I'm not saying the pundits are wrong, but tons of people said Tesla would never amount to anything back when they were just shipping the Roadster and the Model S.
Tesla is committing automotive suicide
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Re: Tesla is committing automotive suicide
#82I 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.
Re: Tesla is committing automotive suicide
#83What 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.
To be clear, Neuralink has shown some promising signs. Has also shown some terrible signs.
And then I don't know if Musk is oversimplifying for a soundbite or more of his Dunning Kruger, but some of the descriptions seem to lack any knowledge of neurology. He describes a universal chip that will do different things and solve different issues depending on what part of the brain it's implanted in. That's not how it works at all.
Re: Tesla is committing automotive suicide
#84Give 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 massive.
It's amazing after 20 years of the same MO, people still don't understand how Tesla/SpaceX operate and succeed. It's like deleting millions of lines of code from a code base. It improves not just performance of the organization, but maintenance as well. The S/X were outsized tech debt on every facet of the business and now they're gone. 100% the right move and very few people understand it.
Re: Tesla is committing automotive suicide
#85I'm surprised that I feel like this is the right move for them. Competing on the cars seems like a bad idea now that EVs are kind of a commodity market.
Re: Tesla is committing automotive suicide
#86Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
I have a 2022 Model 3, and the hilariously tragic part is that the voice assistant was great and basically never gave me any problems until they shoved Grok into it, whereupon it broke completely. I never use it anymore, they effectively removed a feature from my car.
Re: Tesla is committing automotive suicide
#87They 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.
Re: Tesla is committing automotive suicide
#88What 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.
I'll bet that's what people said to Steve Jobs when they were making the iPhone
- PDA sales are 0.01% of PC sales in 2006
Re: Tesla is committing automotive suicide
#89Earlier 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.
Low duty cycle. If one human can drive 20 robots, because most of them are sitting still most of The time, it starts to make sense. Vs a maid or butler that can obviously only really work one home at a time.
Re: Tesla is committing automotive suicide
#90They 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…
It’s almost as if a company would be better off having a CEO who wasn’t also the CEO of four other companies while also dabbling in geopolitics.