Comment by misiti3780 3 days ago
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.
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.
> 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.