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Tesla is committing automotive suicide

electrek.co

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Re: Tesla is committing automotive suicide

#111

Post by nabla9 »

Their revenue is flat for last 4 years. They have established their status outside top 10 manufacturers and losing EV market share to Chinese and Europeans.

  Car revenue: -11%
  operating margin: 3.86%
  Free cash flow -30%
Tesla PE > 280 is magic. Now they are "pivoting" to Cybercab, humanoid robots and investing billions into xAI. Jumping from hype-trend to next without any problem is impressive. Fair valuation always in the future.

Re: Tesla is committing automotive suicide

#112

Post by DiscourseFan »

runako wrote: post #62
Zigurd wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They haven't said it explicitly. But the reason that Waymo can add five cities this year is very likely they are at least at break even on opex. They likely reached that point sometime last year and it seems to have held up. So I wouldn't call robotaxi service unproven. But I would call the idea that you can claim to be running a robo taxi service without depots, cleaners, CSRs, and remote monitoring that can handle…

I read that as meaning even the scaled robotaxi service (Waymo) does not throw off enough cash to offset the loss of Tesla's vehicle sales unit. (The putative Tesla buyer they are dissuading from purchase would have to take a whole lot of robotaxi trips to generate the same amount of profit for Tesla. Assuming Tesla can get robotaxis working.) In the 2000s publishing pivot to the Internet, this was known as "trading…

Such is the law of the falling rate of profit, a general tendency of Capitalism.

Re: Tesla is committing automotive suicide

#113

Post by dmurray »

duskwuff wrote: post #67
foobarian wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

A teleoperated robot is little more than a human worker with extra steps. (And an expensive, clumsy human worker at that.) I can't imagine many situations where that would make sense instead of having a human do the work in person.

Maybe you can scale to have one operator operate ten or a hundred household robots at a time.

An autonomous robot that has 99% reliability, getting stuck once an hour, is useless to me. A semi-autonomous robot that gets stuck once an hour but can be rescued by the remote operator is tempting.

Expect security and privacy in the marketing for these things, too, but I don't think that's a real differentiator. Rich and middle class people alike are currently OK with letting barely-vetted strangers in their houses for cleaning the world over.

Re: Tesla is committing automotive suicide

#114

Post by yardie »

jjfoooo4 wrote: post #40
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…

One of the things Jim Farley, Ford CEO, brought up was they have a lot of 3rd party suppliers, and changes take a long time to implement. So a firmware update may require change notifications and responses from dozens of suppliers for something like door locks. This was in response to why Ford couldn't do firmware as fast or as often as Tesla. Vertically integrated means you have 1 big ship to turn around. Modern JIT manufacturing means your ship is built of 100s of cards and each one needs to be turned.

The lack of new models from updates I believe comes from the fact the CEO is busy elsewhere and the board is reluctant to address that. They have made the P/E so high that they can only continue to function in one direction, do just enough to bring in more outside investment.

Re: Tesla is committing automotive suicide

#115

Post by alterom »

Xmd5a wrote: post #31
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.

> I'll let you find the video, it's brutal

This Daily Mail article¹ has it. It.. doesn't look brutal to me?

Just looks like the minibus driver, who was driving on the median, veered across it into the oncoming lane to crash with the semi.

He wasn't in a lane to begin with.

> Allegedly caused by lane assist activating out of the blue

Yeah dawg, imma need a second opinion on this.

This is alleged by the survivors of the crush.

Which is weird, because the passengers wouldn't know about what happened in the split-second that resulted in the crash.

Particularly, the passengers wouldn't know about whether lane assist interfered.

And the driver, who would, also happened to be drunk and high AF on cannabis, cocaine, and yet-to-be-identified stuff found in the vehicle at the moment of accident⁴.

Methinks, these allegations might be a lil' biased.

* * *

EDIT: the other comment revealed the news that the vehicle did not have a lane assist feature.

Such surprise.

_____

¹ https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sport/football/article-15503545/...

² https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sport/football/article-15503545/...

³ https://www.romaniajournal.ro/society-people/law-crime/new-u...

⁴ https://agerpres.ro/english/2026/01/29/toxicology-tests-reve...

Re: Tesla is committing automotive suicide

#116

Post by dzhiurgis »

BeetleB wrote: post #82

I think we're at the point where there is a bit of healthy competition in the EV space (even when excluding the Chinese), that Teslas are mostly just symbolic. People still buy Teslas. But in my circle, most have bought other EVs (and not just because of Elon). Teslas are no longer the obvious superior choice.

You might be surrounded by people who stopped thinking. My friend said "hell no" to Tesla right around backlash started and ordered a PHEV. Thankfully, somehow, someone convinced him to upgrade to EV. I keep begging him for a drive, but I suspect he's embarrassed by how shitty BYD is (same with other mate who somewhat regrets with all the issues he had, albeit they were far cheaper back then).

Re: Tesla is committing automotive suicide

#117

Post by AlexandrB »

bottlepalm wrote: post #84

Give me a break. Tesla has 4 different, 4 person cars. It's redundant. In manufacturing and business, reducing variability is everything. Engineering and supply chain has now been freed from two entire SKUs. That's massive. In a self driving world, they don't really the Model 3 either. The best part is no part - well getting rid of two entire vehicles worth of parts that contributed very little to the bottom line is…

How many 4-person vehicles does Toyota make again? What about BYD? I think it's way more than 4.

Re: Tesla is committing automotive suicide

#118

Post by lallysingh »

1970-01-01 wrote: post #87
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…

First mover advantage was GM's EV1. Tesla would not exist if GM didn't go and crush every single EV1 they could find.

The EV1 gave GM no advantage.

Re: Tesla is committing automotive suicide

#119

Post by loosescrews »

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.

On top of that, despite huge investments of both time and money into both areas, seemingly rivaling competitors, Tesla does not seem to be anywhere close to a market leader in either segment. They have to both prove the markets and that they can compete in them.

Re: Tesla is committing automotive suicide

#120

Post by alopha »

fintler wrote: post #109
the_sleaze_ wrote: post #4

BYD is slapping the EV industry around like a gorilla, Tesla simply cannot compete in any meaningful way. Waymo has achieved profit per unit and people are happy to see driver-less taxis in their city and pay for the service. Tesla also cannot justify valuations based on automotive sales/subscriptions alone - they were always going to have to pivot. They're in a tight spot and they need to do something drastic.

BYD uses slave labor. "In the dormitories of the Jinjiang Group, the company hired by BYD to carry out the work, there were no mattresses on the beds, and the few toilets served hundreds of workers in extremely unhygienic conditions. The workers also had food stored without refrigeration. The Brazilian Labor Prosecutor's Office (MTP) also accused the companies of withholding the workers' passports and keeping 60% of…

Tesla's factories have been responsible for deaths, systematic injury issues and wage theft - https://sites.uab.edu/humanrights/2025/03/30/human-rights-co...

Pretending BYD is winning because of Chinese labor practices alone or primarily is denial of their technological and operational prowess.

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