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Comment by aNoob7000 | Hacker News Reader

The problem I see is with focus. Elon/Tesla seems to go after the next big thing every couple of years without a real plan.

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.

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I think it’s pretty obvious: sell the machines that replace humans as AI improves, and be ready to run that AI at massive scale.

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.

I'm quite aware that the self driving capabilities of a Tesla is good, has been for a while.

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.

> 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)

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.

Worth noting that Mercedes and BMW were the first to offer real L3 under specific conditions (as in: you could legally do something else, and the company would be responsible in case of accident), but they dropped it this year due to low demand and high cost. Some Chinese manufacturers offer it still.

Waymo has very little market penetration where I live. I've only seen a handful of them driving around. When I went to visit San Francisco last month, I never realized how prevalent they are.

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.

Elon/Tesla haven't delivered on unsupervised self driving cars, how is Tesla/SpaceX going to deliver on robots replacing humans?

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.

Once the Tesla semi is shipping in greater numbers, I expect a lot of trucker jobs to disappear. Not all, and not even most, but still, tens or hundreds of thousands. (IIRC there are 3 or 4 million truckers in the usa.)

"Elon/Tesla seems to go after the next big thing every couple of years without a real plan."

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.

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The line of business is fine. Tesla & SpaceX both make things people want. Neither cars nor rockets are being disrupted by AI. They could achieve good-to-great growth under stable, full-time, drug-free management. But if you feel you need a large amount of capital and you want to retain control of SpaceX and Tesla, bolting these startups onto them is a way to double down. It's just a shame to see those existing things get torched.

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