Tesla is hammered after hours on a much weaker than expected earnings report. In addition, Musk delayed his announcement on robotaxis from August 8 until October. 
Earnings Fall Short
CNBC reports Tesla Reports 7% Drop in Auto Revenue as Earnings Fall Short of Wall Street Estimates
Revenue increased 2% from $24.93 billion a year earlier, Tesla said in an investor deck on Tuesday. But automotive revenye dropped 7% to $19.9 billion from $21.27 billion in the same quarter a year ago. Auto revenue included regulatory credits of $890 million, more than triple the figure from last year.
CEO Elon Musk said, in opening remarks on Tuesday’s earnings call that Tesla will host a robotaxi unveiling event on Oct. 10 Originally, he said the event would take place on Aug. 8.
Musk was asked in the Q&A portion of the call when shareholders can expect “the first robotaxi ride.”
“I would be shocked if we cannot do it next year,” Musk said, after first noting that his predictions have been “overly optimistic in the past.”
We have heard Musk promise full self driving “next” year, every year for at least 8 years.
Flashback January 10, 2016
In about 2 years you will be able to summon your car to drive to you.
Apparently, a Tesla would know how to charge its battery by itself when summoned from LA to NY.
1,000,000 Robotaxis by 2020
Robotaxi Unveil
April 8, 2024: MishTalk
My Reply: Tesla’s Robotaxi August Launch Will Be More Elon Musk Vaporware
On August 8, Elon Musk will make an announcement on robotaxis. Tesla lags Waymo so badly that Musk is not even near the ballpark.
Technical Perspective
Here’s an interesting set of facts from Reddit.
The primary technical difference is that Waymo/Cruise use multiple sensor modalities: Lidar / radar / camera, while Tesla is camera only.
In a vision-only system it is much harder to (1) infer distance / depth of perception tracks, (2) have redundancy in the system, (3) validate using sim or otherwise that your system would do the right thing across a broad range of scenarios, simulating what cameras would see is more difficult.
Technicalities aside, Waymo/Cruise are L4 robotaxis, Tesla is an L2 driver assist for personally owned vehicles.
Another Reddit Comment
Tesla only uses cameras. The idea is to train the car to drive based just on what it seems with cameras, similar to how humans drive based on what we see with our eyes.
Tesla is now trying to do “end to end” which means training a single neural network to drive directly from video. Waymo uses a series of neural networks that are interconnected and trained separately.
The Tesla approach is a lot harder. For one, only using cameras and no detailed maps, means the car has no redundancy if the camera vision makes a mistake. This can be a problem since cameras can be blinded by the sun, occluded by objects or get dirty. And vision can make a mistake. It might misidentify an object or get a false positive or false negative.
That is one benefit of Waymo also using radar and lidar. Radar and lidar are active sensors, so they tend not to fail in the same way cameras do. And radar works great in rain or fog where cameras are less reliable. So having radar and lidar provides that secondary source to make your perception more reliable. And with more reliable perception, your car has better info to make decisions.
Translation
Musk wants to do this cheaply as possible and lags in technology because of it.
Levels of Driving Automation
Levels of Automation from Synopsis.
Musk and the Tesla cult claim that a camera-only system is better but drive results show otherwise.
Claiming superiority of L2 over L4 is a joke.
Robotaxi Demonstration Coming Up
Please note that Musk Plans Coast-to-Coast Self-Driving Demonstration by End of Next Year.
Also note the above story is from 2016.
Tesla plans to do a Los Angeles-to-New York drive “without the need for a single touch” by the end of 2017, Musk told reporters Wednesday on a conference call.
Musk Promises 50,000 EV Semis a Year
That won’t happen because there are 4 Million Semis on the Road But Only 35 Class 8 Truck EV Charging Stations
For the 5th year, Musk is hyping 50,000 electric semis without having a factory to produce them.
Electrek says Tesla’s giga factory is only about 30% complete and Tesla hasn’t expanded the facility for years.
Tesla Robotaxi Conclusion
The Tesla robotaxi is nothing more than vaporware and it will remain so as long as Musk remains committed to unsafe, stand-alone technology.
Tesla is many years behind Waymo.
Musk says “I would be shocked if we cannot do it next year.”
I would be shocked if Musk ever delivers any promise within two years of making one.
I will take tremendous pleasure when Tesla collapses… and because it only makes EVs …. and EVs are coming off the boil… Tesla is DOOMED
hahahahahahaha
Jeff Green – I told you to sell months ago
I love that Musk is willing to take risks. He won’t always get it right or be on time but the man is a beast when it comes to innovation.
“I love that Musk is willing to take risks.”
That’s his long suite. Similar to Soros.
What is disturbingl and full-stop destructive; is the sheer degree to which The Fed and other structures of the dystopia we’re stuck in; saddles people with little to no upside in his gambles, with virtually the entire downside. Again, just like is the case with Soros: Both funded entirely by Fed loot. Sure: There is something exciting about being willing to throw away almost all the loot stolen from millions of starving children so far, on the next spin of the cylinder. But man, is the whole setup destructive for all but those getting a direct cut of the looting.
Free markets work by preventing exactly that sort of “Downsides is for productives, Upsides for connecteds” grotesque wealth transfers. In the process ensuring innovation works efficiently: By baby steps. Instead of; as current; by endless Hail Mary’s; 99% of which don’t work. And then, on the rare occasion when one does stick: Virtually all gains are channeled only to the looting classes. Not a dime to the ones who produced what funded the bets, yet had it all redistributed away from them to the connected casino cowboys, by debasement and other means.
As for “beast when it comes to innovation…” what???? Does he even have a single innovation to name? I recognize that, given the sheer dystopianness of the current West, he does contribute by at least recycling some/most of the loot he’sbeenhanded for the possible benefit of innovations. But man, talk about severely local optimum.
Waymo is a one-trick pony while Tesla has multiple different businesses from cars to batteries to robots. Waymo moves by incrementalism and reminds me of how rockets were originally improved bit by bit. Making the rocket reusable was considered a pipedream until Elon Musk came along and did it by using first principles thinking and it paid off incredibly well. He is applying first principle thinking to the self-driving problem and if it works out it will do to Waymo what he has done to every rocket manufacturer, that is sending them into irrelevancy.
Of course if you don’t like Tesla, you are welcome to short the stock.
Waymo is owned by alphabet. It is just one of a hundred initiatives that google is working on. I still own alphabet stock.
Tesla great for traders. Very volatile. I don’t own Tesla, but have traded it on occasion.
It’s 2024, and I don’t see Mish’s prediction of many transport or taxi drivers being replaced by self driving vehicles (yes there are a few specialized situations). We are many years away from that. The future is hard to predict.
EV adoption is slowing, not accelerating; but also not disappearing; which makes most prognosticators here wrong. EVs will continue to gain market share, but very slowly. PHEVs will increase in popularity for the rest of this decade.
With continuing slow growth in sales of EVs and PHEVs, and with improving fuel efficiency in ICE, the demand for gasoline will drop and so will gasoline prices (sans taxes).
Oil demand will also grow slowly (1 mbpd per year). When refined, 45% of each barrel is gasoline. So: more gasoline supply, but less demand. Hence lower gasoline prices.
I own Google too and have held it for many years. The same for Tesla. As a rule I do not trade my winners. It is too easy to get whipsawed out and end up running after the stock. Waymo is owned by Google but is a separate company where Tesla’s self-driving is an integral part of Tesla. Considering that the search engine generates 72% of Google’s revenue you could say that Google is a one-trick pony too. Tesla is a different animal altogether but that is but one of his companies. Every time SpaceX sells insider stock it is snapped up. Can’t say that for Waymo shares. It is still burning money.
The charging infrastructure remains Tesla’s most valuable product. Nothing else they have can’t be easily replicated in 10 minutes via reverse engineering.
But the infrastructure and adoption of Tesla chargers is hugely valuable because eventually they could essentially dominate the charging market (ie imagine one company owning most of the gas stations).
I am sure that has crossed Musk’s mind. Opening their charging standard to all other EV companies was not done just to be nice.
“Waymo is a one-trick pony while Tesla has multiple different businesses from cars to batteries to robots.”
Rather the opposite: So far; and overwhelmingly likely for several more decades; Waymo’s role is primarily to aid the greater Google/Alphabet soup in recruiting straiht-out-of-college still starry-eyed-and-uncriticals. Notmuch different from why Honda kept sinking money into Asimo for his past two decades. Google can always find less utopian roles for them if pure-hype funding should dry up too severely. Again,j ust like Honda/Asimo.
As for real business cases; aside from novelty rides; for “sorta-kinda-working kinda-self-driving” vehicles for shifting humans around….Human drivers are cheap, available, plentiful and; most importantly; adaptable. Everything the various hype-toys will not be for, likely, centuries.
Self driving can beat humans at meaningful transportation tasks, once they get their environment designed for them. Free of unpredictable humans. Just as is the case in any other area: Machines can easily be built to beat humans once environmental complexity is low and predictable enough. That’s it. Until/unless then/that: The whole thing is just a sillyshow for sillydunces flush with stolen sillymoney..
If Biden quits ==> Kamala Harris will become the new US president. Can it happen
tonight : yes !!
Could definitely happen. Some scenarios:
They are sending up a trial balloon to get better polling on Kamala. If it doesn’t look good they can still yank her.
They could make her president now(tonight). Then she could run as President OR they could have a “primary”, elect someone else and still give themselves credit for the first female black president AND save democracy at the same time.
Crazy right? No matter what happens look to see who they choose as Kamala’s running mate. That is the person they really want to be president.
Hey there libertards!
Relax, I’m an independent daiper wearing foot in the grave INDEPENDENT.
My definition of independent?
How do you know if an politician or lawyer is lying?
You all know the punch line…
Okay, the assignment is to find me a link to a video of t-Rump LAUGHING.
NOT A GIGGLE OR GAFAW.
How many people do you associate with that never laugh?
You love and respect them, yes?
Because?
Thanks for enlightening me.
Libtards. LOL
NQ Nasdaq100 E mini is down since July 11. Don’t blame Ilan for shaking out the Mag 7. NQ BB : June 20/24, 20,371/19,728. It might close June 12/13 gap and popup to a new all time high, or cont down to support at around 18,700/18,600, or even to Nov 2021 high at 16,767.
and still, after hours, 64% above its 52 week low.
Musk and SpaceX, good.
Musk and Twitter, good.
Musk and Tesla automation, like MSFT for years, selling vaporware.
Tesla sales in CA are down from 70K to 52K bc Ilan bs CA and SF. At the same time the non-Tesla were up from 35K to 50K. EV sales in CA stalled at 100K. Other mfg cannibalized TSLA, losing money on the crumbs.
Those who were fully committed to EV changed their mind. KIA ev is taking over. If China EV moves in they will eat KIA for lunch.
Musk takes “fake it until you make it” to a whole new level.
You are describing every successful startup that becomes a big company. In the beginning you have to convince investors to give you money for only an idea and then you work to make it work.
Telsa isn’t a start up anymore and hasn’t been for quite some time.
When do the training wheels come off so Telsa can be a big boy company and not a “start up”?
Yes. That means Musk is not faking it because he has made it.
Radar and lidar give depth and speed information about objects in a car’s vicinity, which is more valuable than a flat image when driving.
Lidar can’t see far and eats energy like no other. It is much more expensive than visual. What worries me is that Lidar is very easy to jam.
Problem there is that Teslas only use lidar.
Electric cars and full self driving are the Tesla sizzle that attracts revenue and capital investment. They are not the core competence nor the goal of the Tesla Corporation. The goal is humanoid robots that can replace repetitive human labor. Automotive assemble provides the vehicle to perfect versatile, adaptive, humanoid robots. When Elon Musk perfects the robot he can stop making automobiles and sell a billion robots for manufacturing, construction, food service, agriculture, retail, etc.
Of course Musk hyped the products his company sells, and so would any good, savvy, business experienced owner of their company and its products.
Musk is merely parroting the U.S. MSM and the EU MSM. Wouldn’t you too, if they were hyping your companies products? All the MSM & Our Leaders in Government do is Hype EV’s, Solar Panels, Windmills Etc. as a scam for their “Go Green” Initiatives, but they are turning more into “Go Broke” Initiatives.
Neither the U.S. or the EU can manufacture the parts required, or even supply the materials to make the parts. Many of those parts are extremely bad for the environment, and extremely expensive as well. Don’t even get me going on the clueless lack of charging stations…
So now that the EU and the U.S. are on full display as being dreamers and hypocrites, can we RIP this nonsense?
That is all that Musk and other savvy business owners are doing. Plugging the dike and hunkering down to await another day and time to try again. Better Leadership that’s much more business oriented, and keen to what’s going on for demand and able to be met profitably will help tremendously!
Let’s get back to the basics and do them right and profitable, before taking on initiatives we can’t take on ourselves even a little bit. We are too involved in what people want, and need to be paying attention to what our Country can realistically afford to want. Can’t sell what Can’t be purchased… Econ101
During the eighties and early nineties I worked for a Major European engineering company turning out large electronic, Telecommunications, computer, DC power, and electrical products. The management from bottom to top were engineers. The company was run by engineers and bean counters.
The sales force sold a product which was ready to go out the door. Anybody who sold a “future or vaporware ” was automatically instantly sacked. The company’s 120 year old engineering reputation came before the sales and marketing.
All destroyed in the late 1990’s when the Chinese started churning out stuff – which sort of functioned to do the job and was cheap.
And then the Hedge fund moved in.
It was rumored that during the 1980’s, Japanese Universities churned out 1000 engineers for every 6 western Universities produced.
I still remember back in the eighties a conversation I had with the CEO of the company(Bachelor engineer). He said : “The day when Sales staff and marketing people take over the engineering world we are stuffed.
That is how Mitt Romney made his money.
Tesla stainless steel cyber truck looks like 1980’s DeLorean. Delorean alpha5 EV, a shear beauty, est price is $125K.
That is for very specific Buyers. Wealthy, Love owning the Best, Fastest etc. and nobody around to tell them differently…
At 6.6 seconds to 100 mph, the Cyberbeast edges out the Porsche 911 GT3 RS and leads every other truck by more than a second. Trapping 11.0 seconds at 113.7 mph also makes it the fastest truck we’ve ever tested through the quarter mile.
Ok so what? Who buys a truck for speed? Very few I’d wager. Trucks have traditionally been purchased for thier utility and that still holds true today. Horray the Cyber truck is faster than a Porsche, but has less practical utility than a Ford Ranger and it’s ugly to boot. To each thier own though.
Who buys a truck for speed?
A MORON.
Now where’s my prize
Cyber Trucks are for Fanbois. Even an old fashion station wagon is more capable. Witness any amount of automotive YouTuber who has bought one, used it for a month or so, found it only good for hooning or “look at me” and then sold it shortly after before the depreciation kicks in.
And if you run it that fast you suck the battery dry in about 5 minutes.
Ever tried cornering a vehicle especially one as poorly made as a Tesla… with a 500kg battery on board? Every try braking into a sharp corner?
You’d be a dead man if you tried it at speed
Still the ugliest piece of shit on the road. I didn’t think I could hate those any more until I saw two of them in person. A Cybertruck just screams pencildick technodork! LOL
Driving is a pleasure that I won’t forfeit.
You may not have a choice in that, look at the amount of changes in the industry that have already happened. You had a say in none of it.
in order to make robotic vehicles safe to operate independently the first thing that will have to go in the human driver. It will more than likely start with a law that states if you get in the way of automated vehicle you will be at fault. The first automated vehicles will be taxis then trucks. It is when the trucks re automated that the laws will pass because we need the trucks on the roads for deliveries more than you (Yes, the you includes me).
Dream on. Unattended trucks cannot deliver in cities without being hijacked. Crime is already bad enough for truckers to boycott cities. Not that there are many stores left in San Francisco, Baltimore, South Chicago, New York City, Seattle, Portland, Oakland, East St. Louis.
So you are saying the driver of trucks is somehow protecting them? They most definitely are not and will do nothing other than call 911 if someone attempts to hijack the truck. Only Brinks drivers are authorized to shoot.
Automated vehicles can just as easily call 911 if someone breaks into them and with cameras they will get plenty of clear pics of the perps.
Interesting. For me driving is a curse that I’d never do again if given the chance.
Pleasure? I’m not feelin it bro
It’s a pleasure in low population towns with pleasant views. In a crowded busy city it’s just a chore that I would gladly live without. I just doubt we are even near there as the cheerleaders would like us to believe. It along with AI just feel way overhyped.
Googl earnings and revenue were good. Initially Googl popped up, but it’s already down $3. MSFT, AAPL, NVDA, AMZN… are all down in the AH. In the Bay area high tech employees bought $5M/$10M houses for cash, or using stocks as collateral.