[billti]

That's why I think the Optimus thing might make sense from a 'market cap' perspective. Tesla is great at innovation and ramping global manufacturing for new tech. Ten years ago, that was EVs. But now EVs are becoming a commodity and every other car company is catching up.

I do think 'self driving' is still their 'moat' when it comes to EVs. I use it every day, and nothing else comes close. But other than that, building EVs is becoming a cut-throat slim-margin business. I don't think that's where Elon, or Tesla employees, want to spend their energy.

[stickfigure]

When Tesla was overpromising self-driving cars, the thing they sold was still a pretty nice car. Even without the magical features, customers were still satisfied with the product.

Now imagine you're selling robots. If the robot "disengages" and breaks 10% of your plates while emptying the dishwasher, you're going to be pissed. There's no fallback to manual mode. It has to work 100% of the time out the gate.

Based on past history, I don't think Tesla has an engineering culture capable of hitting a home run with this kind of frontier technology out of the gate. So they either delay it until it's ready or they launch it prematurely, in which case everyone mocks it and the dream crashes (along with the stock price).

[ben_w]

Even optimistically (no pun intended), I don't see Optimus justifying the Tesla share price.

There's plenty of other companies making robots. Robots can either be controlled by AI or by humans. In the case of humans, there's no moat because everyone can do that. In the case of AI, it can either be on device or on a server, but we're already hitting power supply concerns for data centres, rising prices and supply issues for the components for even local servers, and the historical timeline over which hardware and algorithms have become more energy efficient (and the available power envelope) suggests that on-device AI sufficient for an Optimus to get into a non-self-driving car and drive it at some competence score* happens around a decade after that competence is reached by self-driving cars.

It doesn't even matter if your perception on the relative ranking of different self-drive systems is right or wrong, we're still not yet seeing Tesla vehicles do as Musk said in January 2016:

  I think that within two years, you'll be able to summon your car from across the country. It will meet you wherever your phone is

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_predictions_for_autono...

* Any competence score, i.e. 2016 self-drive quality is likely already doable.

[awesome_dude]

> Ten years ago, that was EVs. But now EVs are becoming a commodity and every other car company is catching up.

Kind of yes, the competition, especially from China, is catching up, and exceeding Tesla's offers.

Kind of no - EVs were around for a very long time before Tesla, Tesla's sales pitch (at one point) was that it was a software company not a car company.

On that front - almost every vehicle manufacturer has caught up, and Tesla is still stuck /promising/ a self driving car, but still not delivering.

The Twitter acquisition is widely seen as the marking point where Musk lost his appeal - something that was not smart because, coupled with his foray into politics was an attack on his core market - middle class left of centre people who were buying for the environment.. etc

He poisoned his brand, and Tesla's too (because the two brands, his and Tesla's, were so intertwined)

He lost the impetus in European markets, leaving a dying (for him) US market, and Asia (which is largely interested in Chinese made vehicles).

My Anecdata: In Australia, where I am, it used to be Tesla's were fairly common, now, I think I've seen two in the last week, compared to maybe a dozen BYD (and I am in a middle class suburb)