Tesla ending Models S and X production
cnbc.com
cnbc.com
It’s inevitable, the only question is how many years until it happens: 2, 5, 10, 50?
Place your bets!
But I toured an auto assembly plant of a major US OEM recently and there were a ton of humans on the line.
Unions will be an issue, but all the OEMs are walking dead anyway.
Robots are great at the bulk movement required for sticking sheet metal into huge stamps as well as repeatably welding the output of these stamps together. Early paint stages happens by dipping this whole chassis and later obviously benefits highly from environmental control (paint section is usually certain staff only to enter.)
But with this big painted chassis you still need to mount the engine/transmission, the brake and suspension assembly needs installing, lots of connectors need plugging in for ABS- and supporting all the connectors that will need plugging in is a lot of cabling that needs routing around this chassis. These tasks are very difficult for robots to do, so they tend to be people with mechanical assists, e.g. special hoisting system that takes the weight of engine/trans while the operators (usually two on a stage like this, this all happens on a rolling assembly line) drag it into place, and do the bolting.
Trim line is also huge, insert all these floppy roof liners, install the squishy plastic dashboard, the seats, carpets, door plastic trim, plug in all your speakers and infotainment stuff, again the output of the automated stages is literally the shell of a car, and robots are extremely bad at doing precise clipping together of soft touch plastics or connection of tiny cables. Windshield install happens here too, again these things are mechanically assisted for worker ergonomics but far from automated.
Each of these subassemblies also can be very complex and require lots of manual work too but that usually happens at OEM factories not at the assembly factory. Automation in these staffed areas mostly is the AGVs which follow lines on the floor to automatically deliver kanban boxes which are QR tagged (the origin of the QR code, fun fact) to ensure JIT delivery of the parts needed for each pitch.
It is far from lights out even in the most modern assembly plant and I think it will be a long time until that is true. The amount of poka-yoking that goes into things like connector design so there is an audible "click" when something is properly inserted for example- making a robot able to perform that task at anywhere near the quality of even a young child will take vast amounts of advancement in artificial intelligence and sensing. These are not particularly skilled jobs but the robotics skill required is an order of magnitude more than we can accomplish with today's technology.
Automation is really good at assembly of stiff, solid objects. Anything soft and flexible seems too error prone. See also: the garment industry.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MCBdcNA_FsI
china dark factory
As far as I can tell, the number of humanoid robots doing anything productive is zero. It's all demos.
This is far harder than self-driving. As a guy from Waymo once said in a talk, "the output is only two numbers" (speed and steering angle).
Also, there are at least 18 humanoid robots good enough to have a Youtube video. Tesla is not the leader.
Remember the "cobot" boom of about five years ago? Easy to train and use industrial robots safe around humans? Anybody?
I'm not saying this is impossible, but that it's too early for volume production. This will probably take as long as it took to get to real robotaxis.
Agreed, thing is the robot hardware isn't the hard part anymore, the top ten robots are all sufficient to be transformative if they had good enough AI.
My bet is on Google/Gemini being the first to market from what I've seen so far.
Boston dynamics is a leader in getting robots to do useful niche work in well bounded environments, but that's yesterday's news.
BD did most of their locomotion using classical dynamics and control theory until a few years ago. So did Honda, with Asimo. I did some of that in 1994.[1]
Early thinking revolved around landing on the "zero moment point". There's a landing point which, if hit, maintains speed and balance. To speed up, you aim for slightly beyond that point; to slow down, aim for a nearer point. That was Asimo. You could push that concept to the level of BD's "Big Dog", and later, their smaller dogs. Even pre-calculated flips were possible. But that approach gets you rather clunky motion.
The next step was to use some machine learning to tweak the control system parameters. That works, but you don't get overall coordination of all the joints. That only started to appear as machine learning systems became powerful enough to take on the whole problem at once.
Hard problem. Took over three decades to get decent humanoid control. Now everybody is doing it. You can be too early.
It sounds like this would be giving ~5% of the factory space to Optimus production, which seems reasonable.
The word "just" is doing a lot of work there. Going by that logic: We "just" need to figure out cold fusion to have effectively infinite energy. We "just" need to develop warp drives to travel across the galaxy. We "just" need to figure out the chemo problem to cure cancer.
"Since we failed on self-driving since 2016, robotaxis since 2020 (1 million on the road), and ASI since 2023, we might as well start on failing on robots now".
> MUSK: Yeah. But I think self-driving cars is essentially a solved problem at this point, right? And Tesla’s rolled out a sort of robo-taxi service in a few cities, and will be very, very widespread by the end of this year within the U.S. And then we hope to get supervised full self-driving approval in Europe, hopefully next month.
^Sociopathic rich, I mean. I'm sure you're doing fine.
It's not that I'm surprised that they constantly lie, I'm just surprised anyone falls for it. Like, we were supposed to have "full self driving by next year", every year as far back as 2018, if I remember correctly. You'd think after the third time that FSD didn't happen, people would say "maybe this guy is actually full of shit".
[1] https://blog.tombert.com/Posts/Personal/2026/01-January/What...
He said that would happen in 2025. And probably earlier, too.
Elon's stuck with this 12-year-old-boy absurdity about "becoming interplanetary to save the species" as if Mars could ever be a practical lifeboat when we inevitably drive the planet into the ground or a meteor hits. It's... absurd, puerile fantasy.
Even if I do think it's worth exploring space, including Mars, I think it's silly to assume that it's going to be a way to guarantee the permanence of humanity.
If he had, he was clearly not paying attention to the social and economic message of the book.
Mars isn't happening, at least not on his watch.
The concept is that you can convince smart people to work extra hard for you by selling them the story that no-no-no, they’re not merely tweaking some dystopian algorithm to sell Chinese plastic crap to people, they’re saving the world.
Once you recognise this pattern, you’ll see it everywhere: Zuckerberg, Sam Altman, and Elon all do it.
Hence the “AI safety” rhetoric. Those CEOs will gladly take the safeties off and make an army of Terminators to sell to the highest bidder! The safety talk is for their employees, to convince them to work like slaves to “save the world”.
They do believe in a post capitalism utopia, they just think only about a thousand people need to enjoy it.
> There are acres and acres of machines, and here and there you will find a worker standing at a master switchboard, just watching, green and yellow lights blinking off and on, which tell the worker what is happening in the machine.
> One of the management people, with a slightly gleeful tone in his voice said to me, “How are you going to collect union dues from all these machines?”
> And I replied, “You know, that is not what’s bothering me. I’m troubled by the problem of how to sell automobiles to these machines
- Walter Reuther, Nov. 1956 https://quoteinvestigator.com/2011/11/16/robots-buy-cars
But I recommend listening to those calls, start 5 years back; because on reddit but also here, you get wide eyed awestruck people who say 'ow optimus is december this year! ow self driving everything in september!'.
A large amount of the people I see in grocery store around me are working as pickers filling online orders.
Why would musk love to identify (or at a minimum, but a huge chilling effect on) labor board whistleblowers? The world may never know.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46734078
The Trump administration admits even more ways DOGE accessed sensitive personal data - https://www.npr.org/2026/01/23/nx-s1-5684185/doge-data-socia... - January 23rd, 2026
Case No. 1:25-cv-00596-ELH - https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.mdd.577...
> The unnamed employees secretly conferred with a political advocacy group about a request to match Social Security data with state voter rolls to "find evidence of voter fraud and to overturn election results in certain States," the filing said. It remains unclear whether any data actually went to this group.
“Maybe you do not care much about the future of the Republican Party. You should. Conservatives will always be with us. If conservatives become convinced that they can not win democratically, they will not abandon conservatism. The will reject democracy.” —- David Frum
How else was he going to become wealthy? Wealth is unelected power. Show me evidence he’s after anything but power.
> Also I was told there is no voter fraud. Is that just because nobody’s looking?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electoral_fraud_in_the_United_...
https://www.npr.org/2024/10/11/nx-s1-5147732/voter-fraud-exp...
https://www.brennancenter.org/topics/voting-elections/vote-s...
https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/debu...
There is no material voter fraud. It is a red herring to disenfranchise voters.
The Georgia voter data is clean - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46856850 - February 2026
I was told you haven't raped anyone, is that because we haven't looked into it?
Unless there's evidence that something happened when decisions need to be made we assume it didn't.
It's so sad an engineer like you believe there was widespread fraud in the 2020 election even after all the investigations. It speaks volumes to your abilities in all aspects of life.
What you responded to was a quote of a request that claimed that was what they were looking for. Whether it was a good-faith request or they used the data for only that, etc is the real question.
And if they did find something, it would obviously have been in court a long time ago.
Musk reeks of scam. But for a stock pump and dumb scheme there sure are a lot of teslas on the road.
Tesla’s current market cap is $1.43T. Toyota’s current market cap is $354B.
There really aren’t that many teslas on the road, and their sales are declining.
The stock is priced on expectations of how many humanoid robots they might sell over the next decade.
Those expectations in turn treat humanoid robotics as if Tesla is the only game in town, when Tesla's Optimus is not yet available for purchase and other companies already ship.
Then someone brings up the value of Tesla's AI to those robots, and here's my response to that to save re-writing it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46799603
A product no one knows if there is a real demand for promised to be made by a company that has no core competency in robotics
But hey let's just value this BS in the trillions because why not. Sam Altman's ChatGPT is not far behind
ChatGPT, for all its flaws, does actually exist and definitely isn't just a remote-control-based illusion, and some people even pay for it.
Optimus, the only thing we can be sure is real is the hardware, which is the least interesting part. But even if they really are running just on software without remote control, the one and only thing they've shown in any public demo that would actually be impressive, was voice comprehension in a noisy environment.
because why not???? at least Grok is real and we are years away from real "Skynet"
SpaceX for weapon delivery, xAI for the brain and Tesla for robot chasing
[1] https://www.roadandtrack.com/news/a62919131/tesla-has-highes...
“The models on this list likely reflect a combination of driver behavior and driving conditions, leading to increased crashes and fatalities.”
I would like to remind you that Tesla's least powered vehicle has around 300HP and needs ~7s to go from 0 to 100km/h. Musk is a moron but Teslas are still good and safe vehicles.
Besides EVs, Tesla's long term revenue could very well be in the supercharger network, too. It's not as exciting as self driving cars, but the oil companies have been the most valuable companies / stocks worldwide without being exciting like that. I mean I don't think EV charging will be anywhere near as big as oil because it doesn't involve nearly as much infrastructure or international trade, but it's still big, especially if governments refocus on replacing ICEs with EVs.
(the focus has been let go because the subsidies were too popular and expensive)
Not sure it's going to work out. Without some big jumps in battery tech, EVs are going to be difficult to sell without subsidies.
This despite the 2025 support by the Chinese state for the Chines EV industry now being almost nothing.
By contrast, defenders of China could point out that the data show that subsidies as a percentage of total sales have declined substantially, from over 40% in the early years to only 11.5% in 2023, which reflects a pattern in line with heavier support for infant industries, then a gradual reduction as they mature.
In addition, they could note that the average support per vehicle has fallen from $13,860 in 2018 to just under $4,600 in 2023, which is less than the $7,500 credit that goes to buyers of qualifying vehicles as part of the U.S.’s Inflation Reduction Act.
but the arc of less subsidies is clear.
Perhaps "support" already factors in all relevant subsidies.
https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2024/10/human-rights-...
BYD is at the bottom of the list (worst for human rights). Tesla is second at the top (better for human rights).
Thank you for the suggestion.
I should point out that is not my work, and dates from 2023. If you follow the link to the work quoted you might be able to contact the authors and pass them your thoughts.
Lack of worker safety standards can be considered to be a government subsidy when doing a comparison.
Therefore, it's reasonable to point out that it should be factored in.
Now, I'm not going to tell you what _you_ should do, nor would I even tell you what I think you should do.
I'll leave that to @thesmtsolver2 and others who enjoy that type of thing.
Meanwhile how do you factoring in PRC manufacturing is simply more modern with more labour saving automation, i.e. they simply have less people to "abuse". PRC simply be peak human rights by eliminating the most humans from process.
Tesla’s doesn’t really have a complex strategy at this point, they are getting squeezed out of the high end by legacy automakers where their lower cost batteries don’t matter as much. They are absolutely fucked on the low end as soon as Chinese cars enter the picture.
So self driving is really the only option to sell any long term upside to keep the stock from tanking. It’s not a very convincing argument, but you play the hand your dealt.
The deep irony here is that after ~15 years of trying ti differentiate from the legacy American automakers, they land in a very similar competitive position. Chinese EVs are in the process of running the table outside the protectionist markets of the EU + US/Canada.
Eventually those protective barriers will fall as they protect a relatively small number of citizens by taxing the majority. It remains to be seen whether the US and European domestic producers will survive.
They successfully launched their second model, the gravity, which would have competed with the X but will now likely just outright replace it.
Their mass produced $50k SUV is expected to launch this year.
Porsche, Audi, BMW, Mercedes-Benz, Genesis, and Cadillac are all competitive in different ways. Stat wise someone buying the electric G-Wagon is making a poor decision, but swagger is a selling point which very much costs Tesla sales.
Cadillac’s approach of a huge dumb battery powering a huge heavy vehicle may not be ideal for the average use case, but customers are going to prioritize different things. One SUV just can’t be the best solution to every lifestyle.
So the literal opposite of the Cybertruck, which was released less than a year ago.
Why hasn't the cheap car been designed yet then?
In Europe we can get new cars for less than half that price, both for domestic production and also post-tariffs on Chinese imports.
Or, on the contrary, a sign that something went right. If Europeans weren't drowning in poverty, they would also buy more expensive cars.
How come the US has a higher rate of struggling with groceries (12.2% US vs 8.5% EU), healthcare (44% US vs. 18.6% for costs) EU, education costs, etc.?
> they would also buy more expensive cars.
Price != quality. European cars have better safety standards, as well as being cheaper to own and run. American cars… the vibe I got from them on trips was the expectation for them to serve as an additional air-conditioned entertainment room that just happened to be on wheels, whereas the European ones are mostly a mode of transport unless you're specifically into luxury brands.
Reliability of statistical data. The more totalitarian a state is, the more out of touch with reality it can be in its statistics. If we look at the statistics provided by North Korea, they have zero on all the points mentioned. Europe isn't there yet, but it's moving at full speed. Their cars even safer and cheaper to own and run than European ones.
That's more of an American problem than an EU one at the moment.
We're not the ones shooting unarmed protesters in the head ten times after removing their legally owned gun, nor faking arrest photos, etc.
Even before that, our leaders have not* called for the death penalty to be used against politicians reminding troops of their existing obligations to not follow illegal orders.
Even before that, the US government shutdown at end of last year means some economic data was never collected at all.
Even before that, DOGE having Musk at the helm had obvious conflicts of interest with regards to e.g. ongoing investigations against Tesla.
* to my knowledge, but TBH wouldn't be surprised if Orban has, but also Hungary is to the EU as, IDK Wyoming perhaps, is to the USA.
To be fair, can you even "open carry" a firearm anywhere in Europe? Isn't the UK trying to ban pointy kitchen knives[1]?
[1] https://www.msn.com/en-us/crime/general/uk-considering-point...
(The permit requirements differ a lot between countries, but that an implementation detail, you should not be killed while respecting the law)
Still, UK does have a firearms licensing process; I doubt anyone at any protest would be allowed one, but the response of UK police only escalates to "pin to ground then shoot in head" when they've mistaken you for a suicide bomber wearing an explosive vest and expect you to blow yourself up in a crowded subway train (which has happened! I don't excuse this! But this is still less stupid than claiming someone is armed after removing their weapon).
I mean, compare the median wages of factory workers in Europe and in the US and the amount of taxes they pay to support gangs of alien rapists.
Because while Russia is indeed within the continent of Europe, counting it in this context is about as sensible as calling Venezuela and El Salvador "American" just because of the continent they happen to be part of.
If you didn't mean Russia, I have no idea what fiction you're reading.
Not that any of this justifies American cars being overpriced, having no real low-end options. You're way more car-centric than we are, lots of you need cars, whereas many more of us are fine without any, so you having no cheap (new) options is more surprising.
Right?
The actual sales figures show otherwise, but sure, there's still a lot of uncertainty with regards to batteries / range, I can imagine even moreso in the US. Traveled to Austria a while ago in an EV (~1000 kilometers), we had to stop 3x on the way, but the battery was good for another 2.5 hours of driving after a coffee. I keep hearing that "solid state batteries are around the corner" and they will solve all problems with capacity and safety / fire risk, apparently. I'll just sit and wait patiently, it'll take years before their production capacity is on par with current battery tech.
For an EV with a range of 250 miles (400km) you can drive 400mi (645km) with one (1) thirty minute stop.
That's pretty much, drive 3 hours, stop for 30 minute lunch, drive 3 hours.
The confusion stems from the fact that gas cars don't fill up themselves before you depart, and they don't fill up themselves when you arrive. There are rather large differences between gas and electric cars, but people still treat EVs like gas cars, and demand EVs be more like gas cars.
The EPA tests at 55MPH, and driving faster than that will yield a lower range, so each 200 mile leg should take closer to 4 hours.
Of course, that doesn't mean they had to discontinue those lines.
Maybe the wisdom of having a 'full lineup' is wrong and has to do with making dealers happy.
On the other hand, having 99% of your sales be 2 very similar vehicles seems questionable strategy.
So when I hear they're cancelling the S and X I can't even picture which cars we're talking about.
You wouldn't mistake Mercedes S-Class for E-class and E-class for C-class. Even BMW 7 vs. 5 vs. 3 look more distinct than Tesla S vs. 3 and X vs. Y. The Mercedes and BMW do the good job of market differentiation while in my view Tesla failed here, and thus cheaper 3 and Y cannibalized sales of S and X. Thus, paradoxically, given that Tesla started in luxury segment, Tesla hasn't recently been capturing that high margin of the luxury segment (which is doing very well overall - just look at those Maybach and AMG numbers)
They have not proven they are waymo level or near it, or that they will ever be there given the lack of lidar.
Uber, the globally available taxi company, is valued 8 times less than tesla. If you are now able to kill all the costs for the taxi driving and reduce the cost for the car also, how much revenue is left?
Robotaxi has to be cheaper than a normal taxi to kill taxis. The margin of that company can't be that much more than a company like uber.
And uber itself will also invest in this, as every other car company. XPeng and co everyone who is building or working on this, will not just idly looking and waiting for tesla to just take 'whatever this cake' will look like.
For me it becomes a complet game changer if it becomes so reliable so extrem reliable, that i can order a car at night, a fresh bed / couch is then in the car and i can lie down while it drives me a few hundred kilometers away.
This just isn't true. If you're a woman, choosing a slightly more expensive robotaxi over a ride share where you might meet your end is a valid choice.
And woman have used taxis plenty of times especially because or for security. So I don't think your argument is very strong.
https://www.wctv.tv/2026/01/14/rideshare-driver-arrested-aft...
https://www.wkrn.com/news/local-news/nashville/woman-shares-...
... plus 24/7 shifts of human drivers
I'm not sure that's true. Self serve checkouts are killing the checkout. Washing machines killed the washing board. Something can be the same price or dearer if it's more convenient.
Are you sure? They are great for reducing personnel cost for the shop operator, but a cashier scans so much faster than you do. If you want to optimize for speed, the human cashier would still be better.
They may already work better than a Waymo. It's hard to tell. It's certainly there using the public version of FSD. There's awkwardness, but the same can be said of Waymo. What I don't know is how many mandatory edge cases remain to be handled before they can set it free.
So yes, there's a surprising contingent of people who commute to work every single working day using hire cars.
This is information that suggests that Uber does not compete with public transit
I think my grandma could easily afford this, but there would have been others considering dragging the shopping onto the bus.
The point is taxis supplement and can replace public transport for low-income or unable-to-drive people in some situations — not necessarily every day.
Typically this word means that the product or service broadly serves same market in some way that overlaps. It isn't typically used so narrowly to imply that the products/services are directly replaceable in all ways.
It's possible they'll be even cheaper but that range is the cost according to the IRS of operating a typical vehicle all in, and that seems like a reasonable guess of the cost of an autonomous electric vehicle with far lower probability of crash than a human (all the savings basically going to profit margin).
At ~60¢/mi, there'd be a lot of people who would save money on balance using autonomous taxis to get everywhere vs owning a private vehicle (10k mi/yr would cost only ~$6k/yr, a pretty low cost of ownership/use for a private vehicle).
But I calculated traveling 2 times a week, of course at the commute time everyone else commutes and public transport costs 50 Euros per month.
My company car though costs 200 Euros + 100 Euros energy.
Im pretty sure cybertaxi can't and will not provide 40 cents / mi in high demand times, for middle class paying more mone for the convinince of having your own car is still cheap and if i need to do anything further away like any trip, it will be expensive again.
And all of these cybertaxis have to live somewere.
The math doesn't make sense already.
So even if prices plunge, thus encouraging people to take more self driving cabs vs other things because of the fixed road size you immediately induce severe traffic, which discourages people and sets a ceiling on adoption as people pick more efficient alternatives.
As others have said, they definitely compete in the same market.
Waymo is already there, just needs to scale and they are already cooperating with Uber.
>public transit
Unless Musk develops the shrink ray it will never compete with actual high throughput public transit, for the same reason if jets flew themselves we wouldn't commute by air. The cost of drivers per fare is less than in a private car, so the benefits for a bus are lesser. Modern metros are already autonomous.
Uber makes money on every ride.
Teslas Robotaxi has to be cheaper than a taxi with a human and i don't think they will be able to have a lot higher revenue per ride than uber. Not 9x
And if Tesla starts to deliver a robotaxi, all of this revenue has to be shared between taxis, uber, Tesla, Waimo, Zoox, Rimac, Cruise, Baidu, WeRide, ...
So how huge is the market for Tesla to be valuated 9x higher than Uber?
We can even combine a big car company, a robotics company, a solar roof company, battery storage company, ETruck and a robotaxi company and STILL don't get to the same valuation than Tesla currently has.
Teslas share price is math for stupid people.
Why would Tesla need to have higher revenue per ride than Uber? The value of a company is driven (ultimately) by its profit, not its revenue. And Tesla doesn't have to give the majority of the fare to the driver.
Higher costs means higher revenue is necessary to break even. It's basic math. Don't even need to get to first order principles.
And, also, Tesla car owners will be able to use their POVs as part of the Robotaxi network, for which Tesla will get a cut of the fare.
There is only a "small" issue - to make those robotaxis, i.e. the self-driving system for them. Almost 20 years in, Google/Waymo is way ahead of everybody and is still not there yet (i believe we will get there anyday now - which maybe next year or in 10 years - especially giving all the avalanche of investment in AI. Though i'd have expected that 4+ years in we'd see a lot of autonomous platforms/weapons in Ukraine, yet it hasn't happen too yet)
Currently an Uber driver can drive at any given moment only one car for Uber. With robocars, a driver can invest in 2, 3 or more robocars and send them to work for Uber. Similar to how people buy multiple properties to rent out on AirBnB.
Amazon is looking to replace 600k employees over the next decade.
Why do you believe demand for humanoids isn't high?
Demand for Tesla products is tanking.
Demand for humanoid robots not made by Tesla may rocket. Who knows.
The Chinese are massively out-manufacturing Tesla in the electric car market - would you bet on Tesla somehow being better than the Chinese at manufacturing?
The rest as I said is software; given Tesla's consistent lack of success in "Full Self-Driving", would you bet on them outengineering the rest of the world in the software aspect of robotics?
And this is about industrial robots, which is much easier to handle than what household robots supposed to be about. Will we ever see a robot that will be able to take grandma to the tub and clean here, to then carry her up the stairs to bed, without killing her? I doubt it.
And finally: Boston Dynamics has actual working products for ages now. They don't need to cheat by using RC toy remote controllers to control their robots. And they are doing serious expectation management. This is completely different league than what Musk is doing.
Also, I don't think it's desirable to have robots taking away human work without first solving the question "and what are we going to do with all the unemployed?".
and oddly enough, while i kneejerk hated it at first, the design has grown on me, something genuinely different, playful. much rather see a parked cybertruck than yet another oversized bloated "regular" truck.
Really? I tend to see much more aggressive acceleration from people in electric cars (including myself when I'm driving, though I try not to). I've been putting it down to people being used to how gas cars seem to be working harder when you ask them to accelerate heavily, while electric just goes with no complaints.
But not like that.
(Also, the problem is "Americans love trucks"—the Cybertruck doesn't solve that. It's still just a lethal grocery-getter in suburbia where the Cybertruck was only going to sell anyway. I'd sooner get behind the new golf-cart craze in suburbia—let them drive their golf carts to Costco.)
It's just not a good truck.
It's also suffered from being insanely overhyped, and then underdelivering on basically every front.
---
Part of my problem with modern Tesla is that they seem to have really jumped the shark on delivering products that are functional. Across the board - from autonomous driving, solar roofs, power walls, Cybertruck, Semi, etc... Even the mass manufactured lines like the Y get staggeringly bad reliability ratings and reviews.
Good form is great! Good form at the expense of good function is not.
If you drive a truck because you need a truck, then Cybertrucks don't really work.
That being said, I think a lot of people are in the first category.
The second category people have things that can be fit in a normal truck, but not a Cybertruck.
IIRC, the fully-electric F150 Lighting was canceled due to poor sales, and its sales were better than the Cybertruck's.
For many people, the very term EV itself is still ubiquitous to Tesla.
And somehow Tesla is still worth more than every other non-Chinese automaker combined. $1.5T.
GM? $80B. Stellantis? $40B. Toyota? $280B. Mercedes-Benz? $60B. BMW? $55B. Volkswagen Group? Also $55B.
I’m sure I’ve missed plenty of others, but I could miss some 18 $50B automakers, and Tesla would still be worth more than all of them combined.
If Tesla was valued fairly, it would probably be at the tune of $5B. But I’ll never bet against it, because the markets can remain irrational for longer than I can remain solvent. And for some unbeknownst to me reason, the markets value Tesla as a hot tech company, not a 3rd rate automaker, which is what it actually is.
And to add insult to injury, even GM Super Cruise is widely renowned as better and safer than Tesla’s current “FSD”.
You've explained yourself why it would be untenable for Musk to pursue becoming the biggest car manufacturer in the world - if he succeeded in that goal... he would have succeded in shrinking the value of the company significantly.
It's pure logic that Tesla has to pursue bets that would justify billion dollar valuations and being a car company isn't that.
Has Optimus signed up for any sports yet: https://edition.cnn.com/2026/01/02/china/china-humanoid-robo...
Is Optimus close to what Boston Dynamics is doing with Atlas: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YIhzUnvi7Fw
It really isn't. (1)
Also, what's the first billion dollar market for humanoid robots? Industry? "lights-out manufacturing" exists already, and doesn't require humanoid robots.
Hyundai and BYD (among others) say they're going to put humanoid robots in their factories (2). They won't be Tesla robots. Is this really such a huge use?
1)https://www.topgear.com/car-news/tech/here-are-nine-humanoid...
Finally, I know lots of people who own cars, but none who own robots. Many friends will not have Alexa in their homes due to privacy concerns. How many people will trust Elon to have a robot in their homes and assume he's being benign and safe with your personal data?
But it's make-believe. Tesla is a car manufacturer. They haven't shipped anything else other than cars. And they even suck at making cars these days. Tesla Semi? All but dead. The new roadster? Also dead. Full Self Driving? Doesn't exist. Robotaxis? Even if they got them to work, at this point the brand is too toxic for widespread adoption of those.
They could have persisted at being a disruptive car manufacturer and still held a several hundred billion dollar valuation. Now they are a very mediocre car manufacturer, with their only actual success being conning everyone into believing that they are a bleeding-edge tech company so their $1.5Bn valuation seems justified.
> Tesla Semi?All but dead.
They’ve been running a pilot all this time, and the factory in Nevada to mass produce them is on schedule. Production ramp is second half of this year. The factory is ginormous.
> The new roadster? Also dead.
Elon said yesterday the unveil is in April “hopefully”
> Full Self Driving? Doesn't exist. Robotaxis?
Cars are driving passengers around Austin now with nobody in either front seat.
It takes automakers almost a decade to bring a new vehicle online, Elon just does it all publicly while everyone else doesn’t take the wraps off until the final 6 months.
Obviously everything is way behind elons hype timelines, but I do still think it’s all coming.
So did Nikola.
Elon said yesterday the unveil is in April “hopefully”
Who could possibly argue with that.
Obviously everything is way behind elons hype timelines, but I do still think it’s all coming.
At least you've identified it for what it is.
I think comparisons to Nikola are not very even.
I'm aiming for being better looking and having more hair. Elon and I are even right now.
Unless the reporting was wrong, they've moved the supervisor to a chase car. The hobo-taxi still isn't operating on its own.
This is a good example of Tesla being sketchy: https://electrek.co/2026/01/28/teslas-unsupervised-robotaxis...
Musk made the announcement before earnings, put a few cars on the road, and now has pulled them all back because the earnings report is out.
This is a little more than doing it publicly - remember, Musk has been saying FSD will be functional every year for more than a decade.
Lambert claims David Moss couldn't find a Robotaxi ride without a safety driver. True enough, there aren't a lot of them on the road. That doesn't mean they don't exist or were "pulled back."
Here's Moss's latest tweet on the subject: "ANOTHER UNSUPERVISED:
2 in a row now here in Austin, TX of Tesla Robotaxi’s completely autonomous without chase cars.
You can see 2 cars in the clip with no one in it & anyone can book it!
Ride 59 complete." https://x.com/DavidMoss/status/2016939137031381487
Note also in that SAME ARTICLE, Lambert credits Moss with driving 10,000 miles on FSD v14 with zero interventions.
To paraphrase William Gibson: full self-driving is here, it's just unevenly distributed.
Aren’t model Y and model 3 considered the best cars in their class by most motor journalists?
Internationally, BYD destroys it.
Range: 429km
Price: $70,116 AUD
Performance: 0-100 5.1s
Tesla model 3:
Range: 520km
Price: $59,979 AUD
Performance: 0-100 6.1s
It's pretty hard to argue like for like here. I've driven the Ioniq before and it's fine, but it looks and feels like a 2015 Mazda inside.
BYD is worse in every category, I have no idea what you're talking about.
As a computer? Not many to be honest. Dog Mode is an afternoon project for a junior programmer and still _ZERO_ car manufacturers have copied it.
The obvious downside to that is that when Tesla cuts back on R&D, it becomes painfully obvious to the car owners. I'm not expecting anything like dog mode to show up ever again.
You can pursue everything with words, even you can pursue Sydney Sweeney but then you have to show the receipts.
The receipts of Tesla (Factories, lines of production, expertise of people hired, 25 years of history...) are one of car company.
But of course, it's all narrative so people will keep outbidding each other to own a piece of this company.
The financialization of hope, that's what it is.
As commodification accelerates, consolidation follows. In the current landscape, where private capital and state power are deeply entangled under the banner of national security, this consolidation no longer stays economic. It becomes geopolitical.
The end result... it translates to not just corporate monopolies, but geo-monopolies... enforced not by markets alone, but by coercion, conflict, and control over resources.
Companies routinely, exaggerate, obfuscate and mystify investors. Most of investors don't care. The SEC is a joke.
5 billion sounds good for tesla
This was the justification for their stock price for quite a few years: "It's logical that Tesla is worth more than all other automakers combined because it will soon be the only automaker."
Then in 2022 Elon basically admitted that they couldn't win on production and had to continue to win on technology and they'd do that with self driving. [https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-tesla-worth-basica...]
But now Tesla is way behind on self driving (which was oversold by the whole industry tbh). So what's their new plan? Now they're no longer a car company and will make robots!
i.e. the GigaPress for frames but it just didnt scale like they hoped.
> It's pure logic that Tesla has to pursue bets that would justify billion dollar valuations and being a car company isn't that.
Tesla is valued as if it is a tech company with a car business as a side gig. Its balance sheet is a car business, and I'm not even sure it spends enough on tech to have tech qualify as a side gig. And the other tech avenues it has been pursuing (autonomous vehicles, humanoid robots) are areas that other people have been doing for better and longer. Hell, Honda had autonomous (not tele-operated) humanoid robots working 20 years ago.
To be honest, at this point, I mostly consider the other bets that Tesla is pursing are just passion projects to keep the stock price artificially high. Were Tesla more realistically valued, it would lose probably 90% or more of its value, and Musk would be a much poorer man.
Elon's business model is moving from one government subsidized thing to the next (see SpaceX now bribing for tax dollars to go to Mars).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodity
> a resource, that specifically has full or substantial fungibility: that is, the market treats instances of the good as equivalent or nearly so with no regard to who produced them
Uhh.. not sure where you live or what your local / regional market is like. I'm in the United States, where what car you drive is a really big decision. Many people share on social media what car they bought, and tell people around them about the new car they bought. I've yet to witness a situation where someone said "I bought an electric car" and the response was something like "Why are you telling me you bought toilet paper?" (Even toilet paper has brand names and advertising.)
That isn't to say that the car market hasn't shifted over time.
Cars began as "engine to move wheels plus a few other things" and evolved so that the engine seemed less of the central reason why you bought a specific vehicle. An electric powertrain does take things a bit further, in that most EV buyers know very little about the motors, though they certainly know a thing or two about the battery.
Batteries are generally a commodity at smaller scales, but in a car, they matter significantly. Still, brand matters, too. Ask Lucid or Rivian or Porsche how they sell their electric cars for $70K - $160K. How is it that a commodity available to purchase for ~$30K can be sold for $130K additional? (That's not how commodities work.)
No, electric cars are not a commodity. It's just a difficult market with a lot of players, and a broad market with constantly evolving tastes. Ask Toyota why they have half a dozen different SUV models. Or why the Ford F-150 comes in 200 configurations. (That's not how commodities work!)
Just because the gasoline-burning engine was replaced with electric motors and batteries, the car didn't turn into a commodity overnight. I'm open to counterarguments and persuasion to the contrary.
It absolutely makes no sense to convert a car manufacturer into an AI company. Or a robotics company after you have build CAR FACTORIES around the planet.
If you as a CEO don't like the business you are running for your shareholders, it is time to get a new CEO that does. There still are managers that really like running car companies.
I don't get the feeling that BYD management is bored about the EV business...
Tesla had a very good computer, they were learning how to put a car around it.
Traditional manufacturers (German mostly) had good or very good cars, but they sucked at the computer stuff.
---
And unknown to all, the Chinese learned how to make good cars with good computers built in as those two were trying to achiever their respective goals.
And of course you're just going to pretend what the mission statement was.
Isn't this in reply to a post (or was that another reply just below it?) about how other, "traditional", car companies are valued at 55, 60, 80, and 280 billion dollars...? Seems being a car company and having a billion dollar valuation isn't all that incompatible.
I fully agree that TSLA is madly overpriced as a car company, and too hyped as any other type of company.
But just to keep the story straight
Tesla received ~$3 billion in subsidies.
When Elon exercised his Tesla options in 2021, he paid $11 billion in taxes on it.
By all accounts those subsidies were an incredibly good use of taxpayer money, and similar subsidies should keep being handed out, even if the byproduct is another big troll on twitter.
Tesla was given $3 billion in government subsidies.
It made $11 billion selling regulatory credits created by government regulation.
I'm not interested in getting bogged down in how actually government regulation is the same thing as subsidy even though the taxpayer doesn't foot the bill (but does collect the tax on the backend of it.) There is a good reason why subsidy and regulation are not the same interchangeable word. I suppose that without glasses of nuance/understanding they blur together and look the same (government action -> money for someone), but lets wear glasses here.
But then you go to defend them as if it were something you're obligated to do. I think you demonstrably do not hate Tesla and Elon as much as the next naysayer.
On a deeper level, I hate bandwagons because they are invariably full of idiotic parrots.
Elon has done a enough demonstrably stupid and bad shit that we don't need to play deception to drum up resistance. Especially when that deception plays on "government subsides in the green sector have been a colossal waste of money".
It goes like this:
Person A makes up some unsupported fact about a despised figure. For example, "Hitler had 12 fingers".
Person B comes in and says "I think Hitler just had 10 fingers like normal"
And then person A or some other person responds "holy shit dude, I can't believe you're defending Hitler!"
And then neo nazis go around telling susceptible people "Look, Hitler's detractors think he had 12 fingers, just look at any picture of him, he clearly only has 10. You're gonna trust people that stupid to be honest about him? To know anything about him?"
Disinformation feels good in the moment, but is immensely damaging overall. Even the people who believed he had 12 fingers will feel betrayed and question everything else when they one day learn he actually had 10.
Edit: I love making legitimate points and instantly accruing downvotes from 'Valley VC types. Look yourself in the mirror.
My Huyndai's Autopilot equivalent (I don't even know what they call it) is better than the enhanced Autopilot in the Model 3 that I traded in. It actually changes lanes when I put on the blinker, instead of only changing lanes 70% of the time, and the other time just sitting with the blinker on and a clear lane.
Cars only work because we can predict driver behavior, if they break that prediction that’s when bad things are likely to happen…
Lately I’ve started to ignore Tesla blinker.
In a tesla an on-ramp to straight highway is rarely enough to stop the blinker, something I’ve never experienced in any other car.
Couple this with, IMO, the best baseline speaker system of any manufacturer… I’ve been driving with the blinker on for several kilometers at times!
The real Tesla engineers must be in all kinds of frustrations getting whipsawed by their chief engineer-designer-physicist-scientist-government economist-savant but probably the stock options assuage that.
Lastly Tesla still doesn’t have real birds-eye view / 360 surround view for parking. It’s year 2026 and even cheaper cars have this.
That's a very Hacker News point of view, that *of course* engineers have the correct opinion and attitude and are merely suffering under the boots of the real incompetent and nefarious.
Engineers at Tesla are wholly complicit.
A single engineer telling him that LIDAR and radar is superior to camera-based systems isn't doing anything except getting said engineer fired.
There's a reason Waymo is doing actual level 4/5 driving while Tesla remains at 2.5.
On stretches of pretty straight highway and in traffic, it fares very well, only requiring minor interaction, but on larger curves, it completely disengages with no tone or warning, just a light on the dashboard that turns off.
I'm fully aware you're supposed to drive a car by paying attention to the road, but if the whole point of this feature is to make driving more chill, randomly disengaging makes me distrustful of it
I think you -- and everyone else -- should not only be "distrustful" of these purported "autopilots" or "copilots" or WETF the marketeers call the contraptions, but actively avoid ever buyin any vehicle equipped with them. Just refuse, and do your own damn driving. For everyone's sake, including your own.
I think it's a wrong mental model to think of stock market value as "fair" or "unfair" (or maybe it's just me thinking of "unfair" when I see the word "fair").
My impression is that if Tesla would be valued based on quantifiable things it would be much much lower (production costs, competition, revenues, potential, etc.). Of course, you shouldn't value something only based on quantifiable things, but in Tesla the "wishful thinking" part seems to be much larger than for others.
Interestingly, retail investors and company insiders collectively own more of Tesla than institutional investors.
A company's market cap is, by definition, its fair market value.
> Tesla is not priced according to its underlying assets or technical analysis (e.g. P/E ratio), but solely based on hype/sentiment.
You're right that it's not priced according to underlying assets, but it doesn't follow that it is priced on vibes. Its price is based on potential future earnings; the expectation that Elon can pull off his plans for a robotaxi fleet or building an Optimus robot that might unlock the massive demand for household and/or general use commercial robots. Both offer the prospect of being the first mover into markets which could be worth trillions. It's speculation, sure, but not mere "vibes". The company is also led by a man who has made and delivered on massive, seemingly impossible promises, which adds credibility to the idea that Tesla might actually bring these markets into existence.
> Fair market value (FMV) is similar to market value, which is the price that the asset would trade for in the open market under current conditions. However, fair market value has the following additional assumptions: Both buyer and seller are reasonably knowledgeable about the asset, Buyer and seller are behaving in their own best interests, Both parties are free of undue pressure, Each is given a reasonable period for completing the transaction.
However that's why I said "something closer to FMV" as yes - what you described is generally how FMV is calculated for things like stock options.
> but it doesn't follow that it is priced on vibes. Its price is based on potential future earnings
To be clear, I also didn't use the word "vibes," but rather "hype/sentiment" which refers to things like "the expectation that Elon can pull off his plans for a robotaxi fleet or building an Optimus robot that might unlock the massive demand for household and/or general use commercial robots." I'm not sure where you got "vibes" that you quoted in your reply.
Technical analysis uses statistics (e.g. P/E ratios) and marketplace analysis to determine if future potential earnings are worth the price of the stock. TSLA's price is far in excess of any technical analysis I have seen.
> The company is also led by a man who has made and delivered on massive, seemingly impossible promises, which adds credibility to the idea that Tesla might actually bring these markets into existence.
We might have to agree to disagree on this one. (Are we FSD yet?)
Fair market value is different from market value and appraised value.
FMV makes a lot of sense in things like insurance payouts and private equity, cuz the assets aren't liquid and have to be assessed. If the thing is already being bought and sold on public markets, like Tesla, FMV is less useful to talk about. Now you enter the realm of financial analysis (like some analyst's report about a publicly traded stock) and even financial audits and such, it's orthogonal.
XAI acquiring twitter is probably a better recent example than solarcity.
Cults do not operate on logic, but almost always result in a mass casualty event of some sort.
It's a study in many things.
Tesla only exists because of the transfer of wealth from the government. DOE loans, EV tax credits and other incentives are the difference between existing and not existing.
That's not necessarily bad. The problem is the government really gets nothing for their money. Look at how China incubates their businesses.
As an example, imagine where we'd be if the government had insisted on standardized charging infrastructure instead of Tesla's originally proprietary Supercharger network.
> If Tesla was valued fairly, it would probably be at the tune of $5B.
I could see it as high as $100B but not $1.5T. Not even close.
And I, too, would never bet against it. Nothing fundamental is behind Tesla's valuation. It's just gambling.
Do you have any sources for that claim? I can attest that current iteration of FSD is very, very good, and very likely is a safer driver than I am. At least one major insurance company agrees [0]. I don't have any experience with Super Cruise though.
That's a damning statement about your driving skills, and probably not true or you'd have had your license revoked by now. I've had FSD for five years, and even today it regularly makes dangerous mistakes. For example, left turns and roundabouts are the equivalent of Russian roulette, but just last week my FSD started driving through a red light because it interpreted a green left-arrow as a sign that it could proceed forward.
If you need to do 50 miles on the interstate it's pretty solid though.
So L2 is great, the issue is calling L2 "Full Self Driving"
"Tesla Full Self-Driving is twice as safe, so Lemonade takes 50% off every mile driven with FSD."
Beyond that, the effect size of my anecdotes assures me that it is not safer than a human driver. It's just obvious.
You mean the insurance company that has only existed for 10 years and I never heard of before this Tesla tie-in marketing gimmick?
https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/lemona...
Their product is dynamically priced and individualized, and there is no guarantee of what the base rate will be. I don't see any reason they can't keep offering the 50% discount and then adjust the base rates to reverse engineer a sustainable price regardless of FSDs real safety.
> Considering how human operators behave with these systems, I'd also wager having the human operator (many don't even look at the road!) makes only a small difference.
Lemonade will likely be getting driver monitoring telemetry and calculating rates accordingly, but in either case I'm convinced that we are still on the left hand side of the Valley of Degraded Supervision [0]. Operators may not pay full attention at all times but they likely still have pretty good heuristics for what situations are difficult for FSD and adjust their monitoring behavior accordingly.
Tesla could of course release detailed crash and disengagement data to prove FSD safety. That they do not is itself a form of evidence, and in lieu of that we have to rely on crowdsourced data which says FSD 14.x still has a very long way to go to be safer than the average driver [1].
[0] https://www.eetimes.com/disengagements-wrong-metric-for-av-t...
Lemonade has <1% market share
2. The market determines what is a fair value, not rando haters on the internet. Even professional Wall Street consensus is that it's fair value at approximately $1.2T market cap.
Cult. It's a cult.
There's a contingent of tech bros that think they're "smart" because they latched on to Tesla and have been riding its nuts through Elon's political stunts without a care in the world. Tesla failing would mean to them that they failed. They can't fail, they're too smart. If they just HODL for a little longer, then he'll get something magical out and validate their decision making. Sunk cost running wild.
I doubt that because Tesla was not a first mover, established automotive companies were.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nissan_R%27nessa#Nissan_Altra
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_Ranger_EV
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honda_EV_Plus
Etc.
The innovation/imitation/commoditization cycle is not really new or limited to Tesla, it applies to everything from robot vacuum cleaners to CPUs. Whether Tesla survives or not probably depends a lot more on boring things like economic and trade policies of large countries.
The much more interesting thing to study would be how ice auto manufacturers not only completely wasted their first mover advantages, but also their long established brand value, supply chains and distribution and sales networks when it came to EVs.
It was not many years ago, industry "experts" were still going on about how Tesla could never hope to build cars at scale, that their "build quality" would sink them, etc. Whereas many people have rightly identified this commoditization and threats from Chinese manufacturers as being one of the biggest risks to Tesla from the beginning. Surely it's more interesting to study the things that were not obvious or well predicted?
Sure, it might be considered safer because it only allows itself to work when its on a controlled highway in a straight line.
Did they ever have a first mover advantage? They had first mover hype, but did they really have an advantage?
Companies like Kia and Hyundai had an advantage. They already had logistics, design, R&D, manufacturing, supply chains, etc. all figured out from decades of building and improving cars. Tesla had NONE of that. All Kia and Hyundai had to do to get into EVs was add another few models to their lineup with some iteration on all their existing processes. And immediately, these models became hot sellers.
Tesla had to literally reinvent (but to themselves invent) what it takes to design, build, and sell a car.
This writing has been on the wall for years. Tesla has less than a handful of models and can't even iterate on them in any substantial way. Other car makers make dozens of models and rev them every year and do a design refresh every five to ten years. Tesla never had any advantage or key selling point outside of hype.
They won’t need to rely on others prioritizing their priorities, like low volume, high cost early investments in batteries designed for a market (humanoid robots) that doesn’t exist.
If they then scale them up, they also have the benefit that there is no 3p supplier who can turn around and sell those to a competitor.
Tesla's growth plan originally had them doing factory expansions and new factory in Mexico by now, but instead they have pivoted to trying to keep utilization of their existing lines up by introducing cheaper trims of existing vehicles.
Elon for years has said Tesla is not a car company. He’s also said the “factory is the product.” Tesla also has energy divisions and investments, as well as xAI investments now.
Logically given that Model S and X are something like less than 5% of deliveries (and have been for years), if they’re right about Optimus, that capacity will generate far greater revenue.
It will be slightly creepy when the Optimus walks into the bedroom and stares while its owner is ... in the middle of something, but that's a small price to pay.
Plus the Tesla employees in the U.S. will also be able to share the video, so it's a win-win.
How many Cyber Trucks were they supposed to sell?
Yeah. And that was a car. A thing that is at least a category people buy.
I’m confused as to what’s not clear from the article for you?
Saying they’re dropping two products that aren’t profitable so they can make a new product that most people seem to think is a complete joke is the problem.
markets are healthiest when there are many healthy competitors
This makes sense if your business strategy is to get existing Tesla owners to trade their current Teslas to buy new Teslas, rather than to convert non-Tesla owners to buy new Teslas. The latter market is WAY bigger and the tax credit was a huge carrot enticing them to look at a brand they'd never try otherwise in a market where ICE vehicle prices were skyrocketing.
As it stands, there are a ton of Tesla owners who bought their cars with the tax refund, are underwater on them, bitter about it and/or dislike Elon personally, and will never buy a Tesla again. This is churn and brand destruction without a corresponding top of funnel increase.
In contrast, the supercharger network was significant not just for the convenience factor for Tesla owners, but also for the fact that it was a social signal that Tesla was serious about growing the addressable market of EV owners generally by not just making a decent car but making the "EV lifestyle" seem possible to non-EV owners.
If Tesla actually is happy that the tax credit is going away, that seems like they're acknowledging that they're satisfied taking shrinking share of a shrinking market, which is their prerogative, but it's a bad business.
GM wrote down $4B when they reduced their EV production. Despite that, last year GM sold half the number of EVs as Tesla did. If THAT was reduced production by 100%, then Tesla would have been truly fucked had Harris won the election.
Tesla is suffering because Elon Musk was a genius at some point in the past. Then, he got into ketamine and fried his brain.
The cars are expensive, have QC issues, and are facing steep competition from the rest of the world. Tesla's attempt to build an F150 competitor was a disaster, Optimus is years away from being useful for anything, and after 15 years of "We'll totally release FSD this year!" the market seems to finally be realizing that it's not going to happen for a little while.
It really sucks to see a perfectly good company get blown to smithereens, but shareholders did choose to bet on the man.
When he wrote the Hyperloop white paper? When he backdated himself as the founder of Tesla, then pushed the real founders out?...
He is a genius snake oil salesman, I give you that.
[0] https://www.cnbc.com/2026/01/28/cnbc-china-connection-newsle...
[2] https://interestingengineering.com/ai-robotics/limx-humanoid...
[3] https://www.bgr.com/2083491/china-agibot-humanoid-robot-us-c...
China is hyper-capitalist. They're living proof that capitalism has won.
In China, I imagine that if your company does something relevant to the five year initiative then you get a lot of red tape cut for you.
i.e. in China, the government controls capital; in the US, capital controls the government.
Through bonds? or SVPs to fund the building of datacentres?
It just probably overregulated hardware manufacturing out of existence with unionizing and other too strong regulations.
China is one party system, where CPC controls and owns production, policy, finance and even consumption levers.
These terms are useless for distinguishing anything -- what you said can be said about literally any capitalist state.
> China is one party system
This is also relatively uninteresting. There have been many countries where a single party has nominally remained in power for about as long as the CCP has. That Deng Xiaoping's coup occurred without nominally dismantling the party makes the "one party system" distinction a superficial one.
CPC mandates and gets seats on highest boards of companies, combines IP research across civil military, is both producer and consumer of products etc. Look at China's civil military fusion policy on the latest iteration of how they are doing this. In china there is no separate 3-4 branches of govt like in most places. CPC controls all legislative, executive, judiciary, military and private company boards and financial capital.
I think it could have gone differently if we gave our economic system something to optimise other than itself, but then we wouldn't have centibillionaires, so... swings and roundabouts I guess?
Did you just get out of your Time Machine from a decade ago?
No innovation made them stagnate. Being blocked from the US made BYD innovate.
Which would be par the course for Ketamine Elon
As if China cannot produce kick ass robots ? What special sauce does Musk have here that a country with a massive pool of highly trained and educated engineers and decades of manufacturing expertise don't have?
nobody really can predict the future, so unsurprisingly, "reading various articles about this doesn't make it more clear." but people on the Internet keep getting worked up about it. to me, people do not comprehend the meaning of "high risk, high reward."
Amazon has a lucrative incentive to automate its supply chain up to and including last mile delivery. Waymo has proven out the tech and could easily partner with Uber or Lyft for the rider experience and reach.
If you’re FedEx, for example, would you rather buy from Amazon or from Tesla? Who is more likely to be a sane and trustworthy partner?
The reason that you don't see more Waymo areas has nothing to do with rider pool or experience, it is because their tech requires pre-mapping everything with LiDAR several times- the advantage is that if you know what is static (because it was in all of that LiDAR mapping) then a simple difference algo can tell you everything that is dynamic in the environment. (Also, they are just starting to hit cities with significant precipitation- SFO, LA, ATX, PHX are all pretty dry cities, they are going into ATL, MIA, DC, DEN, etc.)
1: With a lot of suspicion that much of their profit comes from drivers not understanding depreciation of their vehicles, something that the accountants who work for Uber and Lyft will understand very very well.
Similarly, Waymo isn't bottlenecked by mapping or rain. I've seen enough of them testing in Seattle and Tokyo, as examples.
So, it's pretty easy to see why people are confused and upset. Tesla is discontinuing all the things people like about Tesla, and selling vapourware that no one really wants anyways, instead. It's also not "a difficult conversation."
What seems more likely is that Musk, in his extreme shift to the right, has abandoned the original goal of Tesla: producing sustainable electric vehicles. He's become more and more delusional, with failing like the Boring machine and the Cybertruck starting to pile up. He's alienated his existing customer base by both getting into politics and dropping any pretext of trying to help the environment.
From my point of view, Tesla is a failed company with a leader who has gone off the rails, and a board that refuses to reign him in. Revenues are falling off a cliff outside of US governmental money, and it's betting the whole ship on only two ideas: self driving, which is so far no where close to being where it needs to be, despite the progress, and on yet another fairy tale that is humanoid robots.
At this point, it's entirely because Musk refuses to add LIDAR. If he did they could probably be competing with Waymo in a year.
His rationale at this point seems to be mostly stubbornness, coupled with a healthy dose of anxiety when he considers how much money he'll have to spend to deliver FSD to the people who bought it 10 years ago.
similar?! what exactly is your definition of similar? tesla and waymo are so far apart that it is difficult to accept any argument that tries to make this comparison. they cannot co-exist in the same sentence unless to explain one’s success against the other’s failures
- https://x.com/Waymo/status/1945106097741664630
will leave it to the astute reader to look up “robo”taxi
S and Y are not special enough to do anything for the brand, they dont qualify as halo products anymore. Probably still wouldnt be that interesting even if refreshed.
CT is still interesting, it looks different and has some tech inside that seems worthwhile to iterate on.
And unlike traditional brands, tesla has FSD, Optimus, and Musk to do enough to keep the brand itself healthy.
My guess would be they are deciding what they can learn by iterating the CT, and might decide to drop it in a year or two when the roadster takes the halo role.
They will keep trying to improve on volume for 3 and Y.
Tesla's value proposition was that it was going to be an iPod in a world of identikit MP3 players, and charge a premium for it. One brand to rule them all, no pesky dealerships, with futuristic EV tech and a touchscreen dash that made gas-powered, tactile button-laden cars obsolete.
That was twenty years ago. Tesla went from leading the pack to struggling to achieve scale, with its limelight-seeking leader increasingly holding it back. The leader wants headlines for pioneering "cool shit" and pushing hype to pump the stock price. Buyers on the other hand want affordable and timely repairs (impossible with their resistance to third party body shops and unit cost of replacement parts). As a mature company, it is completely un-equipped to compete with the incumbents whose leaders, not by coincidence, are all largely unknown to the public.
Didn't the US government put ~$80b into rescuing GM etc, years ago?
Subsidies bootstrapped the EV industry. Stupid policies mean walking away from the investment, ceding the market to foreign competitors, and doubling down on legacy ICE crap the rest of the world no longer wants...and Americans will be less and less able to afford.
That's the Toyota Corolla. I find this inaccurate glazing of musk to be relatively common but it always strikes me as profoundly weird.
I was googling the data for 2025 and it seems that it’s number 2 now (behind the RAV4 to my surprise) with the Corolla at 3.
No idea how accurate these are, finding global numbers was harder than I thought.
But that's okay! They have the Cybercab that will 100% drive itself For Real This Time, $99/mo Autopilot/FSD subscriptions and robots that will theoretically wash your dishes in an age where most people have an adversarial relationship with anything AI, so.
Yearly sales of model X have been comparable to the 5 series, at least until last year when musk's political activities took the shine off the brand.
High end cars are more profitable. There are millions of 3 and Y owners with positive experiences who would stay with the brand if it had something to move up to.
My 23 MX is the best car I've ever owned. I wouldn't buy the current iterations of 3 and Y.
Most refresh X owners think it's pretty great (not perfect). There are no alternatives at the moment, mostly because other manufacturers are terrible at software development...and that's not good for software defined vehicles.
It's sad to see Tesla walk away from the luxury segment so they can focus on robots, go karts, and robots pretending to drive go karts.
Agree with other posters who say whatever you think of Musk, Tesla styling has gotten very stale.
I don’t think they have. Humanoid robots are a bad joke. But that’s why they are pivoting.
Meantime, as others have pointed out, the Model S and X are not selling enough to justify keeping the factory running. I don't see them going into Optimus production immediately, since as you suggest it's a solution looking for a problem.
It was supposed to cost $39k at the low end and have 500 miles of range at the high end. This drove the hype and high reservation numbers.
In reality it costs $79k and offers up to 325 miles of range. Doubling the price is going to significantly limit the reach of the product.
Perhaps more interesting is the F-150 Lightning outsold the Cybertruck in 2025 and Ford still canceled it as a failure.
As much as I dislike it, I can't disagree with the business case here. They already have >300k monthly subscribers at about $100/month. That business will grow rapidly from here as well as the robotaxi business itself.
Within 2 years, this business will look radically different just because of these two changes.
> I mean, they’re very expensive, made in low volume. To be totally frank, we’re continuing to make them more for sentimental reasons than anything else. They’re really of minor importance to the future.
Now the Roadster, I could see make sense as a trophy car that rubs off coolness and sportiness to the rest of the lineup
He doesn't have FSD, camera only navigation without sensor fusion with LIDAR will fail, the only thing keeping Tesla where it is is the bullshit dispersal field that surrounds Musk.
"Tesla’s far more popular models are the 3 and Y, which accounted for 97% of the company’s 1.59 million deliveries last year."
The problem is that Musk has been promising it for almost 10 years and it is still not sufficiently stable to be rolled out and relied upon by car owners.
FSD is only actually "ready" in terms of the whole "don't need to own a car for personal transport" when there can be passengers and no driver.
When Mom can dispatch the family car to pick up the kids from school.
Tech level, I agree--that's FSD.
But even if we had that tech today, Mom ain't sending the car without getting a police visit.
You can't even let your kids go to the local playground alone anymore. They're not going to be captain and first mate alone in a vehicle if the Karens have anything to say about it.
Yet they are perfectly fine to ride on their own for an hour in the train or tram.
If.
It doesn't exist in isolation. The competition isn't just from the American firms, but also European and Chinese, and it isn't really possible to overlook Musk himself given both his long history of Musk over-promising and under-delivering, deflecting blame.
Even the current release isn't what Musk was talking hopefully about a decade ago, e.g.:
Our goal is, and I feel pretty good about this goal, that we'll be able to do a demonstration drive of full autonomy all the way from LA to New York, from home in LA to let's say dropping you off in Times Square in New York, and then having the car go park itself, by the end of next year. Without the need for a single touch, including the charger.
Likewise, based on a video I saw recently from someone reproducing Tesla's 2016 "Paint It Black" drive, Tesla's AI is only now around the performance level that they faked in 2016.
Don't get me wrong, that level was impressive… just, the world isn't isolated developments.
So it's literally nothing special compared to other manufacturers. I am happy to argue that's it's a better Level 2 than most others, sure. But it's still just that. No magic, no bullshitty "by 2017 the car will drive itself from New York to Los Angeles". No it hasn't and no it won't.
Tesla could stop spending money on bullshit like the Cybertruck and spend it on vehicles that people actually need/want.
There are heaps of small/subcompact EVs on the European market now, all with very competitive prices. The newer ones seem to be getting cheaper and cheaper.
Honestly I reckon a Tesla M2 will have a hard time succeeding in this market.
Plus there are plenty of popular options for high-end EVs that are far more glamorous as well as practical than the Cybertruck.
Re: Robots bla bla: yeah, of course. FSD bla bla. Meh.
Yeah, that would be the Model 2, which Musk cancelled, then denied he cancelled, then has made no effort to review whatsoever so it exists in a limbo state of zero people working on it but it not being officially cancelled. Either way, it didn't come out in 2025 as planned.
https://www.cbtnews.com/tesla-execs-raise-red-flags-after-mu...
For a normal company, this would be disastrous. For a meme stock, this makes total sense since anyone claiming the Model 2 is dead can be shouted at by fans saying Musk himself disputed it was dead.
S 3 X Y
The C didn’t fit that, nor would a 2. Unless he’s aiming for a lineup of products that has you seeing someone next Tuesday.
S 3 X Y C A R S
Cybertruck, ATV (?), Roadster, Semi
When Tesla got started, full EVs were extremely niche. They were known for their short range and nothing else. Tesla defeated common sense. This is what supports their anti-common-sense stock price.
No-one (serious) thought there was a market for the cybertruck.
The stock price is pure madness, it's like it's priced in robotaxis, but that's clearly not going to happen for Tesla. And if it did, it would be a small-ish market, their brand has become toxic in so many big markets.
Definitely not. Car electrification was definitely not obvious, and Tesla had to do many semi-impossible things to make it even slightly feasible.
The first electric car predates the 20th century. That seems pretty obvious.
The problem was always batteries and charging infrastructure. I wouldn't call these semi-impossible, but it's something Tesla definitely contributed significantly to.
If you count remote control cars as well then you have an even weightier point.
But if you're serious about adapting technologies, countries and drivers to electric cars then you'll know that an electric car being made in the 19th century is totally irrelevent. Toyota even bet big on hydrogen rather than electric for a long time; that's how non-obvious it was.
But then you strangely ignored why it was irrelevant, which I already pointed out and was the meat of the statement. The concept of an electric car is painfully simple. Way more so than an internal combustion engine, in fact.
Great, now do steam. Being produced in the past does not mean it will make a comeback, despite steam being quieter, with great torque, and the main ingredient for propulsion (water) being safer than gasoline for normal people to refuel
I can assure you I would point out the silliness of someone saying steam technology was not obvious too.
You know that steam is used in nuclear power, right?
Good for them as a company, thats why they are still here.
And now? Everyone builds EVs, everyone is as far as Tesla or better.
Even the old school companies like BMW have now more models than Tesla and the Cybertruck was expensive to build, build badly and did not deliver what Elon the druggy and antidemocrat Musk promised.
Tesla unveiled the Roadster 20 years ago. That's plenty of time for other companies to catch up. They made a bet that once the battery moat evaporated the millions of miles of driving footage, powering affordable fully autonomous driving, would be their next moat. They failed, not because camera-based FSD is a silly idea (we drive with our eyes after all), but because it's a really hard problem. If they had won that bet, Tesla would justify its valuation. They didn't, and so we're left with the flailing of a doomed company.
If they'd hit the price and performance of the launch announcements they might have. $40k base for what he initially talked about is a vastly better proposal than $61k base for what he actually delivered.
Tesla as a car company seems dead-set on a continuous downward spiral.
Maybe the switch to robots will pay off and you'll be right. Somehow, I'm skeptical.
If you equal Elon to Tesla then there are plenty of - SpaceX dominates near-earth orbit payload launches. A private company competing against and replacing NASA would have been a laughingstock idea 30 years ago. xAI made competitive SOTA models despite a very, very late start.
Of course Elon isn't Tesla. I think the biggest risk of Tesla now is the investors realizing he's more into AI and politics and will siphon resources from Tesla to his other companies.
SpaceX is essentially the same kind of commercial provider as always, except that they didn't sit on laurels of 1960s ICBM work, and among other things built their own additional infrastructure.
... But remember they were explicitly early financed to do that by DoD and NASA.
Tesla has a monopoly on their car repairs, which reduces the number of mechanics qualified to work on it, increasing the cost and the wait time.
Teslas are a very expensive platform to service being largely an aluminum frame. Difficult+expensive to repair and replacements are expensive compared to cheaper cars which usually have more plastic. This means insurance is also expensive.
And this doesn’t even begin to get into the weirdness of their reputation for hiring private eyes to stalk employees and call the police to in an attempt to get an employee killed. Having an exec who has a ketamine problem and mania issues doesn’t lend itself to long term stability.
Maybe the more recent models, like the Xiaomi thing, are better. But at the moment, Tesla is at least on par, if not better. The brand being tainted is very relevant though.
Now if you ask me if the German car managers are better I doubt it. Gassing apes by Volkswagen in US is on the same level as Elon. Mercedes guy was complaining about lazy workers too much. Only BMW guy was able to keep acceptable silence. Overall German equivalent of model Y is at least 20000€ more expensive than Elon‘s car.
Personally I don’t buy anything from China if I can. I am not brave and as the Ayways story showed clearly, that great Chinese car can quickly be without any service. Maybe it’s ok to lease such car for couple years, but I don’t want to have car after small accident for what no replacement parts are available.
What?!? VW id.4 has the same starting price as a Tesla Model Y if I look it up on their German websites. Don't see where the swasticar would be cheaper.
I drove everything available to buy in my area. My real options were the Mustang Mach-e, Volvo XC40 Recharge, Hyundai Kona, Polestar 2. I decided to test drive a Model Y for completeness.
And CRAP.
The Model Y was obviously the best car. So much more refined than the other options. Way better charging network. 7 seat option. The only real downside was the zany CEO.
Fine, I thought. I’ll live with it.
I bought a Model Y and love it.
But.
I’ll never buy another Tesla. I have a bumper sticker disavowing the CEO. I paid off its loan so nobody would make money from me owning a Tesla. I honk support at the No Kings protestors outside the local Tesla facility.
I think the only thing that can save Tesla is a crash/buyout/relaunch. Get Musk out of the picture. Reset the stock price to something sane. Ditch the distractions. Release a Model 2. Keep expanding the SuperCharger network.
That’s a long hard road. Nobody involved makes money in that scenario. It’ll only happen when there are no other options.
As for me, I’m driving my Model Y until the wheels fall off. With the bumper sticker.
Design is subjective (I like it), and build quality. Not sure, I don't have issues with mine except one where after 2 years frunk latch started failing. It was replaced in an hour when I went to service center.
Teslas are the cheapest EV for the features offered in Europe. I would gladly buy another car, but they are either more pricey, or lack features. (I did market research 2 years ago when I was buying Model Y, the closest one was ICE - RAV4 for similar price, but I didn't want ICE).
I've lost count of the number of times i've seen tesla drivers "defrosting" their door handles. You may live in a sunny desert but many people do not.
Why the heck would I buy such car, even if it costed 1 euro? Have some self-respect and morality ffs, do you also go to restaurant where you know they will spit on you and insult you, just because they have cca same stuff as all other places, often worse while more expensive? [1]
[1] https://www.autoevolution.com/news/tuev-report-2026-tesla-mo...
Lol... not with those tariffs. In fact, I'd be willing to bet we see higher growth of Tata than Telsa in Europe over the next 10 years.
In fact, I'd be willing to bet we see higher growth of Tata than Telsa in Europe over the next 10 years.Also:
I'd make a slighly different bet than the person I quoted:
Assuming Tesla remains under Musk's control, and absent WW3 or the technological singularity, or EU significantly changing size on that timescale, I expect Tata's sales in EU+EFTA+UK in 2035 will be more than 90% of Tesla's sales in same area in 2035.
And of course, Cybertruck design might not have been mass compatible buy being ugly. But that is subjective, if it was cheap and functional and without the political connotations it might have been different.
But it was certainty a risky bet.
- be smaller
- have an actually usuable truck bed
- be painted (so rust isn't an issue)
- have a body that's not literally duck taped together in some places and can easily snap in others
- use steel (which bends) for body construction
- be suitable for towing hauls
- not be ridiculously overpowered (...to the extent where engine can overpower the breaks)
- have good visibility with a windshield that isn't at a sharp angle to the ground and body geometry which doesn't maximize blind spots
- not have sharp corners that the cut you or doors that can decapitate your dog
- have door handles that make doors openable in case of emergencies/no power situations/electric shorts
- not have bulletproof glass (WTF, "for the masses"?) which makes makes it harder to rescue people when accidents happen
- be easily repairable, or at least amenable to repairs in local non-Tesla shops, with customers being confident it their warranty won't go poof (as the law requires)
- be easily customizeable for different applications (particularly when it comes to the bed)
- not look so different from other trucks without any reason other than "Elon Musk wants to be edgy": ugly is subjective, being a billionaire's fashion statement isn't
...to start. That's off the top of my head.
And, of course, being priced for the masses, which doesn't just happen. It's a design requirement.
As it stands, the Cybertruck is, and has always been, a rich boy's luxury toy — and it was designed as one.
It really seems like something got to Musk's head that he thought the world has so many edgy rich boys.
You want to see a modern truck "for the masses"? That's Toyota IMV 0, aka Hilux Champ [1]. Ticks all the above boxes.
And hits the $10,000 price point [2]. A literal order of magnitude cheaper than the Cybertruck.
Speaking of which: a car "for the masses" isn't a truck. It's a minivan (gets the entire family from one place to another), it's a small sedan/hatchback (commuter vehicle), a crossover/small SUV to throw things, kids, and dogs into without having to play 3D Tetris in hard mode.
But not a pickup truck, which is a specialized work vehicle.
The masses aren't farmers and construction workers (most people live in the cities, and only a small number needs such a work vehicle).
The popularity of The Truck in the US is, in a large part, a byproduct of regulation which gives certain exemptions to specialized work vehicles.[3]
That's not even getting to the infrastructure part: trucks shine in remote, rural areas. And while one can always have a canister of gas in the truck bed, power stations can be hard to find in the middle of the field or a remote desert highway.
But again, it's not impossible to make a truck for the masses (at least for certain markets). That's the $10K Hilux Champ.
For all the luxury aspects of the Tesla sedan, it's been one of the most (if not the most) practical electric vehicles on account of range alone. It also looked like a normal car at a time when EVs screamed "look at me, I'm so greeeeeen!" from a mile away (remember 1st gen Nissan Leaf or BMW i3?). It was conformal and utilitarian, while also being futuristic and luxurious enough for the high price point was fair for what was offered.
The public image of having a Tesla was good: you are affluent, future-forward, and caring for the environment.
The Cybertruck went back on everything that made Tesla a success: it's conspicuous, impractical, overpriced, and currently having publicity rivaling that of the recent Melania documentary.
It was not a risky bet. It was an a-priori losing bet. The world simply never needed as many edgy toys as Musk wanted to sell.
And driving a car shaped as an "I'm a Musk fanboy" banner really lost its appeal after a few Roman salutes and the dear leader's DOGE stint.
Overly optimistic engineering assessments? Perhaps, but they are much further down on the list of reasons of Cybertruck's failure.
[1] https://www.roadandtrack.com/reviews/a45752401/toyotas-10000...
[2] https://www.motortrend.com/reviews/2025-toyota-imv-0-pickup-...
[3] https://reason.com/2024/02/02/why-are-pickup-trucks-ridiculo...
- F150 is big
- Its perfectly usable, claim otherwise are nonsense. Arguable depending on your workload it has advantages. Not being as good for side-loading is a downside, but many people can't side-load F150 either. But having a cover that locks safely is clearly an upside. In terms of what people actually use these trucks for, like shopping or picking up a few things from Home Depot the bed is useful. Secondly, beds are empty 99% of time anyway.
- All electric trucks are not perfect at towing loads over long distances. For short distances its very good. And again 99.99% of time people are not towing loads long distances. The issue is really only if you want to tow loads long distances as fast as possible.
- Visibility is better then F150
Most of the rest is just nit-picking or looking at the issue only from one side.
And you completely ignore that F150 is already a truck for the masses, as it is literally the most sold vehicle in the US, and it doesn't have to cost 10k. Comparing the Cybertruck to something like Toyota IMV 0 makes no sense when F150 was the target.
> The popularity of The Truck in the US is, in a large part, a byproduct of regulation which gives certain exemptions to specialized work vehicles.[3]
Something that is often claimed but isn't true. That's a contributing factor but by no means the only reason.
I suspect China is going to beat him to the punch on this one too.
If you sell millions and its your main product, your company is over. This is the same playbook German manufacturers followed since forever. I bet the next gen Model 3 and robotaxi will get the cybertruck tech.
If Tesla needed beta testers for things they hadn't figured out yet there would have been better ways to go about that.
If this is true that's not what Musk was saying beforehand.
A few years ago, perhaps. But the brand has become tainted to the point where the exact people who would buy such a car are now avoiding Teslas. Instead, European manufacturers are filling that niche with cars like the Renault 5.
The traditional fix for this is to license the technology and do manufacturing for another carmaker to brand.
It's super common for brand X of car to actually be a rebadged Y with slightly different shaped body panels.
However, it only works if your product is good and you have decent margins. That means you have to compete with china cars, since the obvious thing for a western brand to do is to rebadge a chinese designed car and split the margins with the chinese designer/manufacturer.
Actually this is already happening with the Dacia Spring/Renault City: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dongfeng_Motor_Corporation#eGT...
Not sure if the product has to be good. Look at the lineage of my wife's car The 2019 Chevy Trax, based on the Buick Encore, based on the Opel/Vauxhall Mokka. It isn't a good car under any of the badges, but it does run, and is small, but the crazy thing is my Ford Ranger gets roughly the same milage as it. Note: the gas milage is probably an American issue, because it runs a naturally aspirated i4 gas engine instead of a more efficient turbo diesel.
Has it? I really don't know but I see these every day in my major city and there was a closed mall parking lot filled with cybertrucks the local dealer used to park there which were quickly turned over.
https://insideevs.com/news/784715/tesla-cybertruck-ev-sales-...
And since when is HN just like Reddit when one is downvoted for asking a question for clarity?
An failure that didn't live up to the hype that generated the initial sales volume in pre-orders.
The idea of the Cybertruck sold well — at a time before Musk's Roman salutes, shadowing Trump, running DOGE, and further enshittifying what remains of Twitter.
The actual Cybertruck, once the pre-orders ran out... did not.
Nearly half of all Cybertrucks sold (about 75% of those sold in 2024) were pre-orders.
That's to say, people stopped buying once they saw the Cybertruck for what it actually was (ditto for Elon).
https://www.fastcompany.com/91475013/2026-will-be-the-year-c...
The Chinese EVs selling in Europe are mostly bigger cars.
And the only reason they don't sell more is because we tariff the hell out of them.
But yeah, I guess Tesla lives by its CEO (and his grand promises that keep the stock price up) and dies by its CEO (who alienated Tesla buyers by, amongst other things, throwing his lot in with a regressive fossil fuel supporting administration and by personally supervising the dismantling of agencies such as USAID).
Niche buyers are fine, Ferrari makes a lot of money doing just that, and cars made for the masses are not always successful
Also, I am not a big fan of small EVs, and I live in Europe and I like small cars. Problem with small EVs is the range. Batteries are big, heavy, and expensive. It is fine in bigger, higher-end cars like what Tesla makes, but on a smaller, budget-friendly car, you have to make compromises, and consumers may demand a price too low to make good profit. So it is not guaranteed to be a market worth taking, especially if you have to compete on price against the Chinese.
With all of that, the stock closed upwards on the after market hours. Perhaps only Musk's death could cause it to tank, would have never expected to see a cult of personality being run on the top of S&P 500 market caps, what a strange world...
FSD is good in video, given. But its not full self driving as it still requires you to keep an eye on it.
Real FSD for me at least, means I can sit in a 'car' open a laptop and work. But honestly working with a laptop in a car makes it dangerous when driving fast.
For my work commute, I don't need a FSD. For my holiday also not.
What I want is real and save FSD something which has proofen on the road that it is really really good.
We are far away from this. 5 years minimum if not 10. And while Tesla is playing around with FSD and putting it now behind a subscription and fooled everyone with the promise of FSD with HW3 and below, it will not suddenly make Tesla the single leader in FSD at all.
Waymo is working on it, Xpeng can do it, BMW, Mercedes and Nvidia.
For Cybertaxies alone you need a lot of infrastructure (parking spots), cleaning crew, management software etc. you need the legal framework to be allowed to drive them (not going to happen anytime soon in europe) and then you only compete with normal taxis and uber.
Sure. Meanwhile, I'm literally using FSD 90% of the miles driven in my Y (the last update added a counter). I can appreciate a non-existant better product as much as the next guy, but as it is my daily commute is vastly improved.
FSD isn't perfect (probably about 90%!), but it's everyday amazing and useful.
What do you do know why sitting in front of your stearing wheel?
I listen to music and audibooks and I would not have a device between me and the airbag.
Last time I went 5 hours to Raleigh and back I let it drive door to door and it was incredible.
I'm still convinced we are going to need dedicated roads - or lanes at the very least - and dedicated parking/waiting areas for this to be feasible on a truly large scale.
However, it may be easier than we think-- they've already done something like this for rideshare drivers in many places, and it wouldn't necessarily need to be much more complicated than that.
Beyond that the fact that both Google and Rivian are so sure LIDAR is critical it suggests that the LIDAR-less solution is unsafe and kept afloat by musk hype and neutered USA regulators.
AI bot of course. Assuming it can move fast enough and is powerful enough, won’t work without competent AI.
They’re being beaten on every front.
Tesla Robotaxis are fully operating in Austin since November and they are running a pilot in San Francisco with safety drivers?
https://www.teslarati.com/tesla-opens-robotaxi-access-to-eve...
[0]: https://www.jalopnik.com/2063124/tesla-austin-robotaxi-fleet...
[1]: https://www.automotiveworld.com/articles/waymo-confirms-flee...
176 tracked Tesla Robotaxis vs 51 tracked Waymos in SF, with 1000 claimed SF fleet size by Waymo
90 tracked Tesla vs 134 tracked Waymo in Austin.
They claim their data is incomplete and uses indirect app tracking to guess the numbers
Steve Jobs had a cult of personality as well. Of course Apple had financial reasons to support its valuation when he was leading it in the 2000s
I don't know to what extent that's still the case. But someone always ends up with the hot potato no matter what.
At this point, investing is exacly like playing slots at casino.
This is the keyword here, just because the other approach is harder does not mean it is impossible.
It's a decent gamble to try and do things the hard way if it is possible to be deployed on cheaper/smaller hardware (eg: no lidars, just cameras).
No. It's not a good idea. It's not a good gamble. It's stupid, and the engineers can see it's stupid. A lot of them have quit, reducing the very slim chances of it working even further.
Hint: it's not the sensor inputs that are the bottleneck!
Not my area of expertise, so I’d rather not try to predict what will work and what won’t.
They're still the best way we know of going about the business of building a flying machine, for various reasons.
Artificial machines rely on spare parts manufactured elsewhere, which are used by external agents to replace the worn out parts.
For an animal to have wheels, it would have to grow wheels in some part of the body, periodically, then use its limbs to detach the wheels and attach them on the axles, after removing the old wheels. This is something sufficiently complex to be extremely unlikely to appear from evolution.
Even this huge complication would be enough only for passive wheels. For active wheels there exists no suitable motor, as the rotational motors with ionic currents are suitable only for the size of a bacteria. All bigger living beings use contractile motors, which cannot be used for a rotation of unlimited angle. So active wheels would also need a different kind of motor, which can work without a solid connection between the 2 moving parts. The artificial motors of this kind use either electromagnetic forces or fluid expansion due to temperature or pressure variation. Both would be very difficult to evolve by a living being, though electric fish and bombardier beetles show some possible paths.
At every relevant level, life relies on rotating and cyclic structures coupled through continuous material exchange. The objection to wheels in animals assumes that axles and wheels must be rigid, permanently isolated parts. Biology does not work this way. Instead of discrete components joined once and preserved unchanged, living systems implement rotation through structures that are simultaneously connected, repaired, and replaced.
Cells are full of rotary and quasi-rotary machinery. Flagella are true rotating motors with stators, rotors, bearings, and torque generation via ion gradients. ATP synthase is literally a wheel-and-axle device, converting rotational motion into chemical energy and back again. The fact that these devices operate at molecular scale does not make them conceptually different from macroscopic axles; it shows that evolution favors rotation precisely where continuous repair and material flow are required.
At larger scales, joints function as constrained rotational interfaces. Hips, shoulders, knees, and vertebrae are axles embedded in living bearings, lubricated, rebuilt, and reshaped throughout life. Bone remodeling, cartilage regeneration, and synovial fluid circulation solve the very problem claimed to prohibit wheels: permanent connection combined with continuous maintenance. The difference from artificial machines is not the absence of rotation, but the absence of rigid separability.
Even limbs themselves behave as compound wheels. Gait cycles convert linear muscle contraction into rotational motion around joints, then back into translation. Tendons wrap around bones as belts around pulleys. Muscles do not rotate indefinitely, but unlimited rotation is not a requirement for a wheel; it is a requirement imposed by certain human machines. Biological wheels rotate as much as function demands, then reverse, exactly as many engineered systems do.
The claim that active wheels require exotic motors overlooks that biology already uses fields and flows. Ionic gradients are electric fields. Blood pressure, osmotic pressure, and gas expansion are fluid-based actuators. Electric fish demonstrate macroscopic bioelectric control, and insect flight shows that indirect actuation can drive cyclic motion far from the muscle itself. The distinction between electromagnetic motors and biological motors is one of implementation, not principle.
What evolution did not produce is a detachable, externally replaceable wheel, because life does not outsource maintenance. Instead, it internalizes repair, redundancy, and gradual replacement. From this perspective, an animal is not a wheeled vehicle lacking wheels; it is a dense hierarchy of axles and wheels whose boundaries are soft, whose materials are alive, and whose motion is inseparable from their growth and repair.
Life did not fail to invent wheels. It dissolved them into itself.
All the rotating parts bigger than some tens of micrometers have only a limited rotation angle, where the limits are enforced by the solid connections between the 2 mobile parts, e.g. tendons, nerves and blood vessels.
The bacterial flagella and the rotating enzymes, which are powered by ionic currents, cannot be scaled to greater sizes. Already the flagella of nucleated cells (eukaryotes) are no longer based on rotating motors, but on contractile proteins, which must be attached at both ends on the mobile parts, limiting the relative movement.
Unlimited rotation is an absolutely necessary condition for a wheel that is used in locomotion, otherwise it is no longer a wheel.
A wheel used in locomotion that would have limited rotation would be just a leg that happens to have the shape of a wheel, because like a leg it would have to be raised from the ground for the forward motion, eliminating the exact advantage in efficiency that wheeled vehicles and tracked vehicles have over legs (i.e. that backward and forward movement are simultaneous and not separated in time during a step cycle, and no energy is wasted with a vertical oscillation of the leg).
The distinction between electromagnetic motors and biological motors is definitely one of principle and not an implementation detail. The only resemblance is that both are motors.
It is true that you can claim that when analyzing both chemical reactions and the interactions between the mobile parts of an electromagnetic motor they can be eventually reduced to electromagnetic interactions. Nevertheless such an assertion is completely useless, because most things that matter to us in the surrounding world can be reduced to electromagnetic interactions. Knowing this is not helpful at all for classifying them and understanding the differences between them.
The contraction of a protein caused by a chemical transformation and the magnetic forces that appear either between electrical currents through conductors or between electrical currents and ferromagnetic materials are very different phenomena and knowing that both of them have as primary cause electromagnetic interactions is of absolutely no help for understanding how they work or for designing either kind of motors.
Electromagnetic motors that are not extremely small need ferromagnetic materials. The only ferromagnetic material that is known to be synthesized by living beings is magnetite. Magnetite crystals can be good enough for sensing the magnetic field of the Earth, but they would be a very poor material for motors.
An easier to evolve rotating biological motor would be a rotating hydraulic motor, e.g. powered by pumped blood or lymph. This could work if the wheel would become non-living after being grown, to no longer need nerves and blood vessels. However it would be very difficult for a living being to seal the space between an axis and the rotating wheel in such a way so that blood or lymph would not spill out through the interstice.
Using more senses allows simpler processing of the sensor data, especially when there is a requirement for high reliability, and at least until now this has demonstrated a simpler complete system.
Whether it be altimeters based on radio[1] or air pressure[2], avoidance and surveillance systems that use radio waves to avoid collisions with other aircraft[3][4], airborne weather radars[5], sensors that measure angle of attack (AoA), GNSS location, attitude, etc, many aircraft (even unpowered gliders!) have some combination of special sensing systems that aren't strictly necessary to take off, fly to a destination, and land, even if some are required for what many would consider safe flight in some scenarios.
Many of these systems have redundancies built in in some form or another and many of these systems are even built into unmanned aerial systems (UASes) big and small.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radar_altimeter
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pressure_altimeter
[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traffic_collision_avoidance_sy...
[4]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_Dependent_Surveillan...
Humans are fallible and we have other sensors, like hearing, or touch (through feedback on the steering wheel) that are also involved in driving.
We already have other sensors that are not vision that work with us when driving like ABS and electronic stability.
The other reason it's dumb is that adding LIDAR and proper sensor fusion makes things better and the cost of LIDAR is rapidly dropping as its installed across new fleets in CN and elsewhere.
I never understood why they would choose to fight with "one hand behind your back". More sensors = more better
I don’t think it makes sense to limit yourself while you are still figuring out what really works. You should go with a maximum of sensors and once it works, you can see what can be left out.
I think it's got something to do with an innate belief to self-determination. It's fine if I make a mistake to kill myself, and it's not fine if someone else does. It's super not fine if someone dies at the hands of a rich person's technology. Outrage, lawsuits, "justice."
CCD and CMOS sensors can easily work in sub-freezing temperatures with various kinds of heating. There are 10's of millions of surveillance cameras installed outdoors in sub-freezing climates that work fine.
Cameras also have moveable IR cut filters, which is analogous to your sunglasses example.
Human eyes do have greater dynamic range in the visible light spectrum, but solid state sensors can commonly interpret light above 1000nm, and of course you can do thermal/IR imagers to provide optical sensing of wavelengths outside of what a human can see.
Sensor technology relative to the human eye isn't what is holding FSD back.
Eyesight isn’t the thing. Humans have a persistent mental model of the world, and of the physics that drive it. Our eyes only check in every now and then to keep our model up to date.
Our ears and sense of touch do a lot of work in walking and driving, too. Trying to narrow it all down to vision is silly.
I knew a guy with no arms who drove with his prosthetic hooks. Of course he can feel vibrations and things through his ass, but so could the car if they wanted. Do they use accelerometer data? (I don't know the answer to that) Do they have ABS sensors that can detect wheel lockup/speed status? Because I don't.
I believe I can drive a car to the legal standard, remotely, with a good enough camera array.
You should fix that. Go out on a rainy day and slam the brakes hard enough for it to kick in. There's an obvious vibration and knowing what it feels like might save your life.
Of course I can feel the ABS work.
I'm saying my body doesn't have wheel rotation sensors that can act in place of ABS
But if FSD had the same rate, people would be losing it.
With the 3 and the Y they're already catering for a large part of the market demand, but a smaller model, and a stationwagon might help get it up to 80%+ of all demand.
Good though: If you are in an accident Teslas are the safest car one can buy
https://www.ancap.com.au/media-and-gallery/media-releases/22...
> The Tesla Model Y achieved the highest overall weighted score of any vehicle assessed by ANCAP in 2025, recording strong performance across all areas of occupant protection and active safety technology.
Also, you need a breakdown of the failures as wear and consumables (washer fluid low, splits in wipers, headlight alignment, mobile phone holder in wrong location) can be a failure but would not be a good indicator for lack of quality.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/autos/news/nearly-half-of-tesla-mo...
"Most of the issues involve critical components like brakes, lights, and suspension. Many cars fail because of play in the steering or faulty axles. These are problems rarely seen at the same level in competitors like Volkswagen or Hyundai."
The markets the have been missing to this point are the big passenger / cargo carriers like a minivan or full size SUV.
For some reason my Youtube echo chamber is trying to convince me that BYD makes so many cars but cannot sell them. It's really bizarre. Other things it's trying to convince me of "Don't get an electric car. Period", "Ukraine won. Done deal", "Trump is devastated" about something else every day. Yes I do want the latter two to be true and it's playing on that but I don't get the BYD thing.
Maybe your YouTube echo chamber additionally thinks that this will cause BYD to collapse, but I doubt that. There are about a hundred Chinese EV manufacturers in worse financial shape, who're likely to go bankrupt first, which should reduce oversupply enough for BYD to survive.
Oversupply is in legacy ICE displacement due to rapid domestic EV penetration. "Zero-milage used car" accounting trick is primarily to export excess capacity of gasoline cars (now that EV has taken over) that aren't moving domestically anymore. MOST of PRC exports are ICE, IIRC 60-80%, there's plenty of global demand for ICE still. Pushing domestic sku new car with crushed domestic demand as "used" exports where there's plenty of demand = meet sales target, but less through discounts but import fees engineering - used cars circumvent import duties, certifications, warranty requirements etc. It's a lifehack to unload domestic ICE inventory, not EV. This also likely transient effect because NEV transition in PRC happened so fast ICE manufacturer that target domestic market caught flat footed. They need a few years to either retool to EV or shift primarily to target export markets that still has appetite for affordable gasoline cars.
Also, at least the EU doesn't distinguish between new and old cars when importing from outside the EU https://taxation-customs.ec.europa.eu/buying-and-selling-car... presumably precisely to avoid creating the kind of loophole you imagine exporters are exploiting. But they aren't; they just hurt their own profitability to juice their numbers and chase growth.
BYD/EV zero mile hack is more for subsidy harvesting, they're trying to dip on domestic subsidies for new sales then skip on stuff like servicing/warranty because used sale, i.e. shady involution behavior that abuse national policies, hence crackdown. It's not because EV are excess capacity, but so many EV players involuting and accountants find creative ways to carve margin. It's not EV sector makes 100 cars can only sell 50, because overcapacity, so discount to sell 100. It's EV sector makes 100 cars, sell 100 @1% margin but with some engineering they sell 100 @2% margin.
Yes, there are some brands that does use it for price cuts, premium brands, i.e. nio/xpeng, who won't lower sticker price, so they have to flip to lower price in used market. But that's also less overcapacity, more PRC EV moving so fast last few years no one wants 12 month old models. AKA tech stack progressing so fast / involution pressures so hard consumers won't pay sticker for anything older than 1 gen. What happens PRC manufacturing turns car cycles into phones obsolescence cycles. The broader the point here is EV makers are generally not doing accounting tricks to sell more cars due overcapacity / lack of demand (what over capacity implies), they're doing accounting tricks to sell the same amount of cars to make their razer thin involution margins slightly less razer thin, at the expense of the government.
The legroom in my son's VW e-Up! is markedly better, despite it being a smaller car.
Also not sure what the point of the "old state" part of the parent comment was. Renault is just another big carmaker.
I'm not 100% what you mean by "dispersal field", but outside of America, Elon's image in recent years has done more harm to Tesla than good.
Tesla's sales have suffered, yes, and Elon's image is a significant contributor to that, besides all the reasons directly related to the cars themselves.
But Tesla's stock price is still stuck in irrational heights, not even remotely justifiable by the company's performance.
It just seems that people reconsider purchasing a physical object way quicker than they reconsider a stock investment. Maybe because the stock investment, especially in TSLA, is considered more like a gamble - "as long as others also think that this stock will skyrocket, even just because they think that others like me think it will skyrocket - as long as that's the case, I'm good with buying shares".
Meanwhile, RIP Windows, Google Search, and maybe the entire games industry, maybe even then end of affordable home computing and being forced to rent computing power from 'the cloud'.
Google is winning the AI race. They did with self driving and they are doing it with LLMs. They are sitting back quietly not making noise and then massively rocking the status quo regularly.
I suspect they are going to do similar in the field of quantum computing.
So if I hear what you're saying, the stock will be up another 50% this year!
I feel like EVs are a checkbox product - you either make things 'good enough' for the customer - range, driving dynamics, power, charge speed, smart features, autonomous stuff or don't.
To get range right you need a big battery and low drag and efficiency - the only way you can make the first 2 things in the same vehicle is to create an aerodynamic shape.
This is a packaging problem, you need to make the car low, and long - so you stretch it out, so the battery can be thinner and no longer pushes up the rest of the vehicle. You also have a lot of place in the front for crash structures, and aero shaping. Finally since your car is big (D segment), you can charge more money as per conventions of the market.
If you make a C or B segment car, you either reduce the battery size to save money, which makes it impractical for general use or pack in all that stuff into a smaller volume, and you get a car thats more expensive to make than a Model 3, while having worse drag and range, while the market expects you to charge less for it.
These small cars only make sense with a small battery, but you wouldn't want one for yourself as a second car - hence the robotaxi.
So no, your hypothetical Model 2 would not be cheaper if you didn't compromise it in some major way, which they dont wanna do.
Upwards differentiation is also hard for Tesla - base models are already powerful enough, have all the smart features, they wont compromise on autonomous stuff etc.
This is not only my opinion but the market's - S and X sold like 2 orders of magnitude less cars than the 3 and Y.
For range, how much range is sufficient? This may be one area where the EU and US need fundamentally different vehicles, as per the saying "in America 100 years is a long time, in Europe 100 miles is a long way". Certainly the EU market supports B-segment with 44kWh @ 320 km / 199 miles: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citroën_C3#Europe_(2024)
They sold less because they're far more expensive and have to compete against much more well put together products. Meanwhile, their platforms are 10 years old and there are now other offerings in an overall niche field.
You're right about aero to an extent, but aero is only felt on long highway drives and it can be mitigated somewhat with a couple more cells. Some consumers will choose style for a cost premium. Others will choose something more expensive simply because they don't want to support Musk.
I'm not so sure on this one. I think we'll see it this year. It will have embarrassing bugs (ie. running over cats which are hiding under the car) and we'll see lots of issues to begin with (ie. the car stops in the middle of a freeway because a camera got splattered with mud).
But I think they'll achieve the goal of something that can be deployed fairly widespread without public outrage causing it to be banned without lidar.
Actions speak louder than words, and the fact that a 'cybercab' production line is firing up this year is also a strong indicator - the fact they didn't do that 5 years ago means tesla leadership didn't think it was going to work back then. 'cybercab' wouldn't sell well as a 2 seater if it couldn't self drive. (although the actual mass production will be delayed till next year is my guess, but we'll see model 3 or y being used for a taxi service in the meantime)
If you can train a policy that drives well on cameras, you can get self-driving. If you can't, you're fucked, and no amount of extra sensors will save you.
Self-driving isn't a sensor problem. It always was, is, and always will be an AI problem.
No amount of LIDAR engineering will ever get you a LIDAR that outputs ground truth steering commands. The best you'll ever get is noisy depth estimate speckles that you'll have to massage with, guess what, AI, to get them to do anything of use.
Sensor suite choice is an aside. Camera only 360 coverage? Good enough to move on. The rest of the problem lies with AI.
It always goes back to my long standing belief that we need dedicated lanes with roadside RFID tags to really make this self driving thing work well enough.
Making a car that drives well on arbitrary roads is freakishly hard. Having to adapt every single road in the world before even a single self-driving car can use them? That's a task that makes the previous one look easy.
Learned sensor fusion policy that can compensate for partial sensor degradation, detect severe dropout, and handle both safely? Very hard. Getting the world that can't fix the low tech potholes on every other road to set up and maintain machine specific infrastructure everywhere? A nonstarter.
Also, 99% of roads in civilized areas have something alongside them already that you can attach RFID tags to. Quite a bit easier than setting up an EV charging station (another significant infrastructure thing which has rolled out pretty quickly). And let's not forget, every major metro area in the world has multi-lane superhighways which didn't even exist at all 50-70 years ago.
Believe me, I've thought about this for a lot more than 15 minutes. Yes, we should improve sensor reliability, absolutely. But it wouldn't hurt to have some kind of backup roadside positioning help, and I don't see how it would be prohibitively expensive. Maybe I am missing something, but I'm gonna need more than your dismissive comment to be convinced of that.
Everything about road infrastructure is "cheap to deploy, cheap to maintain". This is your design space: the bare minimum of a "road" that still does its job reasonably well. Gas stations and motels are an aside - they earn money. Not even the road signs pay for themselves.
Now, you propose we design some type of, let's say, a machine only mark that helps self-driving cars work well. They do nothing for human drivers, who are still a road majority. And then you somehow manage to make every country and every single self-driving car vendor to get to agree on the spec, both on paper and in truth.
Alright, let's say we've done that. Why would anyone, then, put those on the road? They're not the bare minimum. And if we wanted to go beyond the bare minimum, we'd plug the potholes, paint the markings and fix the road signs first.
All the same, it still reminds me of past infrastructure changes which ended up being widely distributed, with or without standards, from railroads to fiber optic cables.
And this:
> if we wanted to go beyond the bare minimum, we'd plug the potholes, paint the markings and fix the road signs first
...just strikes me as a major logical fallacy. It's like the people who say we shouldn't continue exploring our solar system because we have too many problems on Earth. We will always have problems here, from people starving because of oppressive and unaccountable hierarchies they're stuck under to potholes and road markings the local government is too broke or incompetent to fix. We should work on those, yeah, but we should also be furthering the research and development of technology from every angle we realistically can. It feels weird to be explaining this here.
Just look at how Waymo is struggling to grow and scale. And they don't even need every road remade. They just need every road mapped and scanned out into 3D objects with their reference cars. They're solving a problem orders of magnitude easier, and it still throttles their growth.
Are they? They seem to be growing fine.
Regardless, they are approaching it the right way. They start with a safe solution, even though it is expensive, then bring the cost down over the years as technology improves. The wrong way to do it is to start with a less expensive but unsafe tech then add a safety driver in every car. That approach is wrong both because the "tech" of the safety driver will never improve, and you'll kill a few people along the way, like Tesla.
Source: trust me, bro? This statement has no factual basis. Calling the most common approach of all other self-driving developers except Tesla a wank also is no argument but hate only.
If you are doing end to end driving policy (i.e the wrong way of doing it), having lidar is important as a correction factor to the cameras.
Every time you pit the sheer violent force of end to end backpropagation against compartmentalization and lines drawn by humans, at a sufficient scale, backpropagation gets its win.
I fully agree, but your statement is quite ironic.
For driving, humans drive well because we operate more like Mu Zero model does - we can "visualize" the possibilities of the future states depending on what we do and pick the most optimal path. We don't need to know what the specific object is on the road, the fact that we can recognize that its there, in our path, and understand the physical interacting of a car hitting something that is taller than a bump means we can avoid it.
The way to implement self driving is exactly that - train your model to take sensor data and reconstruct a 3d space in latent dimensions, train another model to predict evolutions on the 3d space given time history with probabilistic output, and then your inference is a probabilistic guided search in that space with time constraints based on hardware. Mu Zero is nothing new, and already proved that you don't even need a hardcoded model of environment to operate in.
And you don't even need human driving data for this, as the model will be able to predict things collisions solely based on pure physics. And as a bonus, as you enhance it with things like physical models of the cars, where it can reconcile what it thinks the system is going to do versus what the physics calculations predict, you can even make it drive well in snow with low traction.
The irony of your statement is that everyone who is going end to end is manually hand coding all these hacks (like image warping in the case of Comma AI) to make the training work, all because the training data is just not sufficient, which is the exact same exercise as humans drawing lines.
And if you doubt that what Im saying is true, again, Mu Zero was proven to work. Driving is just another game where you can easily define a winning scenario, the board, and moves you can make, and apply the same concepts. The only technical part becomes accurately determining the board from sensor data.
AI + cameras have relevant limitations that LIDAR augmented suites don't. You can paint a photorealistic roadway onto a brick wall and AI + cameras will try to drive right through it, dubbed the "Wile E. Coyote" problem.
> Tesla’s far more popular models are the 3 and Y, which accounted for 97% of the company’s 1.59 million deliveries last year
I see way more Model S and X than Cybertruck.
There's nothing inherently wrong with a company deciding to stop producing models that are extremely old, have newer comparable models that are more widely available globally and sell multiples more of. So why would you keep those older models?
If anything its a good thing. But its Tesla so nothing they do will be spoken positively of.
They completely refreshed the Model Y last year and made a number of updates to the Model 3 including different body word.
The new refreshes don't look nearly as big in terms of changes as new generations of car models for other manufacturers, and Lord knows even Tesla fans have plenty of things they'd like to see improved.
Because Tesla is being measured against the benchmarks they set for themselves. It's not a good look with cancelled models, declining sales, and a lot of self-inflicted brand damage.
Musk used to claim Tesla will sell 20 million vehicles per year:
https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/tesla-...
The new goal is to have sold 20 million in total by 2035. That target represents a further decline in sales. And, given that Tesla over-hypes everything, maybe they won't achieve it:
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/05/business/elon-musk-tesla-...
Also we can have a conversation without tossing the "everyone hates Tesla!" poison down the well immediately.
The Model S is comparable performance to the Model 3 performance.
My point is that the latest models 3 & Y are more affordable alternatives to the S & X and more widely available globally.
I guess then it's more like Toyota EOLing Lexus or GM getting rid of Cadillac.
I understand the point that the cheaper models are higher volume. Historically that had not precluded the creation of sports and luxury models for most manufacturers. Are the legacy brands wrong to do this? Currently I doubt their business acumen far less than Elon's.
Nothing wrong with keeping a sport and luxury model, however I would argue that the latest models are quite sporty and luxurious in their own right.
Companies like Ford constantly discontinue models, but they don't get the level of attention Tesla does.
If Tesla aren't seeing the Model S and X being sold to anywhere near the degree of the 3 and the Y, then why continue making them? They aren't as globally available and its clear people don't want them as much as the others.
> Companies like Ford constantly discontinue models, but they don't get the level of attention Tesla does.
If they axed 2/5 of their models it might. But they're also not run by an attention wh- addict with an Apple-like fanbase.
Oh and also they're axing 2/5 of their models to build teleoperated robots. Seems like the attention is well deserved here.
Your main point is highly valid. Why does any manufacturer bother to make anything better than a Camry?
Because it makes money, of course.
They went from being able to profitably produce a luxury car, to not being able to profitably produce a luxury car, to not being able to produce a luxury car at all. All while becoming uncompetitive in the econobox market, and losing huge chunks of it even before their real competitors arrive in market…
Europe doesn't seem to want for EV competition in anything like the same way that the US is falling behind.
On top of all the problems you have identified, as well as more, they’re clearly now just aiming for fantasy land.
Mazda handled the small vehicle chassis design for Ford. So without Mazda, Ford no longer had the knowledge for continued development of their sedans and crossovers based on sedan platforms.
Ford wanted to also build trucks for the Chinese market, with a different joint venture. However, the rules limited companies to two joint ventures, which was a problem because Mazda also had a joint venture with FAW. Which meant it counted as part of Ford's 2 joint ventures.
So Ford sold Mazda. Changan Ford/Mazda got split in their respective halves. FAW was no longer associated with Ford and left with Mazda. Ford could then pick up a new joint venture for trucks, which they did and I don't believe they're doing well.
Ford just really wanted to double down on trucks, in more than one market.
The other way of looking at this: The X is the only Tesla model with door handles that aren't stupid.
Since he couldn't leave it at that, he announced a pivot to a product that doesn't exist. This is also negative.
Ford got rid of plenty of popular models including all hatchbacks and many sedans.
10 years ago people here would be describing this as a good decision.
GameStop is buying and selling used games, which is becoming impossible as consoles keep pushing for digital games.
GameStop requires a major shift in their business model to stay relevant, while Tesla just needs to hope the public doesn’t reject the idea of electrics cars out of stubbornness or politics.
While there is a lot of hype baked into both stocks, it seems like hype with Tesla is founded in more reality than the GameStop hype.
https://techcrunch.com/2026/01/28/tesla-earnings-profit-q4-2...
They’ve been overvalued for a very very long time. And then the head of the company decided to alienate as many people as possible. All while pouring a ton of resources into a product that very few people want instead of saner things.
Tax credits and foreign competition are bad enough, but they really could innovate through it. They could even try robots and taxis and see if it floats. Instead it’s sink the ships behind them because Elon is never wrong.
Their only benefit is the fact they can raise ludicrous capital to spend their way through many years of dumb. But that’s probably not enough to salvage the tire fire.
My odds on their humanoid robots are basically zero. China is too far ahead here and I’m not convinced there’s a material market that could develop fast enough. I am a fan of Waymo’s and use FSD but will not believe in their taxi product - they’re too far behind Waymo. I don’t think they will gain the regulatory traction they’ll need especially after pissing off every democrat and their mayors and city councils.
I will say, though, that there is a longstanding tradition, certainly in the United States, of an in group hurting their own material interests to deprive an out group of that same thing. https://www.marketplace.org/story/2021/02/15/public-pools-us...
The people behind the Diesel won and now are moving the money flows their way. See GM stock.
The dam is breaking. We have Canada lowering tariffs and agreeing to allow the import of Chinese EVs (limited, at least to start with) and the US administration goes off on Canada for doing it because they know what it means: crumbling American influence.
South America, Africa and Asia are likely forever lost to Tesla. And European sales are tumbling.
The supercharger network will maintain some inertia for some time but only for so long.
You can see this in Tesla announcements about attempts to diversify. AI robots? I'll believe it when I see it. Robotaxis? Well you're reliant on FSD for that and you have stiff competition in Waymo and who knows what China is cooking up there.
The GP was correct: it's a meme stock. It's no longer an investment in a business. It's an investment in Elon and, more generally, an investment in the administration. There's no fundamental way to predict how that goes and on what time scale. If you want to gamble, gamble. But gamgling is what it is. And, just like Twitter, I guarantee you the people at the top won't be left holding the bag.
Tesla's valuation has no grounding in any physical goods it manufactures.
Humanoid robots? Ain’t nobody made the business case for that. It is pure vibes.
For example, I work in deep tech and pay attention to the manufacturing industry. The idea that humanoid robots will replace, streamline and revolutionize manufacturing is a joke in that community. They’ve already long since replaced the humans with CNC machines, industrial (non-humanoid) robots, and 3d printing.
The humanoid robotics craze is a lot like the crypto craze. Pure vibes and motivated reasoning. Like crypto, there is actual value there, but way out of proportion to the hype.
If it does laundry too? We'd easily pay $20,000, and we don't have FAANG type salaries.
A dishwasher saves a lot of time but it certainly doesn't save all of the time.
But let's be generous and suggest you'll actually get someone willing to come out for just one hour and work for half the pay of market rate. Sixteen weeks. Still far short of 52 weeks.
More than I can afford, I bet.
If you can scope your problem to some degree, you can probably make some purpose-built automation that won't look like a human, but will do the job competently and cheaply.
I see the demos with the robots carrying boxes and think "okay, why not just use a conveyer belt?"
These are unsolved problems for robotics. There is a reason that most industrial robots work behind guards or in very constrained areas with use cases that are 100% on rails and stringently tested.
The idea that if you just make a robot in a human shape all these cease to be problems is magical thinking. We are fare from knowing that a humanoid-ish robot is the best option to do any of these things because we have no idea what it would take for it to do these things safely other than to say it would take technology that we currently don’t have.
WCGW?
I want the endgame version, but not the first version.
Dirty -> Sort It Yourself -> Plan Washing Chunks -> Load into Washing machine -> Yay It "Washed it For You" -> wet pile of clothes -> Unload it -> dryer -> Dryer "Dries" it For You -> Fold It Yourself -> Storage.
Now do this for a family with 2 kids that go to school. Washing is literally an hour or two of collective human time every day.
I'd pay money to rather spend that time with my kids instead of yet another useless daily chore that can be automated.
Now also apply the same logic to dishes, clearing up around the house, sorting cupboards, Driving!!, and a host of other things. The market is absolutely huge, and people are sticking their heads in the sand because they know that once this drops, humanity will reach an inflection point and all pointless manual labor will disappear, which means saying goodbye to cheap third world labor and only capital + raw resources + energy will be the only things holding back all scaling.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Washer-dryer
A business case is not just a matter of a willing buyer. It is a buyer and a vendor who can agree on a price that works for both. You may have agreed but the physics of the matter mean that there is nobody to take the other side.
Imagine the profits companies will have when they can eliminate, or drastically reduce, their single largest expense... payroll. Not only the base pay, but 401K match, insurance, payroll taxes, etc. Poof... gone.
Oh no, but Elon Musk tells us that out of the kindness of his heart we're going to have unlimited abundance. The same man responsible for taking away aid from thousands of the poorest people in the world through DOGE's interruption of PEPFAR and USAID.
With a single sentence from him, he could start saving thousands of lives without impacting his wealth in the slightest. He could do that right now.
I don't know if it's enough people to buy the goods, but robot-produced goods should bottom out on price, closing in on the actual cost of materials/energy.
I don't think that's really true, or rather it's variably true along a continuum for different kinds of things. Some things sell for close to the marginal cost of production, others close to what the market will bear.
For two examples, flat-screen TVs seem to be on one end of the continuum, iPhones on the other. Lots of other things are at different points in between. Robots won't eliminate demand for luxury goods, which are not usually near the marginal cost of production end of the scale.
I don't know what it costs Apple to make an iPhone, but if they could cut it in half while people were still willing to pay $1,000, there's no reason to think they'd lower the price.
My layman's opinion is that I would happily pay a lot of money to have a robot help me around the house: fold my clothes, do the dishes, whatever dumb menial labor. That seems like a business case to me, unless someone is going to tell me I'm the only one in the world who could want that (but I doubt it).
OP said:
> Humanoid robots? Ain’t nobody made the business case for that. It is pure vibes.
I can't make sense of this. Are you really telling me you wouldn't pay any amount of money to do menial housework? If not, why not?
For one, I don’t spend a lot of time doing housework. Just organize your life better.
Beyond that, the cost would not be small. Based on current designs, operating costs would be thousands of dollars per month. I would not pay that.
It would require a cloud controlled robot with cameras in my home. Why in the world would I want that.
Finally, I already have dishwashers and laundry machines.
Why would cloud connectivity be required? (I'm almost certain you're right, the big makers will require cloud--but that's not a requirement of the tech, is it?)
Do you really think this is a viable solution to families with kids?
Like, more than the cost of your house? For something that can't do those things right and has to be supervised? To a company that can't deliver product on time?
You can hardly even buy a reliable new car for that amount.
Do you own a Roomba? I don't. It's a huge liability and doesn't do the cleaning I want out of it, even at a sub-$1000 price point. The humanoid robot is clunkier, more of a liability, and will still refuse to do certain tasks.
Then why don't you hire a helper for that? You just said you'd pay a lot of money, so money doesn't seem to be an issue. What is then?
1) I live way, way out in the middle of nowhere.
2) Humans are fickle, late, emotional. They have requirements in their own life that conflict with the jobs I want them to do.
3) Taxes. I don't want to deal with this headache. 1099 my cleaner or whatever?
4) In my version, the costs of owning the robot are less than the costs of hiring humans. If that wasn't true, then I'd reconsider. I probably wouldn't buy one until the cost switched like that, unless maybe it was open-source or something.
Here's another way to think about it: Amazon is willing to pay workers to do the job, but they'd obviously rather have the robots do it. The robots work close to free, don't complain, and probably do a better job (at the jobs they're capable of). Why wouldn't they hire a human for that? A lot of the same reasons.
> Thank you for inquiring about our services. I'd love to discuss with you further regarding the person you are seeking. Personal assistants do not do housekeeping and housekeepers do not have the P.A skillset to pay bills and make appts etc unless they are an executive level housekeeper. Rates for executive housekeepers range between $60-$65/hr and a minimum of 20+ hours per week, plus PTO, paid sick days and many also seek a health stipend.
The day that:
- displaced workforce issue is solved
- they cost less than 20k everything included, base model
- do all the processing locally in their HW
- are smaller and lighter than a human being (but can reach higher places)
- last 10 years at least
I will definitely buy one. I don't think I'm going to see this in my lifetime though (I'm in my 40's).
And I'm a former Tesla FSD customer, so I should be the ideal early adopter for this product.
This is called having a live-in maid or a cleaning service. Even in the first-world, where there isn't a disfranchised rural population to provide cheap labor to the middle class (e.g. Philippines, most of LATAM 20 years ago) the service will be cheaper than the price of a vaporware bot [0]. Now, you might say the droid is cheaper if you want a live-in maid in HCOL area, but have in mind that this thing barely can fold clothes and fill a dishwasher (an actual domestic bot). Also it sometimes is actually a dude controlling it remotely.
We would need bots of the level of that awful I Robot movie with Will Smith.
That expands the market greatly.
How much is "a lot of money"? Not picking on you, happy to let you want what you want, but people often seem to mention laundry, which mystifies me.
I am an adult male in the US. I do not need to dress for work in any way I would not dress anyway. Basically, I do two loads of laundry a week, one for clothes, one for towels and bedding.
This requires about one hour of actual work per week. More if we counted "waiting for the washing machine" and "waiting for the dryer" as work, but I don't.
How much would I pay to remove this hour a week of (really easy) work from my life? Almost nothing. I would not, for example, pay someone $50 to come to my house and do it for me. It's not a problem and doesn't need a solution.
So how much would you really pay for a robot that did your laundry, washed your dishes, and did other "dumb menial labor"?
Maybe there will be a $25K robot that can do laundry before your kids grow up enough, but can't recommend holding your breath.
I swear I don't need a humanoid robot, give me a proper autonomous robot that cleans your house and I'm more than happy. Could be 40 cm tall, and look like a box, I don't care.
2. Nature has tested many different form factors and the human form dominated the others.
It's like skipping making kitchen blenders and vacuum cleaners and instead building a robot that will be mixing stuff manually or using a broom.
Manufacturing, where 90% of the process is generally automated has countless specialized ones. It would not make sense to put generic ones there, because humans really are doing very specific work in manufacturing.
But the generic robot is the endgame. I think Musk tries to achieve the endgame, probably too soon. FSD, interplanetary travel, etc
It's not like I can't think of a single use, I do: an army. Sure wheels get you faster, but when you have an army, them being able to climb or move along larger steps is an advantage. A long stick (arm) is ideal for mounting and directing a weapon to fire missiles. Then you only need a observation unit, ideally at the top and maybe some communication tools also at the top, et voila you have a "head". The human form is ideal for fighting and that is what it evolved for (hunting). But I don't know if we want that wannabe dictators aka. billionaires to have a large army, which also doesn't even have moral, so they could revolt. They sure would like that.
Birds are much better at being dinner. The most "successful" bird by a very wide margin is the broiler chicken.
Of the individual animals that are the same scale as humans, the vast majority exist either to be eaten by humans, serve humans, or be cute for humans.
The most successful wild animals of a similar size to humans have 10s of millions of individuals, not billions. Seals for example thrive by existing in places that humans are not suited for.
For instance: a quadruped base can be statically stable in case of power loss - a biped really can't.
Besides that: I, personally, am totally fine with the current state of the technology.
You are correct to wonder this and almost every use case for a robot will be optimized to a non-human form factor.
Certainly there are tasks - like BJJ training partner - that require a human form factor. Almost everything else, including general, purpose, helper, robot, will be cheaper and more extensible in a non-human form factor.
One of your children remarked that nature has experimented with form factors and humans have won… To which I would point out that the upright, bipedal, form factor arose from the limits of oxygen processing, and heat dissipation… Neither limitation will be encountered in the same way with a robot…
… or perhaps I would point out that nature has, indeed, experimented with form factors and ants won - by a very large margin.
There's a business case for robots that are specialized in specific repetitive actions, and we already see this in manufacturing. But general purpose humanoid robots make no sense.
They're incredibly expensive and, from what we've seen, worse across the board compared to humans. It's cheaper to just hire humans.
The human form is actually pretty shit at most things. But, it can do everything. There's just little purpose for that in a business case. You know what you're doing, so you just need robots to do that, not to try to be humans.
Like, okay, you can get a humanoid robot to be a burger flipper. But that makes no sense. You can, instead, have an automated burger cooking machine. Which do exist! I worked in a restaurant with one 10 years ago.
Honda is going to come out with a new Civic next year. It's going to look like the old Civic.
Tesla is trying to create self driving taxis to make the rest of the auto industry obsolete.
If you think that can happen, they should be worth more than the rest of the industry.
They are one of many organisations trying to do that and they are not the most successful at it.
This is a pretty baffling take. Most people in the world operate their own cars, and even if taxis were free, a large portion of them would continue to operate their own cars because it's convenient.
Taxis also don't replace a good chunk of the new vehicle market. People driving fleet trucks aren't going to work out of taxis. The top selling vehicles in the USA are pickup trucks, and it isn't even close.
Lastly, even if they succeed, competition will catch up and the market will be saturated.
In 20 years, people will still be buying the humble Civic. While the next 20 years at Tesla will probably be a string of market failures and wacky promises of personal space craft or some shit.
I'm just offering a reasonable explanation for why people value it. Nobody has to agree.
Waymo is already in the lead, and OEMs will be beating down Waymo's door to license a simplified Driver stack if L3 autonomy becomes a sales-driver (ha!)
Edit: Waymo already has strategic partnerships with Toyota and the Hyundai group, so OEMs are already further along this path than I thought
The best case scenario for a self-driving company would be to target software and sensor solution packages that they can sell or license to other manufacturers. Such a vendor can focus on the self-driving problem and not have to bother with things like "we found a surprisingly big market niche for a 11-passenger minibus, but no platform for it" or "to sell it in the EU we need the headlights to be 5cm lower". I'd expect the margins are also a hell of a lot higher if they don't have to include two tonnes of steel with each auto-driver license they sell.
Maybe they build a small number of test mules, or just chop-shop a few off-the-shelf cars as a R&D fleet, but they hardly need to be a seven-figures-per-year manufacturer to be supplying those needs.
That's even assuming they come out green in the competition to deliver robotaxis. Right now the leading player in the US market is a company who is neither Tesla nor a legacy vehicle manufacturer. It's an adtech who started gluing the contents of a Radio Shack onto the worst cars you could possibly think of (Chrysler Pacificas and Jaguar i-Paces? Really?) and turned it into something that's an everyday thing in several major cities.
Tesla FSD story reminds me of the fracas that was early OS/2. IBM sold people 286 hardware on the promise of it running OS/2, so they had to waste a lot of effort building a 286-capable OS/2 that was clunky and almost immediately obsolete. No matter how talented Tesla's R&D team are, they're walled in by design choices made on existing vehicles (i. e. relying on cameras instead of lidar). I wonder if they'd be better off being ran as an arm's length startup to address the problem more generically, and then they can sell it to other firms if it turns out that the best solution won't work on existing Tesla hardware.
I thought it was hyperloop. I thought it was suboribital taxis. I thought it was underground taxis. I thought it was self-driving semi trucks. Or was it solar roofs? Or powerwall? Wait weren't we supposed to be on the moon again right now?
He's a bullshitter. Yea, he picks good targets, but he is entirely full of shit. The market just does not reflect this. He should have been golden parachuted onto a yacht years ago.
X kind of works. XAi kind of works. You can say it is all kind of broken but it works. People predicted X will collapse just a few months ago!
StarLink is really popular now, and it didn't exist few months ago.
He can still do things. People are betting on that.
Now if you ask me, Tesla is still his biggest moneymaker and collapse of Tesla sales will be catastrophic for his empire.
It is less popular and makes less money than when he acquired it, and that is ignoring the fact that it is a cesspool of racism now.
What robots are they making?
Where can you buy one? What does it do?
You can’t just compare Tesla to a meme stock when the founder’s side gig is launching and landing orbital rockets - a feat that even the most technologically advanced nation states have failed to accomplish.
Come on people, use a little critical thinking skills.
But I will concede the founder's other side gigs would appear to have significantly affected its sales
1. SpaceX was an exceptionally well-executed good idea, and continues to be a leader in innovation.
2. Tesla brought EVs to the mass consumer market and proved the profitability of EVs.
3. Elon Musk was essential to the success of SpaceX and Tesla.
4. Tesla now has fierce competition in the category it defined: EVs.
5. Tesla has undergone revenue and profit reduction.
6. While it experiences promise in alternate product lines, Tesla is not a market leader in robotics (Unitree, Boston Dynamics) or self-driving cars (Baidu, Waymo). Tesla reported profit growth in residential solar and residential power storage, but the revenues from these verticals are dwarfed by other segments.
7. The trend over the past decades is Elon Musk being successful at innovating in underserved parts of the market.
8. Elon Musk is not currently pursuing any underserved parts of the market.
I am not sure. I think buyers or potential buyers shifted their assessment of Tesla in the last, say, 1-2 years a lot.
I can't tell if this is real and he realizes the traditional luxury brands have beaten him or if he's just using the classic rug store sales tactic.
https://www.smh.com.au/business/consumer-affairs/rozelle-rug...
In many countries, "carpet salesman" is equivalent to "used car salesman" as the least trustworthy occupation imaginable.
- Average Selling Price;
- Cars produced vs cars sold;
- How many unsold cars are in inventory. I did find this [1];
- A model breakdown of the above 2.
The reason I'm interested in this because my theory is that:
1. Sales have been shifting from the Model S/X to the Model 3/Y, which reduces average selling price and overall profit. Stopping production is really about the inventory glut;
2. Unsold inventory is going up, particularly for the Cybertruck; and
3. Tesla marketshare is collapsing in many markets due to a combination of brand collapse among the most likely EV buyers and competition from lower-priced alternatives, particularly Chinese EVs in developing markets.
So what exactly is propping up this company at an above $1T market cap?
[1]: https://electrek.co/2025/06/17/tesla-tsla-inventory-overflow...
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/u/0/d/1F5IQOynIawoXiJPV...
So Tesla deserves credit for building the first electric cars that people actually wanted to buy. They also deserve credit for building the largest and most reliable charging network - a key factor in making electric car ownership more feasible.
But they’ve made a lot of poor decisions recently and all the money and power went to Elon’s head. I think it was beneficial to the world for Tesla to exist and do that important work early on, and now it’s beneficial to the world for the company to die.
Of those, the Leaf is the only model that has continuously existed since then, and from the documentary there is a sense of that. GM admits the Volt was a stepping stone and not the final product. Tesla's part of the documentary involves a lot of trials and tribulations and even Tesla seeming unsure about their manufacturing problems. (Though the documentary itself spins a hopeful tune.)
Of the figures in the documentary the most prescient seems to be Carlos Ghosn, then in charge of Renault-Nissan. He very much insisted that EVs weren't just the future, they were the scramble for the present. Renault took that message to heart and seemed to be the side that won it in the messy divorce that also eventually wound up with Ghosn getting charged for treason and embezzlement in Japan. Which is an incredible and weird story on multiple levels and maybe the documentary makers will get a chance to include that in a third movie for the series.
Convincing investors to buy and hold Tesla, because of the vague promise of some great technological innovation being just around the corner. Electric cars and partially automated driving don't serve that purpose anymore.
I have no doubt there will be many tens of millions of them, it’s just a question of when. 5 years? 10? 50?
A longer horizon promise of multi-trillion dollar wealth generation for Tesla.
As the whole robotaxi thing is starting to fizzle, Elon has quite notably talked more and more about how actually Optimus is the true gem of Tesla.
Their electronics, batteries, motors, etc., are world class. Packaging this up into something a partner can use to build actual cars could have less risk. An electric motor or battery can propel many kinds of automobile. They tend to keep their value better when stored in this format too. The moment everything is integrated into a car, things get very bad very quickly unless you're selling Ferraris or Lamborghinis.
This was maybe true 5-10 years ago, but not today.
https://oxide-and-friends.transistor.fm/episodes/predictions...
Saying that, I wouldn’t be too surprised if robotaxi replaces 90% of taxis and Ubers in the next 5-7 years.
But yea, stepping from sinking raft to the next…
“Following contact, the pedestrian stood up immediately, walked to the sidewalk, and we called 911. The vehicle remained stopped, moved to the side of the road, and stayed there until law enforcement cleared the vehicle to leave the scene,” Waymo wrote in the post.
If a human were driving that child could be in much worse shape. You are being disingenuous by leaving out context.
Humans can move further away from parked cars when noticing a chance of hitting a child.
This waymo did not, seemingly
It is not evident to me that a human driver would have hit the child, and hit hit harder than Waymo did.
But we are absolutely certain that Waymo hit a child.
How about we start with 0.00076% first before we start throwing insane numbers like 90% (chance of which happening are in-line with me marrying Beyonce)
I'd bet a kidney that doesn't happen.
Now that they are going away, there's maybe an opportunity to produce some more premium 3/Y models. Before now, they couldn't make the 3/Y too premium because they had to distinguish them from the S/X and keep them in a distinct price bracket.
As such, my guess is “not any time soon”.
“we’re hoping to debut [next gen roadster] in April, hopefully. It’s gonna be something out of this world.”
(I’m just the messenger, don’t shoot me)
[1] https://techcrunch.com/2025/11/06/tesla-delays-reveal-of-pro...
I thought the same thing about the (usable, upgradable) mac pro, but then they came out with the trash can mac pro 2013.
If Tesla completely exits automotive and decides to license their FSD tech (or someone else catches up), then I'll probably just get whatever the equivalent of a Bolt is then with that and premium sound.
And they just might, too. Recall that the EV tax credit went away this year along with regulatory credits to other auto OEMs, which was a huge part of their business. This combined with the Cybertruck (unsurprisingly!) missing sales targets is problematic.
Couldn't have said it better
Don't get me wrong, I don't generally lust after EVs, but I am looking forward to the R3X....
However, the 3 is lighter, has better headlight clusters, the light accent inside of the cabin (that I thought the S was getting, but I guess not), and a marginally better sound system.
The yoke and button turn signals would be a deal breaker for me, but to each their own.
- Husband Tesla daily driver - Wife Bronco daily driver - Truck to pull their boat - Campervan for outdoor adventures - Older car for teenager to drive - 90s convertible for summer fun
Linus Pauling. Chemistry 1954, peace 1962.
TIL that Model S hasn't been as popular. But hopefully when the 2nd gen Roadster finally gets released that it will fill in the slight gap left by Model S's discontinuation.
While "The old auto establishment" is not a benevolent structure, they proved that experience is something earned with time and doing things. Corporate knowledge and memory is real, and you can't beat it with brute force.
They started the change, but they failed to keep up with the pace. Also hubris, greed and monies.
When Tesla came about, they were distinctively different. A different chassis, a different weight distribution, completely different dynamics. Since they started with a blank slate, their cars were greenfield projects, and they correctly took note of the pitfalls, and avoided them.
On the other hand, avoiding past pitfalls or remedying them doesn't make you immune from the future ones, and doesn't mean the other companies can't learn, too. This is where they made the mistake.
They overpromised (esp. with the Autopilot thingy) and underdelivered massively on that front, and while they "made" the software-defined-vehicle, they underestimated the problems and behaved like the problems they face are as simple as configuring a web service right. This is what slowly broke them. They also underestimated hardware problems of the car (like using consumer grade parts in the critical parts of the hardware. Remember wearing down flash chips and bricking cars?)
Because while car is software defined now, it's also an "industrial system". It has to be robust. It has to be reliable, idiot-proof even. Playing fast and loose with these things allowed automakers to catch them, maybe slowly but surely.
Because, "the old automakers" has gone through a lot of blood, sweat and tears (both figuratively and literally), and know what to do and what not to do. They can anticipate pitfalls better then a "newbie" carmaker. They shuddered, sputtered, hesitated, but they are in the move now. They will evolve this more slowly, but in a more reliable and safer way. They won't play that fast, but the products will be more refined. They won't skimp on radars because someone doesn't believe in them, for example.
Not everything is numbers, valuations and great expansions which look good on quarterlies, news, politics, and populists. Sometimes the slow and steads wins, and it goes for longer.
Physics and engineering doesn't care for valuations. They only care about natural laws.
This is what I'm seeing here.
If anything, ending production of SX and giving more focus to 3Y would probably increase the quality of those models, I'd imagine.
If you're pointing to Autopilot / camera-only as the main transgression here, yeah I'll agree that they have definitely overpromised, but it doesn't really seem to me like the lack of a L5 system is actually a deal-breaker for anyone, because from what I hear they are just damn good cars anyway.
Toyota sells more cars in a year then Tesla has sold ever.
Don't be surprised if something else takes its place as they do need something larger than Y and less expensive than X was.
“Full Automated Parenting”. You win a Darwin award on behalf of your kids if you fall for this shtick.
I did not look forward to the news articles about robots accidentally dropping or squashing babies.
I’m very bullish on humanoid robots, but this seems absolutely batshit insane to me. These things are no where near ready for full scale production.
Most of what he says will happen never happens, but people point to the few things that did happen, but were late, and say, "This too will happen."
He has very little connection to the truth. He's a hypeman and a conman
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_predictions_for_autono...
https://electrek.co/2026/01/28/teslas-unsupervised-robotaxis...
https://electrek.co/2026/01/28/tesla-is-still-trying-to-dece...
Courts have consistently ruled that state and local jurisdictions are not legally required to cooperate with federal law enforcement.
why not kill the cybertruck instead?
Tesla crashed the allure of its brand by lowering the price point of the Y and 3. The X and S aren’t different enough to attract $100K+ purchasers.
(It’s one reason why Toyota and other brands use different marks like Lexus for their high end offerings).
What they are really signaling though is with EVs they are not able to differentiate between the higher and lower cost models enough to show value to the higher end models. This is a huge failure IMO. Model S was the OG car that really was looked up to when it launched. It did have them luxury image, by not matching the build and interior of the car to the image Tesla really dropped the ball. Now the S is seen as inferior to the other luxury cars in that price range and so it’s becoming tough for Tesla to differentiate between the 3 and S.
This actually brings up the larger question, does musk care about cars at all at this point? Or does he just want to move on to robots? Feels like his heart is not on the cars.
X going away probably isn't surprising given sales dynamics. More people would tend to opt for the cross-over or sedan. The model S is a little more shocking since it was always niche, but honestly Tesla doesn't have the trim to be priced like that and I suspect in order to get from where they're at to BMW/Audi etc., just isn't where they want to invest their money.
This definitely feels like an "oh no, people stopped buying" pivot but the moves themselves make sense.
I don't see it as hate. It's quite pragmatic views.
This is a lose/lose enemy centered mindset, and a weird personification of a corporation.
“Stop the hate”, but of course only if it’s not me hating. Because that hate is valid and justified.
Add why should anyone look past their opinions about the leader?
We have the saying “the fish rots from the head” for a good reason. Tesla has been rotten ever since Elon got involved.
Because it's the most advanced car manufacturing in the US... Virtually the only successful EV maker outside of China, and it provides over 100,000 jobs worldwide.
This is like asking Mrs. Lincoln what she thought about the play. The scope of the (financial and physical) damage by Musk's government meddling is breathtaking, is ongoing, and will echo for generations.
Not a fanboy, but this seems like it went exactly according to plan.
Adjusted for inflation, $30k then is around $45k now. Tesla sells a Model 3 for just over $35k.
It doesn't make any sense to hold someone to a promise like that and not adjust it for inflation. I think you can legitimately complain that he didn't meet the timeline he was aiming for.
The base is around $28k. This feels like one of the first "affordable" EVs in the USA. It also comes with decent tech without a subscription, and has comparable ranges to Teslas.
The possibility of FSD is probably the only reason I paid $10K more for a M3 over a BYD Seal. But free FSD? Who can compete with that. Nobody.
Also, turning FSD into a subscription is total enshittification and I hate it. It would also go a long way to coax back peeved off buyers and convince them not to make their 2nd EV a different brand.
My current sentiment towards Tesla for making FSD subscription-only AFTER I bought my car? Screw you. Go to hell. It’s MY $80k asset. I feel betrayed.
The level of cynicism of the discussion is overwhelming, frankly. I get it that some people don't like Musk because of his politics, but why should that prevent people interested in technology to at least try to present a steelman case?
Let me try it, at a risk to be down-voted to oblivion...
1. As people correctly point out, S&X are outdated, low volume models. Investing more engineering time in them doesn't make any business sense; these engineering resources and capital should be clearly redeployed elsewhere.
2. People think that Waymo is supposedly better(?) than FSD, but at least some very well informed people (and NVIDIA as a company) believe that it's not. Personal anecdote: an older (HW3) version of Tesla drove me perfectly well in Yosemite last weekend, in on winding mountain roads with 0 cell phone coverage. It will take Waymo forever to map everything there properly with LIDAR, and true autonomy only in selected metro areas has limited value.
3. It's obvious that when we have autonomous, general purpose humanoid robots, they will completely transform our societies. Any such robots would require an enormous AI/vision investment. Say what you want about Elon, but xAI basically caught up with the top LLM shops in ~18 months, and now have comparable AI training capacity. You can bet against Optimus, but who else would have the skills to bring both the technology and the AI to market first? China? Good robotics, but no enough data to train their vision models comparing to Tesla, at least not yet.
4. So the bear case is that (a) driving autonomy is not possible without LIDAR, (b) Tesla can't bring another very complex product to market, and (c) autonomous robots are not possible in our lifetime. If you look at the AI progress even in the last 12 months, that's a tough sell to me.
What are the serious, tech-based counterarguments to the points above?
for us lot who were 'born in it, molded by it' (tech), it can be very hard to internalize that there are a lot of people out there who legimiately cannot for the life of them wrap their head around a computer, or the internet, other than "wifi logo = i can video call my grandkids".
you could say services like dropbox are outreach/charity organisations that onboard the masses onto 10x productivity curves (whether they like it or not!)
and to be honest, ive become guilty of drag n dropping tarballs to/from my gdrive account when im too dumb to figure out the ssh proxy tunnel incantation (or beg an llm for one for the 1000th time.) so really, everyone wins.
im not sure claude code will change all that much for the non-technical segment. from their point of view, you changed one terminal window for another. so what? its still a black box (literally).
Source: 45000 miles in a bit over two years, loved every minute of it. Makes our other high priced German car a disappointing machine to be avoided if possible.
I'll try to provide some counter-points specifically regarding the rate of progress.
3. It's much easier to catch up in capability (ex. LLMs) than it is to achieve a new capability (ex. replace humans laborers with humanoid robots). You can hire someone from a competitor, secrets eventually leak out, the search space is narrowed etc.
4(c). To me, what's most important is whether or not truly autonomous humanoid robots happens in 3 years, 5 years, 10 years, etc. rather than in our lifetime.
These timelines will be tied to AI development timelines which largely outside the control of any one player like Tesla. I believe the world is bottlenecked on compute and that the current compute is not sufficient for physical AI.
It's extremely easy to be too early (ex. many of the self driving car companies of the past decade), and so for Tesla, there is a risk of over-investing in manufacturing robots before the core technology is ready.
Re: both 3 and 4(c) - agree that compute (or maybe even power for that compute) is likely to be a bottleneck in the next 3-5 years. However, I think Tesla/xAI are better positioned than many competitors as Tesla is a manufacturing company first and foremost; and this expertise (which is shared freely between Musk's companies) can help it to build it's own data centers, power generation (e.g., solar), or - in the most bullish case - even fab capacity.
2. Waymo has been offering a driverless taxi service for some time now, and Tesla is not. That's a hard fact. Meanwhile your arguments are beliefs and personal anecdotes.
When, or rather if, Tesla starts offering their service, they will be behind Waymo by approximately however long ago Waymo started theirs, so at least a few years.
Unless you have some "serious, tech-based counterarguments"?
3. It's also obvious that when we have AGI, fusion, etc., they will completely transform our societies. I promise I will deliver you those by the end of this year. Send money now. If my timeline slips by a little—maybe a few decades—well, it was just a best-effort estimate and I did deliver in the end!
4. No, the bear case is that there's no real reason to believe Tesla would be the company that captures the market vs any other company. Their solar, tunnelling, and now car business models have failed/are failing, so they must win on self-driving/robots.
Self-driving is looking really bad, they're badly losing to Waymo.
They have shown nothing in terms of robots. If anything, dressing people up as robots and showing that is a rather negative signal. Oh, and robots are at least a 10x harder problem than self-driving.
Some of these same commenters were trying to make you believe not long ago that FSD wasn't going to be competitive with Waymo because it dropped LIDAR. If you bring that up now they'll just change goalposts. There's no point even arguing with someone unable to approach an argument in good faith.
Are they betting Robotaxi will replace all cars in the future?
So you double down on what you have that no one else can compete on.
Q4 sales: Model 3 & Model Y: 406,585 deliveries All Other Models (S/X/Cybertruck): 11,642 deliveries
X launched in 2016.
Both launched with slow rollouts.
Meanwhile, the average car in use today is 13 years old and getting older. (I currently drive a 22 year old car)
It definitely turns me off buying a used model S to know it's being discontinued. And if I extrapolate that to the 3/Y, a new purchase.
Given my desire for a midsize family sedan, it makes it feel like BMW i4 or Porsche Taycan just won me over in the future.
The S is more in line with with 5er.
I love the way the Taycan CrossTurismo thing looks, but holy hell getting in and out of it is like getting in and out of a sports car. I expect it to be slightly compromised compared to the competition, not.. extremely compromised.
Most people in the western world have no clue HOW bad the crisis in our electronics industry caused by AI BS, tariff wars etc is.
When you wanted to get anything done in China as a western company, last year you might have issues to have China allow EXPORT. For example due to the pissing contest about Nexperia, a lot of really basic chips like USB controllers suddenly were forbidden for export.
And since January 1st 2026, things got far worse: Now some standard connectors (that are, amongst others, used in cars) that are made in the USA can no longer be IMPORTED into China. Which means that you now can typically will have parts missing on PCBAs that you then have to re-solder with the missing US components somewhere else. And many don't have the competence for this anymore.
This is all just wild speculation.
And I am pretty sure that right now it will be next to impossible to source parts for such a complex product like a robot. I need grey market brokers locally in Shenzhen to get even the most basic stuff at insane prices. And a lot of stuff simply is no longer available at all, due to things like "Intel has replaced anyone with a brain with an AI, and now no longer is able to produce and chip embedded N150 CPUs from the US to China, because... how?".
Tesla is now putting in 4680 battery cells back into the Model Y. Years after they had discontinued the 4680 program. What does that mean? They are using up whatever parts they still have, like everybody else in the electronics industry is now doing.
Good luck buying a computer, phone, fridge, car or toaster in the second half of 2026.
1. Build sports car
2. Use that money to build an affordable car
3. Use that money to build an even more affordable car
4. While doing above, also provide zero emission electric power generation options
he got distracted by side-missions, his personal shitty side
however if you separate the ideas from the person you can see how such a simple strategy was executed successfully
5. Peace out from Tesla for a while to pivot hard into far-right politics, using outsized power and influence to wage culture wars, alienate core customers, and inject volatility into a brand that was built on trust, optimism, and engineering credibility.
6. Unveil Optimus as the next grand pillar of the vision, not as a shipping product but as a perpetual demo, a future-shaped distraction that soaks up attention while core execution, margins, and credibility quietly erode.
Tesla step 6 Optimus robot is not. Others are ahead, with less hype and more delivery. See Boston Dynamics / Hyundai
His idea is to keep involving more investors, more people, government is possible in tesla's orbit with nice stories. When other are so invested the failures aren't his problem anymore, he got hist compensation which is tied to the company price.
Setup automated low gravity refueling depots. Then automated mining of the solar system will scale up as it more than pays for itself. And as with Starlink, SpaceX synergy would give him a serious advantage.
Much faster to achieve (despite the challenges), less expensive, and more profitable than a human Mars colony which would burn money without return for decades.
(Regardless of wishful thinking, civilizations coming backup is a second substrate adapted to the rest of the solar system, not a colony suffering truly miserable conditions. Although I am all for human exploration, which would also be easier and cheaper on the back of expanding automated infrastructure.)