Comment by al_borland

Let’s be clear tho - they are betting on two markets that have no history or assurance of success by crapping the bed with their golden goose.

Tax credits and foreign competition are bad enough, but they really could innovate through it. They could even try robots and taxis and see if it floats. Instead it’s sink the ships behind them because Elon is never wrong.

Their only benefit is the fact they can raise ludicrous capital to spend their way through many years of dumb. But that’s probably not enough to salvage the tire fire.

My odds on their humanoid robots are basically zero. China is too far ahead here and I’m not convinced there’s a material market that could develop fast enough. I am a fan of Waymo’s and use FSD but will not believe in their taxi product - they’re too far behind Waymo. I don’t think they will gain the regulatory traction they’ll need especially after pissing off every democrat and their mayors and city councils.

I always wonder why those robots have to be humanoid.

I swear I don't need a humanoid robot, give me a proper autonomous robot that cleans your house and I'm more than happy. Could be 40 cm tall, and look like a box, I don't care.

I think the technology is just not there to make the business case for humanoid robots. It’s like the VR. Everyone would like to use VR but the tech is just not good enough. Same with FSD. The robots may be 10-20 years away from actual being good enough. If Elon can trick people for 20 years like he did with FSD then he may have a business case for humanoid robots

Yes, there's no business case for humanoid robots.

There's a business case for robots that are specialized in specific repetitive actions, and we already see this in manufacturing. But general purpose humanoid robots make no sense.

They're incredibly expensive and, from what we've seen, worse across the board compared to humans. It's cheaper to just hire humans.

The human form is actually pretty shit at most things. But, it can do everything. There's just little purpose for that in a business case. You know what you're doing, so you just need robots to do that, not to try to be humans.

Like, okay, you can get a humanoid robot to be a burger flipper. But that makes no sense. You can, instead, have an automated burger cooking machine. Which do exist! I worked in a restaurant with one 10 years ago.

Robots yes. Humanoid ones? Why? So people can be amazed? Purpose built robots are the future. The human form is sub optimal for most enterprise use cases.

If you think our current tech stack is anywhere close to making humanoid robots viable, then you might as well buy Tesla stock.

There was a "business case" for $25,000 EVs before China did it, and Tesla conveniently pivoted. It's 2026, anyone who's watching the game knows the score.

There's a huge business case! There's also a major business case for teleportation, which seems about as likely to happen under a Musk-led company.

I have no particular idea whether there's a business case for humanoid robots or not. I would love to have the argument set out well. Perhaps you'd indulge my curiosity.

Maybe there is. But isn’t Tesla way, way behind Hyundai at this? It’s not even close? Yet Hyundai’s stock is still very cheap..

No, I’m saying they haven’t made the case. Or at least the case that is being presented and sold to investors is complete BS.

For example, I work in deep tech and pay attention to the manufacturing industry. The idea that humanoid robots will replace, streamline and revolutionize manufacturing is a joke in that community. They’ve already long since replaced the humans with CNC machines, industrial (non-humanoid) robots, and 3d printing.

The humanoid robotics craze is a lot like the crypto craze. Pure vibes and motivated reasoning. Like crypto, there is actual value there, but way out of proportion to the hype.

No, they're probably saying you're that believer that will buy the dip.

Not for what they currently cost and are capable of.

> Tesla is trying to create self driving taxis to make the rest of the auto industry obsolete.

This is a pretty baffling take. Most people in the world operate their own cars, and even if taxis were free, a large portion of them would continue to operate their own cars because it's convenient.

Taxis also don't replace a good chunk of the new vehicle market. People driving fleet trucks aren't going to work out of taxis. The top selling vehicles in the USA are pickup trucks, and it isn't even close.

Lastly, even if they succeed, competition will catch up and the market will be saturated.

In 20 years, people will still be buying the humble Civic. While the next 20 years at Tesla will probably be a string of market failures and wacky promises of personal space craft or some shit.

> Tesla is trying to create self driving taxis to make the rest of the auto industry obsolete.

They are one of many organisations trying to do that and they are not the most successful at it.

Honda have been making humanoid robots since the 1980s.

Well, check Hyundai as well. They do more than cars as well including robots(Boston Dynamics). Tesla is not doing anything special. It was the only EV someone could use but it’s no longer the case. Now it tries to go the robots way but it’s not the same as the EV was. There are tones of humanoid robot companies, some more advanced than whatever Tesla is cooking

It can happen. Its unlikely Tesla will catch up to Waymo any time soon though. Yet valuation for Tesla (relative to how much money they are making) is massively higher than Google’s. Which would make very little sense following this logic?

We're missing a part of the case though: why do you need to be a car-maker to be the vanguard for self-driving taxis?

The best case scenario for a self-driving company would be to target software and sensor solution packages that they can sell or license to other manufacturers. Such a vendor can focus on the self-driving problem and not have to bother with things like "we found a surprisingly big market niche for a 11-passenger minibus, but no platform for it" or "to sell it in the EU we need the headlights to be 5cm lower". I'd expect the margins are also a hell of a lot higher if they don't have to include two tonnes of steel with each auto-driver license they sell.

Maybe they build a small number of test mules, or just chop-shop a few off-the-shelf cars as a R&D fleet, but they hardly need to be a seven-figures-per-year manufacturer to be supplying those needs.

That's even assuming they come out green in the competition to deliver robotaxis. Right now the leading player in the US market is a company who is neither Tesla nor a legacy vehicle manufacturer. It's an adtech who started gluing the contents of a Radio Shack onto the worst cars you could possibly think of (Chrysler Pacificas and Jaguar i-Paces? Really?) and turned it into something that's an everyday thing in several major cities.

Tesla FSD story reminds me of the fracas that was early OS/2. IBM sold people 286 hardware on the promise of it running OS/2, so they had to waste a lot of effort building a 286-capable OS/2 that was clunky and almost immediately obsolete. No matter how talented Tesla's R&D team are, they're walled in by design choices made on existing vehicles (i. e. relying on cameras instead of lidar). I wonder if they'd be better off being ran as an arm's length startup to address the problem more generically, and then they can sell it to other firms if it turns out that the best solution won't work on existing Tesla hardware.

They are actually behind in a lot of their self driving to other car companies

> X kind of works.

It is less popular and makes less money than when he acquired it, and that is ignoring the fact that it is a cesspool of racism now.

BYD made 35% more electric cars than Tesla and its market cap is about 1/10th.

Tesla's valuation has no grounding in any physical goods it manufactures.

imagination and feelings