IMO Tesla would be better if they focused solely on making good EVs, rather than also trying to become the leader in self-driving.
I get that they're trying to create a wider moat against their competitors, but if their self-driving software are found to have systematic failure modes in them as these internal docs seem to suggest, then that could very well do more harm to their reputation in the long run.
Elons point on cars being worth 5x as much with self driving shouldn’t be dismissed. If a car that costs $25,000 to manufacture all of a sudden can be driven 40-50 hours a week automatically, how much is that car now worth?
So I totally disagree on that end, as do most investors given teslas enormous valuation.
Elon doesn't actually believe that Tesla cars are about to quintuple in value now, any more than he did 7+ years ago when he first started saying it; that's just marketing BS.
> So I totally disagree on that end, as do most investors given teslas enormous valuation.
Yes, and most Gamestop investors think the company is going to be the next Amazon. Buying a popular meme stock doesn't make their predictions right.
And he’s admitted self driving was way more difficult than anyone realized, so his dream is gonna be delayed 5-10 years like most of his other major ones.
It’s now 2013, want to see a video of Starship taking off?
Rocketry and self-driving are completely different domains of difficulty. Rocketry is a solved problem - the basic math works, we've done it before, the challenge now is building upon that knowledge, refining it and increasing efficiency, but the basics have been figured out and proven since we've launched the first satellites in orbit. SpaceX is successfully doing this.
Unsupervised self-driving in an unconstrained environment is a completely different game. The reason humans can drive is that they have millions of years of evolution in both low-level image processing, reasoning, etc, diverse knowledge of the world that an individual obtains during the course of their life which can be blended in various ways to make driving-related decisions, as well as a sense of self-preservation that generally forces them to err on the side of caution. Short of a major AGI breakthrough, safe self-driving on existing road infrastructure is impossible.
> Rocketry is a solved problem - the basic math works, we've done it before, the challenge now is building upon that knowledge
This is not true. The only thing that enabled the reusability of SpaceX rockets was the convexification of the soft landing problem, a novelty by Lars Blackmore.
Sure, you could argue the the model predictive control scaffolding was pre-existing, but so was linear algebra for self driving.
> > And he’s admitted self driving was way more difficult than anyone realized,
Sure and the guy is getting paid right now in cold hard cash, while all the synchopants keep ranting about hopes and dreams.
As Jack Nicholson said in 'the Departed' and I quote :
"What we generally do - in this country... is one guy brings the items and the other guy pays him. No tickee, no laundry!"
First the self-driving car for all Americans (the item), then the big payday for Mr.Musk, that's what happened with Mr. Ford back in the day, but what did the guy know? Nowadays you can just bluff your way into riches using the marvelous phenomenon of cult of personality and stock appreciation.
> > It’s now 2013, want to see a video of Starship taking off?
Want to see a sample of what Microsoft's ChatGPT can do?? It's amazing! But that has nothing to do with Microsoft giving Apple a run for its money in the smartphone market like Ballmer predicted back in 2012
There is no correlation between the 2 things just like there is no correlation between rockets and self driving cars, and it's laughable that synchopants think they are correlated just because thought leader and cult of personality enthusiast Elon Musk is both the founder of SpaceX and the petty individual who sued for the right to be called the founder of Tesla
My point was Elon has an incredible track record of success which follows a formula of overhype, delays, and eventual achievement if not overachievement.
You seem to have a more personal vendetta against him, I’m just looking at his insane success and envying hype/ management style
> My point was Elon has an incredible track record of success which follows a formula of overhype, delays, and eventual achievement if not overachievement.
His biggest success is the rocket industry. Let's examine top competitors - corrupt ULA which flies rockets on 50 year old engines and does cost+ contracts, his other competitor was Russia, a corrupt kleptocracy that stopped innovating when USSR fell apart. Russia would sell engines physically made in USSR to ULA.
This market literally had no competition and no innovation for like 40 years.
So yes, his great achievement is that he could march finance into an industry that no-one would consider for investment. But results in other industries were not so great.
Tesla had a head start on electric, but they could not take advantage of this. Once other manufacturers woke up to the threat, it became clear Tesla has nothing on them, and car industry is fiercely competitive. His leadership was not good enough to take advantage of the head start he had and extremely high level of finance that he had.
Where is cybertruck? Other automakers are already selling electric trucks. VW and even Chinese automakers are eating Tesla's lunch.
Elon's boring company is an abject failure, as is hyperloop.
“ Tesla had a head start on electric, but they could not take advantage of this. Once other manufacturers woke up to the threat, it became clear Tesla has nothing on them, and car industry is fiercely competitive.”
Is there any other car company in the world selling electric vehicles at a profit besides Tesla? Everyone else is losing money on their EVs most are losing a lot of money. Not only is Tesla profitable but they have better margins than many companies have on their gas cars.
If that's the case, why Tesla easily beats any other opponent overseas as well? Here, in Australia, they do not get any subsidies. Model 3 and Y sales are leaving all others, including Ioniq, far behind.
Other manufacturers haven’t had time to scale up production. Also the direct you consumer model has been a real winner in preventing dealer price gouging due to shortages
If someone built a dozen companies, and like a third of them succeeded and made him one of (if not the) richest man in the world, I think you could say that that person "has an incredible track record of success"
and I don't even like this guy, but this is just dishonest from you
Parent might be including PayPal too. Though it's not clear what Musk's involvement in their success was.
By the way, if you or I owned either one of the companies you mentioned it would be considered a great success. Your question itself is putting Musk in a league of his own. I don't care that he's an asshole. If someone asked the three of us to eject into space a car that we built, only he could comply.
I would say that PayPal was a success because of the mafia (which mostly consists of Thiel and Levchin's team by the way). I would argue that Musk actually hampered PayPal in many ways (pushing Windows as the dev environment, as one example, when the rest of the team wanted Linux).
That being said, SpaceX and Tesla are successful, even if they took government subsidies to get started. There are many more companies which took a lot of government money yet managed to return nothing except fat bonuses for their executives. Or the number of large companies which have stopped innovating now (IBM and Intel for instance).
Is Tesla and SpaceX not enough of a track record? Seriously, if that is not a track record of success, what is a track record of success by your measure?
Although I do think Tesla did take advantage of their head start. But it’s clear that the pandemic and issues with China and supply chains are hampering them globally.
And sure, Tesla launched successful Electric cars and woke the market up when they realised consumers actually really would switch.
But it’s not like other manufacturers couldn’t do it, they just chose not to.
The biggest thing Tesla did was actually making it happen with vehicles that were significantly differentiated and looked like the future!
In a market where companies stopped selling sedans in favour of SUVs, Teslas came along with the model 3 and then model Y, and showed people will choose electric tech over SUV form factor.
People weren’t buying ICE sedans because they were largely garbage!
I used to be a fan, then he showed up to the cave rescue operation with half a submarine, and in responce to crtiticism he called rescue divers pedoes.
So I started wondering, can he be a good leader when he can't take criticism? How does he retain best pepple if his ego is this fragile?
I am quite happy to see more people reassess him as he demonstrates capricious and callous behavioir, for exanple the Twitter aquisition whoch he first wanted then tried to get out of.
I think you will come around when he targets something yoi carw about.
No, I won't, because I don't think he's a faultless person. In fact, I think he's quite an asshole, but I can rationally separate who he is from his long list of accomplishments.
Just because you want him to be a failure or a con-artist or whatever doesn't mean he actually is.
Elon's biggest accomplishment is how he optimizes for capital growth by any means necessary and is willing to throw norms to the wind and think very big. Elon never had to be a good people person to succeed here. It is why successful companies allow brilliant jerks... they are so brilliant it makes up for their asshole nature. Elon is this, as much as it pains me to say it.
Why do people make semantic arguments disguised as philosophy instead of making a concrete point and furthering the discussion? Seems like a cop out to me. It's tempting to respond to everything online and hit enter but sometimes you don't have to if you don't have anything meaningful to say.
It's not remotely philosophical. What's the point of emphasizing what is rational, when the likely answer is within a much smaller subset (what is reasonable). You overemphasize rationality to the point you aren't reasonable. You sit here and talk about what is rational, but you aren't reasonable and therefore it's not a good argument. We aren't dealing in the abstract world of mathematics, we are dealing with human relationships.
"It's tempting to respond to everything online and hit enter but sometimes you don't have to if you don't have anything meaningful to say."
There is nothing reasonable about pretending like Elon isn't accomplished because you don't like him.
Happy?
It's not reasonable to pretend like Tesla/spacex is not a smashing success story.
You're not dealing with human relationships. What are you talking about. The parent of my original comment is spinning a narrative about Elon's accomplishments because of his personality quirks.
Well Tesla has significantly devalued as of late, is facing tremendous regulatory scrutiny, just recently suffered a massive recall, and is likely never going to deliver on its key promise of achieving practicable self-driving car, and by all estimates from anyone else in the industry, is being completely unreasonable in going about it predominantly via computer-vision.
so as an initial, I don't think your argument is reasonable at all. it goes against so of the most basic and recent facts about tesla. I can understand feeling different because you like him and he makes you feel fuzzy or something like that. but hard to say you are being reasonable - when you don't offer reasons!
> The parent of my original comment is spinning a narrative about Elon's accomplishments because of his personality quirks.
This is absolutely the boundaries of human relationships and is not better defined in the space of mathematics or physics, or even game theory, to the point you boil things down to being rational/un-rational. rational is basically the lowest boundary here, it means possible, it doesn't mean likely.
>There is nothing reasonable about pretending like Elon isn't accomplished because you don't like him.
I guess it depends on what you think accomplished is. I certainly think he's achieved a certain kind of status in society, I'm not sure if it's an accomplishment, but the amount of money that belongs to him is certainly very large and something anyone else would like to have.
SpaceX has been quite successful, though it also came really close to failing.
Solar city actually failed as an independent company.
Boring company is floundering.
Twitter is having massive issues.
I think he’s done more harm to Tesla after taking it over from the original founders than been a benefit. It’s unclear but he definitely took massive risks which were unnecessary and has many serious failures such as how long their truck has slipped.
All together not a bad track record, but also not nearly as impressive as many people seem to think. I don’t want to suggest it’s luck, but many companies that might have been successful which came that close to failure simply failed. We look back on people who happened to have passed those thresholds because they go past them not necessarily because they had a better approach.
> I think he’s done more harm to Tesla after taking it over from the original founders than been a benefit.
Didn't every single product launch happen after the takeover? We probably would have never heard of the company otherwise, why would we assume a similar trajectory with different leadership? It's like saying Jobs did more harm than good after returning to Apple.
Tesla was founded in 2003, Musk invested in 2004, Roadster unveiled in 2006 and entered production in 2008. October 2008, Musk took over as CEO of the 5 year old company which then went public in 2010. The model S entered production in 2012 and they discontinued the roadster.
So Tesla went public selling a product developed under the original CEO, and he took 5 years to get the next model our even after having a working EV. That said the Model S was a hit, but it was also the original founders goal to work down to more mainstream products.
> has many serious failures such as how long their truck has slipped.
i wouldn't call the cybertruck a true failure, since it's effectively free marketing, and they don't have a real obligation to make a sale.
Tesla's massive competitive moat is their battery making capacity. I do not believe the incumbent car manufacturers are able to catch up any time soon.
It would be the chinese manufacturers of electric cars that pose the biggest threat to tesla, not the US/western incumbents.
Tesla is down to 54% of US EV sales (it’s much worse globally) and it’s been falling very quickly. So, their battery moat is basically gone, and the need for the recent price drop amid such rapidly expanding EV sales is a really bad sign.
A significant part of that is they lack of a truck option considering how popular the Ford Lightning, Rivian, etc are. Alongside that is the general perception of stagnation among car buyers, the yoke was seen as a gimmick not the refresh the model S is in serious need of.
They just keep fumbling. Consider the amount of bad press they got around the undersized breaks on the Plaid or their 1 foot rollout numbers. What could have been a real halo product did almost as much harm as it helped.
This is such a silly criticism, of course Tesla's share of the "EV Car" market is going to shrink as more companies sell EV cars. DUH! But that is a silly way to view things, Toyota was never compared on their share of the "Hybrid Car Market", because that is not a real thing, just as the "EV Car" market isn't really a thing, people buy cars and to the extent they cross shop they generally do so across drive trains.
Tesla's share of the overall Automotive market is growing and that is what matters.
The Model S is a tiny and irrelevant portion of Tesla's sales.
The Halo effect / most premium products do drive sales. This is graphics card manufacturers care about the speed crown for a product launch even if their most expensive products are a trivial number of sales.
The perception of the plaid being unsafe unconditionally extends to people viewing all their cars as unsafe irrespective of actual crash statistics etc. The same thing happened with self diving car fatalities it’s a trivial number of accidents but still impacted people’s perception of the brand.
> Tesla's share of the overall Automotive market is growing and that is what matters.
The company’s stock price is based on the assumption they can ride the wave of exponentially increasing EV sales and take a large share of the global car market. Having largely squandered that opportunity the company’s prospects are far less favorable.
I mean we’ve known how to use rockets for decades, but SpaceX was a good idea.
TBMs are just slightly too expensive right now. At 1/2 the price per mile a huge number of projects suddenly become very attractive. Which then opens the door for more economies of scale, further efficiencies, and in theory a very valuable company.
Lower cost, but not cheaper because you can’t use them for the same things. Aka a toy car costs less than a real one but isn’t a cheaper transportation option.
But you can’t use the Boring Company’s TBM to drill ‘real’ tunnels - it’s build for tiny Tesla car sized tunnels (which aren’t actually that much larger than the local sewer being bored)
Trains i.e. proper mass transit, require wide bore tunnels and cost increases with the diameter of the bore
A lot of the costs with tunnels isn’t the tunnel but things like the portals that need to dissipate pressure waves as trains enter and leave at high speed
The boring company produced a smallish bore TBM and then ‘oh look it’s cheaper than a large one’, there is no innovation there
If you disappeared Tesla, SpaceX, Boring, Twitter and even Mr.Musk overnight, the world would look exactly the same the following morning.
Try and disappear Apple, Microsoft, Cisco, Boeing, JPMorgan, BankofAmerica, Exxon, Royal Dutch Shell overnight.
You'll have chaos and civil unrest within a week. That's where your quality of life comes from, sure it's not as exciting aas drinking the kool-aid of future Mars colonies and self driving cars and 100% domination in the EV cars sector, but at least it's real
Hardly, Starlink has had some impact on Ukraine but not nearly that much. They have called it “critical” but they call a great many things critical, the actual use of Starlink still isn’t that common.
The important bit for Ukrainian is Starlink is subsidized by other countries and it reduces the incentives for Russia to destroy communication infrastructure. Unfortunately because Russia is focusing less on communication infrastructure they get to focus more on other targets.
> Where would the Twitter trolls go? They'd flood the streets.
Compare this argumentation with typical argumentation about violenceful computer games players which are also going to flood the streets for some different reasons but with similar unwanted outcomes.
Easy there, cowboy, he’s had incredible success whipping his fans into frothing frenzies of self congratulatory adulation that would make a seesaw get dizzy. No other boss person since the mighty Steve has had this effect on the mass psyche, and Elon has arguably done a lot less. I claim teslas success is in spite of him, not because of him. Facts matter, and the SEC case was where I first realized his lack of leadership skill, and boasting about tanking his own stock price was not impressive. He’s not impressive, rather dull and low imagination if you ask me, which you didn’t, as you were busy falling over yourself to worship Elon Musk, who sounds like a cheap cologne
...this...has to be a troll right? The guy helped bring space flight out of a stagnant era into commercial viability and put electric cars into the world's popular psyche.
And is bought by people that think the company is valuable enough to give the stock said value. You can argue that those people are wrong, sure, but I don't get what point you're trying to make. He isn't taking money away from someone else or being given "underserved" rewards, when the people that are keeping the value of what he receives believes it to be of such value.
Point is that you first sign off the effing self-driving car, then you get your effing money.
That is what we used to do in America, since the days of JD Rockefeller, Henry Ford...but also Steve Jobs and Bill Gates and Larry Ellison. I mean I used Windows before Gates became richest man in the world and so did hundreds of millions of people.
Musk got to #1 by selling go karts to a handful of rich people and promises of future selfdriving and total domination of the EV sector when EVs are not even sure to be the winner tech in the decarbonization of cars
The vast majority of Americans have never even set foot in a Tesla.
You seem to condone the poker game that Wall St. has become, I don't agree with that because entrepreneurship shouldn't be about bluffing and then offloading your hand to a bigger fool. We do that in Vegas, like men where at least you have to look in the eyes the dude you are screwing over.
How do you expect self driving cars, or any extremely hard technology, to come about then without long term risk capital via public/private investment? Just pure R&D working out of universities and gov labs? Let them perfect it and only then try to raise capital? Go back to the Rockefeller days before there was venture capital and mature public markets?
so what do you propose is to be done? you simply stop people from buying tesla stock so that the price doesn't go up and he doesn't get as much money? Seriously i'm really struggling to understand what you are proposing here.
So it happens, then people realize they can earn money with it, then tesla realizes they can sell it now for 4 times more. In the end, you're not going to earn 4 times more because Tesla or whoever makes the car will take that into account and skim off that top.
As with everything, competitors will prevent a single offering from being priced too high.
I personally don't think Tesla will ever develop the FSD architecture that ends up used by everyone else.
Whilst I agree with Elon that _technically_ FSD could be done only with cameras, because that's how humans do it, humans only drive "fine" and not "perfectly". We need cameras, LIDAR and whatever other sensors we can fuse in.
The software that runs the thing will not be developed by a car company, because car companies (yes, even Tesla) are absolute dogshit at software. All of them. Every single one. They can't even make a proper entertainment system that isn't laggy, let alone all of the legwork & research required to piece together enough models in the right way for FSD that meets the lofty standards of the public (ie a perfect 0 fatalities, vs angry evolution-driven hormonal monkeys in multi-tonne hunks of steel powered by explosions whose fatality count grows every day at 3700 deaths/day, 8th leading cause of death globally).
The physical capabilities of the car do not increase with the # of hours it is driven. If you work a car 5x as hard, it will require a similar increase in maintenance and an overall shorter lifetime. (Lifespan. As measured in calendar years, not miles driven)
I’m not saying you’re completely wrong on the general concept, but the relationship between value increase and drivable time per week (or whatever unit of time) is not 1:1. There’s going to be some loss in there.
Also not all cars would see drive time increases. Those used as Ubers or similar certainly will, but that won’t displace the vast majority of car owners who will continue to own a car and drive it at similar rates for the convenience of having it immediately on hand, at all times, ready to go. If it self drives too then that’s great, the claw back some personal time during a commute etc.
Good point. You're likely to get 200,000 - 300,000 miles out of a Tesla. That might take 5 years if used as a robotaxi or 20 years without, but the cost per mile and thus the value of the car will be comparable either way.
That might be different with an LFP Tesla, which have what should be 750,000 mile batteries.
Even if that reasoning were true, the valuation for Tesla doesn’t make much sense, given they’re not remotely close to a self-driving car in the way that the average customer would understand it.
They’re not delayed by a few years. The problem is intractable, unless you can limit the journey to a controlled scope.
I drive over multiple pathways and grassy lanes a week that aren’t mapped and have no markings. A self-driving car can’t arbitrarily account for something like that any time soon.
Waymo is able to operate a limited route in Phoenix because they restrict to best-case routes.
FSD is a very small component of Tesla' current stock price. Some dumbasses are certainly buying Tesla because they think FSD is right around the corner, but dumbasses tend to not have a lot of money.
For any Tesla price estimate, you've got to pick a number, how many million vehicles the company will ship in say 2025.
Then pick an Average Selling Price, profit margin, and P/E multiple.
Divide by 3 billion to get the price per share of your estimate.
Considering Tesla is on track to deliver 1.8M vehicles this year and the delivery growth trajectory it's been on, 4M is a good target goal for 2025, $45k ASP, 10% profit margin, 30 P/E . . . from that I get $180, so today's price is fair as a base case for 2025.
$400 was a nice top in 2022 and I think we'll see it before 2025 as Tesla Energy starts contributing to the bottom line, each $1B of profit from energy is worth $10 on the share price (30 P/E, 3B shares).
If you think $180 for Tesla is way too high you have to account for that in the model...either 2025 deliveries will be a lot less than 4 million, or 10% profit margin will come way down, or P/E will come way down below 30 (it's currently 51).
This is not the way I would do stock valuation. PE is the ratio of future earnings will all its growth to current earnings, discounted. In the future, some of that growth will be in the past, and the PE will be expected to come down. This being Tesla, you could imagine some new fancy product, and not value it strictly as a car company.
Edit: I see that you actually addressed the PE roll down. Missed that on the first read.
If wealth made people smart or gave them taste, we'd know. Dumbasses do tend to have a lot of cash, that's why they can happen to be dumbasses repeatedly.
> Considering Tesla is on track to deliver 1.8M vehicles this year and the delivery growth trajectory it's been on, 4M is a good target goal for 2025, $45k ASP, 10% profit margin, 30 P/E . . . from that I get $180, so today's price is fair as a base case for 2025.
That's a lot of assumptions. Why not wait 3 years till all those projections materialize, and buy it then for $180 (if the price is still there)? Currently, if you buy at $180, you're discounting all the uncertainty and risk included in your calculations. Not to mention, even if you're right, the stock will be worth $180 in 3 years from now, which means your money will be idling for 3 years if you buy now.
This. It’s being priced as if the best possible case has already happened and can be taken for granted with 100% certainty, which if that’s the case, still means you’d be better somewhere else for the interim.
Not really, since you’re getting everything else the company is working on essentially for free at this price, including energy, FSD, the robot, the AI hardware, etc. Best case would be all of those things developing into their own revenue streams.
> If a car that costs $25,000 to manufacture all of a sudden can be driven 40-50 hours a week automatically, how much is that car now worth?
That week of driving is worth what an Uber driver’s take-home pay would be for the same week after finance (or equivalent lost interest if you buy with cash), insurance, on-road costs, charging, maintenance, depreciation, and whatever intangible value you put on not having hundreds of strangers farting in your car every week.
Multiply that by the number of weeks that you expect the car to be nice enough to do this, and that’s your return on investment.
>Elons point on cars being worth 5x as much .... all of a sudden can be driven 40-50 hours a week ...
Look at it this way, assume humans drive, or need to be driven/travel, X miles per year.
Today, assuming a car drives Y miles per year, the market needs X/Y cars.
Given your argument, with self driving, a car runs nY miles per year, the demand for car will drop to X/nY, basically 1/n of before or maybe a little more, since after all the humans won't suddenly need to drive/travel nX miles per year.
So, if a car were to become worth 5x more, but we need 1/5x cars, the total market would remain the same.
Self driving will increase demand, not decrease, as it will displace other less popular modes of transit. Why call an Uber or taxi after a night at the bar when you can just have your EV drive you home?
Why make a medium-distance flight, when you can just sleep in the back of your EV as it cruises down the highway overnight? (This will pare well with lay flat front seats what would allow turning the car into something like one of those airline sleep pods).
Self driving will increase demand, not decrease, as it will displace other less popular modes of transit
Are you sure? How many people right now own a car that they use mostly a few times per week? Car ownership right now is the only way to guarantee personal long-range transport. But if self-driving cars can replace taxis and even some form of public transport, car usage might go up but it's not clear to me that car ownership will go up along with it.
If cars drive themselves, you can let them out as Ubers when you don’t need to drive it. That could definitely mean less cars if they are priced aggressively. Peak is still a problem, but public transit can focus on peak rather than non peak (assuming Robo taxis are price efficient).
Even if we need 1/5 cars (and EVs do last longer, so without self driving, this will happen anyways), as long as the lost cars come from your competitors, it’s fine.
> If cars drive themselves, you can let them out as Ubers when you don’t need to drive it.
This does not require self driving btw, but a more important question is: would you really? Would you let strangers in your private car? Would you want to clean it afterwards? Would you accept damages other people do to you car? Would it still be your car if strangers use it far more than you do? And at this point we have arrived at car sharing, which already exists today...
> as long as the lost cars come from your competitors, it’s fine.
It’s a rather arrogant, and unrealistic assumption, (on Tesla’s part if they are making it) that they will capture the entire market. It’s not going to happen.
> If a car that costs $25,000 to manufacture all of a sudden can be driven 40-50 hours a week automatically, how much is that car now worth?
Cars depreciate based on distance driven, not on age. A car will need to be serviced every X miles and replaced every Y miles, and these numbers are independent of whether the car is driven one hour a week or forty. In no universe does driving more hours per week increase the value of a car.
You clearly don't drive in a location that heavily salts roads! Here, a 15 year old car with 50,000 km is only marginally better than a 15 year old car with 200,000km - and it's mostly because the lower mileage car has probably been driven less in the winter.
Ultra-high mileage vehicles driven over short timeframes where rust doesn’t get a chance to set would probably get into wear-and-tear of structural welds. Something like how airframes are rated for x number of decompression cycles.
First Tesla would have to make a car with plausible hardware for self driving. Not decade+ old cameras trying to do everything. Can't even reliably wipe the windshield at the right time. The idea of robotaxis is just a fantasy.
I'm not whoring my car out to Uber to let people make a mess in my car when I'm not driving it, sorry. So to me this means nothing. I'll still be in it as much as I would otherwise. Maybe a few less trips driving my wife to errands (as she doesn't feel comfortable driving, despite having a license), but otherwise it shouldn't make much difference.
The only thing I can think of is maybe it would make some trips not need my presence at all. Like I could see placing a Wal-mart grocery order, and sending my car to go to Wal-mart without me in it, they load it up, and then it comes back, and I can unload it.
Which is nice, but I'm not paying 5x the already expensive car prices in order to save a few minutes here and there.
You can already lend out your car for other people to drive, and there are numerous companies that do exactly that as their entire business model.
So this is a serious question, in what way does self driving cars mean your personal car is going to be used more?
The only people for whom self-driving cars represent an actual real world monetary win are people and companies that transport people and things. So public transport, trucking companies, uber, etc - for them self driving would mean no longer having to pay for drivers.
For every other group self driving has no financial impact on the value of the car (except possibly tremendously devaluing any existing cars where a component of their value is current generation "self driving").
For a brief moment, that car becomes worth a lot more. But as other manufacturers put FSD-capable vehicles on the road, values might in fact fall as overall capacity skyrockets. What is certain is that the cost of a ride will drop.
How many cars does Uber own? I thought they offloaded all of that pesky "ownership" stuff to their custome.. I mean drivers / coworkers / employees / collaborating business owners / freelancers.
Except that currently all the drivers also manage the inventory of physical cars, and all maintenance, and all legal liability. The parent's question is a good one. Owning and operating a fleet of cars is the core competency of a rental agency, not a ride-hailing app.
People really do not understand that the Companies like Uber, Airbnb and Deliveroo make a huge amount of money from offloading liability - it's suddenly not Deliveroo's fault that the guy delivering your pizza in London does this on illegal, unroadworthy e-bikewith no insurance, and in case of a crash he is liable. Airbnb routinely rents out apartments in blocks that have this forbidden in the leave / rental agreement.
If the human is gone, then liability offloading is impossible. You have noone to blame.
That liability off-load is worth more to deliveroo than is the pittance they pay him.
Self-driving won't make a difference to this structure though ?
The pitch Tesla (if you believe them) keeps making is we could rent out our cars when we don't use it to the rental networks. We still own the car ( and the liability ) and unlock RoI.
Just a ride sharing app cannot reach the scale and revenue to justify the investments they have attracted. It is not realistic to raise $25+ Billion[1] just to be a pure SaaS startup.
Both Uber and Lyft[2] run rental businesses already, the model works where you can rent a car on a weekly basis just to drive on their apps, they cover maintenance and other services.
Uber will have to find a way to maintain their growth, and Lyft probably will be acquired by a rental network. The result is the same vertical integration.
[1] Uber's equity investment so far. SaaS startups can be valued lot more even $100s of billions, but pure tech companies do not raise that kind of cash. Stripe for example despite its delayed IPOs and ESOP issues has only raised $8B.
[2] They own some of the inventory and rest are from partners I believe.
Musk has already stated that Tesla will start a ride sharing service that FSD Tesla owners can participate in. It will also supposedly be exclusive (not allowed to do ride sharing for other services using FSD).
Google self driving car division has an agreement with Uber now.
I don’t know about Uber but Lyft has a car rental service. Drivers can rent cars from Lyft to drive with Lyft. If the infrastructure is already there, going from “driver turns on an app to accept/reject a ride” to “we accept that automatically” is quite simple.
Which Waymo and possibly Cruise are on track to make cars for. Tesla though, nope. Their approach is fundamentally unsound and unworkable (just like Uber's internal effort was).
Five+ years ago when more of us believed that false promise that it was happening any day now it made more sense to have discussions about these kinds of hypothetical situations.
Cars driven commercially like that are worth less money.
Take a hybrid Toyota Camry that’s driven as Taxi almost 25 hours a day.
Are they worth more? Do they command a premium?
No, they do not. And at the end of they short useful lives their value goes to zero.
You could argue that self driving cars don’t need drivers, and so can be driven 24/7 at less cost of labour.
Even that eventuates, and we get a world where car ownership is significantly on the decline, it just means they sell less cars.
As we’ve seen with most technology commodity products, price tends to be forced downwards.
So maybe Elon is right, and a self driving car is worth 5x. But it’s not obvious to me, and I’m wary of people like Elon talking up his own book. He is a proven loser and fantasist, but also a very successful billionaire. :-/
It's not just the software. They are trying to make due without the kind of sensors that are required to properly sense the immediate environment (LIDAR)
They were considerably more expensive the first year Tesla FSD was due to be ready by the end of the year. After that I guess it was deemed easier to do magic with some low quality cameras than get certain people to admit they're wrong and change course.
Current ones still 10-20k, some advances and mass production will lower that further. And there are very different LIDARs (frequency, resolution, range!!), the ones in Smartphones and other small devices work very different.. maybe as different as the ultrasonic sensors in your car vs medical ultrasonic (beware, bad comparison actually).
I'm guessing your vacuum isn't doing 140 miles an hour with four humans in it with an expectation of life-conseving flawless performance for the next 10-15 years. And definitely not in the rain, at night, on rough and uncertain road.
I live in an apartment so I've yet to really see the reach of this thing's lidar. It maps the room almost immediately though, then cleans by first lapping the perimeter of an area then does laps to cover the inside of the perimeter like someone mowing grass. The map is cached from the last full cleaning, so if I wanted it to do some spot cleaning I can define an arbitrary rectangle and specify how many passes I want over that spot (one is always enough, the second pass never picks up anything else). I can also control it manually but the controls have some latency from the app. I love this thing, it fills its chamber entirely with cat hair that I wouldn't even see until sending it out. It also tracks maintenance and tells me when sensors or the filter needs cleaning, or if parts like brushes need replacing (haven't needed one yet).
Mine most likely can’t see 300 meters, but it definitely knows where it is and plans it route, optimizing over time. It’s kinda neat to pick it up in the middle of vacuuming, move it to a different room, then set it back down and watch it go back to where it left off.
This may surprise, but LIDAR is a very recent innovation and virtually zero percent of cars (particularly historically) are LIDAR equipped. Binocular vision has a pretty impressive track record.
Human eye has the dynamic range of 24 F-stops, and best cameras have like 14. That's a difference of several million. Also humans have hearing, and really advanced CPU.
Tesla can't tell apart a deadly bollard from a large plastic bag flying in the wind.
They decided to forgo LIDAR specifically though, it's not that it hasn't been out very long and they haven't adopted it yet. Other car makers have been using it for a while, just as long as Tesla could have if they truly want to be cutting edge.
It might also come as a surprise that the the lack of a LiDAR, and famously disabling the radar directly relates to Tesla’s poor self driving performance compared to the actual leaders in the area like Waymo and Cruise.
Eh, Tesla has already shown the world how to make commercially viable EVs. That's a torch the risk averse legacy auto manufacturers can take up, now that Tesla has done the derisking. Now someone needs to prove out self-driving, even at the risk of some short-term reputational harm. I don't think people realize the life-saving potential in solving this problem.
You are absolutely right, but Tesla is doing more harm than good towards making self driving commercially viable. Repeatedly making bold claims and then failing spectacularly to back them up is hurting everyone's perceptions big time. Cruise and Waymo are doing a far better job.
But if you think this line of reasoning through, cars should have never been admitted on the road in the first place.
The issue I see is lack of transparency. If the % of accidents that can be avoided is provably much higher than those caused by Tesla's self-driving tech, an informed argument could be made in favor or against.
But with Tesla withholding the information in the leak there is just FUD around the whole issue instead of facts.
Since GP hasn't responded yet...I think you missed their point. When they said "if you think this line of reasoning through, cars should have never been admitted on the road in the first place," I think they're referring to all cars. When Ford introduced the Model T, it killed plenty of people. Ford was, in your words, "harming lives to pursue this." In the process it revolutionized transportation.
> I don't think people realize the life-saving potential in solving this problem.
People do realize it. Especially people who specialize in building safety critical systems.
And they are all aware that Tesla's doesn't do anything to build actually safety-critical systems. They just treat it as building a webapp for sharing photos of cats.
In a previous job, I was hard real time systems engineer for a major manufacturer of agricultural and construction equipment (stuff that weighed tens of thousands of pounds and can kill you in an instant). Can you elaborate in greater detail what we all think?
If the term safety critical system doesn’t ring a bell to you, well most likely you didn’t work on safety critical system (which is different from working on heavy machines).
It’s a whole engineering discipline. Just Google safety critical systems and safety engineering.
In terms of automotive, ISO 26262. Tesla’s chaotic release process and hot fixes are definitive proof that they don’t do safety life cycle and change management in compliance with it.
They already have a pretty wide moat in terms of gross margin per vehicle produced. I'd rather they focus on driving down costs - $25000 is already too much for most people.
It would be nice if there were some "autonomous valet" system where cars could drive into a lot, get an electronic "ticket" at the gate, drive to the disembark location, then autopark in the location on the ticket.
In NYC for stops of a few hours or less it would often be cheaper in gas $ to have the car keep driving, circling the local neighborhood, instead of paying for parking.
I get that they're trying to create a wider moat against their competitors, but if their self-driving software are found to have systematic failure modes in them as these internal docs seem to suggest, then that could very well do more harm to their reputation in the long run.