The crutch of punditry is that people can be critical of a person or a company, over and over again, and so long as that company fails one time, those writers can be correct and crow about how they were right all along. It is much easier to be a critic of the producer than it is to be the one who produces things for critique. It’s also generally far more rewarding financially to be the producer than the critic, which is how the universe finds balance.
Elon Musk is more successful than I probably will ever be as a businessman and celebrity, so perhaps my critiques are not worth that much. At the same time, Tesla is out with its latest Master Plan and it sounds like mostly meaningless garbage to me. Musk also said this shows that cars will be worth less than 20% of the value of the company, which is a point where we might agree.
That’s good for Tesla, I guess, since the cars keep running into trouble. The latest issue is in India, which was supposed to be a growth area for the company. Maybe not so much. Audi, on the other hand, is looking to grow the value of its car division, and it’s looking to grow in America.
Tariffs have screwed up plans across the globe, and now Mazda is becoming two different companies depending on which market you’re looking at, and I think it’s a loss for American consumers.
ALSO, an important note: We instituted some changes this weekend and, uh, the style sheet got altered somehow. We’re fixing it, so apologies for the bright red text everywhere.
‘~80% Of Tesla’s Value Will Be Optimus’
Tesla likes to release these Master Plans that outline what the future of the company will be. I think this is a good practice for a company to undertake, even if Tesla often misses the mark. It’s far better to aim for something big and miss than it is to fail by never attempting anything ambitious.
The first Master Plan goes back to 2006, and the ideas were sound. Build a sports car, use that money to build something affordable, use that money to build something even more affordable. While not everything in Master Plan 2 was achieved (including the weird Solar City sideline business), the company did preview the Model Y, which was a huge success. Master Plan 3, in 2023, seems to be where things went off the rails a bit.
Master Plan 4 is out and, uh, there’s both a lot here and not a lot here:
This next chapter in Tesla’s story will help create a world we’ve only just begun to imagine and will do so at a scale that we have yet to see. We are building the products and services that bring AI into the physical world.
We have been working tirelessly for nearly two decades to create the foundation for this technological renaissance through the development of electric vehicles, energy products and humanoid robots.
Now, we are combining our manufacturing capabilities with our autonomous prowess to deliver new products and services that will accelerate global prosperity and human thriving driven by economic growth shared by all.
We are unifying our hardware and software at scale, and in doing so, we are creating a safer, cleaner and more enjoyable world.
This is sustainable abundance.
The topshot. Is that AI? Why is there an indoor lamp outside? What is going on here?
Whatever. I have said this before, but Elon Musk doesn’t want to be CEO of a car company, because a car company is boring and not, ultimately, as valuable as a company that does AI/Robots, et cetera. Musk said basically the same thing in a response to this tweet:
Those are the biggest factors.
~80% of Tesla’s value will be Optimus.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) September 1, 2025
Logically, if the Optimus robot is worth 80% of the value of the company, then cars are worth less than 20%.
This might be a sincere and thoughtful vision from the company, but given recent promises and the current environment, it is also mostly indiscernible from something a struggling company might do to prop up the sky-high valuation of its own stock. It’s not a good sign when your platitudes about the future sound an awful lot like Faraday Future.
I am not alone in this feeling. Here’s Electrek’s Fred Lambert (who, it’s worth mentioning, is rather critical of Tesla these days) on MPP4:
Tesla is lost as a company. This is a bunch of utopic nonsense, complete with AI “abundance” buzzwords that Grok could have easily written.
Elon’s first two master plans were straightforward, featuring clear, actionable steps and a well-defined product roadmap.
In comparison, this is opium meant for Tesla shareholders to get their fix of potential “infinite growth” as an AI stock. It’s not real.
While we wait for fully functioning robots and truly self-driving cars, there are still Teslas to be sold. Just maybe not in India.
Tesla Only Sold 600 Cars In India
Looking at the global picture, Tesla is sliding in the United States, cratering in Europe, and having trouble in China. Where could it possibly expand? For a moment, India seemed like a potential growth market for the company, as Elon Musk was friends with President Trump and President Trump was friends with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
It doesn’t seem like Musk/Trump is a friendship that’s cherished by either anymore, and President Trump and PM Modi are also at odds.
How is Tesla doing since its launch in India? The company has delivered just 600 cars, which means it’ll likely be short of its goal, according to Bloomberg:
The company had originally aimed to utilize its full 2,500-car annual quota this year, Bloomberg News reported earlier.
While the company was banking on its brand power and its chief executive officer’s once-cozy ties with Donald Trump to break into India’s nascent EV sector, Musk’s public fallout with the US President, deteriorating bilateral ties, high local import taxes and the harsh reality of a price-sensitive market have unraveled that equation.
Tesla’s cheapest car is almost three times more expensive than comparable models, and that’s only going to get worse, according to this Reuters report:
An Indian tax panel has proposed steep increases in consumer levies on luxury electric cars priced above $46,000, a government document showed, a move that could impact sales of carmakers such as Tesla, Mercedes-Benz, BMW and BYD.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi is aiming to reform India’s tax system and is pushing Indians to buy more domestic goods just when relations with the United States have soured due to high tariffs. His government has recommended hefty cuts in the goods and services tax (GST) that could make everything from shampoos to electronics cheaper.
The key panel tasked with making rate suggestions to India’s powerful GST Council has backed sweeping cuts to many items in line with Modi’s overhaul, but it has called for raising taxes on electric cars, the document detailing its recommendations showed.
Yeah, alright, screw it. Robots!
Audi’s Master Plan Is: Sell More Cars
It’s been a rough few years for Audi, in no small part because Tesla replaced it as the cool, tech-forward car to have. The company also doesn’t make any cars in the United States, and its main seller here isn’t USMCA-compliant.
So what’s a company to do? According to Reuters, there’s no “quit” in Audi, although there is a “U” and an “I.”
Audi could target long-term annual sales of at least 2 million cars, up a fifth from 2024, under a new strategy the premium brand is expected to release later this year, according to a person close to the matter.
The potential target would be an annual record for Audi and points towards a more aggressive approach after some tough years that have seen its sales slip.
When is it supposed to hit 2 million sales as a brand? No one knows. How is it supposed to do it? Also, no one knows. Maybe a new Audi TT will help.
A Tale Of Two Mazdas
I have always thought of Mazda as a company that has continued to carry the torch for smaller, sportier, and generally more premium-feeling affordable cars. In this new tariff environment, it seems like Mazda is going to continue that practice, albeit with a different mix of values for different markets.
As an export-heavy company that sells most of its cars outside of Japan while building many of them inside the country, Mazda has left itself open to being a huge victim in the current trade war. The solution seems to be that it’ll try to sell more high-margin, expensive vehicles in the United States at the expense of more affordable small cars. In Japan, it’ll sell more affordable small cars.
Here’s how Hans Griemel describes the plan:
The sudden slowdown in Japan underscores how tariffs are biting harder and forcing a strategy shift at export-dependent Mazda. CEO Masahiro Moro has pledged to restore profitability partly by focusing on higher-margin vehicles, as Mazda fights back from a quarterly loss in the April-June period.
[…]
Mazda, which derives 90 percent of its global sales from outside its home market, said in June it wants to boost sales at home by about a third to buffer the blow from U.S. tariffs.
It seems to be pushing lower-margin vehicles in Japan to offset slower sales of those products overseas. In Japan, Mazda2 sales increased 62 percent in July as Mazda3 sales climbed 18 percent.
Building as many vehicles in the only factory it has in the United States makes sense, though I think Mazda risks getting stuck in extremely competitive categories instead of owning less competitive ones.
What I’m Listening To While Writing TMD
Via Dan Roth, here’s Melissa Carper with “1980 Dodge Van,” which is the only song I know about focused on the 1980 Dodge Van.
The Big Question
What’s your automotive master plan?
Photo: Tesla
If you make small cars with reasonably small prices, like Renault or the mass market parts of Stellantis in Europe, a really popular car in the top 10 of three country’s sales for the year, usually earns profit after tax of 3%.
Hence the attraction of moving up market, where not only are profits after tax around 5% for a good up-market car, but the cars are much more expensive. Three percent of €20,000 is €600 — 5% of €100,000 is €5000.
So if you make cars for the masses and want to be profitable, 1) they have to be good, and 2) you have to make and sell lots and lots of them, and build brand loyalty.
Most Tesla owners, who pay medium range or high range prices, like the cars.
But their pricing is all over the shop, their resale value is poor and hitler salutes have upset most of the people who used to buy them.
Somehow I do not think Musk has the will to build cheap cars for the masses, and recent events have show how fragile profit margins are.
As for the robots — they might work in polite, well regulated societies.
But try putting them in a British pub and it will take minutes before they are running around, soaked in beer with a flashing dildo glued to their backside while people try to hit it with a football.
Or in France where customers will argue with it on principle and end up knocking it over, and probably try to use whisky to set it alight.
Get a minivan. Each minivan seems to have a glaring flaw and it’s just a matter of accepting what flaw you can live with. My wife and I went through them all and ended up picking a Sienna last week. Now we play the incredibly frustrating waiting game as it should get built sometime in October and Toyota doesn’t make enough of them and doesn’t let you spec order either.
I still can’t believe the most expensive car I’ve bought so far, by far, is going to be a minivan. 18 year old me would have thought for sure it would have been a 340i or something like it by now….
There is still a wait for the Sienna?
Back in 2022 when I was car shopping, the Sienna had a 6+ month wait and dealer mark-ups to contend with.
They’ve always been a wait, and dealer mark-ups, for the Sienna.
At least in my area (North East) it seems like the markup is gone unless you’re not willing to wait. Waits are also shrinking. We are getting it for a meaningless amount under sticker and expect to wait about a month to two months to get a specific trim, color combo, and AWD.
Why couldn’t Toyota just have made the middle seats user removable? I’m not asking for an uncomfortable stow-n-go situation; I just want to be able to remove them twice a year without fumbling with airbag wiring. With the hybrid’s climate control, I’d be legitimately interested in using the Sienna as a camper on longer road trips.
What a charming picture of a robot clearly getting ready to beat that young family to death with a coffee mug.
“Hi, I am a fully Self Walking (TM) anthropomorphically adjacent humanoid machine. You do not need to use your hands now. Just tilt you head back and open your mouth and I will pour in the scalding hot coffee.”
So here is my big question for Tesla and Elon that has yet to be explained. If Optimus is supposed to be the future, explain the business model. Glossing over the extreme technical challenges, lets just assume they get the robot to be the *perfect* co-bot that is a super helpful humanoid assistant. Assuming all that how the ever-loving hell is this going to be a 100s of Billions of dollar industry?
Seriously, Boston Dyamic’s Spot dog is 75k. Let me say that again, a small, minimally useful (in an Optimus sense at least) dog is seventy five thousand dollars. There is not a singular chance on this planet that an adult sized, highly articulated, massively useful cohabitational robot starts south of 6-figures. There is no chance in hell anyone but the 1% could even afford it, it would be too expensive for most businesses to use for business things, it isn’t being pitched or marketed as a military capable thing, so WHERE IS THE MARKET FOR THIS?
Elon is such a deeply out of touch insane billionaire hopped up on Ketamine and fueled by sadistic yes-men and Twitter Incels that nobody is able to tell him this idea is genuinely worthless for the company to pursue. I truly do not understand why this is being touted as the future.
Sounds to me like the automotive equivalent of Trump’s current misdirection agenda to avoid releasing the Epstein Files.
Oh look! The future!
It’s a concept of a plan.
I remember when the Segway was going to revolutionize the world as well.
That is exactly the same sort of market issue! Sure it has use, but the cost so far outweighs the benefit, and the scale of production needed to recoup development/manufacturing/etc made it a dead end.
Considering the owner of Segway rode his off a cliff to his death makes this a bad choice of words.
So what you’re saying is there’s a non-zero chance an Optimus prototype strangles Elon at the factory? Seems great to me!
And tablets were going to COMPLETELY replace PCs.
They have for many people, and applications.
But the pundits said the PC was *dead*. Dead as George Washington. That has not come to pass, at all, even if my sainted mother rarely touches her PC anymore. Doing more than casual consumption or very specialized applications on a tablet *sucks*.
There are 7 billion people. Of which 1% is 70 million. If each one of them buys a $100k cobot, that’s $7 trillion dollars. Every single one in the 1% will end up buying them, because that’s what those people do. Even if only 14% buy them, you still looking at a nice $1 trillion dollars.
I think I have decimal off in there, but it doesn’t matter, it still justifies it.
A significant number of the 1 percenters I’ve encountered are too financially shrewd to spend six figures on a robot that mostly just stands around. They’ll undoubtedly sell a few, but it’s not going to keep a company the size of Tesla afloat.
But then the rest of them buy one for each house, thus offsetting that number. I generally agree, but there are enough rich people to justify it. It’s equivalent to every car costing more than $50k. The average buyer has been forgotten for the rich, top 10%.
Most of them are also too financially strapped to blow $100K on this nonsense. Though I guess if he can make it the hottest new thing, and offer 20-year financing at low, low (not) interest rates…
The Global 1% and 1% in the US are very very very different income brackets. 1% globally is anywhere from a 40-65k USD annual income, and 1% in the US is somewhere in the 400k range, both numbers pre-tax. Neither of which ranges are enough for the majority people at those income ranges to be able to justify or want a 6-figure robot. With that adjustment out of the way, there is at least one, if not two zeros knocked off the end of that sales/market estimate, which would mean a 70-700B market. If optimus is to represent 80% of Tesla valuation, that would mean Tesla’s current market cap of 1T is already inflated, for a market that currently does not yet exist for it’s premier product. The math just doesn’t work out.
All of this also is still assuming it will roll out flawless, and soon, which based on the technical challenges this will present, effectively full scale robotics, the autonomy of level 4+ driving, and a high level of artificial intelligence beyond what a currently available LLM can offer, this isn’t happening anytime soon, much less at anywhere south of 250k.
I wouldn’t argue that at all. That is reality. I think Elon spends a lot of his time watching the front porch not slow down. They (the rich overlords) still seem to think we are all beholden to them, when this bubble is one fart away from bursting.
The mere 1% can barely afford their mortgages. You need to be in the .01% to have that sort of disposable income. And don’t forget, in most of the world, being in the 1% still makes you dirt poor by Western standards. And the wealthy in that large part of the world can afford *human* servants, which are a Hell of a lot cheaper.
This is a complete and utter fantasy.
LOL, yeah, true. Pretty soon we will all be *human* servants, as that’s gonna be the only jobs left.
Also – Boston Dynamics is not, and never has been, profitable, despite being the leader in that field with really useful products for what they are intended to do. You are right on, Musk is hitting the wacky powder yet again.
Boston Dynamics is a client of mine, I have been to their HQ a few times. Very cool, very, very, very creepy stuff in-person.
I guess the question becomes is that a genuine/actual/calculated 80% or is it a handwaving shortcut to say “most but not all”?
It’s a suspiciously round number and given previous prognostications I am not convinced there is any math behind it.
“What’s your automotive master plan?”
More. Always more. A convertible would be nice. A 12 cylinder car in addition, doesn’t matter much what kind. Also I probably need another sportbike at some point. And a seriously old car. Like hand crank, brass type stuff.
Add onto the garage so I can keep as much of it as possible at home, at the ready. If it’s too much trouble to go get, you won’t.
More track days.
More road trips.
Tesla was never aimed at being a car company. Their crown jewel is their charging network. They never wanted to be the EV version of Toyota or GM, they wanted to be the Exxon of the future. They just happened to make the best engineered EVs which “accidentally” made them the best selling cars for a while there.
This foray into robots doesn’t change that. Their heavily automated manufacturing process naturally made them a robotics company as well. But once the drugs that Musk is on wear off and he loses interest, Tesla will continue to go down the path of being an energy company.
The charging network was to help them sell cars. There is never going to be any huge amount of money in electron refueling stations. Most people charge at home. Heck, there isn’t any money in selling *gasoline* – the gas is just to get you to buy overpriced candybars, drinks, and smokes in the attached convenience store. Something that Tesla really, really needs to figure out, rather than plopping SuperChargers in the middle of nowhere.
Yes of course the SC network helped the EV side. It showed what was feasible. But Exxon didn’t pull in $30B in profit last year from candy bar sales. Retail gasoline stations earn their money from slushies and other things, but that’s because there are dozens of steps between the energy production and till it gets to the final consumer. Gas stations aren’t recharging stations.
SC stations are unmanned and at least some of them can pull in power from thin air – namely solar. Once the initial construction of a station is done, to a large degree it’s a money-printing operation taking solar or grid power and dispensing it out at 2x to 4x the price. Those are margins that most businesses would kill for.
When you have 100,000 EVs running around a country, of course you’re not going to make much money, but when the entire industry (presumably) switches over, you will have an enormous opportunity for profit no matter how much people will try to fuel up at home. There are 300 million cars in the US alone. In 20 or 30 yrs when those are almost all EV, your profits will be enormous.
Yes, the producers of gasoline make lots of money. The sellers of it do not – nearly all of the profit from a gas station is from the convenience store, not the gasoline. It’s literally a couple percent margin item max unless you are lucky enough to have the only gas station in the middle of a desert or something. Competition in retail gasoline sales is *ruthless*, which is why all of the gas stations in an area tend to follow each other’s pricing in lockstep.
No the profits from EV charging will not be enormous. Once there is that much demand (and I think your projections are ambitious), the competition will be enormous too. A gas station is also a recharging station – you are recharging your ICE with hydrocarbons. No difference. And as a bonus, your throughput is a LOT higher per pump. There are no shortage of unmanned gas stations (other than the silly states that require humans) – I use one all the time.
Solar is not free by any means, especially in the volumes needed to charge a whole bunch of cars in a reasonable amount of time.
Of course solar is (essentially) free. No attendant. Solar panels in their current state are said to have a life of some 30 years. Pay off the initial investment to make them – no surprise that Tesla has on-and-off dabbled in solar – and you are printing money. Tesla is also a huge player in the storage side with their batteries. It is no coincidence that Tesla went vertically integrated, so they could have their hands in all steps of the process. This is a long-play by Tesla but you are focused on the today. If Tesla stopped selling cars in 10 years because people were finally sick of Musk, the company would be fine.
Keep swilling that Kool-Aide lad.
That is a bit like saying being alive has left you open to being murdered. While true, it frames the issue in a way that isn’t informative or helpful.
This. It reads a little bit like Mazda was “asking for it.”
Regarding Mazda, they did recently release 2026 pricing and options for the Mazda3 in the US. Not only are they still selling it, but the hatchback can still be had with a manual transmission. Gotta love it.
I didn’t look too closely, but I don’t think prices increased much either. Looks like they dropped several trim levels which was needed IMO. The lower trims of the sedan are, to me, one of the best options on the market for people that just want “an car” but with a bit of personality. The Skyactiv-G 2.5L + 6AT combo might be old, but it’s rock solid.
What’s your automotive master plan?
Keep enjoying my GR Corolla, drive the Celica race car on occasional weekends, and maintain the Crosstrek as the utility vehicle (or sell at some point to make room for another toy).
Add a convertible of some kind to the fleet.
It’s really my wife’s call as to what, (The Caddy is primarily my car, so she gets to pick next) so it really could end up being anything.
Otherwise I’m riding out what I currently own for a while I think.
A convertible? So you’re thinking less Tesla Optimus, and more Optimus Prime?
My kids would strongly be in favor, maybe not my wife.
What’s the Caddy in question?
I bought a CT5 Blackwing earlier this year, and part of the deal was she gets to pick a fun car next, which she’s told me will be a convertible.
Trade in a 4 door convertible for a station wagon. Maybe even plug in hybrid
Well I happen to think these humanoid robots are gonna be great! I often look around at the world and think, man, there is a real lack of people… If only there were more! Not to mention that instead of having to go through the whole process of making sweet sweet love and then waiting nine months for a new one to drop out, all I need to do is put in a few hundred extra hours of OT down at the ol’ salt mine so I can afford to buy a robo-human. And if the top shots are any indication, I will no longer need to hand beverages to visitors, freeing up additional seconds of time that would be better spent at the aforementioned salt mine, working off my robo-debts.
Just make sure you read up on the dangers of Electro-Gonorrhea: The Noisy Killer.
I wonder how soon The First Church of Appliantology will be founded…
Is Elon Musk the new L. Ron Hoover?
Yep, along with his protégé Lucille.
“‘~80% Of Tesla’s Value Will Be Optimus’”
Good luck with that! Personally I think that plan will be a flop.
“The solution seems to be that it’ll try to sell more high-margin, expensive vehicles in the United States at the expense of more affordable small cars. ”
Which is to say, they are gonna do what everyone else is doing in the USA. This plan made sense in the past when there were voluntary import quotas for Japanese vehicles into the United States. But these days? They had better not hope to go back to “pandemic pricing” unless they want their sales to collapse.
Selling higher trims can be okay as long as it’s still good value for the money in relation to the competition.
But they can’t do the sky-high MSRP fantasy that Stellantis (for example) is still trying to hang onto.
“What’s your automotive master plan?”
Maintain the C-Max I bought last year and hope it lasts me to at least 2034. Also when my daughter graduates from college next year (at which point she will likely need her own car), decide if she should buy the C-Max off of me or if it makes more sense to get her something like a Prius C.
My automotive master plan involves trucks.
I will not buy the first MY of either ProCharger or Scout, though I have reservations for both.
By the time I am ready for one, my current truck will be paid off, which may soften my stance towards a new one.
Scruff McGruff is looking for an EREV truck to drive around Chicago?
It is a nickname I got in college. It is pretty much always available as a username on websites.
Unless Elon plans to drop a Tesla logo on Boston Dynamics tech, I fail to see how this will pan out.
They’re trying to create a humanoid Sony Aibo, which is already a niche product due to price. Who the hell is going to buy these in any appreciable volume?
If AI advances like Musk is betting, then unemployed humans will be more affordable than humanoid robots, before Musk even has a chance to get the robot price down.
The thing that surprises me most about Tesla is how well its stock is doing. It has fluctuated a lot but it is still 2.5x times its value in 2019 and has doubled in value in the past year.
I don’t understand why people believe in a company that makes such erratic decisions. Ten years ago the company appeared to have coherent strategy (EVs, solar panels, home batteries, etc.), but that is gone. I have no idea what this company is going to focus on in five years (cars? robots? fast food? general purpose space lasers?). Plus, the robot idea seems highly unlikely to be successful, much less Tesla’s primary profit center. It is either going to be a gimmick with limited function or stupidly expensive (maybe both?). It just seems bizarre to throw away a successful car building enterprise to pivot to ridiculous moonshot products that it isn’t clear people actually want.
Why do people keep investing in this company? Also, why doesn’t Tesla’s board of directors do something about this?
I’m guessing a lot of large investment firms are deep into TSLA stock and don’t want it to go tits up.
Basically this.
+1… particularly Ark Funds and Cathy Wood.
This won’t go on forever and at some point, there will be a crash.
I suspect these funds don’t fully understand what they invest in. I invested in Tesla in the past because the ‘Master Plans’ back then made sense to me.
The latest plans though make no sense to me and I believe will fail to turn into the big money makers that their automotive business is.
What Tesla is doing reminds me of what Peter Lynch said many times about companies ‘diworsifying’
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uqjucO_99cw
Also unlike their BEVs, there are already companies like Boston Dynamics that are doing the robot thing… and are doing it better than Tesla.
Cause they’ve spent decades and billions of dollars, probably mostly from DOD, to get where they are.
I feel like TSLA is a really big pyramid scheme…the early investors make bank and the late ones will be left holding an empty bag. So much for investing in companies with strong fundamentals.
So the death knell will be a rug pull?
Had not heard of the modern usage of ‘rug pull’ before, but that is a much better descriptor than my ‘pyramid scheme’. Sorta like the old ‘pump and dump’. I learned something today.
Tesla’s web page will go blank except for the word “penis”.
Absolutely. I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s sort of a standoff right now where some of the large investment firms are trying to figure out how to slowly and quietly sell off TSLA without alerting others and causing a cascade. They’re probably all in deep enough that a fast sell by one of them will crash the price.
What they probably want is a Gamestop/AMC moment, so they can unload under cover of a massive consumer push and blame small investors for the crash.
Welcome to Thunderdome. Two robots enter, one robot leaves. In this corner we have Honda’s Asimo vs Tesla’s Optimus.
Personally, my money is on Toyota’s robot.
I saw someone’s take on all the companies and products Elon is part of (SpaceX, Boring Company, Tesla, xAI, Neuralink) and it made sense in terms of providing the technological building blocks to colonize Mars.
IMHO, Tesla needs to sell the robots to xAI and focus on making cars, EV charging infrastructure and battery storage products. Then appoint a new CEO that isn’t toxic to the brand. Let Elon focus on his Mars mission without distracting Tesla.
I don’t understand the Mars thing in the context of investing. I presume that is still decades to centuries away. I know I would not see a return on my investment in my lifetime.
I liked Tesla a as a company in the early to mid-2010s. At that point it seemed like they had a lot of value as a home energy company, which seemed to go well with the EV business since EVs can double as a home backup batteries. Today I don’t even know what Tesla is. I’m at a point where I try to find ETFs that are not invested in Tesla; I’m so skeptical of that company that I want to avoid even indirectly investing in them.
Seems like deep sea colonies would be easier than Mars colonies and there’s actual stuff of interest down there, resources to be harvested. But I don’t see Musk seeking to build Titanic Estates down there.
Mars and en route to Mars seem to be a terrible place for a person with a highly invasive brain implant subject to infection and god knows what else. So I don’t see what conceivable use Neuralink would have.
It’s a meme stock.
“Man munching ketamine like corn nuts has vision of future”
Poor Towlie 🙁
Some people need to go back and watch any one of the hundreds of movies about AI and robot overlords.
We’re gonna finally find out if Androids do, in fact, dream of electric sheep.
And they need to read Asimov’s Foundation series as well as the Robot novels… and get familiar with the Laws of Robotics that SHOULD be built into AI, but currently isn’t.
I’m pretty sure the point of Asimov’s fiction was that even if the laws are programmed in, they’re not foolproof.
They might not be foolproof, but they would be a huge improvement over what is implemented today where we have AI that often makes up shit and is often used with bad intent.
Well duh. Tesla could’ve made bank on the superchargers alone, if he wasn’t impulsive and childish enough to fire the whole supercharger team.
Mazda needs to keep on selling cool cars. The Miata must never die 😀
Imagine throwing away the potential of the entire Supercharger network so you can focus on building doodads for crypto bros.
The Miata will also be split into two products. Japan will get a Kei class variant, and North America will get an EV 2-row crossover carrying the Miata nameplate. The Miata Zoom-E.
I don’t really understand the idea that retail chargers represent a huge profit potential. They sell a product nobody really wants to use (home charging is always a fraction of the price) at the tiny margins associated with almost any commodity like electricity.
Not everyone is able to charge where they live, and as EVs continue to gain market share they’re going to need places to charge during longer trips.
BEVs make very little sense for people who can’t charge at home since retail charging costs more per mile than ICE. It isn’t a market where BEVs are going to gain traction. Retail charging expansion is slowing without incentives, largely because there is no business model that makes it viable without the incentives.
There are EV chargers in the Walmart parking lot, and they are full. Sometimes there is even a wait to use the chargers.
Walmarts, malls, and highway rest stops are probably the best places for them, though Wawa and Buc-Ees are also adding EV chargers too.
Sure. But those were installed under a much different, more promising regulatory and incentive environment. There is little to no money to be made for the people operating the chargers, so there is little incentive to build many. If companies raise prices to achieve meaningful profitability, it only reinforces the fact that charging at home is already a small fraction of the cost of charging elsewhere.
Very true. I’ve owned an EV for almost 10 years and have only used a public charger 15 – 20 times.
I can charge for home at 9 cents per kWh. That is 2.5 cents per mile
I can public DC charge for 50 cents per kWh. That is 12 cents per mile
With gas at $3.50 that equals driving a car that gets 29 mpg
Going to laugh when the South African Nazi is the final domino to cause the AI bubble to burst. Lots of people like to chime in that Stellantis is prime to fail and it really seems like Tesla is the one that may stop building cars before Stellantis does.
Call Tom Selleck, we need a reboot of 80’s movie Runaway featuring Optimus Mime as the defective robot.
I’ll go outside and get him. He is currently appraising my house for a reverse mortgage.
Surely the thing that will save the Hitler company is their incredibly expensive robot slave that looks like a rejected prop from a terrible science-fiction movie and is permanently connected to an AI chatbot controlled by the insane South African man.
I’ve heard it makes lovely paintings, at least.
I like the idea of someone keeping a cursed-looking robot homunculus in their garage specifically to create bizarre paintings.
If it starts talking about it’s struggle, be worried.
And the idea that a humanoid robot is the solution is just bizarre. Purpose-built robots not only do jobs better, but they are simpler to design/produce and can make higher profits. You want to sell a home robot? Sell a machine that folds clothes. Maybe a dryer with the folding robot built right in. Sell a robotic chef. Not a humanoid robot, just a big box that lets you put in ingredients and receive cooked food. Some mechanized arms and/or a conveyor belt could do the work.
Lots of options that have fewer difficulties and weird implications than humanoid robots.
If AI is going to do everything in a couple years then instead of buying a robot you can just hire an impoverished unemployed office worker for cheap.
I’m just shocked that the Tesla Masterplan 4 wasn’t renamed to just be Master Race.
But yeah, Tesla is cooked if they truly believe their fictional robots are going to be 80% of the revenue stream. But also those robo-taxis were supposed to have already been making Tesla owners money by a few years ago.
It’s almost like Elon flourishes on selling vaporware. Honestly, I’m impressed the Cybertruck actually made it to production. I’m not, however, surprised it’s been an utter failure.
Fourth Reich?
Perhaps that 80% figure is more a prediction of the decline of their car business than a prediction of the growth of their robot business.
Own and drive vehicles that serve their purpose and are still at least a little fun.
Keeping it simple for the win.