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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?
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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.
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.
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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.
The people behind the Diesel won and now are moving the money flows their way. See GM stock.
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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.
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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.
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.
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.
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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.
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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…
He generated a lot of goodwill with "that DOGE fiasco", too. It just depends on where you fall politically.
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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…
I'd bet a kidney that doesn't happen.
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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.
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 2…