The tell for me is Hyperloop. That is an optimal environment for FSD, a closed and contained track that has only identical vehicles on it, and yet they still use a human driver.
I only wonder how long it will take before Elon becomes disillusioned, maybe it will never happen. Maybe they'll pull a rabbit out of their hat and actually get it to work. I'm still skeptical.
However I wouldn't d pay attention to the hyperloop thing. It would be trivial to "hardcode" a car to drive at least the tunnel part. It's almost certainly that the FSD team doesn't want to waste time with that.
Musk said, in 2015: "Self-piloting cars are a solved problem." "I view it as a solved problem. We know exactly what we need to do and we will be there in a few years."
Last year, though, he was backpedaling: "Our focus is on solving the problem."
And that's exactly what the output of their factories feel like. Cheap and quickly built. ;-)
More haste, less speed and all that ...
Even manufacturers like Chevy and Ford can run circles around Tesla in terms of overall quality.
Anecdotally in LA which has tons of electric cars, people that originally had interest in the status symbolism of Tesla jumped back to Mercedes, BMW, and Volvo(Polestar) the instant those manufacturers had viable electric options.
People are banging down Toyota's doors for the plugin hybrids. Those people are not buying a Tesla in the meantime. People are just waiting for their existing trusted manufacturers to produce enough capacity.
I've noticed people signing leases on ICE cars to wait out the delivery of their preferred EV solution.
I'm going to keep my ICE car until it is unreasonably old or impractical for me, which is probably at least 8 more years.
At that point who knows what the electric car landscape will look like, but certainly production will be massively more ramped up. PHEVs will be the perfect car for most people. It will do 99.9% of people's trips on pure electric, and not have any compromises on long road trips either.
But I believe in old ICE as opposed to new EV, on environmental, economic and other grounds.
Tesla isn’t good at making cars. And every year my confidence in full self driving goes down. They are good at charging though and will print money doing that.
Do you know how many GM is hoping to deliver? 150,000. Do you know how many they have delivered YTD? 40,000. And they're ahead of Ford, Rivian, and all other US EV manufacturers. Only cheap Chinese only EV brands have a similar volume.
"Easily overtaking" Tesla is not happening at this point. It will be a real fight to ramp production up to Tesla numbers. Did you know that the Tesla model Y was the best selling car in the world thus far in 2023? Not EV, car. It beat out the gas powered Toyota Corolla.
https://www.motor1.com/news/669135/tesla-model-y-worlds-best...
Tesla is now closing in on run rates of 1.5-2 million. They are on bath to overtake companies like BMW in total sales. They are already far more profitable.
You seem to still think of Tesla as some small fish. Tesla is the biggest BEV producer in the world by a large margin. They produce more EV then all of the major German producers put together and at better margins.
Volkswagen is the 2nd largest car company in the world and they have been all in on EV for many years now, and Tesla is highly competitive with them and actually makes far higher profits.
A high level Toyota engineer said of the Model Y 'its a piece of art' (and that was not even the newest generation). Volkswagen CEO said that Tesla is beating them on production efficiency.
If you want a reality check, go look at Toyota first EV and compare it to Model Y. They are not even in the same class, Tesla beats it on literally every metric.
If you still think large car companies can just easily spin up millions of EV per year, you are deluding yourself. You are even more optimistic then the car companies own incredibly optimistic predictions. Ford and GM have even stopped saying they will catch Tesla, its now a race for Nr.2.
> Tesla isn’t good at making cars.
Based on what? Your subjective insights?
Tesla cars have very high margin and are cheaper then competitors in the same class. But they suck at building cars?
Tesla cars have high costumer loyalty and high consumer satisfaction in every survey? But they suck at making cars?
Are you sure your not mixing up your personal feeling with the real world.
> And every year my confidence in full self driving goes down.
They don't need self driving to be highly profitable.
> They are good at charging though and will print money doing that.
Actually charging doesn't make much money, its a terrible business.
> the margin is not insurmountably large
Mhh sorry what?
Look at how tiny Ford is. And you have to understand that Ford was very, very late at doing battery partnership. Their battery factories are very late. So they will not scale very fast the next 3-5 years because of battery constraints.
At the same time, GM on this diagram looks way larger then it is in reality. The reason GM looks big is because of one tiny China only micro-car that yields almost no profit and will never be exported (and sales have gone down this year already). Their actual Ultium sales are barley existing.
You keep thinking these companies are so much bigger then Tesla, they are not. Ford and GM have less then 2x the revenue of Tesla. Tesla has faster growth and less debt and less aging infrastructure (they have brand new factories) and now legacy business. In terms of available capital Tesla can actually deploy far more, and raise money far more then Ford or GM.
Let me give you an example, Volkswagen. The ID.3 is comparable to the Model 3 and it came out in 2019. It was part of their MEB platform, something they had majority invested years before that. In 2018 they said they would invest 50 billion $ and have since increased that. Clearly they matched Tesla in spending for the last 8 years or so. And yet look at the chart, they have half the BEV sales of Tesla. And Volkswagen is consider very successful in the EV world.
You vastly underestimate how hard it is to transition to EV. Just because Ford, GM, Honda and so on are bigger then Tesla, does not magically mean they can just start mass producing EV. Go at actually look at how hard it is to scale, even for large companies with huge ability to invest.
> (Ford, GM) truly change
Have you looked at Ford and GM own predictions. Because you seem to have a higher opinion on these companies then they themselves have.
Ford just talked about how they would be losing money for many more years and then only just match what Tesla is doing just now.
Large companies often over promise what they can do. But you actually go beyond that and claim that they under promised and will do significantly better then they themselves believe.
Of course GM just learn a hard lessen with their initial battery factory, scaling is hard and that why Ultium had almost no sales in Q1.
The real "secret sauce" behind Tesla right now is that they've figured out how to produce affordable, desirable EVs at scale while maintaining industry-leading margins.
The perception of the larger players as laggards comes from the fact that they aren't as keen to lie consumers and investors. Their leadership doesn't enjoy the same privileges as Musk does.
I doubt FSD will get to the point I would ever fully trust it outside of a freeway or city, and almost certainly never for the 2-3 miles closest to my house.
Now, if they can get the cars cheap enough that I can actually afford one, I might be interested. There are 4-6 trips I take a year in the 250-400 mile range, with zero public transport available inbetween (rural-ish to rural-ish areas), and not paying for the gas would be nice.
I haven't seen any evidence they are able to make cars more cheaply and quickly than the incumbents.