Tesla is committing automotive suicide
(electrek.co)312 points by jethronethro 3 days ago
312 points by jethronethro 3 days ago
I have a newer Corolla that's pretty much the absolute floor of the base model (LE with I believe minimal packages) and it has all the technology one would expect now, all while having physical buttons where it matters. Lane assist and adaptive cruise control are table stakes now.
Indeed, I have a 2023 Corolla. The dealer didn't like it when I said "LE" stands for "Low End" as a joke (it means Limited Edition).
The technology for such a low end car is impressive. In addition to adaptive cruise control and lane keeping, the display shows the speed limit not by consulting a map but by reading the signs as you drive down the street. They call it RSA, Road Sign Assist. It also uses the camera and radar to alert when there are potential hazards (closing too quicky on the car in front, and lane changing into someone in the blind spot).
All that in a $23K car, built into that base price.
Makes you wonder. Technology usually becomes less expensive. Car companies have used it as a differentiator for years though. There are giant cost differences between like a base line Tundra and a top of the line and the mechanicals are the same; it's more price for luxury and more tech.
Seems like Toyota is about to make a big Lexus pivot in the next year or two.
2022 Corolla owner here. Mine is UK spec with “Design” trim, which is middle of the range in terms of luxuries. I love mine. It’s got enough technology without it being annoying and has everything I want. The adaptive cruise is a killer feature. Best car I’ve ever owned.
As the unofficial corporate tag line quips: 'Toyota: for when your favorite appliance color is beige'
But in all seriousness, I'll give props to Honda, Toyota, and Mazda for amazing engineering cultures. In the sense of being extremely good at optimizing trade-offs.
I always thought Toyota's LE connoted Luxury Edition and SE Sport Edition
I think in (most of) europe, most of the safety-related features are mandatory on all new cars these days, so all these features must come on all trim levels. This does make the base model a lot more expensive then a few years back, but you get all the nice features, so that also makes them cheaper in general.
Honestly, I don't like this trend. Some of these features - like lane keeping - encourage/enable distracted driving. Meanwhile the necessary sensors make cars so expensive to repair that they're becoming a disposable good. As my driving instructor says: If you need a lane keeping system to keep your car in a lane, you shouldn't be behind the wheel.
I'm very happy that the "base model" of cars now has a lot of the modern tech. Not because I'd personally buy a base model, but because its what you get whenever you travel and need to rent something.
In the past, when traveling, I'd be shocked at just how bare the rental cars were compared to my normal home experience. Fortunately that's no longer the case.
I have an acura Integra and a Toyota Highlander. Both have most of the capabilities as standard except stopping for obstacles/traffic lights and making lane change or turns. They can detect vehicles around it and follow the one in front. Theoretically once you are on the highway/interstate they can drive themselves.
Tesla Model 3/Y will includes Lane Departure Avoidance (a reactive safety feature that nudges you back if you accidentally drift over a line), it just will not actively steer to keep you centered
Yeah, I rented a Corolla recently which was about as basic as it got - and within less than 90 seconds of entering the vehicle/driving I had everything I needed figured out.
CarPlay was trivial to pair up. Screen resolution was meh, but otherwise it Just Worked(tm).
Adaptive cruise was trivial to turn on and read the indicators for.
Lane keep assist was also overtly obvious - both if it was on, and how to turn it on/off.
The A/C controls were nice easily understood knobs and buttons.
Blindspot detection was standard, worked great.
Overall just a very intuitive vehicle.
Unless they dramatically reduce the price, they won't get to 10 million any time soon if ever. This article discusses paid subscriptions info releases in the earnings report, https://electrek.co/2026/01/28/tesla-discloses-fsd-subscribe...
800k paid subs in q4/2024, about the same in q1/2025, 900k in q2/2025, 1 million in q3/25, and 1.1 million in q4/2025.
Let's call that 100k growth per quarter in 2025, and currently at 1.1 million subs. They'll have to significantly increase their growth rate. The interesting modeling point is tesla car sales are dropping, down 9% to 1.6 million last year. All their new vehicles are capable of fsd with subscription, but thats only about 1.5 million a year (and likely to keep shrinking).
I think the only way they get good uptake is to make the price cheap, like $1 a month, with 12 free months but you have to give your credit card (ie fees that people don't notice scam like every streaming company). Even if every new buyer gets it, it would take many years at 1.5 million sales a year. Need 8.9 million more subscribers, 8.9/1.5 sales = ~6 years at 100% uptake. There are about 9 million current owners, but I'd guess at least 50% can't run current FSD code - they are on version 4.5 of their hardware (they recently released 4.5 in some new cars, and they have a major upgrade to v5 coming in a year or two).
There's no harm if they don't get to 10 million, because Musk shouldn't have that really large stock payoff as he's killing the company.
To juice Copilot subscription numbers, Microsoft renamed Office to Copilot. Musk should do something similar. By renaming the heated seat subscription to "full self–driving" and making it free, I'm sure he could achieve 10 million.
Also California raised false advertising issues with the naming of “autopilot”
> Musk's incentive pay has a 10 million full self-driving subscription.
Step 1: > discontinu[e] the basic lane keep + adaptive speed cruise control
Step 2: Redefine "Full Self-Driving" to be those things. Charge 50 cents per month subscription or whatever.
Step 3: Get 10 million subscribers.
Step 4: 100 billion dollar payout! (Number pulled out of my butt)
Parallel steps:
Step 1: SpaceX IPO
Step 2: Trillion dollar payout
Step 3: Nothing matters any more
This is true of every billionaire who is still actively trying to get more money. If you're not satisfied at that point, there's no number where you will be.
I'd like to get a look at SpaceX financials. I'm pretty sure their margins are thinner than you might expect, Starlink is less profitable than you might expect (but quite necessary to fund the launch cadence of Falcon 9) and that Starship blowing up over and over has been funded entirely by the US taxpayer and that they'd be insolvent without that.
You would be entirely wrong.
For example, NASA has evaluated SpaceX financial status as part of awarding COTS and HLS contracts and determined it reasonable. Also, SpaceX isn’t getting a significant fraction of the costs of Starship development from the HLS contract.
SpaceX is rockets, now global satellite internet, ...
To credibly harness off-world resources at any scale, there are going to need to be automated refueling depots and many kinds of robotic automation for resource extraction. With the Asteroid Belt looking amazing for quantity and accessibility of resources.
That would also completely remove the lid on how many $ trillions of market cap SpaceX could accrue.
So I find it ironic that Tesla is moving away from cars as product, and still talking up humanoid robots, which as yet are not a product, and as research don't seem to have an edge on anyone.
ALSO: Data centers on the moon make more sense than data centers in orbit. Obviously where latency isn't king, but compute is. Simple cooling sinks, dense (low local latency) expansion, dense (efficient) maintenance, etc.
our 2014 jeep cherokee had it too, and i'm not sure if it was available earlier though may have been (in jeep models i mean)
> the basic lane keep + adaptive speed cruise control they helped pioneer
What? Basic lane keep and adaptive cruise control have been around a lot longer than Tesla.
Mercedes introduced ACC in 1999 (though Mitsubishi had an accelerator-only - could apply or ease off accelerator but not actively brake - in 1995).
Lane keeping was introduced again by Mitsubishi in the early 90s, though it was more 'lane departure warning'. But by 2000 Mercedes was offering it in some trucks and by 2003 Honda had it widely available in the Inspire with active lane keeping.
2 days ago: https://www.espn.com/soccer/story/_/id/47744955/paok-fans-ki...
I'll let you find the video, it's brutal. Allegedly caused by lane assist activating out of the blue when overtaking other cars.
That was 2 days ago and it caught my eye.
Unfortunately, today in Romanian news:
Google translated link:
https://hotnews-ro.translate.goog/cocaina-cannabis-si-alcool...
Original link:
https://hotnews.ro/cocaina-cannabis-si-alcool-in-sangele-sof...
Informative title:
Cocaine, cannabis and alcohol in the blood of the driver of the minibus with Greek supporters involved in the accident in Timiș, prosecutors announce
Lol part:
The hypothesis was rejected by the company that rented the minibus. The company's lawyer stated to the Greek publication naftemporiki.gr that the rented vehicle did not have the lane assist system.
> I'll let you find the video, it's brutal
This Daily Mail article¹ has it. It.. doesn't look brutal to me?
Just looks like the minibus driver, who was driving on the median, veered across it into the oncoming lane to crash with the semi.
He wasn't in a lane to begin with.
> Allegedly caused by lane assist activating out of the blue
Yeah dawg, imma need a second opinion on this.
This is alleged by the survivors of the crush.
Which is weird, because the passengers wouldn't know about what happened in the split-second that resulted in the crash.
Particularly, the passengers wouldn't know about whether lane assist interfered.
And the driver, who would, also happened to be drunk and high AF on cannabis, cocaine, and yet-to-be-identified stuff found in the vehicle at the moment of accident⁴.
Methinks, these allegations might be a lil' biased.
* * *
EDIT: the other comment revealed the news that the vehicle did not have a lane assist feature.
Such surprise.
_____
¹ https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sport/football/article-15503545/...
² https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sport/football/article-15503545/...
³ https://www.romaniajournal.ro/society-people/law-crime/new-u...
⁴ https://agerpres.ro/english/2026/01/29/toxicology-tests-reve...
All he had to do was lower the cost of the FSD subscription to $50/month.
> Then I learned that Musk's incentive pay has a 10 million full self-driving subscription hurdle, and it all made sense.
Wow that is diabolical and such a scam. I didn’t realize he was gaming the incentives this way. Is that what happened with that previous $54 billion package too?
As far as I can tell, the criteria previous package were basically about getting the market cap up. Based on all the "no"s in the "Met" column here [1], I think you could reasonably accuse him of hitting the goals for that bonus package by driving investor hype for what Telsa "might" accomplish some day.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_predictions_for_autono...
Honestly, I don't think it's irrational: the car industry is just horrible from a business perspective, which is why Tesla had to be financed for so long by crypto scams and most investors wouldn't touch it. Historically (if of course briefly/crudely), it was always a debt-backed gamble on overproduction hoping you could expand forever globally without competition (Ford) or into new market segments through financing (GM).
It's paywalled unfortunately, but [1] is an illustrative Financial Times article discussing car manufacturer behavior in relation to Covid shutdowns and strikes. Many firms found the manufacturing shutdowns to be a boon: the winning strategy to accept it as a cost cut and just raise prices on existing inventory for above average financial performance.
My sense is that Tesla is now just taking that a step further by getting rid of their Fordist aspirations and applying the unarguably successful Apple model to the automotive industry. They don't want to mass produce cars and hope for X% conversion rate to software and services over time: they literally don't want customers who are not able or not going to pay for recurring software services. Software is where free cash flow comes from and free cash flow is where dividends/buybacks come from, which determines the value of an equity. That, of course, is why we get paid well.
I end with the disclaimer that obviously I don't believe the world should be meticulously and exclusively organized for the production of free cash flow, but I do think it's important to understand the logic.
[1] https://www.ft.com/content/4da6406a-c888-49c1-b07f-daa6b9797...
…discontinuing the basic lane keep + adaptive speed cruise control they helped pioneer in cars sold going forward.
[Citation needed] Cars had adaptive cruise control and lane keeping well before Tesla showed up.
As for the feature itself, we have a camper van on a 2024 Ram chassis. It’s a work truck at its core, with fancy RV bits added on. And it has ACC/lane keeping. It claims it will even park itself, though I’ve not tried.
So Tesla is now charging for features that your roofer got for free with her work van. Such luxury.
They had the first mover advantage, but then Musk lost interest in the company and let it just sit there for the last five years or so without making sure that they have a future-proof product pipeline and that those products are actually being delivered on a reasonable schedule. Now they are increasingly turning into an EV also-ran while their moonshots are unlikely to work out any time soon.
Realistically, he should have put someone else in charge after the launch of the Model 3 to develop the company further, but I don't think his ego allows it.
The problem is that EVs are basically a solved problem. There isn't any technological advantage to be gained, since the technology in an EV is very basic (+) compared to ICE vehicles. So then it comes down to manufacturing, and there China is king.
(+) Except for the battery, but that's a very long term battle with very tiny steps.
My brother bought a Tesla recently. They dicked him around with delivery, and he had to pay a ton to get charging infrastructure installed at his house, but it's fast so he's happy. On a recent visit, he finally showed me the car, and it was hilarious how janky the final product is. Everything seems cobbled together-- a good example is that there's apparently two separate voice assistants (plus his phone) and none of them can talk to each other, so commands like "turn on the defrost" are responded to with "I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that".
Controls as simple as the door handles are unintuitive, with the handle apparently being the emergency release that doesn't lower the window (for who knows why). You have to brief your passengers on egress like it's an airplane.
EVs might be a solved problem, but Tesla is still fighting their own additional layer of complexity that they added on top. The added subscription nonsense makes him look like a fool for having bought in, something I am definitely even more reluctant to do now that I've seen it play out.
> Controls as simple as the door handles are unintuitive, with the handle apparently being the emergency release that doesn't lower the window (for who knows why). You have to brief your passengers on egress like it's an airplane.
I caught a ride with a friend in a Tesla, and when we stopped I opened the door - like a human being operating a century-old piece of technology - and he looked at me like I was crazy, and told me not to do that.
Truly, a bonkers decision.
Yeah, it apparently damages the weatherstripping (and maybe the window and other things) and is meant to be used only in an emergency /facepalm. Which is probably why your friend was alarmed.
I didn't care, I still tested it out the day I picked up mine to see where the manual handle is and make sure it works, because just a couple days earlier two people had gotten trapped in a burning Tesla, were unable to figure out the mechanism, and died.
I have a 2022 Model 3, and the hilariously tragic part is that the voice assistant was great and basically never gave me any problems until they shoved Grok into it, whereupon it broke completely. I never use it anymore, they effectively removed a feature from my car.
EVs are a solved problem, but as amelius notes the real tech is the battery. Tesla + Panasonic has a built in advantage in terms of battery manufacturing. Tesla has a massive amount of capital, if they put it into reducing and scaling manufacturing of vehicles and batteries, I think they could probably win. Now maybe Telsa has looked at the numbers and decided they can't win and are choosing to pivot rather than die a slow death.
I don't think that is what is happening here. Instead, Tesla is continuing the strategy that brought them to this disaster of going all in on driverless. That isn't a bad strategy, but if they get the timing wrong a third time, they destroy the company and they have gotten the timing wrong on this twice already. This strategy has two downsides:
1. AI has no real moat and Tesla has largely pursued commodity sensors, meaning that other than EVs+battery tech (which Tesla appears abandoning), robotaxis have no hardware or software moat.
2. They could use network effects to win, in which case their competitors are not other car companies but Uber and Lyft. Uber has been pursuing the same long term strategy at Tesla.
Now by itself, going all in robotaxi, is risky but could work if they time it right. Tesla isn't going all in on robotaxi since they are splitting the effort between robotaxi and Optimus robots.
It is likely that the experience Tesla gets with Optimus robots will help other robotics companies, but unlike robotaxis where the timing might (but probably won't work), the timing is clearly isn't right for Optimus.
It seems like the motivation here is that Musk is aligning Tesla to a narrative that justify the absurd stock price, even if that narrative isn't reality.
> It seems like the motivation here is that Musk is aligning Tesla to a narrative that justify the absurd stock price, even if that narrative isn't reality.
Since Tesla stock has always been 90% based on the narrative, the narrative is the reality (and the product) of Tesla, and the actual machinery made and sold are just props and decorations to create the impression of it.
Maybe they should rebrand themselves as poTemkin: keep the T logo and the mysterious Slavic vibe, while shedding the pretense about what they're about.
Won't affect the stock anyway. Everyone knows the company is overvalued based on promises and perception alone.
Everyone's just betting on the charade going on one moment longer than their hold on the stock.
If you squint, the Cybertruck is shaped like a pyramid on wheels, which couldn't work any better as a visual metaphor for the enterprise.
Kia is making these incredibly popular cheap EVs and who knows who their CEO is? Probably some middle aged Korean in a business suit.
Automotive industry versus tech industry.
> Tesla + Panasonic has a built in advantage in terms of battery manufacturing.
What advantage do they have over CATL, BYD, and LG?
CATL batteries perform better: https://electrek.co/2026/01/06/catl-ev-batteries-significant...
CATL is rolling out sodium ion batteries: https://electrek.co/2026/01/23/ev-battery-leader-plans-first...
CATL, BYD, and LG are developing solid state batteries. Everyone is.
> It is likely that the experience Tesla gets with Optimus robots will help other robotics companies
Why? Other robotics companies have been doing it for longer. Is Optimus better than Atlas:
If Tesla has lost the advantage in battery tech, that is unfortunate and speaks poorly to Tesla's long term strategy. Reclaiming this lead would be an important strategic goal and I disagree with that not being prioritized.
> Why? Other robotics companies have been doing it for longer. Is Optimus better than Atlas:
Atlas costs about half a million dollars, targeting a price tag of $160,000 once mass produced, and assumes the user will be able to do some maintenance.
Optimus is targeting a price tag of $30,000, but probably costs around $80,000 to produce. It is plastic, it is cheap, it doesn't work.
Atlas is better than Optimus but all measures. The advantage of Optimus so far has been, the mass production-->usage until failure-->improvement cycles that are already underway. Tesla is, as an extremely high cost, slipping on every single banana peel first and this is clearing a path for other companies to learn what doesn't work when you switch from functional over-engineered robot to barely functional robots that can be mass produced.
Telsa isn't alone in this space, but they investing a lot and trying to cut corners. So much of engineering is learning the corners you can cut and the corners that cause a battery fire after 8 weeks of use.
> Tesla + Panasonic has a built in advantage in terms of battery manufacturing. Tesla has a massive amount of capital, if they put it into reducing and scaling manufacturing of vehicles and batteries, I think they could probably win.
This is a very wrong way to tell the story.
Tesla + Panasonic were the first to commit to a massive factor car cells with very advanced chemistry. But this advantage didn't hold long as the model was soon copied.
And at that point, when that investment happened Tesla did actually not have 'a massive amount of capital'. And Panasonic also didn't, and even more so, Panasonic didn't want to go all in on batteries. As they were a company from Japan that still believed in the Hydrogen future.
By the time Tesla had serious capital, the other battery companies had long shot past Tesla+Panasonic and it wasn't even close.
Claiming that Panasonic and Tesla can win now is just silly and based on nothing.
Tesla was actually pretty clever on this and invested rather a large amount in their own battery supply chain. And they spun up a whole battery supply chain pretty quickly. But arguably they were a bit two ambitious. Musk really pushed the boundary with the cells, introducing or trying to introduce a lot of things that were hard to do and simply took time. They should have started more conservatively first and only tried to innovated once they could match the other companies on the standard process.
There was no chance for them to be a massive battery supplier to the outside, but making their own batteries for their own cars and getting better margin then all the other companies was well within the cards. And that by itself is a win.
But overall their battery strategy wasn't really the problem. They did a lot of good things there. And things that can pay off over time. The problem was to much investment in stuff other then batteries and their car models. The most important thing for them was to have growing volume every year. Work on manufacturing improvements and fight on margins.
But as you say, I agree the focus on driverless was a mistake.
You can say the same about the traditional car industry. Just because it’s a “solved problem” doesn’t mean you can ignore the TAM.
I think people are frustrated because Musk has been pretty up front that Tesla only exists to further his goals for Mars and robots. He doesn’t actually care about selling cars.
Teslas don’t even have HUDs, there’s plenty of work left to do
I recently read Origins of Efficiency by Brian Potter, and one of the interesting things it talks about is the path of the Model T.
Ford invested heavily in an in-house, highly optimized production pathway for the Model T. Other manufacturers sourced a lot of their parts from vendors.
This gave the Model T a great advantage at first, but they had a lot more trouble than competitors in coming up with new models. Ford ended up converging with the rest of the industry in sourcing more of their parts externally.
The lack of new Tesla models makes me feel like a similar pivot is what Tesla needs. My suspicion is that they probably need a less terminally distracted Musk to pull it off.
One of the things Jim Farley, Ford CEO, brought up was they have a lot of 3rd party suppliers, and changes take a long time to implement. So a firmware update may require change notifications and responses from dozens of suppliers for something like door locks. This was in response to why Ford couldn't do firmware as fast or as often as Tesla. Vertically integrated means you have 1 big ship to turn around. Modern JIT manufacturing means your ship is built of 100s of cards and each one needs to be turned.
The lack of new models from updates I believe comes from the fact the CEO is busy elsewhere and the board is reluctant to address that. They have made the P/E so high that they can only continue to function in one direction, do just enough to bring in more outside investment.
I think I read somewhere that the model T went something like 12 years without substantial changes to its design.
Ford wouldn’t have known about The Innovator’s Dilemma and possibly not about Sunk Cost Fallacy.
Deming had to go to Japan to get his ideas taken seriously and it nearly bankrupted American manufacturing that they wouldn’t listen to him.
> they had a lot more trouble than competitors in coming up with new models.
I'd read somewhere that it was mainly because Henry Ford was dogmatic that the Model T was perfect, all the car anyone would ever need forever.
First mover advantage was GM's EV1. Tesla would not exist if GM didn't go and crush every single EV1 they could find.
The end game is the SpaceX IPO which will make him a trillionaire, and then he doesn't need Tesla any more.
Indeed.
SpaceX in Merger Talks with xAI - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46814701 - January 2026
Regular IPOs usually have commitments from pension funds, mutual funds, private equity firms and other institutional investors secured in advance of going public. How many of those parties would be interested considering that SpaceX really only has one main customer whose business isn't guaranteed considering his political partisanship?
Their main customer is Starlink and it will continue to be cash printing machine.
Their second customer is the Federal government and SpaceX has a monopoly on cheap reliable fast launch services that will overcome most politics. Even EU companies and Amazon and OneWeb have been forced to use them because there is no better option.
Or the Boring Company which most people have also completely forgotten about.
He barely needs Tesla now, pretty much the only thing stopping electric cars from being ubiquitous are people in politics and media. The new mission statement is just to make everything for everyone, which I guess solves the people-on-earth problems he wanted to tackle. Next is a push for Mars (which again is mostly threatened by some politicians at this point).
> Realistically, he should have put someone else in charge after the launch of the Model 3 to develop the company further, but I don't think his ego allows it.
Well he knows more about manufacturing than anyone else alive on Earth, so he can't be replaced /s
(yes, he actually did say that)
BYD is slapping the EV industry around like a gorilla, Tesla simply cannot compete in any meaningful way. Waymo has achieved profit per unit and people are happy to see driver-less taxis in their city and pay for the service.
Tesla also cannot justify valuations based on automotive sales/subscriptions alone - they were always going to have to pivot.
They're in a tight spot and they need to do something drastic.
BYD uses slave labor.
"In the dormitories of the Jinjiang Group, the company hired by BYD to carry out the work, there were no mattresses on the beds, and the few toilets served hundreds of workers in extremely unhygienic conditions. The workers also had food stored without refrigeration.
The Brazilian Labor Prosecutor's Office (MTP) also accused the companies of withholding the workers' passports and keeping 60% of their wages; the remaining 40% would be paid in Chinese currency."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BYD_Brazil_working_conditions_...
It's hard for any company to compete with that (I hope they don't).
Tesla's factories have been responsible for deaths, systematic injury issues and wage theft - https://sites.uab.edu/humanrights/2025/03/30/human-rights-co...
Pretending BYD is winning because of Chinese labor practices alone or primarily is denial of their technological and operational prowess.
Don't get me wrong, both are pretty terrible. I'm not going to defend Tesla.
But BYD is on a whole different level with that stuff (e.g. human trafficking, suicides and the factory that collapsed and killed a bunch of people).
There's no way that being able to cut costs to that level doesn't help their bottom line.
Is that understanding based on any verifiable sources?
(It seems plausible, but all I’ve seen is speculation.)
But at one time they sold the majority in what many saw as a disruptive new replacement for what those other companies did.
They were poised like Apple which sold relatively few iPhones in the first few years compared to the other companies, all of which are gone now. But Tesla squandered that advantage.
> BYD is slapping the EV industry around like a gorilla, Tesla simply cannot compete in any meaningful way
BYD is slapping every automaker around like a gorilla, and none can compete in a meaningful way.
Tarries mean they don’t have to. For now.
Tesla can compete with BYD all right. They have a better brand, they are still a status symbol. They could totally build the best cars if they wanted to.
But competing with BYD would mean becoming "just a car company". And that's what Tesla can't do. Too many promises have been made, the stock's been pumped too high, and there is no way a just-a-car company can justify that market cap. Their only way is to go for the moonshot now. Maybe once the moonshot fails, stock goes down to "normal", and Tesla can compete with BYD.
What market does Tesla have?
They won't prosper in China which has the biggest car market and better cars, that also happen to be cheaper. In the US, the second largest car market, they reduced their market in half. In Europe their sales are shrinking even as total EV sales increase. In India and Brazil, also in the top 6 largest car markets, their cars are too expensive so they sell a few *dozen* cars per year.
Even if they tried to be a car company with correct valuation they'd have nothing to offer to most of the market.
I was in the market for an EV due to great tax advantages. I assumed BYD would be the sweet spot, but test drove a Tesla for comparison.
I ended up with the Tesla. It is hands down the better vehicle and I'd be very surprised if anybody seriously thought otherwise. There wasn't very much in it price wise so that wasn't a factor.
The BYD (Sealion 7) wasn't even a bad car. It's a good car. But it's inspired and just a little gaudy. It felt like a conventional SUV with an EV powertrain. The Tesla felt like the future.
Funny that you say the BYD was tasteless. I definitely agree, and it's something that can be said about much Chinese-made stuff.
In French we have the word "chinoiserie" which is used to describe objects with a certain aesthetic, reminiscent of Chinese art. It is used derogatively to mean something lacks taste even if it looks sophisticated at first sight.
Americans have the same "Chinese-ium", but referring to the materials its made with. Cheap plastic, low durability, lead-based paint etc
What makes this move even more incredulous is that none of the two market they want to move towards are proven markets:
- Waymo is generating less than 150m in 2025.
- Consumer robotics is an absolute unknown.
How can the transition be rationally justified? Let alone the valuation.
Consumer robotics strikes me as an engineering tar pit so deep it leads to hell. If full self driving is hard due to the long tail of unusual special cases, this is orders of magnitude worse.
Take FSD but multiply the number of actuators and degrees of freedom by at least 10, more like 100. Add a third dimension. Add direct physical interaction with complex objects. Add pets and children. Add toys on the floor. Add random furniture with non-standard dimensions. Add exposure to dust, dirt, water, grease, and who knows what else? Puke? Bleach? Dog pee?
Oh, and remove designated roads and standardized rules about how you're supposed to drive on those roads. There are no standards. Every home is arranged differently. People behave differently. Kids are nuts. The cat will climb on it. The dog may attack it. The pet rabbit will chew on any exposed cords.
We've all seen those Boston Dynamics robots. They're awesome but how durable would they be in those conditions? Would they last for years with day to day constant abuse in an environment like that?
From a pure engineering point of view (neglecting the human factor or cost) a home helper robot is almost definitely harder than building and operating a Mars base. We pretty much have all the core tech for that figured out: recycling atmosphere, splitting and making water, refining minerals, greenhouses, airlocks, and so on. As soon as we have Starship or another super heavy rocket that's reliable we could do it as long as someone was willing to write some huge checks.
And of course it's a totally untested market. We don't know how big it really is. Will people really be willing to pay thousands to tens of thousands for a home robot with significant limitations? Only about 25% of the market probably has the disposable income to afford these.
You'd have to go way up market first, but people up market can afford to just pay humans to do it.
> Will people really be willing to pay thousands to tens of thousands for a home robot with significant limitations?
The answer to that is no, probably for the foreseeable future. The robot demos we have no can't even fold laundry or put dishes away without being teleoperated. Both extremely basic tasks that any household robot would be required to do, along with other messy jobs that put it at risk as you said: taking out the trash, feeding the pets, cleaning up messes, preparing or cooking food, etc.
The price it would have to cost with current tech would be astronomically more than just hiring a human, and they would almost certainly come with an expensive subscription as well, whereas I can hire a human to come in and clean my home weekly for about $200/month.
Also, how will these robots make money? They are a less capable human. Humans who aren't skilled don't make much money.
Humans who aren't skilled require training regardless of how "unskilled" the task is.
Humans that are chronically unskilled also don't learn well, somewhat as a rule.
Humans that don't make much money have a high turnover rate from burnout. Additionally, those that can learn typically leave for greener pastures.
The bar isn't terribly high. Efficiency of scale in production will solve this eventually. I think the likely outcome is robots building themselves first.
Almost all developed economies are running into a fertility crisis right now, with labor shortages already appearing in the frontrunners of the trend, such as Germany.
Human work is going to cost more in the future, and immigration from countries such as Thailand or Vietnam is already slowing down. Even a mediocre robot will be sought after if it is the only choice you have.
I understand that. It's my personal opinion that one of the causes of low birth rates is that we continually choose to have robots solve our problems instead of choosing a human.
I think we could increase birth rates by making a taxation scheme in which the most marginally effective way to solve a problem is with a human, paid a wage which allows for that occupation to be a lifelong career.
They’ll be bought/leased, providing direct profit. Also, there’ll be maintenance revenue. I think they’re expected to cost around $30K.
In the case where they’re replacing a low-skill human worker, they’ll pay for themselves in 1-2 years…plus no sick days, no drug use, no theft, and they can work 24 hours a day, less any recharging time.
Once large swaths of the planet have been rendered uninhabitable from human activity, we'll require them to continue extracting profit from those areas. (this is a downer comment but also realistically the first thing that came to mind when trying to think of a use for them).
I think if they are teleoperated they could make sense, or at least more than the device-local versions
A teleoperated robot is little more than a human worker with extra steps. (And an expensive, clumsy human worker at that.) I can't imagine many situations where that would make sense instead of having a human do the work in person.
If a robot can do basic cleaning, laundry, and dishes, that's worth a lot to a lot of people. Dual-professional households have the money, and not having to do this housework could save some marriages.
I don't think it actually is worth a lot to people. I know dual-professional households who don't even use their dishwasher consistently, and multiple companies have gone bankrupt trying to bring automated laundry folding (which does exist in industry) to the consumer market.
Robot vacuum with a mop, washing machine, tumble dryer and dishwasher reduce housework to like an hour per week, ie 30 min/person/week. This can be higher if you live in a big house, but if your marriage can’t tolerate 30 mins of house work a robot will not solve it.
> Dual-professional households have the money, and not having to do this housework could save some marriages.
Dual-professional households could hire a maid and pay for marriage counseling and still save money compared to a $20k robot plus whatever a subscription would run.
Nobody has yet demonstrated a stationary robot that can do these things.
They're all legs. The impressive demos are just show, not useful.
The first MVPs dont need to reach parity to human autonomy, they only need to enforce that humans do the cheap work.
They haven't said it explicitly. But the reason that Waymo can add five cities this year is very likely they are at least at break even on opex. They likely reached that point sometime last year and it seems to have held up.
So I wouldn't call robotaxi service unproven. But I would call the idea that you can claim to be running a robo taxi service without depots, cleaners, CSRs, and remote monitoring that can handle difficult situations in a more sophisticated way than each car having a human monitor it, naïve.
I read that as meaning even the scaled robotaxi service (Waymo) does not throw off enough cash to offset the loss of Tesla's vehicle sales unit. (The putative Tesla buyer they are dissuading from purchase would have to take a whole lot of robotaxi trips to generate the same amount of profit for Tesla. Assuming Tesla can get robotaxis working.)
In the 2000s publishing pivot to the Internet, this was known as "trading physical dollars for digital pennies."
Such is the law of the falling rate of profit, a general tendency of Capitalism.
A lot of the current valuation is based on Elon drumming up investor expectations. As they start to lose their spot as market leaders in EV, Tesla's inability to deliver on what Elon promised will become more clear as their competitors level with and surpass them.
Moving to new, unproven markets is fruitful ground for someone like Elon to drum up expectation and hopefully keep distracting people from the fact that he's had very few recent successes to show for all the hype he receives.
On top of that, despite huge investments of both time and money into both areas, seemingly rivaling competitors, Tesla does not seem to be anywhere close to a market leader in either segment. They have to both prove the markets and that they can compete in them.
EVs were a very unproven market when Tesla started and it was commonly accepted they didn’t have a hope in hell.
I think musk knows you gotta take risks and skate to where the puck is going, not where it is now.
If he’s wrong, it’s all over of course.
>Let alone the valuation.
Maybe that's the driver. I always figured keeping Musk on was a sort of suicide pact, without Musk the company might be more traditionally valued, but that means the stock would tank. So they have to stick with him.
Staying in autos, eventually folks figure out the math and the stock tanks ... so they have to keep moving and keeping that sort of aspirational stock price.
To be fair, market has been decoupled from reality on the ground for a while now. Just the fact that companies were able to operate giving stuff away for free only to suddenly yank the chain in a desperate bid to gain profitability later should be enough of a signal.
That said, as much as I dislike Musk ( and I have bet money against him before ), his instincts are likely not wrong. And it does help that, clearly, he knows how to bs well.
I am not saying you are wrong, but I think he is just a poster child for everything wrong with current market ecosystem.
Except that it doesn't need to be consumer to start off. You can build specialized robots that deliver value at a massive scale. Imagine a "Prep Cook" at a restaurant, there are millions of these around the world. If the Optimus can do that job for a price of $1,000/month, that's likely to be more efficient and better quality than a human can do. And there has to be many jobs like this.
Robots that specialise in one thing already exist. In big factories, where they'll peel and dice tons of onions per hour, being fed via unsexy conveyor belts into massive dicers.
That's the problem with robots like Optimus. The "specialized" part (Cutting the onions) is 1% of the skills. You'd still need to other hard 99% (Prehensility, vision, precise 3D movement, etc.).
And if you sorted the hard 99%, what's the point in specialising in cutting onions, when the same exact skills are needed to fold and put away laundry?
A million robots making $1k a month is $12b a year, but you need to actually produce the robots, maintain them, train the AI, own the data centers.
Also, if you take 1 million jobs, do you think that might cause demand to drop for services?
No, automation doesn't reduce jobs, i.e. doesn't reduce consumer spending, as consumer spending is determined by output, which automation boosts.
The savings from automation in a particular sector are spent elsewhere — wherever services are more costly (in labor). That's the dynamic behind Say's law, which shows that spending on less automatable jobs like barbers and physical therapists increases as automation reduces costs in other sectors of the economy.
I understand this is a well-developed economic theory and I am complete uninformed, but this doesn't make intuitive sense at all.
If 1 million prep cooks are replaced by robots, will food become cheap enough that those prep cooks can all get jobs as barbers, and the money people spend on food will shift to haircuts?
Will the food be so cheap that all those prep cooks can afford to learn to cut hair?
Also consider the money velocity of a human vs a robot. A human is probably paycheck to paycheck spending everything they earn. Robot earnings go back to company, which makes the stock go up, 90% of which is owned by billionaires who just keep hoarding and hoarding.
A general drop in services, yes. A drop in the services being provided by the robot, probably not. I doubt if many Prep Chefs are regularly eating at the restaurants they work at. When the robots are taking millions of jobs in all areas of service, there might be a problem.
> How can the transition be rationally justified? Let alone the valuation.
Musk seems to have successfully decoupled investors from results. The stock price seems to move far more based on what he says and does than what the company says and does. It's completely irrational. Tesla is a huge bubble.
Because it's hard and Tesla think they can do it.
See 'reusable rockets' and 'having paralysed people control things with their minds' for other examples.
HN often seem to think there's Elon fans downmodding things but it seems more like a case of irrational hatred.
Oh, well let me get in my sub-$30,000 Model S, with a swappable battery and full-self-driving capabilities, and take a fully automated trip to the Hyperloop downtown so I can catch a quick ride out to O’Hare so I can fly out to watch a successful Starship launch…
…oh wait. I can’t. Because for all his successes, Musk has also sowed quite a lot of bullshit that has gone precisely nowhere.
Just like to point out Hyperloop wasn’t intended for local transportation and isn’t a Musk company, just some BOE speculation (BON?) that others have pursued.
maybe? Tesla is the biggest reason there are any electric vehicles on the road today, I haven't heard of anyone (knowledgeable) who has even hinted otherwise. I can understand not liking Elon, but trashing the companies he's formed and the marvels they've created is just proof you don't value a truthful understanding of the world.
'having paralysed people control things with their minds' would be great if you guys had a healthcare system that would pay for it.
To be clear, Neuralink has shown some promising signs. Has also shown some terrible signs.
And then I don't know if Musk is oversimplifying for a soundbite or more of his Dunning Kruger, but some of the descriptions seem to lack any knowledge of neurology. He describes a universal chip that will do different things and solve different issues depending on what part of the brain it's implanted in. That's not how it works at all.
So?
They could make the first working flying cars. They could work fantastically.
And maybe one they release them we find out… no one wants flying cars. They sell 500 a year despite only costing as much as a normal car.
Just because you can figure out how to do something doesn’t mean you’re going to make money at it.
If this were the case Waymo would already be gone. Tesla, under Musk, has missed a big opportunity. The claims of FSD "next year", by Musk for the past decade, fall on deaf ears now. While Waymo was focusing on building it Musk was multi-tasking and letting Tesla falter. RIP Tesla and what could have been. The reality is more clearly that Tesla could have been an amazing EV platform in totality. Instead they are being beaten in: driverless, PSD/FSD, and home energy production & storage. The only thing Tesla has a real lead in is still their EV power distribution footprint. I wouldn't be surprised to see that sold off in the next 5 years given their direction.
And yet Tesla's FSD v14 critical disengagement rate is behind where Waymo was over a decade ago, when Waymo first started reporting this figure, even worse in city driving to compare apples to apples.
This story may be true. But I have read Fred Lanbert articles on Tesla and they are always negative. And in many cases even biased. So I'd take it with a pinch of salt.
It's not like Tesla is failing, they have $40 billion cash at hand, more than many auto company's net worth,it's that people want to believe that Tesla is failing. I hope Tesla succeeds, with or without Musk.
;-) looks like they are right, taking the slightly longer view! ;-)
I bought a new Model Y a few months ago.
On the whole, it's a great car, it really is. They've pretty much nailed the fundamentals. It's opinionated, not unlike Apple, but if the opinions work for you you'll enjoy the car.
But there are shortcomings, and they are jarring. The parking sensors basically don't work at all due to being vision only - and apparently can't be made to work properly. The lane change and reverse warnings are just crap and may as well not be there. My previous car implemented these to perfection, but I cannot trust the Tesla. The autopilot is a gimmick that offers you nothing but increased risk - and there's no way in hell I'd trust FSD for car that can't accurately detect the distance of my house when parking. The big touchscreen is great for passengers, but outright dangerous for drivers.
Having said all that, it seems strong emotions around Musk and Tesla cause people to want Tesla to fail. They want the car to be bad. There is so much motivated reasoning around this brand that it's hard to take any article like the above, or half the comments in this thread, seriously.
There's also the various reports of federal technical supervision instances that attest Teslas have the highest failure rates:
Germany: https://www.autoevolution.com/news/tuev-report-2026-tesla-mo...
Denmark: https://fdm.dk/nyheder/nyt-om-trafik-og-biler/tesla-skandale...
Ireland: https://www.rsa.ie/road-safety/statistics/nct-statistics-and...
At some point you have to acknowledge the data as facts.
I kind of don't really care, as long as I get good service if my car is affected. I'm not defending them here. The next few years will tell if it was a bad buy or not. So far I'm really happy with it.
My point was there's a huge anti-Tesla bias entirely as a reaction to Elon Musk. It's emotional, not rational. It's not objective criticism of Tesla. Sure, there are some awful moves he's made, vision only, FSD claims, but if it was another car company it wouldn't even be on HN. Wasn't so long ago that VW (a manufacturer literally started by the Nazis by the way!) were caught falsifying their emissions.
Outside of the personal opinions of Musk, what is the most annoying for me is the constant false promises.
They sell cars based on promises that a missing function will work in a few months/years and that your car will be compatible.
With the years of feedback we have now, we know that those were not promises but lies.
Other brands sell as-is cars, without empty promises. (outside the stupid "perfect outback trip" in every SUV/pickup ad)
I now see Musk as a con man, a very smart con man with a lot of money, not a visionary.
Yes there is dieselgate and yes, every car manufacturer tries to circumvent the system to improve profit. (Every includes also Tesla)
> The parking sensors basically don't work at all due to being vision only - and apparently can't be made to work properly
What's stupid about this is that it is hard to come up with a good reason for it. The no LIDAR thing is at least understandable because at the time LIDAR was very expensive. Ultrasonic parking sensors are cheap.
Same for automatic windshield wipers, which have been a significant source of complaints from Tesla owners. Pretty much everyone else uses a dedicated sensor that is simple and inexpensive and works well. Technology Connections has a good video on how it works [1]. Tesla uses vision.
>There is so much motivated reasoning around this brand that it's hard to take any article like the above, or half the comments in this thread, seriously.
Funny, because for the last year, any submission that have Tesla or Musk or Musk associated with something negative have been flagged very quickly. I assume by Musk fanboys. So when an article or two slips the Crack, it naturally is filled with criticism. Survivor bias at its finest.
Your criticism paragraph being longer than "it really is great!" paragraph does point towards motivated reasoning going both ways.
If I said I wasn't a Musk or Tesla fanboy, I would expect you to take me at my word. I gave a two sided account of my Tesla experience. I do like this car, and I bought it because I liked it.
Maybe it gets flagged because there's no chance of having an intellectually honest discussion if it involves Elon or Tesla? I certainly don't flag them.
I think we're at the point where there is a bit of healthy competition in the EV space (even when excluding the Chinese), that Teslas are mostly just symbolic.
People still buy Teslas. But in my circle, most have bought other EVs (and not just because of Elon). Teslas are no longer the obvious superior choice.
You might be surrounded by people who stopped thinking. My friend said "hell no" to Tesla right around backlash started and ordered a PHEV. Thankfully, somehow, someone convinced him to upgrade to EV. I keep begging him for a drive, but I suspect he's embarrassed by how shitty BYD is (same with other mate who somewhat regrets with all the issues he had, albeit they were far cheaper back then).
Since I'm in the US, BYD is not part of the equation.
And yes, I will grant that at this point, it's possible that Tesla has the least serious problems. I don't know - I haven't looked at recent data. But it's the usual trajectory: I know plenty of people who bought Teslas in the last 5 years and complained how many weeks/months it would sit at the dealer awaiting repairs (just like it is with Hyundai/Ford/everyone-else these days).
Case in point: Pretty much everyone I know who bought a non-Tesla and had issues with it is still happy with the purchase. Just like Tesla users of the past ;-) Only one guy got annoyed and sold his car and bought a different non-Tesla EV.
My point is that if Tesla suddenly dissolved tomorrow, existing automakers will continue improving their vehicles. Maybe 10 or even 5 years ago Tesla's death would have meant the end of EVs in the US. But by this point we've hit critical mass. They're here to stay.
There are just so many non-Tesla EV choices now.
I think there is still a (brief) remaining window where Tesla has an advantage in the US, but it is too late for them to start developing new models to take advantage of it - and that is NACS and the SuperCharger network. Now that new EVs from everyone else are coming out with NACS and are on-boarding plug and charge (and, hopefully, mapping integrated with charging availability), all US EVs will be just as easy as Teslas to take on road trips.
I still think there's a benefit to sticking with EVs from companies that are actually "all in" on EVs. Otherwise you're buying the product that the company (or really the sales/service channel) really doesn't want to sell you.
In this space, Tesla does have competition (e.g. Rivian and Lucid), but nowhere near as much as they should.
Tesla could be a major automaker if they released cars like a normal functional automaker. Elon, for his many faults, was perhaps the best person in the world to get Tesla where it is today, but he is more likely to burn it to the ground than maintain success of the company. If Tesla built a more traditional mid size SUV it would probably sell nearly as well as the Model Y and if they created a new more modern Model S It would probably do well also.
I have my doubts their robots will be anything more than a gimmick for rich people.
That’s why so many credit Gwynne Shotwell with SpaceX’s continued success. Unfortunately Elon didn’t look or didn’t want an equivalent for Tesla.
Their revenue is flat for last 4 years. They have established their status outside top 10 manufacturers and losing EV market share to Chinese and Europeans.
Car revenue: -11%
operating margin: 3.86%
Free cash flow -30%
Amazing that Tesla announced the next generation roadster and sold pre-orders which I think cost $100k and then just never released it and there seems to be no indication (last I checked) that it ever will be.
Yesterday on the earnings call Elon said the reveal is in April “hopefully”.
Tesla also announced they will be discontinuing the basic lane keep + adaptive speed cruise control they helped pioneer in cars sold going forward. But this is now a standard (free) feature even in basic vehicles like the Toyota Corolla. Why would they intentionally cripple their vehicles to the point hat they would be inferior to most cars today?
Then I learned that Musk's incentive pay has a 10 million full self-driving subscription hurdle, and it all made sense.