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Comment by milchek | Hacker News Reader

This is a genuine question, because the discussion here is centered around cars, but is Tesla not just a car company? Aren’t they trying to position themselves in robotics? I figured that’s where the pricing comes from - a mix of people betting on cars + robotics, and an automated robotic workforce + AI being the future of industrial and maybe even retail labour?

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Why would a robotics company justify higher valuations? Isn’t that going to be a capital intensive, low margin race to the bottom like cars?

Seems like only pure software businesses (which are extremely capital light and often come with network or lock in effects) can justify the really crazy valuations.

Thinking of it, is there anything Tesla is involved in that isn't in the end capital intensive needing to build actual things with possible competition driving margins down?

Hell, even robotaxis will have price pressure if market affords say 3 or 4 players. Not many will pay double compared to competition.

The robotaxi evaluation only made sense when they claimed to be years ahead of competitors. A robotaxi service operating in a regular taxi market could have large margins. But Waymo is already operating, any Tesla robotaxi company is going to compete away all the margin with Waymo.

As I understand it, Waymo is restricted to areas that it has mapped extremely well, i.e. major cities.

Which also happens to be where most of the money would be, so it's probably a good bet. Tesla seems to be hoping to displace Uber in the suburbs, while being an also-ran against Waymo in the denser downtowns. That includes ferrying a fair number of people into and out of cities, where Waymo can't (currently) go.

That's probably not as lucrative as Waymo's core market, but it could have some decent margins.

I think a big part of the valuation is self driving. If (and that's a big if) they would get it right, they could have cheaper taxi services than e.g. Uber ($200B market cap), without paying for drivers. And if self driving would work in consumer cars, profits from subscriptions could be big.

I'd like to remind readers of "nuclear fusion", and how it became a meme for parting idiots with money...repeatedly.

If you think cars + robots is the future, Boston Dynamics is owned by Hyundai these days. (That was a ~$1 billion valuation 5 years ago.) Watch some of their videos. None of them feature a guy in a leotard doing the robot.

Are they a car company? A software company? An AI company? A robotics company? They seem to switch identies a lot and it makes them come across to me as a jack of all trades.

I was told their from selling "carbon forgiveness/tax" to other ICE company is higher than their revenue from selling cars

That was true for a few years but now it's about a fifth of their revenue.

It can be all of that, and be a meme stock on top of that.

Well cars are what they sell, so I think that's a reasonable way to regard the company. All the other stuff doesn't have much substance behind it.

They’re a battery company as much as a car company.

Is being battery company any better than being car company? You still have competition and are capital intensive and customers choose based on value. Probably even more so than with cars as products are not always on show.

Being a battery company also seems to put you at significantly more risk of having your lunch eaten by Chinese manufacturers than being a car company would. Although exclusively being an electric car company probably increases that risk too.

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