Tesla is not doing well as a car company. Tesla needs a good, low-cost car. Something that can compete with the BYD Seal, which reviews indicate is a good low-priced electric car. BYD is taking over the world of electric cars outside the US.[1] Only tariffs keep them from taking over the US market. They have many new models at good prices. BYD even has a pickup truck now.
Tesla also is not doing too well in batteries. Despite "Battery Day" and other hype, Tesla failed at making cells themselves.[2] They buy cells from Panasonic and CATL, mostly. Panasonic has some plants co-located with Tesla, but they're Panasonic technology.
Plus Tesla still has trouble with parts and service. The company is twenty years old now. They should have that figured out.
Tesla did fix its production volume problems. But "according to its own figures, the electric automaker produced 46,561 more vehicles than it delivered to customers during the first quarter of 2024. Where are all these cars going? Parking lots at its factories, malls and airports."[3]
Tesla launched the electric car industry. But they've blown their lead. This is what happens when the CEO's attention is elsewhere. Will someone please get Musk into drug rehab? He used to be good at this stuff.
[1] https://www.byd.com/us/news-list
[2] https://electrek.co/2024/07/17/elon-musk-might-give-up-tesla...
[3] https://jalopnik.com/tesla-is-running-out-of-room-to-store-u...
This is direct result of constant changes in the hardware during manufacturing. It might look good from customer perspective that they are always getting latest and greatest hardware, but it is an absolute nightmare from aftermarket perspective as you don't have Model X, but "Model X 2020 Week 23" which was only model using part XYZ v1, every other model is using part XYZ v2, which is not compatible with v1 model. It gets really messy really fast.
Regular OEM manufacturer won't get into this issue simply because they will close the changes and then will manufacture exactly same car with exactly same parts for i.e. 5 years straight.
I think there's more nuance to this. It seems much more that, to Elon, every part sitting on a shelf for parts availability, repair and service is a part that's not on the production line going on a vehicle to increase the almighty quarterly numbers.
Tesla -could- solve this tomorrow, but the Boss Man doesn't care. He has your money, and he wants to sell you another one, not repair yours.
It's usually most optimal to stop fucking around. Gadget stores don't keep us nerds around for our winning personalities, everyone benefits from service.
It's surprising that Waymo is doing OK in a service business. All those cars have to be stored, recharged, and cleaned. Somewhere there's probably someone that didn't come from Google in charge of that.
If you're on the fence, consider giving the other US/EU/Japanese automakers a couple years to catch up. They know the future is 100% EVs. They're steering enormous ships with large investments and many stakeholders.
Meanwhile: "Volvo Cars abandons 2030 EV-only target" https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/volvo-...
"BMW backs away from £2billion electric car pledge amid plans to stick with petrol and diesel vehicles" https://www.gbnews.com/lifestyle/cars/bmw-backs-away-from-ps...
"Audi Changes Strategy, Backs Away From Electric" https://www.dagens.com/autos/audi-changes-strategy-backs-awa...
"Volkswagen Walks Back EV-or-Bust Strategy That Rankled Rivals" https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-05-16/volkswage...
Future was supposed to be nuclear powered everything at one point in the past. Lo and behold the future, we're burning coal and making fields of things that have limited lifecycles and that can't be efficiently recycled, and that are completely reliant on weather being nice.
Volvo: "saying it now expected to still be offering some hybrid models in its lineup at that time."
VW: "will need more plug-in hybrids as EV sales decelerate."
(I'm not clicking the link on the site for the channel that has Nigel Farage, funny though.)
Personally I'd welcome an electric only revolution, because they're a lot less noisy and I hardly ever need a car. But it's future has always been entirely made up marketing speak to prop up shareholder value
The most likely scenario in 10-15 years is that the batteries have degraded some low double digit percentsge, which matches most real world data that I've seen, but will otherwise still be as viable as any other vehicle. And if battery prices do drop as is being predicted replacing them with something similar should not be prohibitively expensive (and possibly will mean extended range as well).
These kinds of announcements/articles have been published every few months, and pretty much never end up in any products because theyre pretty much never economically viable after scaling it up
I'm even willing to put money on that, if you actually believe your own words to be true, I'd easily bet pretty much any amount that we will not have a 50% upgrade in battery capacity in any car as compared to the previous model that's been published 1-3 years prior to that. To keep it simple, say $10 000? It'd be easy money if you yourself think you weren't just talking none sense ( ◕ ᴗ ◕ )
And even if we did get a 50% battery capacity upgrade in 2025 as compared to 2024 - while I wouldve lost the bet... My original point would've still been just as correct, because even at that point, they're still annoying to work around vs ICEs and their biggest cost would still come from a single component (battery) that has a pretty short expected lifespan compared to a regular engine
And you yourself likely know that as well, considering you didn't even acknowledge my bet ( ◠ ‿ ・ )
I'd also argue we're seeing battery improvements in cars pretty consistently, which is one of the reasons I can now buy an EV with 350km range for AUD$30k.
There have definitely been improvements in that regard, just not in such a short period of time
I'm about to buy my first car and while I can't afford an EV I'm very grateful for EVs dropping the 2nd hand market so hard. Currently Mazda 2 from 2020 is half the price of a new BYD Dolphin here and if I needed to drive more I'd get the latter but for that price a cozy road trip rain shelter is too hard to resist!
You get a price drop of 60-70% within 40-60k km for electric vehicles, the ICEs usually only drop by ~50% by 80-100k km. That's less deprecation despite higher usage.
And these electric cars are mostly ~4 years old while the ICEs are 6+ years old.
At least in my region, ICEs resell way, way better
/Edit: the Mazda 2 costs 21k€ new, the byd dolphin 30k.
If you're buying a 4years old Mazda for 1/2 of the price of a new byd dolphin, you're actually paying 70% of the list price of the Mazda. That's kinda proving how high ICEs are reselling vs the electric vehicles. The equivalent electric vehicle would've deprecated more
ICE cars gonna lose value real fast the further EV revolution goes because why would I buy a used ICE car when I can buy a new EV that has 10 times the fuel efficiency and no basically no maintenance overhead? It's a better car in every single aspect minus the refuel time.
Manufacturing is hard and early versions will be expensive. BYD management claims that solid state batteries will be for the high end. They're pushing lithium iron phosphate for now.
Samsung just announced a small solid state battery for wearables. This technology may appear in small devices before it's in cars.
https://thedriven.io/2024/04/03/catl-announces-electric-vehi...
It also means that your country can be in for a world of trouble if your comparative advantage changes. In turn, it means that a large adversary can attack you by turning the tables on your advantage.
Automobiles are a large comparative advantage sector for the US, Germany and Japan. Displacing it - even if only by catching automakers on the wrong foot, as BYD and friends are trying to do - could result in a massive reorganization wave, coupled with recessions and political shocks. This is only possible because of China's size, of course.
Then there's the urgent priority of depriving Russia, Iran and other state actors of their most nefarious revenue stream. In turn they use it to sabotage democracy in other countries, preventing the climate crisis from being addressed.
Today, in the U.S., there's a pretty healthy supply of used EV's as well.
I recently got my kid a '22 Nissan Leaf with about 11K miles and 170 mile range, for a little over $13,000 (including EV incentives).
I'm also seeing some pretty good deals on used Teslas; if I didn’t have to drive rather long distances several times a year, I'd get one myself.
What am I missing?
The first time they showed Optimus, they literally had a human in the suit, so this is a huge step forward.
That said, a teleoperated humanoid body is an impressive tech feat by itself, seriously.
Hard disagree. The point of the event was to show off autonomous robots and this is pure deception.
> The first time they showed Optimus, they literally had a human in the suit, so this is a huge step forward.
That is quite the curve to grade on.
It's just a game of smoke and mirrors. There's a reason Tesla had the demo at a Hollywood movie studio.
You’d think a WFH bastion would be more open minded.
The only reason we don't walk with bent knees is because that uses a lot of energy and can only lock our knees one way, but we do that sometimes for better movement, like when fighting or doing some sports. hydraulics are fundamentally different. The new Atlas seem to keep the legs fairly straight when standing/moving but the video is too short to come with larger conclusions.
Tesla is working with a large difference in approaches from Boston Dynamics. I think they can achieve some success even with the fact that their robots are not as good as the others by using the "pasta to the wall" strategy they seem to use. They made lots of the robots already and that can lead to someone finding a good use case for them even with lots of limitations. BD did this with spot to some success.
Imagine being able to control these things remotely and then walking a few of them into a bank to rob it. Then the robots attach the stolen money/goods to a drone which then flies off to another point to drop off the loot to its threat actors and masters who then get away.
I suppose the price points of them will need to come down drastically before this becomes commonplace and normal. Leaving $150k of burner robots behind to steal $50k doesn't seem that financially feasible.
We are gunna have a lot of new interesting laws in the pipeline.
Imagine having to solve a captcha to get into a building or buildings who have to install anti-robot traps and technology to prevent them from entering. We already have man traps, now we'll need robot traps.
The crypto crowd would probably ask, "what banks?"
I like the thought experiment.
It was literally their "Autonomy Event". Right there in the title.
So he's walking back this, then:
"Tesla could start selling Optimus robots by the end of [2025], Musk says"
"Musk told investors on a conference call that he guessed the Tesla robot, called Optimus, would be able to perform tasks in the factory by the end of [2024]."
Let's not even talk about how it would be "financially irresponsible" to not own a Tesla by 2019 because it will be making you "$30,000 a year in your sleep".
I dunno, if it's not actually an autonomous robot, I'd say it's more a non-demo of a fantasy product.
A big announcement of "a promise in the future"? Like hyperloop or "rockets flying from New York to Tokyo and to Mars in 2024"? Or the 2017 Roadster?
Sounds like what Trevor Milton got sent away for
I think it’s interesting because it reveals their development strategy: • Build a hardware kit that can well avatar human motion from motion capture suits. This gives hardware a validation model to guide development. • Then use the motion capture datasets to train the neural net which will auto operate the kit.
"People who once upon a time handed out military command, high civil office, legions — everything, now restrains itself and anxiously hopes for just two things: bread and circuses"
Why? Because most people do not have any other option. Play along in the hopes of some scrap.
This, LinkedIn posts, Leetcode, Slack conversations, are all this gigantic game of everybody knows is BS but still play along.
Its amazing that Tesla didn't tell people - there are thousands of video clips on X now of people interacting with them and not mentioning its all fake - and Elon is saying something like "let people see the clips and judge by themselves".
At this stage it's 100% fraud and deceiving investors.
I mean are we to believe that Tesla designed their robots to have a California dude accent, a Chicano accent, AND an Indian accent just for the hell of it?
I'd love to see footage of the backroom where they no doubt had a bunch of operators with Valve Indexes and VR headsets.
It has yet to be shown that these robots can do anything useful in any meaningful timeframe. We’re still well within the sphere of vapour ware that Musk has created for many years now. It would be naive not to ask questions at this point, or not to expect clear answers for that matter.