Tesla is committing automotive suicide
(electrek.co)312 points by jethronethro 3 days ago
312 points by jethronethro 3 days ago
It's not like Tesla actually has functional FSD technology. If a ten year staged rollout of "transportation as a service" is the way to get there, then Waymo has a substantial leg up. Either way it is a lose-lose for Tesla. They failed to continue innovating on the EV and battery fronts as well.
What is so enjoyable about this is that it'll be all musk's fault when we look back and realize Tesla just died off over time. Once other companies started actually competing with him, he wasn't smart enough to hold the lead. Lucid, byd, even hyundai, all made better cars within a few years, so Elon just basically gave up. I love that
Interesting to put this into perspective to Tesla's master plans from 20 years (https://www.tesla.com/secret-master-plan) and 10 years ago (https://www.tesla.com/master-plan-part-deux)
I guess people are just a few days from starting to earn $30k/yr on their model 3s, as musk said it years ago? lol
I owned a model 3 and two model Ss. I largely regard model S as the best sedan ever made (in less than 100k USD luxury price range). No, model 3 doesn't even come close. Plus you can buy a 3yr old model S "like new" at the price of a new model 3.
Tesla is committing suicide here by eliminating the best sedan ever and by committing to an idea (taxis) that mainly serve the low end market.
Message to Musk: people like to own things. Only the low end segment don't mind sharing their means of transportation. High end won't share. Biggest profits in tech are in the high end market as Apple and Samsung have repeatedly shown.
... away from their top tier models and into the ones that directly compete with China.
Elon's superpower is commanding insane valuation premiums. The trouble with this is that "the bill eventually comes due", so to speak, which forces Elon's companies to take wilder and wilder bets, or to make wilder and wilder promises.
With telsa it was robotaxis, and when that failed to materialize, humanoid robots (fucking LOL).
SpaceX is an even more insane example. They are eyeing an IPO at a 1.5 trillion valuation. And yet the market for satellite launches is simply not that big. (What would you do with a satellite, if I gifted you one for free?). Estimates have SpaceX doing about $3B in annual earnings, which would give them a 500x earnings multiple at a 1.5T valuation (Apple: 35).
And so SpaceX/Elon had to invent the absolutely idiotic idea of "data centers in space" to sell some future vision of tens of thousands of launches per year.
He keeps upping the ante (and the ridiculousness of the vision), and so far investors keep funding it.
Me? I've realized that this madness is entirely "opt-in" and I choose to simply...not opt-in.
What would you do with a satellite, if I gifted you one for free?
Let's forget orbital mechanics for a while to make this answer more fun. It would follow me around and provide a dedicated, private lifeline of communication anywhere I go, real-time aerial surveillance of my surroundings, and eventually lasers to zap anyone who pisses me off.
Yes, and the reality is that any of those would require a fairly large constellation of satellites. I guess the play is that many large constellations of satellites will be launched.
Not really. That's only the case for LEO sats. Going up higher gets you hemispheric coverage with a single bird.
the humanoid robots thing is so ridiculous, theres no way that comes to fruition
> Estimates have SpaceX doing about $3B in annual earnings
Ummm that information seems terribly out of date or is just uninformed- Starlink alone is estimated around $8 billion for 2024 and projected around $12 billion for 2025, with continued growth.
Fully Self Driving themselves off the cliff one might say...
They might actually be going all-in on a robotaxi future, i.e. betting on a future where car-ownership is not the default.
It is built around driving cars, but not necessarily car ownership. From what I gather through movies and television, cities like New York City don't really have car owners, but there are a lot of taxi cabs. Now Uber and Lyft have moved into small towns that never had taxis.
I’m not sure that is a good example - NYC is an outlier and it has 45% of households owning cars.
Most people^ don’t actually want to own a car and deal with breakdowns, maintenance, repairs, fender benders, etc etc.
They want the convenience and freedom a car provides. Right now in many places the best way to get that is ownership, so we suck it up and buy a horribly depreciating asset that causes headaches.
That could quickly change if someone can figure out how to make using a car just as convenient while also cheaper.
^ of course there are car enthusiasts who will always want to own, but that’s a tiny fraction of car owners.
I don't strongly disagree, but also don't really see why they would keep manufacturing X and S if the design is old and the car needs a refresh to be competitive? I guess the argument is that it would have been worthwhile refreshing it?
I mean that may be the case, but I get the sense that Tesla's primary goal at the moment is creating cheap robotaxi ready vehicles, and S and X don't really fit well with that. Partly because of cost, but also because I suspect it's harder to build FSD for multiple different vehicles so both models are just a distraction right now.
I'm not saying this article is wrong, but it seems like it may make sense that they focus on Y, 3, robotaxis and future projects like optimus.
I don't have strong opinions either way on Musk, but his ability to see future tech trends before others has historically been quite impressive. Personally I think the idea that Tesla would be better off behaving like every other car company betting on small iterative improvements to the current line up is really quite silly. It's going to be extremely difficult to compete with China without protectionist policies. Tesla probably should be looking to the next thing if they want to survive.
Or he never intended for it to stick around and used it a the biggest pump and dump ever to become the richest man in the world using subsidies all along the way to get there. Will be interesting to see how much stock Elon sells...
Bipedal robots are dumb.
A robot that can only walk around my house is still useless. A robot that can wheel or track or even park in front of my dryer and fold laundry would be incredible. Yet every demo is Robot Jumps And Dances, not Robot Does Something Useful.
My theory is that bipedal motion is the "easy" problem, and fine motor control is the hard problem. That makes me bearish on Optimus: A car with questionable full self driving is still a useful car. A robot with questionable fine motor control is going to break every dish in the house.
A 9 month old baby also can't play tic tac toe, but that doesn't mean tic tac toe is difficult.
There was millions of years of very strong selective pressure making humans evolve to learn to walk easily. There has been very little selective pressure making humans be good at learning tic tac toe.
Often whether something seems difficult or easy to humans has more to do with how well evolution has prepared us for it than with the inherent difficulty of the problem.
Here's a figure robot unloading the dishwasher https://x.com/chatgpt21/status/2016210798884815156
Progress! First robot demo of something useful.
Still, whoever puts this robot on a wheeled chassis for half the price, twice the battery life, and 3X the reliability is going to own the market.
> Bipedal robots are an easy drop-in replacement for humans.
Robots that merely walk around are just as useless as humans who merely walk around.
A robot that folds laundry would be useful even if it was built into the washing machine.
The legs are not important. The arms are important. Show me the arms doing something useful, if you can.
Twice as efficient is an incredible achievement if you think that a few years ago humanoid robots struggled to stay upright and couldn't locate their own... well, charging port.
More like surgery to remove the excess weight. If they are not selling well, why would they continue making them? That would be suicide.
"If you don't cannibalize yourself, someone else will." -Steve Jobs
The Y and 3 do everything the X and S do. I don't see how they could keep making them without eating away sales.
The discontinued models were 3% of the sale. It's not "suicide".
Also if they feel self driving is sufficient, why would they bother with inferior stuff
I just quit reading any articles from this site. They are so obviously biased it’s obnoxious. I wonder who is paying them.
I wonder if he has some kind of dementia brought on by excessive consumption of ketamine? Or perhaps it's just that he has surrounded himself with people who will never tell him no. Sort of like a lot of dictators do where they have executed everyone around them who could give them pushback and therefore they end up living in a fantasy world while their people starve.
What I'm wondering at this point is why the investors in Tesla are still riding this crazy train. Blaming simple market manipulation seems far fetched. Mass hysteria and delusional beliefs are common enough in the stock market but reality eventually sets in and this bubble has been inflating for a long time. The people who lose the most are going to be the small investors- the really ruthless hedge fund bros will probably walk away unscathed.
I have to admit, I love my model S and have been very bullish of TSLA but this news makes me very bearish. There is no way they are going to make robots at scale in the next 5 years and the model s and model X are cool pieces of technology. If they dont start rolling out robotaxi extremely quickly to new locations, I cant imagine the stock going anywhere but down.
> There is no way they are going to make robots at scale in the next 5 years
If you said 1 year okay I would believe you. But have you seen the advances in AI recently...? And the work done in robotics by other companies like Google and Figure? 5 years is definitely doable.
Sorry, Ill say it a different way. I dont think Tesla will be able to sell ME a robot within the next 5 years that does my laundry and cooks me dinner. If they want to sell millions of these things, that is what it's going to need to do.
AI isn't the only bottleneck - even if the software problem was solved today, a robot arm competitive with human arms simply doesn't exist (and the only ones that have a hope of competing cost $16k each) - it turns out all those degrees of freedom makes the arm super fragile, and the human arm is filled to the brim with sensors (e.g. to figure out the weight of the item you're holding, or to tell when the teatowel is slipping or if you're gripping it tight enough).
(Source: construction-physics, if anyone wants to comment with the link)
I know the Optimus marketing wank is all sci-fi humanoids, but I wonder if the products that actually hit the market will be much simpler, not trying to compete with human arms, as you say. Does that seem likely to you?
That is exactly the plan: https://www.teslarati.com/tesla-confirms-robotaxi-expansion-...
I think robotaxi will eventually everywhere but austin is rolling out a lot slower than i expected.
But the Model S and X are luxury competitors and if Tesla wants to be Toyota/Honda instead of BMW/Mercedes, perhaps they no longer fit in their plans. The issue is they don’t have any other mainstream models besides the 3 and Y. Perhaps they really need bigger CUVs and SUVs that cost less than the X and a higher end Model 3 (like Corolla/Camry or Civic/Accord) to replace them.
Give me a break. Tesla has 4 different, 4 person cars. It's redundant. In manufacturing and business, reducing variability is everything. Engineering and supply chain has now been freed from two entire SKUs. That's massive. In a self driving world, they don't really the Model 3 either. The best part is no part - well getting rid of two entire vehicles worth of parts that contributed very little to the bottom line is massive.
It's amazing after 20 years of the same MO, people still don't understand how Tesla/SpaceX operate and succeed. It's like deleting millions of lines of code from a code base. It improves not just performance of the organization, but maintenance as well. The S/X were outsized tech debt on every facet of the business and now they're gone. 100% the right move and very few people understand it.
Model X wasn't a 4-person car. It was designed to be a 6-7 seater, far bigger than the Model Y. The Model Y's optional third row is practically useless.
Its like arguing the Honda CR-V is the same kind of vehicle as the Honda Odyssey.
The real question is why continue having the Model Y and the Model 3, when those are so incredibly close in dimensions. The 3 is only 2" smaller than the Y in length. Just kill the 3 and make a cheaper trim level of the Y. $10k more to have a 7" higher roof and more features in the base model.
> Tesla has 4 different, 4 person cars. It's redundant.
You are spot on, it makes sense to have the Model 3 (economy sedan) and Model y (upmarket crossover SUV).
My question here is why did Tesla have four 4-person cars in the first place? If you wanted to streamline engineering and supply-chain why have Cybercabs instead of using the model 3 or model y as the base? Why split the company between Optimus and making cars?
Cybertrunk does make sense, it is a technology demonstrator and test article filled with all the new ideas and tech they are going to build into the next generation. They get data on people using it by selling it to them.
What you say is a sound strategy for Telsa to peruse, but they don't seem to be perusing it.
> Tesla has 4 different, 4 person cars. It's redundant.
You must be a topologist.
It's weird that you think people don't understand the concept of simplification, especially here. And that if someone says "that's an odd move" it must be because they can't grasp the idea of redundancy (between vehicles priced differently by a factor of two).
Well, Elon decided to go that way. Really can't blame anyone else but himself here.
I have a Model Y with AI hardware version 4. It is phenomenal at self-driving, and if your impression of FSD is a year old or older, then you are woefully out of date in understanding where the tech is today. If I could, I would send my own grade school child off to her friend's houses and extracurricular activities in my car unaccompanied. It is safer than buses, taxis, and me. Not since Tesla created the first economically viable EV for the American public have I been as excited about a revolution in automotive technology. Other than the fact that Tesla still needs people out there manually driving to generate training data, I don't think Tesla should be selling cars at all. I fully support this move, and all I have to say is thank God for Waymo, so we can have good competition in the Robotaxi market.
I'm done listening to pundits doubt Elon. I haven't seen Wall Street forecast future economic and technological trends well at all. Elon has created an EV market, caught falling rocket boosters, created the leading AI "nonprofit", and launched a worldwide satellite internet service, mostly in the face of rent seeking financial professionals and hacker news SSEs calling him dumb. I'm not sure what else a man needs to do to prove he deserves a little deference in his strategic decisions.
> Not since Tesla created the first economically viable EV for the American public have I been as excited about a revolution in automotive technology.
What do you mean by "economically viable" and "for the American public"? I wouldn't count the Roadster because it was expensive (~$100k) and only produced in limited numbers (~2500 over its lifetime). I'd say that to count as for the American public a car has to be quite a bit more affordable than that, and quite a bit more available.
its MDS, the same thing as TDS.
FSD can be working right before people's eyes, and yet they only believe what they read on news and not what they see in front of their eyes.
Will Tesla be remembered as the DeLorean of the 2020s, or more like the Edsel?
The DeLorean was a stupidly-expensive car that had a lot of maintenance problems, decided to use an unpainted stainless steel exterior and had corrosion issues as a result, but is remembered despite all of this engineering mediocrity due to its unusual stylistic choices.
I'm guessing Tesla's cybertruck will be the DeLorean of the 2020s.
The delorean is only remembered the way it is because of Back to the Future.
Without that movie, it would be a pub trivia question.
Is anyone going to make a generation defining movie that features the Cybertruck? God I hope not, I can't take such powerful satire right now.
Maybe a remake of Idiocracy?
(Last night I rewatched Radio Free Albemuth and it seemed too relevant to the current mood in the USA. PKD was truly a prophet of the modern age).
If you want to restrict the discussion to just the Cybertruck, it's more like the Edsel - an embarrassing failure from a dominant manufacturer. The Delorean similarities are largely skin-deep.
Also probably 99% of people here are familiar with Deloreans and stainless steel.
I was very close to going short on Tesla yesterday. Very glad I didn't in the end. The fundamentals of the company are absolute trash, yet the stock price is through the roof year after year. One day the crash will be epic.
In the last couple of months it was really crazy: Some inconvenient truth came out, and within minutes the stock made a huge jump UP. Who regards it as a good sign if a car manufacturer just got ordered to pay $200 mio in damages in just one single Autopilot crash case, creating precedent for a lot more of lawsuits.
I think you could wake up one day, read the WSJ with the headline "All Tesla cars ever sold have just exploded at the same time, killing hundred thousands of people" - and the stock price would surge 10%.
I really would like to know what the stock price would do if Tesla had good news. But I guess we'll never find out about that one... ;)
That’s a good point. Can Tesla fail?
Seems like he’s constantly using one company to fund others, shuffling the cups and balls around claiming everything is still fine.
I could see him doing serious damage or even trashing an otherwise healthy company doing this to prop up total failures.
I have no issue understanding why Musk does that, he's gone from “weirdo with lost of enthusiasm and charisma” to “batshit crazy, so full of himself there's basically no negative feedback loop anymore”.
What I don't understand is why are the Tesla shareholders accepting his bullshit?
Tesla shareholders who fully believe Musk is crazy will either 1) be quietly selling their stocks and don't want to draw attention, or 2) factored in the crazy and bought in anyway. If the craziness started today then that would be a good question, but it's been years.
I mean of course Musk has been crazy for years, but there's 1. “calling the leader of a rescue mission a pedo”-cazy and 2. “Tesla exits the personal car market”-crazy and as much as I can understand that investors could get away with 1., it's unbelievable to me that they accept 2.
Because without Musk's reality distortion field, Tesla stock would lose most of its value.
Lol, there's way too many Musk fanboys on this platform. Attempting to “get karma” (what for, actually?) by criticizing Musk is a guaranteed failure (as illustrated by the fact that this comment has been heavily downvoted).
Cults of personality are all the rage these days. And in this case, people are probably just ratcheting up their stop loss prices and hoping the market is suckered by his next grand scheme.
This "Elon Musk lost interest" is very, very naive take.
Actually I think this new directions demonstrates how great decision making they have at Tesla. Today and even more in the future they have no way of competing with the Chinese manufacturers. It is simply physically not possible.
So they are rightfully pivoting and moving away from the race to the bottom that is ensuing.
> Pivoting to consumer robots? Isn’t that cool?
Has there been a single public video of an Optimus robot that isn't an embarrassment? Has there been a single public video of an Optimus robot performing a complex or precise task? No, scooping popcorn at the Tesla diner isn't a complex or precise task...it wasn't very good at that in the videos I saw either, and it seemed they only had it doing that job for a short amount of time. If we're that close to consumer robots, why isn't Tesla (or other Musk companies) increasingly using them internally? Seems like it'd be a great way to prove the potential while working through the kinks.
It'd be exciting if there was any actual detectable signal of a product worth buying.
Instead we have...this... https://www.youtube.com/shorts/bk91DpkdPQY
The author said he saw Tesla prove that EVs were profitable, but it was profitable when taxpayers gave it $7,500 per vehicle sold... That's the whole profit margin on higher-end cars, and more profit than most mass-market makers get. EVs were never profitable.
Tesla don’t only sell in the US - when you say “per vehicle sold” - are you saying that the American taxpayers were subsidising the global sales? Or are you saying they were not profitable only in America?
If you want to deduct tax rebates, then what about the other side?
- New cars are subject to sales tax
- In some states (e.g., California), there are additional fees buried in DMV registration costs. California's Vehicle License Fee (VLF) is based on the depreciated value of the car. So newer and more expensive cars pay more to use the roads than do older cars. So the VLF is effectively another tax on new cars.
Even when excluding regulatory credits and consumer tax incentives, Tesla’s automotive business remains profitable.
Cost of Goods Sold (COGS): As of late 2024 and early 2025, Tesla’s average cost to produce a vehicle dropped to an all-time low of under $35,000.
Gross Margin: Tesla’s automotive gross margin (excluding regulatory credits) has typically hovered between 15% and 18% recently. This means they earn several thousand dollars more per car than it costs them to build.
That was a very long time ago and many billions ago and it was a loan that was repaid with interest in two years.
I think this makes a lot of sense if he puts all the effort into Optimus and makes it a really good robot. Once you have a really good robot, you do not need the car to self-drive, the robot can drive any car (or truck). I know it is very hard, but as we should have learned by now Elon loves very hard problems and this is exactly in his wheelhouse. It may all have been in his plans considering how he was very opposed to LiDAR and tried to base the system on vision alone.
Additionally, to take another step toward AGI, you need vast amounts of real-world data. Optimus can provide that, much like Tesla cars have for driving data.
MDS is real. Just as real as TDS.
I have Model Y and FSD. FDS is light years away from its competition
It's business as usual for Elon. This is his main strategy. He always goes all in on risky technology that people say won't work. People said it about EVs. They said it about reusing first stages. They said it about Starlink's phased array antennas.
Now he's going all in on self driving. It's obvious that self driving turns personal transportation into a service business. So that's where he's going. Yeah, if you don't believe in self driving then it's suicide. But if you do, it's the only thing that makes sense.
He’s been all in on self driving for at least a decade now. He has not been able to produce anything close to his claims.
I'm more and more inclined to suspect that XEverything is some kind of money laundering scam, where the world's richest people throw money at Musk because of his politics - which they hope will make them even more money. And not because of his technological promises, which are increasingly ridiculous and unbelievable based on more than a decade of his own public statements.
Help me understand this: why would anybody buy a Tesla car today, unless it was incredibly well-priced with respect to the competition? Seems to me, yes, this kills Tesla cars.