Tesla Talk 2

Exactly. If and when the car has taken over, the car manufacturer is responsible. Whether this is in a strictly geofenced bit of Autobahn at max 60km/h only for a few minutes like in a current Mercedes with level 3, or in any fully automated, no steering wheel, level 5 car

The car will still need to be insured by an insurer under the current Road Traffic Acts anyway. We then have the in inevitable blame game between the representatives of the autonomous vehicle and the owner and the driver.

It has often crossed my mind that there is going to be a point soon when we will be naming car manufacturers as defendants in motor traffic claims; I almost did it earlier this month for the first time when it was disclosed the automatic braking appears to have malfunctioned at the wrong time in a car, but ultimately didn’t as nothing could detract from the fact the driver failed to stop anyway.

It's not about belief, it's hard to argue that the technology will get to a point where something can be presented as self-driving.

It's more about the pragmatic reality - the technology barrier is miniscule compared to the regularity barrier that L5 self-driving will face, especially in Europe. Maybe in the regulatory Wild West of the US they'll see something happen in the next 20 years.

Seems we've all been helping Google train Waymo for free

A thing I always think about in regards to full automation is there's a vandalised speed limit sign I pass regularly (in the north) where someone has changed the 30mph sign to an 80, and the camera recognition on my car constantly picks it up as 80.

I had to change the auto-speed-adjust to require confirmation because the car would be rocketing up to 80 otherwise.

We’re here in the Tesla thread because they’ve tried for a decade to make their cars interact safely with the current fleet of old vehicles, roads, weather and geography, using vehicles with hw4 that I can buy today for €37k - and it highlights just how complex this is and how far we have to go to make progress (same with waymo - lidar or not they have similar issues, but I can’t buy a waymo)

Maybe not a big deal. But fact is that Tesla now have more total coverage in the USA after 2 months than Waymo has after 6 years

That said, I won't really be impressed until robotaxis (of whatever make) are available in pretty much all major urban centres…

Tesla pushing even further away from EVs and talking vaguely more about robotics and AI

https://arstechnica.com/cars/2025/09/tesla-has-a-new-master-plan-it-just-doesnt-have-any-specifics/

”It's the fourth such document for Tesla, replacing the goals Musk laid out in 2023 when he said the company would sell 20 million EVs a year in 2030. This time, it is not entirely sure what Tesla's plan actually entails. The text, which reads as though it was written by AI, is at times anodyne, at times confusing, but always free of specifics.”

imagine having a North Star just 23 months ago to sell 20m cars by 2030, getting to just 8% of that stretch-target to date, and then simply binning that in favour of this new, um, whatever this is.
It really does read like it was written by an Ai chatbot in fairness

to be fair to Musks truly awful taste in what he thinks is funny, he might’ve just used grok and lashed it out in a tweet

TL;DR

Optimus robots are the next big product

Musk knew early on the value of hype in valuations. His promises of FSD, Dojo, Cybertruck, and Optimus were/are and are the primary narratives used to justify Tesla's tech-like stock valuation.

It reminds me of the lunch scene from Wolf of Wall Street;
Mark Hanna: You know what a fugazi is?

Jordan Belfort: Fugazi, it's a fake.

Mark Hanna: Fugayzi, fugazi. It's a whazy. It's a woozie. It's fairy dust. It doesn't exist. It's never landed. It is no matter. It's not on the elemental chart. It's not real.

By definition, the current market cap of a company is the consensus from the whole world, including people who have shares and people who do not have shares, of what the company is worth

This is just fundamentally not the case! It has rarely ever been the case, but especially hasn't since r/WallStreetBets proved that you can make any company become worth anything without any connection to reality.