Tesla Hasn't Had a Successful New Product Launch Since JB Straubel Stepped Down

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.

• martythemaniak · 14 hours ago

  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.

  • slowin · 14 hours ago

    Crazy that they have a $1.4T market cap while having given up their entire business (which was never worth a fraction of that anyway).

    • buran77 · 14 hours ago

      Their charging network and carbon credits revenue were probably the more valuable parts of the company. Tesla's current promise and foundation for that valuation is that they'll deliver fully autonomous driving. 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.

    • judge2020 · 13 hours ago

      I think the market is mainly banking on Robotaxi being nationwide in 5 years, and Optimus being ready in 10. 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).

      • flyinglizard · 13 hours ago

        Safer drivers I believe, but how do you get around the uncapped liability the service provider carries if someone gets hurt?

        • dghlsakjg · 13 hours ago

          The same way you do it with human drivers is one option. I.e. mandatory liability insurance.

          • close04 · 12 hours ago

            Human drivers pay one insurance, for themselves. It’s easier to swallow because most drivers think they are above average skill. Not so easy when they need to cover someone else’s coding mistakes. And if the company has to pay for every car that self drives that can get ugly fast, one bug and half the fleet has a fender bender.

            • judge2020 · 11 hours ago

              Chances are they just self-insure (like they are now) and eventually will have some group insurance if they can actually prove it's safer over the next half decade.

      • gordon_freeman · 13 hours ago

        Waymo is far ahead of them in execution and actually getting people around in major cities. Tesla Robotaxi is still just a concept.

        • lotsofpulp · 13 hours ago

          https://www.tesla.com/robotaxi >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.

          • grandpajoey · 13 hours ago

            They only have ~25 unsupervised rides a day across all markets. https://autonomixinvestor.com/robotaxi-tracker/

            • dzhiurgis · 8 hours ago

              https://www.robotaxitracker.com seems to have actual source (i.e. detectors on city cameras).

          • santoshalper · 13 hours ago

            If you want any kind of good faith information or analysis on Tesla, you're going to need to ignore tesla.com. They are primarily in the business of selling hope and bullshit.

            • judge2020 · 13 hours ago

              They have a xlsx download on https://www.tesla.com/robotaxi/safety that is somewhat transparent. For example it mentions the two following scenarios where hospitalization is alleged, although neither seem to be caused by the robotaxi car: > 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.

          • Zigurd · 13 hours ago

            500K commercial rides per week paid for by a large user population versus... undisclosed.

            • dzhiurgis · 8 hours ago

              What will happen when Tesla will mog Waymo out of existence?

        • dzhiurgis · 8 hours ago

          Robotaxi is months away from taking it away from Waymo tho. 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.

      • hvb2 · 13 hours ago

        > 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 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...

      • close04 · 13 hours ago

        The valuation would be realistic only if they were the only ones with a real shot at autonomy or at least a considerable head start, like they did in the EV market. But they don’t. 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”.

      • origini · 13 hours ago

        Its a story nothing more. 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...

        • judge2020 · 13 hours ago

          > 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. 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.

          • origini · 12 hours ago

            I'm reading this argument and had discussions with people plenty of times. I then remind them of all the other companies. 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.

            • judge2020 · 11 hours ago

              My main issue with Uber/Lyft/Taxi is the human element (humans sometimes want to chat) and the tipping element. Plus how flakey drivers are - e.g. they might not immediately go to pick you up and could taking detours or pit stops, etc. 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.

              • origini · 7 hours ago

                I checked the calculation which was a lot easier than i thought. The german automotive club actually has a table what a car costs per km and the range is between 50-100cents per km. 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

  • deadnomore · 11 hours ago

    Model 3 and Y are basically the same car and both are tied for last in Europe

    • dzhiurgis · 8 hours ago

      Y is still best selling EV in AU/NZ, despite vast competition from China.

      • detourdog · 7 hours ago

        It could be similar to late 90’s market share slide of Macintosh. Apple was the largest pc manufacturer but had the smallest market segment overall. There were so many IBM clones that the overall market share of the PC market was higher volume than Macintosh.

        • bryanlarsen · 7 hours ago

          Model Y might be the best selling, but the VW sister brands have 18 models that compete and together outsell the Y.

• notatoad · 14 hours ago

  is this something that's actually happening, or just something elon told investors at his optimus event with the obviously fake robots a couple years ago?

• thinkingtoilet · 14 hours ago

  It's not crazy at all. Elon, in all his genius, built up an EV company and then alienated the core demographic for his product. They tried to salvage it with a wildly over-priced, virtue-signaling "truck" and that didn't work. There are literally millions and millions of Americans who would have other wise loved to buy a Tesla but will never buy one because of Elon. They have to pivot.

• alpha_squared · 14 hours ago

  Pretending Tesla isn't a car company and SpaceX isn't a satellite services company (Internet, maybe mobile) is wild stuff. The only real profits are from those traditional industries. All the sci-fi hype is for investors and fanatics.

  • jordanb · 14 hours ago

    Value the company by the sizzle not the steak. And before it fails completely fold it into the next grift. Sounds far fetched but it's been working for Elon for years.

    • malfist · 14 hours ago

      Anyone with half a brain can see him stacking his house of cards higher and higher, but yet the market and investors love him. 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

      • FabHK · 12 hours ago

        > stacking his house of cards higher and higher 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.)

  • kevin_thibedeau · 14 hours ago

    Those are just side projects. SpaceX is now an AI company. All their phony future revenue projections are dependent on magic numbers cooked up by a drug addict who convinces people to believe his stream of lies.

  • derefr · 13 hours ago

    FYI, Tesla makes a large fraction of its profits off the margins from selling grid-scale ("Megapack") batteries to utilities; renewable energy projects (buffering energy generated by e.g. private wind farms); and most recently, data centers (where they act either as giant battery-backed UPS systems, or as reservoirs between on-site power generation and fluctuating on-site demand.) 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.

• matthewdgreen · 14 hours ago

  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.

  • stymaar · 13 hours ago

    The big problem for Tesla is that they cannot sustain their valuation from the car manufacturing business. There's a perpetual need to justify why Tesla should be valued an order of magnitude more than other automakers. Selling the dream of future profit is Tesla's main 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.

    • ares623 · 13 hours ago

      SpaceX and Tesla are just another form of the Star Citizen phenomenon.

      • stymaar · 13 hours ago

        That's an awesome analogy, I'm stealing it right away.

      • santoshalper · 13 hours ago

        "Irrational exuberance" is, I believe, the most concise description.

    • hparadiz · 13 hours ago

      They are a battery company. The cars are just a way to sell batteries.

      • petcat · 13 hours ago

        The cars are actually a way to drive yourself around town. Yes they also contain batteries.

      • hdgvhicv · 13 hours ago

        Very expensive batteries compared to the competition

      • stymaar · 13 hours ago

        The comparison is actually even worse if you compare it to other companies on the battery sector. How is Tesla supposed to be five times more than CATL ffs?

      • Reason077 · 12 hours ago

        > "They are a battery company." 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.

        • hparadiz · 10 hours ago

          That's interesting cause FY2025 had them do about 14 billion in battery/energy products (revenue). With auto being a little over 60 billion. The energy products seem to be growing in volume though

          • orwin · 10 hours ago

            Didn't tesla got a bunch of US government money to install superchargers everywhere? Wouldn't that be under 'energy product'?

          • Reason077 · 10 hours ago

            Yes, "Energy Products" refers to Tesla's energy storage products (home Powerwalls and industrial-scale "Megapacks"). Tesla manufactures these packs using battery cells they buy from 3rd parties. Tesla's value is added in the pack design, software, inverter electronics, branding, etc.

    • fifilura · 13 hours ago

      You can laugh at it, and most likely it will crash and burn. 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?

    • origini · 13 hours ago

      Tesla and Space-X.

      • stymaar · 13 hours ago

        Until the merger with xAI, spaceX was actually a decent company with a very solid business, a clear technological edge and clear growth perspective. It shouldn't be a trillion dollar company of course, but it should have been a cash cow capturing all the value from its niche market. Not anymore, I guess.

        • origini · 12 hours ago

          But not with the valuation it currently has. 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.

    • tarsinge · 12 hours ago

      I don’t know, I think at this point the Tesla stock doesn’t have a link with the company anymore and behaves like any meme coin or collectible token. Like in crypto there is some vague narrative about a crazy future but ultimately the point is only to drive further speculation ("buy it before you’re priced out/join the elite crowd that’ll own the future/etc."). The genius of Elon is having realized (I’d say around the time he tested the ground with pumping dogecoin) that in a stock market where investors don’t buy for dividends but only price speculation the underlying business doesn’t really matter, only the narrative does. Dividends are the only link with the real business, without them the price is only a function of the demand, and what Elon has achieved is maintaining demand through narrative, like in crypto, irrelevant of the company results.

      • stymaar · 11 hours ago

        The parallel with crypto is very strong indeed.

    • Reason077 · 12 hours ago

      > "Edit: Tesla is 3 times Toyota in valuation, not 5 as I said earlier, not that it changes the argument much." 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.

      • lesuorac · 12 hours ago

        Sure and Toyota [1] has significantly more outstanding bonds than Tesla [2] which should depress it's market cap. [1]: https://www.tradingview.com/symbols/TSE-7203/bonds/ [2]: https://www.tradingview.com/symbols/NASDAQ-TSLA/bonds/

      • stymaar · 9 hours ago

        Of course thank you, Idk how my brain farted when I did the double check…

    • omgwtfbyobbq · 12 hours ago

      You should probably compare revenue instead of profit because Tesla and Toyota are at very different places in their development. 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.

  • amelius · 13 hours ago

    Being in the EV business means having to compete with China. This market is dictated by manufacturing costs and so it is not where you want to be.

    • ajay-b · 13 hours ago

      Which begs a question: Is it really possible to compete with China on consumer products? The price and cost of labor advantage, indeed state sponsorship and support, would suggest that it's not.

      • StilesCrisis · 13 hours ago

        For electronics, sure. iPhone and Android are American products. Playstation and Switch are Japanese. If you mean "can we compete on cost of manufacturing," no. They all build in China.

      • kraken_cult · 13 hours ago

        That seems like a major issue national security wise. I wonder why no one has brought that up?

      • detourdog · 13 hours ago

        Veblen goods can compete. China is unique in cheap high tech products. As production scales down and shipping costs raise smaller markets open.

      • neves · 13 hours ago

        Musk's companies are some with the most state sponsorship on the planet. Remove the tax credits, government buying, and commercial barriers, and there's nothing. Even then, he is losing to Chinese competition. It's pure incompetence.

      • proxyscore · 12 hours ago

        Well the usa always shouts free market from every rooftop in all the invaded countries, so I wonder where the struggle is?

    • gumby · 13 hours ago

      Chinese cars are effectively excluded from the US market mainly to keep Tesla afloat.

      • maxdo · 13 hours ago

        no, they mostly not allowed to keep fords, gm, and other inefficient manufacturing afloat. 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.

        • bradknowles · 11 hours ago

          So, the irony here is that, according to the latest JD Powers reports, Tesla scores 113 defects per thousand here in the US. That makes them the worst vehicle manufacturer in the country, with regards to quality. In China, Tesla also scores 113 defects per thousand. But there, that makes them the number one vehicle manufacturer in the country, with regards to quality. 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.

          • shawnb576 · 9 hours ago

            I think you're implying that based on these JD Powers numbers Chinese make low quality cars and will therefore not be successful. 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.

            • bradknowles · 6 hours ago

              It is important to know that JD Powers makes a point of not distinguishing between different types of complaint. Not liking the color of the seat belt is treated the same as the motor blowing up when you turn it on. They’re looking at big picture numbers here. 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.

    • neves · 13 hours ago

      Musk basically lost to China competitition, but can't assume it.

      • re4r567t8z9u0k9 · 11 hours ago

        You mean "admit". I know your native language. :-)

    • peri-cl · 13 hours ago

      It's sort of Tesla's core thesis that they want to attain the world's lowest manufacturing costs, by doing novel things with robotics and AI that automate away humans. 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.

      • amelius · 13 hours ago

        But is a low-margin business really the one where you want to bootstrap your robotics industry?

        • peri-cl · 12 hours ago

          It stops being low-margin if suddenly you can build things much cheaper than your competitors can, and they can't replicate what you're doing.

          • amelius · 12 hours ago

            Yes, but a lot of experience is required in robotics to reach that stage. 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).

  • proxyscore · 13 hours ago

    Well fsd and robotaxi are still mere futuristic concepts and semi vaporware but I get it, that doesn't sell shares anymore

• slowin · 14 hours ago

  It’s especially crazy since they sell cars and do not sell robots. Both of Musk’s public companies are little more than financial fraud. That the SEC allows any of this gives me zero confidence in the entire market.

  • mschuster91 · 14 hours ago

    > That the SEC allows any of this gives me zero confidence in the entire market. 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 ).

    • kraken_cult · 13 hours ago

      The cynic in me would say, "all according to plan", it will be right before the new house and senate are going to roll out universal healthcare or something equally good for the average person. Better to get head of it before that happens.

    • parineum · 13 hours ago

      Obama didn't do much with his two years of majority anyway. Plus, president's don't usually have more than two years of majority.

      • lotsofpulp · 13 hours ago

        The Affordable Care Act is the biggest non tax cut legislation of the previous 30 years.

        • runarberg · 13 hours ago

          I would argue that the Affordable Care Act was nothing more then a common sense consumer protection legislation for a consumer market that should not exist in the first place. 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.

          • computerdork · 13 hours ago

            Maybe a bit of both sides in my opinion. It shows the dysfunction of the government and our healthcare system, but it was also practical and helpful to the those left out of the healthcare system.

          • parasubvert · 13 hours ago

            This is a deep misunderstanding. Socialized healthcare has been a fight for almost 100 years. What you find "common sense" has been an intense, almost existential fight, up there with slavery, universal suffrage, civil rights, prohibition, and abortion. 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.

            • runarberg · 7 hours ago

              I am aware that describing the ACA as consumer protection legislation is a hot take, and I understand that many people will take issue with it, and correctly so (it is more complected than that). 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.

        • computerdork · 13 hours ago

          And to add to this, for also properly dealing with the 2008 financial crisis. Just as a reminder to those out there, the strategy of recent administrations for crises like this was to cut federal spending in order reduce deficits, and many of the politicians at the time were calling for cutting spending. Obama listened to his economic advisors who told him to stimulate the economy and get money into the hands of the people. There were some rough edges to their stimulus spending but it seems to have worked and our recovery was the envy of most of the world. In recessions, stimulus seems to have now become the norm.

          • parineum · 6 hours ago

            > Just as a reminder to those out there, the strategy of recent administrations for crises like this was to cut federal spending Which recent administration cut federal spending?

            • computerdork · 4 hours ago

              Ah, maybe "recent" isn't the right word, maybe should have just said "administrations of the past 45 years." Because, was mainly referring to Reagan and his deregulation of the US economy with Reagonomics, and how this type of thinking became the norm afterwards, not just for politicians but for the American people. This is of course my opinion, but think the way a lot of politicians in 2008 reacted to stimulus when it was proposed backs this up at least somewhat. ...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.

        • parineum · 6 hours ago

          The affordable care act forced people to give insurance companies more money and did nothing to curb the rising costs of medical care.

      • khriss · 13 hours ago

        You mean other than Obamacare, Dodd Frank, GFC stimulus, Auto industry support, repeal of DADT? 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.

        • soraminazuki · 13 hours ago

          Surely there are options other than neoliberalism and MAGA? The world would've been very different with say, Bernie Sanders as president in 2016.

          • khriss · 7 hours ago

            edit: spelling > 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.

    • neves · 13 hours ago

      Don't worry, American tax payers will come to rescue the companies.

  • enaaem · 13 hours ago

    Hyundai has been making robots for decades. Imagine the hype if Tesla did half the things Hyundai is doing.

    • Zigurd · 13 hours ago

      Hyundai even bought the humanoid robot company that actually has a working humanoid robot. But it didn't make them any money or give them an absurd P/E ratio.

• mschuster91 · 14 hours ago

  > My gut feeling says they are trying to move out of the EV business as crazy as that may seem to us normals. 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.

  • lotsofpulp · 13 hours ago

    $100 per month in a $40k vehicle that allows it to drive sufficiently well 99% of the time such that it reduces driver stress and liability is worth something. Other car manufacturers somehow can’t even provide dashcam recordings in a $40 vehicle.

  • toast0 · 13 hours ago

    > The last new release of a truly mainstream car was the Model 3 a decade ago. 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.

    • wildzzz · 13 hours ago

      I like what Rivian does, an EV skateboard where different bodies can be bolted on top with little design modification. I could see them moving into the crossover market just by shortening and lowering the frame.

    • origini · 12 hours ago

      Yeah but a decade ago is still a decade ago. You see one Tesla, you have seen every Tesla. Colors? The same too.

  • c0_0p_ · 13 hours ago

    Not to mention that internationally they are competing with Chinese EVs which are very compelling alternatives.

• aNoob7000 · 14 hours ago

  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.

  • ForHackernews · 13 hours ago

    Neuralink brain uploads! Preorder now for immortality!

  • sneak · 13 hours ago

    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.

    • oivey · 13 hours ago

      > 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.

      • FabHK · 12 hours ago

        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.

    • origini · 13 hours ago

      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.

    • aNoob7000 · 12 hours ago

      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.

      • sneak · 12 hours ago

        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.)

    • wildzzz · 11 hours ago

      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.

  • sobellian · 13 hours ago

    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.

  • inglor_cz · 11 hours ago

    "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.

• __MatrixMan__ · 13 hours ago

  Musk's companies are good at entering a stagnated industry and proving that it can work better if radically changed. But once the new concept is proved, they seem kinda spent, a pivot makes sense to me. 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.

• Zigurd · 13 hours ago

  It's not "crazy," it's flim flam. It's what Elizabeth Holmes would've look like had she bought a health tech firm before starting the Thernos scam so she could pump her stock to a P/E ratio over 300 instead of scamming naïve noob tech investors.

• yoyohello13 · 13 hours ago

  That roadster demo proved to me they are not serious about making EVs anymore. Strapping rockets to a car makes an interesting spectacle, but is utterly impractical for a real consumer vehicle.

  • ajay-b · 13 hours ago

    To be fair, I did not believe for a moment that this was a serious idea. Instead it looks a stunt to be performed, not a serous consumer feature. Surely? Such a feature would never pass FMVSS muster.

  • jeffnappi · 13 hours ago

    Truth. However it's pretty great marketing, fairly certain every car enthusiast on the planet has seen that demonstration. Eyeballs that likely can't be bought otherwise. The flying version will never be made for a human occupant, but if they do make a few they will be collectors items.

    • santoshalper · 13 hours ago

      The only thing a stunt like that is going to produce is either A. Nothing, or B. Billions more in losses.

    • origini · 13 hours ago

      I was actually surprised. My Fanboy friend did not mention it. It wasn't discussed at work either.

    • yoyohello13 · 13 hours ago

      The only thing that demo proved to me is that I will never buy a Tesla. I’m even in the market for a new car and I’d be interested in getting an EV. 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%.

    • grandpajoey · 13 hours ago

      Was it great marketing? Did it move the needle on sales? That’s what marketing is supposed to do. I see Musk do dumb stuff all the time and all it makes me think is “I will never buy a product from this scam artist”.

      • dzhiurgis · 8 hours ago

        Probably not good - if you are buying Roadster you'll never get flying model as thats for friends and family, despite car absolutely mogging everything else in the market.

      • fuzzythinker · 6 hours ago

        Maybe not the needle on sales, but the needle on stock valuation. The moment the company stops making dreams is the moment the stock start to fall down to a car company valuation.

      • rrrrrrrrrrrryan · 2 hours ago

        It was more of a recruiting video than consumer marketing. The whole thing was obviously geared toward 19 year old engineering students. "Come work for us and you could get to design rocket cars!"

    • Ekaros · 12 hours ago

      Jaguar also did extremely well spread marketing campaign. It is really questionable if it moves units. Same goes for this one. You might get notoriety but that doesn't always translate to sales. And I am pretty sure no one was unaware of Tesla at that point.

• londons_explore · 13 hours ago

  They have to move out of the EV business. Their shareholders have eyed up the big potential returns from optimus/cybercab/next-moonshot and valued the company sky high as a result. 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.

  • grandpajoey · 13 hours ago

    It’s pretty absurd to base such a high valuation on things that don’t exist. Not only do they not exist, they’ve missed every deadline put out by Musk for over a decade. This is where you put the CEO in prison in a functioning society.

• jknoepfler · 13 hours ago

  Why would Tesla pivoting seem strange? They've lost the global EV race, they've sabotaged their American market and they haven't done anything but weak publicity stunts in years. Their profits are tanking, their brand is toxic and their prospects are dim. That doesn't scream 'bright future' to me.

• gim89 · 13 hours ago

  > My gut feeling says they are trying to move out of the EV business as crazy as that may seem to us normals. 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.

• bilater · 12 hours ago

  It's no secret to anyone paying attention. The EV business is basically dead, and they're getting their asses kicked by Chinese competition. 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.

• zombocomvibes · 12 hours ago

  The odds of that acquisition actually happening dropped dramatically last week.

• rurban · 12 hours ago

  My gut feeling is that they won't selling any cars anywhere anymore because of their CEO. They can either shut it down already, or fire him.

Elon had an insane talent of finding the right people with wild moonshot ideas to run his companies while he was getting the credit and the limelight. 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.

• swiftcoder · 14 hours ago

  > 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.

  • MrBuddyCasino · 13 hours ago

    He personally co-designed S3.

    • swiftcoder · 13 hours ago

      My understanding (admittedly second-hand), is that he handed down the famous "malloc for the internet" requirement, and mostly left the team to their own devices past that point

Tesla is one china EV tariff away from bankruptcy

• jm4 · 13 hours ago

  So is at least half the US auto industry, if not all. Modern Chinese cars look great and you get a lot of bang for your buck. Even without CCP subsidies keeping prices low they would eat up other manufacturers if priced similarly.

• modeless · 12 hours ago

  The Model Y outsells every Chinese EV in China . It's every other US manufacturer who would be doomed if the China EV tariff went away. That's why the 100% tariff was imposed by Biden, not Trump.

  • zenexer · 10 hours ago

    Is that because Tesla is actually more popular, or because Tesla offers fewer options than, say, BYD? Who sells more cars in China: Tesla or BYD?

    • modeless · 9 hours ago

      Of course BYD sells more cars overall. The point is that the Model Y and Model 3 are competitive with BYD models even in their home market and would continue to sell even if BYD came to America.

      • bakies · 8 hours ago

        Byd has several models and several times the sales volume total. Having one Tesla option consolidates sales.

        • modeless · 6 hours ago

          ... this is the same point I was just replying to, and my answer is the same.

          • bakies · 4 hours ago

            The counter point is it's a tiny slice of market

            • modeless · 3 hours ago

              Now you're exaggerating. Tesla's 2025 revenue was 85% of BYD's. That's far from tiny.

              • bakies · 3 hours ago

                If you're including markets that byd isn't allowed in. They're over 3x revenue in all the markets that the companies compete

FSD that actually works and the massively popular in live markets robotaxi service are the obvious answer to “big-deal things that came after this CTO left” $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

• malfist · 14 hours ago

  So massively popular Tesla doesn't disclose how many rides it does?

• myvoiceismypass · 13 hours ago

  Your massively popular robotaxi is years behind Waymo. Years.

  • gre · 13 hours ago

    There are so many robotaxis in austin. Something like 300 waymos and 350 Teslas? I love waymo and wont step into a robotaxi, but people definitely are riding them.

• origini · 12 hours ago

  FSD is old and the promises too. Its not new its not whatever its just very slowly progressing to what was promised and it still doesn't show up as the big deal. 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!

  • l1tany11 · 11 hours ago

    They update it all the time. It’s not old, it’s new. Yes it finally is starting to achieve the promise of 10 years ago… and the market is recognizing it and they are calling out the subscription growth on the earnings calls. 67% yoy growth this year. 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.

    • origini · 9 hours ago

      What? Are you joking? You would pay $99 PER MONTH for the car to drive itself? What?

      • l1tany11 · 8 hours ago

        I’m not saying I would. I’m saying that 1.7 million subscribers currently do, and that number is growing rapidly. It’s also a big reason why people buy the cars. People legitimately talk about and consider it from a safety perspective. Drive to the ER, that kind of thing, as well as a luxury feature. 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.

        • origini · 8 hours ago

          Apparently its 870k the rest have bought it initally. 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.

Cybercab seems to have had a very promising start, metrics are good. This seems far more of a political hate piece than one based on any data.

• Levitating · 14 hours ago

  Isn't it completely overshadowed by Waymo? From what I've heard Waymo is more profitable and has substantially fewer accidents due to better technology.

  • strulovich · 14 hours ago

    If a few things work out for Tesla they can do overshadow Waymo very quickly. 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.

    • ben_w · 13 hours ago

      > If a few things work out for Tesla they can do overshadow Waymo very quickly. 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.

    • Zigurd · 13 hours ago

      Waymo's total is probably 5000 or fewer. But they operate 24/7. They are providing half a million commercial rides a week. 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/

  • ftchd · 14 hours ago

    There always gonna be both Pepsi and Cola.

    • grandpajoey · 13 hours ago

      Except I can go to the store and buy a Coke and a Pepsi. Musk’s vaporware doesn’t actually exist in the market.

      • ftchd · 13 hours ago

        Meh, not a Muskboi but it's public now, no invite needed. 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.

        • grandpajoey · 13 hours ago

          It’s not really comparable: 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.

          • ftchd · 12 hours ago

            I was responding to this: > Musk’s vaporware doesn’t actually exist in the market.

    • throw1234567891 · 13 hours ago

      You mean Coca-Cola. Pepsi Cola is a Cola from Pepsi.

      • ftchd · 13 hours ago

        lil yachty and drake clip Sugar water, whatever you want to call it, there's multiple providers.

    • Zigurd · 13 hours ago

      Tesla's taxi business isn't real. Waymo has been transparent about how their cars handle situations that require human intervention. Waymo's most important technology isn't superior sensors, it's the ability to be truly autonomous without continuous oversight, even when putting a human in the loop to make a decision. Humans never drive a Waymo remotely, because that's dangerous and stupid. Tesla won't say how their remote intervention works, but it's probably a sketchy as a Chinese Robo taxi but without the Chinese 5G network that actually is low latency.

  • DoesntMatter22 · 13 hours ago

    Waymo isn't profitable at all. It's a massive money loser. And in some cities Tesla is nearly at parity

  • mbajkowski · 13 hours ago

    Tesla has had a massive surge in cybercabs in Austin over the last few weeks. I would venture to say they have surpassed the number of Waymos over here. Don't have any numbers to back this up though. As for being profitable, it seems the cost of a cybercab should be much less than a Waymo.

    • amanaplanacanal · 13 hours ago

      They have a lot of cars registered, but how many are actually on the road? Does anybody know?

      • wilg · 13 hours ago

        About 250: https://robotaxitracker.com/cybercab . (Waymo has about 4000.)

        • mbajkowski · 13 hours ago

          Thanks for sharing this, nice data, the increase in sightings aligns with what I'm seeing in my area.

  • CrimsonRain · 13 hours ago

    Did you take a look at amount of money waymo is losing let alone profit? 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.

    • grandpajoey · 13 hours ago

      > Unsupervised robotaxi has lower (at fault) accidents than unsupervised waymo. Waymos exist and have for years. Whatever fabricated data Musk came up with here has no relation to reality.

    • pastel8739 · 13 hours ago

      Do either of them have _any_ at fault accidents?

    • fwipsy · 13 hours ago

      My non-existent robotaxi company has had zero accidents! We're better than tesla OR waymo!

  • simonsarris · 13 hours ago

    It may be the other way around if the pace in Austin is repeated elsewhere. Cybercab rides per week has already surpassed, Waymo, allegedly. https://x.com/KHerriage/status/2114902145627504719

  • schneems · 13 hours ago

    From the outside in this is how I see it (being in Austin which seems to be ground zero for a lot of the testing): 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.

    • computerdork · 12 hours ago

      Interesting overview. And on who will win, on one hand, as you said, Waymo's platform is better, and they just need to continue focusing on developing it cheaper. But on the other hand, Tesla has the volume in that you can already buy a car with FSD (although, we're talking about taxis, not consumer cars, but Tesla has assembly lines ready to produce 100k of taxis). Hmm, hard call... ... 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.

      • schneems · 3 hours ago

        Honestly, it's hard to say. > 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.

        • computerdork · 1 hour ago

          Yeah, agreed about Tesla's identity crisis. Tesla (and Elon) are really making a lot of mistakes in the past couple of years and at least regarding creating a great EV, they feel like they have lost their edge. They don't look as good as they did compared to what's currently out there and they don't seem to be innovating as much. Think Elon isn't interested enough in the type of cars normal people buy anymore, or changing the world with a low cost EV. 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.

• underseacables · 14 hours ago

  It was very strange, in the beginning people celebrated Tesla, they raved about it, the sales were great, but then as soon as the politics got involved, suddenly it's all turned negative.

  • MrBuddyCasino · 14 hours ago

    Almost as if journalists were paid partisan hacks.

    • lanstin · 13 hours ago

      The early Tesla fans are politically engaged woke people. Having to settle for new Leaf now but in some ways it’s nicer than Model 3. And more friendly to my kids networks of ethnically diverse trans and queer friends and partners. And less scary for the many immigrant communities in my neighborhood.

  • y0ssar1an · 13 hours ago

    Elon's cognitive decline from drug addiction affected both his business and political decision making. pre-ketamine Elon delivered the Falcon 9, Model 3/Y, and Starlink. post-ketamine Elon gave us Cybertruck, Starship (aka the SpaceX Cybertruck), and a bunch of fake products like the flying roadster, humanoid robots, and Cybercab.

  • analog31 · 13 hours ago

    This is a business lesson that most competent CEOs are intuitively aware of.

  • icegreentea2 · 13 hours ago

    "Politics got involved" from the beginning. In the context of USA politics, being an EV company while your CEO talked about how important electrification was to stave off the effects of human caused climate change is 100% a politically coded act. 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.

  • pessimizer · 12 hours ago

    Musk has been consistently vile the entire time, it's just that liberals always think they were always right, even when they had the opposite opinion five minutes ago and were advocating that people who have their current opinion be fired and arrested for treason. He must have changed they say. 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.

• jazzypants · 14 hours ago

  There are millions of Americans like me who will never step foot in one because of their association with Elon Musk. 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).

  • parineum · 13 hours ago

    > There are millions of Americans like me who will never step foot in one because of their association with Elon Musk. 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.

    • jazzypants · 13 hours ago

      Yeah, sure. That's why Tesla sales have fallen for two consecutive years ever since he exposed himself as a fascist. You keep telling yourself that, buddy.

  • losvedir · 13 hours ago

    Speaking as someone who follows the NFL, people will forgive all kinds of horrendous behavior if the player's team is winning. It's easy to say things in the abstract like "won't buy a Tesla" because most people aren't really shopping for a car all that often. But if the cybertaxi works and is cheap, then I would guess a lot of people won't be sticking to their proclaimed values. That said, I have my doubts that cybercab will really work all that well.

    • jazzypants · 13 hours ago

      I was a Cleveland Browns fans for literally my entire life until they signed Deshaun Watson. I watched every single game, but now I haven't watched a game in like four years. I was already concerned about the effects of CTE, but I couldn't go on cheering for a team that knowingly signed a rapist. You should surround yourself with people who are willing to stand up for their convictions.

  • geepytee · 11 hours ago

    Why do you hate so many people?

    • jazzypants · 9 hours ago

      Very few people actually, and they're mostly all billionaires. It's an interesting correlation.

• grandpajoey · 13 hours ago

  The Cybercab has not had a promising start. Years behind schedule, available nowhere and Musk has negative brand value. Another DOA Tesla scam.