Tesla Posts Big Quarterly Loss as Its Electric-Car Sales Lag

That’s not a perceptible change. It’s a wonderful thing and I’m all for people not dying, but people aren’t suddenly going to notice the difference. It’s not like people entering a car think “Am I going to die?!” every time they go to work.

> Drive you home the rest of the time?

Again I don’t see this as being more than a convenience. At beta it leads to more screen time zoning out with a Netflix a la train commuting.

> Drive you cross country overnight while you sleep?

The vast majority of people can’t afford to take a week off to travel across the country so they would not notice this.

> Come and pick you up at the airport after a holiday?

Again a convenience, not a major change. One can already call an Uber from the airport.

> Make you money during the day as an autotaxi while you're not using it?

I don’t see this being as popular an idea as people make it out to be. The phrase “Make money while you sleep” has been pitched for years and in the case of renting your car out overnight, doesn’t factor insurance costs and the race to the bottom on pricing . Once that catches up there won’t be much money to be made.

> Save your life by avoiding accidents you didn't see?

Again this is a great thing but not perceptible to the daily user.

> Radically bring down the cost of taxis and car hire for those who don't own a car?

It’s already lower than the cost of ownership thanks to VC money.

> In our lifetimes all cars will be electric driverless cars in at least some countries. It may not be Tesla but the future is coming.

Electric has nothing to do with “smart”. It can be a gas engine. It can be a fuel cell. It could be something we don’t even know about yet.

Aside from Autopilot and the everymans model 3, Tesla has delivered some pretty damn incredible tech that actually works in the real world. I would love to own a Model S, maybe when V2 comes out, I will be in a position to get one. Lets hope they still exist when that happens.

I personally don't understand why someone would wish for them to fail. Maybe to prove that how they feel about Elon was "right", who knows. I see some issues with autopilot coming to a head at some point. They are either going to deliver or have a giant rebate due at some point in the future. I don't see any other option. If I bought a car in 2018, and had to wait 4 years for a feature my car would be about used up(I drive about 26,000 miles a year).

This is one of the main reasons for VW to develop the MEB. This drive matrix can be used as the foundation for EV iterations on many of their current production models plus new ones of course:

> The MEB platform is part of a wide strategy to start production of new battery electric vehicles between 2019 and 2025. In 2017, the VW Group announced a gradual transition from combustion engine to battery electric vehicles with all 300 models across 12 brands having an electric version by 2030.

> As of May 2018, the VW Group has committed $48 billion in car battery supplies and plans to outfit 16 factories to build electric cars by the end of 2022. The upcoming Volkswagen-branded production cars will be assembled in VW's Zwickau plant in Germany for the European market from 2020, while two production centers in North America and China are planned to be "launched at almost the same time". The Škoda-branded SUV Vision E is to be produced in the Škoda plant Mladá Boleslav, Czech Republic, along with electric motors and electric car batteries. [1]

I wonder how Tesla will keep up with that.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volkswagen_Group_MEB_platform

Pay attention to other drivers, I've seen people watch a movie on their phone while driving.

I've seen people move their hands completely off of the wheel and drive.

At least with this you usually don't go hitting other cars, rather hit barriers and walls.

li-ion batteries have done an excellent job walking down the learning/cost curve, but we can all see the way it bends and how much headroom is left in the chemistry. we'll likely hit $100/kwh in the next few years, but even just $80/kwh is likely 5+ years away after that. the model 3 will never start with a $2.

so if you're going to bottom out at around 3x the price it would take to fully replace the existing market... then you have to figure out a way to get 3x+ the value out of the asset you're delivering.

that means some combination of lasting 3x longer (~500k miles) and/or being in use 3x more (~600hrs/year). the former is viably unlocked by the EV engineering advantages, but w/r/t the latter, individual drivers have no intention of tripling their car usage. so it simply has to be turned into some kind of shared asset.

imho self driving makes this a nirvanna, so I'm glad they're pursuing it, but its not actually required. tesla could add a basic uber/lyft feature set to their existing app and then when the last 0.01% of self driving winds up taking years longer than elon said it would he can blame the regulators and just make it a regular human-driver ride sharing app.

remember the mission is the end of carbon emissions, so any plan for "lets just get good market share and margins in the luxury segment" is a plan to fail.