The problem is that EVs are basically a solved problem. There isn't any technological advantage to be gained, since the technology in an EV is very basic (+) compared to ICE vehicles. So then it comes down to manufacturing, and there China is king.
(+) Except for the battery, but that's a very long term battle with very tiny steps.
My brother bought a Tesla recently. They dicked him around with delivery, and he had to pay a ton to get charging infrastructure installed at his house, but it's fast so he's happy. On a recent visit, he finally showed me the car, and it was hilarious how janky the final product is. Everything seems cobbled together-- a good example is that there's apparently two separate voice assistants (plus his phone) and none of them can talk to each other, so commands like "turn on the defrost" are responded to with "I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that".
Controls as simple as the door handles are unintuitive, with the handle apparently being the emergency release that doesn't lower the window (for who knows why). You have to brief your passengers on egress like it's an airplane.
EVs might be a solved problem, but Tesla is still fighting their own additional layer of complexity that they added on top. The added subscription nonsense makes him look like a fool for having bought in, something I am definitely even more reluctant to do now that I've seen it play out.
> Controls as simple as the door handles are unintuitive, with the handle apparently being the emergency release that doesn't lower the window (for who knows why). You have to brief your passengers on egress like it's an airplane.
I caught a ride with a friend in a Tesla, and when we stopped I opened the door - like a human being operating a century-old piece of technology - and he looked at me like I was crazy, and told me not to do that.
Yeah, it apparently damages the weatherstripping (and maybe the window and other things) and is meant to be used only in an emergency /facepalm. Which is probably why your friend was alarmed.
I didn't care, I still tested it out the day I picked up mine to see where the manual handle is and make sure it works, because just a couple days earlier two people had gotten trapped in a burning Tesla, were unable to figure out the mechanism, and died.
I have a 2022 Model 3, and the hilariously tragic part is that the voice assistant was great and basically never gave me any problems until they shoved Grok into it, whereupon it broke completely. I never use it anymore, they effectively removed a feature from my car.
Whoa, did Tesla pull an Apple? Siri used to work okay on the iPhone, but once it got LLMed it frequently sits there indefinitely while failing to make any progress on even the simplest commands.
Counterpoint: I like my Tesla, and I find the AI assistant diverting and useful. I have very little doubt the functionality of the limited on-board voice assistant will be merged into Grok (it's literally on the coming features).
Whether you like this or not, who cares? The pace of improvement in Tesla software compared to any other manufacturer is astonishing, and astonishingly good.
I have no love for the CEO, but my Model Y is a very interesting (and intuitive) car.
Do a quick press of the voice button and the old voice control activate; if you hold it down or press too long, it uses the grok AI which can't do anything (and I never use).
I have an older X, and I'm kind of happy that the AP and Infotainment hardware in it is largely deprecated, and they are unlikely to be able to shove Grok crap into it. It will stay largely the same for the life of the car.
This is part of the reason why I believe cars should delegate as much software functionality to your phone as possible. Phones have good voice assistants and they will get better, same with GPS and music. Just let the phone do it. Plus, when the software is out of support you don't have to buy a new car.
These are niche enough use cases I don't think they're worth bothering about.
I wouldn't dump millions into a custom GPS solution for that 1 time out of 1 million someone drives a car without a smartphone. Especially when that GPS system is guaranteed to be worse than Google maps and not as well supported.
If someone else drives your car they can connect their phone. Which is an improvement, because now they have THEIR music and navigation. See, it comes with personalization out of the box and automatically!
EVs are a solved problem, but as amelius notes the real tech is the battery. Tesla + Panasonic has a built in advantage in terms of battery manufacturing. Tesla has a massive amount of capital, if they put it into reducing and scaling manufacturing of vehicles and batteries, I think they could probably win. Now maybe Telsa has looked at the numbers and decided they can't win and are choosing to pivot rather than die a slow death.
I don't think that is what is happening here. Instead, Tesla is continuing the strategy that brought them to this disaster of going all in on driverless. That isn't a bad strategy, but if they get the timing wrong a third time, they destroy the company and they have gotten the timing wrong on this twice already. This strategy has two downsides:
1. AI has no real moat and Tesla has largely pursued commodity sensors, meaning that other than EVs+battery tech (which Tesla appears abandoning), robotaxis have no hardware or software moat.
2. They could use network effects to win, in which case their competitors are not other car companies but Uber and Lyft. Uber has been pursuing the same long term strategy at Tesla.
Now by itself, going all in robotaxi, is risky but could work if they time it right. Tesla isn't going all in on robotaxi since they are splitting the effort between robotaxi and Optimus robots.
It is likely that the experience Tesla gets with Optimus robots will help other robotics companies, but unlike robotaxis where the timing might (but probably won't work), the timing is clearly isn't right for Optimus.
It seems like the motivation here is that Musk is aligning Tesla to a narrative that justify the absurd stock price, even if that narrative isn't reality.
> It seems like the motivation here is that Musk is aligning Tesla to a narrative that justify the absurd stock price, even if that narrative isn't reality.
Since Tesla stock has always been 90% based on the narrative, the narrative is the reality (and the product) of Tesla, and the actual machinery made and sold are just props and decorations to create the impression of it.
Maybe they should rebrand themselves as poTemkin: keep the T logo and the mysterious Slavic vibe, while shedding the pretense about what they're about.
Won't affect the stock anyway. Everyone knows the company is overvalued based on promises and perception alone.
Everyone's just betting on the charade going on one moment longer than their hold on the stock.
If you squint, the Cybertruck is shaped like a pyramid on wheels, which couldn't work any better as a visual metaphor for the enterprise.
If Tesla has lost the advantage in battery tech, that is unfortunate and speaks poorly to Tesla's long term strategy. Reclaiming this lead would be an important strategic goal and I disagree with that not being prioritized.
> Why? Other robotics companies have been doing it for longer. Is Optimus better than Atlas:
Atlas costs about half a million dollars, targeting a price tag of $160,000 once mass produced, and assumes the user will be able to do some maintenance.
Optimus is targeting a price tag of $30,000, but probably costs around $80,000 to produce. It is plastic, it is cheap, it doesn't work.
Atlas is better than Optimus but all measures. The advantage of Optimus so far has been, the mass production-->usage until failure-->improvement cycles that are already underway. Tesla is, as an extremely high cost, slipping on every single banana peel first and this is clearing a path for other companies to learn what doesn't work when you switch from functional over-engineered robot to barely functional robots that can be mass produced.
Telsa isn't alone in this space, but they investing a lot and trying to cut corners. So much of engineering is learning the corners you can cut and the corners that cause a battery fire after 8 weeks of use.
> Tesla + Panasonic has a built in advantage in terms of battery manufacturing. Tesla has a massive amount of capital, if they put it into reducing and scaling manufacturing of vehicles and batteries, I think they could probably win.
This is a very wrong way to tell the story.
Tesla + Panasonic were the first to commit to a massive factor car cells with very advanced chemistry. But this advantage didn't hold long as the model was soon copied.
And at that point, when that investment happened Tesla did actually not have 'a massive amount of capital'. And Panasonic also didn't, and even more so, Panasonic didn't want to go all in on batteries. As they were a company from Japan that still believed in the Hydrogen future.
By the time Tesla had serious capital, the other battery companies had long shot past Tesla+Panasonic and it wasn't even close.
Claiming that Panasonic and Tesla can win now is just silly and based on nothing.
Tesla was actually pretty clever on this and invested rather a large amount in their own battery supply chain. And they spun up a whole battery supply chain pretty quickly. But arguably they were a bit two ambitious. Musk really pushed the boundary with the cells, introducing or trying to introduce a lot of things that were hard to do and simply took time. They should have started more conservatively first and only tried to innovated once they could match the other companies on the standard process.
There was no chance for them to be a massive battery supplier to the outside, but making their own batteries for their own cars and getting better margin then all the other companies was well within the cards. And that by itself is a win.
But overall their battery strategy wasn't really the problem. They did a lot of good things there. And things that can pay off over time. The problem was to much investment in stuff other then batteries and their car models. The most important thing for them was to have growing volume every year. Work on manufacturing improvements and fight on margins.
But as you say, I agree the focus on driverless was a mistake.
There have been significant advances in power electronics and electric motors in the recent decades. Yes, there's not a lot to gain when you're starting at 85%+ efficiency, but it's far from "basic" technology.
You can say the same about the traditional car industry. Just because it’s a “solved problem” doesn’t mean you can ignore the TAM.
I think people are frustrated because Musk has been pretty up front that Tesla only exists to further his goals for Mars and robots. He doesn’t actually care about selling cars.
(+) Except for the battery, but that's a very long term battle with very tiny steps.