Comment by EthanHeilman

Comment by EthanHeilman 3 days ago

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.

alterom 3 days ago

> 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.

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expedition32 2 days ago

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.

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breve 3 days ago

> 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:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9e0SQn9uUlw

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YIhzUnvi7Fw

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EthanHeilman 2 days ago

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.

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panick21_ 2 days ago

> 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.

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