Comment by blindriver

Tesla has lost a lot of their lustre this year. Sales plummeting is incontrovertible. Just based on that alone is devastating. But this robotaxi lack of success will not be treated the same anymore.

>Tesla has proven to be very good at lying

Not Tesla. Musk was, but that ship sailed together with his nazi salute.

> They might launch it with, like, 5 cars total, or have it be 100% teleoperated, or limit it to side roads.

All of these things. On a previous investor call, he said "10-20 Model Ys" would be deployed in Austin.

And that they'd all have remote operators.

And that fully autonomous would be geofenced (or in his words, "with some limitations", because he's allergic to that word).

It's "fully autonomous, driverless self-driving" that's actually heavily Mechanical Turk-ed.

To be fair, buying puts is probably the safest way for OP to take a short position.

A great quote and applies to a lot of things

Keynes

Sure, tell that to Theranos' executives.

Oh yeah, you can't, they're in jail.

Regardless of what happens theta and IV crush will probably wipe you out. I don't like Tesla's stock but I don't touch it just because both the stock and options tend to be way overpriced.

When it comes to Tesla Reddit is 95% in line with hacker news sentiment.

I used to be on Reddit a lot when I was a teenager. I remember during a state election I was certain this libertarian representative/delegate would win, he was so popular on Reddit!

I don't think he got even 5% of the vote. The voting on Reddit combined with a number of other features of the site just give you this really twisted idea of the way people around you think. I don't think it's good to even visit it.

No one here is ready to have that conversation.

> But just to be honest here, the people who have full on bought into the hype have made incredible amounts of money.

They'll only have made incredible amounts of money once they sell the stock for an incredible amount of money to a buyer that gives them incredible amounts of money. Before that they just have a share of the above empty promises.

Don’t worry, your pre-paid roadster will be delivered by a Tesla Semi driven by a Optimus robot as early as tomorrow.

While I agree with everything you said, there was one main factor regarding this particular grift - The public opinion in general used to be a lot more positive about Musk.

I wonder if his constant lies are becoming more scrutinized now. This will make it harder to keep up the game of making outlandish promises that are only 1 year away.

You mean his political allies that he accused of pedophilia?

> What if his political allies

Does he have any of those left? Like, he just had a very public spat with Trump, and despite his attempts to crawl back, Donald doesn't really seem to be taking the bait. Who is his political constituency at this point, far right never-Trumpers? That seems fairly marginal.

It’s not the people in Robotaxis that are the issue; it’s everyone around the damn things that are the big liability.

Regulatory protection will not help Tesla the first time it runs over a random pedestrian. It will be a PR nightmare.

I think that "would like to think" applies more when he was pissing off the Democrats (and Brazilians, Ukrainians, British, Germans, Canadians, South Africans, etc.); it looks like he's since burned his bridges with the Republicans in general and Trump in particular, which I believe leaves him with the support of Russia (who may just be trolling) and China (at least until BYD et al. are big enough to absorb the Chinese Tesla factory workers).

It's almost a meme stock at this point. Trying to time a market reckoning is very difficult because investor interest is highly decoupled from fundamentals.

Especially on the Tesla he drives.

Liability waivers are often limited by state law, especially when negligence is involved.

There is no driver in a robotaxi. If it kills a pedestrian, you can be sure that person’s family will say Tesla is liable.

I used to try it for a few drives after each release then revert to driving myself. with the newest version i let it drive a lot- and i’m on the older hardware. Everyone likes to bemoan the lying but every corp lies, at least with Tesla you get to point the finger instead of yell at a faceless mass. and if it’s 15 years of lying and a well known political target, then at some point it’s not lying- it’s a feature. people need to take some personal responsibility. also, of course, every day that goes by without a fatality is another day that all the naysayers should capitulate- but we won’t hear it. time and pressure will solve fsd sooner than later, i doubt there is a soul in here that doubts it, so there is also /that/ clock that is ticking.

Cars, one of life’s current greatest killers. by accidents and by pollution-hmmm, let’s run down that evil dude!

edited: made on writing mistakes

I don't have FSD, just basic autopilot, but I'm unhappy enough with the lane following/braking/accelerating behavior that I only use it in very limited cases.

Unless FSD improves on these -- which I don't think it does, I think it just adds features -- I can't imagine trusting it.

Yes, I'm a control freak, but I wouldn't be happy with a human driver doing the things AP does, so why would I be happy with the car doing it?

It's definitely behind Waymo level, but the selling point of Tesla FSD is apparently that it works with 'normal' cameras as opposed to the super expensive Waymo kit so they can afford to put it in an upper mid range car.

I've seen it action only in my friend's Tesla in SF, and he also had to manually intervene, but to be fair Tesla themselves say you must be ready to take the wheel at any time. I think it may reach fully autonomous level with a few more years in the oven though.

I'm old enough to remember when the iMac was the best selling PC in the world*.

This was the 90s and Apple had only just narrowly avoided bankruptcy, but as they only had one model (even one colour!) of "cheap" consumer PC whereas everyone else had loads, they were by this measure the best seller.

* or the region, I forget, after all it was the 90s.

You're cherry picking by listing by model rather than by brand. This advantages Tesla in two ways.

- Tesla has very few models. The model Y is more than half of Tesla's total sales. The Seagull is less than 10% of BYD's total sales. A better metric is total sales per company by either volume or dollars.

- Tesla already sells pretty much everywhere, so don't have the "easy" option of expanding sales by expanding into other markets. OTOH, the Chinese brands are not yet widely available in several large markets.

Robotaxis are a pleasant experience now partially because, like early zipcar, it's mostly richer nerds using the service.

Over time they are going to run into all the problems of public infrastructure in low trust places like NYC where, unattended, you will have people use the backseat as a dining room, smoking lounge, bar and toilet. Time will tell how they deal with bad riders.

I disagree. Most rideshares happen in urban areas, where people are liberal. Liberals hate Musk. If you have the choice to take MAGAtaxi or a Waymo, as a liberal that's an obvious choice.