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Elons point on cars being worth 5x as much with self driving shouldn’t be dismissed. If a car that costs $25,000 to manufacture all of a sudden can be driven 40

Elons point on cars being worth 5x as much with self driving shouldn’t be dismissed. If a car that costs $25,000 to manufacture all of a sudden can be driven 40-50 hours a week automatically, how much is that car now worth? So I totally disagree on that end, as do most investors given teslas enormous valuation.

Finnucane 3y ago
Is there a big market for $125,000 cars? Who needs a car 40 hours a week?
- HDThoreaun 3y ago
  Uber
  - capableweb 3y ago
    How many cars does Uber own? I thought they offloaded all of that pesky "ownership" stuff to their custome.. I mean drivers / coworkers / employees / collaborating business owners / freelancers.
    - manquer 3y ago
      The point being they could eliminate the human drivers and take the whole revenue instead of sharing it. From ridesharing company PoV right now they are only taking 30%-50% of the revenue, and they have gaps in meeting demand due to resourcing challenges. The business model is pretty solid if self driving taxis work even if its only in urban and suburbs
      - kklisura 3y ago
        > The point being they could eliminate the human drivers and take the whole revenue instead of sharing it. Why would then Tesla even sell such cars if they can just compete and outcompete Uber?
        seanmcdirmid 3y ago
        Musk has already stated that Tesla will start a ride sharing service that FSD Tesla owners can participate in. It will also supposedly be exclusive (not allowed to do ride sharing for other services using FSD). Google self driving car division has an agreement with Uber now.
      - kibwen 3y ago
        Except that currently all the drivers also manage the inventory of physical cars, and all maintenance, and all legal liability. The parent's question is a good one. Owning and operating a fleet of cars is the core competency of a rental agency, not a ride-hailing app.
        ClumsyPilot 3y ago
        > and all legal liability. People really do not understand that the Companies like Uber, Airbnb and Deliveroo make a huge amount of money from offloading liability - it's suddenly not Deliveroo's fault that the guy delivering your pizza in London does this on illegal, unroadworthy e-bikewith no insurance, and in case of a crash he is liable. Airbnb routinely rents out apartments in blocks that have this forbidden in the leave / rental agreement. If the human is gone, then liability offloading is impossible. You have noone to blame. That liability off-load is worth more to deliveroo than is the pittance they pay him.
        manquer 3y ago
        Self-driving won't make a difference to this structure though ? The pitch Tesla (if you believe them) keeps making is we could rent out our cars when we don't use it to the rental networks. We still own the car ( and the liability ) and unlock RoI.
        manquer 3y ago
        Just a ride sharing app cannot reach the scale and revenue to justify the investments they have attracted. It is not realistic to raise $25+ Billion[1] just to be a pure SaaS startup. Both Uber and Lyft[2] run rental businesses already, the model works where you can rent a car on a weekly basis just to drive on their apps, they cover maintenance and other services. Uber will have to find a way to maintain their growth, and Lyft probably will be acquired by a rental network. The result is the same vertical integration. [1] Uber's equity investment so far. SaaS startups can be valued lot more even $100s of billions, but pure tech companies do not raise that kind of cash. Stripe for example despite its delayed IPOs and ESOP issues has only raised $8B. [2] They own some of the inventory and rest are from partners I believe.
    - tyre 3y ago
      I don’t know about Uber but Lyft has a car rental service. Drivers can rent cars from Lyft to drive with Lyft. If the infrastructure is already there, going from “driver turns on an app to accept/reject a ride” to “we accept that automatically” is quite simple.
      - Gunnerhead 3y ago
        I don’t believe Lyft owns the cars, they just partner with the traditional car rental agencies. Uber also has a car rental service.
  - CydeWeys 3y ago
    Which Waymo and possibly Cruise are on track to make cars for. Tesla though, nope. Their approach is fundamentally unsound and unworkable (just like Uber's internal effort was).
- contravariant 3y ago
  5 people.
rurp 3y ago
Elon doesn't actually believe that Tesla cars are about to quintuple in value now, any more than he did 7+ years ago when he first started saying it; that's just marketing BS. > So I totally disagree on that end, as do most investors given teslas enormous valuation. Yes, and most Gamestop investors think the company is going to be the next Amazon. Buying a popular meme stock doesn't make their predictions right.
- TheCaptain4815 3y ago
  And he’s admitted self driving was way more difficult than anyone realized, so his dream is gonna be delayed 5-10 years like most of his other major ones. It’s now 2013, want to see a video of Starship taking off?
  - JumpinJack_Cash 3y ago
    > > And he’s admitted self driving was way more difficult than anyone realized, Sure and the guy is getting paid right now in cold hard cash, while all the synchopants keep ranting about hopes and dreams. As Jack Nicholson said in 'the Departed' and I quote : "What we generally do - in this country... is one guy brings the items and the other guy pays him. No tickee, no laundry!" First the self-driving car for all Americans (the item), then the big payday for Mr.Musk, that's what happened with Mr. Ford back in the day, but what did the guy know? Nowadays you can just bluff your way into riches using the marvelous phenomenon of cult of personality and stock appreciation. > > It’s now 2013, want to see a video of Starship taking off? Want to see a sample of what Microsoft's ChatGPT can do?? It's amazing! But that has nothing to do with Microsoft giving Apple a run for its money in the smartphone market like Ballmer predicted back in 2012 There is no correlation between the 2 things just like there is no correlation between rockets and self driving cars, and it's laughable that synchopants think they are correlated just because thought leader and cult of personality enthusiast Elon Musk is both the founder of SpaceX and the petty individual who sued for the right to be called the founder of Tesla
    - austhrow743 3y ago
      Elon is paid in stock not cash.
HyperSane 3y ago
Elon Musk is a modern day P. T. Barnum and Tesla will never have full self driving cars on the market.
kibwen 3y ago
> If a car that costs $25,000 to manufacture all of a sudden can be driven 40-50 hours a week automatically, how much is that car now worth? Cars depreciate based on distance driven, not on age. A car will need to be serviced every X miles and replaced every Y miles, and these numbers are independent of whether the car is driven one hour a week or forty. In no universe does driving more hours per week increase the value of a car.
- xattt 3y ago
  Ultra-high mileage vehicles driven over short timeframes where rust doesn’t get a chance to set would probably get into wear-and-tear of structural welds. Something like how airframes are rated for x number of decompression cycles.
  - TylerE 3y ago
    Highly unlikely. Aluminum has a finite fatigue lifetime. Steel, as long as you stay below a (fairly high) threshold, lasts forever.
- SECProto 3y ago
  You clearly don't drive in a location that heavily salts roads! Here, a 15 year old car with 50,000 km is only marginally better than a 15 year old car with 200,000km - and it's mostly because the lower mileage car has probably been driven less in the winter.
highwaylights 3y ago
Even if that reasoning were true, the valuation for Tesla doesn’t make much sense, given they’re not remotely close to a self-driving car in the way that the average customer would understand it. They’re not delayed by a few years. The problem is intractable, unless you can limit the journey to a controlled scope. I drive over multiple pathways and grassy lanes a week that aren’t mapped and have no markings. A self-driving car can’t arbitrarily account for something like that any time soon. Waymo is able to operate a limited route in Phoenix because they restrict to best-case routes.
- jliptzin 3y ago
  FSD is a very small component of Tesla' current stock price. Some dumbasses are certainly buying Tesla because they think FSD is right around the corner, but dumbasses tend to not have a lot of money. For any Tesla price estimate, you've got to pick a number, how many million vehicles the company will ship in say 2025. Then pick an Average Selling Price, profit margin, and P/E multiple. Divide by 3 billion to get the price per share of your estimate. Considering Tesla is on track to deliver 1.8M vehicles this year and the delivery growth trajectory it's been on, 4M is a good target goal for 2025, $45k ASP, 10% profit margin, 30 P/E . . . from that I get $180, so today's price is fair as a base case for 2025. $400 was a nice top in 2022 and I think we'll see it before 2025 as Tesla Energy starts contributing to the bottom line, each $1B of profit from energy is worth $10 on the share price (30 P/E, 3B shares). If you think $180 for Tesla is way too high you have to account for that in the model...either 2025 deliveries will be a lot less than 4 million, or 10% profit margin will come way down, or P/E will come way down below 30 (it's currently 51). https://www.reddit.com/r/teslainvestorsclub/comments/13obftu/comment/jl3xr0g/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3 https://www.reddit.com/r/teslainvestorsclub/comments/13obftu...
  - blake1 3y ago
    This is not the way I would do stock valuation. PE is the ratio of future earnings will all its growth to current earnings, discounted. In the future, some of that growth will be in the past, and the PE will be expected to come down. This being Tesla, you could imagine some new fancy product, and not value it strictly as a car company. Edit: I see that you actually addressed the PE roll down. Missed that on the first read.
taneq 3y ago
> If a car that costs $25,000 to manufacture all of a sudden can be driven 40-50 hours a week automatically, how much is that car now worth? That week of driving is worth what an Uber driver’s take-home pay would be for the same week after finance (or equivalent lost interest if you buy with cash), insurance, on-road costs, charging, maintenance, depreciation, and whatever intangible value you put on not having hundreds of strangers farting in your car every week. Multiply that by the number of weeks that you expect the car to be nice enough to do this, and that’s your return on investment.
- Gustomaximus 3y ago
  Less as that cost component is removed and replaced with an ROI on the cars costs.
- CydeWeys 3y ago
  Many people don't want to use their car as a robotic rideshare for hire. The inside is gonna get pretty not nice in a hurry. At least when there's a human driver in a car, they can tell misbehaving people to knock it off. Not so when the car is unattended and robotic.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
freejazz 3y ago
Cars aren't suddenly going to cost more because of that...
ineedasername 3y ago
The physical capabilities of the car do not increase with the # of hours it is driven. If you work a car 5x as hard, it will require a similar increase in maintenance and an overall shorter lifetime. (Lifespan. As measured in calendar years, not miles driven) I’m not saying you’re completely wrong on the general concept, but the relationship between value increase and drivable time per week (or whatever unit of time) is not 1:1. There’s going to be some loss in there. Also not all cars would see drive time increases. Those used as Ubers or similar certainly will, but that won’t displace the vast majority of car owners who will continue to own a car and drive it at similar rates for the convenience of having it immediately on hand, at all times, ready to go. If it self drives too then that’s great, the claw back some personal time during a commute etc.
- bryanlarsen 3y ago
  Good point. You're likely to get 200,000 - 300,000 miles out of a Tesla. That might take 5 years if used as a robotaxi or 20 years without, but the cost per mile and thus the value of the car will be comparable either way. That might be different with an LFP Tesla, which have what should be 750,000 mile batteries.
rootusrootus 3y ago
First Tesla would have to make a car with plausible hardware for self driving. Not decade+ old cameras trying to do everything. Can't even reliably wipe the windshield at the right time. The idea of robotaxis is just a fantasy.
blabberwocky 3y ago
For a brief moment, that car becomes worth a lot more. But as other manufacturers put FSD-capable vehicles on the road, values might in fact fall as overall capacity skyrockets. What is certain is that the cost of a ride will drop.
yumraj 3y ago
>Elons point on cars being worth 5x as much .... all of a sudden can be driven 40-50 hours a week ... Look at it this way, assume humans drive, or need to be driven/travel, X miles per year. Today, assuming a car drives Y miles per year, the market needs X/Y cars. Given your argument, with self driving, a car runs nY miles per year, the demand for car will drop to X/nY, basically 1/n of before or maybe a little more, since after all the humans won't suddenly need to drive/travel nX miles per year. So, if a car were to become worth 5x more, but we need 1/5x cars, the total market would remain the same.
- seanmcdirmid 3y ago
  If cars drive themselves, you can let them out as Ubers when you don’t need to drive it. That could definitely mean less cars if they are priced aggressively. Peak is still a problem, but public transit can focus on peak rather than non peak (assuming Robo taxis are price efficient). Even if we need 1/5 cars (and EVs do last longer, so without self driving, this will happen anyways), as long as the lost cars come from your competitors, it’s fine.
  - yumraj 3y ago
    > as long as the lost cars come from your competitors, it’s fine. It’s a rather arrogant, and unrealistic assumption, (on Tesla’s part if they are making it) that they will capture the entire market. It’s not going to happen.
  - haspok 3y ago
    > If cars drive themselves, you can let them out as Ubers when you don’t need to drive it. This does not require self driving btw, but a more important question is: would you really? Would you let strangers in your private car? Would you want to clean it afterwards? Would you accept damages other people do to you car? Would it still be your car if strangers use it far more than you do? And at this point we have arrived at car sharing, which already exists today...
- TylerE 3y ago
  Self driving will increase demand, not decrease, as it will displace other less popular modes of transit. Why call an Uber or taxi after a night at the bar when you can just have your EV drive you home? Why make a medium-distance flight, when you can just sleep in the back of your EV as it cruises down the highway overnight? (This will pare well with lay flat front seats what would allow turning the car into something like one of those airline sleep pods).
MisterBastahrd 3y ago
Not a much more than I'm already paying for it, because the technology will become ubiquitous and the cost should drop appropriately.
olliej 3y ago
Why does self driving impact this at all? You can already lend out your car for other people to drive, and there are numerous companies that do exactly that as their entire business model. So this is a serious question, in what way does self driving cars mean your personal car is going to be used more? The only people for whom self-driving cars represent an actual real world monetary win are people and companies that transport people and things. So public transport, trucking companies, uber, etc - for them self driving would mean no longer having to pay for drivers. For every other group self driving has no financial impact on the value of the car (except possibly tremendously devaluing any existing cars where a component of their value is current generation "self driving").
firecall 3y ago
It’s not worth 5x! Cars driven commercially like that are worth less money. Take a hybrid Toyota Camry that’s driven as Taxi almost 25 hours a day. Are they worth more? Do they command a premium? No, they do not. And at the end of they short useful lives their value goes to zero. You could argue that self driving cars don’t need drivers, and so can be driven 24/7 at less cost of labour. Even that eventuates, and we get a world where car ownership is significantly on the decline, it just means they sell less cars. As we’ve seen with most technology commodity products, price tends to be forced downwards. So maybe Elon is right, and a self driving car is worth 5x. But it’s not obvious to me, and I’m wary of people like Elon talking up his own book. He is a proven loser and fantasist, but also a very successful billionaire. :-/
lepus 3y ago
Five+ years ago when more of us believed that false promise that it was happening any day now it made more sense to have discussions about these kinds of hypothetical situations.
bjornasm 3y ago
I mean it would be worth 10x as much if its also made you breakfast but it don't and it won't.
cableshaft 3y ago
I'm not whoring my car out to Uber to let people make a mess in my car when I'm not driving it, sorry. So to me this means nothing. I'll still be in it as much as I would otherwise. Maybe a few less trips driving my wife to errands (as she doesn't feel comfortable driving, despite having a license), but otherwise it shouldn't make much difference. The only thing I can think of is maybe it would make some trips not need my presence at all. Like I could see placing a Wal-mart grocery order, and sending my car to go to Wal-mart without me in it, they load it up, and then it comes back, and I can unload it. Which is nice, but I'm not paying 5x the already expensive car prices in order to save a few minutes here and there.

Finnucane 3y ago

Is there a big market for $125,000 cars? Who needs a car 40 hours a week?

HDThoreaun 3y ago
Uber
- capableweb 3y ago
  How many cars does Uber own? I thought they offloaded all of that pesky "ownership" stuff to their custome.. I mean drivers / coworkers / employees / collaborating business owners / freelancers.
  - manquer 3y ago
    The point being they could eliminate the human drivers and take the whole revenue instead of sharing it. From ridesharing company PoV right now they are only taking 30%-50% of the revenue, and they have gaps in meeting demand due to resourcing challenges. The business model is pretty solid if self driving taxis work even if its only in urban and suburbs
    - kklisura 3y ago
      > The point being they could eliminate the human drivers and take the whole revenue instead of sharing it. Why would then Tesla even sell such cars if they can just compete and outcompete Uber?
      - seanmcdirmid 3y ago
        Musk has already stated that Tesla will start a ride sharing service that FSD Tesla owners can participate in. It will also supposedly be exclusive (not allowed to do ride sharing for other services using FSD). Google self driving car division has an agreement with Uber now.
    - kibwen 3y ago
      Except that currently all the drivers also manage the inventory of physical cars, and all maintenance, and all legal liability. The parent's question is a good one. Owning and operating a fleet of cars is the core competency of a rental agency, not a ride-hailing app.
      - ClumsyPilot 3y ago
        > and all legal liability. People really do not understand that the Companies like Uber, Airbnb and Deliveroo make a huge amount of money from offloading liability - it's suddenly not Deliveroo's fault that the guy delivering your pizza in London does this on illegal, unroadworthy e-bikewith no insurance, and in case of a crash he is liable. Airbnb routinely rents out apartments in blocks that have this forbidden in the leave / rental agreement. If the human is gone, then liability offloading is impossible. You have noone to blame. That liability off-load is worth more to deliveroo than is the pittance they pay him.
        manquer 3y ago
        Self-driving won't make a difference to this structure though ? The pitch Tesla (if you believe them) keeps making is we could rent out our cars when we don't use it to the rental networks. We still own the car ( and the liability ) and unlock RoI.
      - manquer 3y ago
        Just a ride sharing app cannot reach the scale and revenue to justify the investments they have attracted. It is not realistic to raise $25+ Billion[1] just to be a pure SaaS startup. Both Uber and Lyft[2] run rental businesses already, the model works where you can rent a car on a weekly basis just to drive on their apps, they cover maintenance and other services. Uber will have to find a way to maintain their growth, and Lyft probably will be acquired by a rental network. The result is the same vertical integration. [1] Uber's equity investment so far. SaaS startups can be valued lot more even $100s of billions, but pure tech companies do not raise that kind of cash. Stripe for example despite its delayed IPOs and ESOP issues has only raised $8B. [2] They own some of the inventory and rest are from partners I believe.
  - tyre 3y ago
    I don’t know about Uber but Lyft has a car rental service. Drivers can rent cars from Lyft to drive with Lyft. If the infrastructure is already there, going from “driver turns on an app to accept/reject a ride” to “we accept that automatically” is quite simple.
    - Gunnerhead 3y ago
      I don’t believe Lyft owns the cars, they just partner with the traditional car rental agencies. Uber also has a car rental service.
- CydeWeys 3y ago
  Which Waymo and possibly Cruise are on track to make cars for. Tesla though, nope. Their approach is fundamentally unsound and unworkable (just like Uber's internal effort was).
contravariant 3y ago
5 people.

rurp 3y ago

Elon doesn't actually believe that Tesla cars are about to quintuple in value now, any more than he did 7+ years ago when he first started saying it; that's just marketing BS. > So I totally disagree on that end, as do most investors given teslas enormous valuation. Yes, and most Gamestop investors think the company is going to be the next Amazon. Buying a popular meme stock doesn't make their predictions right.

TheCaptain4815 3y ago
And he’s admitted self driving was way more difficult than anyone realized, so his dream is gonna be delayed 5-10 years like most of his other major ones. It’s now 2013, want to see a video of Starship taking off?
- JumpinJack_Cash 3y ago
  > > And he’s admitted self driving was way more difficult than anyone realized, Sure and the guy is getting paid right now in cold hard cash, while all the synchopants keep ranting about hopes and dreams. As Jack Nicholson said in 'the Departed' and I quote : "What we generally do - in this country... is one guy brings the items and the other guy pays him. No tickee, no laundry!" First the self-driving car for all Americans (the item), then the big payday for Mr.Musk, that's what happened with Mr. Ford back in the day, but what did the guy know? Nowadays you can just bluff your way into riches using the marvelous phenomenon of cult of personality and stock appreciation. > > It’s now 2013, want to see a video of Starship taking off? Want to see a sample of what Microsoft's ChatGPT can do?? It's amazing! But that has nothing to do with Microsoft giving Apple a run for its money in the smartphone market like Ballmer predicted back in 2012 There is no correlation between the 2 things just like there is no correlation between rockets and self driving cars, and it's laughable that synchopants think they are correlated just because thought leader and cult of personality enthusiast Elon Musk is both the founder of SpaceX and the petty individual who sued for the right to be called the founder of Tesla
  - austhrow743 3y ago
    Elon is paid in stock not cash.

HyperSane 3y ago

Elon Musk is a modern day P. T. Barnum and Tesla will never have full self driving cars on the market.

kibwen 3y ago

> If a car that costs $25,000 to manufacture all of a sudden can be driven 40-50 hours a week automatically, how much is that car now worth? Cars depreciate based on distance driven, not on age. A car will need to be serviced every X miles and replaced every Y miles, and these numbers are independent of whether the car is driven one hour a week or forty. In no universe does driving more hours per week increase the value of a car.

xattt 3y ago
Ultra-high mileage vehicles driven over short timeframes where rust doesn’t get a chance to set would probably get into wear-and-tear of structural welds. Something like how airframes are rated for x number of decompression cycles.
- TylerE 3y ago
  Highly unlikely. Aluminum has a finite fatigue lifetime. Steel, as long as you stay below a (fairly high) threshold, lasts forever.
SECProto 3y ago
You clearly don't drive in a location that heavily salts roads! Here, a 15 year old car with 50,000 km is only marginally better than a 15 year old car with 200,000km - and it's mostly because the lower mileage car has probably been driven less in the winter.

highwaylights 3y ago

Even if that reasoning were true, the valuation for Tesla doesn’t make much sense, given they’re not remotely close to a self-driving car in the way that the average customer would understand it. They’re not delayed by a few years. The problem is intractable, unless you can limit the journey to a controlled scope. I drive over multiple pathways and grassy lanes a week that aren’t mapped and have no markings. A self-driving car can’t arbitrarily account for something like that any time soon. Waymo is able to operate a limited route in Phoenix because they restrict to best-case routes.

jliptzin 3y ago
FSD is a very small component of Tesla' current stock price. Some dumbasses are certainly buying Tesla because they think FSD is right around the corner, but dumbasses tend to not have a lot of money. For any Tesla price estimate, you've got to pick a number, how many million vehicles the company will ship in say 2025. Then pick an Average Selling Price, profit margin, and P/E multiple. Divide by 3 billion to get the price per share of your estimate. Considering Tesla is on track to deliver 1.8M vehicles this year and the delivery growth trajectory it's been on, 4M is a good target goal for 2025, $45k ASP, 10% profit margin, 30 P/E . . . from that I get $180, so today's price is fair as a base case for 2025. $400 was a nice top in 2022 and I think we'll see it before 2025 as Tesla Energy starts contributing to the bottom line, each $1B of profit from energy is worth $10 on the share price (30 P/E, 3B shares). If you think $180 for Tesla is way too high you have to account for that in the model...either 2025 deliveries will be a lot less than 4 million, or 10% profit margin will come way down, or P/E will come way down below 30 (it's currently 51). https://www.reddit.com/r/teslainvestorsclub/comments/13obftu/comment/jl3xr0g/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3 https://www.reddit.com/r/teslainvestorsclub/comments/13obftu...
- blake1 3y ago
  This is not the way I would do stock valuation. PE is the ratio of future earnings will all its growth to current earnings, discounted. In the future, some of that growth will be in the past, and the PE will be expected to come down. This being Tesla, you could imagine some new fancy product, and not value it strictly as a car company. Edit: I see that you actually addressed the PE roll down. Missed that on the first read.

taneq 3y ago

> If a car that costs $25,000 to manufacture all of a sudden can be driven 40-50 hours a week automatically, how much is that car now worth? That week of driving is worth what an Uber driver’s take-home pay would be for the same week after finance (or equivalent lost interest if you buy with cash), insurance, on-road costs, charging, maintenance, depreciation, and whatever intangible value you put on not having hundreds of strangers farting in your car every week. Multiply that by the number of weeks that you expect the car to be nice enough to do this, and that’s your return on investment.

Gustomaximus 3y ago
Less as that cost component is removed and replaced with an ROI on the cars costs.
CydeWeys 3y ago
Many people don't want to use their car as a robotic rideshare for hire. The inside is gonna get pretty not nice in a hurry. At least when there's a human driver in a car, they can tell misbehaving people to knock it off. Not so when the car is unattended and robotic.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]

freejazz 3y ago

Cars aren't suddenly going to cost more because of that...

ineedasername 3y ago

The physical capabilities of the car do not increase with the # of hours it is driven. If you work a car 5x as hard, it will require a similar increase in maintenance and an overall shorter lifetime. (Lifespan. As measured in calendar years, not miles driven) I’m not saying you’re completely wrong on the general concept, but the relationship between value increase and drivable time per week (or whatever unit of time) is not 1:1. There’s going to be some loss in there. Also not all cars would see drive time increases. Those used as Ubers or similar certainly will, but that won’t displace the vast majority of car owners who will continue to own a car and drive it at similar rates for the convenience of having it immediately on hand, at all times, ready to go. If it self drives too then that’s great, the claw back some personal time during a commute etc.

bryanlarsen 3y ago
Good point. You're likely to get 200,000 - 300,000 miles out of a Tesla. That might take 5 years if used as a robotaxi or 20 years without, but the cost per mile and thus the value of the car will be comparable either way. That might be different with an LFP Tesla, which have what should be 750,000 mile batteries.

rootusrootus 3y ago

First Tesla would have to make a car with plausible hardware for self driving. Not decade+ old cameras trying to do everything. Can't even reliably wipe the windshield at the right time. The idea of robotaxis is just a fantasy.

blabberwocky 3y ago

For a brief moment, that car becomes worth a lot more. But as other manufacturers put FSD-capable vehicles on the road, values might in fact fall as overall capacity skyrockets. What is certain is that the cost of a ride will drop.

yumraj 3y ago

>Elons point on cars being worth 5x as much .... all of a sudden can be driven 40-50 hours a week ... Look at it this way, assume humans drive, or need to be driven/travel, X miles per year. Today, assuming a car drives Y miles per year, the market needs X/Y cars. Given your argument, with self driving, a car runs nY miles per year, the demand for car will drop to X/nY, basically 1/n of before or maybe a little more, since after all the humans won't suddenly need to drive/travel nX miles per year. So, if a car were to become worth 5x more, but we need 1/5x cars, the total market would remain the same.

seanmcdirmid 3y ago
If cars drive themselves, you can let them out as Ubers when you don’t need to drive it. That could definitely mean less cars if they are priced aggressively. Peak is still a problem, but public transit can focus on peak rather than non peak (assuming Robo taxis are price efficient). Even if we need 1/5 cars (and EVs do last longer, so without self driving, this will happen anyways), as long as the lost cars come from your competitors, it’s fine.
- yumraj 3y ago
  > as long as the lost cars come from your competitors, it’s fine. It’s a rather arrogant, and unrealistic assumption, (on Tesla’s part if they are making it) that they will capture the entire market. It’s not going to happen.
- haspok 3y ago
  > If cars drive themselves, you can let them out as Ubers when you don’t need to drive it. This does not require self driving btw, but a more important question is: would you really? Would you let strangers in your private car? Would you want to clean it afterwards? Would you accept damages other people do to you car? Would it still be your car if strangers use it far more than you do? And at this point we have arrived at car sharing, which already exists today...
TylerE 3y ago
Self driving will increase demand, not decrease, as it will displace other less popular modes of transit. Why call an Uber or taxi after a night at the bar when you can just have your EV drive you home? Why make a medium-distance flight, when you can just sleep in the back of your EV as it cruises down the highway overnight? (This will pare well with lay flat front seats what would allow turning the car into something like one of those airline sleep pods).

MisterBastahrd 3y ago

Not a much more than I'm already paying for it, because the technology will become ubiquitous and the cost should drop appropriately.

olliej 3y ago

Why does self driving impact this at all? You can already lend out your car for other people to drive, and there are numerous companies that do exactly that as their entire business model. So this is a serious question, in what way does self driving cars mean your personal car is going to be used more? The only people for whom self-driving cars represent an actual real world monetary win are people and companies that transport people and things. So public transport, trucking companies, uber, etc - for them self driving would mean no longer having to pay for drivers. For every other group self driving has no financial impact on the value of the car (except possibly tremendously devaluing any existing cars where a component of their value is current generation "self driving").

firecall 3y ago

It’s not worth 5x! Cars driven commercially like that are worth less money. Take a hybrid Toyota Camry that’s driven as Taxi almost 25 hours a day. Are they worth more? Do they command a premium? No, they do not. And at the end of they short useful lives their value goes to zero. You could argue that self driving cars don’t need drivers, and so can be driven 24/7 at less cost of labour. Even that eventuates, and we get a world where car ownership is significantly on the decline, it just means they sell less cars. As we’ve seen with most technology commodity products, price tends to be forced downwards. So maybe Elon is right, and a self driving car is worth 5x. But it’s not obvious to me, and I’m wary of people like Elon talking up his own book. He is a proven loser and fantasist, but also a very successful billionaire. :-/

lepus 3y ago

Five+ years ago when more of us believed that false promise that it was happening any day now it made more sense to have discussions about these kinds of hypothetical situations.

bjornasm 3y ago

I mean it would be worth 10x as much if its also made you breakfast but it don't and it won't.

cableshaft 3y ago

I'm not whoring my car out to Uber to let people make a mess in my car when I'm not driving it, sorry. So to me this means nothing. I'll still be in it as much as I would otherwise. Maybe a few less trips driving my wife to errands (as she doesn't feel comfortable driving, despite having a license), but otherwise it shouldn't make much difference. The only thing I can think of is maybe it would make some trips not need my presence at all. Like I could see placing a Wal-mart grocery order, and sending my car to go to Wal-mart without me in it, they load it up, and then it comes back, and I can unload it. Which is nice, but I'm not paying 5x the already expensive car prices in order to save a few minutes here and there.