Chinese EV buyers are cooling on Tesla and BYD
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I'm curious what scenarios you think about for that calculus, because for most industrial uses the loss of precision would be catastrophic to say make a robot use a handheld drill rather than just make a drill robot, and the capital costs of reconfiguring and segregating zones/steps to intermingle safely is both known and cheaper in the long run due to the productivity gains
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Oh no, I just imagined a room full of nazibots seig heiling and goose stepping while Musk watches on from a stage
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Then you can subscribe to the "knows how to do laundry" feature. The premium tier can use color vision to not put reds in with the whites.
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So Tesla's car sales are tanking.
FSD is marginally functional at best
Robotaxi isn't doing so hot and has a load of competitors
Tesla/xAI is increasingly an also-ran in the AI market
And based on that absolutely stellar track record, we're supposed to believe that a robot that nobody has seen is going to be the company's salvation?
I really don't get Tesla investors.
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Tesla's core competency is spewing endless bullshit to gullible investors, so I'd say "robots" fits right in.
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Is it just me or is the line of causality perfectly backwards here? Q2 predates the summer. And profits usually fall because of a price war, not because of the end of a price war.
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Not only that, energy consumption. How much power does a humanoid robot require?
He'll just have to cull the unwanted human population to save energy.
Perhaps that's the plan. He can't interact with real people, his swarm is via IVF, so replace them all with robots who bow when he enters the room and do his bidding without question.
He's ill.
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Well clearly after I buy one and get it working on my plantation, I’ll be able to afford several more and start to develop my precious metals mines.
The genius of these things is you can build them with cheap labour in west Africa, ship them across to the Caribbean where they can work my sugar plantation, sail to Europe full of rum, then back down to Africa with precision-engineered ball bearings to build more robots!
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A thought I had is that Musk really, really doesn't know what to do about/with competition.
Maybe it's a mindset thing, but it feels like he views each market as a one-shot game that can be 'won' by being first (to market and/or profitability) and is won forever instead of just being the first step in a long-term state of competitive existence.
That's most visible in EVs right now because carmakers have been faster to react, but I suspect we'll see the same thing happen with Starlink and Falcon 9 competitors too once they progress to the point of commercial viability and scale.
Maybe it's a mindset thing, but it feels like he views each market as a one-shot game that can be 'won' by being first (to market and/or profitability) and is won forever instead of just being the first step in a long-term state of competitive existence.
That's most visible in EVs right now because carmakers have been faster to react, but I suspect we'll see the same thing happen with Starlink and Falcon 9 competitors too once they progress to the point of commercial viability and scale.
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Nope, that was the month before last month. Last month was self-driving taxis, which are not in any way alike self-driving cars, because everyone who knows, knows there's no future in self-driving cars. Next month will be taxis driven by humanoid robots, because everyone who knows, knows there's no future in taxis that drive themselves.
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Tesla and SpaceX have had some success by doing things no one else was even trying at. Tesla made it's mark when no one else was even really bothering with EVs. Falcon is successful because no one else has a reusable anything for space. Starlink is the first and only low-orbit satellite data service. The common factor seems to be that Musk did manage to identify a more or less empty market which could be entered successfully. And if you have the whole market to yourself, it's easy to be successful.
But looking forward, self-driving cars is not an empty market. Lots of companies are working on that. Humanoid robots? Another market that is going to be highly competitive. LLM based AI? Again, highly competitive. There's no reason to think that Tesla will be able to achieve outsized results in any of these efforts. None of the things Musk is touting today are visionary or revolutionary in the sense that no other company is pursing it. Even if Musk is successful in them, it's going to be the ordinay success one finds in markets with lots of competition.
But looking forward, self-driving cars is not an empty market. Lots of companies are working on that. Humanoid robots? Another market that is going to be highly competitive. LLM based AI? Again, highly competitive. There's no reason to think that Tesla will be able to achieve outsized results in any of these efforts. None of the things Musk is touting today are visionary or revolutionary in the sense that no other company is pursing it. Even if Musk is successful in them, it's going to be the ordinay success one finds in markets with lots of competition.
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so do they start out punching trees? Can they do the full tech tree?
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I’m failing to find a quote of his that mentions it specifically (way too many hits) but he has often said he finds himself a bit odd.
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Unitree seems to be in the lead in Humanoid robotics. They have a new one that looks pretty good only costing 6k USD. No idea how they can make it that cheap, though they do have more expensive ones. Unitree cleaned up at the Beijing Robot Games a few weeks ago. A lot of Chinese EV makers also do humanoids.
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Even there, there are limits. Musk had the "solving mass transit by running a car in an underground loop like a glorified slot-car" thing pretty much to himself, and AFAIK that remains a market of one. Having a team with some kind of cogent mission is also a required ingredient, and I'm not sure he's attracting those kinds of people anymore.
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We've actually chosen to adapt the human world for robots - washing machines, dishwashers, bulldozers, piledrivers, tunnelling machines, CNC machines.
Humanoid robots doing things in the home - what could possibly go wrong apart from just about everything when it comes to safety?
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The market is controlled by big investors, who are not only riding the bubble, but encouraging it. Their goal is not fair valuation; it’s making money. What sane person actually believes Tesla istock is worth its current ~200 P/E? They’re just riding it until it collapses.
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How long till the new owners realise they've been sold a *turkey?
* a thing that proves to be disappointing or unappealing
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First, the EU has already hitched its automotive future to the Chinese market decades ago. They weren't complaining when for nearly a decade Volkswagen were selling more cars in China than in Europe. Even today, the Chinese market is still incredibly important for European cars.
Second, BYD isn't dumping cars in Europe. In fact, it's the opposite.
https://www.reuters.com/business/au...ev-exports-sell-twice-china-price-2024-04-26/
They sell cars in Europe for far more expensively than they do domestically. they actually use EU to recuperate profit that they're losing in China from price cuts. It's just that there's little competition in EV space in Europe. If only the European car companies got its act together and actually put together some quality EV offerings.
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... a car manufacturer with falling sales, relative to their competition.
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Not the first and not the only. Iridium was the first. Famously went bankrupt pretty much the day it started, but it restructured and has been operating since (eg with the inReach). Globalstar (used by SPOT devices) is the same era.
Starlink is a much bigger scale — lots more bandwidth. But it has competition as well, notably Eutelsat (née OneWeb).
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That’s why I split my comment between areas where a robot is interacting with humans and the human environment and areas where their not.
As an example if you want to introduce a robot to your house. How does it go through doors? Do you add actuators to the doors that the robot can control in order to open/close them? (And have to retrofit every door in your house). Or do you build a robot that can simply use the multitude of dooknobs/handles/latches that humans have developed over millennia? (Which means at the very least humanoid hand style manipulators. )
But for the industrial environment, you’re generally building your workspaces from scratch to support a new manufacturing system. So for that it makes sense for dedicated robots.
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Haven’t you seen those documentaries? Humans become batteries for the robots! /s
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Fixed that for you. And it wouldn’t take years to establish a self-evident fact.
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The robot in my home bumps around until it randomly finds a way. I can use doors to control where it goes.
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innovation? Whats that cause musk doesn't.
I'd wager tesla was an accident, in the right place at the right time. If tesla never happened but he tried it today, it would fail and never be noticed, like MOST musk companies.
Wanna know why falcon 9 succeeded? Aside from the amazing people he had at spacex (not musk), the tech EXISTED. It was low hanging fruit that he got lucky with.
Everything after tesla and falcon 9 has been failure after failure.
Heck, spacex is the ONLY company that can successfully fail. Rocket blows up? Its a scucess cause they learned stuff! Anyone elses rocket blows up? Total failure......
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A few weeks ago the BBC was reporting on Tesla sales and suggested that the record sales in Turkey was probably due to it being a route for cars to illegally go into the Russian market…
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Depends on what the robot is doing. Does a vacuum robot need to open doors? A robot doing laundry might, but that's a pretty expensive object for a pretty mundane simple job too outside of disability scenarios
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I see it on the individual level all the time. Usually among kids, but too often in adults.
You ignore or hide a problem until it is so far gone, someone else demands it be resolved or notices. That is usually the point in time. Occasionally the individual finally decides to address it because they can't ignore it any longer.
If you had done something about it days/weeks/months/years ago, the issue would have been easily resolved. But now, it is a crisis.
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Just because one person says something doesn’t mean it represents anything more than that. If the same person said the opposite thing, you might have a case.
For example, in support of your first strawman, I have a BMW i4 and it’s pretty great. If I then said something bad about BMW, that would be pretty weird. But if some other random person said something bad about BMW, that doesn’t change my statement at all.
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Do you only have a dirty floor in one room? Or on one floor of your house? Or does every segmented area of your house get it’s own roomba?
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It’s not cars but robots, and soon it will be “not robots, it’s actually autocomplete”, and soon after that it will be “allotment rentals on Mars”, and if that doesn’t keep the stock up then “obviously French fries makers were always the end game!”
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Considering he is claiming billions of robot sales per year...
Well, then the legal question is going to be "is Musk delusional? Lying? Or too stupid to pour piss out of a boot with instructions on the sole?"
Or all three.
I don't think it'll be him being hopeful, because that would require him to be delusional or stupid.
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Actually, the market is waiting to identify the next bubble.
The money needs a place to generate returns for the investors. The President is threatening the interest rates and the bond markets, and the tariffs are threatening the bottom lines of companies.
If asset managers sell the meme stock now to invest in lower returns, they are taking a gamble. AI has been the place, but few companies with stratospheric valuations already (including Tesla investing massively in AI), and the doubts are coming in.
As soon as they find the next cash cow, the adjustment is going to be swift and painful.
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