"Take a moment and think about why are they doing this event now. Elon is setting a stage for a capital raise, he's pitching the autonomy narrative after the Model 3 cash cow narrative failed. They're trying to convince investors (and customers) to give them money because money-printing autonomous taxi service is coming next year."
It is probably because they can't
They get money now and keep the car for use as a robo-taxi.
And if they do reach fully self-driving first - and someone will have to lead the way and prove it enough for regulators to allow them on the roads - then they'll have everything else already in place to relatively speaking own/efficiently capture a large portion of the market.
- They were horribly late in delivering the car (and now claim they are going to have fully autonomous taxis by next year when they couldn't even deliver on a basic car on time)
- They can't make the $35k car they promised without losing money
- They have exhausted the market of people that will pay 50k for an electric car knowing the fuel savings will never make up for the premium so they have excess inventory
- They now are low on cash, high on inventory so they make up this moonshot story to get people to invest in them again. Simply saying they are doing standard leases would be too honest.
The day is going to come soon where the amount of people that believe the hype will dwindle and the debt will pile up even more where there is a liquidity crisis. It is essentially a legal pyramid scheme. I have to hand it to them though being able to convince a good amount of people that their leasing is actually ensuring a future supply of robo taxis is impressive. One day people will laugh at the outrageousness of that.
If Tesla was aiming to be the size of Porsche (not VAG) or Lamborghini it’d be something.
But the same “conversion” rates from young person wanting a dream car to old person affording dream car apply regardless of if it’s an EV or a ICE, because the limiting factor is money.
So “stealing” the kind of volume that Porsche and Lamborghini get from... daydreaming young people, isn’t worth anything in the long run if you’re talking about keeping up Tesla’s 40B dollar market cap
Reminds me a tiny tiny bit about rpis. They were said to be a little smaller and a little cheaper. But truth is, you have a lot more chance getting a rpi+options at 50$ than a 10$ rpi w.
That said, the momentum is so huge, it doesn't matter anymore.. maybe this will apply too ?
It's not "their plan," it's just an additional way to bring in cash. If the cars can't be robo-taxis in three years, they'll let lessees buy them out or sell the cars used.
Are there any municipalities that have already passed regulations allowing driverless cars on the roads? Are any already working the regulations through the process? If the answer is no to both of those, there is no way autonomous taxis happens next year.
Having "autopilots" crash while drivers are in the car also does not help the case.
https://www.theguardian.com/cities/video/2019/mar/09/waymo-t...
Initial trials will probably include humans if required to avoid needing laws passed (as I think Waymo is doing), I don't really see that as a huge obstacle, and once the human-supervised models can prove they are safe, it'll be easy enough to change regulations if required.
I imagine Musk has had discussions with a few and felt emboldened to make his statement by that. Of course he constantly exaggerates, the projections of possible profit for owners were not realistic (at least in the next decade), and his timelines are about 2x faster than real life, so I'd be surprised if they have more than a small trial next year for this.
If I come to you asking for $1 billion in funding. I don't tell you about the boring, low growth, probable outcome. I tell you about the exciting, new, unexplored potential market just waiting to be tapped.
But no, self driving taxis aren't just around the corner.
Whether it works? I don't know, the stock rose on the news which would suggest some people are convinced.
Whether your view of a company is positive or negative, you can put your money where your mouth is.
Tesla does not have that kind of advantage over established carmakers.
[1] https://youtu.be/Ucp0TTmvqOE?t=13330