve checkouts are killing the checkout. Washing machines killed the washing board. Something can be the same price or dearer if it's more convenient.
That comparison has the problem that it is not comparable. A robo taxi is not much different from human taxi. I can not see much of an improvement for the rider. Whereas washing machines are an incredible time saver and self checkouts can be faster (especially if you use these little hand scanners).
> has to be cheaper than a normal taxi
... plus 24/7 shifts of human drivers
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.
I don't see the demand for their robots to be high either tbh, but they're betting on them. It's not going to work.
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?
From 2028.
And this is about industrial robots, which is much easier to handle than what household robots supposed to be about. Will we ever see a robot that will be able to take grandma to the tub and clean here, to then carry her up the stairs to bed, without killing her? I doubt it.
And finally: Boston Dynamics has actual working products for ages now. They don't need to cheat by using RC toy remote controllers to control their robots. And they are doing serious expectation management. This is completely different league than what Musk is doing.
Also, I don't think it's desirable to have robots taking away human work without first solving the question "and what are we going to do with all the unemployed?".
"...demand for their robots..."
Demand for Tesla products is tanking.
Demand for humanoid robots not made by Tesla may rocket. Who knows.
If the humanoid robots are no better than the cars, it's unlikely. Unitree and Boston Dynamics are pretty much there in terms of solving the hardware problem, and the rest is software and the hardware manufacturing learning curve.
The Chinese are massively out-manufacturing Tesla in the electric car market - would you bet on Tesla somehow being better than the Chinese at manufacturing?
The rest as I said is software; given Tesla's consistent lack of success in "Full Self-Driving", would you bet on them outengineering the rest of the world in the software aspect of robotics?
My goal was highlight the phrasing in a post.
I have zero interest in whatever conversation you and your intrusive thoughts are engaged in.
Tesla's biggest factory is in China.
Tesla is good at building big factories. The Cybertruck (total sales ~46k) factory was designed to build 250k units a year and later 125k. Meanwhile BYD outsells Tesla in China and globally.
Of course it will be high. Transit is a huge market. They would just need a small share of Uber, lyft, regular taxis, public transit.
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.
>> i don't think they will be able to have a lot higher revenue per ride than uber. Not 9x
Why would Tesla need to have higher revenue per ride than Uber? The value of a company is driven (ultimately) by its profit, not its revenue. And Tesla doesn't have to give the majority of the fare to the driver.
Private taxis don't compete with public transit. They operate in completely different spheres
I imagine this seems "true" to people who don't consider public transit an option for whatever (class) reason.
As others have said, they definitely compete in the same market.
As a blanket statement that's not true with NYC being the most obvious (but not the only) counterexample.
Do you commute to and from work every day by taxi in NYC
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.
The cost of owning a car dwarfs the cost of an occasional taxi ride.
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.
The math doesn't make sense already.
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.
To the extent that millions of customers use them every month to move around NYC. In reading this thread it appears you may have some narrower definition of "compete" than everyone else here.
Typically this word means that the product or service broadly serves same market in some way that overlaps. It isn't typically used so narrowly to imply that the products/services are directly replaceable in all ways.
>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.
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
It would be high if it worked, but it doesn't.
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)
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
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.
I can't remember when was the last S/X refresh. It's nuts they just let it go stale and shut the factory down.
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.
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.
As luxury vehicles they were also competing in a different market, where competitors have caught up.
How can legacy auto refresh models every two years and Tesla cannot?
Perhaps it has to do with sales numbers? The Model S and Model X were not selling well.
Pretty sure the Mercedes S-Class is also not selling a ton of units.
268K of 5 top end Mercedes models were sold in 2025 (and like 1/3 of them were sold in Maybach or AMG version!). Where is Tesla S and X combined sales were only 32K in 2024 and 18K in 2025.
You wouldn't mistake Mercedes S-Class for E-class and E-class for C-class. Even BMW 7 vs. 5 vs. 3 look more distinct than Tesla S vs. 3 and X vs. Y. The Mercedes and BMW do the good job of market differentiation while in my view Tesla failed here, and thus cheaper 3 and Y cannibalized sales of S and X. Thus, paradoxically, given that Tesla started in luxury segment, Tesla hasn't recently been capturing that high margin of the luxury segment (which is doing very well overall - just look at those Maybach and AMG numbers)
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.
It is worth it when it is done right, i.e when you do correct market differentiation (see my other comment here on Mercedes) to avoid your low end cannibalizing your higher end. This high margin really helps you, and this is why almost everybody does it. EVs are probably even better suited for it given that the platform itself is easier/cheaper to share between the low end and the high end - thus the current Teslas S/X story looks even more of a failure as by releasing 3/Y that similar to S/X (that probably helped a lot with 3/Y sales though) they forced themselves into the need for a very significant (expensive) redesign of S/X while having very low sales of it.
Tesla got the job done, which was empower Musk, not manufacture EVs at scale. The stock is the product.
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 think China would’ve gotten us to here without Tesla.
Except that the Model Y accounts for more fatalities than any other car out there.
Going to need a citation on this one.
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.
[1] https://www.roadandtrack.com/news/a62919131/tesla-has-highes...
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.
[1] https://www.iseecars.com/most-dangerous-cars-study
Is it really safe to unleash 300hp daily drivers with instant torque and significantly greater weight to the general public?
That's another question, and not a dumb one at all! But still, while the product is what it is, there is still personal responsibilities in using it properly and safely. Otherwise we should ask regulators to just prohibit this kind of vehicles.
That ship has long since sailed. My college-age niece just bought her first car, which is a 2012 V6 Mustang with 305hp, naturally aspirated. I'm sure it's lighter, but that just makes it faster.
> 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.
Tesla sold 1.7M cars in 2024. Toyota sold 11.1M cars in 2024.
Tesla’s current market cap is $1.43T. Toyota’s current market cap is $354B.
There really aren’t that many teslas on the road, and their sales are declining.
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.
I wonder if this coincides with Musk getting into politics? Never a good choice to alienate half your customer base. Michael Jordan famously said he never got into politics because "Republicans buy sneakers, too."
Tesla stock isn't valued as a car company
Which is exactly the problem.
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.
Then someone brings up the value of Tesla's AI to those robots, and here's my response to that to save re-writing it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46799603
"Robots"
A product no one knows if there is a real demand for promised to be made by a company that has no core competency in robotics
But hey let's just value this BS in the trillions because why not. Sam Altman's ChatGPT is not far behind
Oh, Optimus is much worse than ChatGPT.
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.
Elon would save Tesla by force xAI to buy it like twitter does
because why not???? at least Grok is real and we are years away from real "Skynet"
SpaceX for weapon delivery, xAI for the brain and Tesla for robot chasing
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)
I agreed on the supercharger network, which made it pretty surprising when Musk fired the entire supercharger team.
Has it all really been just one giant grift to steal every Americans social security number.
And what would he do with them?
The same systems had labor board whistleblower info.
Why would musk love to identify (or at a minimum, but a huge chilling effect on) labor board whistleblowers? The world may never know.
Try to impair democracy through election denial groups? Absolute power and all that jazz.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46734078
The Trump administration admits even more ways DOGE accessed sensitive personal data - https://www.npr.org/2026/01/23/nx-s1-5684185/doge-data-socia... - January 23rd, 2026
Case No. 1:25-cv-00596-ELH - https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.mdd.577...
> 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
So why the car company? Also I was told there is no voter fraud. Is that just because nobody’s looking?
I'm not following your logic.
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.
> So why the car company?
How else was he going to become wealthy? Wealth is unelected power. Show me evidence he’s after anything but power.
> Also I was told there is no voter fraud. Is that just because nobody’s looking?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electoral_fraud_in_the_United_...
https://www.npr.org/2024/10/11/nx-s1-5147732/voter-fraud-exp...
https://www.brennancenter.org/topics/voting-elections/vote-s...
https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/debu...
There is no material voter fraud. It is a red herring to disenfranchise voters.
>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.
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.
Not sure it's going to work out. Without some big jumps in battery tech, EVs are going to be difficult to sell without subsidies.
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.
You may have to play the hand you have, but Musk was the dealer and he is still losing.
What's their competition on the high end? Porsche, Cadillac? Do Rivian or Genesis count?
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.
Audi and Mercedes? (Well in Europe where the highend Teslas barely had any sales anywya, at least). Porsche is probably a tier or so above
Lucid runs circles around the S when it comes to build quality and features.
They're very cool in theory. My impression from the EngineeringExplained guy's experience isn't great. And Lucid does something similar to Tesla where too much (IMO) is controlled through the touchscreen.
What about sales, though?
They outsold the model S last year which was their primary competition.
They successfully launched their second model, the gravity, which would have competed with the X but will now likely just outright replace it.
Their mass produced $50k SUV is expected to launch this year.
> 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.
The whole battery thing is a massive misunderstanding of how EVs work vs gas vehicles.
For an EV with a range of 250 miles (400km) you can drive 400mi (645km) with one (1) thirty minute stop.
That's pretty much, drive 3 hours, stop for 30 minute lunch, drive 3 hours.
The confusion stems from the fact that gas cars don't fill up themselves before you depart, and they don't fill up themselves when you arrive. There are rather large differences between gas and electric cars, but people still treat EVs like gas cars, and demand EVs be more like gas cars.
Isn't it more like 4 hours?
The EPA tests at 55MPH, and driving faster than that will yield a lower range, so each 200 mile leg should take closer to 4 hours.
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.
Old source: https://www.csis.org/blogs/trustee-china-hand/chinese-ev-dil...but the arc of less subsidies is clear.
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):
https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2024/10/human-rights-...
BYD is at the bottom of the list (worst for human rights). Tesla is second at the top (better for human rights).
> You should also factor in ...
Thank you for the suggestion.
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 are citing a source to tell a story about subsidies.
Lack of worker safety standards can be considered to be a government subsidy when doing a comparison.
Therefore, it's reasonable to point out that it should be factored in.
Absolutely. Even better, suggest that the authors factor that in to their presentation.
Now, I'm not going to tell you what _you_ should do, nor would I even tell you what I think you should do.
I'll leave that to @thesmtsolver2 and others who enjoy that type of thing.
This is a retarded list of self reported paper commitments, not actual practice, i.e. no actual supply chain assessment was done, not that you can trust a propaganda shitrag like amnesty. Tesla simply "promises" in their PR to be better for human rights. Hint 50%+ of Tesla exports come from Tesla Shanghai which uses same supply raw material supply chain as rest of PRC auto, functionally they're the same.
Meanwhile how do you factoring in PRC manufacturing is simply more modern with more labour saving automation, i.e. they simply have less people to "abuse". PRC simply be peak human rights by eliminating the most humans from process.
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?
You would be better answered by reading the link and any methodology references.
Perhaps "support" already factors in all relevant subsidies.
> 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?
The Model 3 is pretty cheap for an EV. The average car in the US is over $50k now, so it's competitive on price.
If $50k is competitive for you, that should be a sign something's gone wrong.
In Europe we can get new cars for less than half that price, both for domestic production and also post-tariffs on Chinese imports.
> If $50k is competitive for you, that should be a sign something's gone wrong.
Or, on the contrary, a sign that something went right. If Europeans weren't drowning in poverty, they would also buy more expensive cars.
> Europeans weren't drowning in poverty
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.
> We're not the ones shooting unarmed protesters in the head ten times after removing their legally owned gun, nor faking arrest photos, etc.
To be fair, can you even "open carry" a firearm anywhere in Europe? Isn't the UK trying to ban pointy kitchen knives[1]?
[1] https://www.msn.com/en-us/crime/general/uk-considering-point...
With the appropriate permit, yes. Which is also the case in Minnesota.
(The permit requirements differ a lot between countries, but that an implementation detail, you should not be killed while respecting the law)
Ah, you’re talking about the regime that fired the commissioner of the Bureau of Labour Statistics because the president didn’t like the figures, right?
Right?
Scary to realize how some people in the US have been brainwashed into thinking European countries are totalitarian states drowning in poverty
Just be rich (in debt) like Americans seems like a bad plan for a global brand. Poorer countries outside NA and the EU buy stuff too, y'know.
> 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.
According to the Wikipedia article the first one rolled off the line in November 2023. That’s a good two years.
Not to mention the Roadster
The non-existing vehicle Musk still was able to get suckers to pay him for
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.
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.
> 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.
The story needs only to hold up until car production has shut down.
S and X were a small fraction of Fremont already. The plant can do >500k units per year, but S/X were closer to 20k.
It sounds like this would be giving ~5% of the factory space to Optimus production, which seems reasonable.
they have a large buyer - all of the silly people investing money in the company
IF they work (and that is a massive, massive if), every factory on earth will replace every human with them.
It’s inevitable, the only question is how many years until it happens: 2, 5, 10, 50?
Place your bets!
Do think factories are still mostly humans on assembly lines?
"Do think factories are still mostly humans on assembly lines?"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MCBdcNA_FsI
china dark factory
Factory robots have almost nothing in common with humanoid robots and are probably at least 10000x simpler.
That’s the point!
Not mostly, no.
But I toured an auto assembly plant of a major US OEM recently and there were a ton of humans on the line.
Unions will be an issue, but all the OEMs are walking dead anyway.
Tour Toyota. It’s be lights-out except for all the people there on tours to see the mechanical marvels.
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.
Wiring harnesses seem like the final boss of manufacturing automation. A lot of times they're still built entirely by hand, and also installed by hand.
Automation is really good at assembly of stiff, solid objects. Anything soft and flexible seems too error prone. See also: the garment industry.
Which is why Tesla went so hard on the harness for cyber truck, to learn how to do it for the next vehicles
Agreed, let alone 1M units a year!
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".
Nice. I think my new climbing routine will be to just look at the 5.13 and mime moves from the ground for an hour, then go home.
I _could_ flash this V12 but what would be the point?
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!'.
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
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.
Tons of people hire people to do their shopping. Curbside pickup and grocery delivery has existed for a while.
A large amount of the people I see in grocery store around me are working as pickers filling online orders.
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
It's amazing how much hand-waving rich people are allowed to get away with. If I tried that people would (correctly) call bullshit.
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".
[1] https://blog.tombert.com/Posts/Personal/2026/01-January/What...
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.
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
> I went through this Ford engine plant about three years ago, when they first opened it.
> There are acres and acres of machines, and here and there you will find a worker standing at a master switchboard, just watching, green and yellow lights blinking off and on, which tell the worker what is happening in the machine.
> One of the management people, with a slightly gleeful tone in his voice said to me, “How are you going to collect union dues from all these machines?”
> And I replied, “You know, that is not what’s bothering me. I’m troubled by the problem of how to sell automobiles to these machines
- Walter Reuther, Nov. 1956 https://quoteinvestigator.com/2011/11/16/robots-buy-cars
Basically yes. The robots take care of the rich, and poor people with their need to have a cut of the resources just go away.
They do believe in a post capitalism utopia, they just think only about a thousand people need to enjoy it.
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.
The guy owns a rocket company and still hasn't even been to LEO. Katy Perry has spent more time in space than Elon.
Mars isn't happening, at least not on his watch.
The funniest part is that the Mars Trilogy is hella optimistic about the tech needed to get and live there.
>he's obviously read KSR's Red Mars
If he had, he was clearly not paying attention to the social and economic message of the book.
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.
That’s the point. Don’t listen, keep trying and you can achieve anything. Rich people are either bored or stupid so you will get money eventually.
An interview with a Silicon Valley big shot finally explained this.
The concept is that you can convince smart people to work extra hard for you by selling them the story that no-no-no, they’re not merely tweaking some dystopian algorithm to sell Chinese plastic crap to people, they’re saving the world.
Once you recognise this pattern, you’ll see it everywhere: Zuckerberg, Sam Altman, and Elon all do it.
Hence the “AI safety” rhetoric. Those CEOs will gladly take the safeties off and make an army of Terminators to sell to the highest bidder! The safety talk is for their employees, to convince them to work like slaves to “save the world”.
we need AGI and robot so people can leave chore in house to a robot
Why would cybertruck be cancelled?
> Why would cybertruck be cancelled?
IIRC, the fully-electric F150 Lighting was canceled due to poor sales, and its sales were better than the Cybertruck's.
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.
Tesla doesn't disclose the gross margin on Cybertruck. They may say it is positive but if nobody knows what constituted those gross margins or what they amounted to, it's pretty much meaningless.
Hard to imagine it being profitable given the very low utilization of the production line and associated tooling.
I agree. I am quite confident that if someone challenges them on this claim, they will say it was non-GAAP gross margin, which excluded all the crucial expenses
it's one of their models i would like for them to succeed the most. americans love trucks (especially where i live), and the impact of electric truck replacing ice ones on the gestalt of the neighborhood is significant, no noise, no fumes. people tend to drive their electric cars/trucks more gently too. my neighbor bought one, and it's night and day.
and oddly enough, while i kneejerk hated it at first, the design has grown on me, something genuinely different, playful. much rather see a parked cybertruck than yet another oversized bloated "regular" truck.
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.
---
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.
Modern F150s are also bloated and oversized.
it's its own design, doesn't look like a fat truck, more something new and big
> 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 guess it's not accompanied with the noise which makes the difference for me
Lower than expected sales https://www.cbsnews.com/news/tesla-cybertruck-sales-elon-mus...
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.
Because it's selling terribly: https://www.businessinsider.com/cybertruck-sales-decline-tes...
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.
Didn’t they just announce their profits dropped like 45% year over a year?
https://techcrunch.com/2026/01/28/tesla-earnings-profit-q4-2...
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.
Sure but they also beat earnings and revenue targets, and the stock price rose. I think it was expected for EV profits to drop when the tax credit left
Electric cars, maybe. Tesla is valued much larger than the rest of the auto industry combined though.
Humanoid robots? Ain’t nobody made the business case for that. It is pure vibes.
Are you seriously saying there is no business case for humanoid robots?
Yes, there's no business case for humanoid robots.
There's a business case for robots that are specialized in specific repetitive actions, and we already see this in manufacturing. But general purpose humanoid robots make no sense.
They're incredibly expensive and, from what we've seen, worse across the board compared to humans. It's cheaper to just hire humans.
The human form is actually pretty shit at most things. But, it can do everything. There's just little purpose for that in a business case. You know what you're doing, so you just need robots to do that, not to try to be humans.
Like, okay, you can get a humanoid robot to be a burger flipper. But that makes no sense. You can, instead, have an automated burger cooking machine. Which do exist! I worked in a restaurant with one 10 years ago.
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.
1. The world is designed for humans. If you need to reach the places humans reach then you need to be the same size as a human.
2. Nature has tested many different form factors and the human form dominated the others.
Ask a plumber what he thinks about reaching places human reach. Nature tested what exactly? Birds and spiders are sub optimal?
It might surprise you to learn that a plumber is human sized.
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 agree there's a great market for specialized ones. I own some of those, like a vacuum bot.
But the generic robot is the endgame. I think Musk tries to achieve the endgame, probably too soon. FSD, interplanetary travel, etc
1 is the real reason. 2 is really down to things like a big brain and opposable thumbs. Our trunk/legs are evolved for persistence hunting and long distance walking - activities that drive approximately 0% of the economy at this point. If robots didn't have to navigate an environment built for bipeds, other configurations would be far more reliable/efficient.
For instance: a quadruped base can be statically stable in case of power loss - a biped really can't.
“I always wonder why those robots have to be humanoid.“
You are correct to wonder this and almost every use case for a robot will be optimized to a non-human form factor.
Certainly there are tasks - like BJJ training partner - that require a human form factor. Almost everything else, including general, purpose, helper, robot, will be cheaper and more extensible in a non-human form factor.
One of your children remarked that nature has experimented with form factors and humans have won… To which I would point out that the upright, bipedal, form factor arose from the limits of oxygen processing, and heat dissipation… Neither limitation will be encountered in the same way with a robot…
… or perhaps I would point out that nature has, indeed, experimented with form factors and ants won - by a very large margin.
instead, sub 12cm disc shaped ones are rather well understood and perform well. They suck opening doors though - but the 40cm one would have a similar issue.
Besides that: I, personally, am totally fine with the current state of the technology.
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
Robots yes. Humanoid ones? Why? So people can be amazed? Purpose built robots are the future. The human form is sub optimal for most enterprise use cases.
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?
> 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).
And another thought: if the robot can do housework, can it do factory work? Fieldwork? Lawn care? What else can it do with zero modifications?
That expands the market greatly.
> 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.
[0] https://www.1x.tech/order
No, I wouldn’t.
For one, I don’t spend a lot of time doing housework. Just organize your life better.
Beyond that, the cost would not be small. Based on current designs, operating costs would be thousands of dollars per month. I would not pay that.
It would require a cloud controlled robot with cameras in my home. Why in the world would I want that.
Finally, I already have dishwashers and laundry machines.
Why thousands per month?
Why would cloud connectivity be required? (I'm almost certain you're right, the big makers will require cloud--but that's not a requirement of the tech, is it?)
There is insufficient compute to operate these things locally in dynamic environments. The models for doing that kind of robotics inference are running on racks of H200’s.
> Just organize your life better.
Do you really think this is a viable solution to families with kids?
You couldn't pay me any amount of money to have a robot in my home if it's controlled from Elon Musk's data center.
And I'm a former Tesla FSD customer, so I should be the ideal early adopter for this product.
Do you already pay a human to do this work?
I absolutely pay to have a maid come over and clean, yes.
> 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?
I can't speak for the other guy, but as a person who manages humans at work: I'd rather have a robot at home.
1) I live way, way out in the middle of nowhere.
2) Humans are fickle, late, emotional. They have requirements in their own life that conflict with the jobs I want them to do.
3) Taxes. I don't want to deal with this headache. 1099 my cleaner or whatever?
4) In my version, the costs of owning the robot are less than the costs of hiring humans. If that wasn't true, then I'd reconsider. I probably wouldn't buy one until the cost switched like that, unless maybe it was open-source or something.
Here's another way to think about it: Amazon is willing to pay workers to do the job, but they'd obviously rather have the robots do it. The robots work close to free, don't complain, and probably do a better job (at the jobs they're capable of). Why wouldn't they hire a human for that? A lot of the same reasons.
It costs approximately $200 for our house to be cleaned once (by humans). We do it about once a month because we don't feel like spending $200 weekly). It would be great to have it ~continuously cleaned but we the cost/benefit isn't there for having a full-time person.
FWIW, I emailed auntanns.com to ask what a combination personal assistant and housekeeper would cost:
> Thank you for inquiring about our services. I'd love to discuss with you further regarding the person you are seeking. Personal assistants do not do housekeeping and housekeepers do not have the P.A skillset to pay bills and make appts etc unless they are an executive level housekeeper. Rates for executive housekeepers range between $60-$65/hr and a minimum of 20+ hours per week, plus PTO, paid sick days and many also seek a health stipend.
> 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.
What makes the roomba a liability?
You would pay "a lot of money"?
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?
Aren't the humanoid robots looking to ship around 20k?
You can hardly even buy a reliable new car for that amount.
The average new car in the US is now ~$50K.
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.
I agree with everything you've said. To me the next question is: If nobody has a job, who will buy all the robot-produced goods?
Some people will have jobs, even in the most robot-heavy vision.
I don't know if it's enough people to buy the goods, but robot-produced goods should bottom out on price, closing in on the actual cost of materials/energy.
But why are they in humanoid form? Wheels are more efficient than legs, they have no need for a face. It sure does sound like vibes
Because the world has already been built for the "human" interface
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?
How does a wheeled robot navigate stairs?
The same way someone in a wheelchair does. You get rid of the stairs.
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.
Maybe there is. But isn’t Tesla way, way behind Hyundai at this? It’s not even close? Yet Hyundai’s stock is still very cheap..
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?
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.
And imagine if you can share it with your neighbors.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dishwasher
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.
You could hire someone to clean your house today, you don't need to wait for a robot that might never exist. And it will probably be cheaper too!
How much does it cost to have them at your house every evening after dinner to do the dishes?
More than I can afford, I bet.
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.
Do you have a double-digit number of kids? Because I've got one, and it takes about ten minutes.
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.
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.
Next you’ll be telling me there’s a machine to wash your dishes.
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.
What? You don't think I should give my humanoid robot a chainsaw and tell it to clear the field?
WCGW?
Hehe. Yeah exactly. At the moment I have to prep the room for my roomba so it doesn't eat my rug and commit suicide by cable. I can't imagine a humanoid, presumably strong, robot let loose in my home and I am for sure a tech enthusast.
I'm not likely to be the guinea pig, either.
I want the endgame version, but not the first version.
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?
If you think our current tech stack is anywhere close to making humanoid robots viable, then you might as well buy Tesla stock.
There's a huge business case! There's also a major business case for teleportation, which seems about as likely to happen under a Musk-led company.
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.
Not for what they currently cost and are capable of.
No, they're probably saying you're that believer that will buy the dip.
I own no TSLA stock and never have. I have no horse in this race.
Tesla is valued at more than the auto industry because they are doing more than the entire auto industry.
Honda is going to come out with a new Civic next year. It's going to look like the old Civic.
Tesla is trying to create self driving taxis to make the rest of the auto industry obsolete.
If you think that can happen, they should be worth more than the rest of the industry.
> 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
I didn't state my opinion at all. That's just why it's valued the way it is. People believe that it will be valuable, that's what an investment is.
I'm just offering a reasonable explanation for why people value it. Nobody has to agree.
> Tesla is trying to create self driving taxis to make the rest of the auto industry obsolete.
They are one of many organisations trying to do that and they are not the most successful at it.
Honda have been making humanoid robots since the 1980s.
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.
They are actually behind in a lot of their self driving to other car companies
> These are very much things of the future.
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.
To his credit he also delivers, sometimes.
X kind of works. XAi kind of works. You can say it is all kind of broken but it works. People predicted X will collapse just a few months ago!
StarLink is really popular now, and it didn't exist few months ago.
He can still do things. People are betting on that.
Now if you ask me, Tesla is still his biggest moneymaker and collapse of Tesla sales will be catastrophic for his empire.
> X kind of works.
It is less popular and makes less money than when he acquired it, and that is ignoring the fact that it is a cesspool of racism now.
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.
They are making things but the case for them being worth an order or magnitude more than a normal EV company is getting weaker by the day
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.
Tesla's valuation is not related to their production of cars or robots.
refrigirators then? some other household appliances? what exactly is “thing de jour” tesla is today?!
BYD made 35% more electric cars than Tesla and its market cap is about 1/10th.
Tesla's valuation has no grounding in any physical goods it manufactures.
imagination and feelings
We might as well call it “vibe valuation“ since that’s what it is.
They are making no robots.
What robots are they making?
Where can you buy one? What does it do?
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.
I will say, though, that there is a longstanding tradition, certainly in the United States, of an in group hurting their own material interests to deprive an out group of that same thing. https://www.marketplace.org/story/2021/02/15/public-pools-us...
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.
It's pure politics: https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/genera...
The people behind the Diesel won and now are moving the money flows their way. See GM stock.
tesla is not making robots.
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.
BYD makes electric cars. Not sure if Trump will let you import them.
Nor will any American president. Detroit would collapse overnight (again).
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.
> You cannot bet against them
I am not sure. I think buyers or potential buyers shifted their assessment of Tesla in the last, say, 1-2 years a lot.
Did they? It keeps going up despite no reasons for it.
Game stop used its irrationally high stock price to raise money. Tesla instead has been giving away stock to make Musk richer.
I was exactly going to shot Tesla. Is Tesla more like Elon meme ?
GME is a joke that got out of hand. TSLA is a cult that went too far.
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
Multiple things can be true:
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.
And man behind the cybertruck has not earned the presumption that he has a secret plan. If it looks like things are going poorly, they probably are.
But Tesla and SpaceX are different companies
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.
Historically bubbles like this hardly ever lasted this long, though
That doesn't mean there's no such thing as a meme stock, that means there have always been meme stocks and we now have a consice name for it
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.
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!
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.
https://www.cbtnews.com/tesla-execs-raise-red-flags-after-mu...
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.
The completed original line up was
S 3 X Y
The C didn’t fit that, nor would a 2. Unless he’s aiming for a lineup of products that has you seeing someone next Tuesday.
They could have expanded the lineup to 2 S 3 X Y 4 U
I thought it was
S 3 X Y C A R S
Cybertruck, ATV (?), Roadster, Semi
2 S 3 X Y?
Fit a robotaxi, a semi, and a cyberfuck into this, the meme is complete.
What about the roadster?
And he couldn't get E (the original intended name) because Ford had it trademarked.
CyberS3XY was what I always figured he was going for.
Why? I think a lineup with a 2 could have been S3XY 2!
Lol I didn't even connect the dots together until this comment. For a dickhead rich memelord this one is at least somewhat clever.
It's his favourite joke, see Space Sex.
> smaller than Model 3 for Europe
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.
> 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
Actually this is already happening with the Dacia Spring/Renault City: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dongfeng_Motor_Corporation#eGT...
> 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.
This genuinely does not read like a real post.
Actually read like one of those AI-fueled cringe LinkedIn post.
> 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.
Starting price is the same with less equipment. If you start putting the same things the new "cheap" Model Y has already by default, ID4 goes ~5k more expensive (and with less WLTP and I didn't check the charging curve)
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]
[1] https://www.autoevolution.com/news/tuev-report-2026-tesla-mo...
> 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).
not having door handles in an obvious location is such a subjective "feature" that people have been killed in fires because of the door handle placement.
I've lost count of the number of times i've seen tesla drivers "defrosting" their door handles. You may live in a sunny desert but many people do not.
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.
because there is still 2012-era belief hanging around many people that Tesla's EV tech is superior to anything else
yeah, they legitimately used to be but the rest of the world has definitely improved and Teslas weirdly haven't that much. They're cruising on name brand and a really decent charging network, but even that moat is being breached.
Even without Musk's public persona, the Tesla build quality is infamous. I would never.
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.
Volvos are premium cars at a premium price point. Though the brand is now Chinese-owned, I would not group them together with the likes of BYD, MG, Leapmotor etc. They have no disruptive potential whatsoever from my perspective.
BYD already have the Atto 1 (sub AUD30K here) as do other EV manufacturers (eg Nissan Leaf).
Tesla could stop spending money on bullshit like the Cybertruck and spend it on vehicles that people actually need/want.
Don't forget Renault 5!
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.
Interestingly, the Renault 5 Turbo 3E is more Cyberpunk than anything Tesla is making!
Is it an good car ?
Good enough that Ford is planning to slap their badge on it and hope Europe doesn't forget Ford while they are busy not actually manufacturing EVs.
All the big European car manufacturers also have EV cars too.
Plus there are plenty of popular options for high-end EVs that are far more glamorous as well as practical than the Cybertruck.
> 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.
You couldn’t possibly be singing that tune if you were taking their robotaxis taxis every day for the past half a year and seeing how well they drive (albeit supervised)
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.
> Everyone knew that was the future and that the big auto manufacturers were deliberately dragging.
Definitely not. Car electrification was definitely not obvious, and Tesla had to do many semi-impossible things to make it even slightly feasible.
Yeah 10 years ago.
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.
> Yeah 10 years ago.
Tesla unveiled the Roadster 20 years ago. That's plenty of time for other companies to catch up. They made a bet that once the battery moat evaporated the millions of miles of driving footage, powering affordable fully autonomous driving, would be their next moat. They failed, not because camera-based FSD is a silly idea (we drive with our eyes after all), but because it's a really hard problem. If they had won that bet, Tesla would justify its valuation. They didn't, and so we're left with the flailing of a doomed company.
>Car electrification was definitely not obvious
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.
> The first electric car predates the 20th century
Great, now do steam. Being produced in the past does not mean it will make a comeback, despite steam being quieter, with great torque, and the main ingredient for propulsion (water) being safer than gasoline for normal people to refuel
>Great, now do steam.
I can assure you I would point out the silliness of someone saying steam technology was not obvious too.
You know that steam is used in nuclear power, right?
semi-impossible
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).
> Common sense product could be something smaller than Model 3 for Europe and this car would eat Chinese for lunch
The Chinese EVs selling in Europe are mostly bigger cars.
And the only reason they don't sell more is because we tariff the hell out of them.
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....
Elon Musk said he estimated 250k to 500k yearly sales
So he's off by, what Elon might say is an "order of magnitude"
I write that off as marketing BS. They very clearly didn't design it based on those expectations though.
A Cybertruck-styled minivan would've been so badass. Like an updated version of the Toyota Van Wagon.
Any chance we can get VW to do a Cyber Vanagon??
To be fair, robot soldiers are the only robotics and ai problems that need to be solved to pretty much eliminate labor problems across the board.
I suspect China is going to beat him to the punch on this one too.
Cybertruck was /the/ sign that things with Elon had... changed, IMO!
Idk, his twitter account was enough to sort out he had lost control over himself.
Eat BYD for lunch?
... but they aren't canceling the Cybertruck?
Re: Robots bla bla: yeah, of course. FSD bla bla. Meh.
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.
Any discussion of Tesla without mentioning Musk's actions is missing the most important piece. I heard someone on this site use the term "mind share", as in before Musk decided to alienate his main customer base, Tesla had the biggest "mind share" of any company in the world. I looked forward to buying a Tesla one day. Now, with Musk licking Trumps boots and actively doing very real damage with his work in DOGE and other things, I will literally never buy anything from that company ever again. It doesn't matter what Chinese car companies are doing. It matters that he stands for everything I don't so I will not give him my money.
> could be something smaller than Model 3 for Europe
Lol... not with those tariffs. In fact, I'd be willing to bet we see higher growth of Tata than Telsa in Europe over the next 10 years.
Tesla has a factor in Germany.
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:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46710328
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.
But it was certainty a risky bet.
To be "for the masses", it would need to:
- be smaller
- have an actually usuable truck bed
- be painted (so rust isn't an issue)
- 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.
[1] https://www.roadandtrack.com/reviews/a45752401/toyotas-10000...
[2] https://www.motortrend.com/reviews/2025-toyota-imv-0-pickup-...
[3] https://reason.com/2024/02/02/why-are-pickup-trucks-ridiculo...
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 a load bearing exoskeleton.
> it was intended a low-volume product for next-gen Tesla tech
If this is true that's not what Musk was saying beforehand.
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 is the opposite story that Musk told when hyping the Cybertruck, though.
>>The gamble with Cybertruck failed.
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.
Yes. It's a flop:
https://insideevs.com/news/784715/tesla-cybertruck-ev-sales-...
A flop is not a truck that was the best selling in the world two years ago and then 3/4 as many as Ford's EV truck and more than everyone else (according to your link).
And since when is HN just like Reddit when one is downvoted for asking a question for clarity?
It's a flop. The Cybertruck didn't meet its sales targets and the sales it did have in 2024 were cut in half in 2025. It will continue to struggle in 2026:
https://www.fastcompany.com/91475013/2026-will-be-the-year-c...
OK, not a flop.
An failure that didn't live up to the hype that generated the initial sales volume in pre-orders.
The idea of the Cybertruck sold well — at a time before Musk's Roman salutes, shadowing Trump, running DOGE, and further enshittifying what remains of Twitter.
The actual Cybertruck, once the pre-orders ran out... did not.
Nearly half of all Cybertrucks sold (about 75% of those sold in 2024) were pre-orders.
That's to say, people stopped buying once they saw the Cybertruck for what it actually was (ditto for Elon).
The linked article is clear as to why the S and X don’t need to be in Tesla’s product line
> 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
Why are they still making the cybertruck then?
I see way more Model S and X than Cybertruck.
Probably because it’s a segment they think they can grow and is a new vehicle type, rather than redundant.
Regardless, it's probably better to have one flashy car that doesn't sell big numbers than 3. They might treat it as their high end test car or something or plan to figure out a new top tier model.
Probably the same reason Ford makes one, too.
Ford recently stopped it. https://www.npr.org/2025/12/15/nx-s1-5645147/ford-discontinu...
That's all good, don't worry, the stock is doing quite well, near its record high. A man jumping around in spandex is all they need.
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...
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.
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.
It’s being valued on the hope that they will crack full self driving. People still believe they will crack it.
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.
They’re being beaten on every front.
> Tesla said they were going to do this at least as far back as like 2018, and still aren’t.
Tesla Robotaxis are fully operating in Austin since November and they are running a pilot in San Francisco with safety drivers?
https://www.teslarati.com/tesla-opens-robotaxi-access-to-eve...
Seems I was wrong. However, the Robotaxi fleet is still tiny compared to Waymo's. Jalopnik said the fleet was only 34 cars as of EOY 2025[0]. Waymo had over 2,000 as of September 2025[1].
[0]: https://www.jalopnik.com/2063124/tesla-austin-robotaxi-fleet...
[1]: https://www.automotiveworld.com/articles/waymo-confirms-flee...
Elsewhere in this discussion someone pointed out that each Tesla robotaxi in Austin is being directly followed by a supervisor in another car. That resource constraint could explain the low number.
Have you tried FSD on a HW4 model recently?
And?
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.
Yep. If anything the only complaint is that it can be “too safe” when I might personally be more aggressive making a turn for example.
Last time I went 5 hours to Raleigh and back I let it drive door to door and it was incredible.
And for what exactly? What did it do to your commute? how long do you commute?
What do you do know why sitting in front of your stearing wheel?
I listen to music and audibooks and I would not have a device between me and the airbag.
> open a laptop and work
I'm still convinced we are going to need dedicated roads - or lanes at the very least - and dedicated parking/waiting areas for this to be feasible on a truly large scale.
However, it may be easier than we think-- they've already done something like this for rideshare drivers in many places, and it wouldn't necessarily need to be much more complicated than that.
Just build trains at that point, I use my laptop for work all the time when riding for a few hours. It has its dedicated lane, can travel at 220km/h, and it's a much smoother ride than any pothole'd American road.
It's more of a bet on the optimus
Isn't that an issue as well? It's always a bet on the next promised land which never arrives, the goalposts change but the stock never takes a hit from undelivered promises, it's bonkers.
Optimus looks like a joke compared to the robots China has developed like Unitree.
Once they actually start bleeding money they will go down.
> would have never expected to see a cult of personality being run on the top of S&P 500 market caps,
Steve Jobs had a cult of personality as well. Of course Apple had financial reasons to support its valuation when he was leading it in the 2000s
But Apple under Steve Jobs had all the financial numbers to support it, it wasn't valued solely on Steve Jobs' personality, the products were there, and being loved by consumers. Revenue wasn't dipping while the stock was going up, revenue, market share, profits were consistently on the rise.
The most successful meme stock in history, all driven by - "coming soon"
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 own the Y and drove the S as a loaner. The S is a noticeably better car. Also has 1000hp.
I've got a 2025 Model 3 and was blown away by what a great vehicle it is for the price point. I'd be curious how much of a difference there is between and S and a Model 3 Performance.
Also in Europe, an old state company called Renault is beating Tesla with the R5.
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.
And it's not even cheap (actually its success kind of baffles me but great I guess).
Wasn’t Renault an F1 competitor for many years?
3rd place for most F1 wins as a car motor builder.
It still is, albeit they use the Alpine branding.
And not developing their own motor since this year :(
It was but I'm not sure how that's relevant.
Also not sure what the point of the "old state" part of the parent comment was. Renault is just another big carmaker.
It has been listed in the stock market since 1996, the French state owns 15% now (and so does Nissan).
And the point is?
That, like you, I have no idea what was the point of referring to Renault as an "old state company".
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.
I think range only really matters in the context of highway drives, I kinda dislike these composite estimates like WLTP (as you can never be sure of what exactly they measure)
Forgot that the cybertruck was a sales flop and quality joke, and that the Tesla Semi is now the elephant in the room.
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.
But... the Roadster!
"How I feel about Tesla? I wouldn't buy it and I wouldn't short it". Charles Munger.
He’s been dead for more than a year. Is this his 2018 take?
> 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.
This is the first year that I personally think that it will come this year...
Actions speak louder than words, and the fact that a 'cybercab' production line is firing up this year is also a strong indicator - the fact they didn't do that 5 years ago means tesla leadership didn't think it was going to work back then. 'cybercab' wouldn't sell well as a 2 seater if it couldn't self drive. (although the actual mass production will be delayed till next year is my guess, but we'll see model 3 or y being used for a taxi service in the meantime)
It will be interesting to see. At this point, I think much of what is coming out of Tesla in both words and actions is stock price theater. They "fired up" a Cybertruck production line and we all see how that went.
How are those "bugs" not immediately disqualifying? "Move fast and break things" is not an acceptable strategy for controlling 2 tonne bricks hurtling down the freeway
> the only thing keeping Tesla where it is is the bullshit dispersal field that surrounds Musk.
I'm not 100% what you mean by "dispersal field", but outside of America, Elon's image in recent years has done more harm to Tesla than good.
I think he meant "keeping TSLA where it is".
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.
On top of that, the factory is getting converted to make robots...
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.
Up until recently teslas were regularly ranked around the world as the least reliable car brand. https://www.topspeed.com/germany-declares-tesla-model-y-is-l... and https://electrek.co/2025/12/11/tesla-ranks-dead-last-used-ca...
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
https://www.ancap.com.au/media-and-gallery/media-releases/22...
> 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.
They still are, the Danish statistics report ~45% of tesla having issues compared to ~7% of the whole plethora of electric vehicles, that's a lot
https://www.msn.com/en-us/autos/news/nearly-half-of-tesla-mo...
"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."
That’s my thought as well. The X isn’t much bigger than the Y and the price point is much higher. Same with the S and 3.
The markets the have been missing to this point are the big passenger / cargo carriers like a minivan or full size SUV.
Sounds like you get your news from Reddit.
This LIDAR wank annoys me.
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.
Cameras also fail when weather conditions cake your car in snow and/or mud while you're driving. Actually, from what I just looked up, this is an issue with LiDAR as well. So it seems to me like we don't even have the sensors we need to do this properly yet, unless we can somehow make them all self-cleaning.
It always goes back to my long standing belief that we need dedicated lanes with roadside RFID tags to really make this self driving thing work well enough.
Nah. That's a common "thought about it for 15 seconds but not 15 minutes" mistake.
Making a car that drives well on arbitrary roads is freakishly hard. Having to adapt every single road in the world before even a single self-driving car can use them? That's a task that makes the previous one look easy.
Learned sensor fusion policy that can compensate for partial sensor degradation, detect severe dropout, and handle both safely? Very hard. Getting the world that can't fix the low tech potholes on every other road to set up and maintain machine specific infrastructure everywhere? A nonstarter.
Well, we already provide dedicated lanes for multi-passenger vehicles in many places, nearly all semi-major airports have dedicated lots and lanes for rideshare drivers, many parts of downtown/urban areas have the same things... and it didn't exactly take super long to roll all that out.
Also, 99% of roads in civilized areas have something alongside them already that you can attach RFID tags to. Quite a bit easier than setting up an EV charging station (another significant infrastructure thing which has rolled out pretty quickly). And let's not forget, every major metro area in the world has multi-lane superhighways which didn't even exist at all 50-70 years ago.
Believe me, I've thought about this for a lot more than 15 minutes. Yes, we should improve sensor reliability, absolutely. But it wouldn't hurt to have some kind of backup roadside positioning help, and I don't see how it would be prohibitively expensive. Maybe I am missing something, but I'm gonna need more than your dismissive comment to be convinced of that.
You are missing the sheer soul-crushing magnitude of the infrastructure problem. You are missing the little inconvenient truth that live in a world full of roads that don't even consistently have asphalt on them. That real life Teslas ship with AI that does vibe-based road lane estimation because real life roads occasionally fail to have any road markings a car AI could see.
Everything about road infrastructure is "cheap to deploy, cheap to maintain". This is your design space: the bare minimum of a "road" that still does its job reasonably well. Gas stations and motels are an aside - they earn money. Not even the road signs pay for themselves.
Now, you propose we design some type of, let's say, a machine only mark that helps self-driving cars work well. They do nothing for human drivers, who are still a road majority. And then you somehow manage to make every country and every single self-driving car vendor to get to agree on the spec, both on paper and in truth.
Alright, let's say we've done that. Why would anyone, then, put those on the road? They're not the bare minimum. And if we wanted to go beyond the bare minimum, we'd plug the potholes, paint the markings and fix the road signs first.
You definitely have a point. It would not be rolled out all at once, everywhere. It would happen sporadically, starting with areas that have a higher tax revenue base. There may never be an international standard. There will be tons of places it will never work at all.
All the same, it still reminds me of past infrastructure changes which ended up being widely distributed, with or without standards, from railroads to fiber optic cables.
And this:
> if we wanted to go beyond the bare minimum, we'd plug the potholes, paint the markings and fix the road signs first
...just strikes me as a major logical fallacy. It's like the people who say we shouldn't continue exploring our solar system because we have too many problems on Earth. We will always have problems here, from people starving because of oppressive and unaccountable hierarchies they're stuck under to potholes and road markings the local government is too broke or incompetent to fix. We should work on those, yeah, but we should also be furthering the research and development of technology from every angle we realistically can. It feels weird to be explaining this here.
And as long as those places dominate, it makes more sense for AI car makers to say "let's put $5m more into raw dog vision only FSD AI" than it does to say "let's add a $25 long range RFID reader to every car". No one will bet their future on "the infrastructure for it will maybe one day exist".
Just look at how Waymo is struggling to grow and scale. And they don't even need every road remade. They just need every road mapped and scanned out into 3D objects with their reference cars. They're solving a problem orders of magnitude easier, and it still throttles their growth.
> Just look at how Waymo is struggling to grow and scale.
Are they? They seem to be growing fine.
Regardless, they are approaching it the right way. They start with a safe solution, even though it is expensive, then bring the cost down over the years as technology improves. The wrong way to do it is to start with a less expensive but unsafe tech then add a safety driver in every car. That approach is wrong both because the "tech" of the safety driver will never improve, and you'll kill a few people along the way, like Tesla.
You are correct, but the problem is nobody at Tesla or any other self driving company for that matter knows what they are doing when it comes to AI
If you are doing end to end driving policy (i.e the wrong way of doing it), having lidar is important as a correction factor to the cameras.
So far, end to end seems to be the only way to train complex AI systems that actually works.
Every time you pit the sheer violent force of end to end backpropagation against compartmentalization and lines drawn by humans, at a sufficient scale, backpropagation gets its win.
Just don't drive up north in the snow and your good.
> 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.
>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.
Will humans?
SpaceX is going to go public so he doesn't need Tesla any more.
That about sums it up.
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.
Less damage... with his CSAM-making bot. Yeah. Less damage.
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.
> When Mom can dispatch the family car to pick up the kids from school.
Tech level, I agree--that's FSD.
But even if we had that tech today, Mom ain't sending the car without getting a police visit.
You can't even let your kids go to the local playground alone anymore. They're not going to be captain and first mate alone in a vehicle if the Karens have anything to say about it.
the main metric is fsd subs, the other stuff you mention is not as important
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.:
- Oct 2016, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_predictions_for_autono...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.
But it is still (unfortunately) the most competent publicly available ADAS.
I'm not sure it is a bad decision given:
"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."
That just indicates that the other models were allready being wound down.
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.
ADAS levels are not only about technical capability, but also about who takes responsibility.
775 bn
wbu
https://www.forbes.com/profile/elon-musk/
> BYD is eating Tesla for lunch
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.
There's not really NEV oversupply, the EV adoption curve will keep shooting up from 50% to 100%, many PRC EV companies will die from competition/pricewar consolidation not broader oversupply, since EV industrial base is still undersupply relative to 100% adoption curve.
Oversupply is in legacy ICE displacement due to rapid domestic EV penetration. "Zero-milage used car" accounting trick is primarily to export excess capacity of gasoline cars (now that EV has taken over) that aren't moving domestically anymore. MOST of PRC exports are ICE, IIRC 60-80%, there's plenty of global demand for ICE still. Pushing domestic sku new car with crushed domestic demand as "used" exports where there's plenty of demand = meet sales target, but less through discounts but import fees engineering - used cars circumvent import duties, certifications, warranty requirements etc. It's a lifehack to unload domestic ICE inventory, not EV. This also likely transient effect because NEV transition in PRC happened so fast ICE manufacturer that target domestic market caught flat footed. They need a few years to either retool to EV or shift primarily to target export markets that still has appetite for affordable gasoline cars.
The Reuters article focuses on exports because that's what their target audience is likely to be interested in, but the People's Daily article they reference in passing https://paper.people.com.cn/rmrb/pc/content/202506/10/conten... is treating it as a domestic problem, highlighting the appearance of "zero-mileage used cars" on the second-hand market, specifically calls out EV companies for putting quantity over quality, and floats stimulating used car exports as part of the solution.
Also, at least the EU doesn't distinguish between new and old cars when importing from outside the EU https://taxation-customs.ec.europa.eu/buying-and-selling-car... presumably precisely to avoid creating the kind of loophole you imagine exporters are exploiting. But they aren't; they just hurt their own profitability to juice their numbers and chase growth.
Domestic problem as in domestic involution problem not a EV overcapacity problem. I'm pointing out important to distinguish between ICE and EV, ICE is structural overcapacity, EV is under capacity but involution. ICE zero mile shenanigans is to liquidate/ unload excess inventory that doesn't have demand in PRC, mostly targeting loopholes in russia, central asia, mena. There's (less regulates) markets other than EU.
BYD/EV zero mile hack is more for subsidy harvesting, they're trying to dip on domestic subsidies for new sales then skip on stuff like servicing/warranty because used sale, i.e. shady involution behavior that abuse national policies, hence crackdown. It's not because EV are excess capacity, but so many EV players involuting and accountants find creative ways to carve margin. It's not EV sector makes 100 cars can only sell 50, because overcapacity, so discount to sell 100. It's EV sector makes 100 cars, sell 100 @1% margin but with some engineering they sell 100 @2% margin.
Yes, there are some brands that does use it for price cuts, premium brands, i.e. nio/xpeng, who won't lower sticker price, so they have to flip to lower price in used market. But that's also less overcapacity, more PRC EV moving so fast last few years no one wants 12 month old models. AKA tech stack progressing so fast / involution pressures so hard consumers won't pay sticker for anything older than 1 gen. What happens PRC manufacturing turns car cycles into phones obsolescence cycles. The broader the point here is EV makers are generally not doing accounting tricks to sell more cars due overcapacity / lack of demand (what over capacity implies), they're doing accounting tricks to sell the same amount of cars to make their razer thin involution margins slightly less razer thin, at the expense of the government.
Right. I can imagine seeing lots full of unsold cars might be interpreted as "there is no demand", especially if they are trying to push a particular narrative.
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.
I like the comparison, but with aviation on a fundamental level we made it simpler (removing actuation), not added more (senses we dont need)
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.
Jet engines do not strike me as being inherently simpler than muscles, not by a long shot.
They're still the best way we know of going about the business of building a flying machine, for various reasons.
Piston engines surely are more complex than jet engines though? Which replaced the "flapping engines".
They are not. Turbine engines require much higher quality manufacturing and tolerances and operate at much higher speeds and pressures. There is more to it than the perceived number of moving parts.
Others in this subthread discussed the comparison of the complexity of different ways of achieving flight itself, but I think there is an interesting discussion in that... well... we do add senses we don't technically need to achieve stable flight (but are very useful for safe flight and have reduced the incidence of aviation incidents and accidents dramatically).
Whether it be altimeters based on radio[1] or air pressure[2], avoidance and surveillance systems that use radio waves to avoid collisions with other aircraft[3][4], airborne weather radars[5], sensors that measure angle of attack (AoA), GNSS location, attitude, etc, many aircraft (even unpowered gliders!) have some combination of special sensing systems that aren't strictly necessary to take off, fly to a destination, and land, even if some are required for what many would consider safe flight in some scenarios.
Many of these systems have redundancies built in in some form or another and many of these systems are even built into unmanned aerial systems (UASes) big and small.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radar_altimeter
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pressure_altimeter
[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traffic_collision_avoidance_sy...
[4]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_Dependent_Surveillan...
[5]: https://skybrary.aero/articles/weather-radar
How many of these are due to going outside the normal envelope of what birds do?
I would posit that the human brain is complex, and adding senses is simpler than replicating an aspect of the mind more accurately.
> easiest
This is the keyword here, just because the other approach is harder does not mean it is impossible.
It's a decent gamble to try and do things the hard way if it is possible to be deployed on cheaper/smaller hardware (eg: no lidars, just cameras).
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.
But why is FSD "failing" is the key question.
Hint: it's not the sensor inputs that are the bottleneck!
Yeah you could be right.
Not my area of expertise, so I’d rather not try to predict what will work and what won’t.
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.
Yeah and we should replace the wheels with legs. every other company disagrees with musk, putting alternate sensors on even low end cars.
Both the vision and cognition hardware in humans are vastly superior, and don't get me started on the software.
I never understood why they would choose to fight with "one hand behind your back". More sensors = more better
~1.2 million global deaths per year due to motor vehicle accidents say otherwise.
Actually, that's the standard we're all talking about. Nearly everyone is totally fine with human-caused traffic deaths. Nobody wants to ban human drivers at that rate of death.
But if FSD had the same rate, people would be losing it.
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.
Yeah, but even if the safety level was 10% better, let's say--nobody would accept that rate. It wouldn't get adopted, we wouldn't be happy to save those lives. People would be outraged.
I think it's got something to do with an innate belief to self-determination. It's fine if I make a mistake to kill myself, and it's not fine if someone else does. It's super not fine if someone dies at the hands of a rich person's technology. Outrage, lawsuits, "justice."
Eyes have higher dynamic range and eyes don't freeze below 0°C. You can also put on sunglasses for even more weather-related adjustments.
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.
Technology can't compete with how easy it is to make more human-based navigation devices ;-)
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.
Deaf people drive.
I knew a guy with no arms who drove with his prosthetic hooks. Of course he can feel vibrations and things through his ass, but so could the car if they wanted. Do they use accelerometer data? (I don't know the answer to that) Do they have ABS sensors that can detect wheel lockup/speed status? Because I don't.
I believe I can drive a car to the legal standard, remotely, with a good enough camera array.
You might be able to but again, that has little to do with vision and much to do with your persistent and correct mental model of the world.
Humans have cameras (eyes) + AGI. Cars have to compensate with LiDARs and other sensors that humans don't.
We don’t drive with just our eyes, we also drive with our brains.
I fall on my butt all the time.
Because we can't install lidars on our heads
Because I want better?
Careful now. You'll get branded as a "Tesla hater" for stating facts like that. Or you'll get unflattering ad-homs comparing you to the Electrek guy
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]
[0] https://www.cnbc.com/2026/01/28/cnbc-china-connection-newsle...
[1]https://www.unitree.com/g1
[2] https://interestingengineering.com/ai-robotics/limx-humanoid...
[3] https://www.bgr.com/2083491/china-agibot-humanoid-robot-us-c...
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.
Is there anything China isn't far ahead in? Maybe capitalism was a failure.
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.
>Maybe capitalism was a failure.
China is hyper-capitalist. They're living proof that capitalism has won.
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).
> They are also much better at hiding debt
Through bonds? or SVPs to fund the building of datacentres?
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.
> 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.
i.e. in China, the government controls capital; in the US, capital controls the government.
> China is hyper-capitalist.
China is one party system, where CPC controls and owns production, policy, finance and even consumption levers.
> 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.
One emperor in US state doesn't control legislative, executive, judiciary, military and private company boards and financial capital. The way you have to look at China it is an empire with bit of communism and capitalism. If the mandate of heaven is favorable emperor controls everything, otherwise power diffuses a little among the emperor coterie.
Right on, it's always an orientalist delusion that underlies an apparently innocent liberalism.
Political economy is the science that provides the terms to answer the question at hand. There's no other serious way to understand the world.
It's not like US is not capitalist in anything: it's still state-of-the-art in software, which preoves that the problem is not with capital markets.
It just probably overregulated hardware manufacturing out of existence with unionizing and other too strong regulations.
Agreed. The children yearn for the mines and the 12+ hour shifts in factories.
Or in a more charitable light maybe capitalism just isn’t the only system that’s capable of reaching certain technological development.
Marketing, sales, finance.
Free speech.
Unless you are protesting ICE of course.
LLMs...
You acting like china isn't capitalism
But that isn't capitalism. It's socialism, which uses many market mechanisms to manage the economy.
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.
My experience in a BYD is they'd be in very high demand across the U.S. if it were possible to buy them here.
That's why the whole NCAP safety table is topped with Chinese vehicles then.
> Making good cars. They can make cheap ones, maybe acceptable ones, but not good ones.
Did you just get out of your Time Machine from a decade ago?
No, I drove them, and also knowing how they sacrificed safety for example by integrating a lot of safety critical systems for the sake of price.
You’ve driven every car from China? WOW!
It doesn't help that Musk supported a guy who turned around and gutted the incentives that were helping Tesla turn a profit.
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.
You lost me, how does making previous owners whole help tesla sell new ones?
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.
It seems counterintuitive, but a 46% profit loss is good for Tesla and poised them perfectly to succeed.
Huh?
> Elon Musk was a genius at some point in the past
When he wrote the Hyperloop white paper? When he backdated himself as the founder of Tesla, then pushed the real founders out?...
He is a genius snake oil salesman, I give you that.
This seems bizarre. Only reason my family bought a Tesla is thanks to the ev tax credit. Without it there are far better options.
won’t killing the EV market hurt Tesla in the long run?
markets are healthiest when there are many healthy competitors
Right now they struggle to compete with European car manufacturers, there is no way they can compete with China.
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.
Unitree delivered 5500 humanoid robots in 2025.
Another 10 years and maybe they will have sold as many as Sony sold Aibo robot dogs. You're making my point---it's not a significant market, and won't be for many years.
Tesla "competed" by corruptly getting BYD banned from the US and hurting US consumers.
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.
He generated a lot of goodwill with "that DOGE fiasco", too. It just depends on where you fall politically.
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.
Which is interesting because it seems DOGE failed to do anything useful. Patrick Boyle’s video suggested it actually cost $100B.
Which would be par the course for Ketamine Elon
The people he generated goodwill with don't buy a lot of EVs, apparently.
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.
Tesla's sales started declining before the subsidies expired.
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.
It's the 4680 cell that is only used by CT at the moment: https://www.autoevolution.com/news/tesla-cybertruck-on-its-w...
How do you suppose Cybertruck is a failure? I see just as many of them as Rivians, while releasing over 5 years later.
It was estimated at >200k/year, but in reality is well under 50k/year. I'd say that is a failure compared to their guidance.
They are so proud of the Cybertruck sales that they don't eevn dare to disclose sales figures. That's the sign of a market success.
They built production capacity for 125,000-250,000 units per year. They are selling around 20,000 units per year.
It was supposed to cost $39k at the low end and have 500 miles of range at the high end. This drove the hype and high reservation numbers.
In reality it costs $79k and offers up to 325 miles of range. Doubling the price is going to significantly limit the reach of the product.
Ignoring who makes it, this kind of gimmickmobile usually sells well for about a year, and then everyone who wants one has one. It was never going to be a tentpole.
Rivian is not making money on those trucks either... I wouldn't count that as a win.
I regularly see Rivians. I've never once seen a Cybertruck in real life. (Midwest USA)
The meme stock run up made Tesla more valuable than the rest of the auto industry combined. They HAVE to find something bigger.
I don’t think they have. Humanoid robots are a bad joke. But that’s why they are pivoting.
Humanoid robots make sense in only one context I can think of, and I definitely wouldn't put it past Musk to enter that market. It will be a big one. He may just be waiting for material science to catch up with his product vision. Much like Steve Jobs waited by the river until capacitive multitouch came floating by, and then pounced on it.
Meantime, as others have pointed out, the Model S and X are not selling enough to justify keeping the factory running. I don't see them going into Optimus production immediately, since as you suggest it's a solution looking for a problem.
If you’re beating around the same bush, I think the material science is already there. It’s more the power draw and the societal blowback that are issues. It is an underrated market, but not a >1T$ market (I hope).
The X and S were always very low volume niche products unlike the much more mainstream Y and 3. I wouldn’t read much into it.
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.
S you can understand, because sedans are dead. But every other US auto company is making big profits with large SUVs, so I don't get dropping X.
Agree with other posters who say whatever you think of Musk, Tesla styling has gotten very stale.
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.
The two flagship as best selling cars in the world. S and X were low volume cars to get started.
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.
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.
Lol keep dreaming. Those 300k monthly subscribers could churn. Robotaxi isn't two years away. Not even close.
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.
Tesla and musk were living off of monstrous subsidies to the tune of 20B or more
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.
>the most popular car on the planet
That's the Toyota Corolla. I find this inaccurate glazing of musk to be relatively common but it always strikes me as profoundly weird.
To be charitable, according to at least some reports, the Model Y was the best selling car of 2024.
I was googling the data for 2025 and it seems that it’s number 2 now (behind the RAV4 to my surprise) with the Corolla at 3.
No idea how accurate these are, finding global numbers was harder than I thought.
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.
But the metric is good since it incentivizes car companies to make 1 good model instead of many different with the intent to confuse buyers
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"
EVs are becoming commoditized. Tesla doesn’t have the scale ( or experience ) to play that angle.
literally what are the gigafactories for then?
At the moment most of them are running notably below capacity.
Tesla's growth plan originally had them doing factory expansions and new factory in Mexico by now, but instead they have pivoted to trying to keep utilization of their existing lines up by introducing cheaper trims of existing vehicles.
Batteries - lots of uses beyond EVs, but lots of EVs are making use of the batteries they can produce, as well.
you could make the same argument about batteries. Panasonic and other exist.
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.
Regular car factories with a fancy name.
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.
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.
Uber, and to a lesser extent Lyft, has been an extremely prolific investor in the autonomous vehicle space. They're absolutely paying attention to it.
Similarly, Waymo isn't bottlenecked by mapping or rain. I've seen enough of them testing in Seattle and Tokyo, as examples.
Yeah, and then Uber sold off its self driving research team.
I'm talking about after, of course. They retained a massive investment in Aurora as part of that deal. They invested in Waabi not long after, then Nuro, Avride and started partnerships with Waymo, Motional, and others.
Uber spent billions trying to make self-driving work, until they gave up. Not "by design".
> 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
Can you elaborate for those less familiar with the successes vs failures?
- https://x.com/Waymo/status/1924931187274826077
- https://x.com/Waymo/status/1945106097741664630
will leave it to the astute reader to look up “robo”taxi
Just a reminder that Tesla has still not offered driverless robotaxi rides to the public.
At this point, it's entirely because Musk refuses to add LIDAR. If he did they could probably be competing with Waymo in a year.
His rationale seems to be validated by Nvidia following the same strategy, no?
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.
Nvidia isn't offering driverless robotaxi rides to the public either.
You should probably keep reading.
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.
Do they have enough people to remotely operate that many Optimuses?
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.
Is this a Black Mirror episode yet?
> if they’re right about Optimus, that capacity will generate far greater revenue.
How many Cyber Trucks were they supposed to sell?
Yeah. And that was a car. A thing that is at least a category people buy.
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.
Relevant part: "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."
Why is it seen initially so negatively?
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.
> Why is it seen initially so negatively?
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:
https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/tesla-...
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:
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/05/business/elon-musk-tesla-...
> Why is it seen initially so negatively?
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…
Yeah, in Europe Tesla is not losing to BYD. They are losing to VW and BMV before the Chinese manufacturers have entered the competition for real.
And Renault and Dacia and MG and…
Europe doesn't seem to want for EV competition in anything like the same way that the US is falling behind.
But they’re making a robot! It will totally save the company!
On top of all the problems you have identified, as well as more, they’re clearly now just aiming for fantasy land.
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.
The S was a true American "land yacht" in the classic style of an Oldsmobile. There's a lot of reasons for it to be seen as the US flagship model and for it to have done poorly in other markets or not even released to them.
What if they have planned product lines we don’t know about.
Then the smarter PR move would be to tease those before announcing massive cuts?
that's a reasonable strategy. Maybe they want to clear some inventory first?
As a car company the expectation is that they develop new car models for consumers. They don’t seem to be doing that either.
They developed the Model 3 and Y, which is partly why they're stopping the S and X?
They completely refreshed the Model Y last year and made a number of updates to the Model 3 including different body word.
"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.
A 2020 Tesla Model Y and 2026 Tesla Model Y are at least as different as a 2020 Nissan Rogue and a 2026 Nissan Rogue.
So buy nissan stock?
Because it looks like Elon recognized Tesla's inability to compete against BYD and gave up making cars. This is negative.
Since he couldn't leave it at that, he announced a pivot to a product that doesn't exist. This is also negative.
How did he give up? The model Y and the model 3 were refreshed last year. With the model 3 now pushing 750km of range.
Ford got rid of plenty of popular models including all hatchbacks and many sedans.
Toyota sells a lot of Camrys and Corollas. It is nice that they also make (made?) Supras and 86s.
Also we can have a conversation without tossing the "everyone hates Tesla!" poison down the well immediately.
The difference there is that Supra's and 86's are performance cars, whereas Camry's and Corollas arent. You can't compare a Hatchback to an 86.
The Model S is comparable performance to the Model 3 performance.
My point is that the latest models 3 & Y are more affordable alternatives to the S & X and more widely available globally.
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.
The S is faster than any other Tesla. Non-plaid S and X are much faster than non P 3 and Y.
Your main point is highly valid. Why does any manufacturer bother to make anything better than a Camry?
Because it makes money, of course.
Well in Tesla's case they clearly dont
But the 3 isn’t comparable. It’s cheap, looks cheap and feels cheap.
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
Having a halo product can be inspiring. A lot of BMW buyers may get a boring old 3 series but they like that the low volume M cars exist, for example.
If Tesla wanted to be BMW they could just do all the BMW things. But they are aspiring for more, so they flip the script quite often. I'm not arguing for or against their decisions; just saying that because BMW does it is not a good argument for them.
Maybe they will finally release the Roadster to serve this purpose
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.
Will they increase specs on the 3 and the Y after the S and X are sunset?
Ford got a lot of heat for shifting all of their NA production to Mustangs and F-series trucks too a few years ago.
Ford didn’t say it was so they could make a robot butler instead.
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.
Wow! That IS silly! I thought Ford had been in China for a while though.
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.
Oh is that why they gave up small cars? I didn’t realize that.
No, but they are retooling their MachE factory to make batteries, which felt just as much of a wtf as this BS
Ford dropped sedans, they still have plenty of SUVs and other trucks you can buy.
Because it's Elon Musk.
10 years ago people here would be describing this as a good decision.
You are, of course, exactly right but you will nevertheless be downvoted for the same reasons you allude to.
the voting rings at HN are hard at work :))
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.
The sequel Revenge of the Electric Car is a very interesting follow up, especially now with hindsight. It followed the stories of the Tesla Roadster, Nissan Leaf, and Chevy Volt all in about the exact same time period and stages of development.
Of those, the Leaf is the only model that has continuously existed since then, and from the documentary there is a sense of that. GM admits the Volt was a stepping stone and not the final product. Tesla's part of the documentary involves a lot of trials and tribulations and even Tesla seeming unsure about their manufacturing problems. (Though the documentary itself spins a hopeful tune.)
Of the figures in the documentary the most prescient seems to be Carlos Ghosn, then in charge of Renault-Nissan. He very much insisted that EVs weren't just the future, they were the scramble for the present. Renault took that message to heart and seemed to be the side that won it in the messy divorce that also eventually wound up with Ghosn getting charged for treason and embezzlement in Japan. Which is an incredible and weird story on multiple levels and maybe the documentary makers will get a chance to include that in a third movie for the series.
> “If you’re interested in buying a Model S and X, now would be the time to order it.”
I can't tell if this is real and he realizes the traditional luxury brands have beaten him or if he's just using the classic rug store sales tactic.
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.
https://www.smh.com.au/business/consumer-affairs/rozelle-rug...
In many countries, "carpet salesman" is equivalent to "used car salesman" as the least trustworthy occupation imaginable.
"Rug merchant"
Well, at least Sweden and the US. Kind of amazing.
For what it's worth: he has been saying for years, that they were only making the S and X for nostalgic reasons.
classic "closing-store" sale, I wouldn't be surprised if the closing phase never ended.
"Buy the software-dependent product we're not going to support going forward!"
Also, good luck if you ever need replacement parts.
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).
A genuine question, what are the use cases for Tesla's Optimus robots? Are they consumer products that help with household chores, industrial robots for warehouses or manufacturing, a play toy, something else?
> A genuine question, what are the use cases for Tesla's Optimus robots? Are they consumer products that help with household chores, industrial robots for warehouses or manufacturing, a play toy, something else?
Convincing investors to buy and hold Tesla, because of the vague promise of some great technological innovation being just around the corner. Electric cars and partially automated driving don't serve that purpose anymore.
They are one of several memetic devices which keep Tesla’s stock price in orbit, untethered from reality.
They are a financial engineering product with limited real world utility, in an attempt to keep the company solvent.
>A genuine question, what are the use cases for Tesla's Optimus robots?
A longer horizon promise of multi-trillion dollar wealth generation for Tesla.
As the whole robotaxi thing is starting to fizzle, Elon has quite notably talked more and more about how actually Optimus is the true gem of Tesla.
If a use case emerges it will have to be industrial or commercial. The power and maintenance constraints for a robot like that make it pretty impractical for home use.
If they actually work (and I’m not saying for one second they will), they’re intended to be all those.
I have no doubt there will be many tens of millions of them, it’s just a question of when. 5 years? 10? 50?
I know that the Model S platform is old but for me it was always seen as a halo car. I've owned three of them and I really wished they would release a completely redesigned S version.
I think this is where someone says "you're not the target market"
I thought the same thing about the (usable, upgradable) mac pro, but then they came out with the trash can mac pro 2013.
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.
> 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.
Don't you need roadside assistance to change a tire still?
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.
And yet absolutely no under the hood stats have changed in 8 years - battery capacity, charging rate, charging curve, performance
Sorry? The midrange model 3 now has 750km range as of last year.
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.
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.
You can compare the market cap of say GM (automaker) to Bosch (massive automaker supply chain and logistics company) to get a sense of why that sort of pivot would probably not be appreciated by the market. Supply chain companies are usually considered "lesser" companies.
> Their electronics, batteries, motors, etc., are world class.
This was maybe true 5-10 years ago, but not today.
They don't make their own battery cells they are an integrator of third party cells.
One of Oxide+Friends predictions was "6 year: Tesla is out of the consumer car business".
https://oxide-and-friends.transistor.fm/episodes/predictions...
Even Tesla pessimists would probably agree with that. The question is whether they will be in any other business by then.
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 metric for the Cybertruck is the impact to Elon's ego. Nothing about this project is rational.
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.
Part of it is they wanted that factory space at Fremont for the Optimus production line. That's because the Optimus team is located there, in Silicon Valley.
Wondered about that also. Seems like a really big decision to cut off the S and X though! Will they have something else to offer customers who want something more than a Y?
So is the new roadster just not happening?
Tesla designer I know said that it’s not something that anyone is currently working on.
As such, my guess is “not any time soon”.
It’ll be out and immediately cancelled
On the earnings call Elon said
“we’re hoping to debut [next gen roadster] in April, hopefully. It’s gonna be something out of this world.”
(I’m just the messenger, don’t shoot me)
He didn't specify the year.
He said it's on April 1st [1]. So, yeah.
[1] https://techcrunch.com/2025/11/06/tesla-delays-reveal-of-pro...
On an earnings call, everyone expects it to be this year. Unless specified, it should be this year.
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.
he’s done it time and time again and I don’t see him failing this time either.
The market for humanoid robots hasn’t been established like the market for $40,000 personal transport.
Saying that, I wouldn’t be too surprised if robotaxi replaces 90% of taxis and Ubers in the next 5-7 years.
But yea, stepping from sinking raft to the next…
Potentially in a few cities with high cost of living and nice weather, but certainly not worldwide. Not even the best can handle bad weather yet.
Waymo is launching in Detroit.
> I wouldn’t be too surprised if robotaxi replaces 90% of taxis and Ubers in the next 5-7 years
I'd bet a kidney that doesn't happen.
Not Tesla’s version anyway
> 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)
so you own the stock then. right?
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.
There is in fact one person who has won both the Nobel Peace prize and a hard-science one:
Linus Pauling. Chemistry 1954, peace 1962.
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....
We're all going to need to buy some R2's if we want the R3X to become a thing. I have my reservation!
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.
Got it. Yeah, the headlights and sound system on my (2018) 3 are AMAZINGLY good, especially (now) for the age. I drove a 2017 S fairly regularly-- so it's a first year (?) of the refresh, but pretty dated now. The sound system is abysmal (I'm sure it's the low end option) and the car generally feels less cohesive.
The yoke and button turn signals would be a deal breaker for me, but to each their own.
> This is sad in that I was serious about finally getting one in two to three years
Couldn't have said it better
This is slightly off topic but what kind of living situation requires three cars? Polyamorous family?
Any of a dozen common situations, but probably the most common is having children who reach driving age.
I have multiple friends who have 6+ cars. To be fair, they're pretty well-off (mid six figure income), but one for example:
- Husband Tesla daily driver - Wife Bronco daily driver - Truck to pull their boat - Campervan for outdoor adventures - Older car for teenager to drive - 90s convertible for summer fun
I’m guessing this is in the US? Do you think there’s a number where they would go, “too many cars”?
Is it just me or does Tesla design the doors so when you look at the car from the front with both its doors open it looks like their logo.
Hard to believe, but it's almost 10 years since they announced the new Roadster
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"?
In terms of actually selling cars Tesla is around #15 by annual unit sales and around #11 by annual sales in dollars.
Toyota sells more cars in a year then Tesla has sold ever.
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.
This is what I'm seeing here.
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.
> 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.
These robots give of a kind of dark vibe to me, especially with everything going on in his AI company. How long until one of them kills someone? I'd prefer a home robot that can't kill me (like something that is passively safe).
Elon Musk is already doing that kind of parenting, so I can see how he likes it.
No more S3XY lineup of models? I'm surprised Musk was okay with breaking that up.
3YC is the new S3XY.
YC3.
CYR3S, if we're going to add Roadster and Semi, both of which are allegedly still in development.
C3CSY
> 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.
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.
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.
I just hate that what's actually going on with this company is so buried between Musk's bs, and people hate Musk so much that they spew bs as well. Seems to be just "pick your liar" with this company.
X going away probably isn't surprising given sales dynamics. More people would tend to opt for the cross-over or sedan. The model S is a little more shocking since it was always niche, but honestly Tesla doesn't have the trim to be priced like that and I suspect in order to get from where they're at to BMW/Audi etc., just isn't where they want to invest their money.
This definitely feels like an "oh no, people stopped buying" pivot but the moves themselves make sense.
Looks like they are not selling the larger vehicles at all, so why not kill the truck too? It’s god awful and a flop. Ego? Or thy want to try to revive it?
What they are really signaling though is with EVs they are not able to differentiate between the higher and lower cost models enough to show value to the higher end models. This is a huge failure IMO. Model S was the OG car that really was looked up to when it launched. It did have them luxury image, by not matching the build and interior of the car to the image Tesla really dropped the ball. Now the S is seen as inferior to the other luxury cars in that price range and so it’s becoming tough for Tesla to differentiate between the 3 and S.
This actually brings up the larger question, does musk care about cars at all at this point? Or does he just want to move on to robots? Feels like his heart is not on the cars.
Do you believe Mr Musk though?
I can imagine Musk selling these very models with AI slapped onto them and call it revolutionary
I'm almost surprised they didn't end model 3 production too. Benefit would be much smaller since 3 and y are already so similar.
By the same logic it costs less to keep the 3 in production.
Tesla must be in serious trouble given recent erratic moves
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?
[1]: https://electrek.co/2025/06/17/tesla-tsla-inventory-overflow...
While this isn’t sale price data, it should be pretty close, and the trends should be clear:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/u/0/d/1F5IQOynIawoXiJPV...
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.
We outsourced it and it would take us 10 years to retool and rebuild that kind of capability. No one wants to take that kind of investment on.
The narrative from Musk cultists has been "Tesla isn't a car company, it's a bet on $excuse_du_jour" for at least a year and a half.
I am surprised that nobody here is talking about grid energy storage, they basically invented that business vertical. It's about 13% of their revenue.
Certainly longer than that. I actually thought Tesla as an energy company made sense — sadly just an excuse to buy and shelve solarcity.
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.
> See past your opinion about it's leader.
This is like asking Mrs. Lincoln what she thought about the play. The scope of the (financial and physical) damage by Musk's government meddling is breathtaking, is ongoing, and will echo for generations.
Is Tesla really failing? They have $40 billion cash at hand. More than some legacy automobile market cap.
They're clearly not failing, but if you read comments here or on reddit, lots of people want them to, and have wanted them to for a decade.
He's not just the leader, he's the primary beneficiary, and he's a blatant white supremacist. He's arguably responsible for the deaths of over 1 million people world wide from his short tenure shutting down USAID[0]. So yeah, I'd say its more than fine to take pleasure in his failings.
[0] https://www.cgdev.org/blog/update-lives-lost-usaid-cuts
Not nearly as sad as people getting emotionally invested in corporations.
Add why should anyone look past their opinions about the leader?
We have the saying “the fish rots from the head” for a good reason. Tesla has been rotten ever since Elon got involved.
> Add why should anyone look past their opinions about the leader?
Because it's the most advanced car manufacturing in the US... Virtually the only successful EV maker outside of China, and it provides over 100,000 jobs worldwide.
Actions have consequences. Maybe an upshot of this is that people will learn not to put all their eggs in the POS’s basket.
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.
FSD will launch next year, of course. Just like every year.
Any other car company would create an S / X MkII.
Yup, and most are dying and getting bought by Chinese capital.
So essentially down to making one car huh.
> converting Fremont factory lines to make Optimus robots
I’m very bullish on humanoid robots, but this seems absolutely batshit insane to me. These things are no where near ready for full scale production.
If the can walk and randomly fire teargas and bullets into crowds of protesters they could replace half of ICE right now.
but first they have to demo it to the higher ups https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TYsulVXpgYg
This would only replace a small fraction of ICE, and only in states that don't cooperate with federal law enforcement officers.
only in states that don't cooperate with federal law enforcement officers
Courts have consistently ruled that state and local jurisdictions are not legally required to cooperate with federal law enforcement.
Elon Musk says something absolutely insane on the weekly. Almost none of it actually happens.
That’s just nonsense, of course. Almost everything he says happens. It rarely happens on time.
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.
Tesla still doesn't have full autonomy. They've been lying about it for a decade:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_predictions_for_autono...
https://electrek.co/2026/01/28/teslas-unsupervised-robotaxis...
https://electrek.co/2026/01/28/tesla-is-still-trying-to-dece...
No there aren't actually. Seems like they did it once or twice with a chase vehicle. https://electrek.co/2026/01/28/teslas-unsupervised-robotaxis...
Is that actually true? I know they announced it, but I also saw stories that no one seems to be able to actually find one of these...
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.
A few of the things he says will happen, happen. Many of them happen late.
Most of what he says will happen never happens, but people point to the few things that did happen, but were late, and say, "This too will happen."
So many Tesla/Musk haters around here.
People are just being rational and pragmatic.
It’s always funny to me that hating is fine if the person justifies it by some reason, but it’s generally not accepted, when that person doesn’t care about the reason.
“Stop the hate”, but of course only if it’s not me hating. Because that hate is valid and justified.
People are losing money and a product they liked because they imagine disliking it hurts an individual they don’t like.
This is a lose/lose enemy centered mindset, and a weird personification of a corporation.
How so?
They say Tesla cars are not better than any other EV nowadays. They say the Tesla stock is overvalued. They say the Tesla robot will likely not be a super hit in terms of sales.
I don't see it as hate. It's quite pragmatic views.
Tesla Model Y is not the best selling car in the world?
Maybe it is the best selling car (not sure), but that does not mean it is the best car.
They have self-respect.
I simply dont care how good or bad the cars are. I will never put a penny in Elon's hand. He is a despicable nazi and a terrible person. I hope he goes bankrupt.
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.
Which phase of the plan talks about repurposing the cheap car factory to make humanoid robots?
Where exactly are those cheaper cars? Still waiting for a 30k model 3 like promised.
You already have it. Musk's earliest promise of a $30k price point appears to be an interview in September 2009: https://www.wbur.org/onpoint/2009/09/25/teslas-elon-musk-on-...
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.
https://www.caranddriver.com/nissan/leaf
Meanwhile folks are waiting (no, not really) for their $35K Cybertruck...
Elon got distracted and decided we want humanoid robots.
Buy it used?
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.
Tesla's secret weapon will be the dyson sphere. Probably complete within 2.. 3 years maximum.
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.
X sure, but the S? it was the best in the lineup
why not kill the cybertruck instead?
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).
Roadster will replace S
The same vaporware Roadster that was supposed to come out years ago and that Tesla has not shared any updates on?
I’m a little sad (nostalgic?) about this decision. Model S is a truly historic vehicle.
someone is stuffing their channels, huh? first the fsd fiasco, now this
Really sad. I loved my Model S. Amazing car.
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.
Probably one of the dumbest decisions taken by a CEO?
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
"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?
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.
Thanks, these are fair arguments!
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.
Tesla isn’t a market leader in any of these things. It’s a decent shop, but not a leader in any of these things you’ve mentioned.
I would argue that it is a leader in vision-only FSD, which is useful for both self-driving and robots.
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.
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.
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 think there's a danger here of underestimating how varied mankinds 'mindware' is at large.
for us lot who were 'born in it, molded by it' (tech), it can be very hard to internalize that there are a lot of people out there who legimiately cannot for the life of them wrap their head around a computer, or the internet, other than "wifi logo = i can video call my grandkids".
you could say services like dropbox are outreach/charity organisations that onboard the masses onto 10x productivity curves (whether they like it or not!)
and to be honest, ive become guilty of drag n dropping tarballs to/from my gdrive account when im too dumb to figure out the ssh proxy tunnel incantation (or beg an llm for one for the 1000th time.) so really, everyone wins.
im not sure claude code will change all that much for the non-technical segment. from their point of view, you changed one terminal window for another. so what? its still a black box (literally).
Makes sense and it sounds like Optimus is getting ready for prime time.
Are they betting Robotaxi will replace all cars in the future?
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.
How does it "make sense" to you, really? Can you provide more rationale ?
Dropping the S and X is going to kill the market for them. Who is going to buy a car that they know is getting discontinued?
Including Cybertruck, it's just 2.75% of sales
Q4 sales: Model 3 & Model Y: 406,585 deliveries All Other Models (S/X/Cybertruck): 11,642 deliveries
Carmakers discontinue models all the time. The support network is still around, and parts will still be produced for a while.
Yeah but most companies have a few dozen models, Tesla has 4.
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.
It's not like they aren't going to support any new purchases.
S launched in 2012.
X launched in 2016.
Both launched with slow rollouts.
Meanwhile, the average car in use today is 13 years old and getting older. (I currently drive a 22 year old car)
It definitely turns me off buying a used model S to know it's being discontinued. And if I extrapolate that to the 3/Y, a new purchase.
Given my desire for a midsize family sedan, it makes it feel like BMW i4 or Porsche Taycan just won me over in the future.
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.
I guess self-driving will be done by the humanoid robots now
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.
Tesla has no moat - but one thing I will give to Elon is his incredible strategy in building Tesla
1. Build sports car
2. Use that money to build an affordable car
3. Use that money to build an even more affordable car
4. While doing above, also provide zero emission electric power generation options
he got distracted by side-missions, his personal shitty side
however if you separate the ideas from the person you can see how such a simple strategy was executed successfully
The thing is it’s hard to stop at 4.
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.
The problem is that Tesla in step 1 and 2 was a ground-breaking EV market leader.
Tesla step 6 Optimus robot is not. Others are ahead, with less hype and more delivery. See Boston Dynamics / Hyundai
it’s not a difficult strategy to come up with, tbh. tech companies do this sort of thing all the time.
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.
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.
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.)