Not surprised. As I wrote yesterday, the videos of the robots performing household tasks look much smoother than the actual walking robots seen live.
Tesla is not doing well as a car company. Tesla needs a good, low-cost car. Something that can compete with the BYD Seal, which reviews indicate is a good low-priced electric car. BYD is taking over the world of electric cars outside the US.[1] Only tariffs keep them from taking over the US market. They have many new models at good prices. BYD even has a pickup truck now.
Tesla also is not doing too well in batteries. Despite "Battery Day" and other hype, Tesla failed at making cells themselves.[2] They buy cells from Panasonic and CATL, mostly. Panasonic has some plants co-located with Tesla, but they're Panasonic technology.
Plus Tesla still has trouble with parts and service. The company is twenty years old now. They should have that figured out.
Tesla did fix its production volume problems. But "according to its own figures, the electric automaker produced 46,561 more vehicles than it delivered to customers during the first quarter of 2024. Where are all these cars going? Parking lots at its factories, malls and airports."[3]
Tesla launched the electric car industry. But they've blown their lead. This is what happens when the CEO's attention is elsewhere. Will someone please get Musk into drug rehab? He used to be good at this stuff.
[1] https://www.byd.com/us/news-list
[2] https://electrek.co/2024/07/17/elon-musk-might-give-up-tesla...
[3] https://jalopnik.com/tesla-is-running-out-of-room-to-store-u...
> Plus Tesla still has trouble with parts and service. The company is twenty years old now. They should have that figured out.
This is direct result of constant changes in the hardware during manufacturing. It might look good from customer perspective that they are always getting latest and greatest hardware, but it is an absolute nightmare from aftermarket perspective as you don't have Model X, but "Model X 2020 Week 23" which was only model using part XYZ v1, every other model is using part XYZ v2, which is not compatible with v1 model. It gets really messy really fast.
Regular OEM manufacturer won't get into this issue simply because they will close the changes and then will manufacture exactly same car with exactly same parts for i.e. 5 years straight.
> Plus Tesla still has trouble with parts and service. The company is twenty years old now. They should have that figured out.
I think there's more nuance to this. It seems much more that, to Elon, every part sitting on a shelf for parts availability, repair and service is a part that's not on the production line going on a vehicle to increase the almighty quarterly numbers.
Tesla -could- solve this tomorrow, but the Boss Man doesn't care. He has your money, and he wants to sell you another one, not repair yours.
The reason he's doing it is that ... it costs a lot of money to provide adequate service for the millions of cars they sold. It's much cheaper to just not do it.
Service is a profit center idk why you wouldn’t focus on Selling parts and labor at 200-300% markup vs 10% car margins
Agreed. They've done the hard part, make and sell cars. Ride the gravy train. Money printer: someone at a service desk + small logistics problems.
It's usually most optimal to stop fucking around. Gadget stores don't keep us nerds around for our winning personalities, everyone benefits from service.
I have heard so much about how electric cars are close to zero maintenance. I suspect they want to ride that wave as long as possible to further that perception.
That might be true but tire rotations and cabin air filter replacements are still high profit. I think it might be more that a large percentage of electric car repairs are for items covered under warranty so until there is a sizable used fleet outside of warranty they want to minimize claims by making it hard to do.
Customer service is so not Silicon Valley.
It's surprising that Waymo is doing OK in a service business. All those cars have to be stored, recharged, and cleaned. Somewhere there's probably someone that didn't come from Google in charge of that.
As far as false dichotomies go, "Tesla or BYD" is about as bad as it gets. On the whole, the world is a little worse off if you buy either. Might as well buy a gasoline car then.
If you're on the fence, consider giving the other US/EU/Japanese automakers a couple years to catch up. They know the future is 100% EVs. They're steering enormous ships with large investments and many stakeholders.
"They know the future is 100% EVs"
Meanwhile: "Volvo Cars abandons 2030 EV-only target" https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/volvo-...
"BMW backs away from £2billion electric car pledge amid plans to stick with petrol and diesel vehicles" https://www.gbnews.com/lifestyle/cars/bmw-backs-away-from-ps...
"Audi Changes Strategy, Backs Away From Electric" https://www.dagens.com/autos/audi-changes-strategy-backs-awa...
"Volkswagen Walks Back EV-or-Bust Strategy That Rankled Rivals" https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-05-16/volkswage...
Future was supposed to be nuclear powered everything at one point in the past. Lo and behold the future, we're burning coal and making fields of things that have limited lifecycles and that can't be efficiently recycled, and that are completely reliant on weather being nice.
The articles you linked are pretty much confirming what I was saying exactly:
Volvo: "saying it now expected to still be offering some hybrid models in its lineup at that time."
VW: "will need more plug-in hybrids as EV sales decelerate."
(I'm not clicking the link on the site for the channel that has Nigel Farage, funny though.)
It's gonna be hilarious 10-15 yrs after the purchase when the owners of electric vehicles find out that their cars batteries have gone to shit, essentially making their cars resell value 0, while the ICE resell value will likely be even higher then it'd be today, precisely because the used EVs are garbage, effectively removing them from the market.
Personally I'd welcome an electric only revolution, because they're a lot less noisy and I hardly ever need a car. But it's future has always been entirely made up marketing speak to prop up shareholder value
Meanwhile, in reality, there's an article on HN right now that appears practically side by side with this one from Goldman saying batteries are going to be 50% cheaper by 2026.
The most likely scenario in 10-15 years is that the batteries have degraded some low double digit percentsge, which matches most real world data that I've seen, but will otherwise still be as viable as any other vehicle. And if battery prices do drop as is being predicted replacing them with something similar should not be prohibitively expensive (and possibly will mean extended range as well).
If you give me your email I can send you an email at the end of next year, confirming that there will not be any significant battery improvements in any car sold by that year
These kinds of announcements/articles have been published every few months, and pretty much never end up in any products because theyre pretty much never economically viable after scaling it up
I'm even willing to put money on that, if you actually believe your own words to be true, I'd easily bet pretty much any amount that we will not have a 50% upgrade in battery capacity in any car as compared to the previous model that's been published 1-3 years prior to that. To keep it simple, say $10 000? It'd be easy money if you yourself think you weren't just talking none sense ( ◕ ᴗ ◕ )
Ars debunked this weird idea that batteries aren't improving a few years back: https://arstechnica.com/science/2021/05/eternally-five-years...
I didn't mean they didn't improve at all. They absolutely have. Just not enough to matter in the context of cars.
And even if we did get a 50% battery capacity upgrade in 2025 as compared to 2024 - while I wouldve lost the bet... My original point would've still been just as correct, because even at that point, they're still annoying to work around vs ICEs and their biggest cost would still come from a single component (battery) that has a pretty short expected lifespan compared to a regular engine
And you yourself likely know that as well, considering you didn't even acknowledge my bet ( ◠ ‿ ・ )
I didn't bother acknowledging your bet because a) it feels like a bad faith proposition and b) it's a goalpost shift from my first comment which was about batteries getting cheaper, not more efficient.
I'd also argue we're seeing battery improvements in cars pretty consistently, which is one of the reasons I can now buy an EV with 350km range for AUD$30k.
The bet was definitely an afterthought, but definitely not made in bad faith. The claim of 50% improvement yoy in a long established category like batteries was just so outlandishly improbable to me, that it'd be willing to bet that that's not gonna happen.
There have definitely been improvements in that regard, just not in such a short period of time
ICE resale is tanking already and no way it can bounce back ever again. Electric is just a superior technology minus charging time.
I'm about to buy my first car and while I can't afford an EV I'm very grateful for EVs dropping the 2nd hand market so hard. Currently Mazda 2 from 2020 is half the price of a new BYD Dolphin here and if I needed to drive more I'd get the latter but for that price a cozy road trip rain shelter is too hard to resist!
Interesting, I just checked on the most popular used car listing site for my region to check if things changed since the last time I was interested - at least in my region, electric cars deprecate massively more here even now.
You get a price drop of 60-70% within 40-60k km for electric vehicles, the ICEs usually only drop by ~50% by 80-100k km. That's less deprecation despite higher usage.
And these electric cars are mostly ~4 years old while the ICEs are 6+ years old.
At least in my region, ICEs resell way, way better
/Edit: the Mazda 2 costs 21k€ new, the byd dolphin 30k.
If you're buying a 4years old Mazda for 1/2 of the price of a new byd dolphin, you're actually paying 70% of the list price of the Mazda. That's kinda proving how high ICEs are reselling vs the electric vehicles. The equivalent electric vehicle would've deprecated more
Seems like our regions have vastly different markets. For the record I'm in Thailand that manufactures BYD and Mazda cars. New Mazda 2 starts at 21k usd and new byd dolphin at 15k. Obviously there's no real 2nd hand market for the Dolphin yet but 5 year old Mazda 2 I'm looking at rn is at 10k so -50% in 5 years which is just massive! The 2nd hand ICE market is so doomed.
ICE cars gonna lose value real fast the further EV revolution goes because why would I buy a used ICE car when I can buy a new EV that has 10 times the fuel efficiency and no basically no maintenance overhead? It's a better car in every single aspect minus the refuel time.
It's still early on solid state batteries, but there are some working prototypes now. Samsung is now shipping prototype solid-state batteries to manufacturers. 500 Wh/kg, 9 minute charging, 20 year life are claimed.
Manufacturing is hard and early versions will be expensive. BYD management claims that solid state batteries will be for the high end. They're pushing lithium iron phosphate for now.
Samsung just announced a small solid state battery for wearables. This technology may appear in small devices before it's in cars.
>The world’s largest battery maker CATL has announced a new electric vehicle battery pack with a 1.5 million kilometre, 15 year warranty.
https://thedriven.io/2024/04/03/catl-announces-electric-vehi...
Is it bad to buy BYD because you don’t like China?
The political rationale is well known, so I'll add the economic one. The world economy has globalized around the principle of Comparative Advantage [1]. It means every country specializes on what it's relatively better at.
It also means that your country can be in for a world of trouble if your comparative advantage changes. In turn, it means that a large adversary can attack you by turning the tables on your advantage.
Automobiles are a large comparative advantage sector for the US, Germany and Japan. Displacing it - even if only by catching automakers on the wrong foot, as BYD and friends are trying to do - could result in a massive reorganization wave, coupled with recessions and political shocks. This is only possible because of China's size, of course.
[flagged]
What I hate is that we keep yelling global climate change we need to act now then we tarrif byd and prevent the masses from being able to afford an EV. The average person can not afford a $50k plus car. I know allowing China to flood our market would kill the North American car industry but I honestly think allowing climate change to take a back seat instead will ultimately end up being the more costly choice. I wish American car companies could see this and find some way to provide a sub $15k car. It doesn't need to be ultra long range. It doesn't need fancy touch screens. It doesn't need power windows even. Just a basic car with a half decent battery meant to go around 150km or so.
With buying a new EV you massively front-load the CO2. About 60% of the lifetime CO2 cost of an EV car is in the manufacturing. The most affective strategy for reducing CO2 emissions is re-using older cars for as long as possible. Buy used (EV or ICE) if you genuinely care about this stuff.
Today's CO2 bill is only a very narrow and short-sighted part of the picture. Cutting out fossil fuels needs to happen first, in order for renewable and EV tech to have a chance to improve.
Then there's the urgent priority of depriving Russia, Iran and other state actors of their most nefarious revenue stream. In turn they use it to sabotage democracy in other countries, preventing the climate crisis from being addressed.
Yes I do drive older cars. My kids keep saying I should get a new car but I laugh and say for what benefit would I do that? I drive a 2004 Camry 4 cylinder. It has some bumps and scratches but gets me from point to point. Just like I don’t get the newest phones, still rocking my iPhone 8 after years of another iPhone I used for many years, I also don’t feel the need for a new car without reason. But I would like an EV as I do need to eventually help my son get a car I would like to pass him this one and upgrade to something electric. My city even offers free charging in a couple spots for local residents and I am living right by one so I could charge for free some days too. But with huge price tags it still would not make economical sense.
There's no significant market for a car like that in the US. Just look at the commenters even here on HN who "need" a Ford F150 because their friends move ever 2 months or something, or to carry groceries that a regular sedan or hatchback could carry back.
The huge used ICE car market provides sub-$15K vehicles (aside from the inflated prices during the Covid19 supply chain situation).
Today, in the U.S., there's a pretty healthy supply of used EV's as well.
I recently got my kid a '22 Nissan Leaf with about 11K miles and 170 mile range, for a little over $13,000 (including EV incentives).
I'm also seeing some pretty good deals on used Teslas; if I didn’t have to drive rather long distances several times a year, I'd get one myself.
My uninformed opinion on this is that allowing cars from China, a country with extremely weak workers rights that subsidizes a substantial amount of its private sector, will flood the market with EVs at the cost of jobs stateside.
What am I missing?
[flagged]
It's obvious. Imagine the PR disaster if the robot 'hallucinated' and said something inappropriate, or worse, accidentally pushed or hit someone. Why take the risk when everything needs to run smoothly?
The first time they showed Optimus, they literally had a human in the suit, so this is a huge step forward.
That said, a teleoperated humanoid body is an impressive tech feat by itself, seriously.
> That said, a teleoperated humanoid body is an impressive tech feat by itself, seriously.
Hard disagree. The point of the event was to show off autonomous robots and this is pure deception.
> The first time they showed Optimus, they literally had a human in the suit, so this is a huge step forward.
That is quite the curve to grade on.
Many many videos can be seen where the optimus robot explicitly says to the crowd around them great they are being tele-operated.
Link?
Telerobotics is nothing new. The Lindbergh operation was 23 years ago. Check out Boston Dynamics current generation of autonomous robots. The Optimus is years behind the current tech.
It's just a game of smoke and mirrors. There's a reason Tesla had the demo at a Hollywood movie studio.
If telerobotics is not new, where can I buy one? In my country minimum wages are high. But having robots be controlled by remote operators from low wage countries might be viable.
Here's one, you could probably purchase it via the right channels https://www.intuitive.com/en-us/products-and-services/da-vin...
Only if by "run smoothly" you mean "any publicity is good publicity."
What if millions no longer needed to cross borders and could telehandle flipping your burgers? Rising tides…
You’d think a WFH bastion would be more open minded.
Then sell it as that, not as an AI.
I mean we have robots doing telesurgery regularly (Da Vinci), serving drinks is literally a party trick.
It's actually difficult to achieve even something as simple as getting a robot to stand upright. Most of them walk with bent knees and constantly shift from one foot to the other (e.g. Boston Dynamics).
Neither Atlas or the new Atlas shift constantly on a standing position. The big engine powered previous dog/mule robot did tho.
The only reason we don't walk with bent knees is because that uses a lot of energy and can only lock our knees one way, but we do that sometimes for better movement, like when fighting or doing some sports. hydraulics are fundamentally different. The new Atlas seem to keep the legs fairly straight when standing/moving but the video is too short to come with larger conclusions.
Tesla is working with a large difference in approaches from Boston Dynamics. I think they can achieve some success even with the fact that their robots are not as good as the others by using the "pasta to the wall" strategy they seem to use. They made lots of the robots already and that can lead to someone finding a good use case for them even with lots of limitations. BD did this with spot to some success.
[flagged]
Guy owns two AI companies and still is a decade behind.
Behind whom? You are most likely referring to Boston Dynamics based on the 10 year comment. Optimus doesn't do back flips, so sure it's 10 years behind on backflips. Boston Dynamics famously doesn't do AI for control, not sure what you are talking about.
It's on par with Asimo, when not being controlled by a remote human. But you're probably too young to remember what Asimo is.
Does Tesla? All we’ve seen is remote operation
Notably the current humanoid Boston Dynamics robot also doesn't do backflips.
[flagged]
Can we agree that he is leading the company down a path which it will be really hard to come back from later?
I think a sub-$30K sedan will be quite successful, if it can carry 4+ people, 350+ range etc.
What indicates such a product is coming from Tesla? The robotaxi is only 2 door. Unless you mean continued price cuts to the 3, which seems… ambitious.
Unless they are planning a 2-bench version of the cyber taxi, same basic chassis and internals but a conventional passenger car, then yes, probably their next move has to be discounts to Model 3. Would require some significant cost savings even beyond the giga press and other strategies being employed. Maybe make it in Monterey...
The future is going to be so weird and interesting.
Imagine being able to control these things remotely and then walking a few of them into a bank to rob it. Then the robots attach the stolen money/goods to a drone which then flies off to another point to drop off the loot to its threat actors and masters who then get away.
I suppose the price points of them will need to come down drastically before this becomes commonplace and normal. Leaving $150k of burner robots behind to steal $50k doesn't seem that financially feasible.
We are gunna have a lot of new interesting laws in the pipeline.
Imagine having to solve a captcha to get into a building or buildings who have to install anti-robot traps and technology to prevent them from entering. We already have man traps, now we'll need robot traps.
What if the bank is also mostly staffed by robots?
The crypto crowd would probably ask, "what banks?"
I like the thought experiment.
I had a nightmare the other day of robots grabbing people and harvesting their organs.
Captchas serve one purpose: free training data for FSD
It’s all a Potemkin Village.
Of course it was.. Which dum dum still believes any of this is actually real? It's all a wink wink, stock pump show which didn't work this time.
They didn't say otherwise, they showed robots walking around and doing things, but never said anything about not having people controlling them. It was clear that there was a person that was talking on the other end if you listen to the video. Honestly having 20 tele-operated robots walking around in a crowd is pretty impressive. I haven't seen anything like that before.
Have you been to a modern airport lately? A distribution center (warehouse)? Autonomous robots move around in crowded places all the time. Not humanoid robots, because that’s a bad and unnecessary form factor. Disneyland had tele-operated “robots” decades ago. Stop huffing the Kool Aid. You need to evaluate the event based on what Musk promised, not on what you think looks hard or cool.
> They didn't say otherwise
It was literally their "Autonomy Event". Right there in the title.
Yeah sure, that's the promise in the future, it's a demo of an unreleased product. It's all about someday when they are done. It was pretty clear from the talk at the beginning that Optimus is years out from being for sale to consumers.
> It was pretty clear from the talk at the beginning that Optimus is years out from being for sale to consumers.
So he's walking back this, then:
"Tesla could start selling Optimus robots by the end of [2025], Musk says"
"Musk told investors on a conference call that he guessed the Tesla robot, called Optimus, would be able to perform tasks in the factory by the end of [2024]."
Let's not even talk about how it would be "financially irresponsible" to not own a Tesla by 2019 because it will be making you "$30,000 a year in your sleep".
> it's a demo of an unreleased product.
I dunno, if it's not actually an autonomous robot, I'd say it's more a non-demo of a fantasy product.
Then what's the point of the event if you can't even show a prototype?
A big announcement of "a promise in the future"? Like hyperloop or "rockets flying from New York to Tokyo and to Mars in 2024"? Or the 2017 Roadster?
>it's a demo of an unreleased product.
Sounds like what Trevor Milton got sent away for
This is some mental gymnastics.
> Honestly having 20 tele-operated robots…
I think it’s interesting because it reveals their development strategy: • Build a hardware kit that can well avatar human motion from motion capture suits. This gives hardware a validation model to guide development. • Then use the motion capture datasets to train the neural net which will auto operate the kit.
Vid of remote control for Optimus, and some bots at the event admiting remote control https://x.com/TroyTeslike/status/1845047695284613344
The goal of this robot is not just to be as articulating as existing bots but to do so cheaply. so it’s, as often said, about the factory that makes them not the bespoke million dollar shelf pieces we’ve seen before. in some cases, like the actuators, they are making in-house, otherwise, the strategy is likely to be to use as many cheap existing hardwares as possible to get the movement without the costs of greater complexity. let the software handle the rest.
Chuck E Cheese' was more advanced
The robots pretend to work, while the audience pretends to be mystified.
"People who once upon a time handed out military command, high civil office, legions — everything, now restrains itself and anxiously hopes for just two things: bread and circuses"
Well, I mean (a) duh, obviously, but (b) if I was a tech company trying to build hype around something, I would start by _definitely not inviting Robert Scoble_. Not after the Google Glass Shower Incident.
Someone should bring a big faraday cage next time
So, ‘fake it until you make it’ is Elon’s success mantra
How many more years before we can expect some making? Elon's been running Tesla for quite some time now...
Imagine falling for this pt bardum act in the year 2024.
I think everyone knows, but pretend to not know.
Why? Because most people do not have any other option. Play along in the hopes of some scrap.
This, LinkedIn posts, Leetcode, Slack conversations, are all this gigantic game of everybody knows is BS but still play along.
I don't think so. In case of Tesla it's just fraud. People do believe him - there is no doubt that a lot of people do believe the robots seen yesterday were autonomous and they will invest in Tesla accordingly.
They are the dum dum folks I mentioned in another comment.
Even experienced tech bloggers or investors were confused and duped. MKBHD didn't know neither if they are autonomous or teleoperated.
Its amazing that Tesla didn't tell people - there are thousands of video clips on X now of people interacting with them and not mentioning its all fake - and Elon is saying something like "let people see the clips and judge by themselves".
At this stage it's 100% fraud and deceiving investors.
Impressive that the machine was that good of an avatar, but it was pretty darn suspicious all the robots had different accents.
I mean are we to believe that Tesla designed their robots to have a California dude accent, a Chicano accent, AND an Indian accent just for the hell of it?
I'd love to see footage of the backroom where they no doubt had a bunch of operators with Valve Indexes and VR headsets.
"...Agatha All Along"
The Musk grift continues…
[dead]
[flagged]
I don't buy it. The only evidence is the robot itself saying something vague. Their insistence based on flimsy evidence just screams irrational hate intended to inflame confirmation bias.
I’d argue that Tesla needs to provide stronger evidence for us to believe their claims, not the other way around.
It has yet to be shown that these robots can do anything useful in any meaningful timeframe. We’re still well within the sphere of vapour ware that Musk has created for many years now. It would be naive not to ask questions at this point, or not to expect clear answers for that matter.
Last time the robot was a literally a person in a stretchy suit. Forgive our incredulity that this one wouldn't also be a dog and pony show, not unlike the two concept cars shown (the bus has no ground clearance, and the robocab does not have the lighting required to be sold).
Its funny how logic goes away when all u see is hatred