this post was submitted on 28 Aug 2024
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I think the focus on AI is what will be the problem. Sure, AI is cool, and sure you need advances for self-driving, but you’re a car manufacturer and can’t neglect car manufacturing
All that stuff is what justifies Tesla being treated as a Tech Stock rather than an Automotive Stock and hence having Stock Prices which are 10x or 20x what an auto-maker with similar Revenue and Margins would have.
Dropping the techno-bollocks that underpins their "we're disrupting the Auto industry with our Technology and will become the Google of cars" story and just focusing on being good at making electric cars would mean loosing the huge "we're a Tech Stock" premium that keeps Tech companies' stock prices high even when they're loosing money (the valuations are justified by investors with the expectation that they will one day dominate entire markets, like Google or Apple), and hence accepting their stock falling 90%, from Uber style valuations to Ford style valuations.
I doubt shareholders will ever accept that, hence I expect Tesla will just keep "faking until you make it" all the while getting farther and farther away from making it, until eventually they crash far harder (possibly even cease to exist in the next decade or two) than it would happen if they just settled down to be just another auto-maker. (In my mind I have the image of the Coyote from Road-Runner running out of track, going over the cliff and keeping on running until noticing he's not running on ground anymore and is high up in the air)
They were a tech company because they developed cars with features and technology no one else ever had. The stock stayed too high because they were delivery 50%+ growth every year and legacy manufacturers weren’t even trying to compete. The stock was truly excessive because of a long term roadmap to bring the future into present reality. Funding for ai was part of the competitive advantage, when it was used to add features to their cars.
AI for its own sake is not a good place to be and will only suck attention and funding from the core business
Humanoid robotics may be a vision of the future and I’m excited that someone will make that attempt, but it has nothing to do with cars. It’s a distraction of funding and attention at the expense of the core business
Previously Musk developed a portfolio of companies, so each can go for their own attempts at the future with less impact on each other. It’s just basic business sense. For example, a solar company could go bankrupt without affecting a car company. Now he’s taking a leap of fantasy and I don’t see any sign of the solid technical base other of his companies started with, and he’s doing it as part of a company that had been succeeding
Electric cars is an incredibly old Tech (older than ICE, even), since the very first cars invented were electric.
Tesla were just updating an old tech and trying to make it viable (in which they succeeded), by using modern batteries and electric motors instead of what was used in the original EVs.
The innovative Tech stuff was things like automated parking and automated driving. I don't think integrating what's basically a tablet on a car dashboard counts as innovative Tech - it's the same kind of thing makers of "Smart" Fridges were doing - grab old tech, put a touch screen on it and call it high tech.
Without the actual high tech part around automated driving, Tesla is just a company that started in the market for car manufacturing with a strategy of carving out a new market segment by updating to the XXI century a technology from the XIX century that is now cheaper to run and adresses the Ecological concerns of many people - quite a smart and in some ways innovative business strategy but it makes them no more a Tech company than Mercedes-Benz is a Tech company for having invented Electronic Fuel Injection or my local supermarket is a Tech company because they have a smartphone customer loyalty app - merelly using existing Tech, integrating new Tech that somebody else invented with old Tech or even inventing new electronic parts for a specific domain is not what makes a Tech company, IMHO.
That said, the Stock Market will believe any old bollocks and the Startup World has never been this fraudulent (and I say this having been an insider) so you can pass pretty much anything that uses Tech in non-innovative ways as a Tech Company - I mean Glovo is deemed a Tech Company even though their business is basically a booked express delivery business that uses a smartphone app and has some backend integration with sellers - a new combination of existing things, not innovation.
Parking assist is incredibly old: Toyotas had it 1999. You can get it off the shelf from Bosch.
Should even be legal to install on your own, given that it's only steering the car, not operating throttle or brake.
Are you actually trying to says Tesla is no real technology improvement over done 1890s electric salon? I want what you’re smoking
Improving an existing technology using modern components is an "improvement" but is not especially "innovative" and not at all any kind of unique breakthrough - it's Tech use, not Tech making.
Maybe because I've spent most of my life working at or near the bleeding edge of Technology I don't find them especially innovative in Tech except for the self-driving stuff: what they did that was impressive was in the sphere of business strategy and they seem to have run with just that for too long and not pivoted when they should've.
That said I can understand that people holding shares is TSLA would be scared shitless about Tesla not being treated anymore as a Tech company by the stockmarket, and hence desperately try to argue that Tesla is a Tech company that makes cars rather than a car company that uses Tech like all the other carmakers.
If you want to be the google of cars you shouldn't be building cars, but become Bosch.
Thing is, I quite like the idea of a self driving car. I do whitewater kayaking, and I'd love to be able to do a trip and have my car meet me at the end.
It's becoming increasingly obvious this isn't happening any time soon though, and developing a vehicle that is totally reliant on the technology doesn't seem like a smart idea.
It's possible just at the outside that one of the Waymo autonomous taxis could pull it off, but they rely on that giant sensor lump on the roof so you'd have nowhere to put your boat...
If I can leave the boat unattended, I could just take a taxi back to the start of the trip.
The main issue is my vehicle is already set up to carry all my gear, so a taxi of any type is far less convenient.