Not crazy at all. Tesla gave up being a car company a few years ago, but there's lot of inertia and the 3 and Y are still competitive products in the marketplace.
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