I guess I’ll comment. I’m trying to curb my bias and remember that Tesla is not just a car company. It’s a car company led by a politically outspoken CEO who’s flipping off their #1 consumer demographic.
Dang, maybe I let my bias slip in there.
I am starting to wonder if he is a wannabe Ogligarch. His tweet about giving 45 million a week was a step to far. The Billionaire class is starting to make me think really? Just how far do they want to go to make this world in their image?
He’s already backed off that $45 MM per month pledge. Like the Twitter purchase, he bought at the top of the market.
intercst
Also some repairability issues:
Hmmm. A growth company without much growth.
DB2
Someone very vocal is going to be very sad.
Robotaxi will be unveiled this year and humanoid robots will be in production next year for internal Tesla use, and for sale commercially in 2026.
If you believe that, then maybe there is hope.
Hope for what?
Hope for TSLA?
Hope for Elon?
Hope for humanity?
Hilarious. This keeps repeating itself. He is a political and legal nitwit.
To be fair he is handicapped by his autism. He can not read the social cues on a high level.
Most billionaires do not want the publicity. One they do not want to interfere and two they do not want the public’s ire. Business matters more.
I do not believe it. Certainly some of it will work. I do not know when.
Musk is going to get some of his dreams to work. He already has. That will continue.
He needs to figure out how to live the sadder side of his life. He has been on the edge of tears getting off his cross for decades. He needs to settle down. Not just be the divorcee who hates the world. He needs to figure out his messaging. Just aiming at rednecks to accept Tesla is a waste of time. Worse it is now backfiring.
I think all of American manufacturing will have a better second half.
Maybe the hype over Robotaxi will come true, there’s certainly a market for shorter-form transportation. See: Uber, Lyft. I have a hard time seeing a lot of Tesla owners putting their expensive new toy into the general market for babies to throw up into, but maybe. If it’s not that, then Robotaxi is a taxicab service with the inherent capital requirements thereof, ie Hertz, or other ownership paradigms. Is that Tesla’s model? (Because it’s not a good one.)
There’s also the real possibility that Tesla won’t own this market as they did for EVs for a few years, since there are already competitors out there doing it. Tesla probably has some advantages (data collection) but the others do to, so the winner (if this is a winner-take-all market, which I doubt) is questionable at this point.
I remain skeptical of the “humanoid robot” business, at least for the foreseeable future, and again, find no particular reason why Tesla will be the one to win it, if it ever comes true. OK, they have “factories” to test them out, but won’t other large scale producers? And since when is that the important metric? IBM didn’t need “factories” of its own to build large scale computers to work in factories. All the people who work in the vast enterprise of factory automation equipment make it custom to the process, whether that’s food prep, making ball point pens, or automobile assemblage.
Musk says “You’re looking at Tesla the wrong way.” Maybe so, but a clear headed view also looks at the downside, as well as probabilities. He’s hit a couple of home runs, to be sure. That doesn’t mean every at bat is going to be as rich.
I don’t want to regurgitate old arguments but feel the need to correct some misunderstandings.
Tesla’s approach to self-driving is different from the other major players. To my knowledge it is the only self-learning system where the car is not limited to a geo-fenced area and dependent on high resolution mapping and where the robotaxi is not enormously more expensive/complex than cars currently being mass produced.
If humanoid robots are successful, the market is expected to be huge with many winners. Tesla is projecting a cost less than a car for a bot that can be used at home to do all sorts of tasks, from yard work to housekeeping. It is easy to see the usefulness of a humanoid bot in nursing homes, hospitals, restaurants and other locations where the capacity to do multiple tasks in a human environment with human tools is important.
And one shouldn’t forget the fast growing energy storage business nor the fact that lower priced Tesla models will be introduced in a year or so in a US market where 90% of vehicles are still ICEs. Meanwhile the cybertruck seems to be selling, the semi is ramping up, and Tesla still has the best charging network. Tesla has a lot of revenue streams it can shift focus to and develop even if the robotaxi is less successful than expected.
I’m not sure if this is true. I haven’t seen any competitors that have “standard” cars do some of the driving - like stopping at stop signs and stoplights, like turning left and right, adjusting to speed limits, and pulling into a parking spot upon arrival. I’ve seen heavily modified cars, with about $100k of extra equipment strapped on do it, but that’s quite a different thing. By “standard” cars, I mean cars that people regularly go out and buy and then drive around for commuting, errands, and trips.
That said, as I’ve mentioned many times before, none of the current popular Tesla cars out there will ever be truly self-driving for various reasons, but mainly because they can’t see directly in front of them. So if it drives alone, it will run over the bike that was carelessly left in front of the car in the driveway every time. Or, God forbid, a small child playing on the ground in front of the car. And I think Tesla knows this fact, they’ve added a front bumper camera to their latest model, and they’ve added an 8th camera input to their latest hardware platform (HW4). That’s 8th camera input is specifically for a front bumper camera.
The other thing I have concluded that Tesla will need to add before it can truly self-drive is what I call “local learning”. It will need to learn certain specific local things just as a human does when they regularly drive in certain places. A simple example is a place that I drive a few times a week. It is a two lane road that I enter by taking a left turn into it at a T intersection. But this two lane road has the right lane ending in less than 1/2 mile, then the lanes merge, and then less than 100 yards later reaches a traffic circle (roundabout). There is a small sign saying “land ends in 1/4 mile” (or something like that). Most human drivers know to simply avoid that right lane because it’s going to end very soon, and that way you can avoid an unnecessary merge. The speed limit is 40 on that stretch (really it should be 35, but because no houses front to that road, they made it 40). Most normal drivers know to avoid the right lane, except for an azzhole now and then who jumps into the right lane, accelerates above 50 and then hard breaks at the merge just to try to get a car or two ahead when reaching the circle ahead. But the Tesla, when driving itself, will almost always enter that right lane, and then proceed all the way to the end of the merge, and then have to do a quick merge, just to have to slow down at the circle to see if any cars are in the circle. If there’s a car in the circle, it stops and waits, if there is no car in the circle, it enters it (as humans do). I suggest that the car has to “learn” that when driving on that road, instead of using the normal programming of “leave left lane and move right when clear”, it should simply stay in the left lane because there is no point in moving to the right lane. And there are many more such examples. I’ve reported tens of them to Tesla of course (along with hundreds of other small and large bugs/defects in FSD and autopilot).
“Analysts were expecting a small revenue decline for the second quarter. Results during the second quarter were better than expected, however, with Tesla managing to deliver a small revenue increase in nominal terms.”
Since analysts missed actual results I’m downgrading analysts a notch from Unreliable to Ignore.
The Captain
Enlightenment! 1 2
JimA
“too” seems to have lost a wheel.
Schedule: From two to two to two two too.
Language is a living, evolving thing. I’ve seen ‘too’ meaning ‘also’ written with just one ‘o’ in many posts. I wonder when it will become the accepted or alternate spelling.
The Grammarian
Zwei funny 
Pete
Level 3 automated driving is no longer a driving fantasy. Mercedes-Benz, the sole automaker with government approval of the technology in the U.S., will roll out its “Drive Pilot” system in EQS and S-Class sedans later this year and early 2024.
Geofenced is a hindrance to people who want self driving, certainly, but not to the RoboTaxi business. Probably 99% of taxi rides are within a defined boundary; few people get in a cab in Boston and say “Take me to Hartford.” For a personally owned vehicle and a personal driver, yeah that’s a limitation. For a personally owned vehicle being “sublet” as a Robotaxi, not. Nobody wants their car taking rides to Hartford anyway.
Certainly there is some “not geofenced” business to be had: Avis and Hertz likely get a lot of it, so it’s out there.
The head of Waymo says they are on target to bring total hardware costs to about 30¢ per mile. By contrast, Uber and Lyft are between $2-$3, although much of that is borne by the privately owned vehicle of the driver. But if you’re going to make it a “Robotaxi Business, Inc.” then you’re going to own it all (absent the questionable idea of people loaning out their private vehicles to strangers.)
At 30¢ per mile you need to add fuel (electricity), maintenance (daily and mechanical), replacement (tires, washer fluids, etc.) and other costs so it’s still a bit of a stretch, but it’s coming down and could turn into something. For someone. Someday. Probably not tomorrow, or (my guess) within the next 5, maybe even 10 years. I’d put the “humanoid robot” business even further out than that.
Tesla’s car business is under siege, but they’re doing well on the battery storage side - but not well enough to make up the difference for the slump in cars. If they manage to bring a low cost entry to market soon maybe they can get back on track. Meanwhile, as Buffett says, “in the too hard pile.”