Fair enough, although I remember the hype at the time (mostly because a neighbor bought one). And there are some others in the list that shouldn’t have been there: Crystal Pepsi, obviously. The soda category already existed. Mea culpa, I just thought about hyped products that failed. I even thought of “New Coke” but dismissed it because there was already “Coke.”
Anyway, you’re right, we won’t know how this market develops for several years, at which time it will be too late to “invest today” or not. I just think the Tesla valuation at the moment assumes this is going to be huge. My theory, admittedly based on nothing, is that it will be ‘pretty big”, but not industry/society changing.
Waymo feels the need to clean its vehicles after every shift (I think they subcontract that to Avis or Hertz or one of those.) They have maintenance costs and remote monitoring costs. Uber (/Lyft) have none of those because they’re assumed by the actual owners. I also have my doubts about private owners renting out their cars a lot (sure it will happen, right up until it gets returned to them with vomit or smoke smell or whatever or they need their car and find that someone else is using it).
If it isn’t to be individuals then it’s businesses, either large or small, but then there are capital costs (which again Uber/Lyft don’t have) and other impediments.
So while I believe this will be a business, I’ll be surprised to find it’s a unicorn-stand alone business and thus deserving of the sky high multiple priced into Tesla for now.
But you’re right, we won’t know for a while. And I am prepared to be very wrong. It won’t matter a whit to me, I’ll have closed my short and moved on long before it becomes important to me financially.
That is unlikely (and with much more certainty than who will be the major players in this market).
I predict that someone will start a new robotaxi thread at least every month for the next 5 years.
Tesla will have maintenance, cleaning, and monitoring costs just as Waymo does today, and Zoox also will have in the future.
I also agree that private owners adding their personal cars to the Tesla Network will not be widespread for a variety of reasons - cleaning, sure (although I suspect in cabin cameras may enable charging riders for the damage they are caught doing), but also the depreciation involved. Although depending on what Tesla pays vehicle owners for rides the question of whether there is a profitable business for people buying/leasing cars for the service remains to be seen. Tesla has shown an automated cleaning setup for its CyberCabs, but I suspect that may end up being no more real than the previous demonstrations of battery swapping or automated plug-in cable snakes.
The potential of Autonomy also includes the eventual ability to have personal cars chauffeur owners/families member/friends around. Robotaxis will reduce ownership levels, especially for second cars and/or cars mostly used for specific purposes like commuting. But, full autonomy, when that happens, will drive sales to those companies making products with those capabilities.
I really think the question is around the disruptive nature of autonomous driving technology. Some think it’ll just be a business, others think it’ll change who entire transportation market. Where you are in that continuum will drive your investment strategy.
Please re-read what I posted. I am not saying they are low or high probability. Rather, the $1T valuation bakes in, IMHO, around $800 ~ $900 billion valuation that those efforts succeed.
Whether it is $TSLA or $PLTR or $MSTR. The valuation of these names bakes in a very huge runway success for many years even decade. for ex: $PLTR with $3 B revenue run rate has over $303 B valuation, $MSTR is just a company that holds bitcoin, is valued at almost 2x of their Bitcoin holding, same with $TSLA with $100 B sales is valued at $1 T.
There is a huge momentum trade going in US markets. Those trades have completely disconnected with value. If you take last quarter revenue and profit and extrapolate the company is hardly making any money with their existing business, hence I said 90% of its value is future valuation. Even if they succeed, the current valuation captures lots of future upside.
of course your view may be different, that’s what makes the market.
Is that the reason they shut down the whole company? I thought the [main] reason was because the primary investor (GM) wasn’t willing to invest enough capital (many billions) to allow it a chance to potentially mature into a real business.
**One family in Pennsylvania may disagree, though, after their Tesla turned onto some railroad tracks before eventually getting hit by a train** , WFMZ reports. Thankfully, everyone was able to get out of the car and move to safety before the train hit their car, and there have been no reported injuries from the incident.
The car was in self-drive mode (probably FSD), and decided to take a jaunt down the railroad tracks for some reason. I wonder, once this is all legal and common, who will absorb the liability for such adventures?
Yeah, I don’t think that solution scales very well. And there’s already one of those, sort of. It’s called Uber, although admittedly the driver isn’t in the passenger seat
In the most ambiguous situations, the Waymo Driver takes the lead, initiating requests through fleet response to optimize the driving path. Fleet response can influence the Waymo Driver’s path, whether indirectly through indicating lane closures, explicitly requesting the AV use a particular lane, or, in the most complex scenarios, explicitly proposing a path for the vehicle to consider. The Waymo Driver evaluates the input from fleet response and independently remains in control of driving.
XPeng, however, one of the self-driving technology pioneers in China, teased its next generation P7+ sedan that will apparently ditch expensive LiDAR in favor of Tesla’s Vision-only camera approach.
The Jiyue 07, the second model from the Geely-Baidu joint venture, has officially been launched claiming to be the world’s first mass-produced L4 autonomous capable car.
It features the latest version of the Baidu Apollo 2.0 high-end intelligent driving system, a perception-based ADAS that relies only on cameras and sensors without using lidar units, and one that has almost certainly benefitted from the experience of Baidu’s very own robotaxi network.
I have ‘t seen anything that explains in specifics how it might work and Tesla does not yet have robotaxis on the road, but robotaxi service is apparently imminent this Sunday in Austin.
I’d like to express my gratitude to the great state of Texas, with a light regulatory touch, willingness to be at the vanguard of AI entrepreneurship and serve on the front lines of safety testing of robotic vehicles.
States are truly the laboratories of the republic.
Emmanuel Rosner:
Okay. But would you have, like, remote operators, for example?
Unidentified Company Representative:
I mean, every now and then, if a car gets stuck or something, someone will, like, unblock it. But it’s just because we are a bit conservative and are tend towards more safety than even if we get stuck every now and then, we do have remote support.
But it’s not going to be required for safe operation. If anything, it’s just required for more availability.
Elon Musk:
Anyway, it’s only a couple months away, so you can just see for yourself in couple months in Austin.
Based on news today, it appears that the Sunday rollout will be “local” (safety monitor in the car) plus “remote” operators with an idea to test and move towards only remote operators.
In the same way that tesla may use Lidar in more limited testing together with cameras (whereas cameras are deployed across the retail fleet to collect a large data set, without lidar).
