If you want to be the google of cars you shouldn’t be building cars, but become Bosch.
Comment on Questions about the safety of Tesla's 'Full Self-Driving' system are growing
Aceticon@lemmy.world 3 weeks agoAll that stuff is what justifies Tesla being treated as a Tech Stock rather than an Automotive Stock and hence having Stock Prices which are 10x or 20x what an auto-maker with similar Revenue and Margins would have.
Dropping the techno-bollocks that underpins their “we’re disrupting the Auto industry with our Technology and will become the Google of cars” story and just focusing on being good at making electric cars would mean loosing the huge “we’re a Tech Stock” premium that keeps Tech companies’ stock prices high even when they’re loosing money (the valuations are justified by the expectation that they will one day dominate entire markets, like Google or Apple), and hence accepting their stock falling 90%, from Uber style valuations to Ford style valuations.
I doubt shareholders will ever accept that, hence I expect Tesla will just keep “faking until you make it” all they while they get farther an farther away from making it, until eventually they crash far harder (possibly even cease to exist in the next decade or two) than it would happen if they just settled down to be just another auto-maker.
barsoap@lemm.ee 2 weeks ago
AA5B@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
They were a tech company because they developed cars with features and technology no one else ever had. The stock stayed too high because they were delivery 50%+ growth every year and legacy manufacturers weren’t even trying to compete. The stock was truly excessive because of a long term roadmap to bring the future into present reality. Funding for ai was part of the competitive advantage, when it was used to add features to their cars.
AI for its own sake is not a good place to be and will only suck attention and funding from the core business
Humanoid robotics may be a vision of the future and I’m excited that someone will make that attempt, but it has nothing to do with cars. It’s a distraction of funding and attention at the expense of the core business
Previously Musk developed a portfolio of companies, so each can go for their own attempts at the future with less impact on each other. It’s just basic business sense. For example, a solar company could go bankrupt without affecting a car company. Now he’s taking a leap of fantasy and I don’t see any sign of the solid technical base other of his companies started with, and he’s doing it as part of a company that had been succeeding
Aceticon@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Electric cars is an incredibly old Tech (older than ICE, even), since the very first cars invented were electric.
Tesla were just updating an old tech and trying to make it viable (in which they succeeded), by using modern batteries and electric motors instead of what was used in the original EVs.
The innovative Tech stuff was things like automated parking and automated driving. I don’t think integrating what’s basically a tablet on a car dashboard counts as innovative Tech - it’s the same kind of thing makers of “Smart” Fridges were doing - grab old tech, put a touch screen on it and call it high tech.
Without this high tech part, Tesla is just a company that went into the market for car manufacturing with a strategy of carve out a new market segment by updating to the XXI century a technology from the XIX century that is now cheaper to run and adresses the Ecological concerns of many people - quite a smart and in some was innovative business strategy but it makes them no more a Tech company than Mercedes-Benz is a Tech company for having invented Electronic Fuel Injection or Uber or my local supermarket is a Tech company because of they have a smartphone customer loyalty app.
barsoap@lemm.ee 2 weeks ago
Parking assist is incredibly old, I might have gotten my timeline wrong but I think it pre-dates Tesla as a company.
AA5B@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Are you actually trying to says Tesla is no real technology improvement over done 1890s electric salon? I want what you’re smoking
Aceticon@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Improving an existing technology using modern components is an “improvement” but is not especially “innovative” and not at all any kind of unique breakthrough - it’s Tech use, not Tech making.
Maybe because I’ve spent most of my life working at or near the bleeding edge of Technology I don’t find them especially innovative in Tech except for the self-driving stuff: what they did that was impressive was in the sphere of business strategy and they seem to have run with just that for too long and not pivoted when they should’ve.
That said I can understand that people holding shares is TSLA would be scared shitless about Tesla not being treated anymore as a Tech company by the stockmarket, and hence desperately try to argue that Tesla is a Tech company that makes cars rather than a car company that uses Tech like all the other carmakers.