On the one hand, Tesla's all in on automation now, on the other they just walked back their promise of full self driving for vehicles sold from 2016-2023. [1]
Apparently, they're just washing their hands of the matter and leaving out to dry the quarter million people that spent up to $15,000 on the hope that Tesla would develop them an OTA update to enable FSD with cameras. But three days later, they're also saying that automation is the most important thing to the company?
Given these two conflicting reports, is there any hope that Tesla will come to their senses and start putting LIDAR in new vehicles? I don't expect Musk to acknowledge that he was wrong, even with all the documented claims in the past about the feasibility of FSD with cameras... but it's 2025, does it matter if anyone calls him on it? Just put a LIDAR brow on the 2027 models and full steam ahead!
I'd be willing to bet that lidar is not the decisive difference between AVS that work and those that don't. I bet it's the geospatial data. Without the kind of data that Google gets from maps and other geospatial products, making an AV is not practical with current technology.
> Apparently, they're just washing their hands of the matter and leaving out to dry the quarter million people that spent up to $15,000 on the hope that Tesla would develop them an OTA update to enable FSD with cameras.
Well, just like any reliable company (in the crypto/"AI" space) that screws up with false claims like "Auto-Pilot", "Full-Self" Driving, "AI" Taxis (all within the next 2-5 years - of course those are claims > 10 years old) it just wants to move on and leave all the bad hype behind. Responsibility be damned, hype that stonck !
There was an interesting interview with Martin Eberhard, the Tesla founder the other day - Musk came in as an investor. A lot of the build a sports car then luxury car then regular then cheap plan was Eberhard, the FSD and robots stuff was Musk. (youtube link https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=88KHfX_kPIY&t=990s)
> The company's sales have collapsed across the world
Well, that's news to me. According to Tesla's presentations and quarterly SEC reports, sales have most definitely not "collapsed." In the most recent quarter, revenues decreased 12%, to a still-gargantuan $22.5B/quarter, compared to the same quarter last year. Compared to the previous quarter, revenues actually increased by 16%. Yes, increased. The business generated positive US GAAP earnings and positive free cash flow. The company ended the quarter with $37B in cash, compared to $31B in cash a year ago.[a]
Note that during the most recent quarter, the company had to change-over all its factories to start making the updated Model Y, its best-selling vehicle.
I'd be curious to see how the updated Model Y does over the remainder of the year.
It's hard to take the OP seriously when it exaggerates about facts that are easily verifiable.
The article is talking about car sales, you're talking about revenues. Those are two different things. For instance, a very large portion of Tesla revenues comes from leasing and carbon credits rather than car sales. In terms of car sales, Tesla's share of the market is at it's lowest point since 2017. In most of the world, Tesla sales are very significantly down.
As a counterpoint, Apple Inc, stopped using Apple Computers Inc, only years after it had diversified it's production with consumer electronics, software, and cloud services.
Tesla is predominantly known for it's cars. Now, it wants to do AI, taxi, solar, power supply. And it's financing this through their cofounder being the pied piper to investors.
public companies have been running on the fumes of speculative value, or some hypothetical future value according to off-the-chart P/E ratios. this is nothing new for musk. he has been promising some future that always needs to look beyond what others can envision and promise. whether we want that future, or whether he can and he will get us there that is immaterial. as long as he is moving the "future evaluation carrot" away from the investors at a steady pace he will do it.
from this point of view, his goal was never to be the best car company. it was never to serve the customers the best way possible, or have the best value. china has achieved all of that and a lot more so he needs to move the carrot again. that's it.
Let's stipulate the Tesla has done the best job of building a network of chargers that actually works. On that basis, Tesla could spin it off as the highest valued charging network in existence.
The problem is that charging revenue provides Tesla an astronomical contribution to the share price, with Tesla's current price to earnings ratio. It would only make sense to sell it if Tesla were pressed for cash. Instead Tesla has more cash than they've felt like deploying to, for example, update their product line. No need to pile more on top of that.
That problem is solved, but unfortunately the bottleneck has been for the longest time the larger, more complex electrical equipment that is used to connect chargers to the grid. Companies like the Finland-based Kempower produce the best charging equipment on the market, but their problems start where their equipment ends: the grid.
I've looked at this space from an infrastructure investment perspective. Its really tough, and generally not considered "infrastructure" by most infra folks because of the lack of long term revenue contracts. There is not a great way to underwrite the risk of utilization of the chargers. The customers need to show up. Unless you can guarantee some of the revenue, you have a lot of capex with no clear path to repay it. The chargers also require a lot of maintenance and the grid connection is challenging with low consumption and high peak load, and long wait to get connected... Investors have been staying away.
Gas stations are a tough business, too. But they've had a century to develop a working business model. A charging station is different enough that the business has entered the race to the bottom before they figured out how to adapt the gas station business model profitably.
I know people in the sector who made a lot of money from very quickly from installing charging equipment when it was a novelty. They think it's a race to the bottom now, and I don't think it's going get more profitable, certainly not Tesla-valuation level profitable
I read that as “niche for Tesla”. It’s not what their primary product was supposed to be. But, with more EVs being compatible, it might end up being the most stable part of the company. It’s not as sexy as cars, robots, or robotaxis, but it should be consistently profitable.
There is one autonomous ride provider that can count on 1 billion people a day turning on an app that tracks their location, heading, and speed. I strongly suspect this data makes a lot more difference than a lidar sensor.
They were laser-focused, and executed beautifully, on sustainable energy through beautiful EVs and innovative solar products. It's clear that they think that this mission is no longer profitable and that betting the farm on tulips [^0] is the only path to their survival.
Their latest Master Plan is so telling of this. You can tell that Elon wrote the first two plans. They were proud enough to post them on their website, even. The third was some IR-fluff on autonomy, and their latest one looks LLM-generated and says a lot without saying anything. It's also not on their website, which is odd.
I love our two Teslas. They're incredible cars, and FSD (which was always an aspirational name, and it's depressing to see them walk back on those aspirations) has no other in the market. Shame to see them spiral.
The success of Tesla is largely tied to the fact that Elon bet the farm on what he believed the puck was going while most automakers where very cautious.
The market has changed, the brand is not as strong (and even considered toxic by many) but more importantly Chinese automakers are eating this market on all fronts.
Now, moving to robotics and AI is a different story, Elon is following the puck and is Tesla is already quite behind, and again China is in pole position.
Besides, this is an even riskier bet than EV in practice, the AI hype is stalling and many are predicting a loud pop of the bubble.
Also, the technology behind humanoid robots could take a very long time to become useful.
I don't know why they double-downed on self driving which feels like a strange gimmick, why not, hey this car is more fun to drive than the competition and cheaper than ICE vehicles in the long term.
It becomes immediately obvious that there is no plan, it is just advertising the things Tesla has been doing already.
The picture at the top that shows a robot which, as usual, performs an easy task in a clean, dust and dirt free environment, may indicate that they'll focus more on robots. That is it.
Since the stock price is decoupled from all realities, they can do whatever they want.
I think anyone could have seen this from miles away based on:
1. China is going to own the EV market. The only thing that can temporarily stop Chinese EVs from dominating in every country is massive tariffs. But this is not a long-term strategy.
2. Sentiment is low on EV due to Trump
I think the problem with Musk's strategy is that self-driving will also become a commodity over time. There's no reason that only Teslas will be able to drive themselves. Further more, I don't see why China's robotics won't do the same to Tesla's EVs. In fact, I believe China's robotics are world leading at the moment.
That can be said about everything so does it play out in real? For e.g. phones have been labeled as commodities a while ago. But, are they?
Edit:
Self driving is a super specialized tech and it’s still not fully developed yet. A lot of weak areas. I don’t see it getting commoditized in the next 20 or 30 years.
The real opportunity would be in monetizing the time that people would be getting back while not driving.
It's a potential commodity in that there is potentially no network effect stopping people from using any competitor that offers a cheaper ride, unlike how when you're an iPhone user you get locked into Apple's ecosystem. But then there's the thing where despite having had 18 years to catch up, nobody makes phones (including software) better than Apple.
One potential moat is just the amount of data from real drivers that Tesla use to train their models via imitation learning. If this turns out the be important and needed for a general solution (which I believe it will), then only companies that manufacture cars at scale can hope to compete. And at this point, only Chinese companies are forward looking enough to put the right hardware for self driving (and the ability to collect training data) into their cars by default. Tesla has the vertical integration that makes this whole thing much easier: they make the cars, the inference compute, the software AND the training clusters. Can you imagine GM or Ford building a GPU cluster for a couple of billion?
1. Have an option for long-term rental fleet - on a per-day or per-month basis. Provide a 40+ inch screen in the back for people to use the car as an office on wheels. Equip it with a Super high-speed network. Launch an app store on that screen or charge a premium for other apps.
2. Provide an option to get unlimited booze, food, essentials by partnering with Food delivery apps
3. Convert big SUVs/RVs into self-driving vehicles to enable them to be rented by families for summer picnics, long travel, and wedding trips. Many people still dislike air travel, especially given the current issues with flight delays, baggage limitations, and other uncertainties. Any alternative would be a huge win. Imagine travelling for 12+ hours overnight while having the comfort of a home.
4. Make it possible to deliver food, drinks, and essentials anywhere - via drones or other partners, if they've rented your self-driving vehicle.
5. Have super-comfy interiors just like a private jet. Of course, people would love it.
There's no moat in anything you listed. If you want a mobile app you need either Apple or Google's permission to get it. The roads are a public good, they by law cannot be monopolized by a single company (or two).
The difference is that in the phone market, you have one premium brand that makes all of the profit from hardware sales (Apple), one that makes money by manufacturing hardware for the non premium brands (Samsung) and one that gets a cut from all of the manufacturers for licensing (Qualcomm) even when they use non Qualcomm chips.
Tesla’s brand is toxic and seeing declining sales, China is doing the manufacturing, and no one is going to license Tesla’s inferior unproven technology compared to Waymo.
Yes, yes they are. There are new (second-tier, semi-competitive) phone manufacturers popping up almost every year, e.g. Nothing[0].
Once self-driving has been generally "cracked", with the normal mobility of talent, most other car manufacturers will catch up on a timespan that's too small for the first-mover to completely dominate the market with that alone.
> There are new (second-tier, semi-competitive) phone manufacturers popping up almost every year, e.g. Nothing[0].
Good for them. Meanwhile, the vast majority of smartphones people buy, and the vast majority of profits from smartphones, are coming from Apple, Samsung, OnePlus, Xiaomi, and maybe Sony. There are no signs whatsoever of the market commodifying.
I think it is more likely that self driving in the way people have been led to believe would happen never will. Not from Tesla and not from anyone else. Which is bad for Tesla because they have put too many eggs into that basket.
The only thing they have left is the car and they are falling farther and farther behind.
Well that's pretty obvious now that all the technology transfer needed for Chinese companies to catch up have been realised. Realistically though the CCP will want to keep the lead in market where they have crushed the competition with their state sponsored champions; this was the case with photovoltaic panels, and this seems to be the case with their car (computer-on-wheels) manufacturer.
That’s what the now retired leadership wanted though, they got their $10 million paycheck and comfortable retirement in the west, now it’s time for current leadership to clean up.
manual driving is clearly, sooner or later, going out the door. getting from A to B has been getting commodified and the notion of a "car" is rapidly moving towards "private bus".
elon can see this direction. whoever invents self-driving cars first, will kill cars as we know it, completely. so it makes sense then, that if anyone should invent what kills tesla, it should be tesla.
alot of elon hate on hn but he is making objectively very good bets. he doesn't have a pr department like the other guys do (who direct their entire wardrobe, body language, gestures, do speech coaching, etc.), and i suppose we can say that the pr guys are vindicated! zuck, gates, cook, all rehabilitated their public image no-problem.
Betting on solely camera vision for self-driving is not objectively a very good bet. It's not even a good bet. There still are zero self-driving Tesla's on the road. Zero.
It's even likely there will be legislation forcing LIDAR for self driving cars. Elon cannot flip the switch on self driving until they have millions of intervention free miles under their belt. Right now Tesla gets ~500 miles without intervention. One kid gets decked and the law will shutter his plan.
There is another layer too, where because of his polarizing personality, a lot of critical talent is inaccessible to him. Keep in mind Elon is doing -none- of the engineering besides the social engineering. He relies on talented people who want to work for him. I know many talented people who could make a difference for Tesla, but none who would ever give Elon a single minute of time.
Over last 6 months, since their latest upgrade, I have been driving my Tesla mostly on FSD. And it is nothing short of amazing, out of this world. The car drives like a pro and exceptions have become very rare. You have to drive this to believe it. Unlike Waymo which is full of gizmos, this is just a regular car that drives itself. The bet on camera and simplified architecture shows here.
If you just extrapolate what has already been possible and bet on the pace of growth of AI algorithms and techniques, robotaxi is almost a certainity and humanoid robots a possibility.
We've all been reading this exact comment for years now. Maybe it's actually different this time, I don't know.
What I do know is that I took multiple Waymo rides last week where those "gizmos" delivered a safe drive with no one in the driver's seat and zero unsafe exceptions. "Very rare exceptions" isn't even close to good enough for me to put my kid's life at stake.
Why would I care whether Tesla has maybe gotten closer to what they've been promising for a decade, but still having "very rare" extremely unsafe exceptions, when Waymo is objectively delivering full level 4 self driving to hundreds of thousands of people per week with an essentially flawless safety record?
It has felt much much better in recent months. Did a drive from SF to Yosemite that was basically fully autonomous - can’t do that on Waymo. That being said, I still had two issues in the city where it completely screwed up by being in the wrong lane. Humans make the same error but my one concern was that it doesn’t realize it’s in the wrong lane and try to safely just go the wrong direction and recover and instead just tries to take the “correct” route at all costs which can be a safety issue.
I agree that Waymo is generally safer for in city driving. It’s still not technically fully autonomous even though it appears that way; it has a lot of support people on the backend to resolve when the cars get stuck and whatnot. Waymo still can’t go on the highway or leave well-defined city limits whereas I can use my Tesla on every trip I’ve taken. I think comma.ai is a closer comparison point at this time as I can’t have a Waymo for my own personal use that I can take anywhere whenever.
"Humans make the same error but my one concern was that it doesn’t realize it’s in the wrong lane"
This is actually very deadly.. at least humans will signal / try do something in a safe manner to continue going on. An autonomous vehicle may behave in unpredictable ways and cause carnage. It only takes one incident to completely shutter it forever.
> at least humans will signal / try do something in a safe manner to continue going on
Your experience must be very different. I've been on the road long enough to know that humans will try all sorts of things to not avoid missing the turn & Tesla behaved very similarly.
FWIW, it was signalling all the right ways and no collision seemed imminent and I doubt it would have gotten into an accident. I just didn't want it acting like an asshole on the road and didn't trust it enough to let the situation play out by itself.
As someone that has driven thousands of miles, and encountered some interesting roundabouts and junctions - I cannot relate to your experience whatsoever.
"I just didn't want it acting like an asshole on the road and didn't trust it enough to let the situation play out by itself."
So basically you had to intervene and it doesnt meet the standard of a fully autonomous vehicle. Do all the mental gymnastics all you want mate lmao.
I don’t understand the vision bet. As a consumer, I want self driving with expectations of it being reliable and affordable. Again as a consumer I couldn’t care any less how it “works”. If someone is able to produce a car using more than just vision that works first, they will be the winner.
"if the human brain can do it purely on optics, then so should we. if we need extra sensors that the human doesn't have, that means the model is worse than the human brain."
i can totally see that going through elons 105iq head. and there is something to be said there. kind of, "no cheating allowed!", where "cheating" is defined as "a sensor the human wouldn't have had".
whether it has value... well... thats hard to say, but you have to make a bet i suppose. the waymos are very expensive with their sensor arrangements. maybe that can be made cheap?
We still have tens of thousands of car-related deaths in the US.
Also, if doing it a different way than a human is cheating...are they sending data via organically grown neurons in the car? Didn't know that. Looks like "cheating" to me.
Maybe it makes sense in Musks' head.
Me - I want the car to be better than the human brain.
> Betting on solely camera vision for self-driving is not objectively a very good bet.
Maybe, maybe not. It's quite remarkable how far he's been able to go with camera only. And he's not the only one who went the camera route--GM Super Cruise, Subaru Eyesight, etc., work that way as well. There is still no mass-produced car with LIDAR. At worst, the camera tech has kept Tesla at the front of where the industry has actually been going the last 5 years.
Looking at the bigger picture, I'm not sure you can point to someone who has made as many good bets in different engineering fields as Elon. Elon is the opposite of the Gell Manning effect: you think he's wrong about areas you are educated about, and he proves you wrong. You can find my posts on HN mocking SpaceX for going with an oxygen/RP1 rocket as if we were back at the dawn of space travel. Boy was that wrong!
Elon of 2012 was a dramatically different person than Elon of 2025. And like I pointed out he is talent constrained. Elon is not developing camera vision. He is seeking and hiring talented software people to do it. In 2012 Elon was celebrated and going to work for Tesla was a prestigious career. Something you could flex.
Today you would be embarrassed to mention you took at job at Tesla, especially when so many other big name prestigious companies will pay the same or more for those same skills Elon desperately needs.
I doubt that factors into most people’s decisions. If anything, aerospace and automotive engineers tend to lean centrist to conservative: https://par.nsf.gov/servlets/purl/10529569 (Table 5). And aerospace is disproportionately white men compared to other engineering fields.
Additionally, my observation is that reactions to Musk are heavily influenced by individual levels of empathy, and “people focused versus systems focused” thinking. In my experience aerospace engineers are pretty low empathy and low people focus. When I got my degree in aerospace engineering in the early aughts—before SpaceX and the reboot of commercial aerospace—the most exciting job to look forward to was designing missiles for Raytheon and stuff like that. When I worked for a military contractor, the hypothetical scenarios always involved stuff like “so we just overthrew Iraq’s government, and now we need radio uplinks to our UAVs so we can blow up terrorists.” Nobody caught feelings over that stuff. I doubt many of these folks care about Elon’s tweets.
It's neither aerospace nor automotive engineers that are solving camera-only self driving. There is extreme demand for AI engineers right now, and the people capable of solving a problem like that have pick-of-the-litter access to any AI lab they want.
I would imagine math-focused people are even lower in empathy/people focus. Heck, I can imagine it being a recruiting advantage to tout that, at xAI, engineers won't be hamstrung by liberal arts majors telling them to make the results politically correct. After all, xAI seems to have brought Grok to a competitive state quite quickly.
OTOH, we've seen open-source projects like Nix and arguably Rust and arguably workplaces like Google and Twitter taken over by Leftist ideologues (although I would guess that the Leftists are no longer in control of the middle 2 and of course definitely not of the last one).
If you look on twitter it's full of cringey "xXWealthMastersXx" accounts falling over themselves to hype Tesla. It's a full on steel domed welded shut echo chamber.
Its becoming more obvious that X was acquired so that Musk had control of a form of mass communication to benefit himself.
Very ugly world we live in - the joker masquerades as someone who is doing stuff for the benefit of humanity and crossdresses to appeal to whomever to benefit himself.
Have you ever considered many people actually enjoy driving a car?
Regulation cannot simply be imposed on people against their will. Maybe in the US (I dont personally live there so I couldnt care!) but over here in Europe its not that straight forward.
Interesting perception. Here in the US it's unfathomable to think a regulation that doesn't allow people to drive cars would ever receive a single vote. It wouldn't happen. Citizens here would revolt and politicians in support would quite literally be murdered over this. People here really love driving their cars. Yes, to an insane degree.
But from my news bubble, and my perception of much of Europe... it seems to me that it is very likely a regulation like this would happen in Europe, probably through a well-meaning green initiative.
Funny how perceptions of others can be so drastically different!
We're decades away from no one being allowed to drive manually, but people don't actually like driving. They like the autonomy of a car. That's not the same thing.
If there's a button in people's cars that they can push and then play on their phone for the rest of the trip, 99% of people are going to push that button.
And after a few years of that, and insurance rates being higher for manual driving, we'll start seeing some areas be automated-driving only, which will then expand...
I don't think you've been deep in car culture or just disregard them as a minority group. This minority would become extremely vocal if manual driving were to be regulated by the government. Insurance incentivization is another matter; they're used to that already.
It started innocuously with mandatory emergency signalling in the instance of a crash, then mandatory reversing cameras, then mandatory lane keeping assistance, auto emergency braking, speed limit indication. Coming soon in Europe is automatic speed limit adherence. Emissions regs have also led to a huge rise in automatic transmissions in Europe.
For very many people the only thing they do to control their car now is turn the wheel and push the accelerator.
"Insurance incentivization" is just an alternate form of regulation, instead using the power of an economic market rather than the power of the police to impose someone's regulatory will.
For some reason, Americans seem to be fine with regulations that come from companies and enforced via economics, but become extremely vocal when there regulations come from legislators.
The US as it stands is a dictatorship, that thankfully, has some checks and balances to control Mr Trump.
One only has to watch that recent White House dinner of the Big Tech figures getting together (minus Scamath) and the forceful nature in which Mr Trump made Zuck and Cook issue statements of large investment amounts.
Nothing of that nature goes in Europe, at least not so blatantly.
Some people also love riding horses, making their own clothes and hunting for their own food. None of that changes the march of technology for the majority. The plain fact is there are too many benefits to self driving cars like price and safety.
I'm not saying your gut feeling is incorrect, but these arguments aren't compelling.
> Have you ever considered many people actually enjoy driving a car?
This has nothing to do with industry. Calculators were actually a PAID position and they went away, regardless of the number of people that enjoy mathalons.
> Regulation cannot simply be imposed on people against their will.
This is incorrect, historically and practically.
Roads and highways, in an economic metaphor, are rivers of money. They provide capital velocity as well as smoothing labor and consumer availability.
Due to the economy of scale, mass transportation and self locomotion is the only practical transport for people at the highest densities. GOODS, on the other hand, require a powered engine to move in and out. Those stacks of soda can't be transported by subway. The sodas produce trash, that also can't travel by subway. Roads themselves and trucking, in general, have kept personal vehicles in service. Cars still exist in London and New York, over a century later for this very reason.
Motorized bikes dominate many cities in Asia. I can see that becoming a preferred mode in western cities, over time. After that, I could also see personal driving becoming regulated out of existence (ie huge fees to run a personal vehicle in a hyper-urban area). Maybe, just maybe, grassroots political will could have pushed cars off the road (so to speak) when the climate crisis was a meager priority, but I have lost faith in that avenue.
To be fair, there are many things that people 'enjoy' to do that are illegal or not allowed or regulated heavily.
Just because you enjoy something doesn't make it the right thing to do or allow. This as a person who does not believe Tesla has the right formula to actually achieve FSD and that a pure vision approach would never work in the way they want it to (no interventions, all weather, etc).
There will come a time when technology advances enough that self driving with be an order of magnitude safer than human driving, and we will have to battle with the fact that allowing humans to do so will be objectively worse for society. That may not actually be anytime soon, but it may happen.
Not that it's currently possible, but having the infrastructure designed around self driving cars (meaning the road and signs themselves are built to communicate useful information to the car ) and the network of cars communicating with each other, we could achieve high speeds, smooth insertion in traffic etc. The benefits would be stopping congestion in cities, reducing pollution as well as reducing/eliminating car crashes
In that case, there would be absolutely no way we could allow manual driving. The benefits are just too great. Obviously I'm talking about a best case scenario where things actually work as they should.
You do realise this is never going to happen? Especially not with countries that are already running on budget deficits. If you want the roads to be privatised (whom then eventually will setup tolls) be my guest... but leave me out of it lmao.
There are many people who live in dread of sudden large repair bills obstructing their ability to make a living.
When drivers are no longer a prerequisite, there can be large competing fleets of ride services. Getting a ride on-demand with no down payment and lower annual cost will be attractive to a lot of people.
> Regulation cannot simply be imposed on people against their will. Maybe in the US (I dont personally live there so I couldnt care!) but over here in Europe its not that straight forward.
It would be even less straightforward in the US than in Europe. Many cities are 100% car-dependent.
>Have you ever considered many people actually enjoy driving a car?
Many people enjoy writing code 'manually' too. But overwhelmingly, people opt to have LLMs write most of it for them. There is no way in hell I'm ever reading api docs or writing python scripts by hand ever again with gemini, unless gemini craps the bed and i'm forced to do so.
listen man i'm a petrol head too... look, when FSD comes out as-standard, this turning-the-steering-wheel malarky is done-zo. its over. yes theres people who enjoy driving a car, but if you offerd people full self driving in every car with no price premium, 99% of the population would never touch a steering wheel again.
>but over here in Europe
bro, Europeans love daddy government to come and ** their ** up. all you have to do is tell the euro "FSD decreases traffic accidents by 5%!" and they will do the policing themselves.
I can already hear it: "erm excuse me, is your car not FSD? you know, you're endangering myself and others by driving that on the road, right? do you have a license for your manually-operated car?"
> Have you ever considered many people actually enjoy driving a car?
1. Not as many as you think, IMHO.
2. Those folks can perhaps not turn on the self-driving feature.
3. Even those that do may have times where it is a chore (stop-and-go traffic).
> Regulation cannot simply be imposed on people against their will.
If self-driving can be shown to be statistically safer than hour human-driving then your insurance company may offer you discounts for always using it. No government regulation needed: those bearing the risks will incentivize you to do the less risk-y thing.
> he doesn't have a pr department like the other guys do (who direct their entire wardrobe, body language, gestures, do speech coaching, etc.), and i suppose we can say that the pr guys are vindicated! zuck, gates, cook, all rehabilitated their public image no-problem.
I'm confused by this. Zuckerberg has persistently had image problems. Sometimes it has improved for a bit but saying it has been rehabilitated seems to be a major overstatement.
Cook, on the other hand, has generally always been positive with the public except for some skepticism early that he could succeed as successor to Jobs.
I was thinking about this the other day, and I don’t plan on buying another car until something self-driving is available. Waymo is rolling out to my metro this year (Denver) and I bet I’ll be able to buy a self-driving vehicle within 10 years, which is well within the life of my current vehicle.
> alot of elon hate on hn but he is making objectively very good bets. he doesn't have a pr department like the other guys do (who direct their entire wardrobe, body language, gestures, do speech coaching, etc.), and i suppose we can say that the pr guys are vindicated! zuck, gates, cook, all rehabilitated their public image no-problem
I don't think Zuck et al are avoiding criticism because of their wardrobe (I don't think they're avoiding criticism actually). But they haven't spent $44b to signal boost hatred of their core customer base and it's values or offered unconditional up front support for a presidential platform which spends taxpayer money ripping out EV chargers to own the libs, does many other things unhelpful to his businesses, but did let him have a play at destroying regulators for a bit. This has very little to do with PR departments and cost an awful lot more, so it might have been an objectively better bet for Elon not to have done this...
Dude, we can't get fully automated underground trains/above-ground trams yet, and those things run on bolted-down, fixed tracks (which are completely clear when we're talking about the underground).
where do you live where transportation is "rapidly" turning into private multi-person transportation? because i don't think i can name a single city i've been in where cars are noticeably diminishing to any degree.
I wonder if it will ever be practical or economical to have humans and machines driving together on the roads we have now though. Maybe we'll skip that step and go to robot-only roads with more stuff built into the actual roads.
On Musk, he doesn't need PR so much as to keep his mouth shut for a while and try and deliver on some of his BS instead of spouting more.
> > zuck, gates, cook, all rehabilitated their public image no-problem.
They all shipped products that billions of people use and those old enough can remember a world without such products and how different it was.
People can remember what the world was before Musk and it's the same as it is now, the wide eye fans are those who look at the technical accomplishments such as the rockets landing on their butt, however when they are asked by skeptics "what does it mean for me?" the response is always a not well specified "handwaving about the future" as if Musk was a 21yr old out of college
What reality do you exist in where Zuckerberg, Cook and Gates have rehabilitated their public image? At least Zuckerberg and Cook are currently seen as Trump sycophants and are personally despised for it.
Elon is not just a PR department away from being seen as an acceptable person. He did a Nazi salute for the world to see and most of the world finds him contemptible.
Also the only way manual driving diminishes is if the world invests more into public transportation.
I think you underestimate how quickly public sentiment can change. Just a few years ago there was public outcry, protests, etc for anything Musk related.
Now there is none of that, not many people talking about him in a political light and I'm certain public sentiment about him has gone up given it is now already more publicly acceptable to talk about things adjacent to him and his companies.
There will be die hards who will never change, but its clearly apparent on social media he is no longer getting anywhere near the hate he used to, and even people who previously weren't are now publicly praising things like Grok and recent SpaceX missions.
Every day I see contempt for the acts he committed through "Doge". The man is irredeemable. It's not like he personally does any work anyway. Any kind of accomplishment that happens at SpaceX or other companies is from hard working intelligent employees.
If not for the uncertainty around the extremely inflated Tesla stock price due to the lies he has told he would have been ousted years ago. He has no tangible vision of the future and no expertise in anything.
Because there is no moat or first mover advantage anymore, Tesla is in trouble. When I was in China, I drove Zeekr, BYD, and Avatar, and I can tell you that they offer products that outperform Tesla on almost every metric like price, quality, ergonomics, etc. Tesla will soon lose even more market share worldwide. The only thing keeping them afloat in the U.S. is tariffs, but outside the U.S., it’s pretty much over.
Hundreds of thousands of people who (albeit very....haphazardly) committed to Tesla models for sake of FSD would also love FSD.
It's not "hatred and politics" for the people that actually suffer here (IE the folks who drive the same car as you but have yet to receive, and never will receive, promised features.)
It goes without saying that Musk is smarter than most would ever hope to be. But he's just too freaking stubborn sometimes for his own good. He could have owned that whole industry if he didn't have an ego the size of Jupiter. And it saddens me that an American car company had the opportunity to compete on a global stage and and just dropped the ball in the silliest way possible.
Edit: Eh, I should probably have excluded that first statement. That was not the point of this comment, and I don't know why I didn't foresee the controversy it was going to create. There's probably a more descriptive word than smart.
By any standard that you would apply to gauge intelligence based on someone's accomplishments and actions, he would qualify as highly intelligent as applied in the business domain, and I sincerely believe that denying that fact is engaging in willful, ideologically driven blindness.
Smart people do stupid stuff. People incapable of processing large amounts of information don't operate highly successful companies in multiple domains simultaneously that expand the edge of technological innovation in distinct fields.
Stupid people do smart stuff sometimes too. I think it goes without saying that Elon doesnt operate any of his highly successful companies on a daily basis.
Not with the consistency to achieve the results that he has. I'm sorry, if you think that a person that is 'dumb' can run these companies to the level that they're at I simply do not respect your opinion and do suggest you to do some introspection why you cannot cede that someone that has achieved what he has in a way that is consistent and replicable in a multivariable and complex domain such as business is a competent and intelligent person. Sure, there are other things you can detract and criticize him for, but this one seems like a weird one given the evidence.
By any standard that you would apply to gauge intelligence based on someone's accomplishments and actions, Kim Kardashian would qualify as highly intelligent. If you cannot cede that she has one of the greatest intelligences of our generation, possibly even of all time, then I simply do not respect your opinion and do suggest you do some introspection.
Funny enough, while I criticize the cultural impact she and her family have had on young girls as related to body image, I think there is evidence that they are intelligent as in having a capacity to process information. Nowhere near Musk, but you are not actually trying to have that discussion.
there's plenty of larry ellisons in the world as it is.
walk into a casino and put a trillion dollars on red. thats musk. can you imagine the rush? he probably takes drugs to take the edge off his insane business ventures.
I just cannot relate at all to someone actually thinking that equates Elon's success to gambling on roulette. Of the million things you could criticize him for, there is this fixation by his detractors on trying to tear down his character as though he is not competent. It seems important for people that disagree with him to attack that angle, even when there's a mountain of evidence to the contrary.
It is as though people need it to be true that someone holding opposing opinions CANNOT possibly also be smart and competent, it's like the ideology possessing his detractors can't conceive of opposition as intelligent. (Notice that this is a phenomenon from left leaning to right leaning, though the right to left version of this phenomenon is something along the lines of: 'this person is smart but ${"evil" | "lacking common sense"}'). I'm fascinated by this.
not a detractor (quite the opposite), maybe i am putting too much weight on 'gambling', atleast party because it appeals to my own tastes.
to a clueless outside observer, starting a rocket company seems quite risky, then again maybe it wasn't really his money after all? i dont really know the details, but the impression i got was that atleast initially, it was his private venture.
tesla is more sensible but still, building out massive manufacturing chains is risky, because youve got all that capital tied up in it, and you're making a 'gamble' that youre gonna sell millions of cars to get that money back.
twitter to me seemed like a big gamble. social media comes and goes awfully quickly, but the X rebrand seems to have worked, atleast for now. grok was another weird play. competing with openai/google? but they did it and it seems to be holding its own pretty well.
I would say he is less competent than Wang Chuanfu, but then again I'm not a HN reader that jacks off every time Elon posts some race science eugenic shit
From my perspective, it's more that he used to be competent, but something has changed over the last 5-10 years, and now he's essentially coasting (or more nefarious things) off the massive amount of wealth he's piled up. If you or I could come up with many better ways to accomplish Musk's stated goals than he seems to be able to execute, why would I not conclude that something has changed and he's no longer as competent as he once was?
Or maybe I'm just blinded by partisan hatred. Who knows, but I'm still not interested in supporting anything Musk produces these days. I guess we'll see in another few decades whether I'm seeing it correctly.
The car business sucks, FYI. It’s a capitally intensive and labor intensive and highly cyclical business in a highly regulated industry with numerous players propped up by numerous governments based on national security concerns that local auto manufacturing would be crucial during any war, and special interests due to the sheer number of people the companies employ.
It is highly sensitive to interest rates, currency, tariffs, and ability to align all this complicated production with trends and quality so that volume meets demand for long lead time extremely expensive factories.
The advantage of electric over non-electric is that it uses expensive materials that reduce the number of components that slightly reduce the labor and capital intensity and overall management skills it requires to build a high quality vehicle, but this isn’t enough to make it a great industry.
The erosion of Tesla’s brand due to Elon’s political involvement is another significant headwind and end of government subsidies for electric cars has created significant headwinds for Tesla.
That being said, the fact that Tesla produces the most fully optimized electric cars without all the legacy costs and has succesfully been able to hire the best engineers who are passionate about what they are building. They still sell some of the best if not the best cars on the road.
They build better optimized cars without legacy costs so they are better than the legacy automakers, and sold so many units and been able to share parts and engineering costs across most of their platforms and built out an eco system of charging and accessories etc that they are generally significanltly better than the electric vehicle startups.
I would still prefer to buy a Tesla, but I’m not sure I would want to own the company building them or any company in the car industry for that matter.
On the one hand, Tesla's all in on automation now, on the other they just walked back their promise of full self driving for vehicles sold from 2016-2023. [1]
Apparently, they're just washing their hands of the matter and leaving out to dry the quarter million people that spent up to $15,000 on the hope that Tesla would develop them an OTA update to enable FSD with cameras. But three days later, they're also saying that automation is the most important thing to the company?
Given these two conflicting reports, is there any hope that Tesla will come to their senses and start putting LIDAR in new vehicles? I don't expect Musk to acknowledge that he was wrong, even with all the documented claims in the past about the feasibility of FSD with cameras... but it's 2025, does it matter if anyone calls him on it? Just put a LIDAR brow on the 2027 models and full steam ahead!
[1]: https://electrek.co/2025/09/05/tesla-changes-meaning-full-se...
I'd be willing to bet that lidar is not the decisive difference between AVS that work and those that don't. I bet it's the geospatial data. Without the kind of data that Google gets from maps and other geospatial products, making an AV is not practical with current technology.
> Apparently, they're just washing their hands of the matter and leaving out to dry the quarter million people that spent up to $15,000 on the hope that Tesla would develop them an OTA update to enable FSD with cameras.
A fool and their money something something.
Well, just like any reliable company (in the crypto/"AI" space) that screws up with false claims like "Auto-Pilot", "Full-Self" Driving, "AI" Taxis (all within the next 2-5 years - of course those are claims > 10 years old) it just wants to move on and leave all the bad hype behind. Responsibility be damned, hype that stonck !
There was an interesting interview with Martin Eberhard, the Tesla founder the other day - Musk came in as an investor. A lot of the build a sports car then luxury car then regular then cheap plan was Eberhard, the FSD and robots stuff was Musk. (youtube link https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=88KHfX_kPIY&t=990s)
> The company's sales have collapsed across the world
Well, that's news to me. According to Tesla's presentations and quarterly SEC reports, sales have most definitely not "collapsed." In the most recent quarter, revenues decreased 12%, to a still-gargantuan $22.5B/quarter, compared to the same quarter last year. Compared to the previous quarter, revenues actually increased by 16%. Yes, increased. The business generated positive US GAAP earnings and positive free cash flow. The company ended the quarter with $37B in cash, compared to $31B in cash a year ago.[a]
Note that during the most recent quarter, the company had to change-over all its factories to start making the updated Model Y, its best-selling vehicle.
I'd be curious to see how the updated Model Y does over the remainder of the year.
It's hard to take the OP seriously when it exaggerates about facts that are easily verifiable.
---
[a] https://www.tesla.com/sites/default/files/downloads/TSLA-Q2-...
The article is talking about car sales, you're talking about revenues. Those are two different things. For instance, a very large portion of Tesla revenues comes from leasing and carbon credits rather than car sales. In terms of car sales, Tesla's share of the market is at it's lowest point since 2017. In most of the world, Tesla sales are very significantly down.
Year over year, vehicle deliveries decreased 13%.
Quarter over quarter, vehicle deliveries increased 14%.
That's most definitely not a "collapse."
A double digit decline is a collapse --- a collapse from the level of hype Musk has been putting out for a very long time.
In 2024, Tesla projected sales to grow 30% in 2025.
Whether or not it's a "collapse" is a matter of rhetorical style. I was just pointing out that you were comparing apples and oranges.
I disagree:
* Vehicle sales represent the bulk (typically, 75-80%) of Tesla's revenues, so I'm not comparing apples to oranges.
* A decrease of 12-13% is not a "collapse." That's blatant exaggeration, not "rhetorical style."
https://www.theguardian.com/business/live/2025/aug/05/bp-cos...
Well I suppose a 60% fall isn't 100%.
One country ≠ the world.
I think that the same point I was trying to make.
Ah yes, the "hopes and dreams" stock valuation.
I didn't say anything about Tesla's valuation.
Please don't attack a straw-man.
As a counterpoint, Apple Inc, stopped using Apple Computers Inc, only years after it had diversified it's production with consumer electronics, software, and cloud services.
Tesla is predominantly known for it's cars. Now, it wants to do AI, taxi, solar, power supply. And it's financing this through their cofounder being the pied piper to investors.
Elon Musk is not a cofounder of Tesla
According to Elon, he is the "founder" of Tesla.
According to Martin, he is their first major investor.
According to mainstream media, he is the co-founder.
I'd call him the second, but the fanboys would be majorly pissed.
public companies have been running on the fumes of speculative value, or some hypothetical future value according to off-the-chart P/E ratios. this is nothing new for musk. he has been promising some future that always needs to look beyond what others can envision and promise. whether we want that future, or whether he can and he will get us there that is immaterial. as long as he is moving the "future evaluation carrot" away from the investors at a steady pace he will do it.
from this point of view, his goal was never to be the best car company. it was never to serve the customers the best way possible, or have the best value. china has achieved all of that and a lot more so he needs to move the carrot again. that's it.
TBF, being good at running an EV charging business could be a profitable niche for the long term.
Let's stipulate the Tesla has done the best job of building a network of chargers that actually works. On that basis, Tesla could spin it off as the highest valued charging network in existence.
The problem is that charging revenue provides Tesla an astronomical contribution to the share price, with Tesla's current price to earnings ratio. It would only make sense to sell it if Tesla were pressed for cash. Instead Tesla has more cash than they've felt like deploying to, for example, update their product line. No need to pile more on top of that.
That problem is solved, but unfortunately the bottleneck has been for the longest time the larger, more complex electrical equipment that is used to connect chargers to the grid. Companies like the Finland-based Kempower produce the best charging equipment on the market, but their problems start where their equipment ends: the grid.
I've looked at this space from an infrastructure investment perspective. Its really tough, and generally not considered "infrastructure" by most infra folks because of the lack of long term revenue contracts. There is not a great way to underwrite the risk of utilization of the chargers. The customers need to show up. Unless you can guarantee some of the revenue, you have a lot of capex with no clear path to repay it. The chargers also require a lot of maintenance and the grid connection is challenging with low consumption and high peak load, and long wait to get connected... Investors have been staying away.
Gas stations are a tough business, too. But they've had a century to develop a working business model. A charging station is different enough that the business has entered the race to the bottom before they figured out how to adapt the gas station business model profitably.
I know people in the sector who made a lot of money from very quickly from installing charging equipment when it was a novelty. They think it's a race to the bottom now, and I don't think it's going get more profitable, certainly not Tesla-valuation level profitable
Niche?
Strange choice of word for something that is becoming mainstream.
I read that as “niche for Tesla”. It’s not what their primary product was supposed to be. But, with more EVs being compatible, it might end up being the most stable part of the company. It’s not as sexy as cars, robots, or robotaxis, but it should be consistently profitable.
how so? aren't all of the other charging businesses operating at huge losses?
Regardless of the future of self-driving, Musk's many failures to deliver it have given competitors time to leapfrog the distracted doge.
I double dare ANY auto maker to navigate the winding, blind curve and blind rise roads in the Sierra Nevada foothills. And miss suicidal leaping deer.
Methinks it can't be done without active/passive road reflectors or other aids to navigation. AKA rails for autos.
I don't expect city pedestrians to wear transponders. Unless the feature can be introduced to cell phones.
Any takers out there?
There is one autonomous ride provider that can count on 1 billion people a day turning on an app that tracks their location, heading, and speed. I strongly suspect this data makes a lot more difference than a lidar sensor.
Tesla seems to be losing the plot.
They were laser-focused, and executed beautifully, on sustainable energy through beautiful EVs and innovative solar products. It's clear that they think that this mission is no longer profitable and that betting the farm on tulips [^0] is the only path to their survival.
Their latest Master Plan is so telling of this. You can tell that Elon wrote the first two plans. They were proud enough to post them on their website, even. The third was some IR-fluff on autonomy, and their latest one looks LLM-generated and says a lot without saying anything. It's also not on their website, which is odd.
I love our two Teslas. They're incredible cars, and FSD (which was always an aspirational name, and it's depressing to see them walk back on those aspirations) has no other in the market. Shame to see them spiral.
[^0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulip_mania. s/(t|T)ulip/AI/g. Like grandpa shirts and 90's running shoes, what's old is new again.
The success of Tesla is largely tied to the fact that Elon bet the farm on what he believed the puck was going while most automakers where very cautious.
The market has changed, the brand is not as strong (and even considered toxic by many) but more importantly Chinese automakers are eating this market on all fronts.
Now, moving to robotics and AI is a different story, Elon is following the puck and is Tesla is already quite behind, and again China is in pole position.
Besides, this is an even riskier bet than EV in practice, the AI hype is stalling and many are predicting a loud pop of the bubble.
Also, the technology behind humanoid robots could take a very long time to become useful.
There are two ways a founder can interpret early success:
1. I'm a genius. Urgency in implementing my half baked ideas is the key to success.
2. We were fortunate. I'd rather be fortunate than smart, but trying to be smart about how to build on early success is all we've got.
I don't know why they double-downed on self driving which feels like a strange gimmick, why not, hey this car is more fun to drive than the competition and cheaper than ICE vehicles in the long term.
This is the original "master plan" from 2025:
https://www.tesla.com/master-plan-part-4
It becomes immediately obvious that there is no plan, it is just advertising the things Tesla has been doing already.
The picture at the top that shows a robot which, as usual, performs an easy task in a clean, dust and dirt free environment, may indicate that they'll focus more on robots. That is it.
Since the stock price is decoupled from all realities, they can do whatever they want.
http://archive.today/G0ESp
I think anyone could have seen this from miles away based on:
1. China is going to own the EV market. The only thing that can temporarily stop Chinese EVs from dominating in every country is massive tariffs. But this is not a long-term strategy.
2. Sentiment is low on EV due to Trump
I think the problem with Musk's strategy is that self-driving will also become a commodity over time. There's no reason that only Teslas will be able to drive themselves. Further more, I don't see why China's robotics won't do the same to Tesla's EVs. In fact, I believe China's robotics are world leading at the moment.
> self-driving will also become a commodity
That can be said about everything so does it play out in real? For e.g. phones have been labeled as commodities a while ago. But, are they?
Edit: Self driving is a super specialized tech and it’s still not fully developed yet. A lot of weak areas. I don’t see it getting commoditized in the next 20 or 30 years.
The real opportunity would be in monetizing the time that people would be getting back while not driving.
It's a potential commodity in that there is potentially no network effect stopping people from using any competitor that offers a cheaper ride, unlike how when you're an iPhone user you get locked into Apple's ecosystem. But then there's the thing where despite having had 18 years to catch up, nobody makes phones (including software) better than Apple.
One potential moat is just the amount of data from real drivers that Tesla use to train their models via imitation learning. If this turns out the be important and needed for a general solution (which I believe it will), then only companies that manufacture cars at scale can hope to compete. And at this point, only Chinese companies are forward looking enough to put the right hardware for self driving (and the ability to collect training data) into their cars by default. Tesla has the vertical integration that makes this whole thing much easier: they make the cars, the inference compute, the software AND the training clusters. Can you imagine GM or Ford building a GPU cluster for a couple of billion?
A car is not a platform and cannot create the locking/monopoly a phone can.
Just limited by imagination!!
1. Have an option for long-term rental fleet - on a per-day or per-month basis. Provide a 40+ inch screen in the back for people to use the car as an office on wheels. Equip it with a Super high-speed network. Launch an app store on that screen or charge a premium for other apps.
2. Provide an option to get unlimited booze, food, essentials by partnering with Food delivery apps
3. Convert big SUVs/RVs into self-driving vehicles to enable them to be rented by families for summer picnics, long travel, and wedding trips. Many people still dislike air travel, especially given the current issues with flight delays, baggage limitations, and other uncertainties. Any alternative would be a huge win. Imagine travelling for 12+ hours overnight while having the comfort of a home.
4. Make it possible to deliver food, drinks, and essentials anywhere - via drones or other partners, if they've rented your self-driving vehicle.
5. Have super-comfy interiors just like a private jet. Of course, people would love it.
There's no moat in anything you listed. If you want a mobile app you need either Apple or Google's permission to get it. The roads are a public good, they by law cannot be monopolized by a single company (or two).
The difference is that in the phone market, you have one premium brand that makes all of the profit from hardware sales (Apple), one that makes money by manufacturing hardware for the non premium brands (Samsung) and one that gets a cut from all of the manufacturers for licensing (Qualcomm) even when they use non Qualcomm chips.
Tesla’s brand is toxic and seeing declining sales, China is doing the manufacturing, and no one is going to license Tesla’s inferior unproven technology compared to Waymo.
Yes, yes they are. There are new (second-tier, semi-competitive) phone manufacturers popping up almost every year, e.g. Nothing[0].
Once self-driving has been generally "cracked", with the normal mobility of talent, most other car manufacturers will catch up on a timespan that's too small for the first-mover to completely dominate the market with that alone.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nothing_(company)
> There are new (second-tier, semi-competitive) phone manufacturers popping up almost every year, e.g. Nothing[0].
Good for them. Meanwhile, the vast majority of smartphones people buy, and the vast majority of profits from smartphones, are coming from Apple, Samsung, OnePlus, Xiaomi, and maybe Sony. There are no signs whatsoever of the market commodifying.
Did all the brands you mentioned start at the exact same time like in a race?
No. They had to build up a customer base until you now consider them market leaders.
I think it is more likely that self driving in the way people have been led to believe would happen never will. Not from Tesla and not from anyone else. Which is bad for Tesla because they have put too many eggs into that basket.
The only thing they have left is the car and they are falling farther and farther behind.
> There's no reason that only Teslas will be able to drive themselves
I keep seeing this, but where I am, there is only one company offering cars without drivers. That's Waymo, and they do not use Teslas.
Uber is probably better placed for self driving, to take the fattest cut - the usage fees, than any of the hardware providers.
China is free to open up shop in the countries they want to sell in.
Same thing China demands of anyone wanting to sell there.
Well that's pretty obvious now that all the technology transfer needed for Chinese companies to catch up have been realised. Realistically though the CCP will want to keep the lead in market where they have crushed the competition with their state sponsored champions; this was the case with photovoltaic panels, and this seems to be the case with their car (computer-on-wheels) manufacturer.
That’s what the now retired leadership wanted though, they got their $10 million paycheck and comfortable retirement in the west, now it’s time for current leadership to clean up.
> China is going to own the EV market.
Only so long as China is OK for the entire industry running at a loss.
I think sentiment is low on EV due to Trump AND Musk.
Trump got onboard with the red folks dislike of EVs early on.
Musk had his work cut out for him though. He built a brand beloved by blues all to flip it on its head and make them despise it.
I would not be surprised if Musk’s self-own legitimately makes the history books.
I used to think of a company named Ratner.
Now I think of Tesla.
manual driving is clearly, sooner or later, going out the door. getting from A to B has been getting commodified and the notion of a "car" is rapidly moving towards "private bus".
elon can see this direction. whoever invents self-driving cars first, will kill cars as we know it, completely. so it makes sense then, that if anyone should invent what kills tesla, it should be tesla.
alot of elon hate on hn but he is making objectively very good bets. he doesn't have a pr department like the other guys do (who direct their entire wardrobe, body language, gestures, do speech coaching, etc.), and i suppose we can say that the pr guys are vindicated! zuck, gates, cook, all rehabilitated their public image no-problem.
Betting on solely camera vision for self-driving is not objectively a very good bet. It's not even a good bet. There still are zero self-driving Tesla's on the road. Zero.
It's even likely there will be legislation forcing LIDAR for self driving cars. Elon cannot flip the switch on self driving until they have millions of intervention free miles under their belt. Right now Tesla gets ~500 miles without intervention. One kid gets decked and the law will shutter his plan.
There is another layer too, where because of his polarizing personality, a lot of critical talent is inaccessible to him. Keep in mind Elon is doing -none- of the engineering besides the social engineering. He relies on talented people who want to work for him. I know many talented people who could make a difference for Tesla, but none who would ever give Elon a single minute of time.
Over last 6 months, since their latest upgrade, I have been driving my Tesla mostly on FSD. And it is nothing short of amazing, out of this world. The car drives like a pro and exceptions have become very rare. You have to drive this to believe it. Unlike Waymo which is full of gizmos, this is just a regular car that drives itself. The bet on camera and simplified architecture shows here.
If you just extrapolate what has already been possible and bet on the pace of growth of AI algorithms and techniques, robotaxi is almost a certainity and humanoid robots a possibility.
We've all been reading this exact comment for years now. Maybe it's actually different this time, I don't know.
What I do know is that I took multiple Waymo rides last week where those "gizmos" delivered a safe drive with no one in the driver's seat and zero unsafe exceptions. "Very rare exceptions" isn't even close to good enough for me to put my kid's life at stake.
Why would I care whether Tesla has maybe gotten closer to what they've been promising for a decade, but still having "very rare" extremely unsafe exceptions, when Waymo is objectively delivering full level 4 self driving to hundreds of thousands of people per week with an essentially flawless safety record?
It has felt much much better in recent months. Did a drive from SF to Yosemite that was basically fully autonomous - can’t do that on Waymo. That being said, I still had two issues in the city where it completely screwed up by being in the wrong lane. Humans make the same error but my one concern was that it doesn’t realize it’s in the wrong lane and try to safely just go the wrong direction and recover and instead just tries to take the “correct” route at all costs which can be a safety issue.
I agree that Waymo is generally safer for in city driving. It’s still not technically fully autonomous even though it appears that way; it has a lot of support people on the backend to resolve when the cars get stuck and whatnot. Waymo still can’t go on the highway or leave well-defined city limits whereas I can use my Tesla on every trip I’ve taken. I think comma.ai is a closer comparison point at this time as I can’t have a Waymo for my own personal use that I can take anywhere whenever.
"Humans make the same error but my one concern was that it doesn’t realize it’s in the wrong lane"
This is actually very deadly.. at least humans will signal / try do something in a safe manner to continue going on. An autonomous vehicle may behave in unpredictable ways and cause carnage. It only takes one incident to completely shutter it forever.
> at least humans will signal / try do something in a safe manner to continue going on
Your experience must be very different. I've been on the road long enough to know that humans will try all sorts of things to not avoid missing the turn & Tesla behaved very similarly.
FWIW, it was signalling all the right ways and no collision seemed imminent and I doubt it would have gotten into an accident. I just didn't want it acting like an asshole on the road and didn't trust it enough to let the situation play out by itself.
As someone that has driven thousands of miles, and encountered some interesting roundabouts and junctions - I cannot relate to your experience whatsoever.
"I just didn't want it acting like an asshole on the road and didn't trust it enough to let the situation play out by itself."
So basically you had to intervene and it doesnt meet the standard of a fully autonomous vehicle. Do all the mental gymnastics all you want mate lmao.
I don’t understand the vision bet. As a consumer, I want self driving with expectations of it being reliable and affordable. Again as a consumer I couldn’t care any less how it “works”. If someone is able to produce a car using more than just vision that works first, they will be the winner.
it kind of make a muskian sort of sense.
"if the human brain can do it purely on optics, then so should we. if we need extra sensors that the human doesn't have, that means the model is worse than the human brain."
i can totally see that going through elons 105iq head. and there is something to be said there. kind of, "no cheating allowed!", where "cheating" is defined as "a sensor the human wouldn't have had".
whether it has value... well... thats hard to say, but you have to make a bet i suppose. the waymos are very expensive with their sensor arrangements. maybe that can be made cheap?
> if the human brain can do it purely on optics
The human brain doesn't do it purely on optics.
The human brain can do it on optics, poorly.
We still have tens of thousands of car-related deaths in the US.
Also, if doing it a different way than a human is cheating...are they sending data via organically grown neurons in the car? Didn't know that. Looks like "cheating" to me.
Maybe it makes sense in Musks' head.
Me - I want the car to be better than the human brain.
And if he didn't sell it as working better than it does, that would be a principled stance.
And if he didn't have competitors, it would not be a damaging stance.
But in the reality we're in...
> Betting on solely camera vision for self-driving is not objectively a very good bet.
Maybe, maybe not. It's quite remarkable how far he's been able to go with camera only. And he's not the only one who went the camera route--GM Super Cruise, Subaru Eyesight, etc., work that way as well. There is still no mass-produced car with LIDAR. At worst, the camera tech has kept Tesla at the front of where the industry has actually been going the last 5 years.
Looking at the bigger picture, I'm not sure you can point to someone who has made as many good bets in different engineering fields as Elon. Elon is the opposite of the Gell Manning effect: you think he's wrong about areas you are educated about, and he proves you wrong. You can find my posts on HN mocking SpaceX for going with an oxygen/RP1 rocket as if we were back at the dawn of space travel. Boy was that wrong!
Elon of 2012 was a dramatically different person than Elon of 2025. And like I pointed out he is talent constrained. Elon is not developing camera vision. He is seeking and hiring talented software people to do it. In 2012 Elon was celebrated and going to work for Tesla was a prestigious career. Something you could flex.
Today you would be embarrassed to mention you took at job at Tesla, especially when so many other big name prestigious companies will pay the same or more for those same skills Elon desperately needs.
I doubt that factors into most people’s decisions. If anything, aerospace and automotive engineers tend to lean centrist to conservative: https://par.nsf.gov/servlets/purl/10529569 (Table 5). And aerospace is disproportionately white men compared to other engineering fields.
Additionally, my observation is that reactions to Musk are heavily influenced by individual levels of empathy, and “people focused versus systems focused” thinking. In my experience aerospace engineers are pretty low empathy and low people focus. When I got my degree in aerospace engineering in the early aughts—before SpaceX and the reboot of commercial aerospace—the most exciting job to look forward to was designing missiles for Raytheon and stuff like that. When I worked for a military contractor, the hypothetical scenarios always involved stuff like “so we just overthrew Iraq’s government, and now we need radio uplinks to our UAVs so we can blow up terrorists.” Nobody caught feelings over that stuff. I doubt many of these folks care about Elon’s tweets.
It's neither aerospace nor automotive engineers that are solving camera-only self driving. There is extreme demand for AI engineers right now, and the people capable of solving a problem like that have pick-of-the-litter access to any AI lab they want.
I would imagine math-focused people are even lower in empathy/people focus. Heck, I can imagine it being a recruiting advantage to tout that, at xAI, engineers won't be hamstrung by liberal arts majors telling them to make the results politically correct. After all, xAI seems to have brought Grok to a competitive state quite quickly.
OTOH, we've seen open-source projects like Nix and arguably Rust and arguably workplaces like Google and Twitter taken over by Leftist ideologues (although I would guess that the Leftists are no longer in control of the middle 2 and of course definitely not of the last one).
> And he's not the only one who went the camera route--GM Super Cruise, Subaru Eyesight, etc., work that way as well.
Those all include radar.
> There is still no mass-produced car with LIDAR.
There are several from Chinese car makers.
Yeah as time goes on, the grift has become more apparent. But will it get fully exposed before he dies? Thats the real question.
The amount of speical K he goes through that has a better chance of happening by the end of the year (tm) than self driving.
Lol. True.
If you look on twitter it's full of cringey "xXWealthMastersXx" accounts falling over themselves to hype Tesla. It's a full on steel domed welded shut echo chamber.
Its becoming more obvious that X was acquired so that Musk had control of a form of mass communication to benefit himself.
Very ugly world we live in - the joker masquerades as someone who is doing stuff for the benefit of humanity and crossdresses to appeal to whomever to benefit himself.
Posts like this are just pure noise.
Have you ever considered many people actually enjoy driving a car?
Regulation cannot simply be imposed on people against their will. Maybe in the US (I dont personally live there so I couldnt care!) but over here in Europe its not that straight forward.
Interesting perception. Here in the US it's unfathomable to think a regulation that doesn't allow people to drive cars would ever receive a single vote. It wouldn't happen. Citizens here would revolt and politicians in support would quite literally be murdered over this. People here really love driving their cars. Yes, to an insane degree.
But from my news bubble, and my perception of much of Europe... it seems to me that it is very likely a regulation like this would happen in Europe, probably through a well-meaning green initiative.
Funny how perceptions of others can be so drastically different!
We're decades away from no one being allowed to drive manually, but people don't actually like driving. They like the autonomy of a car. That's not the same thing.
If there's a button in people's cars that they can push and then play on their phone for the rest of the trip, 99% of people are going to push that button.
And after a few years of that, and insurance rates being higher for manual driving, we'll start seeing some areas be automated-driving only, which will then expand...
I don't think you've been deep in car culture or just disregard them as a minority group. This minority would become extremely vocal if manual driving were to be regulated by the government. Insurance incentivization is another matter; they're used to that already.
It's being chipped away, though.
It started innocuously with mandatory emergency signalling in the instance of a crash, then mandatory reversing cameras, then mandatory lane keeping assistance, auto emergency braking, speed limit indication. Coming soon in Europe is automatic speed limit adherence. Emissions regs have also led to a huge rise in automatic transmissions in Europe.
For very many people the only thing they do to control their car now is turn the wheel and push the accelerator.
"Insurance incentivization" is just an alternate form of regulation, instead using the power of an economic market rather than the power of the police to impose someone's regulatory will.
For some reason, Americans seem to be fine with regulations that come from companies and enforced via economics, but become extremely vocal when there regulations come from legislators.
There’s enough of a large group of people to the extent that no party wants to piss them off. Pure and simple.
The US as it stands is a dictatorship, that thankfully, has some checks and balances to control Mr Trump.
One only has to watch that recent White House dinner of the Big Tech figures getting together (minus Scamath) and the forceful nature in which Mr Trump made Zuck and Cook issue statements of large investment amounts.
Nothing of that nature goes in Europe, at least not so blatantly.
Some people also love riding horses, making their own clothes and hunting for their own food. None of that changes the march of technology for the majority. The plain fact is there are too many benefits to self driving cars like price and safety.
Imagine comparing driving a car to riding horses, lmao!
I'm not saying your gut feeling is incorrect, but these arguments aren't compelling.
> Have you ever considered many people actually enjoy driving a car?
This has nothing to do with industry. Calculators were actually a PAID position and they went away, regardless of the number of people that enjoy mathalons.
> Regulation cannot simply be imposed on people against their will.
This is incorrect, historically and practically.
Roads and highways, in an economic metaphor, are rivers of money. They provide capital velocity as well as smoothing labor and consumer availability.
Due to the economy of scale, mass transportation and self locomotion is the only practical transport for people at the highest densities. GOODS, on the other hand, require a powered engine to move in and out. Those stacks of soda can't be transported by subway. The sodas produce trash, that also can't travel by subway. Roads themselves and trucking, in general, have kept personal vehicles in service. Cars still exist in London and New York, over a century later for this very reason.
Motorized bikes dominate many cities in Asia. I can see that becoming a preferred mode in western cities, over time. After that, I could also see personal driving becoming regulated out of existence (ie huge fees to run a personal vehicle in a hyper-urban area). Maybe, just maybe, grassroots political will could have pushed cars off the road (so to speak) when the climate crisis was a meager priority, but I have lost faith in that avenue.
To be fair, there are many things that people 'enjoy' to do that are illegal or not allowed or regulated heavily.
Just because you enjoy something doesn't make it the right thing to do or allow. This as a person who does not believe Tesla has the right formula to actually achieve FSD and that a pure vision approach would never work in the way they want it to (no interventions, all weather, etc).
There will come a time when technology advances enough that self driving with be an order of magnitude safer than human driving, and we will have to battle with the fact that allowing humans to do so will be objectively worse for society. That may not actually be anytime soon, but it may happen.
Not that it's currently possible, but having the infrastructure designed around self driving cars (meaning the road and signs themselves are built to communicate useful information to the car ) and the network of cars communicating with each other, we could achieve high speeds, smooth insertion in traffic etc. The benefits would be stopping congestion in cities, reducing pollution as well as reducing/eliminating car crashes
In that case, there would be absolutely no way we could allow manual driving. The benefits are just too great. Obviously I'm talking about a best case scenario where things actually work as they should.
You do realise this is never going to happen? Especially not with countries that are already running on budget deficits. If you want the roads to be privatised (whom then eventually will setup tolls) be my guest... but leave me out of it lmao.
I don't have a crystal ball no. Infrastructure evolves thankfully, that's the purpose of taxes.
Yeah taxes are nice. Especially when running on a budget deficit.
Where is the funding for all this coming from again? Remind me why councils for example in the UK, are broke and barely investing in this stuff?
Ah... yeah. Lets get real.
> Regulation cannot simply be imposed on people against their will.
They can, and have been.
There are many people who live in dread of sudden large repair bills obstructing their ability to make a living. When drivers are no longer a prerequisite, there can be large competing fleets of ride services. Getting a ride on-demand with no down payment and lower annual cost will be attractive to a lot of people.
> Regulation cannot simply be imposed on people against their will. Maybe in the US (I dont personally live there so I couldnt care!) but over here in Europe its not that straight forward.
It would be even less straightforward in the US than in Europe. Many cities are 100% car-dependent.
>Have you ever considered many people actually enjoy driving a car?
Many people enjoy writing code 'manually' too. But overwhelmingly, people opt to have LLMs write most of it for them. There is no way in hell I'm ever reading api docs or writing python scripts by hand ever again with gemini, unless gemini craps the bed and i'm forced to do so.
listen man i'm a petrol head too... look, when FSD comes out as-standard, this turning-the-steering-wheel malarky is done-zo. its over. yes theres people who enjoy driving a car, but if you offerd people full self driving in every car with no price premium, 99% of the population would never touch a steering wheel again.
>but over here in Europe
bro, Europeans love daddy government to come and ** their ** up. all you have to do is tell the euro "FSD decreases traffic accidents by 5%!" and they will do the policing themselves.
I can already hear it: "erm excuse me, is your car not FSD? you know, you're endangering myself and others by driving that on the road, right? do you have a license for your manually-operated car?"
> Have you ever considered many people actually enjoy driving a car?
1. Not as many as you think, IMHO.
2. Those folks can perhaps not turn on the self-driving feature.
3. Even those that do may have times where it is a chore (stop-and-go traffic).
> Regulation cannot simply be imposed on people against their will.
If self-driving can be shown to be statistically safer than hour human-driving then your insurance company may offer you discounts for always using it. No government regulation needed: those bearing the risks will incentivize you to do the less risk-y thing.
Tesla has made no inroads to this story, their valuation is 100% unjustified.
> whoever invents self-driving cars first, will kill cars as we know it
Are you talking about Waymo here? In any case, the timeline is not obvious.
> he doesn't have a pr department like the other guys do (who direct their entire wardrobe, body language, gestures, do speech coaching, etc.), and i suppose we can say that the pr guys are vindicated! zuck, gates, cook, all rehabilitated their public image no-problem.
I'm confused by this. Zuckerberg has persistently had image problems. Sometimes it has improved for a bit but saying it has been rehabilitated seems to be a major overstatement.
Cook, on the other hand, has generally always been positive with the public except for some skepticism early that he could succeed as successor to Jobs.
I was thinking about this the other day, and I don’t plan on buying another car until something self-driving is available. Waymo is rolling out to my metro this year (Denver) and I bet I’ll be able to buy a self-driving vehicle within 10 years, which is well within the life of my current vehicle.
> alot of elon hate on hn but he is making objectively very good bets. he doesn't have a pr department like the other guys do (who direct their entire wardrobe, body language, gestures, do speech coaching, etc.), and i suppose we can say that the pr guys are vindicated! zuck, gates, cook, all rehabilitated their public image no-problem
I don't think Zuck et al are avoiding criticism because of their wardrobe (I don't think they're avoiding criticism actually). But they haven't spent $44b to signal boost hatred of their core customer base and it's values or offered unconditional up front support for a presidential platform which spends taxpayer money ripping out EV chargers to own the libs, does many other things unhelpful to his businesses, but did let him have a play at destroying regulators for a bit. This has very little to do with PR departments and cost an awful lot more, so it might have been an objectively better bet for Elon not to have done this...
I don't think anything is clear about the possibility of full self driving under all conditions.
We could be 2 years away from it or 200. Who knows? Elon doesn't, despite his best misinformation efforts.
Also, private busses? I don't see any movement towards them that can be described as rapid.
Dude, we can't get fully automated underground trains/above-ground trams yet, and those things run on bolted-down, fixed tracks (which are completely clear when we're talking about the underground).
where do you live where transportation is "rapidly" turning into private multi-person transportation? because i don't think i can name a single city i've been in where cars are noticeably diminishing to any degree.
Lol hes delusional. Over here in London the roads are packed more than ever. And I don't see Teslas on the road all that much.
I wonder if it will ever be practical or economical to have humans and machines driving together on the roads we have now though. Maybe we'll skip that step and go to robot-only roads with more stuff built into the actual roads.
On Musk, he doesn't need PR so much as to keep his mouth shut for a while and try and deliver on some of his BS instead of spouting more.
> > zuck, gates, cook, all rehabilitated their public image no-problem.
They all shipped products that billions of people use and those old enough can remember a world without such products and how different it was.
People can remember what the world was before Musk and it's the same as it is now, the wide eye fans are those who look at the technical accomplishments such as the rockets landing on their butt, however when they are asked by skeptics "what does it mean for me?" the response is always a not well specified "handwaving about the future" as if Musk was a 21yr old out of college
What reality do you exist in where Zuckerberg, Cook and Gates have rehabilitated their public image? At least Zuckerberg and Cook are currently seen as Trump sycophants and are personally despised for it.
Elon is not just a PR department away from being seen as an acceptable person. He did a Nazi salute for the world to see and most of the world finds him contemptible.
Also the only way manual driving diminishes is if the world invests more into public transportation.
I think you underestimate how quickly public sentiment can change. Just a few years ago there was public outcry, protests, etc for anything Musk related.
Now there is none of that, not many people talking about him in a political light and I'm certain public sentiment about him has gone up given it is now already more publicly acceptable to talk about things adjacent to him and his companies.
There will be die hards who will never change, but its clearly apparent on social media he is no longer getting anywhere near the hate he used to, and even people who previously weren't are now publicly praising things like Grok and recent SpaceX missions.
Every day I see contempt for the acts he committed through "Doge". The man is irredeemable. It's not like he personally does any work anyway. Any kind of accomplishment that happens at SpaceX or other companies is from hard working intelligent employees.
If not for the uncertainty around the extremely inflated Tesla stock price due to the lies he has told he would have been ousted years ago. He has no tangible vision of the future and no expertise in anything.
Because there is no moat or first mover advantage anymore, Tesla is in trouble. When I was in China, I drove Zeekr, BYD, and Avatar, and I can tell you that they offer products that outperform Tesla on almost every metric like price, quality, ergonomics, etc. Tesla will soon lose even more market share worldwide. The only thing keeping them afloat in the U.S. is tariffs, but outside the U.S., it’s pretty much over.
I really really want a Xiaomi YU7 or SU7. Instead we have embarrassing Cybertrucks and ugly GMs, the US sucks so bad these days
How can anyone believe the Atlantic? Especially when it's regarding Elon Musk or Trump?
Come on people, lol.
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Love my FSD.
People are seriously blinded by their hatred and politics
Hundreds of thousands of people who (albeit very....haphazardly) committed to Tesla models for sake of FSD would also love FSD.
It's not "hatred and politics" for the people that actually suffer here (IE the folks who drive the same car as you but have yet to receive, and never will receive, promised features.)
Tesla "FSD" is the car version of vibe coding in production.
hatred, politics... and also the data
It goes without saying that Musk is smarter than most would ever hope to be. But he's just too freaking stubborn sometimes for his own good. He could have owned that whole industry if he didn't have an ego the size of Jupiter. And it saddens me that an American car company had the opportunity to compete on a global stage and and just dropped the ball in the silliest way possible.
Edit: Eh, I should probably have excluded that first statement. That was not the point of this comment, and I don't know why I didn't foresee the controversy it was going to create. There's probably a more descriptive word than smart.
It's the least productive discussion we can possibly have here, but that does not in fact go without saying. People disagree.
>It's the least productive discussion we can possibly have here
but it is the most engaging and entertaining! X.com vindicated yet again...
By any standard that you would apply to gauge intelligence based on someone's accomplishments and actions, he would qualify as highly intelligent as applied in the business domain, and I sincerely believe that denying that fact is engaging in willful, ideologically driven blindness.
> intelligence based on someone's accomplishments and actions
I think it goes without saying he has done a whole bunch of 5 iq stuff as well.
Smart people do stupid stuff. People incapable of processing large amounts of information don't operate highly successful companies in multiple domains simultaneously that expand the edge of technological innovation in distinct fields.
Stupid people do smart stuff sometimes too. I think it goes without saying that Elon doesnt operate any of his highly successful companies on a daily basis.
Not with the consistency to achieve the results that he has. I'm sorry, if you think that a person that is 'dumb' can run these companies to the level that they're at I simply do not respect your opinion and do suggest you to do some introspection why you cannot cede that someone that has achieved what he has in a way that is consistent and replicable in a multivariable and complex domain such as business is a competent and intelligent person. Sure, there are other things you can detract and criticize him for, but this one seems like a weird one given the evidence.
By any standard that you would apply to gauge intelligence based on someone's accomplishments and actions, Kim Kardashian would qualify as highly intelligent. If you cannot cede that she has one of the greatest intelligences of our generation, possibly even of all time, then I simply do not respect your opinion and do suggest you do some introspection.
Funny enough, while I criticize the cultural impact she and her family have had on young girls as related to body image, I think there is evidence that they are intelligent as in having a capacity to process information. Nowhere near Musk, but you are not actually trying to have that discussion.
People disagree. That's about all that can be productively established on a thread about this person.
> It goes without saying that Musk is smarter than most would ever hope to be.
I about spit out my coffee.
there's plenty of larry ellisons in the world as it is.
walk into a casino and put a trillion dollars on red. thats musk. can you imagine the rush? he probably takes drugs to take the edge off his insane business ventures.
I just cannot relate at all to someone actually thinking that equates Elon's success to gambling on roulette. Of the million things you could criticize him for, there is this fixation by his detractors on trying to tear down his character as though he is not competent. It seems important for people that disagree with him to attack that angle, even when there's a mountain of evidence to the contrary.
It is as though people need it to be true that someone holding opposing opinions CANNOT possibly also be smart and competent, it's like the ideology possessing his detractors can't conceive of opposition as intelligent. (Notice that this is a phenomenon from left leaning to right leaning, though the right to left version of this phenomenon is something along the lines of: 'this person is smart but ${"evil" | "lacking common sense"}'). I'm fascinated by this.
not a detractor (quite the opposite), maybe i am putting too much weight on 'gambling', atleast party because it appeals to my own tastes.
to a clueless outside observer, starting a rocket company seems quite risky, then again maybe it wasn't really his money after all? i dont really know the details, but the impression i got was that atleast initially, it was his private venture.
tesla is more sensible but still, building out massive manufacturing chains is risky, because youve got all that capital tied up in it, and you're making a 'gamble' that youre gonna sell millions of cars to get that money back.
twitter to me seemed like a big gamble. social media comes and goes awfully quickly, but the X rebrand seems to have worked, atleast for now. grok was another weird play. competing with openai/google? but they did it and it seems to be holding its own pretty well.
I would say he is less competent than Wang Chuanfu, but then again I'm not a HN reader that jacks off every time Elon posts some race science eugenic shit
From my perspective, it's more that he used to be competent, but something has changed over the last 5-10 years, and now he's essentially coasting (or more nefarious things) off the massive amount of wealth he's piled up. If you or I could come up with many better ways to accomplish Musk's stated goals than he seems to be able to execute, why would I not conclude that something has changed and he's no longer as competent as he once was?
Or maybe I'm just blinded by partisan hatred. Who knows, but I'm still not interested in supporting anything Musk produces these days. I guess we'll see in another few decades whether I'm seeing it correctly.
The car business sucks, FYI. It’s a capitally intensive and labor intensive and highly cyclical business in a highly regulated industry with numerous players propped up by numerous governments based on national security concerns that local auto manufacturing would be crucial during any war, and special interests due to the sheer number of people the companies employ.
It is highly sensitive to interest rates, currency, tariffs, and ability to align all this complicated production with trends and quality so that volume meets demand for long lead time extremely expensive factories.
The advantage of electric over non-electric is that it uses expensive materials that reduce the number of components that slightly reduce the labor and capital intensity and overall management skills it requires to build a high quality vehicle, but this isn’t enough to make it a great industry.
The erosion of Tesla’s brand due to Elon’s political involvement is another significant headwind and end of government subsidies for electric cars has created significant headwinds for Tesla.
That being said, the fact that Tesla produces the most fully optimized electric cars without all the legacy costs and has succesfully been able to hire the best engineers who are passionate about what they are building. They still sell some of the best if not the best cars on the road.
They build better optimized cars without legacy costs so they are better than the legacy automakers, and sold so many units and been able to share parts and engineering costs across most of their platforms and built out an eco system of charging and accessories etc that they are generally significanltly better than the electric vehicle startups.
I would still prefer to buy a Tesla, but I’m not sure I would want to own the company building them or any company in the car industry for that matter.