It seems that you don't like Tesla for other reasons, so you're bringing up easily dismissed business challenges that have already been solved.

You are imagining one way for this to work and then claiming it wont make good business sense, when that is clearly not the only option.

Airbnb isn't trying to revolutionize home ownership. They can have a successful business even if 99% of homeowners have no interest in renting out their place to strangers.

But when Musk talks about robotaxi, he doesn't describe it as a feature that some small percentage of Tesla owner will take advantage of and that Tesla will use to pull in some extra revenue. Instead, it's used as a justification to treat Tesla as a tech company rather than a car company, since robotaxi is going to completely change how society looks at transportation.

Even if Tesla successfully delivers robotaxi (a hard task in itself), there's no reason to assume it's going to cause the seismic shift that Musk seems to assume it will.

If the vehicles can generate revenue people will buy them looking to make money for themselves. Tesla makes money on the sale and the recurring ride hailing revenue. If 1% of consumer vehicles sold are autonomous robo-taxis that alone makes a significant bump in Tesla's bottom line.

Just did a quick search for ride sharing TAM ~100 billion. If Tesla can capture some of that at high margin (bc no driver). It's a lot of money.

I suspect the plan with cars is similar: subscription-only or on-demand vehicles.