Being in the EV business means having to accept predictable revenues that then tie to more predictable stock prices. Being in the business of "some future technology" doesn't.
(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?
This is the most absurd and also true observation I've read on HN in a while.
As the rate of technological process accelerates, maybe it becomes possible to justify a company's valuation on a never-ending succession of "And then..."s.
Granted, that ended poorly in terms of stock prices for the .com bubble, but mostly for companies that weren't financially solvent enough to withstand higher interest rates + a public market downturn.
And it took a conflation of multiple events to pop that bubble (Asian instability, moderate US interest rate hikes, 9/11/2001).
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.
Starlink was the seed customer for unused gen1 launch capacity.
Space datacenters are probably intended to be the gen2 seed.
Because SpaceX needs to frequently toss rockets up to be able to iterate on them and scale manufacturing, and they'd rather use the (high-risk) payload capacity for something profitable while doing that.
But as a net result, SpaceX can afford to launch mass that others can't, because it wins two ways: whatever profits that launched mass produces + iterating rocket design and manufacturing.
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).