JemmyThings at Tesla are worse than they appear
edition.cnn.com/2025/04/28/business/things-at-t…
Things are undoubtedly bad at Tesla. Its sales are dwindling. Its profits are plunging, as is its share price. There are regular protests outside its showrooms. The Cybertruck is a flop. And somehow, it’s actually a lot worse than that.
The 71% drop in net income it just reported may have been overshadowed by CEO Elon Musk’s announcement that he would be stepping back from his controversial duties at the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). But that drop is just one indication of serious financial sickness at the EV maker, problems brought on by falling sales for the first time in its history and falling prices for electric vehicles.
The bottom line problem at Tesla is its vanishing bottom line. A deeper look at its first quarter report shows it’s now losing money on what should be its ostensible reason for existence – selling cars.
It was only able to post a $409 million profit in the quarter thanks to the sale of $595 million worth of regulatory credits to other automakers.
But if the Trump administration gets its way, the company can kiss those regulatory credits keeping it in the black goodbye, too.
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Good. Let them burn. The moment that loser heil Hitlered he should have been removed the next day. You are now complicit and have chosen your side.
Lol, read the title of the article, saw that it is in "Uplifting News", was confused for half a second but yep, I'm ok with this.
I too had a sensible chuckle. I do feel for the employees who just want to produce cars and innovate. Sure sucks being drowned by your own mother.
Is the new one out yet‽
The new model Y is out I believe. Britain seemed slow to catch up, urm catching up to fewer sales that is. Apparently they have some very decent incentives over there driving sales. However I think they are now in line with some other countries regarding sales, and that is even with the new model. ( From something I read online )
HamartiogonicDidn’t even realize until you pointed it out. I did feel a bit happy while reading, so that checks out.
Then, I thought about the way America is sinking, and the power vacuum being left behind. Gotta say, I wasn’t quite so uplifted any more now that I remembered that China will be taking that role on the world stage. Maybe 100 years from now people will be watching Chinese movies and using Chinese loan words.
ZeddWe had a chance at Star Trek, we decided to aim for Firefly instead.
Maybe 100 years from now people will be watching Chinese movies and using Chinese loan words.
In the West those movies will probably still be in English and mainly from Hollywood. But China will own half the companies making movies there.
Things will change, but somehow they will remain mostly the same.
cygnusChina is facing a huge demographic crisis in the next 10-15 years, so I don't think so. More likely the EU steps up but the world becomes more multipolar in general.
Can you please elaborate or explain what you mean by this. As in what are the details, why would his be happening ? Thanks.
One child policy left them with a population bubble that's going to burst. Meaning population will nosedive because the older generations were so much bigger than the newer ones, this means there's not as many grandkids making money for the family, especially since their youth is having a hard time finding good jobs, also, since the youth are unemployed, they're not as likely to come up to speed as fast as if they had been working in their field should an opportunity show up. And with so much of their youth being educated, nobody wants to farm or manufacture anymore. Population bubbles come with EXTREME economic dangers that will require massive policy/societal change at just the right time to navigate through. It's like doing WRC racing in an 80s Porsche 911. I'm sure it CAN be done, but good luck.
However, the US is trying to manufacture this problem with chasing off Latinos. Without immigration, were a nation in decline.
Thank you. Makes sense now. And I do like that car analogy.
Speaking of immigration, China could mitigate that problem by letting lots of foreigners in. Doesn’t look like it’s going to happen though.
BeatTakeshi
I'm using this now but it does disturb me that it is playing below the bridge.
Have an upvote.
It's because they don't want to produce a pleasant sound for Musk
tenchiken
It is fun to see that the little plus they made came from regulatory credits, i.e. emission trade. Which is likely to be chopped under Trump for being woke in the highest.
It was only able to post a $409 million profit in the quarter thanks to the sale of $595 million worth of regulatory credits to other automakers.
snooggumsMusk is the biggest welfare queen in the US, likely the world. All his businesses are propped up with governement funding.
katy ✨let's go for the trifecta and get it to happen at starlink and spacex too
Im shorting tesla stock lol 3000$, hey if i lose whatever but could win big lol, also fuck that nazi elon
It's not happening at starlink. There is no competition and people who have it are not going back to the shit they had before.
Nah, I can't say that about Star Link despite who the awful owner is. People rely too heavily on Star Link now and there's no competition. If you need a car you can buy a different EV, but they can't do the same for an Internet connection.
However, this would be a great time for some other billionaire who sucks a little less to start a competitor.
☂️-
The QuuuuuillThat's crazy because it looks pretty bad lol
Sterile_Technique*squints*
I can't tell, the Tesla lot is awfully dark. Would anyone mind lighting it up?
Be careful about that - don't want to let them claim them on insurance!
Suddenly I realize what all the data he gathered is for. It's a dead man switch. He dies or gets thrown under the bus, he releases all the data the government knows about all the wealthy dodging their responsibilities and shitting on the middle class.
So you are saying Elon saw what happened to Epstein and thought "He might have been onto something..."
That would be the best case scenario, in reality he just datamined and is using it to sell metadata to foreign countries and train an AI on data that nobody else had
Why though. It seems nobody cares. It could be released and people would go who cares.
I don't know, for the purposes of everything that got him to power and is keeping him in power those people don't seem to care if everyone knows their business.
Nobody's saying the quiet part quietly anymore.
شاهد على إبادةOkay, so people really need to understand what's going on at Tesla and their profits because while things aren't great, it's not as dire as you might be hoping.
Are their profits down, absolutely.
Does Tesla get a lot of money from ZEV credits, yes.
Are things as dire as everyone seems to be thinking, not quite.
Tesla knows they are getting the ZEV credits, and have for years, and they plan their business around it. All those years, and even this quarter, where someone looks at it and says, they only made a profit because of those credits, misses the point entirely (although this quarter I'm sure was unexpected for them)
When you know you have 400-500 million in credits coming in, that means you can plan to spend 400-500 million extra on capital expenditures and R&D and that's what they do. Tesla is spending billions on capital expenditures and research & development to expand, making their own battery cells, building a lithium refinery, scaling their energy business by building 2 new factories (1 in California, 1 in Shanghai), building a massive AI datacenter etc.
It's always been like this at Tesla. They've always been highly profitable if they wanted to be, but have been plowing money back into the business.
So yes, there have been many years or quarters where their profits were entirely ZEV credit based, but that's intentional. Its how you grow a business.
If this sales slump continues, all they need to do is slow growth, or not slow growth because they have something like $35 billion in cash and almost no debt. Is slowing growth bad? Absolutely. But they aren't going to be magically losing money unless they choose to not slow growth and take the hit. (Note: The cybertruck might be the exception there, that might be a money pit)
Is this bad for the stock price? Hell yes.
Is Tesla in dire trouble? Not really.
Dogiedog64Great points all around, well thought out and reasoned. There's just one problem: slowing growth won't save them if nobody buys their rolling dumpsters anymore lmfao.
I mean we'll have to see how bad things get, but there's a long ways to go from now to sales so low even the energy business can't cover the costs of the facilities and staff even if they stop most of the capital intensive projects, idle the lines, and try to turtle while working on kicking Elon out and reorganizing.
Edit: just to clarify, the commercial energy business isn't going to get hit as hard as the consumer vehicles market. I don't expect to see such a huge slump there compared to the consumer vehicles.
The thing is: in the past they used the R&D for things like model 3 and model y, huge commercial successes, now they are investing it in cybertrucks, robotaxis, humanoid robots and AI, which are either proven failures, vaporware, non-monetizable or a combination of all the above.
As they slow down sales, the credits will also slow down, and if (when) he is thrown under the bus by Trump, will go away completely.
2025 tesla is completely different from 2017 tesla. Both overvalued, but with very different outlooks.
No doubt there that R&D is being spent differently now, and a lot of it can fail and end up being a waste.
A lot of it is going to their new batteries though which they've stated are now cheaper than all their suppliers. That doesn't mean it's cheaper to produce than others, but they don't have to pay a profit markup, so it ends up being cheaper. The refinery is just going go make those even cheaper, assuming that is successful as well.
That kind or investment will pay off if they keep it up and stay in that position, and long term, is transferable to the energy business which could prop up bad car sales (but that part would be many years away as they don't have it scaled to that yet)
Then yes they're spending many billions on the cybercab, which might be a failure, but the whole new manufacturing process they've created for it is transferable to other vehicles if they have to admit failure on the cab itself due to FSD failure. But the whole new process itself could also be a failure. That would be very bad catastrophic for them as the new process is how they plan to reduce costs moving forward. There's an additional 2 partially designed vehicles using that new process which were put on hold, so as long as the process itself isn't a failure, they could admit failure on the cab and pivot to those sooner than later.
The cybertruck is a flop, but a lot of the tech is transferable.
Optimus is an easier problem to solve than FSD at least for commercial stuff IMO, and it derisks their heavy R&D into AI stuff as now there's 2 things counting on it instead of 1. But yes still a huge risk, and yes both AI things could fail which would now be very bad.
There are a lot of gambles right now on certain things absolutely, but I wouldn't say all the R&D is wasted.
They can only have so many failures / flops though while also going through a dramatic sales slump. If that worsens they'll rearch a point where they have to reassess their goals and plans or it risk becoming a dire situation, but it's not dire yet.
If everything keeps going bad, they'll have to kick Elon out, or he'll have to change course, or it will actually become dire and they'll fail.
But what if that income disappears?
It was only able to post a $409 million profit in the quarter thanks to the sale of $595 million worth of regulatory credits to other automakers. But if the Trump administration gets its way, the company can kiss those regulatory credits keeping it in the black goodbye, too.
Then they spend 400-500m less on capital expenditures or research and development. It means slower growth and give others an advantage, but it's not the end of the world.
That or they say fuck it and eat into their 35b cash for a bit.
And still their market capitalisation is probably higher than the biggest ten automotive manufacturers combined.
TomMaszThe "uplifting news" that makes us all think about US politics again, for the 40th time today.
I've seen nothing about China's BYDs that doesn't make me think they're far better engineered. Hell, before Trump forced us to pay a huge tax to buy Chinese, they were even cheaper.
oyzmoThis is exactly what someone would say if they were on the 'ragged edge of death'.: "This is not one of those times. We’re not on the ragged edge of death, not even close. There are some challenges and I expect that this year will be probably be some unexpected bumps this year but I remain extremely optimistic about the future of the company.”
Worse?
Its been looking pretty bad for the last couple if months. The stocks did bounce, that's true, but I would buy - that said, I haven't picked a winner yet either.
Things at tesla are not as bad as they should be.
Not yet a smoldering crater, then?
The only thing in this world trending in the right direction is their stock price
Unfortunately Tesla is up 34% from its low in March (I know because I shorted them before their earnings)
Lol shorting Tesla is a wild move. It's a meme stock, the price doesn't reflect anything real.
Not wild, just poorly timed.
Of course, since this is the darkest timeline
Give it some time. I'm sure they could be a whole lot worse still.
This is a big fact almost no one speaks of. Tesla has only ever been profitable by manipulating the carbon footprint regulations and selling Ford and GMC carbon credits. Not a single tesla vehicle has ever been profitable as an actual vehicle. You know, the product they claim to be selling. The real product is pollution hiding. N ot correcting, not fixing, not even slowing pollution. No, its a shell game. Tesla is making money by shifting the blame of pollution for profit. Oh, they build vehicles also.
Where can I learn more about this stuff?
Not from a Jedi
This honestly couldn't be further from the truth.
Tesla's vehicles once ramped have always been extremely profitable (except probably the CyberTruck as it hasn't properly ramped due to low demand)
Any losses you see are due to their aggressive growth involving capital expenditures and research and development. It's not that the vehicle isn't profitable.
The ZEV credits are just bonus money that they can then leverage to expand faster.
Edit: If you want to try and see this another way that might make sense... The Model S and X were very profitable, but they didn't make enough money to fund the expansion for the Model 3 and Y. Ditch the Model 3 and Y, and remain a boutique luxury car company, and they would posted profits instead of losses. It wasn't the cars losing money, it was the growth. The ZEV credits accelerated that growth immensely by giving them more breathing room.
Ah, so the actual reason for the loss is that they can't expand capacity without squandering vast amounts of money. That's much better.
A thing would need to officially be a flop to be considered squandered like the Cybertruck is looking like.
They might have a few failures ahead of them yet though, but you can't call a mid flight project squandered.
Edit: e.g part of that loss could be attributed to them finalizing and now starting production at the megapack factory at Shanghai. Short of Elon backlash stopping sales of their commercial batteries, that won't be squandered and will make a billion or two or three in profits this year.
You have just argued against the article itself. Should we believe you?
The article doesn't say they've never made a profit on any of their cars. If that's what you got from that, you should try reading it again.
Also, if you make 1 billion in profit on something, and then spend 2 billion researching and developing and setting up a factory to build a new product, you end up with a loss of 1 billion. That does not mean your first thing is unprofitable. This is pretty basic stuff.
The vehicles are profitable, they just didn't provide enough profit this quarter to cover their R&D and capital expenditures for growth.
Edit: Sorry, and in case it wasn't clear, their R&D and capital expenditures dwarf the ZEV credits every quarter.
the only reason anyone has bought a cybertruck for a business is because incentives for heavy vehicles make it possible to almost entirely write them off on taxes
OhNoAnyway.jpg.
The interesting thing is, Tesla is perhaps the most obvious and extreme example, but they’re not the only auto manufacturer this is happening to right now. Nissan is in a bit of a tail spin as well.
There are so many problems slamming in to the auto industry right now. Even beyond the tariff instability.
In the US in particular, As cars have gotten more reliable and longer lasting, the market for new “budget” cars has dried up. Car buyers who might have once bought budget are now buying used cars that probably have a good many years left. The sales of new cars have been declining since 2016 but new car price have been skyrocketing, keeping up revenue growth for automakers.
This seemed ideal for automakers as it meant they could drop the lean margins of cheap cars and focus on higher margin markets, which looked much better to shareholders. Those companies that focused on this budget market have suffered, the best example being Nissan. The ideal for automakers is that people will buy “up” the value chain over time, buying higher end or “less used” vehicles when they trade in their old vehicle, going from a twice used, to a once used and eventually to a new car.
This kind of came to a head during the pandemic. Not only was the supply of lower end used vehicles dwindling as less and less entered the market due to less being made a few years back, there was also a shortage of new cars due to supply chain break downs and an increase in demand. Many people were taking out insane financing on massively over priced cars, both new and used. Now a lot of people are underwater on those auto loans from the pandemic because the trade-in/sales price is less way than what they have left on the loan. Many are also defaulting on those insane pandemic auto loans and their repossessed cars are ending up back on the market, increasing supply in the used market.
Many who are underwater on their auto loans but can still make payments can’t afford to make even larger payments, so rolling over the principle from the last loan into a new loan on another car is impractical. So they aren’t buying, let alone moving up the market to buy new or higher end. The demand being suppressed in the used market and the supply being bolstered by repos means used prices are massively depressed. This depressed used market carries over to the new market in turn, as most people buying new probably couldn’t afford to do so without trading in their old car, so a depressed used market hurts their purchasing power. Why would someone buy a new car when the only new one the could afford is probably worse than the existing car.
Tesla is getting a lot of focus because of the political entanglement of their high profile CEO, but the whole industry is under strain. Nissan is frantically looking for buyers to help them out of the debt hole they’re in, and groups like Stellantis (owners of Chrysler, Fiat, Jeep, Ram and Dodge) are desperately chasing new revenue streams as absurd as ads in the central console.
...nah man, that's on the domestic dealers + automakers choosing not to market small affordable cars in favor of big profitable road-tanks, and it's not the first time they've priced themselves out of the market like this...
In fairness(?) Ford bet big on small cars in the wake of the Great Recession, and that worked well for a while, but by the time they decided that the only non-truck (from a CAFE standpoint) that they were going to keep selling was the Mustang, they were losing money on every Focus and Fiesta they sold.
A lot of that was their godawful automatic transmission that was forcing them to spend zillions in warranty repairs, but at the end of the day the margin on economy cars is so slim that you can't afford to make mistakes. Rather than bet on perfect execution in a market that was already shrinking in the US, they decided to focus on higher-margin products... and that's fine in the short term, but as you mention it's going to leave them exposed once nobody can afford to spend $50k+ on a horrifically overpriced big pickup anymore.
It’s a fundamental and inevitable outcome of how these businesses are structured and run. Were the decisions to chase larger more premium vehicles short sighted? absolutely. Was the pursuit of Financialization in car sales to make up for pricing out lower income buyers obviously a bad idea? Without a doubt. Could they have made any other decisions? Not without being replaced by shareholders.
The solution to this problem is not just to “kick the bums out”, these companies need to have their management and ownership restructured in a way that generates incentive structures to maintaining a stable long term market rather than quarterly revenue growth.
Some companies, like Nissan, didn’t pursue the big premium trend and they got burnt as well, largely because the trends of the rest of the market and surplus of used cars is undermining their new sales. To some extent their choice to so heavily pursue sales to fleets like rental companies didn’t help.
I'm always happy to see bad news for Tesla (and by extension, Elon), but they've survived so much despite their mismanagement it feels like we'll never be rid of them.
Never's a long time.
I’d like to see their charging network survive in some way, maybe under someone else’s control. From what I’ve heard from EV owners the Tesla charging stations are the only ones that are readily available especially outside of cities (at least here in Australia).
In the US, the Tesla charging network is the most reliable and most widespread.
It’s one of the reasons many people buy a Tesla; there’s no faffing around with third party charging stations that are a crapshoot IF they work and IF they’re not in a dodgy location.
Hopefully Tesla goes under so much, they have to sell the charging network.
Be of good cheer! That kinda market valuation doesn't disappear overnight, just too much money to piss away quickly. But our man Musk is on the case!
And you'll love this, Musk is committing the ultimate capitalist sin: Losing money. No problem going in the red, if your business plans aren't made of half-ply toilet paper and ghosts. LOL, even Trump will shit on him as soon as it's clear that Elon is a "loser".
Looks at share price: Up 10% in the last month....
Dead-cat bounce.
The market can remain irrational longer that you can remain solvent.
The problem isn't that you can't predict when a stock is mispriced, that's sometimes very easy, it's predicting when all the other dipshits will come to the same conclusion because ultimately that's all that matters.
Right now musk still has a personality cult and there are a lot of morons buying the stock like their worldview depends on it. They don't read the earnings reports, they don't read unbiased news, they mostly don't even own the cars, they just think it's going to the moon because...for lack of a better word, propaganda.
Nailed it. I'd add that investors are treating it as a meme stock, and as you said, it's unrealistic. Fuck me, talk about a house of cards.
Is there enough time‽
Doubt Tesla will fail in the next two minutes, so sure.
People interested in cars have been scratching our heads with Tesla for years. Like at one point it was worth more than every other car market combined and its value kept going up. I mean there seems like years of irrational prices to the point it would be silly to bet against it
But still down 20% from the start of the year, when Trump was supposed to make it soar.
It's not going to survive this high for long with the abysmal sales figures coming from the rest of the world, even if the Musk cult currently still keeps pretending everything is going great.
Wait, you mean The Commercial on the White House lawn back in March didn't move more units?! surprisedpikachuface.jpg
It's still way up from a year ago. The insane climb after the election was unsupported hype, which has been corrected. Say what you want about tesla, but the stock price looks pretty healthy.
How is it possible that tesla is losing sales in markets where EVs are growing? Not a good sign
Normal people don't want a sports car
Publications LOOOOVE to write these articles and then sit on them until the stock gets like a 1-day 5% drop so they can misrepresent the situation. Take a look back 6 months or 12 mos. and it's even greater.
ok, but that didn't happen here
Point is, it only looks bad if you look at a very specific period of time.
ok but your comment isn't related to this particular case
An Enron-like Tesla documentary is coming.
I think it'll be more of an Enron slash Theranos docudrama... questionable accounting and overvaluation mixed with a superstar CEO stuck in a faking-it-till-you-make-it corporate death loop with investors drunk on hype.
Without the regulatory credits, and capital gains Tesla would be $500 million in the red.
And sales continue to drop in all markets. Tesla is no longer competitive in China and EU, only in USA due to tariffs on cars.
A couple of years ago Tesla boasted the highest margins in the industry on their cars, now they are so low, that if prices continue to drop, Tesla will soon be at s deficit on every car sold if they try to follow, or if they don't reduce prices, their cars will simply be too expensive. Damned if you do, damned if you don't.
Maybe they will get bailed out like the airlines did though. I want to see them burn, but nothing seems to work the way it's supposed to anymore.
Airlines run on paper-thin margins and are critical to the economy and country as a whole. Yeah, we kinda have to keep them afloat. Tesla does not enjoy that sort of role.
Or instead of trying to keep Airlines’s from sinking, we could invest in intercity rail, so there would be travel options. Imagine having a choice
Afloat. An airline.
I'm already out.
What about Aeroflot?
At this point of negative journalism, any company that didn't choose to bend the knee to Trump's lunacy would have been denied. The right hates electric vehicles. The right hates these pesky journalists. The right says they're clever enough to see a grifter. However, when an electric car company run by an un-qualified rich boy from South Afrika utilises the media to inflate their numbers so they can sell more electric cars to the people they betrayed (not their "new customers", they won't buy into electric because of their personal politics) it's all "why have trans people existed for so long?"
Monkeys amongst apes.
Is this the greenwashing scam companies use to pretend that they are working toward a carbon-neutral production line? They're just speculating on future production and selling today's emissions to today's buyers on tomorrow's promise?
How fucked.
What happened to moving the choice to the states?
Technically it’s the intended result. It helped fund one or more purely EV manufacturers for the future. Legacy companies chose not to invest n new technology for the longest time, but had to pay the price. At some point that price is too high but the innovators are awarded and the technology has become cheaper, so the surviving legacy manufacturers can adopt it. Ts a good thing that it helped fund a successful EV manufacturer by penalizing the laggards. That was the goal
The only real failure is the credits were apparently too cheap since legacy manufacturers still had to be forced, and are still regressing the first chance they get
Good.
Good riddance. Nazis dont deserve to be rewarded. They deserve the worse of the worse.
The Nazis actually made good cars. Tesla is all the worst parts without the good cars.
Volkswagens aren't that great but I get your point.
The original Beetle (at least the ones I worked on from the 1950s and 60s) didn't have stellar product quality, but it was well-engineered to be maintainable by someone without specialist knowledge or tools. VWAG has definitely gotten worse at quality over the following decades.
Good thing I didn't use the word great, and I'm talking about the cars they made in the 30s and 40s hence the past tense of "made."
Good, great etc schematics....swear yall are insufferable on this site.
Good and great are used differently for a reason. It's not really a semantic difference.
Funniest thing about Tesla was the idea they'd make evs more economical and realible after starting in the luxury space. They did exactly the opposite and now shareholders are paying dearly.
Weren’t they selling like 3000 cars a day at every single dealership in Canada? Seems like sales should be fine.
Funny how now they are making money selling regulatory credits. Lol
I think your comment is misunderstood.
The 3000 cars a day were just for a few days before the government credits were set to expire.
Yeah some people don’t get sarcasm.
Anyway I think musk took the Canadian credits and smuggled them across the border without paying tariffs so he could then sell them as US regulatory credits. It all makes sense now.
Because they weren't selling 3000 a day. They were selling a huge number a minute, one day (maybe a couple).
Without the /s, it could have been a standard Muskie comment. Hard to tell online.
I'm often stunned that internet people take everything a face value, even an obvious post like yours. OTOH, Americans' read at an average of 7th-8th grade levels. Go figure.
Not good. There’s still some remnant of the idealistic vision, hiding from the Nazi.
- robotaxis will eventually be a good thing, but it will be a long time before they’re profitable. I’m all for the experiment, whether teslas approach succeeds or not, but Tesla can no longer afford to stick to a money losing experiment
- the semi has huge potential to disrupt the trucking industry and rapidly decarbonize it. While I do see other companies experimenting with battery trucks, no one else has the potential combining mass produced parts from other vehicles, mass produced charging stations and mega storage, nor are taking the risk to scale up manufacturing. We need to electrify trucking and like it or not Tesla has some unique strengths that may help them succeed first. We need this
- these are teslas big upcoming efforts and they’re both an attempt to be revolutionary, which means risky, money losing. While I can get onboard the protest bandwagon, deprive the Nazi of his god level wealth, we need the EV revolution in trucking
It's going to be a disaster. Tesla "FSD" is glorified cruise control on level 2 on the autonomous driving scale.
It's already a disaster. The economics don't add up and the few on the road break down all the time.
don't other truck manufacturers that actually know how to build a truck also make electrified models?
There are other electric semi trucks out there, but none (at least as of last year) compare in specs and capabilities. The big issue is their power consumption is much higher than the Tesla Semi which has been repeatedly validated by their testers as even better than what Tesla advertises. Efficiency will be king in this kind of business.
Worse efficiency = less range = more batteries = less load capacity = less money per delivery
E.g this is from DHL
https://www.dhl.com/global-en/delivered/responsibility/dhl-tests-tesla-semi-electric-truck.html
Edit: Just some examples... I don't know if these have been verified in use unlike the Tesla, so all theoretical based on the advertised miles/battery size.
And those are all shorter range at that.
Edit: I should also add... we don't know the price of the Tesla Semi. Its possible that its ridiculously priced and the increased efficiency is negated even over the life of the vehicle compared to the other trucks. That's a big unknown given these are pilot vehicles.
I tried fsd demo this spring and it’s getting pretty good. I wouldn’t use it but it was perfect on well marked roads. The thing is it made me realize just how poorly maintained our roads are and everything is an edge case. For example it didn’t stay in lane at one Intersection but the intersection was a weird offset plus the lines were all faded away. Although I also disnt give it any chance to recover so I suppose it could have been ok: Im not risking it not recovering
It might surprise everyone but mostly by staying in a well maintained well mapped area, like Waymo did. There’s no way it fulfills the claim of self-driving everywhere without more improvements
The robots is will have the next generation computer and higher resolution cameras which may help. However that also allows more overhead for the next ai update
I get what you mean but it's still stuck at level 2 and it always will be. No matter how good it is, if you move your eyes from the road, it will eventually kill you. Cameras alone are not sufficient enough for autonomous driving.
I disagree with this assertion, because they’re correct that the only being that can currently drive is relying on vision. Vision alone is sufficient for driving.
But autonomous driving really hasn’t succeeded yet. We still have no idea what is required for autonomous driving or whether we can do it at all, regardless of sensors.
So you’re implying that we can definitely do autonomous driving but can’t do it the way humans do, whereas I say we won’t know the requirements until we find some that succeed, and we may never
Yeah sure. If you want the same bad results as humans deliver, in terms of crash rates, than it's possible. I wouldn't trust it. Also human vision and processing is completely different from computer vision and processing.
Presumably we have the intelligence to set requirements before something can be called self-driving - that’s usually what the fuss is about, whether the marketing is claiming it’s something it’s not.
If they fail with their approach, I’m fine with that, just like I’m fine if Waymo fails with their approach. Of either succeeds, why should I care how? Obviously there’s a problem if it runs over some old lady at a stop sign and drags them down the street but that’s clearly a failure for them