I assume OP meant something closer to "fair market value" than "fair vs. unfair." Tesla is not priced according to its underlying assets or technical analysis (e.g. P/E ratio), but solely based on hype/sentiment.

Interestingly, retail investors and company insiders collectively own more of Tesla than institutional investors.

I did not know this and explains why I see so many teslas with their blinkers on and not maneuvering despite having ample room and time. Ultimately this behavior makes them unsafe for their occupants as well as others around them.

Cars only work because we can predict driver behavior, if they break that prediction that’s when bad things are likely to happen…

Lately I’ve started to ignore Tesla blinker.

Most probably because it has a radar that the Tesla lacks. That means your car has two sources of truth and can very efficiently and quickly make an informed decision about whether or not there's anything in the way.

> Do you have any sources for that claim? I can attest that current iteration of FSD is very, very good, and very likely is a safer driver than I am.

That's a damning statement about your driving skills, and probably not true or you'd have had your license revoked by now. I've had FSD for five years, and even today it regularly makes dangerous mistakes. For example, left turns and roundabouts are the equivalent of Russian roulette, but just last week my FSD started driving through a red light because it interpreted a green left-arrow as a sign that it could proceed forward.

If you need to do 50 miles on the interstate it's pretty solid though.

Tesla's original "secret plan" (published on their website) was to become a commodity car manufacturer faster than electric cars became a commodity. Such that the other manufacturers would find them selling obsolete vehicles and Tesla just becomes the new General Motors.

This was the justification for their stock price for quite a few years: "It's logical that Tesla is worth more than all other automakers combined because it will soon be the only automaker."

Then in 2022 Elon basically admitted that they couldn't win on production and had to continue to win on technology and they'd do that with self driving. [https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-tesla-worth-basica...]

But now Tesla is way behind on self driving (which was oversold by the whole industry tbh). So what's their new plan? Now they're no longer a car company and will make robots!

> It's pure logic that Tesla has to pursue bets that would justify billion dollar valuations and being a car company isn't that.

But it's make-believe. Tesla is a car manufacturer. They haven't shipped anything else other than cars. And they even suck at making cars these days. Tesla Semi? All but dead. The new roadster? Also dead. Full Self Driving? Doesn't exist. Robotaxis? Even if they got them to work, at this point the brand is too toxic for widespread adoption of those.

They could have persisted at being a disruptive car manufacturer and still held a several hundred billion dollar valuation. Now they are a very mediocre car manufacturer, with their only actual success being conning everyone into believing that they are a bleeding-edge tech company so their $1.5Bn valuation seems justified.

Why is making humanoid robots a moat? Other companies have been making robots for longer, humanoid and otherwise, and doing it better.

Has Optimus signed up for any sports yet: https://edition.cnn.com/2026/01/02/china/china-humanoid-robo...

Is Optimus close to what Boston Dynamics is doing with Atlas: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YIhzUnvi7Fw

Brand value is definitely a moat. Not the deepest of moats, but it is a moat nonetheless.

> It's pure logic that Tesla has to pursue bets that would justify billion dollar valuations and being a car company isn't that.

Tesla is valued as if it is a tech company with a car business as a side gig. Its balance sheet is a car business, and I'm not even sure it spends enough on tech to have tech qualify as a side gig. And the other tech avenues it has been pursuing (autonomous vehicles, humanoid robots) are areas that other people have been doing for better and longer. Hell, Honda had autonomous (not tele-operated) humanoid robots working 20 years ago.

To be honest, at this point, I mostly consider the other bets that Tesla is pursing are just passion projects to keep the stock price artificially high. Were Tesla more realistically valued, it would lose probably 90% or more of its value, and Musk would be a much poorer man.

Everything tends toward commodification in a hyper-competitive, hyper-connected world. The only variable is time... and this "time" keeps shrinking.

As commodification accelerates, consolidation follows. In the current landscape, where private capital and state power are deeply entangled under the banner of national security, this consolidation no longer stays economic. It becomes geopolitical.

The end result... it translates to not just corporate monopolies, but geo-monopolies... enforced not by markets alone, but by coercion, conflict, and control over resources.

Pure logic would dictate that Tesla has a market cap of around $5B. It's actually fraudulent that it's not, and for some reason the SEC allows Musk to lie on every earnings call without repercussion.

Tesla's moat is constantly moving to the next thing and claiming it has a moat before moving on to the next thing.

Elon's business model is moving from one government subsidized thing to the next (see SpaceX now bribing for tax dollars to go to Mars).

> > It's pure logic that Tesla has to pursue bets that would justify billion dollar valuations and being a car company isn't that.

You can pursue everything with words, even you can pursue Sydney Sweeney but then you have to show the receipts.

The receipts of Tesla (Factories, lines of production, expertise of people hired, 25 years of history...) are one of car company.

But of course, it's all narrative so people will keep outbidding each other to own a piece of this company.

The financialization of hope, that's what it is.

Bingo.

Can they afford to do that? I would assume it would be the other way around unless the valuation of either/both changes drastically.

XAI acquiring twitter is probably a better recent example than solarcity.

Oh their self-driving thing...Full* "Self" Driving (supervised)(see notes)(not liable for anything)

Trust me, I hate Tesla and Elon as much as the next naysayer

But just to keep the story straight

Tesla received ~$3 billion in subsidies.

When Elon exercised his Tesla options in 2021, he paid $11 billion in taxes on it.

By all accounts those subsidies were an incredibly good use of taxpayer money, and similar subsidies should keep being handed out, even if the byproduct is another big troll on twitter.

That's true for a lot of (most?) car manufacturers?

I fully agree that TSLA is madly overpriced as a car company, and too hyped as any other type of company.

An important question is therefore: why didn't anyone else?

If they actually worked right now, the demand would be high. Demand is certainly high for Waymos. Even if they worked worse than a Waymo I think the demand would still be very high. But it's hard to tell if (or when) it will work well enough to actually be a real product.

I don't see the demand for their robots to be high either tbh, but they're betting on them. It's not going to work.

Of course it will be high. Transit is a huge market. They would just need a small share of Uber, lyft, regular taxis, public transit.

demand for any robotaxis will be high. Just look at the number of Uber drivers whom the robotaxis will replace. Plus leased robotaxis or personal/reserved ones - whatever shape it'd take replacing at least some percentage of personal cars.

There is only a "small" issue - to make those robotaxis, i.e. the self-driving system for them. Almost 20 years in, Google/Waymo is way ahead of everybody and is still not there yet (i believe we will get there anyday now - which maybe next year or in 10 years - especially giving all the avalanche of investment in AI. Though i'd have expected that 4+ years in we'd see a lot of autonomous platforms/weapons in Ukraine, yet it hasn't happen too yet)

> Why would cybertruck be cancelled?

IIRC, the fully-electric F150 Lighting was canceled due to poor sales, and its sales were better than the Cybertruck's.

it's one of their models i would like for them to succeed the most. americans love trucks (especially where i live), and the impact of electric truck replacing ice ones on the gestalt of the neighborhood is significant, no noise, no fumes. people tend to drive their electric cars/trucks more gently too. my neighbor bought one, and it's night and day.

and oddly enough, while i kneejerk hated it at first, the design has grown on me, something genuinely different, playful. much rather see a parked cybertruck than yet another oversized bloated "regular" truck.

Lower than expected sales https://www.cbsnews.com/news/tesla-cybertruck-sales-elon-mus...

Because it's selling terribly: https://www.businessinsider.com/cybertruck-sales-decline-tes...

The refresh would need large investment. And it seems that S/X weren't selling that well to warrant such an investment. Just looking around - SV, a key market for Tesla - everybody buys 3 and Y, not S and X. In some sense it seems that 3/Y cannibalized S/X.

Tesla got the job done, which was empower Musk, not manufacture EVs at scale. The stock is the product.

Musk's goal all along was to get away from boutique production. He wants to sell millions of cheaper cars, not thousands of cars for wealthy people.

Not sure it's going to work out. Without some big jumps in battery tech, EVs are going to be difficult to sell without subsidies.

My dad found it extremely amusing that Elon said "we just have to solve the 'AI problem' and we'll have robots doing shopping for us", or something like that. I can't remember the exact verbiage, but that was the gist.

The word "just" is doing a lot of work there. Going by that logic: We "just" need to figure out cold fusion to have effectively infinite energy. We "just" need to develop warp drives to travel across the galaxy. We "just" need to figure out the chemo problem to cure cancer.

I suspect it's going dormant for a couple years and then he'll say "Hey, this robot thing isn't working out, so we're closing the facility." He doesn't have any desire to stay in California.

S and X were a small fraction of Fremont already. The plant can do >500k units per year, but S/X were closer to 20k.

It sounds like this would be giving ~5% of the factory space to Optimus production, which seems reasonable.

they have a large buyer - all of the silly people investing money in the company

IF they work (and that is a massive, massive if), every factory on earth will replace every human with them.

It’s inevitable, the only question is how many years until it happens: 2, 5, 10, 50?

Place your bets!

Didn’t they just announce their profits dropped like 45% year over a year?

https://techcrunch.com/2026/01/28/tesla-earnings-profit-q4-2...

They’ve been overvalued for a very very long time. And then the head of the company decided to alienate as many people as possible. All while pouring a ton of resources into a product that very few people want instead of saner things.

Electric cars, maybe. Tesla is valued much larger than the rest of the auto industry combined though.

Humanoid robots? Ain’t nobody made the business case for that. It is pure vibes.

> These are very much things of the future.

I thought it was hyperloop. I thought it was suboribital taxis. I thought it was underground taxis. I thought it was self-driving semi trucks. Or was it solar roofs? Or powerwall? Wait weren't we supposed to be on the moon again right now?

He's a bullshitter. Yea, he picks good targets, but he is entirely full of shit. The market just does not reflect this. He should have been golden parachuted onto a yacht years ago.

Tesla's sales are standing still in a growing market. Are they GameStop? Maybe not, but they still require a major shift or their competitors will leave them behind in the dirt.

They are making things but the case for them being worth an order or magnitude more than a normal EV company is getting weaker by the day

This was true when Tesla was primarily in the market of making electric cars. It is not true if their business is humanoid robots: that's squarely meme stock territory.

Tesla's valuation is not related to their production of cars or robots.

tesla is not making robots.

The current administration is “rejecting the idea of electric cars out of stubbornness or politics.” See: Trump moving to withhold funding for EV chargers, terminating EV mandates and government support, etc. I don’t know what Musk is thinking by supporting this administration so steadfastly as they work hard to undermine his own efforts and initiatives.

They are making no robots.

What robots are they making?

Where can you buy one? What does it do?

The only thing keeping Tesla afloat currently is tariffs and restrictions on far cheaper and far better foreign alternatives. That's not a solid foundation. It's certainly not a trillion dollar company.

The dam is breaking. We have Canada lowering tariffs and agreeing to allow the import of Chinese EVs (limited, at least to start with) and the US administration goes off on Canada for doing it because they know what it means: crumbling American influence.

South America, Africa and Asia are likely forever lost to Tesla. And European sales are tumbling.

The supercharger network will maintain some inertia for some time but only for so long.

You can see this in Tesla announcements about attempts to diversify. AI robots? I'll believe it when I see it. Robotaxis? Well you're reliant on FSD for that and you have stiff competition in Waymo and who knows what China is cooking up there.

The GP was correct: it's a meme stock. It's no longer an investment in a business. It's an investment in Elon and, more generally, an investment in the administration. There's no fundamental way to predict how that goes and on what time scale. If you want to gamble, gamble. But gamgling is what it is. And, just like Twitter, I guarantee you the people at the top won't be left holding the bag.

BYD makes electric cars. Not sure if Trump will let you import them.

All fun and games until people game the system. Polymarket for example will frequently just bend/ignore the truth to make specific unlikely/not real outcomes happen.

Did they? It keeps going up despite no reasons for it.

Historically bubbles like this hardly ever lasted this long, though

That doesn't mean there's no such thing as a meme stock, that means there have always been meme stocks and we now have a consice name for it

Critical thinking might ask how the valuation of company A has any relationship to the activity of a completely separate company B (planning for its own IPO)

But I will concede the founder's other side gigs would appear to have significantly affected its sales

Multiple things can be true:

1. SpaceX was an exceptionally well-executed good idea, and continues to be a leader in innovation.

2. Tesla brought EVs to the mass consumer market and proved the profitability of EVs.

3. Elon Musk was essential to the success of SpaceX and Tesla.

4. Tesla now has fierce competition in the category it defined: EVs.

5. Tesla has undergone revenue and profit reduction.

6. While it experiences promise in alternate product lines, Tesla is not a market leader in robotics (Unitree, Boston Dynamics) or self-driving cars (Baidu, Waymo). Tesla reported profit growth in residential solar and residential power storage, but the revenues from these verticals are dwarfed by other segments.

7. The trend over the past decades is Elon Musk being successful at innovating in underserved parts of the market.

8. Elon Musk is not currently pursuing any underserved parts of the market.

But Tesla and SpaceX are different companies

> Common sense product could be something smaller than Model 3 for Europe and this car would eat Chinese for lunch.

Yeah, that would be the Model 2, which Musk cancelled, then denied he cancelled, then has made no effort to review whatsoever so it exists in a limbo state of zero people working on it but it not being officially cancelled. Either way, it didn't come out in 2025 as planned.

https://www.cbtnews.com/tesla-execs-raise-red-flags-after-mu...

For a normal company, this would be disastrous. For a meme stock, this makes total sense since anyone claiming the Model 2 is dead can be shouted at by fans saying Musk himself disputed it was dead.

> smaller than Model 3 for Europe

A few years ago, perhaps. But the brand has become tainted to the point where the exact people who would buy such a car are now avoiding Teslas. Instead, European manufacturers are filling that niche with cars like the Renault 5.

Why would a small Tesla "eat Chinese for lunch" - the brand is tainted (to put it mildly) and the Teslas I've been in didn't seem to have great design or build quality?

BYD already have the Atto 1 (sub AUD30K here) as do other EV manufacturers (eg Nissan Leaf).

Tesla could stop spending money on bullshit like the Cybertruck and spend it on vehicles that people actually need/want.

> The successful cars are made for masses and not for niche buyers.

When Tesla got started, full EVs were extremely niche. They were known for their short range and nothing else. Tesla defeated common sense. This is what supports their anti-common-sense stock price.

> Common sense product could be something smaller than Model 3 for Europe and this car would eat Chinese for lunch

The Chinese EVs selling in Europe are mostly bigger cars.

And the only reason they don't sell more is because we tariff the hell out of them.

It will be a manufacturer of vaporware if you look at how much they announced over the last years and how much of that has actually materialized...

But yeah, I guess Tesla lives by its CEO (and his grand promises that keep the stock price up) and dies by its CEO (who alienated Tesla buyers by, amongst other things, throwing his lot in with a regressive fossil fuel supporting administration and by personally supervising the dismantling of agencies such as USAID).

The Cybertruck was very clearly designed to be a low production model to figure out teething issues in manufacturing and design. Think Plymouth Prowler. Like seriously, nobody makes a body out of heavy gauge sheet metal with simple shapes if they're planning on volume, it doesn't pencil out vs more die complexity and thinner material. But the future growth to justify that never seems to have materialized....

To be fair, robot soldiers are the only robotics and ai problems that need to be solved to pretty much eliminate labor problems across the board.

I suspect China is going to beat him to the punch on this one too.

Cybertruck was /the/ sign that things with Elon had... changed, IMO!

It didn't fail imo - it was intended a low-volume product for next-gen Tesla tech - Ethernet based fieldbus, 48V systems, area controllers etc. The philosophy is the same like other high-end cars - you field test your latest experimental tech first in a car with lower sales but high margins - if your fancy stuff has a 1% failure rate, in a 100k production run, that's 1000 vehicles - high but manageable.

If you sell millions and its your main product, your company is over. This is the same playbook German manufacturers followed since forever. I bet the next gen Model 3 and robotaxi will get the cybertruck tech.

... but they aren't canceling the Cybertruck?

Re: Robots bla bla: yeah, of course. FSD bla bla. Meh.

> could be something smaller than Model 3 for Europe

Lol... not with those tariffs. In fact, I'd be willing to bet we see higher growth of Tata than Telsa in Europe over the next 10 years.

Any discussion of Tesla without mentioning Musk's actions is missing the most important piece. I heard someone on this site use the term "mind share", as in before Musk decided to alienate his main customer base, Tesla had the biggest "mind share" of any company in the world. I looked forward to buying a Tesla one day. Now, with Musk licking Trumps boots and actively doing very real damage with his work in DOGE and other things, I will literally never buy anything from that company ever again. It doesn't matter what Chinese car companies are doing. It matters that he stands for everything I don't so I will not give him my money.

Cybertruck was supposed to be for the masses. The just weren't able to hit the price point required because of overly optimistic engineering assessments. I think the whole stainless steel construction concept didn't work as first designed.

And of course, Cybertruck design might not have been mass compatible buy being ugly. But that is subjective, if it was cheap and functional and without the political connotations it might have been different.

But it was certainty a risky bet.

>>The gamble with Cybertruck failed.

Has it? I really don't know but I see these every day in my major city and there was a closed mall parking lot filled with cybertrucks the local dealer used to park there which were quickly turned over.

Why are they still making the cybertruck then?

I see way more Model S and X than Cybertruck.

It's actually bizarre how seemingly nothing impacts $TSLA: profits down 46%, revenue down 3%, cutting successful product lines that used to sell quite a bit, a massively failed product in the Cybertruck, FSD promises still unfulfilled, and on top of all that US$ 2 billion siphoned away to another unrelated company.

With all of that, the stock closed upwards on the after market hours. Perhaps only Musk's death could cause it to tank, would have never expected to see a cult of personality being run on the top of S&P 500 market caps, what a strange world...

I own the Y and drove the S as a loaner. The S is a noticeably better car. Also has 1000hp.

I just saw an R5 on the street in the bright green. Super cool looking car. There are a whole bunch of promising small EVs coming out in the EU. Hyundai Inster, VW ID.1, Kia EV2, etc.

And it's not even cheap (actually its success kind of baffles me but great I guess).

Wasn’t Renault an F1 competitor for many years?

I think the S and X (and Roadster) sold less because they were expensive early models trying to create a "premium" halo-effect (if so, they succeeded).

For range, how much range is sufficient? This may be one area where the EU and US need fundamentally different vehicles, as per the saying "in America 100 years is a long time, in Europe 100 miles is a long way". Certainly the EU market supports B-segment with 44kWh @ 320 km / 199 miles: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citroën_C3#Europe_(2024)

> This is not only my opinion but the market's - S and X sold like 2 orders of magnitude less cars than the 3 and Y.

They sold less because they're far more expensive and have to compete against much more well put together products. Meanwhile, their platforms are 10 years old and there are now other offerings in an overall niche field.

You're right about aero to an extent, but aero is only felt on long highway drives and it can be mitigated somewhat with a couple more cells. Some consumers will choose style for a cost premium. Others will choose something more expensive simply because they don't want to support Musk.

He’s been dead for more than a year. Is this his 2018 take?

The Tesla Semi was groundbreaking when they revealed it nearly 10 years ago. But now there are dozens of electric truck models, and they get delivered in substantial quantities for over a year now. At least in Europe.

But... the Roadster!

It's been "coming this year" for almost a decade now. The bugs you describe are not embarrassing, they are critical issues that prevent it from being called FSD.

How are those "bugs" not immediately disqualifying? "Move fast and break things" is not an acceptable strategy for controlling 2 tonne bricks hurtling down the freeway

I think he meant "keeping TSLA where it is".

Tesla's sales have suffered, yes, and Elon's image is a significant contributor to that, besides all the reasons directly related to the cars themselves.

But Tesla's stock price is still stuck in irrational heights, not even remotely justifiable by the company's performance.

It just seems that people reconsider purchasing a physical object way quicker than they reconsider a stock investment. Maybe because the stock investment, especially in TSLA, is considered more like a gamble - "as long as others also think that this stock will skyrocket, even just because they think that others like me think it will skyrocket - as long as that's the case, I'm good with buying shares".

Tesla is a meme stock. Its being buoyed up by retail investors (Elon Musk fanbois) and, its been said, by Saudis and others who were trying to curry favor with him (possibly to try and get Trumps ear or other greasy bullshit). The stock is completely divorced from reality, which also attracts further investment--as long as its disconnected from the fundamentals of being a company that has to make a profit, you can argue its worth 100 million billion dollars or a googel, both are just as valid.

Even the best AI can't drive without good sensors. Cameras have to guess distance and they fail when there is insufficient contrast, direct sunlight and so on. LiDARs don't have to guess distance.

You are correct, but the problem is nobody at Tesla or any other self driving company for that matter knows what they are doing when it comes to AI

If you are doing end to end driving policy (i.e the wrong way of doing it), having lidar is important as a correction factor to the cameras.

> If you can train a policy that drives well on cameras, you can get self-driving. If you can't, you're fucked, and no amount of extra sensors will save you.

Source: trust me, bro? This statement has no factual basis. Calling the most common approach of all other self-driving developers except Tesla a wank also is no argument but hate only.

>Self-driving isn't a sensor problem. It always was, is, and always will be an AI problem.

AI + cameras have relevant limitations that LIDAR augmented suites don't. You can paint a photorealistic roadway onto a brick wall and AI + cameras will try to drive right through it, dubbed the "Wile E. Coyote" problem.

Up until recently teslas were regularly ranked around the world as the least reliable car brand. https://www.topspeed.com/germany-declares-tesla-model-y-is-l... and https://electrek.co/2025/12/11/tesla-ranks-dead-last-used-ca...

That’s my thought as well. The X isn’t much bigger than the Y and the price point is much higher. Same with the S and 3.

The markets the have been missing to this point are the big passenger / cargo carriers like a minivan or full size SUV.

The problem is not how well Tesla's FSD works, compared to other FSD from other manufacturers.

The problem is that Musk has been promising it for almost 10 years and it is still not sufficiently stable to be rolled out and relied upon by car owners.

FSD is only actually "ready" in terms of the whole "don't need to own a car for personal transport" when there can be passengers and no driver.

When Mom can dispatch the family car to pick up the kids from school.

If Tesla's FSD existed in isolation, it would be a fantastic breakthrough that signposted the future.

If.

It doesn't exist in isolation. The competition isn't just from the American firms, but also European and Chinese, and it isn't really possible to overlook Musk himself given both his long history of Musk over-promising and under-delivering, deflecting blame.

Even the current release isn't what Musk was talking hopefully about a decade ago, e.g.:

  Our goal is, and I feel pretty good about this goal, that we'll be able to do a demonstration drive of full autonomy all the way from LA to New York, from home in LA to let's say dropping you off in Times Square in New York, and then having the car go park itself, by the end of next year. Without the need for a single touch, including the charger.

Likewise, based on a video I saw recently from someone reproducing Tesla's 2016 "Paint It Black" drive, Tesla's AI is only now around the performance level that they faked in 2016.

Don't get me wrong, that level was impressive… just, the world isn't isolated developments.

I'm not sure it is a bad decision given:

"Tesla’s far more popular models are the 3 and Y, which accounted for 97% of the company’s 1.59 million deliveries last year."

Tesla's Full Self-Driving (FSD) is officially classified as a Level 2 advanced driver-assistance system (ADAS). Despite its advanced capabilities, it requires the human driver to remain fully attentive, monitor the environment, and be ready to take control immediately.

So it's literally nothing special compared to other manufacturers. I am happy to argue that's it's a better Level 2 than most others, sure. But it's still just that. No magic, no bullshitty "by 2017 the car will drive itself from New York to Los Angeles". No it hasn't and no it won't.

Google search? They already have an AI assistant at the top of every search result.

Google is winning the AI race. They did with self driving and they are doing it with LLMs. They are sitting back quietly not making noise and then massively rocking the status quo regularly.

I suspect they are going to do similar in the field of quantum computing.

Less damage... with his CSAM-making bot. Yeah. Less damage.

BYD is selling a lot of cars, but they're also making a lot more cars than they can sell at sticker price in China, as does every other Chinese car company. This oversupply leads to all kinds of distortions, like dealerships registering cars as "sold" to make their sales targets and then selling those brand-new cars as "used" at a discount. https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/local-...

Maybe your YouTube echo chamber additionally thinks that this will cause BYD to collapse, but I doubt that. There are about a hundred Chinese EV manufacturers in worse financial shape, who're likely to go bankrupt first, which should reduce oversupply enough for BYD to survive.

It would be possible to build an ornithopter, evidenced by the existence of avians, but it turned out the easiest ways to make flying machines were otherwise.

Because FSD driving not navigation is going to be held (rightly) to a much higher standard than human driving.

Humans are fallible and we have other sensors, like hearing, or touch (through feedback on the steering wheel) that are also involved in driving.

We already have other sensors that are not vision that work with us when driving like ABS and electronic stability.

The other reason it's dumb is that adding LIDAR and proper sensor fusion makes things better and the cost of LIDAR is rapidly dropping as its installed across new fleets in CN and elsewhere.

Yeah and we should replace the wheels with legs. every other company disagrees with musk, putting alternate sensors on even low end cars.

Both the vision and cognition hardware in humans are vastly superior, and don't get me started on the software.

I never understood why they would choose to fight with "one hand behind your back". More sensors = more better

~1.2 million global deaths per year due to motor vehicle accidents say otherwise.

The safety record of humans is not so great. They tend to fail in snow, ice, fog, rain and at night. We should be aiming a little higher.

I don’t think it makes sense to limit yourself while you are still figuring out what really works. You should go with a maximum of sensors and once it works, you can see what can be left out.

We don’t drive with just our eyes, we also drive with our brains.

Eyes have higher dynamic range and eyes don't freeze below 0°C. You can also put on sunglasses for even more weather-related adjustments.

Humans have cameras (eyes) + AGI. Cars have to compensate with LiDARs and other sensors that humans don't.

Technology can't compete with how easy it is to make more human-based navigation devices ;-)

This is commonly said but trivially falsifiable — a blind human crosses the street better than a Tesla.

Eyesight isn’t the thing. Humans have a persistent mental model of the world, and of the physics that drive it. Our eyes only check in every now and then to keep our model up to date.

Our ears and sense of touch do a lot of work in walking and driving, too. Trying to narrow it all down to vision is silly.

Because we can't install lidars on our heads

I fall on my butt all the time.

Because I want better?

If the problem with being a car company is that they'd have to compete with China, then I have some bad news about being a robot company. China is already farther ahead in both technology and volume of humanoid robots.[0][1][2][3]

[0] https://www.cnbc.com/2026/01/28/cnbc-china-connection-newsle...

[1]https://www.unitree.com/g1

[2] https://interestingengineering.com/ai-robotics/limx-humanoid...

[3] https://www.bgr.com/2083491/china-agibot-humanoid-robot-us-c...

It doesn't help that Musk supported a guy who turned around and gutted the incentives that were helping Tesla turn a profit.

Right now they struggle to compete with European car manufacturers, there is no way they can compete with China.

The problem with being a car company is that they'd have to compete with China.

As if China cannot produce kick ass robots ? What special sauce does Musk have here that a country with a massive pool of highly trained and educated engineers and decades of manufacturing expertise don't have?

Tesla "competed" by corruptly getting BYD banned from the US and hurting US consumers.

He generated a lot of goodwill with "that DOGE fiasco", too. It just depends on where you fall politically.

Agreed. I also thought it was a very dumb move until I saw that. That said, 3% but it costs 2.5x as much, maybe people option them higher idk, that could be a 10% revenue hit. But maybe that's worth it for them

I'm not disagreeing with your overall take, but Tesla and other EV manufacturers have released the same model of vehicle with different battery technologies at different times. Only saying that dropping 4680 production isn't conclusive proof itself.

They built production capacity for 125,000-250,000 units per year. They are selling around 20,000 units per year.

It was supposed to cost $39k at the low end and have 500 miles of range at the high end. This drove the hype and high reservation numbers.

In reality it costs $79k and offers up to 325 miles of range. Doubling the price is going to significantly limit the reach of the product.

It was estimated at >200k/year, but in reality is well under 50k/year. I'd say that is a failure compared to their guidance.

They are so proud of the Cybertruck sales that they don't eevn dare to disclose sales figures. That's the sign of a market success.

Ignoring who makes it, this kind of gimmickmobile usually sells well for about a year, and then everyone who wants one has one. It was never going to be a tentpole.

Rivian is not making money on those trucks either... I wouldn't count that as a win.

I regularly see Rivians. I've never once seen a Cybertruck in real life. (Midwest USA)

Humanoid robots make sense in only one context I can think of, and I definitely wouldn't put it past Musk to enter that market. It will be a big one. He may just be waiting for material science to catch up with his product vision. Much like Steve Jobs waited by the river until capacitive multitouch came floating by, and then pounced on it.

Meantime, as others have pointed out, the Model S and X are not selling enough to justify keeping the factory running. I don't see them going into Optimus production immediately, since as you suggest it's a solution looking for a problem.

I would. Someone in the market for a presumably profitable BMW 5 or 7 series isn't going to stay with BMW and drive a 3 series.

Yearly sales of model X have been comparable to the 5 series, at least until last year when musk's political activities took the shine off the brand.

High end cars are more profitable. There are millions of 3 and Y owners with positive experiences who would stay with the brand if it had something to move up to.

My 23 MX is the best car I've ever owned. I wouldn't buy the current iterations of 3 and Y.

Most refresh X owners think it's pretty great (not perfect). There are no alternatives at the moment, mostly because other manufacturers are terrible at software development...and that's not good for software defined vehicles.

It's sad to see Tesla walk away from the luxury segment so they can focus on robots, go karts, and robots pretending to drive go karts.

S you can understand, because sedans are dead. But every other US auto company is making big profits with large SUVs, so I don't get dropping X.

Agree with other posters who say whatever you think of Musk, Tesla styling has gotten very stale.

Lol keep dreaming. Those 300k monthly subscribers could churn. Robotaxi isn't two years away. Not even close.

Sure. And selling the most popular car on the planet is a failure?

Didn't the US government put ~$80b into rescuing GM etc, years ago?

Subsidies bootstrapped the EV industry. Stupid policies mean walking away from the investment, ceding the market to foreign competitors, and doubling down on legacy ICE crap the rest of the world no longer wants...and Americans will be less and less able to afford.

literally what are the gigafactories for then?

Their autonomous taxi program is a joke right now, especially compared to Waymo. Way fewer cities/rides, and they haven't even deployed their cybertaxi thing.

When Tesla started producing cars, everyone wanted what they proposed. Now, no one wants the cybertruck. No one is really asking for humanoid robots. Their self driving is vastly inferior to waymo when it comes to taxies, I can't see them winning that market. Their batteries and solar panels, like their cars, seem to be more or less abandoned.

So, it's pretty easy to see why people are confused and upset. Tesla is discontinuing all the things people like about Tesla, and selling vapourware that no one really wants anyways, instead. It's also not "a difficult conversation."

What seems more likely is that Musk, in his extreme shift to the right, has abandoned the original goal of Tesla: producing sustainable electric vehicles. He's become more and more delusional, with failing like the Boring machine and the Cybertruck starting to pile up. He's alienated his existing customer base by both getting into politics and dropping any pretext of trying to help the environment.

From my point of view, Tesla is a failed company with a leader who has gone off the rails, and a board that refuses to reign him in. Revenues are falling off a cliff outside of US governmental money, and it's betting the whole ship on only two ideas: self driving, which is so far no where close to being where it needs to be, despite the progress, and on yet another fairy tale that is humanoid robots.

imo their competition for autonomous vehicles doesn’t come from car companies, but from tech companies.

Amazon has a lucrative incentive to automate its supply chain up to and including last mile delivery. Waymo has proven out the tech and could easily partner with Uber or Lyft for the rider experience and reach.

If you’re FedEx, for example, would you rather buy from Amazon or from Tesla? Who is more likely to be a sane and trustworthy partner?

> they managed to pull off something similar to Waymo despite being so much worse at it, yes?

similar?! what exactly is your definition of similar? tesla and waymo are so far apart that it is difficult to accept any argument that tries to make this comparison. they cannot co-exist in the same sentence unless to explain one’s success against the other’s failures

Just a reminder that Tesla has still not offered driverless robotaxi rides to the public.

At this point, it's entirely because Musk refuses to add LIDAR. If he did they could probably be competing with Waymo in a year.

Do they have enough people to remotely operate that many Optimuses?

> if they’re right about Optimus, that capacity will generate far greater revenue.

How many Cyber Trucks were they supposed to sell?

Yeah. And that was a car. A thing that is at least a category people buy.

Optimus is complete vapourware. The quoted 1M units a year would be utterly unbelievable from any company, let alone Tesla with their history of over-promising.

Yeah, in Europe Tesla is not losing to BYD. They are losing to VW and BMV before the Chinese manufacturers have entered the competition for real.

But they’re making a robot! It will totally save the company!

On top of all the problems you have identified, as well as more, they’re clearly now just aiming for fantasy land.

What if they have planned product lines we don’t know about.

Yes, flagship models aren't intended to be good sellers. They often are where new features are tested out on customers willing to overpay to be early adopters. Tesla did test out the new steering yoke and removing the control stalks in the S: both features were met with tepid reception and partially rolled back. This is also bad for the 3 and Y, since there will be low confidence in any changes before they are released.

I guess from my perspective you can't buy the S or the X in Australia, all I see everywhere are the 3 and the Y. So for me its not flagship but I do know that the S was the original popular Tesla and has all of the bells and whistles.

They developed the Model 3 and Y, which is partly why they're stopping the S and X?

They completely refreshed the Model Y last year and made a number of updates to the Model 3 including different body word.

How did he give up? The model Y and the model 3 were refreshed last year. With the model 3 now pushing 750km of range.

Ford got rid of plenty of popular models including all hatchbacks and many sedans.

The difference there is that Supra's and 86's are performance cars, whereas Camry's and Corollas arent. You can't compare a Hatchback to an 86.

The Model S is comparable performance to the Model 3 performance.

My point is that the latest models 3 & Y are more affordable alternatives to the S & X and more widely available globally.

Someone who owns a BMW 5 series isn't going to switch down to a new model of the 3 series. The X makes the 3 and Y feel like go karts (that are slow). The S is a missile. Fun, but not for me.

The other way of looking at this: The X is the only Tesla model with door handles that aren't stupid.

Maybe they will finally release the Roadster to serve this purpose

Just buy an i4, even the eDrive is pretty zippy 0-60 in 5.4 seconds (the M50 can do it in 3.1 seconds). I’m not sure what the M car EV will look like beyond a motor for every wheel, but I can’t really see a point to it.

Ford didn’t say it was so they could make a robot butler instead.

Ford dropped sedans, they still have plenty of SUVs and other trucks you can buy.

the voting rings at HN are hard at work :))

It's an international thing, down to the neverending "Closing now fr fr" sales. There was general bemusement in Sydney when one shop notorious for this actually closed down, but only because the building was demolished to make way for a highway interchange.

https://www.smh.com.au/business/consumer-affairs/rozelle-rug...

In many countries, "carpet salesman" is equivalent to "used car salesman" as the least trustworthy occupation imaginable.

Well, at least Sweden and the US. Kind of amazing.

Also, good luck if you ever need replacement parts.

The only rational reason I could come up with is that the pool of potential Cybertruck buyers is not as saturated as for S/X, which have been around for quite a while.

I can give you the Model Y but take a look at the rest of the lineup compared to when they were first released. Hell, you're in this very post calling the S/X old.

And yet absolutely no under the hood stats have changed in 8 years - battery capacity, charging rate, charging curve, performance

He didn't specify the year.

The market for humanoid robots hasn’t been established like the market for $40,000 personal transport.

Saying that, I wouldn’t be too surprised if robotaxi replaces 90% of taxis and Ubers in the next 5-7 years.

But yea, stepping from sinking raft to the next…

so you own the stock then. right?

Bigger battery, larger center console and the cabin is slightly more premium. Not $76k premium but moreso than the 3. I also really like the yoke.

However, the 3 is lighter, has better headlight clusters, the light accent inside of the cabin (that I thought the S was getting, but I guess not), and a marginally better sound system.

I have multiple friends who have 6+ cars. To be fair, they're pretty well-off (mid six figure income), but one for example:

- Husband Tesla daily driver - Wife Bronco daily driver - Truck to pull their boat - Campervan for outdoor adventures - Older car for teenager to drive - 90s convertible for summer fun

It’s always funny to me that hating is fine if the person justifies it by some reason, but it’s generally not accepted, when that person doesn’t care about the reason.

“Stop the hate”, but of course only if it’s not me hating. Because that hate is valid and justified.

People are losing money and a product they liked because they imagine disliking it hurts an individual they don’t like.

This is a lose/lose enemy centered mindset, and a weird personification of a corporation.

How so?

They're clearly not failing, but if you read comments here or on reddit, lots of people want them to, and have wanted them to for a decade.

> Add why should anyone look past their opinions about the leader?

Because it's the most advanced car manufacturing in the US... Virtually the only successful EV maker outside of China, and it provides over 100,000 jobs worldwide.

In terms of actually selling cars Tesla is around #15 by annual unit sales and around #11 by annual sales in dollars.

Toyota sells more cars in a year then Tesla has sold ever.

Worth related statistics doesn't mean anything in the realm of hard engineering. I completely look from the point of "what the companies are doing tech-wise".

When Tesla came about, they were distinctively different. A different chassis, a different weight distribution, completely different dynamics. Since they started with a blank slate, their cars were greenfield projects, and they correctly took note of the pitfalls, and avoided them.

On the other hand, avoiding past pitfalls or remedying them doesn't make you immune from the future ones, and doesn't mean the other companies can't learn, too. This is where they made the mistake.

They overpromised (esp. with the Autopilot thingy) and underdelivered massively on that front, and while they "made" the software-defined-vehicle, they underestimated the problems and behaved like the problems they face are as simple as configuring a web service right. This is what slowly broke them. They also underestimated hardware problems of the car (like using consumer grade parts in the critical parts of the hardware. Remember wearing down flash chips and bricking cars?)

Because while car is software defined now, it's also an "industrial system". It has to be robust. It has to be reliable, idiot-proof even. Playing fast and loose with these things allowed automakers to catch them, maybe slowly but surely.

Because, "the old automakers" has gone through a lot of blood, sweat and tears (both figuratively and literally), and know what to do and what not to do. They can anticipate pitfalls better then a "newbie" carmaker. They shuddered, sputtered, hesitated, but they are in the move now. They will evolve this more slowly, but in a more reliable and safer way. They won't play that fast, but the products will be more refined. They won't skimp on radars because someone doesn't believe in them, for example.

Not everything is numbers, valuations and great expansions which look good on quarterlies, news, politics, and populists. Sometimes the slow and steads wins, and it goes for longer.

Physics and engineering doesn't care for valuations. They only care about natural laws.

This is what I'm seeing here.

YC3.

but first they have to demo it to the higher ups https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TYsulVXpgYg

This would only replace a small fraction of ICE, and only in states that don't cooperate with federal law enforcement officers.

That’s just nonsense, of course. Almost everything he says happens. It rarely happens on time.

I am surprised that nobody here is talking about grid energy storage, they basically invented that business vertical. It's about 13% of their revenue.

Certainly longer than that. I actually thought Tesla as an energy company made sense — sadly just an excuse to buy and shelve solarcity.

You already have it. Musk's earliest promise of a $30k price point appears to be an interview in September 2009: https://www.wbur.org/onpoint/2009/09/25/teslas-elon-musk-on-...

Adjusted for inflation, $30k then is around $45k now. Tesla sells a Model 3 for just over $35k.

It doesn't make any sense to hold someone to a promise like that and not adjust it for inflation. I think you can legitimately complain that he didn't meet the timeline he was aiming for.

Elon got distracted and decided we want humanoid robots.

Buy it used?

The same vaporware Roadster that was supposed to come out years ago and that Tesla has not shared any updates on?

Thanks, these are fair arguments!

Re: both 3 and 4(c) - agree that compute (or maybe even power for that compute) is likely to be a bottleneck in the next 3-5 years. However, I think Tesla/xAI are better positioned than many competitors as Tesla is a manufacturing company first and foremost; and this expertise (which is shared freely between Musk's companies) can help it to build it's own data centers, power generation (e.g., solar), or - in the most bullish case - even fab capacity.

I would argue that it is a leader in vision-only FSD, which is useful for both self-driving and robots.

You might be more informed that I am. We only have 3 and Y in the family. I based my statement on th fact that S/X were last refreshed 5 years ago; so they would need to be refreshed fairly soon.

Hard to tell whether you are serious or sarcastic, but assuming it's the former: my contrarian position on CC vs SaaS is that in the quest to kill shitty businesses people will discover that creating a high-value SaaS is very non-trivial. CC would kill a whole category of low effort SaaS while at the same time substantially raising the quality bar for SaaS that people are willing to pay money for.

i think there's a danger here of underestimating how varied mankinds 'mindware' is at large.

for us lot who were 'born in it, molded by it' (tech), it can be very hard to internalize that there are a lot of people out there who legimiately cannot for the life of them wrap their head around a computer, or the internet, other than "wifi logo = i can video call my grandkids".

you could say services like dropbox are outreach/charity organisations that onboard the masses onto 10x productivity curves (whether they like it or not!)

and to be honest, ive become guilty of drag n dropping tarballs to/from my gdrive account when im too dumb to figure out the ssh proxy tunnel incantation (or beg an llm for one for the 1000th time.) so really, everyone wins.

im not sure claude code will change all that much for the non-technical segment. from their point of view, you changed one terminal window for another. so what? its still a black box (literally).

Yeah but most companies have a few dozen models, Tesla has 4.

S launched in 2012.

X launched in 2016.

Both launched with slow rollouts.

Meanwhile, the average car in use today is 13 years old and getting older. (I currently drive a 22 year old car)

It definitely turns me off buying a used model S to know it's being discontinued. And if I extrapolate that to the 3/Y, a new purchase.

Given my desire for a midsize family sedan, it makes it feel like BMW i4 or Porsche Taycan just won me over in the future.

The problem is that Tesla in step 1 and 2 was a ground-breaking EV market leader.

Tesla step 6 Optimus robot is not. Others are ahead, with less hype and more delivery. See Boston Dynamics / Hyundai