Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Tesla is committing automotive suicide

electrek.co

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

131–140 of 458 posts

Re: Tesla is committing automotive suicide

#131

Post by misiti3780 »

toephu2 wrote: post #17
misiti3780 wrote: post #12

I have to admit, I love my model S and have been very bullish of TSLA but this news makes me very bearish. There is no way they are going to make robots at scale in the next 5 years and the model s and model X are cool pieces of technology. If they dont start rolling out robotaxi extremely quickly to new locations, I cant imagine the stock going anywhere but down.

> There is no way they are going to make robots at scale in the next 5 years If you said 1 year okay I would believe you. But have you seen the advances in AI recently...? And the work done in robotics by other companies like Google and Figure? 5 years is definitely doable.

Sorry, Ill say it a different way. I dont think Tesla will be able to sell ME a robot within the next 5 years that does my laundry and cooks me dinner. If they want to sell millions of these things, that is what it's going to need to do.

Re: Tesla is committing automotive suicide

#132

Post by sigio »

jjice wrote: post #20
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…

I have a newer Corolla that's pretty much the absolute floor of the base model (LE with I believe minimal packages) and it has all the technology one would expect now, all while having physical buttons where it matters. Lane assist and adaptive cruise control are table stakes now.

I think in (most of) europe, most of the safety-related features are mandatory on all new cars these days, so all these features must come on all trim levels. This does make the base model a lot more expensive then a few years back, but you get all the nice features, so that also makes them cheaper in general.

Re: Tesla is committing automotive suicide

#133

Post by lallysingh »

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…

If a robot can do basic cleaning, laundry, and dishes, that's worth a lot to a lot of people. Dual-professional households have the money, and not having to do this housework could save some marriages.

Re: Tesla is committing automotive suicide

#134

Post by OkayPhysicist »

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.

I could see teleoperated help catching on. Americans are weird about staff. When I visit my old-world family, it's seen as perfectly normal to have someone living in an attached apartment, handling the cooking the cleaning, etc. There are well-established etiquette rules, understood both by the staff and the family, which help navigate the rather complicated, radically unequal relationship between the two.

Americans by and large don't do that. We software developers have not that different of an income gap between us and minimum wage workers compared to my family overseas and their staff. Yet, it would be considered weird, extravagant even, for a $300-500k/yr developer to have dedicated help. We're far more comfortable with people we don't need to interact with directly, like housecleaners, landscapers, etc.

Teleoperated robots sidestep that discomfort, somewhat, by obscuring the the humanity of the staff. It's probably not a particularly ethical basis for a product, but when has that ever stopped us.

Re: Tesla is committing automotive suicide

#135

Post by EthanHeilman »

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…

> Tesla has 4 different, 4 person cars. It's redundant.

You are spot on, it makes sense to have the Model 3 (economy sedan) and Model y (upmarket crossover SUV).

My question here is why did Tesla have four 4-person cars in the first place? If you wanted to streamline engineering and supply-chain why have Cybercabs instead of using the model 3 or model y as the base? Why split the company between Optimus and making cars?

Cybertrunk does make sense, it is a technology demonstrator and test article filled with all the new ideas and tech they are going to build into the next generation. They get data on people using it by selling it to them.

What you say is a sound strategy for Telsa to peruse, but they don't seem to be perusing it.

Re: Tesla is committing automotive suicide

#136

Post by [deleted] »

dzhiurgis wrote: post #116
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).

[deleted]

Re: Tesla is committing automotive suicide

#137

Post by duskwuff »

TylerE wrote: post #91
api wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only places it does is where humans can't easily go: space, underwater, hazardous industrial sites, etc. It can occasionally make sense for high skill stuff where the shortage is people who can even do it, like remote surgery. In your house? That's silly. It'd be 100X more expensive and complicated than just hiring a housekeeper so you could... hire a remote housekeeper?

Except the remote house keeper can be in some super locl 3rd world country where the prevailing wage is a few bucks a day.

That's a pretty profoundly dystopian concept. If the only way this technology is viable is as a way to exploit labor at a distance - count me out.

Re: Tesla is committing automotive suicide

#138

Post by BeetleB »

dzhiurgis wrote: post #116
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).

Since I'm in the US, BYD is not part of the equation.

And yes, I will grant that at this point, it's possible that Tesla has the least serious problems. I don't know - I haven't looked at recent data. But it's the usual trajectory: I know plenty of people who bought Teslas in the last 5 years and complained how many weeks/months it would sit at the dealer awaiting repairs (just like it is with Hyundai/Ford/everyone-else these days).

Case in point: Pretty much everyone I know who bought a non-Tesla and had issues with it is still happy with the purchase. Just like Tesla users of the past ;-) Only one guy got annoyed and sold his car and bought a different non-Tesla EV.

My point is that if Tesla suddenly dissolved tomorrow, existing automakers will continue improving their vehicles. Maybe 10 or even 5 years ago Tesla's death would have meant the end of EVs in the US. But by this point we've hit critical mass. They're here to stay.

There are just so many non-Tesla EV choices now.

Re: Tesla is committing automotive suicide

#139

Post by TacoCommander »

burningChrome wrote: post #64
TacoCommander wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Or the Boring Company which most people have also completely forgotten about.

They just work "underground"

Re: Tesla is committing automotive suicide

#140

Post by Alive-in-2025 »

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…

Unless they dramatically reduce the price, they won't get to 10 million any time soon if ever. This article discusses paid subscriptions info releases in the earnings report, https://electrek.co/2026/01/28/tesla-discloses-fsd-subscribe...

800k paid subs in q4/2024, about the same in q1/2025, 900k in q2/2025, 1 million in q3/25, and 1.1 million in q4/2025.

Let's call that 100k growth per quarter in 2025, and currently at 1.1 million subs. They'll have to significantly increase their growth rate. The interesting modeling point is tesla car sales are dropping, down 9% to 1.6 million last year. All their new vehicles are capable of fsd with subscription, but thats only about 1.5 million a year (and likely to keep shrinking).

I think the only way they get good uptake is to make the price cheap, like $1 a month, with 12 free months but you have to give your credit card (ie fees that people don't notice scam like every streaming company). Even if every new buyer gets it, it would take many years at 1.5 million sales a year. Need 8.9 million more subscribers, 8.9/1.5 sales = ~6 years at 100% uptake. There are about 9 million current owners, but I'd guess at least 50% can't run current FSD code - they are on version 4.5 of their hardware (they recently released 4.5 in some new cars, and they have a major upgrade to v5 coming in a year or two).

There's no harm if they don't get to 10 million, because Musk shouldn't have that really large stock payoff as he's killing the company.

Post reply on HN