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Investors conclude that Tesla is a carmaker, not a tech firm

economist.com

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Re: Investors conclude that Tesla is a carmaker, not a tech firm

#251

Post by fallingknife »

helen___keller wrote: post #142
Cthulhu_ wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's just it. I see it as follows. Back in the 2000s, the iPhone came out. Especially with the 3G, it was miles ahead of the competition, and it took Android manufacturers five years to catch up and overtake it. I believe Tesla holds - or, held - a similar position. They had a head start in many areas, but they could not keep it up. One big difference is quality; Apple phones have great build quality, always have -…

> Its owner messing around with the stock price by announcing a privatization, then buying Twitter on what seemed like a whim was another big issue of course. He lost a lot of credibility over the years. I think this counts for more than people realize. Similar with Facebook/Zuckerberg and Amazon/Bezos. The most effective founder CEO, in my opinion, for a large company is one that stays generally unknown to the publi…

How many people are listening, though? And how many who are care enough to change a car purchasing decision? I think the answer is probably very few. I never hear anyone bring it up IRL.

Re: Investors conclude that Tesla is a carmaker, not a tech firm

#252

Post by Faaak »

yalogin wrote: post #236

The only advantage Tesla has is their charging network. They were forced to build it out because they were the first car out there and they needed to provide a way for their customers to use their cars. However now it has become their strength. Without a fast charging network all the other cars are restricted to a narrow radius. The car itself should be commoditized any day now.

Tesla is not the only fast charging network though. In Switzerland for example there are many (Move, GoFast, Ionity, etc.) and some are even cheaper than Tesla.

Re: Investors conclude that Tesla is a carmaker, not a tech firm

#253

Post by Macha »

leetcrew wrote: post #116
theduder99 wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Last time I went car shopping, I saw a digital speedometer which irritated me for some reason so I rejected that model from further consideration.

I take it you're not shopping for new cars then? the cheapest new car I'm aware of that has analog gauges is a porsche. btw I have the same preference, just letting you know you are in for a disappointment.

Seems to be a market difference? Of the three cheapest cars I could think of in my local market (Honda Civic, Kia Picanto, and Nissan Micra), only the Honda Civic has a digital speedometer.

Re: Investors conclude that Tesla is a carmaker, not a tech firm

#254

Post by jonathankoren »

moonchrome wrote: post #95
elil17 wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’re wrong. Auto manufacturers source parts from a huge variety of outside manufacturers. Auto manufacturers: 1) manage supply chain (hardest part) 2) spec parts (establish quality metrics, change small aspects of design) 3) come up with car concepts 4) assemble parts certain components (e.g. weld the frame, install all the premade parts) They are not building or designing every component in a car - not even close.

I mean what do you expect - for them to build everything down to a screw in-house in order to do manufacturing ? Final assembly, fit and finish - those are very important things on high end cars - and as Tesla demonstrated - not that easy to do even when you're flush with cash. Apple outsources all of it's production - I'd be surprised if they can get premium car assembly from Foxconn model when Tesla is still having…

> Final assembly, fit and finish - those are very important things on high end cars - and as Tesla demonstrated - not that easy to do even when you're flush with cash

Is it that hard though? The initial build problems came from ignoring industry experience about trying to automate final assembly — a step that very manufacture had tried and failed to do before.

No shame in trying it, maybe industrial robotic control have improved since then, but you usually don’t test such a thing in your assembly lines.

After Tesla ripped out the robots, I don’t know what their problem was beyond poor training and line management. Putting doors on straight — let alone with matching colors — for over a hundred years.

If it’s really hard to physically build a car, we’d see similar massive faults from Rivian and Lucid, but I’m unaware of any.

Re: Investors conclude that Tesla is a carmaker, not a tech firm

#255

Post by jcranmer »

rsynnott wrote: post #155
dopamean wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The idea that services like Uber without the drivers would make car ownership obsolete drove those valuations. Did investors really believe that? I don't know a single person who believed that years ago when the pre-IPO valuations were going through the roof. I maybe knew a few people who believed it was possible one day but not anytime soon. It's wild to me that so called sophisticated investors really believed th…

Supposedly, in some places, transport planners, who really should've known better, made decisions about mass transit projects on the basis that self-driving cars were coming any day now. If _they_ got it so wrong, why would investors do any better? There was a weird period a while back where basically everyone except people who actually worked in the area seemed to believe the self-driving car was nigh.

My recollection of those cases is that those who believed mass transit was a boondoggle that no one uses were using the imminence of self-driving cars to argue against mass transit projects that they already opposed.

Re: Investors conclude that Tesla is a carmaker, not a tech firm

#256

Post by dionidium »

lesuorac wrote: post #169
helen___keller wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There was a survey a few years ago of how much more people would be willing to pay for cars that could drive themself, and the median answer was $0. This is because quite a few people gave a negative number, that is, they would pay extra for a car that could not drive itself. I think there's an inherent distrust (which I share) of giving technology the power to end our lives with one bug. Trust in technology, in ge…

> The truth is, if full self driving cars actually happened, with safety statistics better than humans and with a low barrier to entry, you can bet that people would change their opinion real fast. I think this is the wrong counter-argument against self-driving cars being viable. If the median answer is $0 and there were a lot of negative answers then that means there's a lot of positive answers. Just sell the cars t…

> Not everybody wants a self-driving car just like not everybody wants a big mac.

I don't think this will work, because self-driving cars will reveal drivers for what they are: impatient, reckless, anti-social maniacs. People want to speed, to swerve into the bike or parking lane to overtake a left-hand turner, to inch out into traffic to force themselves into a lane, to tailgate, etc, etc. You can't really have a system where x% of the cars are calmly and mechanically following the rules and manually-operated vehicles are taking advantage of that.

Re: Investors conclude that Tesla is a carmaker, not a tech firm

#257

Post by mikeryan »

musasabi wrote: post #90
cainxinth wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Minimalistic interiors, modern infotainment, mobile app performance None of that is why Tesla was ahead of everyone for so long. It's because their cars have better range, and Tesla is still the range leader. They held four of the top six spots in 2022, and the number one is the Lucid Air (only 3k of them have actually been sold): https://www.caranddriver.com/shopping-advice/g32634624/ev-lo... Also, I just want to…

They also have by far the best charging network. IMO Teslas have the best long range driving experience. This detail is important although not the only thing to consider. However, it looms large in how Americans think about their cars. I say this as someone who owns an electric car by a different manufacturer.

They also have by far the best charging network

This isn't a defensible position though for Tesla. New charging networks are coming online at a furious rate. I'm not sure maintaining their own network makes sense unless everything becomes compatible and they use it as an additional revenue stream. But for them to compete when every other auto manufacturer is subsidizing shared networks is risky.

Re: Investors conclude that Tesla is a carmaker, not a tech firm

#258

Post by abruzzi »

dopamean wrote: post #130
pjdemers wrote: post #88

Tesla, and even more Uber, were priced as if self driving cars are almost here. The idea that services like Uber without the drivers would make car ownership obsolete drove those valuations. Now that self driving cars are many decades away, instead of less than one decade away, is bring stock prices down. I always questions how fast we would see self driving cars, not because of the technology, but because of consume…

> The idea that services like Uber without the drivers would make car ownership obsolete drove those valuations. Did investors really believe that? I don't know a single person who believed that years ago when the pre-IPO valuations were going through the roof. I maybe knew a few people who believed it was possible one day but not anytime soon. It's wild to me that so called sophisticated investors really believed th…

I don't know who actually believed it, or if it had any real impact on investors, but it seemed to be a common comment on self driving threads on HN ~5 years ago that instead of ownership, there would just be idle fleets of cars that you would summon from, and you'd simply subscribe to a vehicle service as a monthly cost.

Re: Investors conclude that Tesla is a carmaker, not a tech firm

#259

Post by Zigurd »

macspoofing wrote: post #143
pjdemers wrote: post #88

Tesla, and even more Uber, were priced as if self driving cars are almost here. The idea that services like Uber without the drivers would make car ownership obsolete drove those valuations. Now that self driving cars are many decades away, instead of less than one decade away, is bring stock prices down. I always questions how fast we would see self driving cars, not because of the technology, but because of consume…

>The idea that services like Uber without the drivers would make car ownership obsolete drove those valuations. Huh? What? No. That's not where the valuation came from. To be fair to Uber, they created a new type of market for which there was an immense demand for. Their self-driving initiatives were a moonshot and maybe got some people excited and therefore invested in Uber (see Tesla/Musk), but not quite the same a…

Hype is not a crime. It enabled Tesla to access cheap capital. But Tesla went too far and starting collecting money for something that won't work anytime soon and possibly not within the lifespan of Teslas on the road now.

The promise was "buy this car and soon it will self-drive" (and for Uber it was "Never mind we don't have a sustainable business model now, we will soon with self-driving").

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