This will be the reason Tesla falls behind the rest of the automotive industry, wasting money on vanity projects instead of developing better vehicles.
The 3, Y, and the huge number of Chinese EVs being sold around the world have shown there is a huge market for affordable, practical electric vehicles, and what are they developing? A vehicle that won’t be able to fulfill it’s intended role for a decade almost everywhere.
I think the focus on AI is what will be the problem. Sure, AI is cool, and sure you need advances for self-driving, but you’re a car manufacturer and can’t neglect car manufacturing
All that stuff is what justifies Tesla being treated as a Tech Stock rather than an Automotive Stock and hence having Stock Prices which are 10x or 20x what an auto-maker with similar Revenue and Margins would have.
Dropping the techno-bollocks that underpins their “we’re disrupting the Auto industry with our Technology and will become the Google of cars” story and just focusing on being good at making electric cars would mean loosing the huge “we’re a Tech Stock” premium that keeps Tech companies’ stock prices high even when they’re loosing money (the valuations are justified by investors with the expectation that they will one day dominate entire markets, like Google or Apple), and hence accepting their stock falling 90%, from Uber style valuations to Ford style valuations.
I doubt shareholders will ever accept that, hence I expect Tesla will just keep “faking until you make it” all the while getting farther and farther away from making it, until eventually they crash far harder (possibly even cease to exist in the next decade or two) than it would happen if they just settled down to be just another auto-maker. (In my mind I have the image of the Coyote from Road-Runner running out of track, going over the cliff and keeping on running until noticing he’s not running on ground anymore and is high up in the air)
They were a tech company because they developed cars with features and technology no one else ever had. The stock stayed too high because they were delivery 50%+ growth every year and legacy manufacturers weren’t even trying to compete. The stock was truly excessive because of a long term roadmap to bring the future into present reality. Funding for ai was part of the competitive advantage, when it was used to add features to their cars.
AI for its own sake is not a good place to be and will only suck attention and funding from the core business
Humanoid robotics may be a vision of the future and I’m excited that someone will make that attempt, but it has nothing to do with cars. It’s a distraction of funding and attention at the expense of the core business
Previously Musk developed a portfolio of companies, so each can go for their own attempts at the future with less impact on each other. It’s just basic business sense. For example, a solar company could go bankrupt without affecting a car company. Now he’s taking a leap of fantasy and I don’t see any sign of the solid technical base other of his companies started with, and he’s doing it as part of a company that had been succeeding
Thing is, I quite like the idea of a self driving car. I do whitewater kayaking, and I’d love to be able to do a trip and have my car meet me at the end.
It’s becoming increasingly obvious this isn’t happening any time soon though, and developing a vehicle that is totally reliant on the technology doesn’t seem like a smart idea.
It’s possible just at the outside that one of the Waymo autonomous taxis could pull it off, but they rely on that giant sensor lump on the roof so you’d have nowhere to put your boat…
When I see EVs (southern Netherlands) they are mostly model S or non-Teslas from mostly VW. Autonomous vehicles aren’t even allowed here AFAIK.
Edit: I am agreeing with you, for clarity’s sake.
My understanding is that the only places in the world where self-driving vehicles are actually legal is the UK and weirdly Tehran or something very odd like that.
But that’s all just a technicality, most jurisdictions say you can’t have them because we haven’t verified their safety. The UK says you can have them but only in very limited testing scenarios (limited speed, limited to certain roads in a mapped area). But they both effectively amount to the same thing.
