Here is my take: Pros: - expanding energy storage (50% y2y in 2024, expect similar in 2025) - IMO this is the brightest spot. - humanoid robot, this I think is totally unchartered territory, we know china is using a lot in industrial settings so does amazon use robots for warehouse management etc., Not sure how and which market tsla is targeting? Could be huge opportunity with no meaningful competitors in usa: general dynamic has been doing so for years but i dont think it is AI. Cons: - ev sales are being decimated everywhere: us, europe and china (taken over by BYD) - brand tarnishment due to political meddling.
Elon Musk can do great things! Lone Skum* pisses people off ! *when he dresses in black and goes political
Forgot the robot. Its going to take forever. First FSD needs to be fully deployed and vision only needs to be shown to be effective. I have my doubts. It will suffer in bad weather conditions, or even glare. I think its still years away from truly working for most people in most cities, and that's if it ever gets there being a vision only system. The robot will need to do things even more complex than driving. Its like you are training a toddler at home, but they will never grow up. Perhaps it will be able to lift stuff for you and carry heavy things, but no way is it going to be able to put clothes in the washer, change to dryer, and then fold them, all without help. This is many years away. Maybe I'm wrong, but I see Tesla going bankrupt before they truly have the next killer product like FSD or robots flying off the shelves.
This is all such bullshit. A toddler can do more and learn faster. Nobody is going to pay 25k for a robot that you still have to train. It better come ready out of the box with no down time and able to work 24/7. But I highly doubt this. It will be a gimmick and a toy. Perfect for the factory, I agree, but not for home us anytime soon. I can see these things stocking shelves in a store, which means even less money for people though. So these robots will price themselves out. The more that regular businesses use robots, the less money that people have to buy them. Look at the cybercab. First of all, Elon isn't even talking FSD for Model 3s. Now you need to buy a cybercab if you want it to make you money. But imagine if the Model 3 can operate like a cyber cab. This means that most people no longer need to buy a car, so you don't need to buy a Tesla. In major cities, there are already enough Tesla's that if you put them into Robocab service, there don't need to be car sales anymore, and this will hurt Tesla even more.
the second paragraph is true. With FSD taxis you need like 1/10th the number of cars. Of course taxis are more expensive than car ownership, so Elon makes more money with fewer assets. Have you see Ubers income statement.
I have not... but aren't they always losing money? The drivers are of course the biggest expense, so if they can cut this cost by 80%, the service would likely be nicely profitable. But the pushback I get is that a car like Waymo costs 6 figures with all the sensors, and hence why Elon is trying to go vision only with FSD. The thing for Elon though is that he was always selling the idea that you would be your own taxi service. Then when the cybercab came out, I figured this was nail in the coffin. Why would Elon, even though this is what he advertised, want to let someone else have the profit and running their own cab service if his technology would finally allow for it? So it made sense to make a different car that is more applicable for daily taxi service and then keep all the profits. But I'm sure its going to be stuck for years in continued development and slow rollout to additional cities. By then, Tesla might go bankrupt and he taken private.
They made 5 billion in net income TTM and expected to make 6.5 next 12 months. Pretty profitable and still growing like mad. in first world countries, automation pays for itself pretty fast. The payback on a 100k Waymo is pretty fast compared to a 40k Chevy yellow cab and 3 shifts of Bangladeshi drivers earning minimum wage.
I don't disagree that once the FSD is up and running, then profits can start to roll in. But at the same time, imagine how much competition there could be in the market. What if your $4 ride could only be $3 from a competitor? It could be a race to the bottom. One major Bitcoin guy, Jeff Booth, says that with technology, everything drops down to the cost of production. It could be that these companies one day make just pennies from every ride. It of course adds up when you're serving tens of thousands of rides every day in just one city. Look at AI right now. The LLM monthly subscription model hasn't really taken off. Every week is another model, and a new competitor doing it better and cheaper. So if your profits from running a taxi service are too high, its only a matter of time until someone undercuts you.
This theory has been posited for 3 decades and instead we’ve gotten a winner takes all market place where the winner gets outsized profits. in the example of Uber, Lyft (the second biggest) is 1/10th the size of uber.