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Tesla is committing automotive suicide

electrek.co

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Re: Tesla is committing automotive suicide

#61

Post by Fischgericht »

karmakurtisaani wrote: post #6

I was very close to going short on Tesla yesterday. Very glad I didn't in the end. The fundamentals of the company are absolute trash, yet the stock price is through the roof year after year. One day the crash will be epic.

In the last couple of months it was really crazy: Some inconvenient truth came out, and within minutes the stock made a huge jump UP. Who regards it as a good sign if a car manufacturer just got ordered to pay $200 mio in damages in just one single Autopilot crash case, creating precedent for a lot more of lawsuits.

I think you could wake up one day, read the WSJ with the headline "All Tesla cars ever sold have just exploded at the same time, killing hundred thousands of people" - and the stock price would surge 10%.

I really would like to know what the stock price would do if Tesla had good news. But I guess we'll never find out about that one... ;)

Re: Tesla is committing automotive suicide

#62

Post by runako »

Zigurd wrote: post #52
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.

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 physical dollars for digital pennies."

Re: Tesla is committing automotive suicide

#63

Post by MagicMoonlight »

amelius wrote: post #47
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…

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.

Teslas don’t even have HUDs, there’s plenty of work left to do

Re: Tesla is committing automotive suicide

#64

Post by burningChrome »

TacoCommander wrote: post #35
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…

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.

Re: Tesla is committing automotive suicide

#65

Post by perardi »

nailer wrote: post #9
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.

Because it's hard and Tesla think they can do it. See 'reusable rockets' and 'having paralysed people control things with their minds' for other examples. HN often seem to think there's Elon fans downmodding things but it seems more like a case of irrational hatred.

Oh, well let me get in my sub-$30,000 Model S, with a swappable battery and full-self-driving capabilities, and take a fully automated trip to the Hyperloop downtown so I can catch a quick ride out to O’Hare so I can fly out to watch a successful Starship launch…

…oh wait. I can’t. Because for all his successes, Musk has also sowed quite a lot of bullshit that has gone precisely nowhere.

Re: Tesla is committing automotive suicide

#66

Post by vel0city »

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…

> the basic lane keep + adaptive speed cruise control they helped pioneer in cars sold going forward

LKA existed well before Tesla HW1 released. Honda had cars on the road in 2003 with LKA systems. That's 11 years before Tesla HW1 was available.

Re: Tesla is committing automotive suicide

#67

Post by duskwuff »

foobarian wrote: post #32
api wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

Re: Tesla is committing automotive suicide

#68

Post by rkagerer »

elbasti wrote: post #39

Elon's superpower is commanding insane valuation premiums. The trouble with this is that "the bill eventually comes due", so to speak, which forces Elon's companies to take wilder and wilder bets, or to make wilder and wilder promises. With telsa it was robotaxis, and when that failed to materialize, humanoid robots ( fucking LOL ). SpaceX is an even more insane example. They are eyeing an IPO at a 1.5 trillion valua…

What would you do with a satellite, if I gifted you one for free?

Let's forget orbital mechanics for a while to make this answer more fun. It would follow me around and provide a dedicated, private lifeline of communication anywhere I go, real-time aerial surveillance of my surroundings, and eventually lasers to zap anyone who pisses me off.

Re: Tesla is committing automotive suicide

#69

Post by preisschild »

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…

> Realistically, he should have put someone else in charge after the launch of the Model 3 to develop the company further, but I don't think his ego allows it.

Well he knows more about manufacturing than anyone else alive on Earth, so he can't be replaced /s

(yes, he actually did say that)

Re: Tesla is committing automotive suicide

#70

Post by ultrarunner »

amelius wrote: post #47
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…

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.

My brother bought a Tesla recently. They dicked him around with delivery, and he had to pay a ton to get charging infrastructure installed at his house, but it's fast so he's happy. On a recent visit, he finally showed me the car, and it was hilarious how janky the final product is. Everything seems cobbled together-- a good example is that there's apparently two separate voice assistants (plus his phone) and none of them can talk to each other, so commands like "turn on the defrost" are responded to with "I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that".

Controls as simple as the door handles are unintuitive, with the handle apparently being the emergency release that doesn't lower the window (for who knows why). You have to brief your passengers on egress like it's an airplane.

EVs might be a solved problem, but Tesla is still fighting their own additional layer of complexity that they added on top. The added subscription nonsense makes him look like a fool for having bought in, something I am definitely even more reluctant to do now that I've seen it play out.

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