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Perhaps the timing is just related to the fact he had to take 2 18 hour flights in 2 days, and therefore had nothing to do except pour over spreadsheets and documents... allowing him to figure out that those groups weren't moving in the right direction?

Its starting to sound like rather than shutting down operations of these things, he's trying to reduce the capital investment in these areas -- probably to re-purpose it to data center build-out for AI/FSD. So we slow down new supercharger builds to use the funds elsewhere.

Exactly. They've already created the "branded and owned by other people" supercharger. So now they just have to manufacture and ship it if they have a partner who already owns the land and will take care fo the permitting and installation. ...and yes -- you do need neighborhood chargers...

Or maybe he's already struck a deal to sell of the entire supercharger operation to Chevron, Shell or BP?

Any deal involves giving something in exchange. My guesses are that China gets either: - license FSD to Biadu or - Musk agrees to buy the US portion of TikTok (either through X or Tesla -- probably X)

he's no longer in a position to influence Tesla's decisions. So it makes sense to diversify his portfolio to de-risk his own financial well-being. The folks at Enron were also absolutely sure they had a plan that would continue to bag them huge stock increases, and many of them ended up screwed...

Clearly none. Americans refuse to use metric.

While I don't disagree with your general thesis, if he's truly betting on robotaxis then any of these that allows for it will be part of the 2.5. Powered lift gates (and probably powered doors too), screens in the back, etc... will all be standard features so that it can work without a driver...

name tracks.

Hardly an apples to apples comparison when you compare the most expensive with all the extras from before with the cheapest bare-bones today. but as someone who paid 70k (with all the extras and including FSD and tax) in 2022, it sometimes irks me that I still owe about the same as the current...

Doubt it. Police are in fact trained to drive the cars they drive because they are often required to drive them at the edge of the envelope of what the car can do. This is especially true in California where they seem to like high speed chases a lot if the TV is anything to go by :).

Iacocca dropped his salary to $1 (plus stock options and bonuses). Musk's was $0 (plus bonus stock options) in the first place. I do think he was taking an example out of Iacocca's book when he first asked for that -- its a statement of "i have skin in the game to make this work". Its not really...

IMHO, yes. In fact, I feel like the Y is the perfect robotaxi for airport runs and runs to grocery stores... plus families. I'd probably start with them, then introduce the 2-seater later at a lower cost per ride for solo / couple riders with no baggage.

Exactly. Its sort of like the discussions of "But how am I going to haul my boat around!!??" I mean -- if you're really the person who needs to haul mulch a couple of times a week, you'll want to always own a pickup truck. For the 98% of people who never haul mulch, its not an issue. For the...

I'm also starting to wonder if the layoff is indicative that Optimus is ready to start in-house deployment.

You stated that it wouldn't happen for 10+ years. I was stating that it may take 10+ years to complete, but it will start to happen immediately and will be a gradual transition.

I disagree. I do think the transition will be gradual and take 10+ years, but a large amount of America would move to if as soon as it is provable. Personally, my wife and I decided we wanted to live in more walkable towns and got rid of our 2nd car in the process - partially because Uber is...

Tesla has never done all-in world-wide on anything... even when they had the money. They only grow as fast as their expertise and logistics can grow. So they'll start with one or two cities, and expand one or two cities at a time... with cash-flow expanding with it. I doubt it'll be completely...

Ah! So that's the secret! I do like the more natural "speed of traffic" with the automatic, but if that's the secret to handling adjustments better I'll turn it off in town for now. @Krugerrand - to be clear, I'm experimenting with things that may work. But right now the rate of slow-down when...

For sure -- that's what I mostly do... though right now it takes a couple of blocks to slow down from the normal speed limit to the school zone speed limit. It'd be nice if there were a happy medium.

That's where advertising helps -- addressing the concern of each group of late adopters one at a time while slowly building your reputation. You don't pull that lever until you're ready to address that particular group. And timing when you pull each particular advertising lever is important...

School zones are definitely one of my biggest problems with it currently. In New Orleans, all school zones have speed-based traffic ticket cameras, so making a mistake there is expensive. It doesn't seem to understand them at all and just ignores them. In v11, I could manually set the speed...

exactly... I disengage every single drive becuase I want to make different decisions about where and how to park than it does. Even at my own house, it doesn't choose to go into the driveway, and I do. To me that disengagement doesn't count as the equivalent of a collision.

All these models seem to assume that the robotaxis will be privately owned, and therefore Tesla has to share some of the profit. Why would tehy bother to do that rather than just own them themselves? I know Elon proposed a "use your car as a profit center for us" model years ago. But he's...

I imagine that initially would look a lot like a public Boring Tunnel project.

Good thing they've already produced steer-by-wire so they can do both easily on the same frame.

Doesn't matter. The regulatory process to get Robotaxi approved is going to take years once the technology is proven. And getting it out to all possible areas so that people don't need cars any more will take a decade or more. It would be foolish not to have a low-end small car segment car to...

Someone should fire chatGPT!

No, he's a successful leader because he's willing to take risks and act on his knowledge rather than crowdsourcing and compromising on decisions like most corporate leaders are required to do. That's not the same thing as what you said, nor is it the opposite. One can be circumspect on how you...

The presentation seemed photocopied from a Tesla one a couple of years ago: structural battery pack made up of larger cells, lots of cameras doing vision-based auto-pilot. Glass roof. Charging network. Solar power. etc. That said, its a good plan, so no reason not to copy it. And its a good set...

R2 appears to be what I would want. But then, the R1 is a fantastic vehicle. Its problems are price and scalability. They just plain aren't producing enough. They have a fantastic winner with the Amazon van too, but that doesn't seem to pull their company numbers up enough. Its been my feeling...

By himself he can't "stop" it. Its part of a package passed by congress, so congress would have to pass a new package that repeals it. But he could instruct the departments under him to change the interpretations of the law such that it is difficult or impossible to get.

I suspect they're playing the attack narrative to get approval for exactly that -- something they probably wanted anyway. Never let the opportunity from a disaster go to waste.

It'd be nice if they changed the back end to be a more boxy station-wagon like back end. My Y can haul a lot of stuff with the seat down, but I'm limited by the height of the top of the hatchback opening (not by the height of the interior past it.) The boxy back end would be better for the 'car...

How many times can one company go bankrupt?

FSD is already doing what I call "conditional fencing". If the weather is bad, it either partially or fully turns off. We tend to think of geofencing as "anything in this contiguous shape area", but I feel like the smartest geofencing will actually be "conditional fencing". So real full self...

Those look like completed buildings. They're probably leasing (or buying) buildings for things that don't require specialized construction so that they can get it going faster. That 1.5 year process of building a building is a long time to wait when you're ready to go now on something.

It doesn't work that way. At the time of the infraction, the suit and the ruling they were incorporated in Delaware and subject to Delaware law. If they move to Texas, then Texas law would take effect for any actions they take after that. But I believe previous actions done while they were...

Agreed -- the board really messed this up. The 'independent' part is a red-herring... it just means that they aren't employees. All boards have relationships with other board members and usually officers. that's not prohibited. But there's clear processes that have to happen. Why doesn't the...

...right into the ground.

I agree with you... but also, China expanding and being competition to Tesla doesn't necessarily mean entering the US market at that level. I suspect that competition will happen instead in places where the belt-and-road initiative is already going. I see south-east Asia, Africa, and Europa...

Robotaxi will happen about 4-5 years after FSD can be trusted without a driver, becuase it'll take that long to get through the regulatory environment. Optimus in the factory can happen as soon as it can safely do one task. Even though its the same software, robots will happen first because...

Thus ensuring they continue to have the lowest reported crime rate...

but you can get several LLMs to write about that trip to the supermarket.

Probably accurate eventually just to sell to the Central and South American markets. Probably doesn't impact the US market -- especially since it won't be up and running producing anything at all until at least mid 2025.

I suspect the didn't do the 500 mile version because it required 2 layers of batteries... so a different body/chassis design. We may see it some day, but releasing everything they can make with one body makes sense. I just wish they'd said that.

Why would they do a warranty publicity stunt on the cybertruck? They don't need to increase sales on it yet -- they've got an order backlog of a couple of years. Save that sort of sales booster for when the order book gets to less than a year (and when they have real-world data on thousands of...

I suspect that's Tesla's strategy here... be sure to extract the maximum amount of money from whoever in the queue is willing to pay it, because there's WAY more reservations than they can fulfill for quite a while.

... or slightly wider and higher profile tires.

The Bucees east of Houston was my favorite charging stop crossing the country.