YHK - yet another hacker news clone

Tesla Hasn't Had a Successful New Product Launch Since JB Straubel Stepped Down

129 points gumby 47 minutes ago 72 comments

Avicebron 39 minutes ago | parent

Isn't Tesla trying to be SpaceX's vertically integrated robotics division? My gut feeling says they are trying to move out of the EV business as crazy as that may seem to us normals.

martythemaniak 36 minutes ago | parent

Not crazy at all. Tesla gave up being a car company a few years ago, but there's lot of inertia and the 3 and Y are still competitive products in the marketplace.

slowin 31 minutes ago | parent

Crazy that they have a $1.4T market cap while having given up their entire business (which was never worth a fraction of that anyway).

buran77 27 minutes ago | parent

Their charging network and carbon credits revenue were probably the more valuable parts of the company. Tesla's current promise and foundation for that valuation is that they'll deliver fully autonomous driving.

But Musk has enough avenues to spin things left and right and bury any losses in the process his DOGE assault helped a lot bury some things already) so he'll do that. He's a showman and he'll manage to steal the show for as long as it takes.

judge2020 11 minutes ago | parent

I think the market is mainly banking on Robotaxi being nationwide in 5 years, and Optimus being ready in 10.

For robotaxi, the last 2 years has shown us that FSD 14 has solved the really hard parts of autonomy, so the next logical step is some percentage of people deciding not to own their next car and instead only getting around by Robotaxi.

This is not a bad play by the market. They're poised to redirect a large amount of the existing cash that people are currently paying to (A) own a car, (B) pay interest on the loan, and (C) pay for car insurance. And C does not carry meaningful risk as autonomous vehicles are de-facto safer drivers.

Then the market is kind of putting their faith in giving Tesla 10 years to apply the same playbook to humanoid robots and all of the jobs that that _could_ replace (remains to be seen how capable they can actually make it and what the economics will look like).

flyinglizard 8 minutes ago | parent

Safer drivers I believe, but how do you get around the uncapped liability the service provider carries if someone gets hurt?

gordon_freeman 6 minutes ago | parent

Waymo is far ahead of them in execution and actually getting people around in major cities. Tesla Robotaxi is still just a concept.

notatoad 35 minutes ago | parent

is this something that's actually happening, or just something elon told investors at his optimus event with the obviously fake robots a couple years ago?

thinkingtoilet 35 minutes ago | parent

It's not crazy at all. Elon, in all his genius, built up an EV company and then alienated the core demographic for his product. They tried to salvage it with a wildly over-priced, virtue-signaling "truck" and that didn't work. There are literally millions and millions of Americans who would have other wise loved to buy a Tesla but will never buy one because of Elon. They have to pivot.

alpha_squared 34 minutes ago | parent

Pretending Tesla isn't a car company and SpaceX isn't a satellite services company (Internet, maybe mobile) is wild stuff. The only real profits are from those traditional industries. All the sci-fi hype is for investors and fanatics.

jordanb 32 minutes ago | parent

Value the company by the sizzle not the steak. And before it fails completely fold it into the next grift. Sounds far fetched but it's been working for Elon for years.

malfist 29 minutes ago | parent

Anyone with half a brain can see him stacking his house of cards higher and higher, but yet the market and investors love him.

You can't tell me there's a rational reason there's a common headline of Tesla missing forecast and guidance but still going up after earning report

kevin_thibedeau 29 minutes ago | parent

Those are just side projects. SpaceX is now an AI company. All their phony future revenue projections are dependent on magic numbers cooked up by a drug addict who convinces people to believe his stream of lies.

matthewdgreen 33 minutes ago | parent

Being in the EV business means having to accept predictable revenues that then tie to more predictable stock prices. Being in the business of "some future technology" doesn't.

stymaar 10 minutes ago | parent

The big problem for Tesla is that they cannot sustain their valuation from the car manufacturing business. There's a perpetual need to justify why Tesla should be valued an order of magnitude more than other automakers. Selling the dream of future profit is Tesla's main business.

slowin 32 minutes ago | parent

It’s especially crazy since they sell cars and do not sell robots. Both of Musk’s public companies are little more than financial fraud. That the SEC allows any of this gives me zero confidence in the entire market.

mschuster91 23 minutes ago | parent

> That the SEC allows any of this gives me zero confidence in the entire market.

It will be truly nasty for the next President. All of this shit is going to blow up hard, even worse than 2007 was. With any luck, it will blow up during Trump's final months, but in the truly worst case it will collapse during the early time of whoever the next President is, which means no matter who gets the job will get smoked in the 2030 midterms - in turn ending up like Obama who didn't have a majority of his own for six years (or, in the even worse case, end up like Biden who didn't survive the reelection against someone as unlikeable as Trump).

kraken_cult 21 minutes ago | parent

The cynic in me would say, "all according to plan", it will be right before the new house and senate are going to roll out universal healthcare or something equally good for the average person. Better to get head of it before that happens.

parineum 18 minutes ago | parent

Obama didn't do much with his two years of majority anyway.

Plus, president's don't usually have more than two years of majority.

enaaem 20 minutes ago | parent

Hyundai has been making robots for decades. Imagine the hype if Tesla did half the things Hyundai is doing.

Zigurd 6 minutes ago | parent

Hyundai even bought the humanoid robot company that actually has a working humanoid robot. But it didn't make them any money or give them an absurd P/E ratio.

mschuster91 28 minutes ago | parent

> My gut feeling says they are trying to move out of the EV business as crazy as that may seem to us normals.

It's not that crazy. The last new release of a truly mainstream car was the Model 3 a decade ago. Anything ever since has been facelifts and the ill-fated Cybercuck.

The major problem Tesla faces is that on the one side their brand image is in the gutters and has been for years and on the other side, "established" car companies finally have brought competitive cars to the market at relevant scale. They'll need to invest a lot of money to develop a new model from scratch with a high chance of not making back the money.

lotsofpulp 8 minutes ago | parent

$100 per month in a $40k vehicle that allows it to drive sufficiently well 99% of the time such that it reduces driver stress and liability is worth something.

Other car manufacturers somehow can’t even provide dashcam recordings in a $40 vehicle.

aNoob7000 26 minutes ago | parent

The problem I see is with focus. Elon/Tesla seems to go after the next big thing every couple of years without a real plan.

I'm surprised that the markets have given Elon the amount of slack he's gotten. Once you merge Tesla into SpaceX, what's the plan? Tesla can't seem to roll out new vehicles with different body styling. Is robotics or AI the next big thing? What will happen to their car business? Will it just be CyberCabs? Will they become a mobile phone carrier?

The list of questions goes on and on. All this feels like a YC company looking for a new line of business because they just figured out their current line of business isn't all that great.

ForHackernews 11 minutes ago | parent

Neuralink brain uploads! Preorder now for immortality!

__MatrixMan__ 14 minutes ago | parent

Musk's companies are good at entering a stagnated industry and proving that it can work better if radically changed. But once the new concept is proved, they seem kinda spent, a pivot makes sense to me.

It'll be interesting to see if they can do well in places where there aren't a bunch of stagnant incumbents to upset. I'm sure Musk would love to edgelord his way through a conversation where he offends a bunch of people by implying that they have been doing asteroid mining all wrong, those idiots, and then go prove himself right, but there's just nobody doing that.

Zigurd 11 minutes ago | parent

It's not "crazy," it's flim flam. It's what Elizabeth Holmes would've look like had she bought a health tech firm before starting the Thernos scam so she could pump her stock to a P/E ratio over 300 instead of scamming naïve noob tech investors.

yoyohello13 8 minutes ago | parent

That roadster demo proved to me they are not serious about making EVs anymore. Strapping rockets to a car makes an interesting spectacle, but is utterly impractical for a real consumer vehicle.

troupo 37 minutes ago | parent

Elon had an insane talent of finding the right people with wild moonshot ideas to run his companies while he was getting the credit and the limelight.

Then he got older, got into politics and fully bought into the marketing about himself. He thinks he's a genius and that everything he touches turns to gold.

Well... Turns out stuff works as long as he is out of the loop and doesn't make any direct decisions.

swiftcoder 25 minutes ago | parent

> Turns out stuff works as long as he is out of the loop and doesn't make any direct decisions

This is not unique to Musk - many tech CEOs learn this the hard way when they start meddling in the day-to-day. Bezos built an empire, but the projects he took personal control of (like FirePhone) tended to be unmitigated disasters.

MrBuddyCasino 22 minutes ago | parent

He personally co-designed S3.

xqcgrek2 34 minutes ago | parent

Tesla is one china EV tariff away from bankruptcy

jdross 34 minutes ago | parent

FSD that actually works and the massively popular in live markets robotaxi service are the obvious answer to “big-deal things that came after this CTO left”

$2B cybertruck failure barely registers vs how impactful FSD has been on model Y / 3 sales. Tesla is supply constrained again, with multi-month waits for the model Y L edition

malfist 26 minutes ago | parent

So massively popular Tesla doesn't disclose how many rides it does?

myvoiceismypass 20 minutes ago | parent

Your massively popular robotaxi is years behind Waymo. Years.

0xy 33 minutes ago | parent

Cybercab seems to have had a very promising start, metrics are good. This seems far more of a political hate piece than one based on any data.

Levitating 31 minutes ago | parent

Isn't it completely overshadowed by Waymo? From what I've heard Waymo is more profitable and has substantially fewer accidents due to better technology.

strulovich 24 minutes ago | parent

If a few things work out for Tesla they can do overshadow Waymo very quickly.

Waymo’s entire fleet is estimated at about 6000 cars. Tesla produces this many cars in a little over a day.

The cybercab is also likely to end up costing 1/10th of a Waymo car

It’s not that Tesla is winning here. But the economics of their solution can totally tilt the entire market in the future.

ben_w 14 minutes ago | parent

> If a few things work out for Tesla they can do overshadow Waymo very quickly.

If.

I've been reading the same thing each year since basically the first version of Tesla's car AI. I'm sure I've even written similar things.

ftchd 23 minutes ago | parent

There always gonna be both Pepsi and Cola.

grandpajoey 15 minutes ago | parent

Except I can go to the store and buy a Coke and a Pepsi. Musk’s vaporware doesn’t actually exist in the market.

ftchd 11 minutes ago | parent

Meh, not a Muskboi but it's public now, no invite needed.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T1Id2aas5wI (you can find more using Youtube search, or Chat)

Is it global, or US wide? Nope, Waymo isn't neither.

throw1234567891 6 minutes ago | parent

You mean Coca-Cola. Pepsi Cola is a Cola from Pepsi.

DoesntMatter22 20 minutes ago | parent

Waymo isn't profitable at all. It's a massive money loser. And in some cities Tesla is nearly at parity

mbajkowski 15 minutes ago | parent

Tesla has had a massive surge in cybercabs in Austin over the last few weeks. I would venture to say they have surpassed the number of Waymos over here. Don't have any numbers to back this up though. As for being profitable, it seems the cost of a cybercab should be much less than a Waymo.

CrimsonRain 10 minutes ago | parent

Did you take a look at amount of money waymo is losing let alone profit?

Unsupervised robotaxi has lower (at fault) accidents than unsupervised waymo.

All notable cybercab accidents have been done by remote driving.

The only thing waymo have are - large fleet thus large miles/week - many cities

In last week or so, Tesla went from tiny to equal/more than waymo in Austin seemingly in just a few days.

They'll do that in other cities too in due time.

underseacables 29 minutes ago | parent

It was very strange, in the beginning people celebrated Tesla, they raved about it, the sales were great, but then as soon as the politics got involved, suddenly it's all turned negative.

MrBuddyCasino 23 minutes ago | parent

Almost as if journalists were paid partisan hacks.

lanstin 18 minutes ago | parent

The early Tesla fans are politically engaged woke people. Having to settle for new Leaf now but in some ways it’s nicer than Model 3. And more friendly to my kids networks of ethnically diverse trans and queer friends and partners. And less scary for the many immigrant communities in my neighborhood.

y0ssar1an 12 minutes ago | parent

Elon's cognitive decline from drug addiction affected both his business and political decision making. pre-ketamine Elon delivered the Falcon 9, Model 3/Y, and Starlink. post-ketamine Elon gave us Cybertruck, Starship (aka the SpaceX Cybertruck), and a bunch of fake products like the flying roadster, humanoid robots, and Cybercab.

jazzypants 26 minutes ago | parent

There are millions of Americans like me who will never step foot in one because of their association with Elon Musk.

That's an insane negative attribute that Waymo doesn't have to worry about. I hate the Alphabet guys too, but not to the same extent of completely boycotting all their products (yet).

parineum 12 minutes ago | parent

> There are millions of Americans like me who will never step foot in one because of their association with Elon Musk.

You guys have to realize at some point that you're not a significant part of the market. There are a lot of people who don't particularly like musk but the amount that would never use a cybercab isn't a significant part of a 300m person market.

jazzypants 11 minutes ago | parent

Yeah, sure. That's why Tesla sales have fallen for two consecutive years ever since he exposed himself as a fascist. You keep telling yourself that, buddy.

losvedir 10 minutes ago | parent

Speaking as someone who follows the NFL, people will forgive all kinds of horrendous behavior if the player's team is winning. It's easy to say things in the abstract like "won't buy a Tesla" because most people aren't really shopping for a car all that often. But if the cybertaxi works and is cheap, then I would guess a lot of people won't be sticking to their proclaimed values. That said, I have my doubts that cybercab will really work all that well.

jazzypants 7 minutes ago | parent

I was a Cleveland Browns fans for literally my entire life until they signed Deshaun Watson. I watched every single game, but now I haven't watched a game in like four years. I was already concerned about the effects of CTE, but I couldn't go on cheering for a team that knowingly signed a rapist.

You should surround yourself with people who are willing to stand up for their convictions.

grandpajoey 13 minutes ago | parent

The Cybercab has not had a promising start. Years behind schedule, available nowhere and Musk has negative brand value. Another DOA Tesla scam.

pessimizer 6 minutes ago | parent

> Cybercab seems to have had a very promising start, metrics are good. This seems far more of a political hate piece than one based on any data.

What? This is just a political hate piece because of the potential of something that just started five minutes ago? You're damning Tesla with faint praise yourself and don't even know it.

ckdarby 29 minutes ago | parent

Is this a paid piece behind the scenes by JB Straubel? It reads exactly as someone who was paid or got exclusive access to write something to over highlight someone.

martincsweiss 25 minutes ago | parent

There's too many confounders to say that JB Straubel is the cause.

Examples: Covid controversies around musk in 2020, Twitter acquisition in 2022, Musk becoming the world richest person in 2021

sowhat1 21 minutes ago | parent

Exceptional success is both timing and having an exceptional team. But yea, let's keep attributing it to great man theory, because that's more digestible and people like to mythologize a single person.