Tesla’s value drops $60bn after investors fail to hail self-driving ‘Cybercab’

MicroWave@lemmy.world to News@lemmy.world – 783 points – Tesla’s value drops $60bn after investors fail to hail self-driving ‘Cybercab’
theguardian.com

Analysts criticise lack of detail about the ‘robotaxi’ showcased by CEO Elon Musk

Tesla shares fell nearly 9% on Friday, wiping about $60bn (£45bn) from the company’s value, after the long-awaited unveiling of its so-called robotaxi failed to excite investors.

Shares in the electric carmaker tumbled to $217 at market close following an event in Hollywood, where the chief executive, Elon Musk, revealed a much-hyped driverless vehicle. The stock price is down roughly 12% year-to-date.

…

However, analysts said the event was short on detail and also expressed disappointment over a lack of specifics about other Tesla projects. Musk has a history of making grand projections about upcoming products and failing to follow through in the timeframe he has set, or at all.

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Musk: "I have concepts of a car."

Even at face value, that's still a massive red flag coming Musk. He gave us a concept of the cybertruck that actually looked pretty badass; then delivered a vehicle straight out the Playstation 1. Any concept he pitches can be assumed to be complete bullshit.

That thing looks AI generated. Better than what we got but still ridiculous. I mean, it's huge but still somehow doesn't really seem to have much space for passengers or cargo at the same time

Also, why is the cabin aerodynamic while the hood is not? The whole thing is nonsensical

it's huge but still somehow doesn't really seem to have much space for passengers or cargo at the same time

So like all modern pickup trucks?

the thing we got is unique, that thing looks generic and car shaped as opposed to boxy and finger crushing

Lol this thing with a heavy battery would flip over at the mere sight of a bump, and everyone would die inside

The center of mass is lower due to the battery, so I'd say the opposite is true.

I was going to make a smart ass comment about how bad the Cyber truck is at off-road stuff but it turns out it's actually hard to tip over even with the chassis above the centreline of the wheels

It might not be a particularly new insight, but I find it worth repeating anyway: Musk truly is the new Ford. Runs his own company in the ground and has a hard-on for fascists.

With a bit of Edison thrown in for good measure. He's constantly claiming to have invented things or founded companies that he had nothing to do with.

You'll also notice it's gold colored. Direct homage to trumps tastes.

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Investors we spoke to at the event thought the event was light of real numbers and timeline

Not like Elon is famous for keeping the timeline. Man on Mars and Tesla semi any day now.

Don't worry, Trump and Elon said that if Trump wins 2024, we'll have a man on Mars before Trump's term is over.

So from someone who works in human spaceflight, this is ridiculously outrageous.

I’m not insinuating that anyone thought it was realistic, but just confirming your suspicions.

Don't worry, since Trump will install himself as dictator for life, this means he has more than 4 years to get someone to Mars.

Then again, given Trump's age and diet, maybe 4 years is generous in and of itself...

Can you think of any realistic benefit to a manned mission to Mars?

Bringing back samples would be an amazing feat, and that seems a worthwhile mission. Having a human onboard seems to complicate things far more than any data that would give us would be worth.

Once those ring gates open, Mars will be finished.

🤞

I'm not the person you asked and I don't know anything about such things so this is just supposition but...

I guess it's an important milestone on the way to colonising Mars. It would be an acknowledgement that we've solved (or mitigated...) all the problems in getting a human to and fro.

Now, if you're asking whether there's any realistic benefit to colonising Mars, the answer IMHO is "not in the next 50 years".

Yeah, that's about what I'm thinking. A manned mission to Mars could be an interesting project for our kids or grandkids. Anyone talking about it in our lifetimes is just a grifter.

First, it’s crewed or human mission - inclusive language is important! :)

I do think human exploration is important because humans can cover longer distances faster. So your overall options for exploration increase. I do think both human and robotic are important and serve valuable purposes.

It would be more complicated with humans, but I think that’s also a valuable learning experience that could lead to technology that would benefit Earth.

I do not think “colonization” or whatever term you want to use should be a priority. I think science and exploration are what we should stick to, and if your excuse for colonization is because something bad will happen to Earth so we have to go somewhere else…just spend that time and those resources figuring out how to not fuck up Earth just to go fuck up the next place.

Lots of side benefits when solving the problems faced getting there.

There are lots of useful minerals on Mars.

Backup planet if earth gets asteroided

Will this man be alive by the time he reaches mars, or returns to earth? Will the mars spacecraft have the same build quality and reliability as a Tesla Cybertruck, or will it blue screen after leaving the Earth's orbit?

Dude, I'm positive he won't make it 2 years and then those christofascists can start with their project with JD couchfucking Vance as the president.

Bro. Just one more year bro. I swear bro. Just one more year and we'll have full self driving bro.

Don't lose faith bro. Or I'll sue you and call you a pedo guy.

They could easily do it in a year by purchasing Waymo.

Isn't Waymo driverless like my RC car is driverless?

No, what makes you think that? I understand doubting Elon, but Waymo works great day in and out. The only bad incident I know of with them was when another vehicle with a person driving hit a pedestrian that threw the pedestrian under a Waymo, and they had to update the software to know what to do when a person spawns under the vehicle. Horrible, yes. But one of their cars wouldn't have hit the pedestrian to start.

Your RC car has level 4 autonomy?

Imagine drinking this much Kool-Aid.

Narayan added that some investors were hoping for a teaser about a lower-priced vehicle, with pedals and steering wheel, that would launch next year. However, none was forthcoming.

Expectations were low....

They should bring back the roadster before Mazda makes an electric Miata from hell.

It won't be $30k, it won't be full self driving, it won't be ready for production by by 2027, it won't replace all cars on the road by 2075.

It's shocking that people aren't calling him out on the fact that he also promised every Tesla on the road today would be capable of becoming a robotaxi, which was just an outrageous lie at the time and evidently they are no longer working towards making that plan a reality anymore if they're designing dedicated autonomous vehicles. Letting him pitch a new robotaxi idea feels like letting him get away not having to face any consequences for his blatant bullshit.

No Tesla will, correct.

These cars will be available, just not where governments stand on the scale for industries that refuse to modernize or make vehicles that a lot of people actually want instead of another oversized SUV or truck with a grill taller than a tank.

Is he going to sue the investors?

Sue the stock market for conspiring against the valuation of his companies.

Sure Mars for just being so fucking far away

Sue the BIPM for maintaining the system of time that keeps making him miss his own stated deadlines.

“I hope they stop. Don’t invest. If somebody is going to try to blackmail me with investing, blackmail me with money? go fuck yourself. Go fuck yourself. Is that clear? I hope it is.”

Here’s a list of every time he has promised (lied about) full self driving for literally more than a decade.

https://motherfrunker.ca/fsd/

How is anyone believing this guy's shit after all this time?

I suspect sometime ago it switched from belief in him to most market players believing that "enough people will believe this guy's shit that the line will go up so best jump in early", essentially a self-made prophecy as long as enough people believe that others believe.

In that sense this result of his presentation pushing the line down A LOT means that even the idea that no matter how much he's lying he will move the market up is finished and his bullshit being a Midas Touch has now reached the natural endlife of becoming a Shit Touch.

That being so, has much more massive implications for Elon's business success and wealth as well as that of companies links to him, than merely the market losses in this one instance, since he is very much a One Trick Pony whose "bullshitter of tech fanboys" trick has stopped working and nobody is going to be betting on Elon pushing the line up anymore, the core of his success in getting wildass ideas funded and his companies in non-Tech industries getting Tech-style market valuations.

The next couple of years for Elon are going to be really "interesting".

Could not agree more. I'm hoping he has a Hindenburg moment... Soon

I imagine the robotaxi it gonna just be some really short person under the hood running super fast like the Flintstones with a steering wheel

Musk is facing a LOT more practical scrutiny now that the cybertruck is an ongoing fiasco. People are rightfully wary of getting excited about a taxi that only seats two people. Anyone who’s been paying attention will also be suspicious of his claims that the taxi will actually cost under 30k, or that it will truly go into production “before 2027”.

I will admit that the van looks cool as hell. Of course, I still think Musk is a piece of human garbage, but I will give him that.

It's a bus. Elon Musk invented a bus. Now he only needs to invent a time machine, travel back to the 1800s and woo everyone with his new idea.

I love the aesthetic. I fully support Art Deco public transportation.

A bus designed by someone who absolutely hates public transportation is pretty funny though. "I wish these seats faced each other so I could sit knee to knee with a stranger." -Nobody Ever

And there's so little passenger space, they have a "luggage" compartment in the front. So I suppose I'm just supposed to put my bag there, out of my sight, then hope nobody takes it before I get off?

Front is were the driver is

What driver?

The driver that is driving the vehicle because musk will not be able to deliver the FSD.

Well... It's not being engineered with a driver in mind. I don't think they can just slap a seat in there later; having vs not having a driver is a major design consideration. This vehicle has no driver, period. If the fsd doesn't work, he has no vehicle.

So the question isn't "Will they put a driver in this car?"

The question is "Will they get this cat on the road?"

I can guarantee there is no design yet at all, the whole shit is just vaporware, like all musk's demos. That demo 100% has driver in the van in the front.

Edit: note that this part of the thread is about the bus. The robotaxi is definitely just CGI shit, no real engineer has even looked at the design yet.

I still can't get over the fact that he called the cybercab "individualized mass transit" lol. Wtf does that even mean. Mass transit... For an individual? So like... A car? Or a bicycle? I guess I'm just not smart enough to understand the world's smartest human being ever.

It's windowless. As someone who gets motion sickness if I can't see out, I would cover the inside of that thing with barf. And the seats are conveniently facing sideways, which is another strong trigger for me, the barf would be aimed directly at the stranger facing me.

Oh, the cybercrab.

Looks good for a video game. For real life? Nah

now that the cybertruck is an ongoing fiasco

Is it, though? I personally hate the fucking things, but it's not like Tesla is having any trouble selling them.

I don’t know what the sales figures are. I was referring to the multiple recalls.

A two seater with lambo doors that look like they’ll immediately get sheared off by a passing truck that can’t see them. A laughable delivery timeline. And the “concept” bus looks like a Dustbuster that’ll get stuck in a pothole or on top of a speed bump with its current ground clearance. It’s almost like he’s deliberately trying to tank the stock making all this impractical shit.

But, the cybervan can carry 20 people, revolutionary!!!!!

Its a freaking "shitty" bus without a poor person as a driver.

His innovation is that he hates people. Doesn't seem that new for rich people actually.

Edit: comparing it to a regular bus is too generous.

I just continue to be amazed that, instead of the old, tried-and-true method of giving people what they want—a solid, reliable car at a good price, and a stellar charging network in the places people want to be—a man of his means keeps trying weird gimmicks.

It's not so surprising when you consider the fact that he's nothing but a charlatan.

Just a colossal idiot with enough money and little enough self awareness that everyone is indulging his every whim and he never stops to consider that maybe he isn't a visionary and a genius.

Musk said the company would start building the fully autonomous “Cybercab” by 2026 at a price of less than $30,000, and showed off a van he claimed was capable of transporting 20 people around town autonomously – which he said would reshape cities by turning car parks into parks.

$30,000 for a fully autonomous bus?

He’s learned that if you put an (R) next to your name there are literally zero consequences for blatantly lying.

Why is he even bothering when we already have Waymo? It already has full-self driving, and it works wonderfully. I use it to get rides to work when I'm too tired to drive. Just hop in, take a nap, and wake up at your destination. I trust it way more than any Uber/Lyft driver.

The price is for yearly subscription

I think he made it reasonably clear that $30k was for the small self driving taxi, and the mini-bus would also become available

one of my old computer science professors said self driving cars “have been 5 years away for the past 20 years”. still rings true to this day

Self driving cars and net positive fusion, same same

Oh nobody's predicting net positive fusion anytime soon. There's huge materials hurdles in both magnetic confinement and inertial confinement while also regenerating tritium. Neutron radiation just does not play nice.

I agree with your professor. It's one of these things that people have a hard time understanding. A lot of folks can easily imagine the end-state, but have no clue what has to be solved to arrive there. A lot of folks think that projects in electronics, software engineering, computing, etc. are just a linear march from beginning to end; failure is a human or resource problem. In reality, there are problems out there that get exponentially harder to pull off with linear inputs, which is much harder to imagine let alone a great way to scare off investors.

In this case, the framing of the problem is all wrong. We're not trying to solve "a car that drives itself" (e.g. autopilot). Instead we are "simulating human sensory organs and cognition in order to pilot a vehicle without catastrophe or injury." The latter is much harder to solve, but IMO, is a much more realistic portrayal of the job.

This company will soon have zero value under our fearless leader Elon Musk.

No one can ruin the Tesla name like someone taking credit for their underlings inventions.

Oh please let us see Elon lose all his fucking money because he's a gigantic ass hat.

The key risk for this whole bet Tesla is making is the software. I couldn't give two shits about their hardware plans, that will come and it's not the key challenge. Saying "we will have it next year" is just not good enough when you've said it before and ruined your credibility already. This event should not have happened until the software is ready to go, it's worth nothing without that.

I just don't get why they still have him as CEO.

The man spends his time mostly on Twitter, driving it into the ground to simp for Trump. He's taken obscene amounts of money from it, while failing to offer the simplest of products from its roadmap a decade ago - an affordable electric car.

If they don't pivot in the next few years, they'll run the risk of Tesla being leapfrogged to market more than it already has, with an inferior product to practically everyone that enters the EV market.

I still fully maintain that Musk will push Tesla towards making a petrol-powered car within the next few years, so IMO the board needs to get rid before that becomes a thing.

What problems do autonomous taxies solve that are worth this investment of possibly decades?

Edit: grammar

Really. Give me reliable public transportation instead.

the feds would have to start issueing grants for light rail like they do with roads for that to happen. Otherwise cities will always default to a free road over a paid train system

The dream of being the first to do it and corner the market for more of that sweet growth.

I just wish it went into autonomous trains like France did with Paris Line 14

none. But they would have to be electric so that they don't lose fuel economy as 3x the number of cars on the road will 100% create traffic jams.

And even then the amount of energy wasted on traveling empty from drop offs to pickups would probably be collossal. Not to speak of the infrastructure we don't have to keep these charged

They should outcompete Uber and the others. They should provide very low cost point to point transport

I was making a point that the overall goal is for people to get from point A to point B. There are known solutions for that (trains, busses), investing millions into this just to replace taxis/Uber sounds ridiculous to me. This seems to me just an investment to promote the car centric mentality for solving such problems

Yeah public transport is ideal for most transport cases and should be funded by cities to the level to allow it to provide that

But still some cases call for individual transport and my preference on that is taxis over Uber and the like as taxis have a duty to pick up anyone who can pay which the newer companies don't

I hope that self driving taxis include accessible ones, I expect there will still need to be a class of staffed cars to help people who need assistance - eg those who can't lift their bag into our out of the vehicle, those who need assistance to put on a seat belt

Do you find autonomous cars at a clear advantage in those cases where you think cars are still preferred?

Awe shucks. Tesla should boot out Dork MAGAT and bring back Eberhard and Tarpenning. When Leon leaves, then I will consider a Tesla.

Leon?

Nooo they didn’t like the self-driving robotaxi that isn’t self driving. What about the bus that can’t go over a pothole? No? How about robots that are controlled and voiced by humans? Damn. Tough crowd.

Also there's this whole track record of Elon Musk's demonstrations were there's no clear independent validation that they actually work as we are being said they to or they're merelly announcements or concepts: those things are invariably complete total bollock at best bordering on Fraud.

I reckon that finally he has entirely exhausted both the benefit of the doubt that his demonstrations are in any way honest and representative of real products present or future, and the idea that "he might be bullshitting but he'll pull in enough suckers that early investors will win from going all in even if it's 100% bollocks".

The Midas Touch of Elon's bullshit has finally ran its course and turned into a Shit Touch.

Especially the person in the background starting Elon's first public robotaxi-trip with a remote control didn't really help.

At least the robovan looks like a vehicle from a dystopian cyberpunk movie, and the bad guy cops (that are of course working for a private police firm) are being ready to burst out from it to try to arrest the good guys.

“And all transport will be fully autonomous within 50 years.”

Bro even cold fusion reactors have less estimation than that.

For clarity, this means the stock is back to the price it was in September. I know car-man-bad but I get tired of these sensationalized articles that are only shared because they confirm that someone we like is bad actually

Market Cap of a company is sort of a meaningless number. As in, it's shares in existence times price per share, which is just another way of saying its the share price. If somebody were to sell $100 Billion worth of Tesla shares, the market price would plummet and he'd not get the $100 Billion the shares were originally worth.

Of course, a rule of thumb is that a company is worth 20 times it's annual profit, or its revenue. So, by that valuation, Tesla is worth 28 Billion dollars, or 25.5 Billion dollars if we go by revenue. (I'm surprised that both approaches lead to results so close to each other) Compare with a market cap of 682,47 billion, we can see that Tesla is ridiculously overvalued. So, I guess you should go and buy puts on Tesla. Or sell your shares if you have any.

But you're comparing profit "apples" to (meaningless) market cap "oranges". Almost everything looks overvalued that way.

Looking at a different example, Ford's market cap is $42.61e9, and its revenue is $47.81e9, while the profit is $1.83e9, 20 times of which is $36.6e9. If we average both of them we get $42.205e9. So Ford seems to have about the right valuation.

So it's not meaningless then, it's useful for value investing strategies.

I suppose that's true. But it just bothers me when people talk about the market cap like it's an amount of money that exists somewhere, instead of being an abstract valuation.

I'm just getting into stocks. Would this be a good time to invest now that it's low?

Investing is where you buy into market trackers and have no more than a couple of percent in any given company.

What you're talking about is gambling.

Gotcha. Would now be a good time to gamble?

Possibly. If Trump wins what are the odds on him letting Elon's crappy self driving cars be road legal as a thank you for all the election interference? But then what are the odds on Trump doing what he always does and abandoning everyone at the first sign of trouble. What if Trump loses?

It's a lot of ifs. Don't bet more than you can afford to lose is the only advice I can give.

The stock price/earnings ratio is still quite high. So based on fundamentals it's still not a good buy. Instead, you're gambling that in the future you'll hear more unexpected good news from Tesla than unexpected bad news.

Personally, I wouldn't take that bet.

depends on how much faith you have in elons ability to bullshit the masses. I wouldn’t do it, but some have gotten money off that gambit.

It might be a good time to invest in a high grade bond fund. Or emerging markets bonds if you want higher return.

Tesla is a so called "meme stock" detached from how a company is actually performing. I'd say avoid it if you're looking for "steady" buy and hold investing instead of (high tax) daytrader style gambling.

Generally yes, buy when it is low. Have a look at some graphs of recent performance to see if this is lower than typical weekly low points

Tesla does have room to expand; the biggest risk is that Musk does something stupid that damages Tesla, he has not done so yet - he seems competent at running (or has given important parts of the job to competent people) Tesla and SpaceX

Safer investment is through exchange traded funds, especially those which track major indexes (also known as index funds). You buy these the same way you buy other stocks - you're buying shares in the fund

Do you actually believe anything he said is true? Follow-up question, are you literate and do you have access to the internet?

More like after Elon's failed performance at the Trump rally, foreign "investors" pulled their money from Tesla

Tesla and Elon are one of the reasons why I don’t but individual stocks but I rather get indices… It’s just the lack of consistency and the fact a single person can make you lose money…

Elon musk extended family will own the entire Mars facility production and open hell portal?