Tesla Hasn't Had a Successful New Product Launch Since JB Straubel Stepped Down
cleantechnica.com
cleantechnica.com
But Musk has enough avenues to spin things left and right and bury any losses in the process his DOGE assault helped a lot bury some things already) so he'll do that. He's a showman and he'll manage to steal the show for as long as it takes.
For robotaxi, the last 2 years has shown us that FSD 14 has solved the really hard parts of autonomy, so the next logical step is some percentage of people deciding not to own their next car and instead only getting around by Robotaxi.
This is not a bad play by the market. They're poised to redirect a large amount of the existing cash that people are currently paying to (A) own a car, (B) pay interest on the loan, and (C) pay for car insurance. And C does not carry meaningful risk as autonomous vehicles are de-facto safer drivers.
Then the market is kind of putting their faith in giving Tesla 10 years to apply the same playbook to humanoid robots and all of the jobs that that _could_ replace (remains to be seen how capable they can actually make it and what the economics will look like).
>Our fleet of Model Y and Cybercab vehicles offers autonomous rides in cities across the U.S. You can already hail a car in Austin, Dallas, Fort Worth, Houston, Miami, Orlando and Tampa with more rides arriving in more cities soon.
> The ADS was proceeding straight through a work zone on a street and drove over a pothole at approximately 29MPH. The ADS had two riders present in the vehicle. One customer alleged they sought medical care.
> Summary: The ADS was stopped at an intersection stop sign, waiting to turn left and yielding to crossing traffic. An SUV that was stopped behind traffic straight across at a stop sign drove into the oncoming lane passed traffic. The SUV then drove up to the intersection, stopped, and proceeded straight, crossing into the lane and path of a passenger vehicle from their right cross street. The front of the passenger vehicle collided with the right side of the SUV and the SUV's airbags were deployed. Post collision, the SUV's front was pushed into the ADS's lane and collided into the front of the ADS. The ADS was pushed backward, causing its rear to collide with the front of another SUV that was stopped behind it. The ADS had one rider present in the vehicle. The driver of the passenger vehicle from the original collision was transported to the hospital for unknown reason.
For total autonomous fleet miles driven Tesla is years away from Waymo.
Both stacks can succeed, but for Google it's not existential fight so I don't think they will.
So when I go for a coffee, I don't go to the place where it's a dollar less expensive because it has a robot...
I'm not convinced we wanted to be helped by a robot, even if it does the same thing.
So the economics might be there.... But that's not the whole story, this isn't automating a production line...
The real incentive is that Musk won’t let one of his companies “fail”. It will be absorbed into a larger more successful one and keep delivering “investor value”.
Tesla fan boys still say that NO ONE else can do self driving despite plenty of companies which do like waymo or Nvidia, Mercedes and BMW.
Then they tell you that no one will own a car anymore but we already have Taxi/Uber and the world hasn't changed much and they complelty ignore basics like traffic spikes for workers.
You don't get good utilization when you can handle everything and low utilization means a LOT of space for waiting cars.
Its the same spiel with Optimus but there people seem to be quite enough and do understand that china is ahead.
Lets ignore the fever dream of Space-Xs payload story...
Absolutely no one is saying that. The bad faith is people saying that Robotaxi is doomed because it's vision-only. It may end up not being the best approach, but it's looking to be good enough to be performant and still be one of the larger players in the market.
> Then they tell you that no one will own a car anymore but we already have Taxi/Uber and the world hasn't changed much and they complelty ignore basics like traffic spikes for workers.
I'm not saying this either. This is like saying that busses and trains are vaporware because they can't serve 100% of transportation needs.
Some peoples' lifestyles will adapt to this change or already fit within it. A lot of people's won't. Over time, they will gradually close the gaps and/or people will change their own lives to fit it if they'd like to save money on transportation.
Does selfdriving work? yes. Is robotaxi a real business? Yes.
Thats not the point. The point here is the valuation of Tesla because of it and thats not justifiable. Despite the fact that Tesla originally sold FSD so that everyone can leverage this feature.
So either Tesla builds a cheap Robotaxi and floods the market as a car company OR Tesla becomes a competitor on a competitive market.
Why would people adjust their lifestyles based on a Robotaxi? We have already Taxis and Ubers.
The only chance for 'people changing their lifestyles' is if a Robotaxi is always available and A LOT cheaper which then again breaks the whole valuation of Tesla.
To actually switch to it myself, I'd need robotaxi to deliver:
- p99 5 minute wait for ride hailing, including at peak times - 24/7 operation
Longer 200-500 mile trips would also be nice, although then you get into needing robotic and/or wireless charging pads at SCs for road trips to work.
Also, there are a lot of ways some sort of subscription service could be handled. Maybe included usage, maybe I pay to have it ready in my driveway between 6am and 9am (but still to where I don't own it / need to personally insure it). Either way, it won't be hard for it to undercut my current car expenses if I can cut out car insurance.
None of the above is de-facto impossible with automation in the space. In fact, more reliable ops would be easier because the company can predict and dynamically scale how many are running at any given time, purely limited by (non-human) capital, instead of needing to increase their bid for human drivers to accept rides when demand is high.
Although the question is indeed if they can do all of this economically in a crowded space; I don't disagree that $1T is an insane valuation in any respect. Elon's umbrella of companies is all funny money to me.
Tax and uber are at around 2.5 Euro per km so 250 cents per km.
Tbh I thought before already that this not an easy story to sell, but the price point is between 2.5-5 already and if you remove 16% of the driver, you only get down to 2.1-4.2
You can't tell me there's a rational reason there's a common headline of Tesla missing forecast and guidance but still going up after earning report
Indeed. What I find particularly grating is that Tesla seems rather overpriced, but if SpaceX acquires it, it'll provide the Tesla investors with a nice exit. (And SpaceX of course is a very long shot that's in any number of retirement portfolios by virtue of its rash index inclusion.)
They probably have also been trying to penetrate the military energy storage market (a.k.a. "tactical microgrids"), but so far they haven't. They need more vertical integration for that. Right now they don't own battery-cell manufacturing, so the defense contractors that build ruggedized battery packs skip them and go straight to sourcing from the battery-cell manufacturers.
(Fun fact: Tesla's Gigafactories as physical spaces produce a ton of battery cells, but Tesla itself doesn't. Tesla leases space in its Gigafactories to cell manufacturers like Panasonic, who actually produce the cells, so that Tesla can then directly consume some of the cells produced into battery packs, without any intervening logistics costs.)
It's always been my own personal stance that Tesla is a battery company, that happens to sell some of its battery packs in the form of cars. (Remember that 80% of the depreciated value of an EV is its batteries.) The cars were never the core of Tesla's business model; they were a useful vertically-integrated B2C demand-sink they used to bootstrap their B2B battery sales business.
(For the record Tesla makes roughly 10% of Toyota's profits and has almost 3 times the valuation, no Tesla shareholder is ready for a 97% share price drop so Tesla has to keep the dream machine at full steam).
Edit: Tesla is 3 times Toyota in valuation, not 5 as I said earlier, not that it changes the argument much.
Not really. Tesla, like most automakers, purchases most of its battery cells from other companies (Panasonic, CATL, LG Chem). In recent years they have started to manufacture their own cells as well, with their 4680 cell manufacturing line at "Giga Texas". But this is a small portion of the cells they use globally.
But at the same time, maybe they are doing the correct analysis.
"If we stay here and grow fat the others will eat us. To infinity and beyond!".
100 years ago your business was your warehouse or your locomotive. These days, maybe your business is defined by your rate of change?
Not anymore, I guess.
The only reason why Payload into space increased from 1000t to 3000t is Starlink.
And there they have also massive problems for scaling. Base Station is expensive and they have to replace the Satelites every 5 years. Withouth the v3 and rocket big enough to send it up, they can't scale properly.
If they then scale, the rate of atmosphere poisening through STarlink will increase.
Per Google finance, Tesla's market cap today is $1.42T. Toyota's is ¥48.72T, or $307B USD. So that would make Tesla's valuation about 4.6 times Toyota's.
But Toyota still makes 3x Teslas revenue.
I'm guessing some of the 9x difference is speculative and some is because Tesla is all in on EVs/etc, which are doing well, and Toyota is still very much in ICEs, which aren't doing as well.
Even then, he is losing to Chinese competition. It's pure incompetence.
Proofs? tesla exists in China and cable to compete there. There is no ford or GM in it's US shape, only sub brands that loosing ground.
If Chinese vehicles were allowed into the US, they would certainly eat all the other vehicle manufacturers, except for customers who care about quality. And that’s where Toyota would be able to continue to survive.
But even Toyota would lose a ton of sales, because prices here in the US are so, so much higher than they should be. You can just look at prices in Europe and Canada to see that.
I don't know what to make of these numbers. Are all defects the same? (I can't be bothered to look).
What I can tell you is we owned a Model Y in the US for 3+ years. It was great, we had one small seat problem (which mobile service promptly fixed). The news is full of customer horror stories from Tesla, and not only did we like ours, our wide network of friends had many with similar experience.
I now live in Australia and have a Zeekr 7x (Chinese EV). My in-laws have an MG. The place is swimming with BYDs, Geely's, GWMs, etc. The idea that Chinese cars are low quality and people won't like them is laughable. No - they are cars people like at a price they are willing to pay.
We've only had our Zeekr 4 months but so far its been great and the build quality seems MUCH higher than the MY. It's quieter, the trim is much nicer, its generally great.
Letting Chinese cars into the US will decimate the US auto industry. No question about it, they will be reduced to light trucks for a time but even that probably isn't defensible.
And on that criteria, at the time that survey was done, I do think that Tesla probably may well have been the best car manufacturer in China. But perhaps things have changed quickly there?
I also think that Tesla quality has significantly declined overall as time has progressed. They’ve been more about trying to be the new thing, whatever that is.
I am also convinced that if Chinese car manufacturers are let into this country, that will kill the low to midrange market for any of the traditional car manufacturers. People are willing to put up with a lot of crap, if they can get it at a lower price — witness the rise of Amazon, Walmart, and Temu. And China can guarantee that they will always have the lowest prices, with lower labor costs, lower government environmental scrutiny, and active government subsidization. Tariffs on Chinese cars will need to be super high — maybe 100% or more? And even that isn’t going to save the car manufacturers in this country.
China can attack the high-end luxury market, but they’re going to have a lot more friction there, simply because people buying cars in that bracket won’t want to be seen as being cheap. China is going to have a long road ahead of them, but when they can deliver Lexus and Mercedes quality at bargain basement prices, there will be some people that they can peel away from the more well-established brands.
Meanwhile, companies like Polstar will do well, because many people don’t realize (or care) that brand is largely owned by Geely and another Chinese company. It will really be about the branding and how transparent the Chinese parent companies are about their ownership of other brands that people are more open to exploring.
Everyone gets this backwards. Tesla isn't abandoning their low-margin auto manufacturing in order to switch to high-margin robotics tech; they want to capture the margin of robotics for themselves first. If their manufacturing half fails, that means their robotics half also failed at its primary task.
Techworld has an inductive bias towards expecting successful products to be luxury lifestyle products, because so much of past tech successes came from that. Most likely the first successful AI robotics aren't going to be iPhone-like consumer luxuries, laundry-folding novelties for bored techies. They'll rather continue the trend of robotics to focus on industrial processes in controlled settings, capturing value by lowering the costs of doing banal things.
Maybe the insight is that it is better to first sell the robots (the "shovels") and only later go into the gold business yourself (if ever).
It will be truly nasty for the next President. All of this shit is going to blow up hard, even worse than 2007 was. With any luck, it will blow up during Trump's final months, but in the truly worst case it will collapse during the early time of whoever the next President is, which means no matter who gets the job will get smoked in the 2030 midterms - in turn ending up like Obama who didn't have a majority of his own for six years (or, in the even worse case, end up like Biden who didn't survive the reelection against someone as unlikeable as Trump).
Plus, president's don't usually have more than two years of majority.
The fact that it was this big and this hard to get and with this many compromises against consumer interest, speaks more of the disfunction of the USA government at the time then it does about the value of that legislation.
This fight not about the dysfunction of the USA government at the time, it's about a fight over the structure of the USA as it was founded. There have always been strong political forces trying to dismantle all "common sense" features of the welfare state, who have convinced the masses to vote against their own interests out of the American Dream of rugged individualism.
This is in contrast to the unique decentralized communitarian history of America with community activism, charities, NGOs and nonprofits filling the social holes between the government and private enterprise. The current healthcare system evolved out of this, and gradually received more patchwork of private and government involvement (Medicare/medicaid, and the ACA) which why it's an expensive mess. Most European countries post WW2 had a chance to design something more efficient and didn't centralized insurance as a threat to liberty.
But in essence the most revolutionary part of the ACA was regulating how health insurance companies sell insurance to their costumers, i.e. consumer protection. There were other aspects of the ACA, like subsidies to low income families etc. which weren’t consumer protection, but the regulations about how insurance is priced and sold most definitely were. And these regulations were very basic and common sense kind for any consumer products, stuff like don’t abuse your customer’s health situation with personalized premiums etc.
I say that this should not be a consumer market because private health insurance are inherently consumer hostile, and cannot be sold on the consumer markets without hurting the customers with unfair charges, etc.
Which recent administration cut federal spending?
...and I don't have anything against cutting spending. In fact, actually think Reagan did the right thing in using this tool as well as deregulation to end stagflation. But it seems like cutting & spending should be based on the situation and for 2008, spending seemed the right course of action.
Yeah, you're right. Much better to have Trump who just passed tax cuts for billionaires and corporations, imposed tariffs on Penguins and pardoned a bunch of people, some of whom he said he didn't even know.
> The world would've been very different with say, Bernie Sanders as president in 2016.
Undoubtedly, US and probably the world would likely have been a better place if that had happened.
Unfortunately, at present in the United States, the choices om offer(at least at a national level) are either neo liberalism with a woke 1.0 add on, or full on MAGA. The latter part is likely going to swing back to neocon territory by 2028 though.
It's not that crazy. The last new release of a truly mainstream car was the Model 3 a decade ago. Anything ever since has been facelifts and the ill-fated Cybercuck.
The major problem Tesla faces is that on the one side their brand image is in the gutters and has been for years and on the other side, "established" car companies finally have brought competitive cars to the market at relevant scale. They'll need to invest a lot of money to develop a new model from scratch with a high chance of not making back the money.
Other car manufacturers somehow can’t even provide dashcam recordings in a $40 vehicle.
I'm no Tesla fan, but having longevity in car models is a good thing. My fun car was built by VW in Germany for a decade and then by VW in South Africa for another decade; parts availability is great.
In today's marketplace of very samey cars, models that work should probably last a decade or more.
That said, Tesla could have built out a couple more styles, such as maybe a minivan/workvan/delivery van, although van sales can be pretty cyclical, and Tesla parts and service was (is?) notoriously poor in some cases, so I dunno if commercial users would be interested.
You see one Tesla, you have seen every Tesla. Colors? The same too.
I'm surprised that the markets have given Elon the amount of slack he's gotten. Once you merge Tesla into SpaceX, what's the plan? Tesla can't seem to roll out new vehicles with different body styling. Is robotics or AI the next big thing? What will happen to their car business? Will it just be CyberCabs? Will they become a mobile phone carrier?
The list of questions goes on and on. All this feels like a YC company looking for a new line of business because they just figured out their current line of business isn't all that great.
First off is robotaxis and semis (99% of highway driving and 80-90% of city driving driver jobs have been very effectively replaced right now by machine, look at Waymo if you don’t believe Elon), and then Optimus for stuff that needs hands, like warehouse workers or other low-skill “move heavy things from here to there” jobs.
My six year old Tesla 3 just drove me from Vegas to LA, door to door, without me having to give it any control inputs. Not a lot of people seem to be paying attention to how good it is now.
I imagine Optimus will be a really big deal once they get it working as well as Teslas drive.
Waymo hasn’t achieved that, though, right? They’re deployed in minimal markets, and I would be surprised if they had even replaced a majority of taxi rides where they are deployed.
Your trip still requires you to be at the wheel and conscious because the technology can’t be guaranteed to not try to murder you. How many miles do you go between driving accidents? Really asking: how many miles do you go between intervening with self driving?
The lack of complete market takeover is a sign the technology just isn’t there yet.
So were is the revolution now?
Even the internal Tesla paper determined that the self driving market is not that big. There are clear issues no one seems to really like to hear:
People don't mind driving; A lot of people have to drive at the same time (which is not economic to catch this spike and then have all these cars with low utilization the rest of the day); We know the taxi/uber market.
Either it is so good that i literlay can do whatever i want while its driving and not getting car sick and move around, OR i'm sitting in a car seat anyway. I hate being not the driver, its a lot more boring than driving.
Your claim that robotaxis and semis have replaced humans is not credible. Show me all the truck driver job losses due to self driving trucks.
I'd say that only some places have seen city drivers replaced by Waymo to such an extent. As for self-driving semis, the market penetration is near zero. Maybe the tech is good enough but no one is buying it.
I wouldn't consider this to be a weakness, necessarily. No plan survives a contact with the enemy, and the market is sorta-kinda war with unclear sides and developments. Plans tend to bind people to their old decisions, and make them beholden to sunk costs even if the world drifts in another direction.
It'll be interesting to see if they can do well in places where there aren't a bunch of stagnant incumbents to upset. I'm sure Musk would love to edgelord his way through a conversation where he offends a bunch of people by implying that they have been doing asteroid mining all wrong, those idiots, and then go prove himself right, but there's just nobody doing that.
Imagine if they put all that engineering effort to building an affordable, reliable, EV? Man that would be something to behold. But America is in the meme economy now, nobody cares about real products for real people. Just hype generators that appeal to the 1%.
"Come work for us and you could get to design rocket cars!"
When you have a sky high valuation, spending capital on something that just gives steady returns is a net negative for everyone. You have to put all the capital into the moonshots.
Expect this trend to continue. I've started seeing it all over across different industries. Consumer based businesses are being abandoned to instead chase the bigger numbers from B2B sales and premium consumers.
Robotics is the new focus. Depending on who you ask (and how well they execute), this will either be another grift for bagholders or exactly the right move to capture a massive emerging industry.
I do think people are massively underestimating robotics. The convergence of LLMs and robotics will be the next great wave of AI, unlocking an enormous boom in productivity across the economy.
Examples: Covid controversies around musk in 2020, Twitter acquisition in 2022, Musk becoming the world richest person in 2021
That means it will have to be more capable a driver than most human beings and that seems unlikely at the moment if you look at how well FSD works today. Yes, it works okay most of the time, but that's just not good enough for a self-driving taxi cab without a steering wheel or controls. And Tesla can't have thousands of remote taxi-drivers standing by all the time. That would make the service uneconomical and a loss leader.
some say the bar is higher due to sentiment, but it's insurance companies who will decide, and they are more interested in the numbers than sentiment. Your view that it has to be better than 'most' humans doesn't make any kind of insurance sense
One child run over and killed by a CyberCab and the government will have to nationalize SpaceX to prevent it from evaporating and taking $4 Trillion with it.
accidental death is inconsolable, but it is also insurable
No doubt SpaceX will try to defer responsibility in its T&C's, but that won't fly IMHO. The manufacturer will be held responsible (or the cab company if they're lucky) but either way a fatal accident will mean the service will be curbed or halted.
And this has nothing to do with insurability (is that a proper word?). It has to do with voters demanding justice and accountability for the death of this infant from their representatives.
So on principle, you're probably right. In practice it's easy to see why a corporation running a fleet of self-driving vehicles would have a different insurance profile than randos driving around.
Look at the Maverick sales, when it was 20k. Slate Auto seems to have gotten it right.
The slate is a joke. They said they need to sell 80k per year to break even. The maverick is currently only double that in its 6th year, after a major mid cycle refresh, basically without competition. Now the slate is going to appear with less utility, fewer features, 205 miles of range and sell in comparable volumes? What a joke.
Who sells more cars in China: Tesla or BYD?
- COVID, that put a strain on manufacturing during lockdowns and the eventual worldwide supply chain disruptions
- the new administration and its anti EV stance
- emergence of AI
- betting the future of Tesla on Optimus (product) and Robotaxi (service)
How much could JB Staubel have influenced Tesla during these times is anybody’s guess.
Why would him being there have changed anything? What ‘hit product’ could JB have launched that you would have bought given everything that happened with Tesla.
This is the weirdest thing ever by far. Why would you not just build a Tesla supercar? Why 2028?
You know what I bet? They are so dependend on what Elon Musk does and says and decides, that stuff like Twitter, DOGE and alllll the other garbage he did on the side, just stalled everything.
$2B cybertruck failure barely registers vs how impactful FSD has been on model Y / 3 sales. Tesla is supply constrained again, with multi-month waits for the model Y L edition
Wasn't there even multiply lawsuits against Tesla because the payed for FSD didn't work? Didn't exist? Wasn't supported by the Hardware build in?
2016 did Tesla announce that every future car has the hardware for FSD. 2016!
Most people don’t care that some guy paid $10k for a feature on a $80k car 10 years ago that didn’t achieve its crazy promise. They care that they can pay $99 today for a feature that blows away their expectations, AND is good enough to not just be a surprising novelty but something they use long term.
What?
People don’t like driving, and they hire(d) people to do it for them. There’s even a word for it: chauffeur. Now the car does it itself. Yes the chauffeur could do other things as well, but you can’t pay a chauffeur $99 a month.
So 9% bought their Tesla with FSD.
A lot less bought FSD than I expected, a lot more people who pay for the subscription.
A lot of people btw. do like driving.
Edit: All you Tesla haters just google "best selling car in the world last 3 years" and you'll see.
2023: $15B
2024: $7B
2025: $3.8B
2023: $4.357 billion
2024: $3.581 billion
2025: $6.22 billion
https://www.goodcarbadcar.net/2026-us-auto-sales-figures-by-...
https://www.best-selling-cars.com/usa/2026-q3-usa-top-10-bes...
I’d also say that the YL is something of a new product and a very successful one, even though it’s more of a long wheelbase variant.
Still, I agree with the thesis of the article. Where are the smart decisions?
The Cybertruck could have been a home run product for the US market, but Tesla’s own hubris about that market really buried it. They focused on styling and marketed it as a cyberpunk lawless society survival vehicle where angry mobs of cyberpsychos can’t break your window.
Hello, Tesla, you needed to put the truck in NFL advertisements and show how it’s going to be amazing for your blue collar cosplay sessions and how it’s going to get 300 miles of range while towing a boat (which it was supposed to but it didn’t).
The Cybercab being a two-door coupe is insane. How did that pass the first design discussion? Look at how the Waymo Zeekr cab is designed, look at a how a London cab can fit like 5-6 people in a normal-sized car, look at the Nissan NV200 as NYC’s exclusive taxi from 2012-2018.
None of these are two seater low entry coupes.
Where is the full size 3-row family vehicle to convince upper middle class suburban moms to not buy an EX-90? Where is the European city car?
What is Tesla doing with their time?
Yeah, if you disqualify or assume imminent failure of all of those, then zero successful new product launches.
Then he got older, got into politics and fully bought into the marketing about himself. He thinks he's a genius and that everything he touches turns to gold.
Well... Turns out stuff works as long as he is out of the loop and doesn't make any direct decisions.
This is not unique to Musk - many tech CEOs learn this the hard way when they start meddling in the day-to-day. Bezos built an empire, but the projects he took personal control of (like FirePhone) tended to be unmitigated disasters.
Waymo’s entire fleet is estimated at about 6000 cars. Tesla produces this many cars in a little over a day.
The cybercab is also likely to end up costing 1/10th of a Waymo car
It’s not that Tesla is winning here. But the economics of their solution can totally tilt the entire market in the future.
If.
I've been reading the same thing each year since basically the first version of Tesla's car AI. I'm sure I've even written similar things.
Tesla hasn't got the scale or operating consistency to even truly call itself a commercial service. Elon keeps claiming the Tesla will overwhelm everybody in the whole fleet will wake up one day and be a moneymaking taxi machine.
No it won't. Here's the reality:: https://autonomixinvestor.com/robotaxi-tracker/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T1Id2aas5wI (you can find more using Youtube search or Chat)
Is it global, or US wide? Nope, Waymo isn't neither.
https://autonomixinvestor.com/robotaxi-tracker/
Tesla:
> Roughly 20 on a given day, never more than about 50 active in a week across all markets. The genuinely unsupervised slice peaked around 25 in spring and has drifted sideways since.
Waymo:
> Roughly 500,000 paid rides per week, a figure Alphabet cited at both Q1 and Q2, so it is flat, not fresh.
> Musk’s vaporware doesn’t actually exist in the market.
Sugar water, whatever you want to call it, there's multiple providers.
Unsupervised robotaxi has lower (at fault) accidents than unsupervised waymo.
All notable cybercab accidents have been done by remote driving.
The only thing waymo have are - large fleet thus large miles/week - many cities
In last week or so, Tesla went from tiny to equal/more than waymo in Austin seemingly in just a few days.
They'll do that in other cities too in due time.
Waymos exist and have for years. Whatever fabricated data Musk came up with here has no relation to reality.
Waymo is betting that cutting zero corners and being rigorous will pay off down the line. They seem best in class.
Zoox seems to be betting that reducing time to get passengers in and out while providing a novel platform will be a differentiator. More sensors than Tesla but fewer cars than both the others.
Cybercab seems to be about cutting cost (and corners) wherever they thing they can get away from it and betting cheap will win the day (sort of like a discount airline). This assumes they're not doing something O(N) expensive behind the scenes, like having every ride monitored by a human operator in another country.
I remember some company dragging a person for awhile and the car not realizing. I'm worried tesla will find itself in a situation like that (or another edge case). I feel safer being around a Waymo as a pedestrian than a cybercab. I even had a Waymo stop for me at a pedestrian crossing when I was waiting for it to go by (I wasn't trying to cross).
In the long run Waymo will have to figure out how to have a cheaper platform and Tesla will have to toe the cheap/good-enough line. Zoox is still seemingly unlaunched so IDK about them. Time will tell.
... just looked it up, Waymo's 6th gen hardware is estimated to cost $20k per vehicle. That's getting down there. And if they ever do even higher volumes, will probably go down further: https://x.com/fchollet/status/2023522267846815874
Looked online, Waymo is really starting to ramp up it's services. They're now in 13 US cities (including Atlanta and Austin): https://support.google.com/waymo/answer/9059119#zippy=
And are planning on increasing the size of their fleet by a factor of 5: https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/waymo-...
They will have a huge advantage and seems to me like Waymo is going to win out, but can never tell.
> you can already buy a car with FSD
Which did things like drive off roads into parked cars and killed people. I feel like if Tesla hadn't been selling "full self driving" for years, the trust would be higher "no guys, we promise it's actually full self driving this time for real now" just doesn't have the same ring.
On the rollout:
It's notable that Tesla is building their own rideshare while Waymo is partnering with Uber. Tesla has the vertical integrated benefit of getting all profits but Waymo doesn't have to handle new user acquisition they just peel off existing requests and can roll out faster.
Tesla might "pivot" later to selling the 2 seater cybercab as a cheap base to competitors like waymo. It seems like Tesla has an identity crisis. They don't know how to be a consumer car platform (cybertruck halting production) they torched their PR with the green base that made them successful in the first place. Now sort of feels like a startup trying to "pivot" to find product market fit instead of a mature, well run company with solid strategic vision. There are a lot of jobs on the line so I hope they figure something out.
And yeah, FSD has been misrepresented for a long time now, but yeah, what I've been hearing it is finally getting really good. It's not completely hands free, but it's supposed to be very usable, and keep reading in reviews that this is the one feature that sets Tesla's EV's apart.
... And actually, on Uber, only in Austin (where said you are) and Atlanta does Waymo use Uber. Yeah, I used to live in the SF Bay Area, and had used Waymo a couple of times directly from their own app. It was a very natural experience. And recently stumbled upon an article that even in Austin and Atlanta, Waymo is going to discontinue using Uber in 2028.
What happened wasn't "politics got involved", what happened was that CEO started talking other politics.
And to say that "politics got involved" is a ridiculously passive statement. Elon has full control over how he publicly acts. Politics "didn't get involved" from 2022 onwards, Elon's publicly articulated political views significantly shifted, AND THEN Elon personally led massive organizational changes in the federal government.
Regardless of if you support or oppose DOGE, it's completely dishonest to wall off his actions at DOGE into a separate category of acts that you can clearly separate from his business.
Even now, they have no idea how to criticize him because they adore the blindingly wealthy, opinionated, and willing to use that wealth to force that opinion on others (it's upper-middle-class sainthood.) His biggest crime somehow is that he allowed you to say what you wanted on twitter. His second biggest is that he went after the "administrative state", which is this mysterious theory that the Executive Branch should have authority distinct from the President, and therefore not be subject to democracy at all, in any way. Just like they turned on Assange, it's always telling that their consistent enemy is democracy. Democracy is directly offensive to the credentials that they dedicated their lives and compromised their personal integrity to get from wealthy people and institutions.
They're offended by Musk because they wanted to show their Teslas off, and to talk about the projects that their company partnered with Tesla on at parties, and to be proud of their kids getting named Tesla scholars and getting Tesla genius grants. They can't be because he's obviously a slimeball in a way that they can't overlook and ignore and mock the victims of (in return for money and status.) That's it. They, however, are currently overlooking the crimes of their favored billionaires and employers, so have no language to articulate their resentment of him that doesn't also incriminate themselves. So it's just this insane inarticulate id-explosion.
Reminds me of people being embarrassed about working at Arthur Anderson or Lehman Brothers at parties. "I worked in accounting; I worked in insurance," they would say. Their mothers used to gush about them, and now they don't even mention the names of the companies, like a father who died in prison. All Musk's properties are like that now, as well as Google, Facebook, Amazon, etc.. Musk's properties still actually even come out better than other tech slop because they all ostensibly have some material purpose other than extracting rents from normal people through deceit and by doing the least work possible.
I used to have a name for people who can't see this dynamic: "emoluments libs." They were the libs during Trump's first term who kept saying "The Democrats aren't going after Trump for profiting from his office because they're too afraid." No, dude. They're not going after him because they have the same deals with the same people, and everything that they would go after him for implicates them too. After you avoid the obvious, you're left with impeaching a totally corrupt guy for not arming Ukraine hard enough to threaten Russia hard enough because they wouldn't cooperate in uncovering the blatant corruption of a prominent Democrat. If that's the best you've got, a thing that sabotages one of your own prominent politicians (who was destined to win the next presidency by a hair), and highlights an evil thing you're currently doing in Ukraine, the other alternatives must be really horrible i.e. would send you to jail with him. Their only bright spot is that they hoped it would take (a notoriously disobedient) Biden out so The Atlantic libs could push one of their soulless golems Harris or Buttigieg into the presidency.
I have to be honest. I'm part of the ancient left that is celebrating the imminent death of the middle class, because it's their weird psychology that is killing us. I encourage their replacement with AI wherever it is possible, my criticism of AI is that it is still not good enough to do it, and if the middle class have anything to say about it it will never be. They will ruin it by either coddling the owners of AI to total flaccid laziness or threatening the owners of AI to make them cripple it, but they will make sure that they will maintain a lawn by any means necessary. They will, however, never give a shit about the uninsured unless they get sick themselves.
That's an insane negative attribute that Waymo doesn't have to worry about. I hate the Alphabet guys too, but not to the same extent of completely boycotting all their products (yet).
You guys have to realize at some point that you're not a significant part of the market. There are a lot of people who don't particularly like musk but the amount that would never use a cybercab isn't a significant part of a 300m person market.
You should surround yourself with people who are willing to stand up for their convictions.
What? This is just a political hate piece because of the potential of something that just started five minutes ago? You're damning Tesla with faint praise yourself and don't even know it.