11–20 of 59 posts
I used to be so upset at this king of bullshitters. Had paid for FSD I think a decade back and it never came. But now I look around and see he is a mere product of his environment. Nothing to get angry about.
That's P.T. Barnum, Charles Ponzi, or Edward Bernays.
Given the way AI is advancing it would be really dumb to not go hard on Robotaxi. That's it. That's the analysis. If you think AI progress is going to hit a wall or Tesla's AI in particular is going to hit a wall then sure spin up a Model 2 and prepare for a long grueling endless war with BYD.
Let’s say we’re headed for fully-autonomous vehicles in whatever optimistic medium term you want. I’m kinda missing the winning strategy here. Unless there’s some kind of moat to building/selling robotaxis, the sale price equalizes to marginally above the production cost, except with far less volume than what the market is selling today.
I used to be so upset at this king of bullshitters. Had paid for FSD I think a decade back and it never came. But now I look around and see he is a mere product of his environment. Nothing to get angry about.
> king of bullshitters That's P.T. Barnum, Charles Ponzi, or Edward Bernays.
Given the way AI is advancing it would be really dumb to not go hard on Robotaxi. That's it. That's the analysis. If you think AI progress is going to hit a wall or Tesla's AI in particular is going to hit a wall then sure spin up a Model 2 and prepare for a long grueling endless war with BYD.
Actually at this point Tesla's AI seems to have hit lots of things: trucks, barriers, emergency vehicles, pedestrians, cyclists...
It's already clear for a lot of people that the numbers at Tesla don't add up. They were able to cut a lot of (legal and accounting...) corners when they were growing quickly, but it will be much more complicated now when they are contracting.
Sure they can kick the can down the road a bit, let's say for 4 years during which US seems to be akin to a Banana Republic, but what's the end game ?
Is there anyone serious who still believes that this is a 1 Trillion $ company ? I would love to hear some serious arguments (other than projecting 100s of Billions $ from Robotaxis next year...)
But alas, that is not what the for profit public companies have a mandate to do.
If the maths come to about ±0 then there would be tons of goodwill to be gained by spinning up the robo-taxi project as a non-profit org.
I think it would have been very apparent at the start of 2024 that Tesla cannot compete with the Chinese manufacturers on cost. And Robotaxi is an attempt to expand beyond the luxury car bracket before someone eats that lunch. Without the article spin, the decisions could be quite sensible for the market at that time. It also helps explain the lengths Musk has since gone to to ensure Chinese manufacturers don't get a…
But they weren’t going to have to anytime soon. The US would have had very little issue convincing their allies and trade partners to block or tariff Chinese EVs to the point of preventing them from undercutting the market.
I used to be so upset at this king of bullshitters. Had paid for FSD I think a decade back and it never came. But now I look around and see he is a mere product of his environment. Nothing to get angry about.
Meanwhile on wall street, one sane analyst were pegging a valuation of $424 billion for robotaxis and ARK invest projected $240 billion in ebitda for robotaxis. Creative writing > bean counting https://www.barrons.com/articles/tesla-valuation-ai-stock-pr...
Given the way AI is advancing it would be really dumb to not go hard on Robotaxi. That's it. That's the analysis. If you think AI progress is going to hit a wall or Tesla's AI in particular is going to hit a wall then sure spin up a Model 2 and prepare for a long grueling endless war with BYD.
Might as well make money when other companies sell cars too.