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Tesla is committing automotive suicide

electrek.co

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Re: Tesla is committing automotive suicide

#31

Post by Xmd5a »

z2 wrote: post #7

Tesla also announced they will be discontinuing the basic lane keep + adaptive speed cruise control they helped pioneer in cars sold going forward. But this is now a standard (free) feature even in basic vehicles like the Toyota Corolla. Why would they intentionally cripple their vehicles to the point hat they would be inferior to most cars today? Then I learned that Musk's incentive pay has a 10 million full self-dr…

2 days ago: https://www.espn.com/soccer/story/_/id/47744955/paok-fans-ki...

I'll let you find the video, it's brutal. Allegedly caused by lane assist activating out of the blue when overtaking other cars.

Re: Tesla is committing automotive suicide

#32

Post by foobarian »

api wrote: post #22
p-o wrote: post #2

What makes this move even more incredulous is that none of the two market they want to move towards are proven markets: - Waymo is generating less than 150m in 2025. - Consumer robotics is an absolute unknown. How can the transition be rationally justified? Let alone the valuation.

Consumer robotics strikes me as an engineering tar pit so deep it leads to hell. If full self driving is hard due to the long tail of unusual special cases, this is orders of magnitude worse. Take FSD but multiply the number of actuators and degrees of freedom by at least 10, more like 100. Add a third dimension. Add direct physical interaction with complex objects. Add pets and children. Add toys on the floor. Add r…

I think if they are teleoperated they could make sense, or at least more than the device-local versions

Re: Tesla is committing automotive suicide

#33

Post by ndr42 »

1970-01-01 wrote: post #24

More like surgery to remove the excess weight. If they are not selling well, why would they continue making them? That would be suicide. "If you don't cannibalize yourself, someone else will." -Steve Jobs

Cannibalize meant in this case to have product that will kill one of your other products (in this case the back then cash cow iPod would be killed by the iPhone).

I don't see this in Tesla.

Re: Tesla is committing automotive suicide

#35

Post by TacoCommander »

this_user wrote: post #10

They had the first mover advantage, but then Musk lost interest in the company and let it just sit there for the last five years or so without making sure that they have a future-proof product pipeline and that those products are actually being delivered on a reasonable schedule. Now they are increasingly turning into an EV also-ran while their moonshots are unlikely to work out any time soon. Realistically, he shoul…

The end game is the SpaceX IPO which will make him a trillionaire, and then he doesn't need Tesla any more.

Re: Tesla is committing automotive suicide

#36

Post by MBCook »

malshe wrote: post #11
karmakurtisaani wrote: post #6

I was very close to going short on Tesla yesterday. Very glad I didn't in the end. The fundamentals of the company are absolute trash, yet the stock price is through the roof year after year. One day the crash will be epic.

I think in a weird way SpaceX listing publicly would trigger Tesla’s downfall as Elon fans will switch to that stock. Then SoaceX will buy out Tesla.

That’s a good point. Can Tesla fail?

Seems like he’s constantly using one company to fund others, shuffling the cups and balls around claiming everything is still fine.

I could see him doing serious damage or even trashing an otherwise healthy company doing this to prop up total failures.

Re: Tesla is committing automotive suicide

#37

Post by mekdoonggi »

api wrote: post #22
p-o wrote: post #2

What makes this move even more incredulous is that none of the two market they want to move towards are proven markets: - Waymo is generating less than 150m in 2025. - Consumer robotics is an absolute unknown. How can the transition be rationally justified? Let alone the valuation.

Consumer robotics strikes me as an engineering tar pit so deep it leads to hell. If full self driving is hard due to the long tail of unusual special cases, this is orders of magnitude worse. Take FSD but multiply the number of actuators and degrees of freedom by at least 10, more like 100. Add a third dimension. Add direct physical interaction with complex objects. Add pets and children. Add toys on the floor. Add r…

Also, how will these robots make money? They are a less capable human. Humans who aren't skilled don't make much money.

Re: Tesla is committing automotive suicide

#38

Post by toomuchtodo »

TacoCommander wrote: post #35
this_user wrote: post #10

They had the first mover advantage, but then Musk lost interest in the company and let it just sit there for the last five years or so without making sure that they have a future-proof product pipeline and that those products are actually being delivered on a reasonable schedule. Now they are increasingly turning into an EV also-ran while their moonshots are unlikely to work out any time soon. Realistically, he shoul…

The end game is the SpaceX IPO which will make him a trillionaire, and then he doesn't need Tesla any more.

Indeed.

SpaceX in Merger Talks with xAI - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46814701 - January 2026

Re: Tesla is committing automotive suicide

#39

Post by elbasti »

Elon's superpower is commanding insane valuation premiums. The trouble with this is that "the bill eventually comes due", so to speak, which forces Elon's companies to take wilder and wilder bets, or to make wilder and wilder promises.

With telsa it was robotaxis, and when that failed to materialize, humanoid robots (fucking LOL).

SpaceX is an even more insane example. They are eyeing an IPO at a 1.5 trillion valuation. And yet the market for satellite launches is simply not that big. (What would you do with a satellite, if I gifted you one for free?). Estimates have SpaceX doing about $3B in annual earnings, which would give them a 500x earnings multiple at a 1.5T valuation (Apple: 35).

And so SpaceX/Elon had to invent the absolutely idiotic idea of "data centers in space" to sell some future vision of tens of thousands of launches per year.

He keeps upping the ante (and the ridiculousness of the vision), and so far investors keep funding it.

Me? I've realized that this madness is entirely "opt-in" and I choose to simply...not opt-in.

Re: Tesla is committing automotive suicide

#40

Post by jjfoooo4 »

this_user wrote: post #10

They had the first mover advantage, but then Musk lost interest in the company and let it just sit there for the last five years or so without making sure that they have a future-proof product pipeline and that those products are actually being delivered on a reasonable schedule. Now they are increasingly turning into an EV also-ran while their moonshots are unlikely to work out any time soon. Realistically, he shoul…

I recently read Origins of Efficiency by Brian Potter, and one of the interesting things it talks about is the path of the Model T.

Ford invested heavily in an in-house, highly optimized production pathway for the Model T. Other manufacturers sourced a lot of their parts from vendors.

This gave the Model T a great advantage at first, but they had a lot more trouble than competitors in coming up with new models. Ford ended up converging with the rest of the industry in sourcing more of their parts externally.

The lack of new Tesla models makes me feel like a similar pivot is what Tesla needs. My suspicion is that they probably need a less terminally distracted Musk to pull it off.

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