[p-o]

What makes this move even more incredulous is that none of the two market they want to move towards are proven markets:

- Waymo is generating less than 150m in 2025.

- Consumer robotics is an absolute unknown.

How can the transition be rationally justified? Let alone the valuation.

[api]

Consumer robotics strikes me as an engineering tar pit so deep it leads to hell. If full self driving is hard due to the long tail of unusual special cases, this is orders of magnitude worse.

Take FSD but multiply the number of actuators and degrees of freedom by at least 10, more like 100. Add a third dimension. Add direct physical interaction with complex objects. Add pets and children. Add toys on the floor. Add random furniture with non-standard dimensions. Add exposure to dust, dirt, water, grease, and who knows what else? Puke? Bleach? Dog pee?

Oh, and remove designated roads and standardized rules about how you're supposed to drive on those roads. There are no standards. Every home is arranged differently. People behave differently. Kids are nuts. The cat will climb on it. The dog may attack it. The pet rabbit will chew on any exposed cords.

We've all seen those Boston Dynamics robots. They're awesome but how durable would they be in those conditions? Would they last for years with day to day constant abuse in an environment like that?

From a pure engineering point of view (neglecting the human factor or cost) a home helper robot is almost definitely harder than building and operating a Mars base. We pretty much have all the core tech for that figured out: recycling atmosphere, splitting and making water, refining minerals, greenhouses, airlocks, and so on. As soon as we have Starship or another super heavy rocket that's reliable we could do it as long as someone was willing to write some huge checks.

And of course it's a totally untested market. We don't know how big it really is. Will people really be willing to pay thousands to tens of thousands for a home robot with significant limitations? Only about 25% of the market probably has the disposable income to afford these.

You'd have to go way up market first, but people up market can afford to just pay humans to do it.

[thewebguyd]

> Will people really be willing to pay thousands to tens of thousands for a home robot with significant limitations?

The answer to that is no, probably for the foreseeable future. The robot demos we have no can't even fold laundry or put dishes away without being teleoperated. Both extremely basic tasks that any household robot would be required to do, along with other messy jobs that put it at risk as you said: taking out the trash, feeding the pets, cleaning up messes, preparing or cooking food, etc.

The price it would have to cost with current tech would be astronomically more than just hiring a human, and they would almost certainly come with an expensive subscription as well, whereas I can hire a human to come in and clean my home weekly for about $200/month.

[mekdoonggi]

Also, how will these robots make money? They are a less capable human. Humans who aren't skilled don't make much money.

[foobarian]

I think if they are teleoperated they could make sense, or at least more than the device-local versions

[lallysingh]

If a robot can do basic cleaning, laundry, and dishes, that's worth a lot to a lot of people. Dual-professional households have the money, and not having to do this housework could save some marriages.

[throwawayqqq11]

The first MVPs dont need to reach parity to human autonomy, they only need to enforce that humans do the cheap work.

[Zigurd]

They haven't said it explicitly. But the reason that Waymo can add five cities this year is very likely they are at least at break even on opex. They likely reached that point sometime last year and it seems to have held up.

So I wouldn't call robotaxi service unproven. But I would call the idea that you can claim to be running a robo taxi service without depots, cleaners, CSRs, and remote monitoring that can handle difficult situations in a more sophisticated way than each car having a human monitor it, naïve.

[runako]

I read that as meaning even the scaled robotaxi service (Waymo) does not throw off enough cash to offset the loss of Tesla's vehicle sales unit. (The putative Tesla buyer they are dissuading from purchase would have to take a whole lot of robotaxi trips to generate the same amount of profit for Tesla. Assuming Tesla can get robotaxis working.)

In the 2000s publishing pivot to the Internet, this was known as "trading physical dollars for digital pennies."

[jfyi]

>They haven't said it explicitly.

This seems to be a major strategic decision of Alphabet pretty much across the board. I have only recently noticed the stark contrast to the constant hype trope you see in their competitors.

[jamincan]

A lot of the current valuation is based on Elon drumming up investor expectations. As they start to lose their spot as market leaders in EV, Tesla's inability to deliver on what Elon promised will become more clear as their competitors level with and surpass them.

Moving to new, unproven markets is fruitful ground for someone like Elon to drum up expectation and hopefully keep distracting people from the fact that he's had very few recent successes to show for all the hype he receives.

[loosescrews]

On top of that, despite huge investments of both time and money into both areas, seemingly rivaling competitors, Tesla does not seem to be anywhere close to a market leader in either segment. They have to both prove the markets and that they can compete in them.

[testing22321]

EVs were a very unproven market when Tesla started and it was commonly accepted they didn’t have a hope in hell.

I think musk knows you gotta take risks and skate to where the puck is going, not where it is now.

If he’s wrong, it’s all over of course.

[duxup]

>Let alone the valuation.

Maybe that's the driver. I always figured keeping Musk on was a sort of suicide pact, without Musk the company might be more traditionally valued, but that means the stock would tank. So they have to stick with him.

Staying in autos, eventually folks figure out the math and the stock tanks ... so they have to keep moving and keeping that sort of aspirational stock price.

[esseph]

> be rationally justified?

Nothing about this stock has ever been rational

[iugtmkbdfil834]

To be fair, market has been decoupled from reality on the ground for a while now. Just the fact that companies were able to operate giving stuff away for free only to suddenly yank the chain in a desperate bid to gain profitability later should be enough of a signal.

That said, as much as I dislike Musk ( and I have bet money against him before ), his instincts are likely not wrong. And it does help that, clearly, he knows how to bs well.

I am not saying you are wrong, but I think he is just a poster child for everything wrong with current market ecosystem.

[socalgal2]

I'll bet that's what people said to Steve Jobs when they were making the iPhone

- PDA sales are 0.01% of PC sales in 2006

[gilbetron]

And also what people said to Dean Kamen when he was making the Segway in 2001.

[notfried]

Except that it doesn't need to be consumer to start off. You can build specialized robots that deliver value at a massive scale. Imagine a "Prep Cook" at a restaurant, there are millions of these around the world. If the Optimus can do that job for a price of $1,000/month, that's likely to be more efficient and better quality than a human can do. And there has to be many jobs like this.

[lbreakjai]

Robots that specialise in one thing already exist. In big factories, where they'll peel and dice tons of onions per hour, being fed via unsexy conveyor belts into massive dicers.

That's the problem with robots like Optimus. The "specialized" part (Cutting the onions) is 1% of the skills. You'd still need to other hard 99% (Prehensility, vision, precise 3D movement, etc.).

And if you sorted the hard 99%, what's the point in specialising in cutting onions, when the same exact skills are needed to fold and put away laundry?

[mekdoonggi]

A million robots making $1k a month is $12b a year, but you need to actually produce the robots, maintain them, train the AI, own the data centers.

Also, if you take 1 million jobs, do you think that might cause demand to drop for services?

[burnte]

> How can the transition be rationally justified? Let alone the valuation.

Musk seems to have successfully decoupled investors from results. The stock price seems to move far more based on what he says and does than what the company says and does. It's completely irrational. Tesla is a huge bubble.

[nailer]

Because it's hard and Tesla think they can do it.

See 'reusable rockets' and 'having paralysed people control things with their minds' for other examples.

HN often seem to think there's Elon fans downmodding things but it seems more like a case of irrational hatred.

[perardi]

Oh, well let me get in my sub-$30,000 Model S, with a swappable battery and full-self-driving capabilities, and take a fully automated trip to the Hyperloop downtown so I can catch a quick ride out to O’Hare so I can fly out to watch a successful Starship launch…

…oh wait. I can’t. Because for all his successes, Musk has also sowed quite a lot of bullshit that has gone precisely nowhere.

[Qwertious]

More examples, please! Reusable rockets is the load-bearing example, I don't think that argument works without it. You could maybe squeeze in "he kickstarted the EV market".

[Fischgericht]

'having paralysed people control things with their minds' would be great if you guys had a healthcare system that would pay for it.

[FireBeyond]

To be clear, Neuralink has shown some promising signs. Has also shown some terrible signs.

And then I don't know if Musk is oversimplifying for a soundbite or more of his Dunning Kruger, but some of the descriptions seem to lack any knowledge of neurology. He describes a universal chip that will do different things and solve different issues depending on what part of the brain it's implanted in. That's not how it works at all.

[MBCook]

So?

They could make the first working flying cars. They could work fantastically.

And maybe one they release them we find out… no one wants flying cars. They sell 500 a year despite only costing as much as a normal car.

Just because you can figure out how to do something doesn’t mean you’re going to make money at it.

[dzhiurgis]

Tesla processes as many miles in 2 days as Waymo in its entire lifetime. Waymo will be crushed in few years.

[windexh8er]

If this were the case Waymo would already be gone. Tesla, under Musk, has missed a big opportunity. The claims of FSD "next year", by Musk for the past decade, fall on deaf ears now. While Waymo was focusing on building it Musk was multi-tasking and letting Tesla falter. RIP Tesla and what could have been. The reality is more clearly that Tesla could have been an amazing EV platform in totality. Instead they are being beaten in: driverless, PSD/FSD, and home energy production & storage. The only thing Tesla has a real lead in is still their EV power distribution footprint. I wouldn't be surprised to see that sold off in the next 5 years given their direction.

[q3k]

We've been hearing this 'Tesla has so much data!! Tesla FSD and robotaxis any day now!!' bullshit for probably a decade now.

[lern_too_spel]

And yet Tesla's FSD v14 critical disengagement rate is behind where Waymo was over a decade ago, when Waymo first started reporting this figure, even worse in city driving to compare apples to apples.