Such a shame that Tesla will need to report the Robotaxi rollout due to tariffs /s. I kid you not - this is a great excuse and they will 100% use it in some way.<p>It's already clear for a lot of people that the numbers at Tesla don't add up. They were able to cut a lot of (legal and accounting...) corners when they were growing quickly, but it will be much more complicated now when they are contracting.<p>Sure they can kick the can down the road a bit, let's say for 4 years during which US seems to be akin to a Banana Republic, but what's the end game ?<p>Is there anyone serious who still believes that this is a 1 Trillion $ company ? I would love to hear some serious arguments (other than projecting 100s of Billions $ from Robotaxis next year...)
I think it would have been very apparent at the start of 2024 that Tesla cannot compete with the Chinese manufacturers on cost. And Robotaxi is an attempt to expand beyond the luxury car bracket before someone eats that lunch. Without the article spin, the decisions could be quite sensible for the market at that time. It also helps explain the lengths Musk has since gone to to ensure Chinese manufacturers don't get access to the US market.
Meanwhile on wall street, one sane analyst were pegging a valuation of $424 billion for robotaxis and ARK invest projected $240 billion in ebitda for robotaxis.<p>Creative writing > bean counting
<a href="https://www.barrons.com/articles/tesla-valuation-ai-stock-price-1ccb2c46" rel="nofollow">https://www.barrons.com/articles/tesla-valuation-ai-stock-pr...</a>
<p><pre><code> We had lots of modeling that showed the payback around FSD [Full Self Driving] and Robotaxi was going to be slow. It was going to be choppy. It was going to be very, very hard outside of the U.S., given the regulatory environment or lack of regulatory environment.
</code></pre>
I wonder how they originally thought it would roll out?<p>Somewhat related, but did anyone see the EV event in China a few days ago? Have any opinions?
"One of the people familiar with the analysis said:
There is ultimately a saturation of people who want to be ferried around in somebody else’s car."<p>I think this is wrong. i think Musk is right about this.<p>People don't want to or cannot drive, people don't want to find public transport, people just want to get where they are going as cheaply as possible.<p>Robotaxis have to be cheaper than normal taxis with a person driving and charging wages.
This article is more Musk bashing, but I’d like to add that this is very common in companies private or public, large or small.<p>CEOs and/or senior leaders get ideas stuck in their head and it becomes apparent that no amount of analysis is going to change it. Then the product/expense is more of a “we’re doing this, how do I do it the least risky/least expensive way.”<p>This isn’t just products. I’ve seen examples at prior companies I worked for. It’s for getting that additional jet (we got a 3rd jet, all calcs and opinions was definitely unnecessary and barely used) or putting in this additional massive plant in a non-union state to brag about how state of the art/no risk from unions we were (plant never hit anywhere near capacity just like prior analysis showed, waste of money and eventually sold at a loss.) That said, there are lots of examples where projects and products did work where analysis failed them.<p>This is where CEOs can steamroll their boards, especially when they are also the Chairman.
Um, yeah, rolling out something that hasn't been done before (large scale robotaxi service) is going to be slow, choppy, and hard. What did they think the analysis would show? Ask Google about how hard this is even with a handful of taxis, let alone a million a year.
smart move, to shut down internal dissent, on.something the rest of the industry is moving towards as fast as possible, up.to including flying robo taxis bieng given the green light in China.
Given that tesla, and the varios x group have very deap resouces pertaining to navigation and automation, an internal report of iminent failure does seem very strange indeed
Not that I particularly support Musk in any way or the things they stand for, it's a great goddamn shame that they dropped the project.
Even if the company in itself would not be monetarily as good as they would've liked, there's still basically an infinite amount of _value_ that they can still create.<p>But alas, that is not what the for profit public companies have a mandate to do.<p>If the maths come to about ±0 then there would be tons of goodwill to be gained by spinning up the robo-taxi project as a non-profit org.
Given the way AI is advancing it would be really dumb to not go hard on Robotaxi. That's it. That's the analysis.<p>If you think AI progress is going to hit a wall or Tesla's AI in particular is going to hit a wall then sure spin up a Model 2 and prepare for a long grueling endless war with BYD.
I used to be so upset at this king of bullshitters. Had paid for FSD I think a decade back and it never came. But now I look around and see he is a mere product of his environment. Nothing to get angry about.