What If Tesla Is Just a Car Company?
wsj.com
wsj.com
All these things are true except Amazon is mostly a cloud company and Apple makes the computers most people use for non work.
Eventually they will all be valued as such, but for a while mass delusion will continue to make them more expensive. You are probably too young to remember when Cisco was basic the internet company and valued as such.
I am 42 years old. I remember when the SGI O2 was the hot thing to have on your desk, Netscape was the hot new startup, when Mozilla was open-sourced, and when jwz left to burn some of his fuck-you money on saving nightclub in San Francisco. All I could afford was my Linux PC, but I was alive. I remember the entire dotcom boom and bust.
None of that matters. I actually know some of the engineers that work (or have worked) at Elon Musk's companies. They're all extremely smart, talented and hard-working. (One of them hates Musk's guts, one is indifferent, and the rest of them respect him enormously.) Tesla will eventually be the largest company on Earth, and no one else is close.
This is quite a take. I guess you're basing this on FSD becoming a huge moneymaker for them, but that's unlikely given it's not true FSD and it's only Level 2 autonomy, and Level 3 is probably years away for them. Compare to Mercedes, who just got Level 3 approved in Nevada. It's under very specific conditions, but while it's activated, Mercedes assumes liability. I don't see Tesla doing that before 2026.
IMO adding very unreliable features like FSD should not even be legal. The car should be very good at what it tries to do.
>Tesla will eventually be the largest company on Earth, and no one else is close.
And yet you have no way of knowing how "close" the "no one" companies are if you have zero knowledge of a competitor that has already surpassed their technology.
Cut the hyperbole and talk about things that you have knowledge of.
Tesla with thrive, and only some of their competitors are going to make it through. I hope that's not too controversial (shrug).
Is your thesis that A) Tesla will finally develop fsd AND B) no one else will ever be able to?
I definitely think that competing companies will catch up, but that it will take them around 5-15 years to do it. (It took Microsoft about a decade to come up with a real competitor to the original Macintosh, for example.) That's an eternity in business, so Tesla will accrue huge gains financially over that period and this first-mover advantage will give them a huge lead with the Tesla Bot.
I didn't make it past the paywall, but I think this is a pretty silly argument. Yes, the stock might even drop another 50% between now and the bottom of the recession as margins fall to keep demand level. No, the company is going to be just fine. They'll be making huge software-style margins on FSD in 2024 and beyond. FSD has been the better part of a decade in the making, and it runs on every Tesla made since 2019. That's a lot of cars! Hundreds of thousands of people have it, and while it definitely isn't complete yet, they're a heck of a lot closer. My sources are my friends that use FSD in their own cars every day.
The really cool thing about FSD is that the same software is going to take Tesla into whole new markets with the Tesla Bot in a few years. This isn't worth anything to Wall Street right now, but it sure will be in 2027.
Then it’s worth substantially less than it trades for. (Also, it should lay off most of its staff, cut the remainder’s pay, and overhaul its business model.)
Amazon isn’t just a bookstore. That is the article’s point.
> isn't worth anything to Wall Street right now
It’s worth everything to Wall Street, to the degree massive uptake numbers are already priced in.
I think other companies might come close. They might not have Tesla style "FSD", but coming close in terms of highway only, slow speed only, might be enough to make Tesla a "car company".
Mercedes has already started its approval for L3 self-driving in the US, where they would assume liability. A lot of other cars have a subset of "Autopilot + FSD" features like: adaptive cruise control, auto-park, summon, better lane assist*. Sure, these are not the same as Tesla FSD, but in a few years other manufacturers will come close enough.
One big factor in why Tesla is/seems ahead is because they are using regular people to "test" their "FSD", when other companies are being more cautious.
Tesla could showcase their "FSD" by having "full self-driving" teslas in certain cities, and applying for licenses, but they haven't.
Tesla is selling only L2 software, pretending that it is L5. When they will take legal liability as well, then it is possible to assume, that they trust their product. Until then, it is just a scam.
Tesla promised FSD, delivered an oddball L2 ADAS. Promised a long haul semi, customer delivers potato chips with it. Promised a pickup, says "basically finalized" ("funding secured?"). Promised a robot, delivered something a Boston Dynamics dog could take down with one nudge.
Elon Musk decided machine vision is enough for L5 AV driving. He may be wrong, in which case the value of all that camera data collected by FSD customers may be of little value compared to the 3D maps Google has been collecting.
Ah, the standard "full self-driving next year, for reals this time!" lie. It's boring at this point:
https://jalopnik.com/elon-musk-promises-full-self-driving-ne...
I think you've been Teslaed or possibly Musked.
:-)
The software isn't perfect, nor is it finished. Drivers are required to keep their hands on the wheel and be ready to take over at any moment, and there is a monitoring system to enforce it. You can pick it apart and poke at the issues all you want, but Tesla is obviously far ahead of all of their competitors if you look at it from the perspective of a computer person rather than a car guy. The competition is still using LiDAR and pre-programmed maps which can't deal with real-world conditions, which is where Tesla was back 6-7 years ago.
I hope we can talk about this in the future to see how my prediction did. I'm @realtaraharris on Twitter (different handle because I began transitioning in October 2022).