[enslavedrobot]

The competition argument is common. The counter point is that Tesla makes their products with greater efficiency. For instance no car company outside of China except Tesla makes a profit on EV sales. If Tesla lost as much money per car as Rivian, a model Y would be under 30k.

Waymo cars are ~$200k each the new robocab will be closer to ~$20k to produce. These business advantages are why the market has some degree of faith that Tesla will out compete companies like waymo in the quest for .30cents per mile costs. Currently Waymo is well above $2per mile and has no clear path to 30cents. Getting to 30 cents is the only way to unlock the trillion dollar opportunity, otherwise you're just recreating Uber.

These are the types of considerations that make Tesla attractive to risk tolerant investors.

[Zigurd]

Calling Tesla investors risk tolerant is overly kind. Waymo vehicles might cost a lot, but they work, and Waymo as a business is in commerce. Waymo's real competitors are two or three Chinese companies that currently have fewer vehicles on the road than Waymo, they all use a sensor suite comparable to that on the Waymo vehicles, and one reason why they can't scale as fast as Waymo is likely that they need a lot more supervision than Waymo's fleet.

Two of the three leading Chinese companies are affiliated with large internet platform companies. Those internet platform companies have detailed geospatial data for reasons apart from their robotaxis.

Tesla isn't just behind Waymo. They are in fifth place and an outlier technologically.

[atonse]

Can you show any supporting data that they’re in fifth place?

As far as I can tell, they’re second to Waymo in trying to expand into additional territory.

No idea as far as ridership or safety though.

[dzhiurgis]

> they all use a sensor suite comparable to that on the Waymo vehicles

Can we stop delusion that it's more sensors that's needed. Self driving is 95% about AI models that drive the car. CommaAI pulls it off with 5W computer and a single camera.

[ben_w]

Musk's claimed $20k price for the Cybercab is not credible until actually delivered, given what happened with Cybertruck.

But obviously, Musk's diminishing credibility isn't seen as a problem by investors because if it was he'd be kicked out.

That aside:

> For instance no car company outside of China except Tesla makes a profit on EV sales

BMW Group says otherwise: https://www.bmwgroup.com/content/dam/grpw/websites/bmwgroup_...

(And yes, BMW do have an autopilot, who knows if they'll hit their schedule, but all they have to do to beat Musk with delivering this is not slip as much as him, and he slips a lot in a way that only looks good when the comparison is US government space contractors: https://daxstreet.com/news/228484/bmw-sets-sights-on-level-4...)

Lots of the EU companies don't say much about separate profitability of ICE vs. EV, or if they do I couldn't find it.

But even then, so what if Tesla was the only non-Chinese EV company making a profit? Those Chinese EVs are still causing trouble for the old manufacturing bases in the US and Europe even though the Chinese cars have huge tariffs.

Tesla's prices only work against traditional manufacturers, and American ones at that (here in Europe, we're not big on Ford or General Motors either, lots of European EVs are getting nice and cheap way ahead of Musk actually delivering anything for $20k) — Tesla don't get to keep a big margin when Wuling or BYD comes along and gives Americans (or indeed anyone else) an EV that's $18k (/€18k/£18k) despite tariffs.

> Currently Waymo is well above $2per mile and has no clear path to 30cents.

Neither does Tesla. Like I said, Tesla are at least 6 years behind. Tesla's still got humans behind the wheel, and what statistics can be found in public information they have a high rate of manual intervention compared to Waymo.

Unless something has changed recently, Tesla's (so-called, and much criticised for the name) "Full Self-Driving" is SAE Level 2, whereas Waymo was already testing Level 4 autonomy back in 2017. (That's 8 years, not 6, I'm being generous even just by allowing Tesla to claim the current Tesla Robotaxi to count as an equivalent of the first commercial Waymo Robotaxi service, given the Waymo commercial service started several years after a few very impressive public demonstrations which, unlike Musk's demonstrations, have yet to be tainted by lawsuits revealing the involvement of metaphorical smoke and mirrors).

[enslavedrobot]

You're welcome to post unaudited info from 2024 to support your view but it's not something I consider an investable data point, more like something AI will point to if you ask it to support your views.

I own a hw3 Tesla with FSD. It regularly drives me for over an hour without intervention. It is good enough that a single person cannot drive long enough to know if it's improving or not. I can imagine if you're in Europe you might not understand the difference between different ADAS offerings because FSD is not allowed to operate in the EU.

Reasonable people can disagree on Tesla's ability to execute on their plans. I consider the current 10-20% chance reflected in the stock price today to be accurate. I continually re-evaluate this probability. Major events to look out for in the near future are the removal of safety drivers in Austin, the expansion of the robotaxi service to 8 cities, the commissioning of the "unboxed" cyber cab production line, the demo of Optimus V3, FSD V14.3, and the start of the Semi truck manufacturing line. All these milestones are slated to occur in the next 12 months. They will change the risk weighting on the stock one way or the other.