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Tesla is committing automotive suicide

electrek.co

41–50 of 458 posts

Re: Tesla is committing automotive suicide

#41
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…

Also California raised false advertising issues with the naming of “autopilot”

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Re: Tesla is committing automotive suicide

#42
post #33

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.

The Y and 3 do everything the X and S do. I don't see how they could keep making them without eating away sales.

Re: Tesla is committing automotive suicide

#44

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.

My understanding is that the main reasoning for this isn't revenue growth but rather one of the big triggers for his $1T pay package (10 million FSD subscriptions).

Re: Tesla is committing automotive suicide

#45
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…

> Musk's incentive pay has a 10 million full self-driving subscription. Step 1: > discontinu[e] the basic lane keep + adaptive speed cruise control Step 2: Redefine "Full Self-Driving" to be those things. Charge 50 cents per month subscription or whatever. Step 3: Get 10 million subscribers. Step 4: 100 billion dollar payout! (Number pulled out of my butt)

Parallel steps:

Step 1: SpaceX IPO

Step 2: Trillion dollar payout

Step 3: Nothing matters any more

Re: Tesla is committing automotive suicide

#46
post #22
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…

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Re: Tesla is committing automotive suicide

#47

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 problem is that EVs are basically a solved problem. There isn't any technological advantage to be gained, since the technology in an EV is very basic (+) compared to ICE vehicles. So then it comes down to manufacturing, and there China is king.

(+) Except for the battery, but that's a very long term battle with very tiny steps.

Re: Tesla is committing automotive suicide

#48

It's business as usual for Elon. This is his main strategy. He always goes all in on risky technology that people say won't work. People said it about EVs. They said it about reusing first stages. They said it about Starlink's phased array antennas. Now he's going all in on self driving. It's obvious that self driving turns personal transportation into a service business. So that's where he's going. Yeah, if you don'…

He’s been all in on self driving for at least a decade now. He has not been able to produce anything close to his claims.

Re: Tesla is committing automotive suicide

#49
post #5
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.

> be rationally justified? Nothing about this stock has ever been rational

To be fair, market has been decoupled from reality on the ground for a while now. Just the fact that companies were able to operate giving stuff away for free only to suddenly yank the chain in a desperate bid to gain profitability later should be enough of a signal.

That said, as much as I dislike Musk ( and I have bet money against him before ), his instincts are likely not wrong. And it does help that, clearly, he knows how to bs well.

I am not saying you are wrong, but I think he is just a poster child for everything wrong with current market ecosystem.

Re: Tesla is committing automotive suicide

#50
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.

Except that it doesn't need to be consumer to start off. You can build specialized robots that deliver value at a massive scale. Imagine a "Prep Cook" at a restaurant, there are millions of these around the world. If the Optimus can do that job for a price of $1,000/month, that's likely to be more efficient and better quality than a human can do. And there has to be many jobs like this.
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