| ▲ | Tesla Hasn't Had a Successful New Product Launch Since JB Straubel Stepped Down(cleantechnica.com) |
| 106 points by gumby 38 minutes ago | 52 comments |
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| ▲ | Avicebron 30 minutes ago | parent | next [-] |
| Isn't Tesla trying to be SpaceX's vertically integrated robotics division? My gut feeling says they are trying to move out of the EV business as crazy as that may seem to us normals. |
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| ▲ | matthewdgreen 24 minutes ago | parent | next [-] | | Being in the EV business means having to accept predictable revenues that then tie to more predictable stock prices. Being in the business of "some future technology" doesn't. | | |
| ▲ | stymaar a few seconds ago | parent [-] | | The big problem for Tesla is that they cannot sustain their valuation from the car manufacturing business. There's a perpetual need to justify why Tesla should be valued an order of magnitude more than other automakers. |
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| ▲ | martythemaniak 26 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Not crazy at all. Tesla gave up being a car company a few years ago, but there's lot of inertia and the 3 and Y are still competitive products in the marketplace. | | |
| ▲ | slowin 21 minutes ago | parent [-] | | Crazy that they have a $1.4T market cap while having given up their entire business (which was never worth a fraction of that anyway). | | |
| ▲ | judge2020 a minute ago | parent | next [-] | | I think the market is mainly banking on Robotaxi being nationwide in 5 years, and Optimus being ready in 10. For robotaxi, the last 2 years has shown us that FSD 14 has solved the really hard parts of autonomy, so the next logical step is some percentage of people deciding not to own their next car and instead only getting around by Robotaxi. This is not a bad play by the market. They're poised to absorb some amount of the costs that people are currently paying to (A) own a car, (B) pay interest on the loan, and (C) pay for car insurance. And C does not carry meaningful risk as autonomous vehicles are de-facto safer drivers. Then the market is kind of putting their faith in giving Tesla 10 years to apply the same playbook to humanoid robots and all of the jobs that that _could_ replace (remains to be seen how capable they can actually make it and what the economics will look like). | |
| ▲ | buran77 18 minutes ago | parent | prev [-] | | Their charging network and carbon credits revenue were probably the more valuable parts of the company. Tesla's current promise and foundation for that valuation is that they'll deliver fully autonomous driving. But Musk has enough avenues to spin things left and right and bury any losses in the process his DOGE assault helped a lot bury some things already) so he'll do that. He's a showman and he'll manage to steal the show for as long as it takes. |
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| ▲ | slowin 23 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | It’s especially crazy since they sell cars and do not sell robots. Both of Musk’s public companies are little more than financial fraud. That the SEC allows any of this gives me zero confidence in the entire market. | | |
| ▲ | mschuster91 14 minutes ago | parent | next [-] | | > That the SEC allows any of this gives me zero confidence in the entire market. It will be truly nasty for the next President. All of this shit is going to blow up hard, even worse than 2007 was. With any luck, it will blow up during Trump's final months, but in the truly worst case it will collapse during the early time of whoever the next President is, which means no matter who gets the job will get smoked in the 2030 midterms - in turn ending up like Obama who didn't have a majority of his own for six years (or, in the even worse case, end up like Biden who didn't survive the reelection against someone as unlikeable as Trump). | | |
| ▲ | parineum 9 minutes ago | parent | next [-] | | Obama didn't do much with his two years of majority anyway. Plus, president's don't usually have more than two years of majority. | |
| ▲ | kraken_cult 12 minutes ago | parent | prev [-] | | The cynic in me would say, "all according to plan", it will be right before the new house and senate are going to roll out universal healthcare or something equally good for the average person. Better to get head of it before that happens. |
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| ▲ | enaaem 11 minutes ago | parent | prev [-] | | Hyundai has been making robots for decades. Imagine the hype if Tesla did half the things Hyundai is doing. |
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| ▲ | alpha_squared 25 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Pretending Tesla isn't a car company and SpaceX isn't a satellite services company (Internet, maybe mobile) is wild stuff. The only real profits are from those traditional industries. All the sci-fi hype is for investors and fanatics. | | |
| ▲ | kevin_thibedeau 20 minutes ago | parent | next [-] | | Those are just side projects. SpaceX is now an AI company. All their phony future revenue projections are dependent on magic numbers cooked up by a drug addict who convinces people to believe his stream of lies. | |
| ▲ | jordanb 23 minutes ago | parent | prev [-] | | Value the company by the sizzle not the steak. And before it fails completely fold it into the next grift. Sounds far fetched but it's been working for Elon for years. | | |
| ▲ | malfist 20 minutes ago | parent [-] | | Anyone with half a brain can see him stacking his house of cards higher and higher, but yet the market and investors love him. You can't tell me there's a rational reason there's a common headline of Tesla missing forecast and guidance but still going up after earning report |
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| ▲ | Zigurd a minute ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | It's not "crazy," it's flim flam. It's what Elizabeth Holmes would've look like had she bought a health tech firm before starting the Thernos scam so she could pump her stock to a P/E ratio over 300 instead of scamming naïve noob tech investors. | |
| ▲ | aNoob7000 16 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | The problem I see is with focus. Elon/Tesla seems to go after the next big thing every couple of years without a real plan. I'm surprised that the markets have given Elon the amount of slack he's gotten. Once you merge Tesla into SpaceX, what's the plan? Tesla can't seem to roll out new vehicles with different body styling. Is robotics or AI the next big thing? What will happen to their car business? Will it just be CyberCabs? Will they become a mobile phone carrier? The list of questions goes on and on. All this feels like a YC company looking for a new line of business because they just figured out their current line of business isn't all that great. | | | |
| ▲ | notatoad 26 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | is this something that's actually happening, or just something elon told investors at his optimus event with the obviously fake robots a couple years ago? | |
| ▲ | __MatrixMan__ 4 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Musk's companies are good at entering a stagnated industry and proving that it can work better if radically changed. But once the new concept is proved, they seem kinda spent, a pivot makes sense to me. It'll be interesting to see if they can do well in places where there aren't a bunch of stagnant incumbents to upset. I'm sure Musk would love to edgelord his way through a conversation where he offends a bunch of people by implying that they have been doing asteroid mining all wrong, those idiots, and then go prove himself right, but there's just nobody doing that. | |
| ▲ | mschuster91 19 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > My gut feeling says they are trying to move out of the EV business as crazy as that may seem to us normals. It's not that crazy. The last new release of a truly mainstream car was the Model 3 a decade ago. Anything ever since has been facelifts and the ill-fated Cybercuck. The major problem Tesla faces is that on the one side their brand image is in the gutters and has been for years and on the other side, "established" car companies finally have brought competitive cars to the market at relevant scale. They'll need to invest a lot of money to develop a new model from scratch with a high chance of not making back the money. | |
| ▲ | thinkingtoilet 26 minutes ago | parent | prev [-] | | It's not crazy at all. Elon, in all his genius, built up an EV company and then alienated the core demographic for his product. They tried to salvage it with a wildly over-priced, virtue-signaling "truck" and that didn't work. There are literally millions and millions of Americans who would have other wise loved to buy a Tesla but will never buy one because of Elon. They have to pivot. |
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| ▲ | martincsweiss 16 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| There's too many confounders to say that JB Straubel is the cause. Examples: Covid controversies around musk in 2020, Twitter acquisition in 2022, Musk becoming the world richest person in 2021 |
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| ▲ | 0xy 24 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Cybercab seems to have had a very promising start, metrics are good. This seems far more of a political hate piece than one based on any data. |
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| ▲ | Levitating 22 minutes ago | parent | next [-] | | Isn't it completely overshadowed by Waymo? From what I've heard Waymo is more profitable and has substantially fewer accidents due to better technology. | | |
| ▲ | CrimsonRain a few seconds ago | parent | next [-] | | Did you take a look at amount of money waymo is losing let alone profit? Unsupervised robotaxi has lower (at fault) accidents than unsupervised waymo. All notable cybercab accidents have been done by remote driving. The only thing waymo have are
- large fleet thus large miles/week
- many cities In last week or so, Tesla went from tiny to equal/more than waymo in Austin seemingly in just a few days. They'll do that in other cities too in due time. | |
| ▲ | mbajkowski 6 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Tesla has had a massive surge in cybercabs in Austin over the last few weeks. I would venture to say they have surpassed the number of Waymos over here. Don't have any numbers to back this up though. As for being profitable, it seems the cost of a cybercab should be much less than a Waymo. | |
| ▲ | DoesntMatter22 11 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Waymo isn't profitable at all. It's a massive money loser. And in some cities Tesla is nearly at parity | |
| ▲ | ftchd 14 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | There always gonna be both Pepsi and Cola. | | |
| ▲ | grandpajoey 6 minutes ago | parent [-] | | Except I can go to the store and buy a Coke and a Pepsi. Musk’s vaporware doesn’t actually exist in the market. | | |
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| ▲ | strulovich 15 minutes ago | parent | prev [-] | | If a few things work out for Tesla they can do overshadow Waymo very quickly. Waymo’s entire fleet is estimated at about 6000 cars.
Tesla produces this many cars in a little over a day. The cybercab is also likely to end up costing 1/10th of a Waymo car It’s not that Tesla is winning here. But the economics of their solution can totally tilt the entire market in the future. | | |
| ▲ | ben_w 5 minutes ago | parent [-] | | > If a few things work out for Tesla they can do overshadow Waymo very quickly. If. I've been reading the same thing each year since basically the first version of Tesla's car AI. I'm sure I've even written similar things. |
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| ▲ | grandpajoey 4 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | The Cybercab has not had a promising start. Years behind schedule, available nowhere and Musk has negative brand value. Another DOA Tesla scam. | |
| ▲ | jazzypants 16 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | There are millions of Americans like me who will never step foot in one because of their association with Elon Musk. That's an insane negative attribute that Waymo doesn't have to worry about. I hate the Alphabet guys too, but not to the same extent of completely boycotting all their products (yet). | | |
| ▲ | losvedir a few seconds ago | parent | next [-] | | Speaking as someone who follows the NFL, people will forgive all kinds of horrendous behavior if the player's team is winning. It's easy to say things in the abstract like "won't buy a Tesla" because most people aren't really shopping for a car all that often. But if the cybertaxi works and is cheap, then I would guess a lot of people won't be sticking to their proclaimed values. That said, I have my doubts that cybercab will really work all that well. | |
| ▲ | parineum 3 minutes ago | parent | prev [-] | | > There are millions of Americans like me who will never step foot in one because of their association with Elon Musk. You guys have to realize at some point that you're not a significant part of the market. There are a lot of people who don't particularly like musk but the amount that would never use a cybercab isn't a significant part of a 300m person market. | | |
| ▲ | jazzypants a minute ago | parent [-] | | Yeah, sure. That's why Tesla sales have fallen for two consecutive years ever since he exposed himself as a fascist. You keep telling yourself that, buddy. |
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| ▲ | underseacables 19 minutes ago | parent | prev [-] | | It was very strange, in the beginning people celebrated Tesla, they raved about it, the sales were great, but then as soon as the politics got involved, suddenly it's all turned negative. | | |
| ▲ | y0ssar1an 2 minutes ago | parent | next [-] | | Elon's cognitive decline from drug addiction affected both his business and political decision making. pre-ketamine Elon delivered the Falcon 9, Model 3/Y, and Starlink. post-ketamine Elon gave us Cybertruck, Starship (aka the SpaceX Cybertruck), and a bunch of fake products like the flying roadster, humanoid robots, and Cybercab. | |
| ▲ | MrBuddyCasino 13 minutes ago | parent | prev [-] | | Almost as if journalists were paid partisan hacks. | | |
| ▲ | lanstin 8 minutes ago | parent [-] | | The early Tesla fans are politically engaged woke people. Having to settle for new Leaf now but in some ways it’s nicer than Model 3. And more friendly to my kids networks of ethnically diverse trans and queer friends and partners. And less scary for the many immigrant communities in my neighborhood. |
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| ▲ | xqcgrek2 25 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Tesla is one china EV tariff away from bankruptcy |
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| ▲ | sowhat1 11 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Exceptional success is both timing and having an exceptional team. But yea, let's keep attributing it to great man theory, because that's more digestible and people like to mythologize a single person. |
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| ▲ | ckdarby 19 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Is this a paid piece behind the scenes by JB Straubel? It reads exactly as someone who was paid or got exclusive access to write something to over highlight someone. |
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| ▲ | troupo 28 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Elon had an insane talent of finding the right people with wild moonshot ideas to run his companies while he was getting the credit and the limelight. Then he got older, got into politics and fully bought into the marketing about himself. He thinks he's a genius and that everything he touches turns to gold. Well... Turns out stuff works as long as he is out of the loop and doesn't make any direct decisions. |
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| ▲ | swiftcoder 16 minutes ago | parent [-] | | > Turns out stuff works as long as he is out of the loop and doesn't make any direct decisions This is not unique to Musk - many tech CEOs learn this the hard way when they start meddling in the day-to-day. Bezos built an empire, but the projects he took personal control of (like FirePhone) tended to be unmitigated disasters. | | |
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| ▲ | jdross 24 minutes ago | parent | prev [-] |
| FSD that actually works and the massively popular in live markets robotaxi service are the obvious answer to “big-deal things that came after this CTO left” $2B cybertruck failure barely registers vs how impactful FSD has been on model Y / 3 sales. Tesla is supply constrained again, with multi-month waits for the model Y L edition |
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