[underwater]

The thing that takes this into scam territory for me is Elon’s comments that “we started with a person in a robot suit and improved dramatically year after year, so if you extrapolate this we’re going to have something extraordinary.”

This statement is deliberately worded to avoid making a promise because Elon knows it is effectively a big fat lie. To date Tesla have solved the same problems that others have already solved. You can’t extrapolate progress because what comes next are the really hard problems that no one has solved. Even if Tesla is able solve those problems, there is zero chance that they can move at the same speed. They have 50% of an autonomous robot, but the next half is going to take 90% of the effort.

This is the usual smoke and mirrors. Elon shows off a tech demo using incremental gains and falsely represents how long it will take them to deliver on a revolutionary product.

[fastball]

Elon's companies actually have a track record of solving the hard problems that take 90% of the effort, so that doesn't seem like a lie at all.

[api]

SpaceX does, as we saw today. I suspect it’s in part because your employment options in aerospace are very limited and SpaceX is one of the best if you want to advance your career or work on cool stuff in space. I also get the sense it’s the one Elon cares most about and the one with the strongest sense of internal mission.

His other companies less so. Tesla was early in EVs and did a lot of things right but the FSD push has been a huge disappointment and stuff like Cybertruck is a joke. Meanwhile other car companies are catching up. Boring company is boring. Maybe Neuralink?

[nova22033]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ufbxvRo2rnY

[pvaldes]

> To date Tesla have solved the same problems that others have already solved.

So, everybody was making electric vehicles before Tesla? This is not how I remember it.

[tzs]

In the mid to late '90s there were actually several EVs from major car makers, such as the first generation RAV4 EV from Toyota (1997-2003), the Nissan Altra (1997-2001) (the first production EV to use a lithium-ion battery), the Honda EV Plus (1997-1999), the Chevy S-10 Electric pickup (1997-1998), the GM EV1 (1996-1999), the Ford Ranger EV (1997-2002), and the Chrysler TEVan (1993-1995).

This was in response to California pushing for more efficient cars with the ultimate goal of zero-emissions.

What really helped Tesla was that they started out going for the sports car crowd. For someone's day to day workhorse car a lack of good support infrastructure is a big problem. People want that car to be useful for everything.

The people who could afford a $100k+ sports car could afford another car for when they needed to take the whole family somewhere, or take a long trip, or get groceries (the first generation Tesla Roadster's cargo capacity was less than that of a Mini Cooper convertible, about 1/3 of a Honda Civic or Nissan Sentra or Toyota Corolla). This meant that Tesla's market in the mid-2000s cared a lot less about EV infrastructure than the people who might have been interested in those '90s EVs.

There was another company making an EV sport car at the time, the AC Propulsion tzero. The people who founded Tesla actually founded Tesla because they saw that such a car would have a good chance of success but AC Propulsion wasn't interested in going into commercial production. They wanted to remain a technology company selling EV technology to others, rather than become a car company. So Tesla was formed, and licensed AC Propulsion's drive train and thus was born the Tesla Roadster.