Comment by raincole 4 days ago
> The successful cars are made for masses and not for niche buyers.
When Tesla got started, full EVs were extremely niche. They were known for their short range and nothing else. Tesla defeated common sense. This is what supports their anti-common-sense stock price.
> Is there any indication that they're going to "defeat common sense" again?
If you equal Elon to Tesla then there are plenty of - SpaceX dominates near-earth orbit payload launches. A private company competing against and replacing NASA would have been a laughingstock idea 30 years ago. xAI made competitive SOTA models despite a very, very late start.
Of course Elon isn't Tesla. I think the biggest risk of Tesla now is the investors realizing he's more into AI and politics and will siphon resources from Tesla to his other companies.
Except SpaceX "competing and replacing NASA" is ... also a meme.
SpaceX is essentially the same kind of commercial provider as always, except that they didn't sit on laurels of 1960s ICBM work, and among other things built their own additional infrastructure.
... But remember they were explicitly early financed to do that by DoD and NASA.
Everyone knew that was the future and that the big auto manufacturers were deliberately dragging.
No-one (serious) thought there was a market for the cybertruck.
The stock price is pure madness, it's like it's priced in robotaxis, but that's clearly not going to happen for Tesla. And if it did, it would be a small-ish market, their brand has become toxic in so many big markets.
> No-one (serious) thought there was a market for the cybertruck.
If they'd hit the price and performance of the launch announcements they might have. $40k base for what he initially talked about is a vastly better proposal than $61k base for what he actually delivered.
What I could see happening is Alphabet getting an exclusive lock on Tesla (probably not buying because the stock is too high) and then quasi-merging it with Waymo for a fully integrated, functional robo taxi company. A bit like when they bought Motorola phone division.
You couldn’t possibly be singing that tune if you were taking their robotaxis taxis every day for the past half a year and seeing how well they drive (albeit supervised)
> Everyone knew that was the future and that the big auto manufacturers were deliberately dragging.
Definitely not. Car electrification was definitely not obvious, and Tesla had to do many semi-impossible things to make it even slightly feasible.
Yeah 10 years ago.
Good for them as a company, thats why they are still here.
And now? Everyone builds EVs, everyone is as far as Tesla or better.
Even the old school companies like BMW have now more models than Tesla and the Cybertruck was expensive to build, build badly and did not deliver what Elon the druggy and antidemocrat Musk promised.
> Yeah 10 years ago.
Tesla unveiled the Roadster 20 years ago. That's plenty of time for other companies to catch up. They made a bet that once the battery moat evaporated the millions of miles of driving footage, powering affordable fully autonomous driving, would be their next moat. They failed, not because camera-based FSD is a silly idea (we drive with our eyes after all), but because it's a really hard problem. If they had won that bet, Tesla would justify its valuation. They didn't, and so we're left with the flailing of a doomed company.
>Car electrification was definitely not obvious
The first electric car predates the 20th century. That seems pretty obvious.
The problem was always batteries and charging infrastructure. I wouldn't call these semi-impossible, but it's something Tesla definitely contributed significantly to.
> The first electric car predates the 20th century. That seems pretty obvious.
If you count remote control cars as well then you have an even weightier point.
But if you're serious about adapting technologies, countries and drivers to electric cars then you'll know that an electric car being made in the 19th century is totally irrelevent. Toyota even bet big on hydrogen rather than electric for a long time; that's how non-obvious it was.
>an electric car being made in the 19th century is totally irrelevent.
But then you strangely ignored why it was irrelevant, which I already pointed out and was the meat of the statement. The concept of an electric car is painfully simple. Way more so than an internal combustion engine, in fact.
> The first electric car predates the 20th century
Great, now do steam. Being produced in the past does not mean it will make a comeback, despite steam being quieter, with great torque, and the main ingredient for propulsion (water) being safer than gasoline for normal people to refuel
Is there any indication that they're going to "defeat common sense" again? They're cancelling products, making marginal improvements to old models, alienating their customers, etc.
Tesla as a car company seems dead-set on a continuous downward spiral.
Maybe the switch to robots will pay off and you'll be right. Somehow, I'm skeptical.