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by DilettanteQuant 781 days ago
People literally do this, it's called Airbnb. I don't understand, this is supposed to be a tech news site and you guys are acting like you haven't heard of any of these massively successful peer 2 peer companies.

It seems that you don't like Tesla for other reasons, so you're bringing up easily dismissed business challenges that have already been solved.
3 comments
WA 781 days ago
Last time I went to an Airbnb that was actually the home of someone else was in 2016 or so. I assume most Airbnbs are apartments made explicitly for using them as Airbnb rentals. Same logic applies to Robo taxis. This won't happen. The "private space" argument is quite strong imho.
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DilettanteQuant 781 days ago
what does it matter if that ends up being the case with the transportation p2p networks too?

You are imagining one way for this to work and then claiming it wont make good business sense, when that is clearly not the only option.

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nolok 781 days ago
Airbnb has long since turned into commercial renting. People short renting their actual home when they're not there is now a minimal part of their activity.
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mkipper 780 days ago
The difference is scale.

Airbnb isn't trying to revolutionize home ownership. They can have a successful business even if 99% of homeowners have no interest in renting out their place to strangers.

But when Musk talks about robotaxi, he doesn't describe it as a feature that some small percentage of Tesla owner will take advantage of and that Tesla will use to pull in some extra revenue. Instead, it's used as a justification to treat Tesla as a tech company rather than a car company, since robotaxi is going to completely change how society looks at transportation.

Even if Tesla successfully delivers robotaxi (a hard task in itself), there's no reason to assume it's going to cause the seismic shift that Musk seems to assume it will.

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DilettanteQuant 780 days ago
I feel stupid even responding to this. I'll take your comment on the assumption of good faith.

If the vehicles can generate revenue people will buy them looking to make money for themselves. Tesla makes money on the sale and the recurring ride hailing revenue. If 1% of consumer vehicles sold are autonomous robo-taxis that alone makes a significant bump in Tesla's bottom line.

Just did a quick search for ride sharing TAM ~100 billion. If Tesla can capture some of that at high margin (bc no driver). It's a lot of money.

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