Say it isn’t so. {{ LOL }}
Though I will admit that area around Jersey Village and Willowbrook in Houston is kind of dodgy.
How much will the stock pop when Elon pulls the switch activating unsupervised Robotaxi across the entire installed fleet of millions of vehicles? Or is that already baked into current valuation.
intercst
That won’t ever happen. The majority of the fleet is HW3, which probably will never be capable of unsupervised driving. A big chunk of the HW4 fleet lacks a front bumper camera, which may preclude operating as a robotaxi.
Finally, using a vehicle as a Robotaxi may require being part of a fairly robust support network of remote operators and other support staff that may never scale up to be able to handle “millions” of vehicles - especially vehicles that lack full-cabin internal cameras and beefed up communications capabilities.
It’s already baked into the current valuation by triple, maybe more, since it’s a pipe dream.
As someone observant of “skim, scam and fraud”, a similar very skeptical eye should be applied to Tesla product announcements.
Tesla autonomous robotaxi isn’t a service at scale right now.
At best, Austin, Bay Area, and now Dallas and Houston, are small demos that serve as marketing stunts near earnings releases (Wed, April 22). The vast majority of this is human supervised driving, not real L4 autonomy.
After you follow Tesla for awhile you realize most of this is pretend - the product is the product announcement, not an actual product, which many times never comes to exist in a material way or is something much less than the revolution promised (Semi, Roadster, the low cost model, FSD in robotaxi and personal cars, Cybertruck, Dojo1 & 2, 20 million vehicle sales - it’s a long list).
To add to the points made above about insufficient hardware,
First - they don’t have an autonomous vehicle with demonstrated safety at scale and every indication so far is that any expansion will be slow and incremental with one city at a time and then step by step expansion of range within each city (larger service area, tricky intersections/school zones/railroad/highways, etc). Tesla has shown zero autonomy on highways.
Second - Even if Tesla gets some capability of autonomy (it will be in limited geofenced areas, not nationwide),
Is Tesla ready to, after the flip of a switch, instantly accept liability for FSD driving decisions across a consumer (owned and maintained) fleet of newly activated cars? I doubt it.
Tesla has a market cap of about $1,450 billion and last year had net income of $3.79 billion (on revenue of $95 billion) for a P/E of 385 and net income margin of 4%.
Whatever is driving the stock valuation, it is not actual products.
From the history books, Oct 2016
We are excited to announce that, as of today, all Tesla vehicles produced in our factory – including Model 3 – will have the hardware needed for full self-driving capability at a safety level substantially greater than that of a human driver.
Regarding Houston - first, I live in a separately incorporated city a mere 5 miles from downtown Houston. When I saw the announcement accompanied by a map of the geofenced service area my first thought was “WHY???” This area is maybe 15-20 miles out in the burbs with seemingly questionable rationale for testing there. And is there more than one car there? Are they truly unsupervised? I don’t discount that there may be some legitimate reasons to test in a bedroom neighbor hood ---- the area does include at least a small part of one main suburban thoroughfare that would have its challenges. However, this does not appear to be a viable market area if it was based on expected market economics. Anyone like the Arcade Fire song “The Suburbs”"? — I guess Elon must.
It does make me wonder is “marketing stunt” the real reason for this choice. Elektrek Fred has suggested so too. Meanwhile, we know that Elektrek Fred has his gripes these days with Tesla but he may be right with this following comment. He may not have even realized this is just a tiny part of the burbs being promoted.
“This is exactly what we’ve come to expect from Tesla’s “Robotaxi” program: announce the expansion, share a map, provide zero operational details, and let the stock-pumping hype machine do the rest.”
Tesla CEO Elon Musk just proposed the company could build “microfactories” in urban areas in order to upgrade the computers and cameras in those videos, adding high costs for a company that is already running thin on profitability – but we’ll see if it actually happens.
Musk said it directly in today’s quarterly conference call, stating:
Unfortunately Hardware 3, I wish it were otherwise but Hardware 3 simply does not have the capability to achieve unsupervised FSD. We did think at one point it would have that, but relative to Gardware 4 it has only 1/8th of the memory bandwidth of Hardware 4. And memory bandwidth is one of the key elements needed for unsupervised FSD. It’s generally a thing thats needed for AI, if youre doing an auto-regressive transformer, memory bandwidth is the chokepoint.