Comment by doctorpangloss

Comment by doctorpangloss 4 days ago

20 replies

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it's very difficult to have a conversation about this, because it would appear that sincere answers to your question will get downvoted. one POV is that, if you accept the bear case from Internet commenters that these guys are incompetent or stupid - blah blah blah, Cybetruck - the existence of their autonomous taxi product is extremely bullish. they managed to pull off something similar to Waymo despite being so much worse at it, yes? I'm not sure they will even need a diverse product line of premium cars, if they can sell an autonomous 3 for the price of a small house. on the flip side, the bear case there is, if they could figure it out, so will a lot of other car companies. and yet, Cruise ceased operations, and Tesla will seemingly pay a manageable amount of blood money for Autopilot and move on.

nobody really can predict the future, so unsurprisingly, "reading various articles about this doesn't make it more clear." but people on the Internet keep getting worked up about it. to me, people do not comprehend the meaning of "high risk, high reward."

mosdl 4 days ago

Their autonomous taxi program is a joke right now, especially compared to Waymo. Way fewer cities/rides, and they haven't even deployed their cybertaxi thing.

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  • sixQuarks 4 days ago

    [flagged]

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    • rossjudson 4 days ago

      I love FSD and I know it well. I probably wouldn't feel super comfortable in a Tesla taxi. I've seen too much.

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      • vel0city 3 days ago

        Tesla doesn't even trust their own full self driving system. They still have safety monitors for their self-driving taxi service.

        The Las Vegas Loop continues to have actual drivers and that's an enclosed space entirely controlled by Tesla. If you can't even trust it in a single lane space you completely control, how can you trust it in the real world?

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    • Mawr 4 days ago

      If you think it is, take your hands of the wheel and close your eyes. Fall asleep at the wheel. Not willing to do so? I guess your car isn't really driving you everywhere.

      Your view on how stocks work is interesting as well — you realize most of the investors are regular, uninformed non-techies who invest based on vibes, right? Vibes like "my car is driving me everywhere, this is the future!" — the exact same thoughtless, surface-level analysis you're going off of.

      Therefore, you're trying to beat the market by using the exact same reasoning 99% of its investors have used. Good luck.

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bdangubic 4 days ago

> they managed to pull off something similar to Waymo despite being so much worse at it, yes?

similar?! what exactly is your definition of similar? tesla and waymo are so far apart that it is difficult to accept any argument that tries to make this comparison. they cannot co-exist in the same sentence unless to explain one’s success against the other’s failures

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tensor 4 days ago

When Tesla started producing cars, everyone wanted what they proposed. Now, no one wants the cybertruck. No one is really asking for humanoid robots. Their self driving is vastly inferior to waymo when it comes to taxies, I can't see them winning that market. Their batteries and solar panels, like their cars, seem to be more or less abandoned.

So, it's pretty easy to see why people are confused and upset. Tesla is discontinuing all the things people like about Tesla, and selling vapourware that no one really wants anyways, instead. It's also not "a difficult conversation."

What seems more likely is that Musk, in his extreme shift to the right, has abandoned the original goal of Tesla: producing sustainable electric vehicles. He's become more and more delusional, with failing like the Boring machine and the Cybertruck starting to pile up. He's alienated his existing customer base by both getting into politics and dropping any pretext of trying to help the environment.

From my point of view, Tesla is a failed company with a leader who has gone off the rails, and a board that refuses to reign him in. Revenues are falling off a cliff outside of US governmental money, and it's betting the whole ship on only two ideas: self driving, which is so far no where close to being where it needs to be, despite the progress, and on yet another fairy tale that is humanoid robots.

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  • jeltz 4 days ago

    The board cannot rein him in because doing so risks having the stock valued as a car company stock and not as a tech company or meme stock. I think they can only fix this after the stock has crashed.

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tyre 4 days ago

imo their competition for autonomous vehicles doesn’t come from car companies, but from tech companies.

Amazon has a lucrative incentive to automate its supply chain up to and including last mile delivery. Waymo has proven out the tech and could easily partner with Uber or Lyft for the rider experience and reach.

If you’re FedEx, for example, would you rather buy from Amazon or from Tesla? Who is more likely to be a sane and trustworthy partner?

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  • mandevil 4 days ago

    I don't think that Uber or Lyft are going to invest in self-driving taxis. The capital model is completely different: Uber and Lyft are by design capital light, they own nothing more than the software (1), and someone needs to buy all of these self-driving machines and then someone needs to maintain them, whereas their current model doesn't do that- they can't offer that to any tech partner.

    The reason that you don't see more Waymo areas has nothing to do with rider pool or experience, it is because their tech requires pre-mapping everything with LiDAR several times- the advantage is that if you know what is static (because it was in all of that LiDAR mapping) then a simple difference algo can tell you everything that is dynamic in the environment. (Also, they are just starting to hit cities with significant precipitation- SFO, LA, ATX, PHX are all pretty dry cities, they are going into ATL, MIA, DC, DEN, etc.)

    1: With a lot of suspicion that much of their profit comes from drivers not understanding depreciation of their vehicles, something that the accountants who work for Uber and Lyft will understand very very well.

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    • AlotOfReading 4 days ago

      Uber, and to a lesser extent Lyft, has been an extremely prolific investor in the autonomous vehicle space. They're absolutely paying attention to it.

      Similarly, Waymo isn't bottlenecked by mapping or rain. I've seen enough of them testing in Seattle and Tokyo, as examples.

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      • Marazan 3 days ago

        Yeah, and then Uber sold off its self driving research team.

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        • AlotOfReading 3 days ago

          I'm talking about after, of course. They retained a massive investment in Aurora as part of that deal. They invested in Waabi not long after, then Nuro, Avride and started partnerships with Waymo, Motional, and others.

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    • cesarvarela 4 days ago

      Uber spent billions trying to make self-driving work, until they gave up. Not "by design".

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SR2Z 4 days ago

Just a reminder that Tesla has still not offered driverless robotaxi rides to the public.

At this point, it's entirely because Musk refuses to add LIDAR. If he did they could probably be competing with Waymo in a year.

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  • voisin 4 days ago

    His rationale seems to be validated by Nvidia following the same strategy, no?

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    • SR2Z 4 days ago

      Nvidia follows the same strategy because having a large end-to-end model is how you get your customers to buy GPUs with their AI slush fund (and I don't think they limit themselves to vision).

      His rationale at this point seems to be mostly stubbornness, coupled with a healthy dose of anxiety when he considers how much money he'll have to spend to deliver FSD to the people who bought it 10 years ago.

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    • wmf 4 days ago

      Nvidia isn't offering driverless robotaxi rides to the public either.

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