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> They didn't need to invent the lithium-ion battery, or the electric motor, or the automobile

They do have their own batteries, their own motors, and a pretty unique automobile. I'm not so sure the point stands. If the "they are only using existing technology" line was true, you'd have seen a ton of companies from China, or the traditional automakers, take the market before Tesla had any chance to compete. Somehow Tesla had time to build their own factories and parts from scratch and still beat them...

Having Rosie the robot maid from the Jetsons at home is the vision of the future being sold, but as you point out, that level of technology is very much still the realm of science fiction. If you're watching the other parts of the AI conference this was presented at, self-driving cars are practically here. The reality, of course, is that that actually aren't yet. But you can buy a Tesla today to get an electric car taste of that future, even though it's not actually quite here.

A bipedal furniture dolly, however, is as unsexy as it is possible, using today's technology. It requires none of the impossible breakthroughs, though energy storage seems like it would be a problem. (Quad-copter drones seem to have follow as a control scheme figured out already.)

Doing this under Tesla means the earliest versions don't need to sell at all, they just need to be useful internally. Which I'm sure is why this is coming up in the first place. Think of all the places a forklift can go in a factory vs a human. The forklift is extremely useful, but still limited to flat, paved terrain. A bipedal robot base solves that, enabling Tesla to make more use of available space.

If this bot follows Tesla's strategy for self-driving (which still isn't here), it'll ship with "all the necessary hardware for Rosie the robot maid-mode", and then consumers will have to wait another couple decades for the software to actually catch up.

You've left out manufacturing. Building a car factory + supply chain is quite the challenge.

Tesla had the best and the brightest - I've worked with them before they were acquired by Tesla on a daily basis: https://teslagrohmannautomation.de/en/

and still had trouble scaling. Manufacturing is considered to be one of the hardest things about building cars - electric or not.

Edit: What's with the downvotes? Disagree? Comment below then.

According to musk manufacturing is the hardest part of rocketry as well.

that makes sense. rockets are big dumb objects with incredibly tight engineering tolerances. humanoid robots are anything but big and dumb, and there's no incremental path to success between a bunch of servos wired to a mannequin and having it do the dishes.

>Building a car factory + supply chain is quite the challenge

And yet Elon announced to the world he was going to have the most automated factory in the world, the machine that builds machines, and that the factory was the actual product. People lapped this up. 2 years later they were hand-assembling cars in a tent.

Now do you see the problem?

>Manufacturing is considered to be one of the hardest things about building cars

Again, you say this as if it's some kind of revelation. It's obvious. The only shock is that Musk and the people he was surrounded with didn't realize it.

They tried to do something quite crazy with manufacturing and it didn't work. Musk has often ignored industry standard and often it works. In this case it didn't and people will now use this forever to show how stupid he is.

However what happened then is that they effectively corrected their mistake, fixed their production, reached their production targets with excellent unit margins.

They learned from the episode and realized they need to reduce part count and made a whole series of innovation and if you look at how their new Model Y are going to be developed in the new factories you see a huge improvements. They developed a new alloy for casting, worked to put largest casting process into production, totally redesigned the battery for manufacturing and massively simplified the battery pack.

To the point where Tesla are quite competitive in terms of weight and ease of manufacturing. They already have industry leading unit margins and some of these innovations will only hit next year.

That part of the story somehow is never mentioned when people say 'hahahahha build cars in a tent'.

They are not doing so bad it seems:

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/E9FARebWUAYd5NI?format=jpg&name=...

>They tried to do something quite crazy with manufacturing and it didn't work.

What did they try to do that's "crazy with manufacturing" that hasn't been done by every other car company on the planet?

>fixed their production, reached their production targets

Have their plants ever reached production capacity?

>To the point where Tesla are quite competitive in terms of weight and ease of manufacturing.

And here we have the point. Tesla are competitive, fantastic. That's a long way from all of the early claims about upending the entire manufacturing industry through factory automation the likes of which the world has never seen. Funny how that part of the narrative disappeared.

>They are not doing so bad it seems

Looks to me like legacy car makers are catching up, no?

I was responding to the comment above mine that didn’t mention manufacturing but pretty much everything else. It might be obvious to you but general populace have no idea about difficulty of manufacturing. Some engineers haven’t got a clue on what goes into building things by millions.

> "but they are primarily repackaging and improving technologies that already exist."

Did you mean: they are innovating? IMO there's not enough appreciation for getting to commodification and scaling the existing tech. It's a very difficult problem, from what I understand.

> I'm dismissive because building a useful, mass-market humanoid robot would be an achievement of incredible magnitude

Agreed. But they don't have to start with "mass-market humanoid robot", there are 1000s of niches where then can execute "land and expand" strategy. Same playbook as with Tesla or SpaceX: start with something niche (sport car for rich people/gov contracts), iterate to expand ($30k EV/satellite internet everywhere).