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- A driver who believed Autopilot could drive him home despite his being drunk. The car drove the wrong way on the highway and killed another innocent victim of Musk's hype.
- Autopilot rear-ending a merging vehicle and killing another innocent victim, a 15-year-old.
- Autopilot slamming into a broken down vehicle on the highway. When the Tesla driver left the wreck she was hit and killed by another car.
- Autopilot speeding through a T-junction and crashing into a parked truck.
"If somebody doesn’t believe Tesla is going to solve autonomy, I think they should not be an investor in the company."Elon Musk, 24th April 2024
The Results
In Tesla’s biggest problem: cars, Drew Dickson looks at Tesla's first quarter results:Of Tesla’s total quarterly sales of $21.3bn, 82 per cent were indeed “automotive revenues” while the rest were energy and services.82% of $21.3B is $17.5B, so Tesla has almost an entire quarter of unsold cars on hand.
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Tesla burned through $2.5bn of cash in the quarter. Inventories grew by over 10 per cent to $16bn.
One problem is that Musk's persona as an extreme right-wing troll has been putting off the key Tesla customer demographic, well-off liberals who care about climate change. Another problem is that Tesla lineup of models is old and expensive. Tesla used to recognize that they needed a cheaper product but:
A cut-price Model 2 was first teased at the 2023 Tesla AGM, with Musk saying in January that it would be in production towards the end of next year, but the expected spring product announcement never came.The resources that could have developed a Model 2 or refreshed the existing models instead went to develop the "Incel Camino", the Cybertruck. This isn't just a $82K laughing-stock, but a manufacturing nightmare that will be lucky to sell 20% of Musk's 250K/year projection, especially since it cannot be road-legal in either of Tesla's #2 and #3 markets (China and EU). It will definitely be a drag on the results for some time. So the Models S (2012), X (2015), 3 (2017) and Y (2020) will have to soldier on for a while.
Tesla now states it is “accelerating” plans, though as with the Cybertruck it’s easy to mistake the accelerator for the brakes. The notion that a Model 2 might be built in new factories in Mexico or elsewhere have been replaced with vague commitments to retool existing infrastructure and production lines.
This aging product line isn't attracting customers:
Shrinking margins on shrinking sales hit earnings per share:Extreme pricing pressure is forcing affordable vehicles on Tesla, irrespective of whether it chooses to launch one. Amid a lack of demand for EVs in general, and Teslas in particular, its quarterly automotive revenues were down nearly 13 per cent over the past year and by over 19 per cent sequentially.
- Sequential growth in units sold was down 13 per cent sequentially.
- Tesla’s price per vehicle, excluding regulatory credits and leasing or finance income, was $38,924.
- This was down 13 per cent from $44,642 last year, which itself was down 11 per cent from $50,037 the previous year.
“Clean” automotive margins (which exclude regulatory credits and leasing income) were down from 29.7 per cent in the first quarter of 2022, to 18.3 per cent in the first quarter of 2023, and again to 15.6 per cent in the first quarter of 2024. If you back out the new IRA US tax credits (which Tesla doesn’t seem to disclose) then automotive gross margin looks to have fallen even further, to around 14.1 per cent.
GAAP EPS was down 53 per cent year-on-year, accelerating from the 23 per cent drop in the first quarter of 2023. Even using non-GAAP EPS it’s a 47 per cent decrease over the past year.
In the summer of 2022, when the stock was above $300 share, analysts were expecting Q1’24 EPS of $1.80. Instead, they got $0.45. That is a 75 per cent downgrade to expectations.
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Tesla released its 10-Q, a quarterly report that provides a more detailed view into the company’s financial position. For several years running, Tesla has provided regular updates in these statements on how much revenue it’s taken in from customers and not yet fully recognized. Some of this deferred revenue relates to a work-in-progress product: Full Self-Driving, or FSD, for short.
Tesla’s deferred automotive revenue amounted to $3.5 billion as of March 31, little changed from the end of last year. Of that amount, Tesla expects to recognize $848 million in the next 12 months — meaning much of the performance obligations tied to what it’s been charging customers for FSD will remain unsatisfied a year from now.
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In these filings, Tesla also reports how much deferred revenue it’s actually recognized — and the Austin-based company has consistently undershot its own forecasts. It has recognized $494 million of deferred revenue in the last 12 months, short of the $679 million that it projected a year ago.
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The carmaker reported this week that its operating margin shrank to 5.5% in the first quarter, the lowest since the last three months of 2020. The measure of profitability was at 16% when Zachary Kirkhorn, Tesla’s then-chief financial officer, said during an earnings call that it was key to the company.General Motors operating margin is 7.35%. But not to worry, Tesla isn't a car company, its an AI and robotics company:
“As a management team here, we’re most focused on what our operating margin is,” he said in January 2023, in response to an investor question on a different earnings metric. “That is what we’re primarily managing to now.”
If the auto business is worth 3 or 4 times the multiple of a Stellantis or Volkswagen, then it would get a forward PE of, say, 20x. That’s more than generous for a business the CEO talks about as a legacy sideline.Tesla will definitely issue more shares, for example after the 13th June shareholder vote when they will reward Musk's corporate experiments in robotics and AI by reinstating the $56B incentive package cancelled by the Delaware court.
Street numbers for Tesla are consistently far too high but even using the 2024 consensus EPS of $2.64, Tesla would be worth just over $50 per share. Using today’s diluted shares (and assuming that they don’t issue more, which they will) that works out to a market cap of $181bn.
Tesla’s fully diluted market cap at pixel time is still $580bn. Simplistically, that means shareholders are already paying around $400bn for corporate experiments in “robotics and AI”, along with anything else Musk has or tries to conjure up.
Pumping The Stock
About 70% of the stock price is based on Musk hyping the technology. Thus for Musk it is more than twice as important to pump the stock as it is to sell more cars. He has to follow two strategies:- Make the results look better in the short term by increasing margins. The obvious way to do this is to cut costs, even though this will reduce profits in the longer term. After all, in the longer term Tesla isn't about selling cars, it is about AI and robotics.
- Distract people from looking at the results by unleashing the hype cannon.
Cutting Costs
The knee-jerk reaction of US companies to bad quarterly results is to lay off staff, but they generally target the less successful parts. Elon Musk not so much:Even Tesla's harshest critics must concede that the company's Supercharger network is its star asset. Tesla has more fast chargers in operation than anyone else, and this year opened them up to other automakers, which are adopting the J3400 plug standard.Like most of the recent desperation moves, this was Musk's decision:
All of which makes the decision to get rid of senior director of EV charging Rebecca Tinucci—along with her entire team—a bit of a head-scratcher. If I were the driver of a non-Tesla EV expecting to get access to Superchargers this year, I'd probably expect this to result in some friction. Musk told workers that Tesla "will continue to build out some new Supercharger locations, where critical, and finish those currently under construction."
The decision to cut the nearly 500-person group, including its senior director, Rebecca Tinucci, was made by Chief Executive Officer Elon Musk in the last week, according to a person familiar with the matter.In return for gorvenment subsidies, Tesla had been turning Superchargers into a separate business:
Access to high-speed charging is critical to EV adoption, and Tesla invested billions of dollars into developing a global network of Superchargers that became the envy of other automakers. It’s also a critical driver of Tesla sales, and the carmaker pointed to the division’s growth during its first-quarter results just last week.But maybe Musk couldn't resist a chance to mess with the competition:
“Starting at the end of February, we began opening our North American Supercharger Network to more non-Tesla EV owners,” Tesla said in its shareholder deck.
The Musk-led company has also signed charging partnerships with carmakers including Stellantis NV, Volvo, Polestar, Kia, Honda, Mercedes-Benz and BMW. It’s not clear who will now oversee Tesla’s partnerships with those companies. GM, Volvo and Polestar were all due to open NACS chargers to their customers in the immediate future, according to Tesla’s website.
The job eliminations mean Rivian, Ford and others have lost their main points of contact in Tesla’s charging unit shortly before the kickoff of the busy summer driving season. Tinucci was one of the main executives building and managing outside partnerships and was thought of highly, two people who had worked with her inside and outside of Tesla said.Musk Undercuts Tesla Chargers That Biden Lauded as ‘a Big Deal’ by Craig Trudell suggests a political motive:
In addition to potentially compromising budding partnerships with other carmakers looking to tap Tesla’s chargers, another consequence of Musk’s move may be undercutting Biden’s EV push in the midst of his reelection campaign. Presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump has repeatedly attacked electric cars on the campaign trail and predicted a “bloodbath” for the auto industry if he isn’t elected.Faced with a huge short-term threat to his wealth Musk isn't concerned with the longer term, when unlike robotaxis, Superchargers could have been a nice little earner:
Tesla had been building a tidy charging business over more than a decade. BloombergNEF estimates that the company delivered 8% of the public charging electricity demanded globally last year. Before Musk’s surprise decision, the researcher was projecting that Tesla’s annual profit from Supercharging could rise to around $740 million in 2030.Musk may already be having second thoughts:
That level of earnings is now likely out of reach, as BNEF’s estimates assumed Tesla would accelerate the pace of installations through the end of the decade. Musk had given indications this was the plan.
The move will slow the network’s growth, according to a person familiar with the division, who asked not to be identified discussing private matters. There already are discussions about rehiring some of the people affected in order to operate the existing network and grow it at a much slower rate, the person said.Way to motivate the team, Elon!
Musk believes the future depends upon robotaxis but:
Many Tesla fans had been holding out hope that Musk would debut a cheap Model 2 EV in recent weeks. Instead, the tycoon promised that robotaxis would save the business, even as both of its partially automated driver assistance systems face recalls and investigations here in the US and in China.Cutting off communication with the regulators who will have to approve robotaxi service isn't likely to help. And if there was another technology critical to Tesla's success it would be batteries:
Delivering on that goal is more than just a technical challenge, and it will require the cooperation and approval of state and federal authorities. However, Musk is also dissolving the company's public policy team in this latest cull.
Earlier this month, Tesla engaged in another round of layoffs that decimated the company and parted ways with longtime executive Drew Baglino, who was responsible for Tesla's battery development.Jonathan M. Gitlin rounds up reactions in What’s happening at Tesla? Here’s what experts think. He quotes Ed Niedermeyer:
Car companies "go bankrupt because A, they overinvest in factories, and then demand falls off. Which... that fits the profile," said Niedermeyer. "And B, they don't invest in products. Not investing in products is sort of a longer-term cause, and the proximal cause is [that] demand falls, and you've been investing in too many factories, and you get crushed by those fixed costs. So those cases that are common across most auto industry bankruptcies are certainly there."Musk isn't listening, because he is still firing people:
But with almost $27 billion of cash on hand, that shouldn't happen any time soon. "The thing that is really hard to understand is that if you have tens of billions of dollars in cash but you're losing market share and you're losing margin, losing pricing power, and all the other things that are happening with the business—you don't cut your way out of that problem," Niedermeyer continued. "That's the confusing part about all this. What would you use that cash for if not to solve those problems? And yet, instead, they're cutting.
"One of the things I've said for a really long time, and I think this is what's happening, is that an automaker is not really real until they survived a serious downturn," Niedermeyer said. And while the broader economy looks fine, EV sales are battling a strong negative headwind. "The car game is a survival business. You can capture more upside than the other guy in the good times. And that can be really good for your stock. But if you do that by not investing in the things that protect you in the downturn, it doesn't matter. And you're just another one on the list of defunct automakers,"
On Sunday night, even more Tesla workers learned they were no longer employed by the company as it engaged in yet another round of layoffs. ... The latest round of layoffs has affected service advisers, engineers, and HR.
Hyping The Technology
The Washington Post team's Faiz Siddiqui and Trisha Thadani report that Tesla profit plunges on price cuts, but company unveils plans for affordable models:CEO Elon Musk, who has a unique penchant for redirecting the conversation, used Tuesday’s earnings call to deflect from the poor numbers, focusing instead on the company’s commitment to artificial intelligence and a fully autonomous car. Details on Tesla’s apparent new offerings — which include the “more affordable models” and the “cybercab” — were scant and did not address how the company would overcome the technological and regulatory hurdles ahead.`Musk has form when it comes to hyping his technologies and companies. His tweeting that funding had been secured to take Tesla private at $420/share led to a settlement with the SEC that is still in place:
The supreme court on Monday rejected an appeal from Elon Musk over a settlement with securities regulators that requires him to get approval in advance of some tweets that relate to Tesla, the electric vehicle company he leads.The hype is starting to wear thin but not yet with the markets, as Brandon Vigliarolo points out in Musk moves Tesla's goalposts, investors happily move shares higher:
Elon Musk has a strategy and you may have seen it before: When things aren't going well, he'll say something wild to take everyone's eyes off the trouble, and raise share prices with dreams.Last year Tesla shipped 1.8M vehicles. There are 6 years left to the "end of the decade". Musk is promising to ship an average of at least 3M vehicles/year, all of which would be enrolled in the robotaxi fleet. Even if this were plausible, one has to question where all the riders would come from for a fleet 2.5 times bigger than Uber's global driver list. Note that in the US 36% of adults have used Uber or Lyft, so the market is already close to saturated. I'm sure we all remember that:
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The first quarter of 2024 didn't go well for Tesla, either economically or reputationally. As we reported earlier, sales fell, net profit tumbled off the same cliff Tesla's stock price earlier careened over, and production and deliveries decreased as well.
But give Musk a chance to toss out a flash grenade and he'll do just that: This time around with some wild predictions about his automaker producing a "purpose-built robotaxi" dubbed the "Cybercab," and Tesla's latest vision for the future as one in which it is focused on "solving autonomy."
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"It's like some combination of Airbnb and Uber, meaning that there will be some number of cars that Tesla owns itself and operates in the fleet … and then there'll be a bunch of cars where they're owned by the end user," Musk said. He added the fleet will likely grow to include "several tens of millions" of vehicles by the end of the decade.
Musk spent plenty of time in the 2010s claiming he'd have one million robotaxis on the road by 2020.Pumping the stock full of hype is a Musk habit:
Getting in trouble over "Full-Self Driving" claims? Stick a guy in a robot suit and call it Optimus to distract shareholders. Fail to get FSD realized this year - again? Just kick it down the road. Journalists calling him out on his nonsense? Rant about the "woke mind virus" and the media on Twitter.Vigliarolo isn't alone. In Musk Sells the Tesla Dream, But Don't Ask for Details Liam Denning notices a detail from the earnings call:
Of course, Optimus has been nowhere to be seen and was barely mentioned during the call. Likewise, Tesla's dreams of tens of millions of robotaxis on the road in the next six years rests on the need for serious technological breakthroughs the automaker has failed to make despite years of trying. Oh, and a ton of permits if this is to operate in the States, at least.
There was an odd tweak to the low-cost vehicle strategy Tesla laid out in March 2023, when management talked about cutting costs in half with revolutionary manufacturing methods. Now, Tesla talks about melding aspects of next-generation platforms with its existing ones in the new models, enabling the company to build them on existing manufacturing lines. To be clear, that is an intriguing possibility, offering efficiencies to reduce stubborn costs.Tesla is starting to have serious competition:
But also to be clear: It won’t deliver a $25,000 Model 2 anytime soon — “this update may result in achieving less cost reduction than previously expected” — and also isn’t what Tesla talked about only a year or so ago. It is a major overhaul of strategy requiring details.
So consumers — some of whom are turned off by Musk’s incessant posting on X, the social platform he owns, and by his controversial political comments — have a lot of choices when it comes to buying an electric car. Tesla’s share of the EV market in the US was roughly 51% in the first quarter, Cox says, down from almost 62% a year earlier.To respond to this competition, Tesla has understood for a long time that they needed a $25K Model 2:
The competition is even fiercer outside the US, where Chinese carmakers dominate. About half of all EVs sold globally are Chinese brands — BYD, the top brand within China, sold more cars than Tesla did in the last quarter of 2023, though Tesla regained the lead in the following quarter.
Musk first teased about such a car in September 2020, saying a series of innovations Tesla was working on would enable it to make an EV at that price within about three years. As recently as January, Musk said Tesla was “very far along” with work on its lower-cost vehicle.But as always, Musk's schedule was just a fantasy, and then the need to pump the stock took over:
Then, in early April, Reuters reported that Tesla had shelved plans for the cheaper vehicle to prioritize its robotaxi, creating bedlam among investors. The tension within Tesla over Musk’s desire to focus on the robotaxi is nothing new. It was chronicled by Walter Isaacson, who wrote in his book published in September that the billionaire had “repeatedly vetoed” plans to make a less-expensive model. Musk refused to give any details about a new, more-affordable model when asked about them by analysts on the first-quarter call.My guess is that it has dawned on Tesla that, without the resources sunk into the Cybertruck, they simply can't build a $25K car and make money, unlike the competition:
China’s EV advantage is in batteries — the most expensive part of an EV. They’re much cheaper in China because of the country’s control of the mining and processing of component materials such as lithium, cobalt, manganese and rare earth metals. UBS analysts say BYD had a 25% cost advantage over North American and European brands in 2023. Its cheapest model goes for $10,000. Tesla’s cheapest Model Y — the world’s best-selling car of any kind last year — is about $35,000 in the US after accounting for federal tax credits.China's other advantage is in driver assistance technology:
“Chinese EVs are simply evolving at a far faster pace than Tesla,” agrees Shanghai-based automotive journalist and WIRED contributor Mark Andrews, who tested the driver assistance tech available on the roads in China. The US-listed trio of Xpeng, Nio, and Li Auto offer better-than-Tesla “driving assistance features” that rely heavily on lidar sensors, a technology that Musk previously dismissed, but which Tesla is now said to be testing.
The Robotaxi Rescue
According to Musk the thing that will transform Tesla's profitability is a robotaxi. Lets assume for the moment that, despite being dependent only upon cameras, Tesla's Fake Self Driving actually worked. In Robotaxi Economics I analyzed the New York Times' reporting on Waymo and Cruise robotaxis in San Francisco and concluded:These numbers look even worse for Tesla. Last year Matthew Loh reported that Elon Musk says the difference between Tesla being 'worth a lot of money or worth basically zero' all comes down to solving self-driving technology, and the reason was that owners would rent out their Teslas as robotaxis when they weren't using them. This was always obviously a stupid idea; who wants drunkards home-bound from the pub throwing up on their Tesla's seats? But the fact that the numbers don't add up for robotaxis in general, and the fact that Hertz is scaling back its EV ambitions because its Teslas keep getting damaged because half of them are being used by Uber drivers as taxis, make the idea even more laughable.Even for Waymo, it turns out that replacing a low-wage human with a lot of very expensive technology (Waymo's robotaxis "are worth as much as $200,000"), and higher-paid support staff isn't a path to profitability.
It is true that Tesla's robotaxis would be cheaper than Waymo's, since they won't have the lidar and radar and so on. But these things are what make the difference between Waymo's safety record, which is good enough that regulators allow them to carry passengers, and Tesla's safety record, which is unlikely to impress the regulators.
The regulators have a lot of reasons to be skeptical. Back in 2021 they started investigating Autopilot:
The U.S. government has opened a formal investigation into Tesla’s Autopilot partially automated driving system after a series of collisions with parked emergency vehicles.Since then the evidence has piled up, as the Washington Post team report:
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NHTSA says it has identified 11 crashes since 2018 in which Teslas on Autopilot or Traffic Aware Cruise Control have hit vehicles at scenes where first responders have used flashing lights, flares, an illuminated arrow board or cones warning of hazards.
At least eight lawsuits headed to trial in the coming year — including two that haven’t been previously reported — involve fatal or otherwise serious crashes that occurred while the driver was allegedly relying on Autopilot. The complaints argue that Tesla exaggerated the capabilities of the feature, which controls steering, speed and other actions typically left to the driver. As a result, the lawsuits claim, the company created a false sense of complacency that led the drivers to tragedy.Musk claimed they would never settle these cases, but:
Tesla this month settled a high-profile case in Northern California that claimed Autopilot played a role in the fatal crash of an Apple engineer, Walter Huang. The company’s decision to settle with Huang’s family — along with a ruling from a Florida judge concluding that Tesla had “knowledge” that its technology was “flawed” under certain conditions — is giving fresh momentum to cases once seen as long shots, legal experts said.The regulators move slowly but they keep moving:
Meanwhile, federal regulators appear increasingly sympathetic to claims that Tesla oversells its technology and misleads drivers. Even the decision to call the software Autopilot “elicits the idea of drivers not being in control” and invites “drivers to overly trust the automation,” NHTSA said Thursday, revealing that a two-year investigation into Autopilot had identified 467 crashes linked to the technology, 13 of them fatal.Last December, the NHTSA forced Tesla to recall more than 2M vehicles because Autopilot:
has inadequate driver monitoring and that the system could lead to "foreseeable misuse,"The agency suspects the recall wasn't adequate:
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration disclosed Friday that it’s opened a query into the Autopilot recall Tesla conducted in December. The agency is concerned as to whether the company’s remedy was sufficient, in part due to 20 crashes that have occurred involving vehicles that received Tesla’s over-the-air software update.The recall involved an over-the-air update, but Tesla's attitude to regulation showed through:
the agency writes that "Tesla has stated that a portion of the remedy both requires the owner to opt in and allows a driver to readily reverse it" and wants to know why subsequent updates have addressed problems that should have been fixed with the December recall.What is the point of a safety recall that is opt-in and reversible? Clearly, it is to avoid denting the credibility of the hype. The NHTSA is not happy:
In a separate filing, NHTSA detailed findings from its investigation that preceded the December recall. The agency found that Autopilot didn’t sufficiently ensure drivers stayed engaged in the task of driving, and that Autopilot invited drivers to be overconfident in the system’s capabilities. Those factors led to foreseeable misuse and avoidable crashes, at least 13 of which involved one or more fatalities, according to the report.The NHTSA is skeptical that the recall was effective:
“Tesla’s weak driver-engagement system was not appropriate for Autopilot’s permissive operating capabilities,” NHTSA said. This resulted in a “critical safety gap” between drivers’ expectations and the system’s actual capabilities, according to the agency.
But NHTSA says it knows of at least 20 crashes involving Tesla Autopilot that fall into three different categories. It says there have been nine cases of a Tesla having a frontal collision with another vehicle, object, or person, for which there was time for an alert driver to have avoided the crash. Another six crashes occurred when Teslas operating under Autopilot lost control and spun out or understeered into something in a low-grip environment. And five more crashes occurred when the driver inadvertently canceled the steering component of Autopilot without disengaging the adaptive cruise control.The agency is giving Tesla until July 1st:
NHTSA also says it tested the post-recall system at its Vehicle Research and Test Center in Ohio and that it "was unable to identify a difference in the initiation of the driver warning cascade between pre-remedy and post-remedy (camera obscured) conditions," referring to the supposedly stronger driver monitoring.
to send NHTSA a lot of data, including a database with information for every car it has sold or leased in the US, with information on the number and dates of all Autopilot driver warnings, disengagements, and suspensions for each of those vehicles. (There are currently more than 2 million Teslas on the road in the US.)Finally, Mike Spector and Chris Prentice report that In Tesla Autopilot probe, US prosecutors focus on securities, wire fraud:
Tesla must also provide the cumulative mileage covered by Autopilot, both before and after the recall. NHTSA wants Tesla to explain why it filed an official Part 573 Safety Recall Notice, "including all supporting engineering and safety assessment evidence." NHTSA also wants to know why any non-recall update was not part of the recall in the first place.
U.S. prosecutors are examining whether Tesla committed securities or wire fraud by misleading investors and consumers about its electric vehicles’ self-driving capabilities, three people familiar with the matter told Reuters.This is all about Autopilot, but Fake Self Driving has problems too, as the Washington Post team reported in Tesla worker killed in fiery crash may be first ‘Full Self-Driving’ fatality:
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Reuters exclusively reported the U.S. criminal investigation into Tesla in October 2022, and is now the first to report the specific criminal liability federal prosecutors are examining.
Investigators are exploring whether Tesla committed wire fraud, which involves deception in interstate communications, by misleading consumers about its driver-assistance systems, the sources said. They are also examining whether Tesla committed securities fraud by deceiving investors, two of the sources said.
The Securities and Exchange Commission is also investigating Tesla’s representations about driver-assistance systems to investors, one of the people said.
Two years ago, a Tesla shareholder tweeted that there “has not been one accident or injury” involving Full Self-Driving, to which Musk responded: “Correct.” But if that was accurate at the time, it no longer appears to be so. A Tesla driver who caused an eight-car pileup with multiple injuries on the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge in 2022 told police he was using Full Self-Driving. And The Post has linked the technology to at least two serious crashes, including the one that killed von Ohain.The regulators still approve Waymo's cautious and well-engineered robotaxi effort. Uber's and Cruise's robotaxi efforts flamed out. Given the lack of sensors, the history of crashes, the fact that their "autonomy" technology is still at level 2, and the resistance to regulation, why would any regulator approve even the testing, let alone the revenue service of a Tesla robotaxi?
After Robotaxis, What?
Now that the effectiveness of the robotaxi hype is starting to fade, it is time for Musk to roll out the next shiny object. Dan Robinson reports on it in Elon Musk's latest brainfart is to turn Tesla cars into AWS on wheels:EV carmaker Tesla is considering a wonderful money-making wheeze – use all of that compute power in its vehicles to process workloads for cash, like a kind of AWS on wheels.Seriously? Unless you're a gig worker for Uber or Lyft, who clocks 56 hours/week sitting behind the wheel? I can't believe that Musk is under-estimating the potential here:
The Elon Musk-led outfit said in its recent earnings conference call for calendar Q1 that it had noticed its vehicles spend a considerable amount of their time just sitting there not moving. Many pack in a decent amount of processing power, so why not get them to do something useful and earn some cash for the company as well?
Speaking on the conference call, Musk said that he thought most Teslas were probably used for about a third of the hours in a week.
"And now that we have already paid for this compute in these cars, it might be wise to use them and not let them be, like, buying a lot of expensive machinery and leaving to them idle. We don't want that. We want to use the computer as much as possible and close to like basically 100 percent of the time to make full use of it," Elluswamy said.Tesla is currently selling around 2M vehicles/year, so "at some point" will be sometime in the 2070s, by which time the vast majority of the vehicles Tesla has shipped will have been scrapped, and even if they still work 50 years of Moore's law will have made all but the last few obsolete.
"It takes a lot of intelligence to drive the car anyway. And when it's not driving the car, you just put this intelligence to other uses, solving scientific problems like a human or answering dumb questions for someone else," he added.
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"If you get, like, to the 100 million vehicle level, which I think we will at some point get to, and you've got a kilowatt of usable compute – I think you could have on the order of 100 gigawatts of useful compute, which might be more than anyone, more than any company, probably more than any company," he mused.
Robinson starts thinking about the details:
Of course, all this compute capacity isn't sitting conveniently clustered together in a datacenter. It is distributed here and there, reached via a cellular connection in each Tesla, or possibly via Wi-Fi if the car is on the owner's driveway.
So the model Tesla would be looking at is perhaps more akin to edge computing, such as Heata in the UK, which uses heat from servers in homes to provide domestic hot water and rents out the compute capacity via cloud company Civo.
Among the issues we can see is that Tesla would be effectively using electricity that the car owner has paid for to run any workloads while it is idle, so would they get a cut of the money generated?
Yes, it seems. CFO Vaibhav Taneja, said "the capex is shared by the entire world. Sort of everyone owns a small chunk, and they get a small profit out of it maybe."
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IDC Senior Research Director for Digital Infrastructure Andrew Buss said the idea sounds technically feasible, but the potential downsides are perhaps too big to justify it being actually implemented.
"They'd not even be edge processing nodes as the code and data would have to be centrally managed and stored and then packaged and sent for processing before being returned once complete," he told The Register.
Other downsides include third-party code and data running on a private asset, Buss said, and if taking power from the battery, this would accelerate the degradation of these, which are the single most expensive and crucial part of a Tesla and need to be kept in as optimal a shape as possible for longevity and consistency of range.
In other words, Tesla might well find that implementing this idea may prove more trouble than it is actually worth for the returns it generates.
And as The Register noted after the earnings conference, Elon has a habit of throwing out wild ideas when things aren't going well to distract the punters and energize investors. This could well be one of them.
