8 ms·

Tesla Wants Out of the Car Business

63 points by fortran77 1y ago

jlei523 1y ago
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.
- mandeepj 1y ago
  > 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.
  - hobofan 1y ago
    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) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nothing_(company)
    - tsimionescu 1y ago
      > 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.
      - grim_io 1y ago
        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.
  - sporkxrocket 1y ago
    A car is not a platform and cannot create the locking/monopoly a phone can.
    - mandeepj 1y ago
      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.
      - sporkxrocket 1y ago
        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).
  - pendenthistory 1y ago
    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?
  - scarface_74 1y ago
    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.
- izzydata 1y ago
  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.
- mensetmanusman 1y ago
  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.
  - touristtam 1y ago
    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.
    - mensetmanusman 1y ago
      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.
- tyleo 1y ago
  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.
  - LightBug1 1y ago
    I used to think of a company named Ratner. Now I think of Tesla.
- blitzar 1y ago
  Uber is probably better placed for self driving, to take the fattest cut - the usage fees, than any of the hardware providers.
- runako 1y ago
  > 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.
- jgalt212 1y ago
  > China is going to own the EV market. Only so long as China is OK for the entire industry running at a loss.
sleepyguy 1y ago
http://archive.today/G0ESp http://archive.today/G0ESp
webdevver 1y ago
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.
- sporkxrocket 1y ago
  Tesla has made no inroads to this story, their valuation is 100% unjustified.
- utyop22 1y ago
  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.
  - frizlab 1y ago
    > Regulation cannot simply be imposed on people against their will. They can, and have been.
  - webdevver 1y ago
    >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?"
mentalgear 1y ago
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 !
rjsw 1y ago
TBF, being good at running an EV charging business could be a profitable niche for the long term.
- originalvichy 1y ago
  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.
- amelius 1y ago
  Niche? Strange choice of word for something that is becoming mainstream.
  - mbreese 1y ago
    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.
- notahacker 1y ago
  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
- ishtanbul 1y ago
  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.
thevillagechief 1y ago
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.
- tptacek 1y ago
  It's the least productive discussion we can possibly have here, but that does not in fact go without saying. People disagree.
  - javier123454321 1y ago
    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.
    - blitzar 1y ago
      > 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.
      - javier123454321 1y ago
        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.
k310 1y ago
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?
- Zigurd 1y ago
  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.
  - k310 1y ago
    Point taken. That might be useful with GPS. I am thinking of some worst cases. And of course, that doesn't help you avoid all the others out there without it, facing over-bright oncoming headlights, and guessing which way the road bends. And deer. Remember the motto: Drive carefully. The life you save may be mine.
    - Zigurd 1y ago
      I'm pretty confident that, eventually, new roads and substantially renovated existing infrastructure will be designed to help AVs work better. But between lack of foresight, slow moving civil engineering standards, and self interest by incumbent manufacturers, we're going to get their ass end first. First we're going to make AVs work in existing traffic on existing infrastructure. That will be more expensive and slower than it needs to be. Other things like vehicles designed specifically to be AVs used in mainly urban environments, with varying passenger capacities, and also variants for freight delivery are going to be developed along the way.
diamondfist25 1y ago
Love my FSD. People are seriously blinded by their hatred and politics
- grim_io 1y ago
  Tesla "FSD" is the car version of vibe coding in production.
- micromacrofoot 1y ago
  hatred, politics... and also the data
- Reubachi 1y ago
  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.)
bgwalter 1y ago
This is the original "master plan" from 2025: https://www.tesla.com/master-plan-part-4 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.
stephc_int13 1y ago
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.
- Zigurd 1y ago
  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.
shadowvoxing 1y ago
How can anyone believe the Atlantic? Especially when it's regarding Elon Musk or Trump? Come on people, lol.
yardie 1y ago
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.
- drdrey 1y ago
  Elon Musk is not a cofounder of Tesla
  - yardie 1y ago
    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.
throwaway984393 1y ago
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pupppet 1y ago
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.
cs702 1y ago
> 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-Q2-2025-Update.pdf https://www.tesla.com/sites/default/files/downloads/TSLA-Q2-...
- grim_io 1y ago
  Ah yes, the "hopes and dreams" stock valuation.
  - cs702 1y ago
    I didn't say anything about Tesla's valuation. Please don't attack a straw-man.
- JohnFen 1y ago
  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.
  - cs702 1y ago
    Year over year, vehicle deliveries decreased 13%. Quarter over quarter, vehicle deliveries increased 14%. That's most definitely not a "collapse."
LeifCarrotson 1y ago
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-self-driving-give-up-promise-autonomy/ https://electrek.co/2025/09/05/tesla-changes-meaning-full-se...
- surgical_fire 1y ago
  > 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.
- Zigurd 1y ago
  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.
diabllicseagull 1y ago
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.
nunez 1y ago
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 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.
lossolo 1y ago
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.
- throwaway-11-1 1y ago
  I really really want a Xiaomi YU7 or SU7. Instead we have embarrassing Cybertrucks and ugly GMs, the US sucks so bad these days
daft_pink 1y ago
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.
tim333 1y ago
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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=88KHfX_kPIY&t=990s)

63 points by fortran77 1y ago

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.

mandeepj 1y ago
> 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.
- hobofan 1y ago
  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) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nothing_(company)
  - tsimionescu 1y ago
    > 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.
    - grim_io 1y ago
      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.
- sporkxrocket 1y ago
  A car is not a platform and cannot create the locking/monopoly a phone can.
  - mandeepj 1y ago
    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.
    - sporkxrocket 1y ago
      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).
- pendenthistory 1y ago
  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?
- scarface_74 1y ago
  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.
izzydata 1y ago
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.
mensetmanusman 1y ago
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.
- touristtam 1y ago
  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.
  - mensetmanusman 1y ago
    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.
tyleo 1y ago
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.
- LightBug1 1y ago
  I used to think of a company named Ratner. Now I think of Tesla.
blitzar 1y ago
Uber is probably better placed for self driving, to take the fattest cut - the usage fees, than any of the hardware providers.
runako 1y ago
> 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.
jgalt212 1y ago
> China is going to own the EV market. Only so long as China is OK for the entire industry running at a loss.

sleepyguy 1y ago

http://archive.today/G0ESp http://archive.today/G0ESp

webdevver 1y ago

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.

sporkxrocket 1y ago
Tesla has made no inroads to this story, their valuation is 100% unjustified.
utyop22 1y ago
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.
- frizlab 1y ago
  > Regulation cannot simply be imposed on people against their will. They can, and have been.
- webdevver 1y ago
  >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?"

mentalgear 1y ago

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 !

rjsw 1y ago

TBF, being good at running an EV charging business could be a profitable niche for the long term.

originalvichy 1y ago
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.
amelius 1y ago
Niche? Strange choice of word for something that is becoming mainstream.
- mbreese 1y ago
  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.
notahacker 1y ago
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
ishtanbul 1y ago
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.

thevillagechief 1y ago

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.

tptacek 1y ago
It's the least productive discussion we can possibly have here, but that does not in fact go without saying. People disagree.
- javier123454321 1y ago
  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.
  - blitzar 1y ago
    > 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.
    - javier123454321 1y ago
      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.

k310 1y ago

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?

Zigurd 1y ago
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.
- k310 1y ago
  Point taken. That might be useful with GPS. I am thinking of some worst cases. And of course, that doesn't help you avoid all the others out there without it, facing over-bright oncoming headlights, and guessing which way the road bends. And deer. Remember the motto: Drive carefully. The life you save may be mine.
  - Zigurd 1y ago
    I'm pretty confident that, eventually, new roads and substantially renovated existing infrastructure will be designed to help AVs work better. But between lack of foresight, slow moving civil engineering standards, and self interest by incumbent manufacturers, we're going to get their ass end first. First we're going to make AVs work in existing traffic on existing infrastructure. That will be more expensive and slower than it needs to be. Other things like vehicles designed specifically to be AVs used in mainly urban environments, with varying passenger capacities, and also variants for freight delivery are going to be developed along the way.

diamondfist25 1y ago

Love my FSD. People are seriously blinded by their hatred and politics

grim_io 1y ago
Tesla "FSD" is the car version of vibe coding in production.
micromacrofoot 1y ago
hatred, politics... and also the data
Reubachi 1y ago
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.)

bgwalter 1y ago

This is the original "master plan" from 2025: https://www.tesla.com/master-plan-part-4 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.

stephc_int13 1y ago

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.

Zigurd 1y ago
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.

shadowvoxing 1y ago

How can anyone believe the Atlantic? Especially when it's regarding Elon Musk or Trump? Come on people, lol.

yardie 1y ago

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.

drdrey 1y ago
Elon Musk is not a cofounder of Tesla
- yardie 1y ago
  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.

throwaway984393 1y ago

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pupppet 1y ago

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.

cs702 1y ago

> 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-Q2-2025-Update.pdf https://www.tesla.com/sites/default/files/downloads/TSLA-Q2-...

grim_io 1y ago
Ah yes, the "hopes and dreams" stock valuation.
- cs702 1y ago
  I didn't say anything about Tesla's valuation. Please don't attack a straw-man.
JohnFen 1y ago
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.
- cs702 1y ago
  Year over year, vehicle deliveries decreased 13%. Quarter over quarter, vehicle deliveries increased 14%. That's most definitely not a "collapse."

LeifCarrotson 1y ago

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-self-driving-give-up-promise-autonomy/ https://electrek.co/2025/09/05/tesla-changes-meaning-full-se...

surgical_fire 1y ago
> 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.
Zigurd 1y ago
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.

diabllicseagull 1y ago

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.

nunez 1y ago

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 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.

lossolo 1y ago

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.

throwaway-11-1 1y ago
I really really want a Xiaomi YU7 or SU7. Instead we have embarrassing Cybertrucks and ugly GMs, the US sucks so bad these days

daft_pink 1y ago

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.

tim333 1y ago

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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=88KHfX_kPIY&t=990s)