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Comment by macspoofing | Hacker News Reader

>The idea that services like Uber without the drivers would make car ownership obsolete drove those valuations.

Huh? What? No. That's not where the valuation came from. To be fair to Uber, they created a new type of market for which there was an immense demand for. Their self-driving initiatives were a moonshot and maybe got some people excited and therefore invested in Uber (see Tesla/Musk), but not quite the same as saying it drove their valuation.

>Tesla, ... were priced as if self driving cars are almost here.

Tesla was/is a hype stock based on the personality cult of Elon Musk that stemmed from being first-to-market with EVs. The valuation wasn't really driven by whether or not Tesla cars are self-driving.

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You must have missed part of the huge hype bubble when Musk claimed that Teslas with FSD would be "appreciating assets" because owners would be able to rent them out as robotaxis when not using them. He said they should be worth up to $200k because of that, and also this p2p robotaxi fleet would make Uber and all taxis obsolete. If FSD was actually full self-driving, then the idea makes a lot of sense.

Yes, Tesla customers and investors believed it because of the personality cult of Musk, but there was an actual (albeit wrong and likely deceptive) business proposition that gave investors a reason to value it as being worth more than all the other auto makers put together. That proposition depended entirely on FSD being only X years away and that Tesla would produce the best FSD product.

https://electrek.co/2019/07/16/tesla-cars-worth-100k-200k-fu...

> You must have missed part of the huge hype bubble when Musk claimed that Teslas with FSD would be "appreciating assets" because owners would be able to rent them out as robotaxis when not using them.

If Musk actually believed this it was irresponsible of him to sell any cars at all since holding onto them would have yielded a better return for investors/stockholders.

> If Musk actually believed this it was irresponsible of him to sell any cars at all since holding onto them would have yielded a better return for investors/stockholders.

When Musk announced this, he said they were still selling Teslas because they needed just a bit more real-world data to 'complete' FSD.

Probably not actually. If you rent your car you, you also need to clean it. Musk/Tesla isn't setup to do that, and the overhead of getting setup for that type of operation means that while is a profitable small business idea it may not work out for a large company.

While there is a business in that space to be had, I'm not convinced it is very big.

That was the rationale for why they planned on not actually allowing leases of the Model 3 to buy out their lease at the end. Since robotaxi was right around the corner...

Not sure what ever happened there, but I think Tesla managed to hold firm on that stance and won by luck since the used market bubble happened...

Hype is not a crime. It enabled Tesla to access cheap capital. But Tesla went too far and starting collecting money for something that won't work anytime soon and possibly not within the lifespan of Teslas on the road now.

The promise was "buy this car and soon it will self-drive" (and for Uber it was "Never mind we don't have a sustainable business model now, we will soon with self-driving").

>The promise was "buy this car and soon it will self-drive" (and for Uber it was "Never mind we don't have a sustainable business model now, we will soon with self-driving").

OK - you can make that argument. The point I'm disputing is OP's statement that "Tesla, and even more Uber, were priced as if self driving cars are almost here." I don't believe that statement. That is, I don't believe that the valuation of either company was based on the idea that FSD was almost here.

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