Then I learned that Musk's incentive pay has a 10 million full self-driving subscription hurdle, and it all made sense.
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.
Seems like Toyota is about to make a big Lexus pivot in the next year or two.
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.
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.
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.
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)
Step 1: SpaceX IPO
Step 2: Trillion dollar payout
Step 3: Nothing matters any more
Something tells me that Musk isn't the sort of person who'd ever be satisfied. It's easier for me to imagine him like Mr. House from Fallout, trying to control everything over centuries.
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.
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.
> Simple cooling sinks, dense
I'll also mention that the moon isn't very cold, except on the dark side. In the moon's day the temperature is 120C and at night -130C. The same side of the moon always faces us and the moon isn't always full. I'll let you figure out the rest.
Also you need to consider that the thermal conductivity of lunar regolith is quite low.
I'm not saying it's not possible but I am saying there's a lot of technical challenges that make naïve approaches not so simple. The reason doing things in space is hard is not just the difficulty of getting things up into space. It's that all the things you take for granted just don't work.
Oversimplification is a footgun. Or more accurately, in this case a foot taser (if you know why you've found one of the major challenges of doing anything on the moon and mars)
Watch out universe, here we come!
What could possibly go wrong, mining asteroids? An awful lot, when we start messing with orbital dynamics in the asteroid belt.
But Space X can externalise those risks. It will probably be centuries before disturbed orbits start to threaten Earth... So who cares?
Me.
Asteroid resources would be useful for building in space, but that is getting a step ahead.
Everyone is laboring under this subtle belief that space industry will be just like scifi speculated, but scifi stories always treated space like the ocean, with lots of interplanetary trade and easy travel and no consideration of energy (because it makes for good storytelling) but the actual energy budgeting and consideration of gravity wells is the exact opposite of ocean transport.
Global trade works at all because buoyancy and fluid physics make ocean vessels stupidly efficient at transport.
Moving any matter through space is stupidly inefficient.
The tyranny of the rocket equation constrains everything.
I'll let you find the video, it's brutal. Allegedly caused by lane assist activating out of the blue when overtaking other cars.
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.
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...
[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.
LKA existed well before Tesla HW1 released. Honda had cars on the road in 2003 with LKA systems. That's 11 years before Tesla HW1 was available.
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...
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.
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?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_predictions_for_autono...
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.
(+) Except for the battery, but that's a very long term battle with very tiny steps.
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.
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.
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.
Whether you like this or not, who cares? The pace of improvement in Tesla software compared to any other manufacturer is astonishing, and astonishingly good.
I have no love for the CEO, but my Model Y is a very interesting (and intuitive) car.
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.
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:
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.
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.
The battery progress is more an accidental discovery than research problem alone.
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.
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'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.
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 didn't, and this is just absurd.
Not only were electric cars available since the very beginning of cars, but they've always been available as niche options. There are tens of electric cars that postdate the EV1 and predate the Tesla. Do you even know their names?
We have stupidly cheap gas. An electric car has only ever been a curiosity for America. Even now, the primary driver of people buying electric cars is ideological, and a mild convenience of never having to go to a gas station.
Pre-lithium battery electric cars are a huge hassle, for very little gain, even outside the US. The history of cars is a global one, and no amount of conspiracy theory about GM can counter the fact that nobody else made electric cars either, even in places with drastically more expensive and unreliable gasoline.
They have always been a novelty, like hydrogen and LPG and compressed gas engines.
Hybrids were the closest anyone got to making older battery chemistries meaningful for car-style transportation, and even that was extremely limited.
Being first isn’t enough to establish a lead. You also have to be in competition, which means selling product.
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.
It's just that the company has stalled every major project they started, and, so far, completed a rather shitty an uninspiring one in Vegas that has no reason to exist in the first place (it's subway but with Teslas instead of trains).
Its only purpose is to prevent the money from being spent on viable public transportation projects, and in that sense, it's very interesting that it got so far.
I assume you got a cut of the $23bn my state took with the promise of a high-speed rail, which afaik is the only "viable(?!)" transportation project that could have been affected by this, or you just hate subways/subterranean transportation progress?
SpaceX in Merger Talks with xAI - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46814701 - January 2026
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)
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.
"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).
Pretending BYD is winning because of Chinese labor practices alone or primarily is denial of their technological and operational prowess.
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.
(It seems plausible, but all I’ve seen is speculation.)
Their valuation was never justified by that. They always sold a fraction of what other companies do.
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 every automaker around like a gorilla, and none can compete in a meaningful way.
Tarries mean they don’t have to. For now.
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.
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.
- 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.
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.
In the 2000s publishing pivot to the Internet, this was known as "trading physical dollars for digital pennies."
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.
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.
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.
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.
Americans by and large don't do that. We software developers have not that different of an income gap between us and minimum wage workers compared to my family overseas and their staff. Yet, it would be considered weird, extravagant even, for a $300-500k/yr developer to have dedicated help. We're far more comfortable with people we don't need to interact with directly, like housecleaners, landscapers, etc.
Teleoperated robots sidestep that discomfort, somewhat, by obscuring the the humanity of the staff. It's probably not a particularly ethical basis for a product, but when has that ever stopped us.
- Services like maids or cleaners are usually scheduled, maybe you have to wait and open the door etc. Maybe they can't make it that day because of snow storm etc.
- Services are normally limited to certain hours. With a remote operator, the robot could do laundry all night ran by someone in a different time zone.
- If needed could be operated in shifts.
- Other new use cases could arise, e.g. wellness check on elderly, help if fallen or locked out etc.
An autonomous robot that has 99% reliability, getting stuck once an hour, is useless to me. A semi-autonomous robot that gets stuck once an hour but can be rescued by the remote operator is tempting.
Expect security and privacy in the marketing for these things, too, but I don't think that's a real differentiator. Rich and middle class people alike are currently OK with letting barely-vetted strangers in their houses for cleaning the world over.
Pitching "security and privacy" as features of a device that's remotely operated and monitored is going to be a very hard sell.
It can occasionally make sense for high skill stuff where the shortage is people who can even do it, like remote surgery.
In your house? That's silly. It'd be 100X more expensive and complicated than just hiring a housekeeper so you could... hire a remote housekeeper?
Global trade right now is literally about exploiting labor at a distance.
Our shit didn't get made in China because they were inherently better at making shit!
If that job is "monitor the remote robots from a desk" then that's likely also a fairly good job.
The future with this as a reality is a really dark place, where the uber wealthy live entirely disconnected from the working class except through telepresent machines half a planet away. That way the wealthy don't have to be inconvenienced by the humanity of the poors.
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.
They're all legs. The impressive demos are just show, not useful.
(Will someone eventually invent a machine that can do all of that and more? Yes, probably, and they'll make billions when they do. But Tesla has offered no reason to believe this is on their horizon, and the focus on a humanoid form factor strongly suggests that they're optimizing for media appeal over practical capabilities.)
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.
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?
Also, if you take 1 million jobs, do you think that might cause demand to drop for services?
Nothing about this stock has ever been rational
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.
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 wait. I can’t. Because for all his successes, Musk has also sowed quite a lot of bullshit that has gone precisely nowhere.
Not just watch a launch, but go to O'Hare to launch and go to Sydney in ~30min. In September 2017 they said we'd be flying Earth-to-Earth on a BFR last year.
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.
I was using the classic idea of the flying car as an example of a thing that has been out of reach as an as a product for normal people and may not actually be successful if it were to really be sold.
Replace flying car with whatever example you want.
To put it in a different way, you could be so busy figuring out how to do it that you don’t figure out that a business case doesn’t actually exist.
I wasn’t trying to comment on any of Musk‘s other companies specifically. Only that we don’t know if making robots will actually make money.
> Where did I say that?
> > > Just because you can figure out how to do something doesn’t mean you’re going to make money at it.
I really was not trying to slam his other companies.
I think you’re reading too much into this. Making humanoid robots is not a guaranteed path to riches. That’s all I’m trying to say.
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.
If the original schedules hadn't been made public knowledge, the progress they have made would seem quite fast-paced.
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.
I have my doubts their robots will be anything more than a gimmick for rich people.
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.
In this space, Tesla does have competition (e.g. Rivian and Lucid), but nowhere near as much as they should.
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.
Car revenue: -11%
operating margin: 3.86%
Free cash flow -30%
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"If you don't cannibalize yourself, someone else will." -Steve Jobs
I don't see this in Tesla.
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.
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.
You must be a topologist.
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.
I'm guessing Tesla's cybertruck will be the DeLorean of the 2020s.
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.
Also probably 99% of people here are familiar with Deloreans and stainless steel.
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... ;)
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.
If SpaceX buys it, it will fail upward :)
He did that with SolarCity when Tesla bought it then repeated with X when XAi bought 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.
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.
What I don't understand is why are the Tesla shareholders accepting his bullshit?
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.
(Source: construction-physics, if anyone wants to comment with the link)
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.
They won’t make 25k cars either. Very little margin on that.
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
- 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.
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.
"Profitability" is a momentary property.
You could make ICE cars unprofitable by charging less than they cost to make too.
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.