The Effective Executive by Stanley Druckenmiller
Elon Musk can not be replaced.
If you think a Harvard MBA can replace Musk, you would be bankrupting Tesla.
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So when he “goes Martian”, Tesla goes “ker-SPLATT!!!”.
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At that point the FSD ASI will be in charge.
ralph
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At the bare minimum, it would have been trivial to replace having to talk to Louie De Palma the dispatcher with an app that would pop something up on the dispatchers screen. They didn’t do it and still haven’t done it. If I want a cab, I still have to call 1-800-777-7777 or 1-800-444-4444 or whatever and talk to someone, give them the address, and then they hear it wrong, give it to them again, etc. Instead of a trivial app that has the exact GPS coordinates. Sure they might have had to cooperate with nearby competitors sometimes (like if they have no cars at the moment), but they could have worked out the details (and they already shared periodically anyway). And, heck, they probably could have even charged for the extra service just like they charge for an extra bag, extra stop, etc.
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Except that “taxicabs” has always been a local business, city by city, town by town, So trying to coordinate 300 different companies, get the app written to all their satisfaction and implementing it (and charging the cab companies for the right to use it) was, for practical purposes a non-starter. That doesn’t mean it shouldn’t have been done just the the hurdles were so much greater than getting a VC to underwrite a national company like Uber, bypassing all those messy local regulations and approval boards, and figuring out who gets paid, how much, and when.
Could it have been done? Maybe. Easier I think to do it once and roll it out, even if you had to do it city by city to cope with the infrastructure demands on your servers.
Fortunately his predictions have an excellent track record.
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Well, whatever you think the reason, it just is.
United Rentals is the largest tool & machines rental in the country. Almost a 50% share. Their ROI? Roughly 11%
Let’s look at Hertz, shall we? ROI? Maybe 2% percent. Been as high as 8 the last decade.
How about Public Storage? There’s a “rent” business, and they’re the biggest. ROI? 10-12%. They hit 20% during the Pandemic but that’s gone.
And what was the other you mentioned? Oh yes, U-Haul, ROI bounces between 5-10%. Lately closer to 5%.
OK, let’s look at those poor beleaguered car companies which sell, not time-share, rent, or otherwise fancy dress their business.
How about Toyota? Pretty consistently around 10%, year in and out.
If it makes you happy to see a loser, there’s GM, which has yet to get off the mat following the 2008 debacle. 0-2% maybe.
And for Volkswagen Group, well it’s all over the board. Lately between 10-12%.
So maybe I do understand a little about this, you think? “Rental” has high capital costs, because the stuff is abused and must be replaced, often even before it can be fully depreciated.
Of course Uber & Lyft don’t have that problem since the “capital” is mostly paid for by the schlubs driving between bars at 2AM. If Tesla can convince people to use their cars as Robotaxis like this maybe they’ve got something. If they’re going to produce cars and then run them ragged and then sell them at a discount like Hertz, Avis, etc. then they’ll probably be somewhere in that same range.
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The theory is that cars are very underutilized. Most of them get used for 23 to 42 minutes in the morning, then sit in a parking lot until late afternoon and then get used for 25 to 51 minutes. Then they sit in a driveway and get used for 2 to 6 minutes periodically and then sit in a driveway all night. The theory is that utilizing them more efficiently can save money for most people and make money for some people.
Of course theory is one thing, real life is often a completely different thing. I would settle for a car that can drive itself. I would use it to drive the kids to school, then come home, drive me to work, drive home, drive my wife around for errands, and later go back to the school to pick up the kids, and later come pick me up at work. Of course that is how I would have used it when applicable. Today would be a bit different (kids grown, me retired, etc). Or maybe I could share a car with the neighbors for ferrying the kids around, especially if some of our respective kids share common afterschool activities.
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Given FSD, you are talking robotaxi–multiple owners sharing. So a company offering a subscription plan to the public works–because you said it could work (above). Cheaper than ownership AND you avoid the costs associated with buying, insuring, and maintaining one or more vehicles.
Maybe. In theory. But as discussed above you then have new/other issues - smelly cars, not clean enough, smoking, not fully operational, etc. If the car sits in my driveway or my neighbor’s driveway, and gets used by both of us at various times, then that alone could be a win. Without most of the new issues.
The subscription provider is obligated to provide vehicles suitable for the general public on a “demand” basis. So they will already be aware of smokers, etc and have procedures to properly take care of those vehicles. Otherwise, no ability to sell subscriptions to the public.
Those cost do exist, so will be payed for with higher rates.
DB2
You don’t avoid any of those costs. You still pay them. You just pay them per ride, rather than in a car payment. For some users, it won’t be any cheaper than ownership.
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Okay, sounds reasonable. But what does it mean practically? A car is driving around suburb A, picks up 3 kids at a house and brings them to school a few miles away, leaves the school, now what? Does it have to drive 20-30, maybe 50 miles to the nearest depot to be cleaned? Or does each “subscription provider” need to have depots in a maximum 10 mile radius? That would be absurdly expensive, and would probably make the whole effort barely worth doing. It would end up being a cab service where the vehicles all have to return to the depot a few times a day for cleaning!
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Prediction - Musk will go to Mars and discover an alien reactor made from terbinium that is capable of turning ice deep within the Martian crust to breathable air. Instead of engaging the reactor, Musk will keep it secret to make huge profits selling breathable air to colonists.
Once his evil plot is discovered, a small band of rebels, led by his former friend who’s had his memory wiped, will fight for their freedom. Musk will attempt to leverage his fleet of robotaxis to keep the rebels at bay.
Spoiler alert…the rebels will win, unleashing the reactor and transforming the Martian atmosphere.
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Each subscription provider handles their own fleet. Cleaning the vehicles is part of the program submitted before getting approved to provide service. Likely, the vehicle will be designed to permit fairly rapid internal cleaning. How that will be done is up to the provider. Otherwise, they will have to maintain a larger fleet in order to cover the need for out-of-service vehicles due to them being cleaned at a relatively slow rate.
True. But the cost per rider is far less (magnitudes of order less), as FSD would eliminate most accidents–especially the ones caused by human drivers. The real question is simple: Will anyone be able to afford car insurance for a human-driven automobile? Not when there are FSD cars on the same road.
Right, but that’s one of the big unknowns here. No one really knows much about how people will behave in driverless cars. So we don’t know whether these types of operational costs will be small and manageable, or whether they’ll be large enough to affect the viability of large-scale adoption of an AV fleet. Cleaning, damage to the vehicles, leaving doors ajar, liability for incidents in an AV - no one has much visibility into what those expenses will look like, and the ones that do (Cruise and Waymo) aren’t sharing yet.
That and deadheading ratios are probably the biggest factors affecting how practical AV fleets providing TaaD will be. If operating costs and deadheading amounts are low, AV fleets could expand beyond current taxi/rideshare markets; if they’re high, then AV might not have all that significant an impact outside those areas.
Oooh stop.
You’re gonna cause some 
.
ralph
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IMO, deadheading during busy periods would mostly be empty vehicles heading from downtown areas to pick up another round of commuters. This is normal and planned. During the night, vehicles would be prepped (cleaned, charged, etc) and located for the first round of the morning rush. Then do a second round of the morning rush. Then school runs. Then the noon-2pm lunch crowd. Then the evening rush and school kids going home. By 7pm, fairly quiet. Clean, charge, and prep for next day. Repeat.