Isn't Tesla trying to be SpaceX's vertically integrated robotics division? My gut feeling says they are trying to move out of the EV business as crazy as that may seem to us normals.
(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).
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
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.
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!"
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.