Tesla is committing automotive suicide
electrek.coTesla also announced they will be discontinuing the basic lane keep + adaptive speed cruise control they helped pioneer in cars sold going forward. But this is now a standard (free) feature even in basic vehicles like the Toyota Corolla. Why would they intentionally cripple their vehicles to the point hat they would be inferior to most cars today?
Then I learned that Musk's incentive pay has a 10 million full self-driving subscription hurdle, and it all made sense.
I have a newer Corolla that's pretty much the absolute floor of the base model (LE with I believe minimal packages) and it has all the technology one would expect now, all while having physical buttons where it matters. Lane assist and adaptive cruise control are table stakes now.
Indeed, I have a 2023 Corolla. The dealer didn't like it when I said "LE" stands for "Low End" as a joke (it means Limited Edition).
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.
Makes you wonder. Technology usually becomes less expensive. Car companies have used it as a differentiator for years though. There are giant cost differences between like a base line Tundra and a top of the line and the mechanicals are the same; it's more price for luxury and more tech.
Seems like Toyota is about to make a big Lexus pivot in the next year or two.
2022 Corolla owner here. Mine is UK spec with “Design” trim, which is middle of the range in terms of luxuries. I love mine. It’s got enough technology without it being annoying and has everything I want. The adaptive cruise is a killer feature. Best car I’ve ever owned.
I always thought Toyota's LE connoted Luxury Edition and SE Sport Edition
You are right -- I just looked it up. All the same, the LE is the low-end Corolla model and I wouldn't have ever guessed it meant luxury edition.
I think in (most of) europe, most of the safety-related features are mandatory on all new cars these days, so all these features must come on all trim levels. This does make the base model a lot more expensive then a few years back, but you get all the nice features, so that also makes them cheaper in general.
Plus people who buy cars are eating all the depreciation. I’ll glad buy your 2024 Corolla in 2032.
Are you sure about that? The sustainable operation of modern cars is in doubt, from very specialized parts and fully integrated modules, to critical software that will not be updated, to dealer keying required for most every substitute part, the era of anyone being able to run cars for 200,000 miles long after the warranty is over will soon be in the history books.
Honestly, I don't like this trend. Some of these features - like lane keeping - encourage/enable distracted driving. Meanwhile the necessary sensors make cars so expensive to repair that they're becoming a disposable good. As my driving instructor says: If you need a lane keeping system to keep your car in a lane, you shouldn't be behind the wheel.
Lane keeping is also tremendously dangerous, if the system gets confused on e.g. construction sites. I hated how much I had to fight the car not to swerve into the huge barriers running along the middle of the original road layout.
Like many (many) things, it is all about the implementation - not all lane keeping assist thinks it knows better than the driver.
I agree, and I think we're in a dangerous middle ground between fully engaged driving (manual transmissions) fully automated driving. It's hard to evaluate the net impact of these features, but I would not be surprised to learn that lane keeping actually results in more injuries and deaths due to distracted driving than it prevents
Lane keeping assist helps when trying to use the increasingly complex infotainment systems to do simple things like adjust seat warmers.
A lot fewer people should be behind the wheel than is currently the case in most countries. Unfortunately in the world we live in we need to make do with less than perfect solutions for this.
I'm very happy that the "base model" of cars now has a lot of the modern tech. Not because I'd personally buy a base model, but because its what you get whenever you travel and need to rent something.
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.
I have an acura Integra and a Toyota Highlander. Both have most of the capabilities as standard except stopping for obstacles/traffic lights and making lane change or turns. They can detect vehicles around it and follow the one in front. Theoretically once you are on the highway/interstate they can drive themselves.
Tesla Model 3/Y will includes Lane Departure Avoidance (a reactive safety feature that nudges you back if you accidentally drift over a line), it just will not actively steer to keep you centered
Yeah, I rented a Corolla recently which was about as basic as it got - and within less than 90 seconds of entering the vehicle/driving I had everything I needed figured out.
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.
Can you remove the modem or sim card to prevent it from phoning home without disabling these features?
Unless they dramatically reduce the price, they won't get to 10 million any time soon if ever. This article discusses paid subscriptions info releases in the earnings report, https://electrek.co/2026/01/28/tesla-discloses-fsd-subscribe...
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.
> Musk's incentive pay has a 10 million full self-driving subscription.
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)
Parallel steps:
Step 1: SpaceX IPO
Step 2: Trillion dollar payout
Step 3: Nothing matters any more
>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.
This is true of every billionaire who is still actively trying to get more money. If you're not satisfied at that point, there's no number where you will be.
I'd like to get a look at SpaceX financials. I'm pretty sure their margins are thinner than you might expect, Starlink is less profitable than you might expect (but quite necessary to fund the launch cadence of Falcon 9) and that Starship blowing up over and over has been funded entirely by the US taxpayer and that they'd be insolvent without that.
You would be entirely wrong.
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.
SpaceX is rockets, now global satellite internet, ...
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.
I think you need to go back to physics class. You seem to not even understand the very basics of heat transfer. You need more than "cold". I'll give you a hint, the problem is the same problem as "in space no one can hear you scream."> Simple cooling sinks, denseI'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.
Well, there are the permanently dark crater bottoms that might contain water ice and are definitely very cold. Turn the water ice into thermal transfer fluid and drill (The Boring Company) cooling loops underneath and the try to heat sink into the very cold ground. I’m sure you could run the Data Center for months before you exceed the radiative heat dispersal available to the ground.
You don't need to but in a dark crater to use the ground as your sink.
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)
> With the Asteroid Belt looking amazing for quantity and accessibility of resources.
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.
I always wonder what resources from asteroid belt do we need on Earth. We have plenty of iron and aluminum for building things. Lithium and rare earths aren't available in asteroids. Gold isn't worth grinding up whole asteroid.
Asteroid resources would be useful for building in space, but that is getting a step ahead.
The expanse and A City on Mars covers the risk pretty well.
I dunno; Humans being their own worst problem an extermination level event would resolve many human problems.
> Simple cooling sinks
What? You're in a huge vacuum thermos
Also California raised false advertising issues with the naming of “autopilot”
They should have discontinued the phantom braking instead.
2 days ago: https://www.espn.com/soccer/story/_/id/47744955/paok-fans-ki...
I'll let you find the video, it's brutal. Allegedly caused by lane assist activating out of the blue when overtaking other cars.
That was 2 days ago and it caught my eye.
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.
> I'll let you find the video, it's brutal
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...
thanks anon for rectifying the record.
> the basic lane keep + adaptive speed cruise control they helped pioneer in cars sold going forward
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.
our 2014 jeep cherokee had it too, and i'm not sure if it was available earlier though may have been (in jeep models i mean)
> Then I learned that Musk's incentive pay has a 10 million full self-driving subscription hurdle, and it all made sense.
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?
As far as I can tell, the criteria previous package were basically about getting the market cap up. Based on all the "no"s in the "Met" column here [1], I think you could reasonably accuse him of hitting the goals for that bonus package by driving investor hype for what Telsa "might" accomplish some day.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_predictions_for_autono...
…discontinuing the basic lane keep + adaptive speed cruise control they helped pioneer in cars sold going forward.
[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.
Honestly, I don't think it's irrational: the car industry is just horrible from a business perspective, which is why Tesla had to be financed for so long by crypto scams and most investors wouldn't touch it. Historically (if of course briefly/crudely), it was always a debt-backed gamble on overproduction hoping you could expand forever globally without competition (Ford) or into new market segments through financing (GM).
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...
> the basic lane keep + adaptive speed cruise control they helped pioneer
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.
They had the first mover advantage, but then Musk lost interest in the company and let it just sit there for the last five years or so without making sure that they have a future-proof product pipeline and that those products are actually being delivered on a reasonable schedule. Now they are increasingly turning into an EV also-ran while their moonshots are unlikely to work out any time soon.
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.
The problem is that EVs are basically a solved problem. There isn't any technological advantage to be gained, since the technology in an EV is very basic (+) compared to ICE vehicles. So then it comes down to manufacturing, and there China is king.
(+) Except for the battery, but that's a very long term battle with very tiny steps.
My brother bought a Tesla recently. They dicked him around with delivery, and he had to pay a ton to get charging infrastructure installed at his house, but it's fast so he's happy. On a recent visit, he finally showed me the car, and it was hilarious how janky the final product is. Everything seems cobbled together-- a good example is that there's apparently two separate voice assistants (plus his phone) and none of them can talk to each other, so commands like "turn on the defrost" are responded to with "I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that".
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.
> 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.
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.
Yeah, it apparently damages the weatherstripping (and maybe the window and other things) and is meant to be used only in an emergency /facepalm. Which is probably why your friend was alarmed.
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.
>here's apparently two separate voice assistants
There is one functional voice assistant (short press) and the Grok LLM (long press). Only the first one can do physical things to the car.
But having the Grok LLM is quite nice. You could ask it things like "what are the most iconic bakeries in SF Chinatown?" or "how does California treat long-term capital gains?" and have a productive conversation with your car while you're driving.
I love Tesla actually. It's a vision of a car built by and for tech-savvy people, whereas all other cars seem to be designed to accommodate the lowest common denominator (i.e. some grandpa). It's as if Elon told his designers to assume nobody over 35 is ever gonna buy a Tesla and it shows in everything from the software to the ride quality.
I have a 2022 Model 3, and the hilariously tragic part is that the voice assistant was great and basically never gave me any problems until they shoved Grok into it, whereupon it broke completely. I never use it anymore, they effectively removed a feature from my car.
Counterpoint: I like my Tesla, and I find the AI assistant diverting and useful. I have very little doubt the functionality of the limited on-board voice assistant will be merged into Grok (it's literally on the coming features).
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.
Whoa, did Tesla pull an Apple? Siri used to work okay on the iPhone, but once it got LLMed it frequently sits there indefinitely while failing to make any progress on even the simplest commands.
Apple did an even worse job than you think: they didn't even LLM Siri so I guess it just broke.
This is part of the reason why I believe cars should delegate as much software functionality to your phone as possible. Phones have good voice assistants and they will get better, same with GPS and music. Just let the phone do it. Plus, when the software is out of support you don't have to buy a new car.
I have an older X, and I'm kind of happy that the AP and Infotainment hardware in it is largely deprecated, and they are unlikely to be able to shove Grok crap into it. It will stay largely the same for the life of the car.
EVs are a solved problem, but as amelius notes the real tech is the battery. Tesla + Panasonic has a built in advantage in terms of battery manufacturing. Tesla has a massive amount of capital, if they put it into reducing and scaling manufacturing of vehicles and batteries, I think they could probably win. Now maybe Telsa has looked at the numbers and decided they can't win and are choosing to pivot rather than die a slow death.
I don't think that is what is happening here. Instead, Tesla is continuing the strategy that brought them to this disaster of going all in on driverless. That isn't a bad strategy, but if they get the timing wrong a third time, they destroy the company and they have gotten the timing wrong on this twice already. This strategy has two downsides:
1. AI has no real moat and Tesla has largely pursued commodity sensors, meaning that other than EVs+battery tech (which Tesla appears abandoning), robotaxis have no hardware or software moat.
2. They could use network effects to win, in which case their competitors are not other car companies but Uber and Lyft. Uber has been pursuing the same long term strategy at Tesla.
Now by itself, going all in robotaxi, is risky but could work if they time it right. Tesla isn't going all in on robotaxi since they are splitting the effort between robotaxi and Optimus robots.
It is likely that the experience Tesla gets with Optimus robots will help other robotics companies, but unlike robotaxis where the timing might (but probably won't work), the timing is clearly isn't right for Optimus.
It seems like the motivation here is that Musk is aligning Tesla to a narrative that justify the absurd stock price, even if that narrative isn't reality.
> Tesla + Panasonic has a built in advantage in terms of battery manufacturing.
What advantage do they have over CATL, BYD, and LG?
CATL batteries perform better: https://electrek.co/2026/01/06/catl-ev-batteries-significant...
CATL is rolling out sodium ion batteries: https://electrek.co/2026/01/23/ev-battery-leader-plans-first...
CATL, BYD, and LG are developing solid state batteries. Everyone is.
> It is likely that the experience Tesla gets with Optimus robots will help other robotics companies
Why? Other robotics companies have been doing it for longer. Is Optimus better than Atlas:
> It seems like the motivation here is that Musk is aligning Tesla to a narrative that justify the absurd stock price, even if that narrative isn't reality.
Since Tesla stock has always been 90% based on the narrative, the narrative is the reality (and the product) of Tesla, and the actual machinery made and sold are just props and decorations to create the impression of it.
Maybe they should rebrand themselves as poTemkin: keep the T logo and the mysterious Slavic vibe, while shedding the pretense about what they're about.
Won't affect the stock anyway. Everyone knows the company is overvalued based on promises and perception alone.
Everyone's just betting on the charade going on one moment longer than their hold on the stock.
If you squint, the Cybertruck is shaped like a pyramid on wheels, which couldn't work any better as a visual metaphor for the enterprise.
You can say the same about the traditional car industry. Just because it’s a “solved problem” doesn’t mean you can ignore the TAM.
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.
Traditional car industry is toast.
There have been significant advances in power electronics and electric motors in the recent decades. Yes, there's not a lot to gain when you're starting at 85%+ efficiency, but it's far from "basic" technology.
This is a very realistic analysis which isn't going to be very popular.
The battery progress is more an accidental discovery than research problem alone.
Teslas don’t even have HUDs, there’s plenty of work left to do
I recently read Origins of Efficiency by Brian Potter, and one of the interesting things it talks about is the path of the Model T.
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.
One of the things Jim Farley, Ford CEO, brought up was they have a lot of 3rd party suppliers, and changes take a long time to implement. So a firmware update may require change notifications and responses from dozens of suppliers for something like door locks. This was in response to why Ford couldn't do firmware as fast or as often as Tesla. Vertically integrated means you have 1 big ship to turn around. Modern JIT manufacturing means your ship is built of 100s of cards and each one needs to be turned.
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 think I read somewhere that the model T went something like 12 years without substantial changes to its design.
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.
First mover advantage was GM's EV1. Tesla would not exist if GM didn't go and crush every single EV1 they could find.
The EV1 gave GM no advantage.
It wasn't the first modern EV?
Doesn't matter if it was or wasn't, it was a failure that GM never followed up with. Why it was a failure is also irrelevant, because whether you feel it was a technical failure or killed by GM, GM never did anything with the project or knowledge. Effectively it was a curiosity.
If GM killed it to keep it from succeeding, then there is massive precedent to never reuse the tech. In fact, their NiMH battery patents were sold to Texaco/Chevron who held them close and never let anyone use them. From that point, they couldn't follow-up without dumping even more cash into it, effectively burying it. Until new lithium battery tech matured, there was no way to do it again.
GM didn't sell EVs for years after releasing the EV1. They didn't get any market advantage from the EV1 because they left the market after, for a long time.
We are in complete agreement here. They wasted their lead.
They didn’t have a lead. It’s like saying the DC-X was ahead in propulsive landing over F9, or the LG Prada had a lead over the iPhone.
Being first isn’t enough to establish a lead. You also have to be in competition, which means selling product.
It is very widely known that GM held a 7 year head start on every other automaker on manufacturing the modern EV. Several other EVs were sold during it's time in low volume.
The EV1 was a regulatory anomaly. The tech wasn't there yet for mass market adoption.
It’s almost as if a company would be better off having a CEO who wasn’t also the CEO of four other companies while also dabbling in geopolitics.
The end game is the SpaceX IPO which will make him a trillionaire, and then he doesn't need Tesla any more.
Regular IPOs usually have commitments from pension funds, mutual funds, private equity firms and other institutional investors secured in advance of going public. How many of those parties would be interested considering that SpaceX really only has one main customer whose business isn't guaranteed considering his political partisanship?
Their main customer is Starlink and it will continue to be cash printing machine.
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.
Unfortunately, enough for many regular people to be screwed when that stock crashes.
What do you base this on?
Or the Boring Company which most people have also completely forgotten about.
Because it’s boring.
Not in principle, mind you.
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.
Or, digging tunnels is a lot harder than expected and there have been no big technical leaps to change that. The idea is great, but only if the cost goes down and digging speed goes up by a lot.
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?
Not to mention that keep getting fined for improper disposal of waste material. Just dumping tunneling fluid into the sewer.
They just work "underground"
He barely needs Tesla now, pretty much the only thing stopping electric cars from being ubiquitous are people in politics and media. The new mission statement is just to make everything for everyone, which I guess solves the people-on-earth problems he wanted to tackle. Next is a push for Mars (which again is mostly threatened by some politicians at this point).
Indeed.
SpaceX in Merger Talks with xAI - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46814701 - January 2026
I don't think the problem was a lack of Elon Musk's involvement.
> 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.
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)
BYD is slapping the EV industry around like a gorilla, Tesla simply cannot compete in any meaningful way. Waymo has achieved profit per unit and people are happy to see driver-less taxis in their city and pay for the service.
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.
BYD uses slave labor.
"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).
Tesla's factories have been responsible for deaths, systematic injury issues and wage theft - https://sites.uab.edu/humanrights/2025/03/30/human-rights-co...
Pretending BYD is winning because of Chinese labor practices alone or primarily is denial of their technological and operational prowess.
Don't get me wrong, both are pretty terrible. I'm not going to defend Tesla.
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.
My understanding is that the main reasoning for this isn't revenue growth but rather one of the big triggers for his $1T pay package (10 million FSD subscriptions).
Is that understanding based on any verifiable sources?
(It seems plausible, but all I’ve seen is speculation.)
> Tesla also cannot justify valuations based on automotive sales/subscriptions alone - they were always going to have to pivot.
Their valuation was never justified by that. They always sold a fraction of what other companies do.
But at one time they sold the majority in what many saw as a disruptive new replacement for what those other companies did.
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.
Yup, they pivoted to making robots and subsidizing X/Grok.
Well, they pivoted to saying they're going to make robots.
Any day now.
> BYD is slapping the EV industry around like a gorilla, Tesla simply cannot compete in any meaningful way
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.
Tesla can compete with BYD all right. They have a better brand, they are still a status symbol. They could totally build the best cars if they wanted to.
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.
What market does Tesla have?
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.
Tesla's brand is pretty much trash across much of Europe and they certainly not a status symbol
What makes this move even more incredulous is that none of the two market they want to move towards are proven markets:
- 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.
They haven't said it explicitly. But the reason that Waymo can add five cities this year is very likely they are at least at break even on opex. They likely reached that point sometime last year and it seems to have held up.
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.
I read that as meaning even the scaled robotaxi service (Waymo) does not throw off enough cash to offset the loss of Tesla's vehicle sales unit. (The putative Tesla buyer they are dissuading from purchase would have to take a whole lot of robotaxi trips to generate the same amount of profit for Tesla. Assuming Tesla can get robotaxis working.)
In the 2000s publishing pivot to the Internet, this was known as "trading physical dollars for digital pennies."
Such is the law of the falling rate of profit, a general tendency of Capitalism.
A lot of the current valuation is based on Elon drumming up investor expectations. As they start to lose their spot as market leaders in EV, Tesla's inability to deliver on what Elon promised will become more clear as their competitors level with and surpass them.
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.
On top of that, despite huge investments of both time and money into both areas, seemingly rivaling competitors, Tesla does not seem to be anywhere close to a market leader in either segment. They have to both prove the markets and that they can compete in them.
Consumer robotics strikes me as an engineering tar pit so deep it leads to hell. If full self driving is hard due to the long tail of unusual special cases, this is orders of magnitude worse.
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.
Also, how will these robots make money? They are a less capable human. Humans who aren't skilled don't make much money.
Once large swaths of the planet have been rendered uninhabitable from human activity, we'll require them to continue extracting profit from those areas. (this is a downer comment but also realistically the first thing that came to mind when trying to think of a use for them).
> Will people really be willing to pay thousands to tens of thousands for a home robot with significant limitations?
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.
I think if they are teleoperated they could make sense, or at least more than the device-local versions
A teleoperated robot is little more than a human worker with extra steps. (And an expensive, clumsy human worker at that.) I can't imagine many situations where that would make sense instead of having a human do the work in person.
I could see teleoperated help catching on. Americans are weird about staff. When I visit my old-world family, it's seen as perfectly normal to have someone living in an attached apartment, handling the cooking the cleaning, etc. There are well-established etiquette rules, understood both by the staff and the family, which help navigate the rather complicated, radically unequal relationship between the two.
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.
There could be some compelling reasons for one.
- 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.
Maybe you can scale to have one operator operate ten or a hundred household robots at a time.
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.
> Expect security and privacy in the marketing for these things, too
Pitching "security and privacy" as features of a device that's remotely operated and monitored is going to be a very hard sell.
Low duty cycle. If one human can drive 20 robots, because most of them are sitting still most of The time, it starts to make sense. Vs a maid or butler that can obviously only really work one home at a time.
The only places it does is where humans can't easily go: space, underwater, hazardous industrial sites, etc.
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?
Except the remote house keeper can be in some super locl 3rd world country where the prevailing wage is a few bucks a day.
That's a pretty profoundly dystopian concept. If the only way this technology is viable is as a way to exploit labor at a distance - count me out.
The person in a third world country is not a slave, they're doing the job for a few bucks a day because it's still better than other options available to them.
There's an indie sci-fi film called Sleep Dealer about this. It's not bad.
That's not necessarily exploitation: a worker in another country paid a far lower rate in absolute terms may in local terms be earning good money.
If that job is "monitor the remote robots from a desk" then that's likely also a fairly good job.
We're living in a dystopia.
Yeah but with a teleoperated worker you can have them work remote from a place with poor labor regulations and extremely low pay.
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.
Suddenly I think Musk is trying to turn Earth into Solaria.
If a robot can do basic cleaning, laundry, and dishes, that's worth a lot to a lot of people. Dual-professional households have the money, and not having to do this housework could save some marriages.
> Dual-professional households have the money, and not having to do this housework could save some marriages.
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.
Robot vacuum with a mop, washing machine, tumble dryer and dishwasher reduce housework to like an hour per week, ie 30 min/person/week. This can be higher if you live in a big house, but if your marriage can’t tolerate 30 mins of house work a robot will not solve it.
Nobody has yet demonstrated a stationary robot that can do these things.
They're all legs. The impressive demos are just show, not useful.
I don't think it actually is worth a lot to people. I know dual-professional households who don't even use their dishwasher consistently, and multiple companies have gone bankrupt trying to bring automated laundry folding (which does exist in industry) to the consumer market.
There are a lot of maid services that imply (to me) otherwise.
Maid services are generally expected to handle "everything" for a pretty expansive definition of everything. They pick up scattered stuff and put in a sensible location, they arrange everything visible in an aesthetically pleasing way, they take out the trash, if there's some weird dirt that's hard to clean they creatively problem solve to find a way to get it off. I don't think there's a market for a service that can only handle basic cleaning.
(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.)
The first MVPs dont need to reach parity to human autonomy, they only need to enforce that humans do the cheap work.
> How can the transition be rationally justified? Let alone the valuation.
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'll bet that's what people said to Steve Jobs when they were making the iPhone
- PDA sales are 0.01% of PC sales in 2006
And also what people said to Dean Kamen when he was making the Segway in 2001.
Or Mark Zuckerberg when he was making the metaverse in 2019 or whatever.
EVs were a very unproven market when Tesla started and it was commonly accepted they didn’t have a hope in hell.
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.
> be rationally justified?
Nothing about this stock has ever been rational
To be fair, market has been decoupled from reality on the ground for a while now. Just the fact that companies were able to operate giving stuff away for free only to suddenly yank the chain in a desperate bid to gain profitability later should be enough of a signal.
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.
Except that it doesn't need to be consumer to start off. You can build specialized robots that deliver value at a massive scale. Imagine a "Prep Cook" at a restaurant, there are millions of these around the world. If the Optimus can do that job for a price of $1,000/month, that's likely to be more efficient and better quality than a human can do. And there has to be many jobs like this.
Robots that specialise in one thing already exist. In big factories, where they'll peel and dice tons of onions per hour, being fed via unsexy conveyor belts into massive dicers.
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?
A million robots making $1k a month is $12b a year, but you need to actually produce the robots, maintain them, train the AI, own the data centers.
Also, if you take 1 million jobs, do you think that might cause demand to drop for services?
A general drop in services, yes. A drop in the services being provided by the robot, probably not. I doubt if many Prep Chefs are regularly eating at the restaurants they work at. When the robots are taking millions of jobs in all areas of service, there might be a problem.
Because it's hard and Tesla think they can do it.
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.
More examples, please! Reusable rockets is the load-bearing example, I don't think that argument works without it. You could maybe squeeze in "he kickstarted the EV market".
maybe? Tesla is the biggest reason there are any electric vehicles on the road today, I haven't heard of anyone (knowledgeable) who has even hinted otherwise. I can understand not liking Elon, but trashing the companies he's formed and the marvels they've created is just proof you don't value a truthful understanding of the world.
Oh, well let me get in my sub-$30,000 Model S, with a swappable battery and full-self-driving capabilities, and take a fully automated trip to the Hyperloop downtown so I can catch a quick ride out to O’Hare so I can fly out to watch a successful Starship launch…
…oh wait. I can’t. Because for all his successes, Musk has also sowed quite a lot of bullshit that has gone precisely nowhere.
Just like to point out Hyperloop wasn’t intended for local transportation and isn’t a Musk company, just some BOE speculation (BON?) that others have pursued.
> so I can fly out to watch a successful Starship launch
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.
Technology sometimes takes longer than estimates.
And in Musk’s case, “longer” means “abandoned”. Like the cheap model 3. Or the Hyperloop. Or swappable batteries. Or X as an everything app that includes banking.
So?
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.
Are you saying SpaceX doesn't make money? I have no idea about Neuralink but the first sounds pretty odd.
Where did I say that?
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.
> > Are you saying SpaceX doesn't 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.
Oh come on. Lots of successful companies are based on something they figured out how to do that others hadn’t.
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.
To be clear, Neuralink has shown some promising signs. Has also shown some terrible signs.
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.
'having paralysed people control things with their minds' would be great if you guys had a healthcare system that would pay for it.
Tesla processes as many miles in 2 days as Waymo in its entire lifetime. Waymo will be crushed in few years.
We've been hearing this 'Tesla has so much data!! Tesla FSD and robotaxis any day now!!' bullshit for probably a decade now.
Tesla could be a major automaker if they released cars like a normal functional automaker. Elon, for his many faults, was perhaps the best person in the world to get Tesla where it is today, but he is more likely to burn it to the ground than maintain success of the company. If Tesla built a more traditional mid size SUV it would probably sell nearly as well as the Model Y and if they created a new more modern Model S It would probably do well also.
I have my doubts their robots will be anything more than a gimmick for rich people.
That’s why so many credit Gwynne Shotwell with SpaceX’s continued success. Unfortunately Elon didn’t look or didn’t want an equivalent for Tesla.
Tesla cannot sustain astronomical valuations by delivering actual products. A dream cannot be real
I think we're at the point where there is a bit of healthy competition in the EV space (even when excluding the Chinese), that Teslas are mostly just symbolic.
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.
I think there is still a (brief) remaining window where Tesla has an advantage in the US, but it is too late for them to start developing new models to take advantage of it - and that is NACS and the SuperCharger network. Now that new EVs from everyone else are coming out with NACS and are on-boarding plug and charge (and, hopefully, mapping integrated with charging availability), all US EVs will be just as easy as Teslas to take on road trips.
I still think there's a benefit to sticking with EVs from companies that are actually "all in" on EVs. Otherwise you're buying the product that the company (or really the sales/service channel) really doesn't want to sell you.
In this space, Tesla does have competition (e.g. Rivian and Lucid), but nowhere near as much as they should.
You might be surrounded by people who stopped thinking. My friend said "hell no" to Tesla right around backlash started and ordered a PHEV. Thankfully, somehow, someone convinced him to upgrade to EV. I keep begging him for a drive, but I suspect he's embarrassed by how shitty BYD is (same with other mate who somewhat regrets with all the issues he had, albeit they were far cheaper back then).
Since I'm in the US, BYD is not part of the equation.
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.
I'm not saying the pundits are wrong, but tons of people said Tesla would never amount to anything back when they were just shipping the Roadster and the Model S.
;-) looks like they are right, taking the slightly longer view! ;-)
Their revenue is flat for last 4 years. They have established their status outside top 10 manufacturers and losing EV market share to Chinese and Europeans.
Car revenue: -11%
operating margin: 3.86%
Free cash flow -30%
I heard Tesla's "Full Self Drive" is now ready. The only thing missing is "self" and "full" but that's just a small detail. Moving on to fully autonomous robots now.
I guess people are just a few days from starting to earn $30k/yr on their model 3s, as musk said it years ago? lol
Strongly disagree with this opinion piece. I think Musk/Tesla figured out it is impossible to compete with Chinese manufacturers in the foreseeable future so they are pivoting.
The article basically says Tesla lost it's lead due to inaction years ago, so what you're saying isn't much different - "it's already dead, they're just pulling the plug" VS "they're committing suicide, which started several years ago".
... away from their top tier models and into the ones that directly compete with China.
their top tier models barely sell any volume, at least for now with Tariffs in most of the west, Tesla can still move huge numbers of Y and 3 but will see how that will go this year with so much movement in geopolitics
They might actually be going all-in on a robotaxi future, i.e. betting on a future where car-ownership is not the default.
in US? Country built around car-ownership?
It is built around driving cars, but not necessarily car ownership. From what I gather through movies and television, cities like New York City don't really have car owners, but there are a lot of taxi cabs. Now Uber and Lyft have moved into small towns that never had taxis.
I’m not sure that is a good example - NYC is an outlier and it has 45% of households owning cars.
Most people^ don’t actually want to own a car and deal with breakdowns, maintenance, repairs, fender benders, etc etc.
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.
Amazing that Tesla announced the next generation roadster and sold pre-orders which I think cost $100k and then just never released it and there seems to be no indication (last I checked) that it ever will be.
Yesterday on the earnings call Elon said the reveal is in April “hopefully”.
Elon's superpower is commanding insane valuation premiums. The trouble with this is that "the bill eventually comes due", so to speak, which forces Elon's companies to take wilder and wilder bets, or to make wilder and wilder promises.
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.
What would you do with a satellite, if I gifted you one for free?
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.
Yes, and the reality is that any of those would require a fairly large constellation of satellites. I guess the play is that many large constellations of satellites will be launched.
Not really. That's only the case for LEO sats. Going up higher gets you hemispheric coverage with a single bird.
You wouldn't like the latency on the internet connection. And this isn't even theoretical: it's why LEO constellations were a big deal.
the humanoid robots thing is so ridiculous, theres no way that comes to fruition
> Estimates have SpaceX doing about $3B in annual earnings
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.
That's revenue. Earnings (profit) is what's relevant, because as you can imagine putting stuff in space is pretty expensive!
I'm surprised that I feel like this is the right move for them. Competing on the cars seems like a bad idea now that EVs are kind of a commodity market.
Is it a bad idea for Toyota, or Honda, or Hyundai/Kia, or GM, or Ford, or even Rivian and Lucid?
Yes, they wouldn't be able to retain share price whatsoever if they announced this.
Fully Self Driving themselves off the cliff one might say...
Bipedal robots are dumb.
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.
It seems very rational to assume bipedal motion is easy and fine control is difficult. Some babies can walk from 9 months. No 9 month olds are playing Beethoven's 5th on the Piano.
A 9 month old baby also can't play tic tac toe, but that doesn't mean tic tac toe is difficult.
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.
Bipedal robots are an easy drop-in replacement for humans. It just becomes a software problem for them to do any task we do- your tracks are fun until you want the robot to drive your car, walk around the side of the house, or even go up the stairs.
> Bipedal robots are an easy drop-in replacement for humans.
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.
Why would I show you arms of current robots doing something useful? You said "Bipedal robots are dumb" and that's all I talked about.
Chinese manufacturers were recently reporting that people were twice as efficient as humanoid robots
Twice as efficient is an incredible achievement if you think that a few years ago humanoid robots struggled to stay upright and couldn't locate their own... well, charging port.
Or he never intended for it to stick around and used it a the biggest pump and dump ever to become the richest man in the world using subsidies all along the way to get there. Will be interesting to see how much stock Elon sells...
Help me understand this: why would anybody buy a Tesla car today, unless it was incredibly well-priced with respect to the competition? Seems to me, yes, this kills Tesla cars.
Well, Elon decided to go that way. Really can't blame anyone else but himself here.
More like surgery to remove the excess weight. If they are not selling well, why would they continue making them? That would be suicide.
"If you don't cannibalize yourself, someone else will." -Steve Jobs
Cannibalize meant in this case to have product that will kill one of your other products (in this case the back then cash cow iPod would be killed by the iPhone).
I don't see this in Tesla.
The Y and 3 do everything the X and S do. I don't see how they could keep making them without eating away sales.
Not really. The Y doesn't even come close on towing capacity.
But the CyberTruck does, though it is an entirely different segment.
Give me a break. Tesla has 4 different, 4 person cars. It's redundant. In manufacturing and business, reducing variability is everything. Engineering and supply chain has now been freed from two entire SKUs. That's massive. In a self driving world, they don't really the Model 3 either. The best part is no part - well getting rid of two entire vehicles worth of parts that contributed very little to the bottom line is massive.
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.
There's clearly no difference whatsoever between a Toyota Aygo and a Hilux, as they both seat exactly four people. That's why most car brands only have a single model.
> Tesla has 4 different, 4 person cars. It's redundant.
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.
It's weird that you think people don't understand the concept of simplification, especially here. And that if someone says "that's an odd move" it must be because they can't grasp the idea of redundancy (between vehicles priced differently by a factor of two).
> Tesla has 4 different, 4 person cars. It's redundant.
You must be a topologist.
How many 4-person vehicles does Toyota make again? What about BYD? I think it's way more than 4.
Model X wasn't a 4-person car. It was designed to be a 6-7 seater, far bigger than the Model Y. The Model Y's optional third row is practically useless.
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.
The new Roadster is such vaporware that no one is even bothering to bring it up.
Yo, it will have a rocket!
It's not like Tesla actually has functional FSD technology. If a ten year staged rollout of "transportation as a service" is the way to get there, then Waymo has a substantial leg up. Either way it is a lose-lose for Tesla. They failed to continue innovating on the EV and battery fronts as well.
"We are lucky they're so stupid"
He’s just retooling to manufacture his fighting Uruk-hai.
From FSD to Full Self Destruct ...
Will Tesla be remembered as the DeLorean of the 2020s, or more like the Edsel?
Almost certainly neither.
The DeLorean was a stupidly-expensive car that had a lot of maintenance problems, decided to use an unpainted stainless steel exterior and had corrosion issues as a result, but is remembered despite all of this engineering mediocrity due to its unusual stylistic choices.
I'm guessing Tesla's cybertruck will be the DeLorean of the 2020s.
If you want to restrict the discussion to just the Cybertruck, it's more like the Edsel - an embarrassing failure from a dominant manufacturer. The Delorean similarities are largely skin-deep.
Also probably 99% of people here are familiar with Deloreans and stainless steel.
I was very close to going short on Tesla yesterday. Very glad I didn't in the end. The fundamentals of the company are absolute trash, yet the stock price is through the roof year after year. One day the crash will be epic.
In the last couple of months it was really crazy: Some inconvenient truth came out, and within minutes the stock made a huge jump UP. Who regards it as a good sign if a car manufacturer just got ordered to pay $200 mio in damages in just one single Autopilot crash case, creating precedent for a lot more of lawsuits.
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... ;)
I think in a weird way SpaceX listing publicly would trigger Tesla’s downfall as Elon fans will switch to that stock. Then SoaceX will buy out Tesla.
That’s a good point. Can Tesla fail?
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.
> Can Tesla fail?
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 have no issue understanding why Musk does that, he's gone from “weirdo with lost of enthusiasm and charisma” to “batshit crazy, so full of himself there's basically no negative feedback loop anymore”.
What I don't understand is why are the Tesla shareholders accepting his bullshit?
Tesla shareholders who fully believe Musk is crazy will either 1) be quietly selling their stocks and don't want to draw attention, or 2) factored in the crazy and bought in anyway. If the craziness started today then that would be a good question, but it's been years.
Because without Musk's reality distortion field, Tesla stock would lose most of its value.
Do you actually care why or is this just a rhetorical question so get hn karma?
Cults of personality are all the rage these days. And in this case, people are probably just ratcheting up their stop loss prices and hoping the market is suckered by his next grand scheme.
I don't strongly disagree, but also don't really see why they would keep manufacturing X and S if the design is old and the car needs a refresh to be competitive? I guess the argument is that it would have been worthwhile refreshing 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 have a Model Y with AI hardware version 4. It is phenomenal at self-driving, and if your impression of FSD is a year old or older, then you are woefully out of date in understanding where the tech is today. If I could, I would send my own grade school child off to her friend's houses and extracurricular activities in my car unaccompanied. It is safer than buses, taxis, and me. Not since Tesla created the first economically viable EV for the American public have I been as excited about a revolution in automotive technology. Other than the fact that Tesla still needs people out there manually driving to generate training data, I don't think Tesla should be selling cars at all. I fully support this move, and all I have to say is thank God for Waymo, so we can have good competition in the Robotaxi market.
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.
I have to admit, I love my model S and have been very bullish of TSLA but this news makes me very bearish. There is no way they are going to make robots at scale in the next 5 years and the model s and model X are cool pieces of technology. If they dont start rolling out robotaxi extremely quickly to new locations, I cant imagine the stock going anywhere but down.
But the Model S and X are luxury competitors and if Tesla wants to be Toyota/Honda instead of BMW/Mercedes, perhaps they no longer fit in their plans. The issue is they don’t have any other mainstream models besides the 3 and Y. Perhaps they really need bigger CUVs and SUVs that cost less than the X and a higher end Model 3 (like Corolla/Camry or Civic/Accord) to replace them.
That is exactly the plan: https://www.teslarati.com/tesla-confirms-robotaxi-expansion-...
I think robotaxi will eventually everywhere but austin is rolling out a lot slower than i expected.
> There is no way they are going to make robots at scale in the next 5 years
If you said 1 year okay I would believe you. But have you seen the advances in AI recently...? And the work done in robotics by other companies like Google and Figure? 5 years is definitely doable.
AI isn't the only bottleneck - even if the software problem was solved today, a robot arm competitive with human arms simply doesn't exist (and the only ones that have a hope of competing cost $16k each) - it turns out all those degrees of freedom makes the arm super fragile, and the human arm is filled to the brim with sensors (e.g. to figure out the weight of the item you're holding, or to tell when the teatowel is slipping or if you're gripping it tight enough).
(Source: construction-physics, if anyone wants to comment with the link)
Sorry, Ill say it a different way. I dont think Tesla will be able to sell ME a robot within the next 5 years that does my laundry and cooks me dinner. If they want to sell millions of these things, that is what it's going to need to do.
This "Elon Musk lost interest" is very, very naive take.
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.
So, they're pivoting to competing with China on manufacturing robots? Yeah, that'll pan out...
The S and X were the luxury models. They're keeping the cheap ones. It sounds like they're jumping headfirst into the race to the bottom instead of pivoting away from it.
Why is everyone freaking out? They won’t produce cars which don’t sell well. Model S and Model Y were rounding errors.
They won’t make 25k cars either. Very little margin on that.
Pivoting to consumer robots? Isn’t that cool?
> 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
The author said he saw Tesla prove that EVs were profitable, but it was profitable when taxpayers gave it $7,500 per vehicle sold... That's the whole profit margin on higher-end cars, and more profit than most mass-market makers get. EVs were never profitable.
Tesla don’t only sell in the US - when you say “per vehicle sold” - are you saying that the American taxpayers were subsidising the global sales? Or are you saying they were not profitable only in America?
If you want to deduct tax rebates, then what about the other side?
- 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.
Even when excluding regulatory credits and consumer tax incentives, Tesla’s automotive business remains profitable.
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.
EVs were profitable. The loss of the incentive has meant vendors need to adjust their pricing.
"Profitability" is a momentary property.
You could make ICE cars unprofitable by charging less than they cost to make too.
Also helps if Obama gives you $500M to R&D the Model S.
That was a very long time ago and many billions ago and it was a loan that was repaid with interest in two years.
It's business as usual for Elon. This is his main strategy. He always goes all in on risky technology that people say won't work. People said it about EVs. They said it about reusing first stages. They said it about Starlink's phased array antennas.
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.
He’s been all in on self driving for at least a decade now. He has not been able to produce anything close to his claims.
He was doing self driving but he wasn't all in on it until a few years ago, when they (apparently) stopped working on new models of cars for personal ownership. That's what makes it all in.
I'm more and more inclined to suspect that XEverything is some kind of money laundering scam, where the world's richest people throw money at Musk because of his politics - which they hope will make them even more money. And not because of his technological promises, which are increasingly ridiculous and unbelievable based on more than a decade of his own public statements.