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Tesla ending Models S and X production

cnbc.com

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Re: Tesla ending Models S and X production

#161

Post by droopyEyelids »

nunez wrote: post #113
harshaw wrote: post #15

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?

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.

Re: Tesla ending Models S and X production

#162

Post by vtail »

"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 As people correctly point out, S&X are outdated, low volume models.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?

Re: Tesla ending Models S and X production

#163

Post by totetsu »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #143
sampton wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Tesla got the job done, which was empower Musk, not manufacture EVs at scale. The stock is the product.

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

Re: Tesla ending Models S and X production

#164

Post by MBCook »

kenhwang wrote: post #160
MBCook wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Oh is that why they gave up small cars? I didn’t realize that.

Re: Tesla ending Models S and X production

#165

Post by neets »

stackghost wrote: post #13
SilverElfin wrote: post #10

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.

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.

Re: Tesla ending Models S and X production

#166

Post by Der_Einzige »

direwolf20 wrote: post #131
hrunt wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.co…

Is there anything China isn't far ahead in? Maybe capitalism was a failure.

LLMs...

Re: Tesla ending Models S and X production

#167

Post by saimiam »

burnt-resistor wrote: post #139
vannevar wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 proba…

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.

Re: Tesla ending Models S and X production

#168

Post by jbm »

stackghost wrote: post #13
SilverElfin wrote: post #10

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.

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.

Certainly longer than that. I actually thought Tesla as an energy company made sense — sadly just an excuse to buy and shelve solarcity.

Re: Tesla ending Models S and X production

#169

Post by Der_Einzige »

vtail wrote: post #162

"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…

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.

Re: Tesla ending Models S and X production

#170

Post by aaronbrethorst »

gcr wrote: post #127
al_borland wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 politic…

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...

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