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Ford has $150B in debt. Toyota has double that.
That doesn't mean Ford is ten times as likely to go under - indeed the market cap's being the same means that buyers and sellers generally believe that Ford can carry ten times as much debt as Tesla with about the same risk.
Tesla bet it's financial future into being able to mass produce Model 3 profitably in large quantities. The amount of debt Tesla has prevents them from retreating into smaller scale luxury cars. When Model 3 is in trouble, lets move to the taxi-scheme.
They have to dilute the stocks again and again and current owners see less of the (possible) future profits.
There will be some kind of economic slowdown or correction in the next few years. Tesla has maybe one more financing round left until the music stops.
Ford has $150B in debt. Toyota has double that.
> a fleet of self-driving vehicles that will make their way into the robotaxi service as soon as next year. So... are we living on the same planet? Does Musk seriously think that Tesla will have solved full autonomous driving, with no LIDAR, and have commercialized a functioning robotaxi service, by next year ? This is so far outside of the realm of possibility that it's like saying he's going to Pluto next week.
Ford has $150B in debt. Toyota has double that.
I still think that traditional auto makers are in big trouble, some of them in far bigger trouble than Tesla. If the trend towards electric vehicles accelerates they are potentially sitting on mountains of stranded costs.
Ford has $150B in debt. Toyota has double that.
Ford and Tesla's market cap are about the same at $40 billion, yet Ford's total liabilities are ten times Tesla's: https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/F/ford-motor/total... That doesn't mean Ford is ten times as likely to go under - indeed the market cap's being the same means that buyers and sellers generally believe that Ford can carry ten times as much debt as Tesla with about the same risk.
Ford's sales are about 7.5X Tesla, and it's EV is about 4X Tesla.
Tesla's financials and market cap are not completely out of whack when compared to other car companies.
> a fleet of self-driving vehicles that will make their way into the robotaxi service as soon as next year. So... are we living on the same planet? Does Musk seriously think that Tesla will have solved full autonomous driving, with no LIDAR, and have commercialized a functioning robotaxi service, by next year ? This is so far outside of the realm of possibility that it's like saying he's going to Pluto next week.
Also, have they given any evidence that they’ve thought through and prepared for the regulatory hurdles that a robotaxi service would entail, even if the tech problems were solved?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
He's used to overpromising and then delivering far later than expected - it's worked so well for SpaceX. Maybe he inherited Jobs' reality distortion field?
> it's worked so well for SpaceX In Elon's biography the author mentions that in all projects he was part of he would constantly give far optimistic delivery dates.
> a fleet of self-driving vehicles that will make their way into the robotaxi service as soon as next year. So... are we living on the same planet? Does Musk seriously think that Tesla will have solved full autonomous driving, with no LIDAR, and have commercialized a functioning robotaxi service, by next year ? This is so far outside of the realm of possibility that it's like saying he's going to Pluto next week.
It's not infeasible to train an automated driving system specifically suited to the streets of LA or wherever. Some place where it doesn't snow, doesn't rain often, and drivers/cyclists/pedestrians are fairly predictable (at least compared to someplace like Asia).
Alternatively, a robobus, that is to say an automated system that drives from one place to the other on a highway or interstate, seems to be mostly solved.
In both cases, if the vehicles were mostly autonomous but could also be controlled remotely by a human in ambiguous cases, they would still be vastly cheaper to operate than existing taxi/bus services.