[vannevar]

The next shoe to drop will be shifting Model Y production from Fremont to Austin. Fremont will make Model 3s. Austin will make Model Ys and Robotaxis/2s. Cybertruck will be canceled. None of the Tesla plants will be making robots at any scale for many years.

[phendrenad2]

Yeah I don't buy this announcement. Converting their huge Fremont facility to just making humanoid robots? Do they have some large buyer or something? I'm skeptical.

[laughing_man]

I suspect it's going dormant for a couple years and then he'll say "Hey, this robot thing isn't working out, so we're closing the facility." He doesn't have any desire to stay in California.

[_ea1k]

S and X were a small fraction of Fremont already. The plant can do >500k units per year, but S/X were closer to 20k.

It sounds like this would be giving ~5% of the factory space to Optimus production, which seems reasonable.

[bdangubic]

they have a large buyer - all of the silly people investing money in the company

[testing22321]

IF they work (and that is a massive, massive if), every factory on earth will replace every human with them.

It’s inevitable, the only question is how many years until it happens: 2, 5, 10, 50?

Place your bets!

[riffraff]

Do you expect the demand for Tesla's robotaxis to be high? I don't see it.

[lacker]

If they actually worked right now, the demand would be high. Demand is certainly high for Waymos. Even if they worked worse than a Waymo I think the demand would still be very high. But it's hard to tell if (or when) it will work well enough to actually be a real product.

[Cthulhu_]

I don't see the demand for their robots to be high either tbh, but they're betting on them. It's not going to work.

[JasonBorne]

Of course it will be high. Transit is a huge market. They would just need a small share of Uber, lyft, regular taxis, public transit.

[trhway]

demand for any robotaxis will be high. Just look at the number of Uber drivers whom the robotaxis will replace. Plus leased robotaxis or personal/reserved ones - whatever shape it'd take replacing at least some percentage of personal cars.

There is only a "small" issue - to make those robotaxis, i.e. the self-driving system for them. Almost 20 years in, Google/Waymo is way ahead of everybody and is still not there yet (i believe we will get there anyday now - which maybe next year or in 10 years - especially giving all the avalanche of investment in AI. Though i'd have expected that 4+ years in we'd see a lot of autonomous platforms/weapons in Ukraine, yet it hasn't happen too yet)

[sampton]

I can't remember when was the last S/X refresh. It's nuts they just let it go stale and shut the factory down.

[trhway]

The refresh would need large investment. And it seems that S/X weren't selling that well to warrant such an investment. Just looking around - SV, a key market for Tesla - everybody buys 3 and Y, not S and X. In some sense it seems that 3/Y cannibalized S/X.

[laughing_man]

Musk's goal all along was to get away from boutique production. He wants to sell millions of cheaper cars, not thousands of cars for wealthy people.

Not sure it's going to work out. Without some big jumps in battery tech, EVs are going to be difficult to sell without subsidies.

[toomuchtodo]

Tesla got the job done, which was empower Musk, not manufacture EVs at scale. The stock is the product.

[tempestn]

Agreed, let alone 1M units a year!

[tombert]

My dad found it extremely amusing that Elon said "we just have to solve the 'AI problem' and we'll have robots doing shopping for us", or something like that. I can't remember the exact verbiage, but that was the gist.

The word "just" is doing a lot of work there. Going by that logic: We "just" need to figure out cold fusion to have effectively infinite energy. We "just" need to develop warp drives to travel across the galaxy. We "just" need to figure out the chemo problem to cure cancer.

[groundzeros2015]

Why would cybertruck be cancelled?

[palmotea]

> Why would cybertruck be cancelled?

IIRC, the fully-electric F150 Lighting was canceled due to poor sales, and its sales were better than the Cybertruck's.

[trgn]

it's one of their models i would like for them to succeed the most. americans love trucks (especially where i live), and the impact of electric truck replacing ice ones on the gestalt of the neighborhood is significant, no noise, no fumes. people tend to drive their electric cars/trucks more gently too. my neighbor bought one, and it's night and day.

and oddly enough, while i kneejerk hated it at first, the design has grown on me, something genuinely different, playful. much rather see a parked cybertruck than yet another oversized bloated "regular" truck.

[AlexandrB]

Because it's selling terribly: https://www.businessinsider.com/cybertruck-sales-decline-tes...

[geoffeg]

Lower than expected sales https://www.cbsnews.com/news/tesla-cybertruck-sales-elon-mus...