Tesla Talk

it was as only unveiled last night after the market closed..

It's down in premarket

224.95-13.82(-5.79%)Pre-Market: 5:04 AM EDT

https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/TSLA/

I dont think having just two seats is that bad. Here in Ireland, the average number of passengers in a taxi is just 2-3. That includes larger cabs too.

Cars take up disproportionately large areas of our cities compared to other forms of transport. They make inefficient use of space by needing car parks. They are also underutilised most of the time where only one passenger may be in a four seater vehicle. So a smaller vehicle taking up smaller city space like the robotaxi could be more acceptable.

But yea, I agree, Elons timelines and promises are closer to astrology than anything concrete.

Musk: Less than $30k and in production 2026…

Also Tesla:

🙃

there was nothing tangible in that presentation. Men in suits pretending to be robots, other genuine robots that could only pretend to serve beer, and an underwhelming taxi model that demonstrated zero ability to operate in a real world environment. The most obvious of snake oil stuff (I suppose Elon has been getting lessons in that from his new orange pal)

Meanwhile there are several legit companies already years ahead in running fully autonomous taxi services, and basically everything else that was promised here.

Lastly — if you’re going to have a 2-seater autonomous taxi, it had better be not much bigger than the space required to fit two people in.

It’s absolutely fascinating that a 700bn MarCap mega-corp can pull a literal stunt like this and get away with it over and over.

It stinks of more musk smoke and marketing showmanship.

As for that humanoid robot bs, for about €300 you can get a robotic vacuum that uses lidar - I saw one work at an Airbnb recently and it was actual witchcraft. They’ll be €200 next year probably.

The human form has long since been proven to be a terribly inefficient robotic starting point too.

Again, it all just stinks and let’s face it, we kinda knew things what was going to happen when he pulled this out of his ass the day the model 2 was canned and the SP fell of flat a cliff.

current taxis can scale, from 1 to e.g 9, where 9 is a Mercedes vito or similar.

This concept car takes up roughly the same space on the street as those current taxis, but has a maximum of 2 pax. now that I think about it, with limitations on FSD it’ll probably need bigger gaps between other cars/margins of safety, and actually take up more room on the streets.

God there’s so many example of where this concept car falls over - say at surge times after games or concerts, airport runs, you can pretty much name any corner case - except for a simple 1-2 person journey from A to B with minimal luggage. So it will work for maybe 30-40% of journeys.

Most of what’s in the press today isn’t even the concept car, it’s polished generated imagery of the concept car on a nice American brownstone suburban street.

Autonomous taxis will certainly happen - but when they do, this certainly won’t be one of them.

Why does it look like a coupe? It’s meant to be a taxi that rarely exceeds 50kmh and the shape seems to militate against it being wheelchair accessible… I assume Dublin isn’t the only city in the world where taxis being wheelchair accessible is a big thing!

Tesla is dead, that farce looked like something from the apprentice!

I would have thought taxis to be private transport, not public transport!

Am not getting why the focus on a literal definition (regardless of whether right or wrong) has any bearing on the topic as we all know what a taxi is (whether you regard it as public or private)

he’s calling it a robotaxi (or a cab) - and it’s not really a taxi, most of the time. Hence the discussion on what this is actually replacing.

But it’s a fair point - this whole discussion is moot anyway.

Just realised we haven’t even mentioned the bus thing he showed - which the whole concept and its presentation could’ve been pulled together with a few ChatGpt requests in 5mins.

“Show me what a 10 seater bus might look like in 2050 if it had no driver”

I’m not even joking 🙃

Indeed. They have 1.5 mass market models which are rapidly aging and have had costs cut so close to the bone it's at a point where safety may be impacted, and no timeline on replacement models. Profit margin gone from industry leading to just about hanging in there and price slashing required to keep sales up in the face of ever improving competition. FSD et al is a load of bollox which will never deliver what has been claimed, and priced into the share price. The entire edifice is simply a gargantuan stock market vessel at this stage, and it's rapidly taking on water. Politically I'm on Musk's 'side' but he's quickly becoming a liability for Tesla and I can see him being forced out within the next year.

I'm a Tesla owner BTW lest I be labelled a hater!